The Democrats' Willie Horton Problem

At TIPP Insights, "Diana Allocco lays down the facts regarding the Willie Horton case and how Democrats have forgotten the vital lessons from the unfortunate incidents":

“One of my objectives, quite frankly, is to lock Willie Horton up in jail.” — Joe Biden, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair, bragging Democrats were tougher than Republicans on criminals, 1990.

The nation’s 2022 top-tier fear is crime. Three quarters of Americans say violent crime is a major problem, and getting worse. Democrats’ cashless bail laws, attacks on police, and other liberal soft-on-crime policies have unleashed unrestrained criminality across the country, particularly in Democrat-run cities, where dangerous criminals are no longer locked up in jail. At all. “Arrested-and-released” is now the most common phrase in every crime article.

And this is not just theory to people, or some kind of political talking point. According to a recent Golden/TIPP poll, a record 16 percent of Americans themselves or a family member have been victims of crime — and the distressing numbers are particularly elevated among African Americans, Hispanics, and urban voters, where close to 25 percent — one in four — are crime victims.

Republicans are campaigning hard for the midterms on the real problem of crime — and gaining traction everywhere. The Democrat response: “That’s racist! It’s Willie Horton all over again! Shut up!” ....

To Democrats, Willie Horton is shorthand for: “Racist Republicans using racist dog whistles to get racist votes.” Democrats spit out this name like a two-word incantation, with total confidence that few current voters have any idea what the real story is. Well, let me lay out some essential details — because everything you think you know about Willie Horton is bull...

Leftists are desperate. People are increasingly frustrated with Racism! Racism! Racism! all the time. It's near the bottom of priorities that Americans say are important this year.

In any case, click through at that top link to read the rest. Lots of links embedded in the piece.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Is Tearing Academia Apart

From John Sailer, at UnHerd, "Ideological litmus tests are becoming the norm in America":

Ideological litmus tests are becoming the norm in American academia. Already, many universities require faculty job candidates to submit “diversity statements” — 19% of the faculty job listings in one recent survey. Now, similar requirements increasingly apply to sitting faculty members, as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements and criteria have become standard components of the promotion and tenure process.

To give one example: last year, the highly-ranked Oregon Health and Science University School of Medicine released its Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism Strategic Action Plan, listing dozens of “tactics” for advancing social justice. Here is an example:

“Include a section in promotion packages where faculty members report on the ways they are contributing to improving DEI, anti-racism and social justice. Reinforce the importance of these efforts by establishing clear consequences and influences on promotion packages.”

The reference to “consequences” reads like a warning to dissenters, especially given that concepts such as “equity”, “anti-racism”, and “social justice” often simply connote adherence to progressive political views. Thanks to the ubiquity of Ibram X. Kendi’s work, many American professionals are primed to point out that anti-racism, far from merely being “not racist”, entails embracing “race conscious” policies, coupled with the belief that any disparity is by definition racism.

With official DEI requirements for promotion and tenure on the rise, Kendian “anti-racism” has come closer to a formal requirement for many in academia. In its 2022 survey of tenure practices, the American Association of University Professors found that 21.5% of the institutions it surveyed had DEI criteria in their tenure standards. For larger institutions, it was 45.6%.As diversity officers increase, so too will their preferred policies.

Unfortunately, the diversity statements can easily stamp out dissenting viewpoints. At UC Berkeley, for example, job candidates will receive a low scores on their diversity statements for “explicitly state[ing] the intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat everyone the same’”, and a high score for “Discuss[ing] diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as core values that every faculty member should actively contribute to.” Institutions from Emory University to the Texas Tech University Department of Biological Sciences have adapted the UC rubric, proudly policing the core values of faculty.

DEI requirements for promotion and tenure often come in the form of evaluation criteria, rather than required statements. The California Community Colleges (CCC) system — the largest system of higher education in America, serving almost two million students — recently mandated that all faculty, staff, and administrator evaluations “include DEIA [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility] competencies and criteria as a minimum standard for evaluating the performance of all employees.”

The resolution mandating these competencies employs unmistakably ideological language...

Still more. 

'Radicals' Are Racist Criminals

From David Horowitz, at FrontPage Magazine, "Driving America towards the abyss":

The crisis currently facing our nation is a crisis of faith – faith in the Constitution that has shaped our destiny, faith in the rule of law, and faith in the principle of equality before the law. The root cause of the lawlessness that is consuming our country is the monopoly of the executive power in Washington by a political party that has fallen under the control of the radical Left. This Left describes itself as “progressive,” but is focused on the goal of “re-imagining” American institutions and principles, in other words of dismantling the constitutional order that created the prosperity and freedoms that have shaped this country since its beginnings.

Having been born into this political Left and then rejected it, I have acquired an intimate perspective on its nature, and the threat it poses to the American future, which is grave. I was raised by Communists who always referred to themselves as “progressives,” and were sworn enemies of America and its institutions, as was I. We saw ourselves as warriors for social justice, acting on the “right side” of history.

We could not have been more mistaken. The “moral arc” of history is not “bent towards justice,” as progressives like to say. If it were, the 20th Century would be the most enlightened instead of the scene of the greatest atrocities and oppressions on human record. Worse yet, for this progressive myth, these atrocities and oppressions were perpetrated by progressives in the name of “social justice.”

The practical achievement of the revolutionaries was the dismantling of whole societies, and their reconstruction as national prisons, and slave labor camps. Supported by progressives everywhere, Communists bankrupted whole continents while killing more than 100 million people – in peacetime – in order to realize their radical schemes. Their atrocities and failures continued until the day they saw their progressive future collapse under its own weight. This failure was entirely predictable because as every similar attempt to “re-imagine society” and change it by force has shown, it is simply beyond the power of human beings to create a “just” world.

Forty years ago, a series of tragic events that I have described in my autobiography, “Radical Son,” stopped me in my tracks, and caused me to re-evaluate what I had believed until then. These second thoughts turned me against the cause to which I had been devoted since my youth, and which I now saw as a threat to everything human beings hold dear. Most of my generation of radicals, however, chose to continue on their destructive course. Over the next decades I watched the radical movement I was born into infiltrate and then take control of the Democratic Party and the nation’s cultural institutions, until one of its own, Barack Obama, became President of the United States.

From the moment I joined the conservative Right forty years ago, I was impressed – and also alarmed – by the disparity in political rhetoric used by the two sides fighting this fateful conflict. My radical comrades and I always viewed these battles as episodes in a war conducted by other means – even as our opponents did not. Our rhetoric proclaimed our goals to be “peace,” “equality” and “social justice.” But this was always a deception. We used terms that demonized our opponents as “racists,” and “oppressors” because we believed our goals could only be achieved by vanquishing our opponents and destroying America’s constitutional order.

The Constitution valorized political compromise and was built on the defense of individual rights – most prominently the right to own property. America’s founders regarded property ownership as the basis of individual freedom. As radicals, we regarded property as the root cause of the evils that oppressed us. Consequently, the principles we operated under were not the same as those we gave lip service to in order to win public support.

The Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky explained our attitude in a famous pamphlet called “Their Morals and Ours.” “Their” morals, he denigrated as bourgeois morals. They were morals based on class values that served the oppressors. One can hear the same sophistry today in the Left’s attacks on meritocracy and standards as “racist,” and in their demands for equal outcomes regardless of whether they are earned or not.

While “their morals” served a ruling class, “our morals” served the people, and therefore social justice. Because we believed these propositions, “our morals” were by default Machiavellian: The end justifies the means.

Trotsky’s pamphlet was, in fact, a desperate attempt to avoid admitting that there was anything amoral or immoral in this cynical outlook. He did so by denying the existence of moral principles, claiming instead that all morality was self-interested and designed to serve a class interest. “Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ or Mohammed,” i.e., to accept universal moral standards, Trotsky argued, “must acknowledge that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character.”

But this is just an admission that “our” morals were indeed accurately summarized as, “the end justifies the means.” The future we imagined we were creating was so noble that achieving it justified any means to get there, which included the lies that hid our destructive purposes, and the atrocities they led to.

The full import of this belief was brought home to me in the spring of 1975 when our so-called “anti-war movement” forced America out of Indo-China, allowing the North Vietnamese and Cambodian Communists to win. For more than a decade, we had claimed to care about the people of Indo-China, championed their rights to self-determination and condemned the war as a case of American imperialism and American racism oppressing Asian victims.

By the time America withdrew from the conflict and abandoned its Indo-Chinese allies, I already knew that Communism was a monstrous evil. But I remained a supporter of the “anti-war” cause, and of the rights of the Indo-Chinese to self-determination. To defend the commitments I had made, I deluded myself into believing that self-determination meant the Vietnamese and Cambodians should be able to choose even this evil if they wanted. This was so much sophistry because I knew that the Communists would not give them an inch of space in which to breathe free. The end that justified my position was that I believed America was the world’s arch imperialist power and its defeat was an absolute good.

What I was not prepared for was the moral depths to which the movement I had been part of had sunk. These depths were revealed in the events that followed the Communist victory. When America left Cambodia and Vietnam, the Communists proceeded to slaughter between two and three million peasants who were “politically incorrect” and did not welcome their Communist “solutions.” It was the largest genocide since Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. In Cambodia they killed everyone who wore glasses on the grounds that as readers they would transmit the oppressive ideas of the past and obstruct the Communist future. But there was no resistance to these atrocities from the “anti-war” Left.

As the genocidal slaughter proceeded, prominent Leftists like Noam Chomsky provided cover for the Communists’ crimes by denying that the atrocities were taking place. More disturbingly, there was not a single demonstration to protest the slaughter by the activists who claimed to be “anti-war” and to care about the Cambodians and Vietnamese. This silence unmasked the true agendas of the movement I had been part of.

My comrades’ abandonment of the peoples they claimed to defend showed in a definitive manner that the anti-war movement was never “anti-war.” It was anti-American. It wanted America to lose and the Communists to win. Progressives had lied about the nature of their movement and its agendas in order to accomplish their real goal, which was the “fundamental transformation” of America and the creation of a socialist state. I had known this to be the case for many years, but had accepted the lies because they served what I imagined was a noble end. But when the lies led to the embrace of genocide, my eyes were opened to the realization that the movement I had been part of my whole life was evil.

On my way out of the Left, I spent several years re-thinking what I had believed, and trying to understand the nature of the cause that I had served. Perhaps, my most profound and certainly most disturbing conclusion was that revolutionaries were by nature – and of necessity – criminals, who would routinely lie and break laws to achieve their ends. Every radical who believed in a “revolution” or a “re-imagining” of society from the ground up, every progressive who believed in a “fundamental transformation of America” as Barack Obama described his own agenda on the eve of his 2008 election, was a criminal waiting to strike.

America’s Constitution includes methods to amend it, and therefore to reform the American social order when and where changes are needed. In making such changes there are procedures to ensure that these changes represent the will of the American people, and are done lawfully. But revolutionaries do not respect a constitutional order created by rich, white men, many of whom were slaveowners. Radicals believe instead that “social justice” requires them to dismantle the social order, and “due process” along with it. Radicals are not “reformers.” In the name of social justice, they refuse to be bound by the laws and procedures that an unjust and oppressive “ruling class” has created. The end justifies the means.

Before President Obama – a constitutional law professor – decided to break America’s immigration laws and grant 800,000 illegals resident status, he admitted to his fellow Americans on 22 public occasions that he had no constitutional authority to do so – none. Creating such an amnesty by executive order was illegal and unconstitutional. And he knew it. But he did it anyway because to him and his party, violating the fundamental law of the land was justified because the system that had created the law was oppressive and unjust – racist. In committing this crime against the nation he led, Obama was guided by a radical ideology that justified the illegal means as a victory for “social justice.”

As a former radical I understood how high the stakes had become with Obama’s election. Since the Right was defending America’s freedoms while the Left was paying lip-service to patriotic pieties but intending nothing less than the destruction of constitutional order, I also understood that the rhetorical disparity between the two factions posed a grave threat to America’s future.

In fighting this cold war, progressives regularly demonize Republicans as racists, white supremacists, insurrectionists, Nazis and traitors. Republicans respond to these reckless attacks by calling Democrats “liberals” and similarly tepid descriptions. For example, they describe Democrats as “soft on crime.” Democrats are not soft on crime. They are pro-crime: Democrat prosecutors have systematically refused to prosecute violent criminals; Democrat mayors and governors have released tens of thousands of violent criminals from America’s prisons, and abolished cash bail so that criminals are back on the streets immediately after their crimes and arrests; Democrat mayors did nothing to prevent the mass violence orchestrated by Black Lives Matter in 220 cities in the summer of 2020, provided bail for arrested felons, de-funded police forces, and instructed law enforcement to stand down in Democrat-run cities, which allowed “protesters” to loot and burn, and criminal mobs to loot and destroy downtown shopping centers.

Democrats regard the criminal riots that took place in the summer of 2020, as social justice. The riots cost $2 billion in property damage, killed scores of people and eventually thousands as their “De-Fund the Police” campaign triggered a record crime wave in America’s major cities. Democrats regard criminal lawlessness and mayhem as understandable responses to what they perceive as “social injustice” – courts and the law be damned. To them, mass lootings are “reparations,” and individual robberies and thefts a socialist redistribution of wealth.

If you are in a battle of words – which is the nature of political warfare – and you are calling your enemies “liberals,” portraying them as not really understanding the gravity of what they are doing, while they are calling you “white supremacists” and “Nazis,” you are losing the war.

Why are Republicans so self-destructively polite? Why do they fail to see, or to identify their opponents as the criminals they are – or, at least, when they are?

Ever since Donald Trump won the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2016, Democrats have conducted a verbal war against white America. This war has been so effective that Gallup polls show that 61% of Democrats think Republicans are white racists. At the same time the Biden administration has made “Equity” a centerpiece of its policies and programs. “Equity” is a weasel word to cover a socialist agenda. The White House defines “Equity” as privileging select racial groups with government largesse on the basis of skin color – a policy that is racist, inequitable, unconstitutional, and illegal.

Even when it is the government doing the redistribution and not street mobs, “social justice” – the policy of equalizing outcomes among politically select groups, regardless of merit – is another name for theft. Redistributing income on the basis of race is not equity, it is racism. Joe Biden is the first overt racist to occupy the White House since Woodrow Wilson – who not coincidently was also a progressive Democrat. Yet Republicans avert their eyes from this anti-American travesty. Why don’t Republicans call Democrats out for their racism?

Over the years I gave a lot of thought to these questions, and eventually I came up with an answer that should have been obvious in the first place...

 Keep reading.

The Sinister Symmetry of CRT and GRT

From Andrew Sullivan today, on Substack, "The extremes of right and left on immigration are fueling each other":

The MSM rushed last weekend to explain the previously obscure conspiracy theory that motivated a mass-murderer on a shooting spree in a black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. We didn’t get to read the warped “manifesto” of the mass shooter, but we were told about its account of “Great Replacement Theory.” It posits that a shadowy, global elite (in this case — surprise! — Jewish) is deliberately fostering mass non-white immigration to dilute the voting power of white Americans. The goal is a minority-majority country in which the Republican Party is doomed by inexorable racial demographics, and a whole new multiracial society can be built on the smoldering ruins of “white supremacy.”

“Wait a minute!” as Homer Simpson might say. Haven’t I heard some of that kind of talk before? It’s coming back to me now. Here’s one devotee: “Folks like me who are Caucasian of European descent — for the first time in 2017 we’ll be an absolute minority in the United States of America. Absolutely minority … That’s not a bad thing. That’s a source of our strength.” Here’s another: “There’s nothing really [the Republicans] can do against this incredible demographic revolution.” And another: “The Republican majority has always been based upon whites and, in particular, white males … The bulwark of Republican electoral strength is disappearing.”

These quotes are from then-VP Joe Biden, Univision founder Jorge Ramos, and sassy Dem Party hack James Carville celebrating the implosion of white America. This was also the theory that drove the 2016 Clinton campaign to ignore white swing voters and focus instead on the non-white: “What I found fascinating about the primary was how we got into our different demographic lanes, and demographics were to some extent destiny,” was how the genius Robby Mook put it, before he helped elect Trump.

No, these people do not represent a secret conspiracy — let alone a Jewish one — to dilute the “whiteness” of America. There is nothing secret about it at all. The majority-minority enthusiasts represent instead a transparent movement to see Americans primarily in racial/generational terms, to view a multi-racial society as a zero-sum endeavor in which a gain for whites always means a loss for non-whites, and who therefore cheer the declining percentage of Americans who are deemed “white.”

Whole libraries could be constructed by the books outlining this thesis. It really got started with John Judis’ and Ruy Teixeira’s “The Emerging Democratic Majority” (2002), Sid Blumenthal’s “The Strange Death of Republican America” (2008), Carville’s “40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation” (2009), Ron Brownstein’s Next America project (2012), Paul Taylor’s “The Next America” (2014), and William Frey’s “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America” (2014), to cite a few. All of them argue that mass immigration is a critical factor in making America majority non-white and therefore Democratic. And all of them are pretty much psyched.

When I say “psyched,” there is a spectrum. Here’s Michelle Goldberg not so long ago: “Right now America is tearing itself apart as an embittered white conservative minority clings to power, terrified at being swamped by a new multiracial polyglot majority” — and she “felt good” about that non-white future. Here’s Jen Rubin, reacting to the news last year that the Census found numbers of white people falling: “This is fabulous news. Now we need to prevent minority White rule.” And who can forget Michael Moore’s reaction to the same news “Best day ever in U.S. history.”

None of them seemed concerned that the thesis could boomerang on them. By “boomerang,” I mean racializing politics so aggressively that you actually help create and legitimize a racially white party — because of negative partisanship. In the words of Michael Barone: “When you keep telling white Americans that they will soon become a minority — a message that sometimes sounds like ‘hurry up and die’ — then many non-college graduate ‘deplorables’ may start acting like members of a self-conscious minority, and vote more cohesively.” Exactly.

And when this demographic prediction is combined with constant denigration of “white people,” and when a simple white majority is suddenly redefined as “white supremacy” — indistinguishable from the era of Jim Crow — then feelings might get, shall we say, “triggered.” If you demonize an entire race, you may at some point get the compliment returned. The more you raise racial consciousness among non-whites, the more you risk the same among whites. As Thomas Chatterton Williams warned: “so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes.”

As for the GRT notion that demographic transformation was somehow imposed on America by cunning elites, there’s no real evidence for that. The key moment — the Immigration Act of 1965, which made non-white immigration a priority — was not deemed demographically revolutionary at the time. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach testified: “This bill is not designed to increase or accelerate the numbers of newcomers permitted to come to America.” Senator Edward Kennedy pledged:

The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.

His brother, Bobby, told the House subcommittee his prediction of Asian immigration under the bill: “I would say for the Asia-Pacific Triangle, it would be approximately 5,000, Mr. Chairman, after which immigration from that source would virtually disappear … we do not expect that there would be any great influx after that.” Emanuel Celler, House sponsor of the bill, insisted: “Quota immigration under the bill is likely to be more than 80 percent European.”

And yet by 1998, Patrick Reddy, a Democratic consultant, boasted that the act had “resulted in a wave of immigration from the Third World that should shift the nation in a more liberal direction within a generation. It will go down as the Kennedy family’s greatest gift to the Democratic Party.” And by 2018, 78 percent of immigrants were non-European, and Europeans made up a mere 9.8 percent of new green-card holders in 2020. As for Bobby Kennedy’s prediction of 5,000 immigrants from Asia, the number now is 14 million. Not a plot. Just a massive predictive error.

Mass illegal immigration has also lent legitimacy to gripes about rapid demographic change against the majority will. You could argue that the 1965 Act was a democratic process; but you can’t really say that about subsequent illegal immigration. The GOP liked the cheap labor; the Democrats believed that it would eventually help them win elections. That wasn’t a conspiracy, but it was a kind of anti-democratic mutual understanding — and you can’t blame someone for thinking it felt like one. Voters repeatedly voted for border control, but even Trump failed...

If we are to get past the kind of ugly violence and race essentialism in Great Replacement Theory, then we also need an antidote to the toxins of Critical Race Theory. The two illiberalisms are profoundly connected. They need each other. And, in their racialized heart, they are morally exactly the same.

 

Great Replacement Theory

You'll be hearing more of this "great replacement theory" in the days ahead. It's not a conspiracy as much as a real theory that can be tested against evidence. Cathy Young, for example, debunks it, here: "The Replacement Theory -- And Terrorist Practice" (Via Memeorandum). 

The American Mind, the popular "national conservatism" website, defends the theory here: "Replace the Ruling Class," and "Shaping the Perfect Subjects: The managerial class wants to replace America’s core demographic with one it can more easily control."

Fox News --- and Trucker Carlson in particular --- have come under heavy fire since the killings. I quit watching his show, but obviously the Democrat Party's open borders policies are predicated on the supply a steady stream of illegal alien public welfare supplicants to build a permanent leftist-socialist-immigrant voting coalition. 

I did catch this segment at the time, last year, featuring Mark Styen (with video snippets of Tucker). Good times, heh:

Harvard's Slave Photos Raise Many Questions

Following-up, "Harvard University Pledges $100 Million to Redress Past Ties to Slavery (VIDEO)."

At the New York Times, "The First Photos of Enslaved People Raise Many Questions About the Ethics of Viewing."

This is Renty below, in a very famous photograph you may have seen before.

From the article:

For a century, they languished in a museum attic. Fifteen wooden cases, palm-size and lined with velvet. Cocooned within are some of history’s cruelest, most contentious images — the first photographs, it is believed, of enslaved human beings.

Alfred, Fassena and Jem. Renty and his daughter Delia. Jack and his daughter Drana. They face us directly in one image and stand in profile in the next, bodies held fixed by an iron brace. The Zealy daguerreotypes, as the pictures are known, were taken in 1850 at the behest of the Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz. A proponent of polygenesis — the idea that the races descended from different origins, a notion challenged in its own time and refuted by Darwin — he had the pictures taken to furnish proof of this theory.

Agassiz wanted images of barbarity, and he got them — implicating only himself. He had hand-selected his subjects in South Carolina, seeking types — “specimens,” as he put it — but each daguerreotype reveals an individual, deeply dignified and expressive. Their hurt, contempt, fatigue, utter refusal are unequivocal. The photographer, Joseph T. Zealy, who specialized in society portraits, did not alter his method for the shoot; he carried on as usual, using the same light, the same angles, giving the images their unsettling, formal perfection.

Agassiz showed the pictures only once. They were then tucked away at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Rediscovered in 1976, they have been at the center of urgent debates about photography ever since...

 

Harvard University Pledges $100 Million to Redress Past Ties to Slavery (VIDEO)

Ooo!

Well one would think. They're sitting on a $53.2 billion endowment. I'm sure they can afford a chintzy $100 million to throw a sop for reparations. *Eye Roll.*

At the New York Times, "Harvard Details Its Entanglements With Slavery and Its Plans for Redress."

Plus, "The Major Findings of Harvard’s Report on Its Ties to Slavery":

Harvard University issued a 134-page report investigating its ties to slavery, and its legacy. Here are the key findings.

In 2019, Harvard’s president, Lawrence S. Bacow, appointed a committee of faculty members to investigate the university’s ties to slavery, as well as its legacy. Discussions about race were intensifying across the country. Students were demanding that the names of people involved in the slave trade be removed from buildings. Other universities, notably Brown, had already conducted similar excavations of their past.

The resulting 134-page report plus two appendices was released Tuesday, along with a promise of $100 million, to create an endowed fund to “redress” past wrongs, one of the biggest funds of its kind.

Here are some of its key findings and excerpts.

Slavery Was Part of Daily Life at the University

The report found that enslaved people lived on the Cambridge, Mass., campus, in the president’s residence, and were part of the fabric, albeit almost invisible, of daily life.

“Over nearly 150 years, from the university’s founding in 1636 until the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found slavery unlawful in 1783, Harvard presidents and other leaders, as well as its faculty and staff, enslaved more than 70 individuals, some of whom labored on campus,” the report said. “Enslaved men and women served Harvard presidents and professors and fed and cared for Harvard students.”

Four Harvard Presidents Enslaved People

The committee found at least 41 prominent people associated with Harvard who enslaved people. They included four Harvard presidents, such as Increase Mather, president of the university from 1692 to 1701, and Benjamin Wadsworth, president from 1725 to 1737; three governors, John Winthrop, Joseph Dudley and John Leverett; William Brattle, minister of First Church, Cambridge; Edward Wigglesworth, professor of divinity; John Winthrop, professor of mathematics and natural philosophy; Edward Hopkins, founder of the Hopkins Foundation; and Isaac Royall Jr., who funded the first professorship of law at Harvard.

The University Benefited From Plantation Owners

While New England’s image has been linked in popular culture to abolitionism, the report said, wealthy plantation owners and Harvard were mutually dependent for their wealth.

“Throughout this period and well into the 19th century, the university and its donors benefited from extensive financial ties to slavery,” the report said. “These profitable financial relationships included, most notably, the beneficence of donors who accumulated their wealth through slave trading; from the labor of enslaved people on plantations in the Caribbean islands and in the American South; and from the Northern textile manufacturing industry, supplied with cotton grown by enslaved people held in bondage. The university also profited from its own financial investments, which included loans to Caribbean sugar planters, rum distillers, and plantation suppliers along with investments in cotton manufacturing.”

Integration Was Accepted Slowly

Early attempts at integration met with stiff resistance from Harvard leaders who prized being a school for a white upper crust, including wealthy white sons of the South.

“In the years before the Civil War, the color line held at Harvard despite a false start toward Black access,” the report said. “In 1850, Harvard’s medical school admitted three Black students but, after a group of white students and alumni objected, the school’s dean, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., expelled them.”

Faculty Members Spread Bogus Science Harvard faculty members played a role in disseminating bogus theories of racial differences that were used to justify racial segregation and to underpin Nazi Germany’s extermination of “undesirable” populations.

“In the 19th century, Harvard had begun to amass human anatomical specimens, including the bodies of enslaved people, that would, in the hands of the university’s prominent scientific authorities, become central to the promotion of so-called race science at Harvard and other American institutions,” the report said.

The bitter fruit of those race scientists remains part of Harvard’s living legacy today...

The Legacy of Slavery Lived On

Until as recently as the 1960s, the legacy of slavery lived on in the paucity of Black students admitted to Harvard...

 

Unpack Your Privilege!

I have all kinds of privilege and I think about it often. My mom was white though, but not my dad. So how am I defined by leftists? It's not by my goodness and decency, my fairness and kindness, my honesty and integrity, my work ethic, nor my commitment to faith and family. Nope.

You're defined by your ideological fanaticism, about swallowing the woke critical theory ideology and making your entire existence about that. Nothing else matters. It's diabolical.

On Twitter:

The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling

A phenomenal essay, from Robert Pondiscio, at Commentary, "How contemporary education fetishizes the bad and the broken in American life":

On a mild October night in 1962, a frightened housewife, eight months pregnant, climbed into bed in Yonkers, New York, with her two-year-old daughter. Her husband was at work on the West Coast and not with his family on what she felt certain would be the last night of their lives. Laying down in the dark holding her child, she cried and prayed until sleep overtook her.

Morning came and they were both still alive, not incinerated in bed as she had feared after President Kennedy shocked the nation with his televised address on the Cuban missile crisis the night before.

I was born five weeks later. Days before my first birthday, Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas. By the time I started kindergarten on Long Island, nearly 30,000 American GIs had been killed in Vietnam. I learned to read in Mrs. Bobrowitz’s first-grade class the same year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; race riots tore apart Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and other cities the summer before I started second grade. My elementary-school years were marked by levels of domestic unrest and political violence that in retrospect stagger the imagination. There were more than 1,900 domestic bombings in 1972 alone. Airplane hijackings were common. My dad flew for American Airlines.

My parents made no attempt that I’m aware of to shield me from the turbulent events of my childhood years. I thumbed the New York Daily News every morning after checking the Mets box score; I plucked Newsday out of the mailbox when I came home from school. The television was rarely turned off in our home. I watched Eyewitness News at 6 p.m. and, once I was allowed to stay up late, again at 11. It became a forgone conclusion that I would someday work in the news business after I had stayed up all night mesmerized by Jim McKay’s coverage of the Black September terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics the summer I was nine. Vietnam stretched far enough into my middle-school years that I wondered whether it would be over before I was old enough to be drafted.

In short, I grew up understanding that the world could be a dangerous place of unpredictable menace.

But I was not tyrannized by this knowledge.

I went to school, played unsupervised in the street, and had blanket permission to range widely on my bike, far from my neighborhood, provided I was home when the streetlights came on. Adults were not omnipresent as they tend to be in children’s lives today, but they seemed in charge and mostly competent. I also knew one thing with certainty about my country, reinforced by my parents and teachers and in the media and culture at large: We were the good guys.

*****

The mental landscape of American childhood is very different today. By any reasonable measure, the world is safer and more stable than at any time in living memory. Adults could hardly be more active in children’s lives, but at the same time we seem less inclined to play a reassuring role. This is particularly true in schools, where curricula and school culture seem nearly to revel in the bad and the broken, suggesting to children that they have suffered the great misfortune to have been born into a country that is racist to its core, whose founding documents were lies when written, and where democracy is hanging by a thread. Not that it matters, since we are just a few short years away from irreversible climate catastrophe, all but certain to render the world a spent and burned-out husk by the time they are grown. Neither is it a given that American children will internalize the idea that their country is a force for good in the world or an engine of freedom and prosperity. In fact, quite the opposite.

Forget adult competence. Children are told, sometimes explicitly in school and in the broader culture, that the world is counting on them for deliverance from problems grown-ups heedlessly created and have proven incapable of solving. In 2019, Time magazine named 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg the youngest “person of the year” in its history. A group of Parkland, Florida, high-school gun-control activists topped the magazine’s list of the world’s most influential people. The article praising their efforts was written by Barack Obama.

Worst of all, this pedagogy of the depressed—America the Problematic—is thought to be a virtue among professional educators who view it as a mark of seriousness and sophistication...

Keep reading.

 

American Bar Association Forcing Wokeness on Law Schools

It's everywhere. And it's not going away soon.

Here's William Jacobson and Johanna Markind, at RCP, "ABA Forcing Wokeness on Law Schools."

Laura Ingraham: The Left's Racial Hatred Never Ends (VIDEO)

The never-ending obsession with race is one the top factors driving political polarization, thanks to the radical left.

Hateful, hateful people. And they never learn, either. Expect a lot of pushback this year culminating in a massive walloping for the Democrats in the midterm elections. I can imagine it now: Just sitting in front of my TV next November, watching the returns come in, rubbing my hands together with glee. If Biden loses in 2024 (if he even runs), it's going to be a new day in America, and Republicans cannot squander the opportunity to turn things around. They need to get ruthless. Beat the left at their own game, divide the opposition, and destroy them.

Here's Ms. Laura:

White 'Antiracist' Teacher Fired in Tennessee

This is a the Washington Post, via Memeorandum, "A White teacher taught White students about White privilege. It cost him his job."

The guy's employed was terminated in 2020. He lost his appeal in October -- and the dude was tenured. 

Here's the story at Education Week, "Teacher Fired for Lesson on White Privilege Loses Appeal":

A Tennessee teacher was fired justifiably last school year for teaching his students that white privilege is a fact of life

rather than a theory, an outside hearing officer overseeing his appeal process ruled late last week.

Matthew Hawn, a Sullivan County, Tenn., contemporary issues high school teacher, was insubordinate and unprofessional and violated the teacher code of ethics when he failed to provide students “varying viewpoints” on the existence of white privilege during a lesson on police brutality against Black men, hearing officer Dale Conder said in his decision.

“Despite knowing he was to provide varying viewpoints, Mr. Hawn did not provide a viewpoint contrary to the concept of white privilege,” Conder wrote in his decision.

Hawn, reached by Education Week over the weekend after the ruling, has not yet decided whether to appeal Conder’s ruling.

“I really thought that I was going to be teaching in Sullivan County. I thought we made a great case,” said Hawn, 43, who grew up in the county and had been teaching in the district for 16 years. “I’m just extremely disappointed and defeated.”

The ruling comes amid a raucous national debate over whether districts and states should censure the ways teachers talk to students about America’s racist past.

As his case gained national attention, Hawn, who was tenured, decided to appeal the firing, asking for a hearing to determine whether the district acted legally.

Hawn taught a contemporary issues class at Sullivan Central High School for more than a decade, where he brought up current events in his classroom for students to debate and discuss. In September 2020, Hawn told his contemporary issues students, “white privilege is a fact,” while juxtaposing the police shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, and the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teenager who walked away unharmed after fatally shooting two people at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wis.

On Sept. 10, Hawn was told by his principal in an email to allow room for classroom discussion and not make declarative statements about the topics he brought up in class. Undeterred, he later that year assigned a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay called “The First White President” about Donald Trump, which calls the former president a white supremacist.

After a parent complained, Assistant Director of Schools Ingrid Deloach issued Hawn a reprimand for failing to provide varying perspectives, which is a requirement under Tennessee’s Teacher Code of Ethics.

When Hawn wanted to discuss former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s verdict for killing George Floyd with his class in June, he chose to show a video of Black poet Kyla Jenee Lacey reciting her poem, “White Privilege.” This time, he also assigned students to read Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking an invisible knapsack” and CNN writer John Blake’s opinion piece, “It’s time to talk about Black privilege.”

Conder did not consider any of these to be a “varying perspective” to the poem, because they did not question the existence of white privilege.

“These articles do not challenge the concept of ‘white privilege,’” he said in his decision...

 

Abe Greenwald: "Review of 'Woke Racism' by John McWhorter"

At Commentary, "Among the Elect":

If the United States manages to put down the woke revolution, it will be because a critical mass of liberals chooses to reject it. Conservatives, opposed to wokeness from the start, can make arguments and stand up for their principles individually. But they can’t stop the liberal-to-woke conversion process that turns mildly left-of-center Americans into cosplay Black Panthers overnight. The liberals themselves are the gatekeepers of their own movement and its institutions. Given that these institutions—news media, social media, entertainment, academia, and the current majority party in Washington—shape so many aspects of American life, it’s mostly up to liberals to halt and reverse the transformation of the country.

Among the dozen or so prominent liberals who have answered this call, John McWhorter has taken on an invaluable role. McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, is less consumed with particular woke-inspired outrages than with getting at the substance of wokeness itself and the threat it poses to his fellow black Americans. On those matters, his new book, Woke Racism, makes several major contributions.

First, it’s not pitched at the woke. McWhorter is done with them. “Our current conversations waste massive amounts of energy by missing the futility of ‘dialogue’ with them,” he writes. No one can be argued out of wokeness and, just as crucially, McWhorter wants to get to liberals—black and white—before they’re irretrievably lost to the impenetrable mob: “I want to reach those on the fence, guilted into attention by these ideologues’ passion and rhetoric but unable to disregard their true inner compass.”

McWhorter also argues that wokeness is insulting to and catastrophic for black Americans. By the lights of the woke, he says, “white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special.”

Despite the book’s title, McWhorter dispenses with the term woke altogether. Borrowing, with acknowledgment, from the conservative writer Joseph Bottum, he deems the woke “the Elect.” The term evokes the social-justice warrior’s smugness in his sense of having come to higher moral knowledge. The Elect also has a helpfully medieval resonance to it: “This is apt, in that the view they think of as, indeed, sacrosanct is directly equivalent to views people centuries before us were as fervently devoted to as today’s Elect are.” The Elect are, to some degree, inquisitors.

From there, McWhorter makes his most convincing argument—that Electism is not a political persuasion at all but a religion. “I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion,” he writes. “I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion. An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.”

Understanding Electism as a real, not metaphorical, religion, requires some explication. McWhorter details the new faith’s tenets and motivations at length. Like any religion, Electism involves “certain suspensions of disbelief.” This means, for example, one is not to question the Elect’s boundless outrage over the police killing of George Floyd compared with its more muted response to thousands of black-on-black murders committed the same year. “Does that mean ‘It’s not as bad if we do it to ourselves?’” McWhorter asks. Moreover, “to suspend disbelief,” he writes, “is a kind of submission.” And the Elect evince this submission when they refuse to question a host of policies—from an extreme version of affirmative action to defunding police—that show no benefit for the black Americans the Elect want to help.

The Elect also have a very influential clergy. Figures such as Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Ta-Nehisi Coates make up a priestly class, and their writings are scripture...

Continue reading.

And buy the book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

Remarkable Shape-Shifting on Left's Critical Race Theory Takeover

They're scared. Race-bait leftists are scared shitless.

They're up against the wall and resorting to anything --- pure lies, propaganda, and even the power of the federal government --- to shut down kids and school moms showing up at board meetings nationwide. 

Goodness prevails over evil, and "antiracist/C.R.T." is going down.

From Ayaan Ali Hirsi, at UnHerd, "Critical Race Theory’s New Disguise":

Does “critical race theory” (CRT) really exist? Not according to Ralph Northam, the Governor of Virginia. CRT, he recently told The New York Times, “is a dog whistle that the Republicans are using to frighten people. What I’m interested in is equity.”

But rather than convince anyone about the non-existence of CRT, his comments merely confirmed something else: namely, CRT’s remarkable ability to shape-shift into whatever form its advocates choose. For Northam, CRT might not exist — but that’s only because it has undergone a rebranding.

Indeed, while many on the Right have obsessed over the rise of CRT in the past year, a different abbreviation has quickly become entrenched in America’s schools and colleges: “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI).

Part of its purpose appears to be to sow confusion among opponents of CRT. It has certainly riled the conservative Heritage Foundation. In its recent guide on “How to identify Critical Race Theory”, it warns of a “new tactic” deployed by the movement’s defenders: they “now deny that the curricula and training programs in question form part of CRT, insisting that the ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)’ programs of trainers such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are distinct from the academic work of professors such as Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, and other CRT architects”.

Certainly, regardless of which trendy three-letter term you prefer to describe the latest iteration of America’s obsession with race, the goal in each case is the same: to shift away from meritocracy in favour of an equality of outcome system.

But implementing a grievance model into our youth education curriculum will not fix the problems it purports to solve. There is, after all, a dearth of evidence suggesting that DEI programmes advance diversity, equity or inclusion. In fact, if DEI programmes in schools have similar results as DEI corporate training, they might be not only ineffective, but potentially harmful.

This shift is due to the clear failure of affirmative action policies. First introduced more than 50 years ago, they were intended to create equal opportunities for a black community said to be held back by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow laws. Suffice it to say that they failed. Today, only 26% of black American’s have a Bachelor’s degree, 10% lower than the national average. More than half of black households earn less than $50,000 annually, and the labour force participation rate for black men is 3.3% lower than for white men; it has actually shrunk by 11.6% since the early 1970’s. Only four CEOs from Fortune 500 companies are black.

Instead of providing opportunities for black students, affirmative action threw many students into the deep-end of schools where they lacked the educational foundation to succeed. Frequently, as Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr have observed, they were mismatched: “Large racial preferences backfire[d] against many, and perhaps, most recipients, to the point that they learn less… usually get much lower grades, rank toward the bottom of the class, and far more often drop out.”

But rather than recognise the failure of this approach, its proponents have chosen to double down. Without analysing why affirmative action failed to produce equal opportunity for black students, and without trying to identify solutions that would be more impactful, those interested in CRT and DEI only wish to manipulate the system further.

Instead of focusing on ways to lift black students up as individuals with agency, ability and choice, they believe the system must reorient itself to produce the desired outcome, starting with kindergarten. It is dependent on the magnification of barriers and tension between racial groups — something which I suspect is psychologically damaging to both white and black students.

For white students, the blame of slavery and Jim Crow laws are laid at their feet...

More.

 

Colonial-Era Royal Carriage Stirs Up Modern Backlash in Netherlands

So lame. *Eye-roll.*

At the New York Times, "The “Golden Coach,” built for Queen Wilhelmina of Holland in 1896, is emerging as a new focus of debate over slavery, colonialist oppression and history":

AMSTERDAM — In 1896, the city of Amsterdam decided to build Queen Wilhelmina a very special gift: a carriage covered in gold. The “Golden Coach” was designed to represent the entire kingdom and its resources, with leather from Brabant, cushions filled with flax from Zeeland and teak from the Dutch colony of Java.

A prominent Dutch artist of the era, Nicolaas van der Waay, was commissioned to make panel paintings on all four sides. One of them, “Tribute from the Colonies,” depicts a virgin on a throne. On the left, Africans in loin cloths bow down before her. On the right, Southeast Asians in colorful batiks present her with gifts, as representations of the Dutch East Indies colony.

All of these component parts glorifying the empire would have been appreciated by most Dutch people in that era. But it is precisely these elements — reminders of slavery and colonial oppression — that make the carriage a source of pain in the Netherlands, particularly for descendants of formerly colonized people.

In the context of the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, the coach has become a focus of anti-colonialist and antifascist protest. The controversy is an echo of similar debates in the United States over Confederate statues and other monuments, and in Europe over monuments honoring colonialists and slave traders.

An online petition to retire the Golden Coach has received more than 9,000 signatures.

The coach was first used in 1898 to carry Queen Wilhelmina to what the Dutch call her “inauguration,” eight years after she became queen at age 10. In recent years, the Golden Coach has been used primarily for the ceremonial opening of the Dutch Parliament in The Hague, and occasionally for weddings and coronations. Since the 1960s, royal trips in the carriage have often been met with street protests.

It was last used in 2015, without incident, after which it underwent a five-year, $1.4 million renovation before it was put on display at the Amsterdam Museum, where it will remain through Feb. 27, 2022.

“We must finally end this practice of parading colonial images as displays of power,” Sylvana Simons, a member of Parliament and the founder and leader of an anti-racist political party, BIJ1, said in June.

Gideon van Meijeren, a lawmaker with the Forum for Democracy, a right-wing populist party, had no patience with that. “We must not allow ourselves to be emotionally blackmailed by a small group of pushy extremists who see racism under every stone,” he said.

His comment echoed the 2020 Twitter sentiments of a populist Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, who characterized efforts to decommission the coach, known in Dutch as the Gouden Koets, as “left-wing, antiracism terror.” He continued, using a slang term for drop dead: “I say: Don’t bow, don’t kneel, let them all get the rambam!”

Last month, Emile Schrijver, director of the Jewish Cultural Quarter, wrote an opinion piece in the Amsterdam daily Het Parool, calling the coach “an outdated and unacceptable glorification of a colonial sense of superiority,” which should be decommissioned and permanently housed in a museum.

On July 16, King Willem-Alexander addressed the subject at a news conference, saying he was “listening” to public forums on the matter organized by the museum. “The discussion is ongoing,” he added. The carriage is scheduled to return to The Hague after the exhibition. “You will hear from us then,” he said.

The Golden Coach was hoisted over the top of the museum by crane in June for the grand opening of the exhibition, attended by the king, and is now displayed in a large glass box in the inner courtyard. The exhibition exploring its history from its 19th-century conception fills six rooms within the museum, with another room devoted to visual responses to the coach by 15 contemporary artists.

What will happen to it thereafter — whether to put it back in service to the king and queen; or keep it in the museum with lots of explanatory content; or store it somewhere out of sight; or destroy it — has become a matter of intense public debate. Ultimately, the decision will be made by the royal family...

Nine-thousand signatures, c'mon!

"Rambam" is right, sheesh.

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

At Amazon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me.

The Year of the Woke Revolution

It's Lee Siegel, at City Journal, "Year Zero: The roots of the woke revolution":

On the day in March that eight people were murdered in a massage parlor in Atlanta, six of them Asian-American, a Cherokee County, Georgia, police captain gave a media briefing after the alleged murderer was caught. He described the suspect’s motivation as follows: “He was pretty much fed up, and at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”

Indignation erupted. How, people cried, could the police captain attribute the murders to someone merely having a bad day? Having determined that the crime was motivated by anti-Asian hatred, the Internet furies concluded that the captain had spoken callously because of his own anti-Asian bias.

Leave aside that anyone who had seen a police movie could recognize as tough-guy talk the captain’s seemingly casual description of an unspeakable act. And never mind that just a few weeks later, President Biden described the slaughter of eight people in a FedEx facility not as a human tragedy but as a “national embarrassment,” as if it had been a messily disputed election. Consider instead what the policeman’s critics cared about. Imagine that the captain had appeared before the media and had said that he believed that the suspect was motivated by anti-Asian hatred and that this hate was the true virus ravaging us all. Would he have been lauded? Yes. But what if he gave this briefing while the suspect remained at large, giving him time to flee? In reality, the entire Atlanta police department was on the scene almost immediately. The suspect was caught shortly after the shootings, before he could harm anyone else. Even if the police captain had been insensitive, why should this matter more than his and his officers’ actions?

Words are crumbling under the weight of moral one-upmanship. One cannot, for example, call both Hitler and Donald Trump “fascists” without the term losing its meaning. But for four years, an imminent fascist revolution sponsored by the Trump movement was a liberal obsession. (Hard to make a fascist revolution, though, without having the military on your side, and Trump spent four years insulting both the military and the state’s intelligence apparatus.) Nor does the term “systemic racism” mean anything if it describes both the structure of apartheid in South Africa and slavery in the antebellum American South and the circumstances we live in today. Apartheid South Africa was systemically racist. Georgia in 1860 was systemically racist. But the New York suburb where I live—Montclair, New Jersey—has a black mayor who succeeded another black mayor; a black superintendent of schools; a black assistant superintendent of schools; several black school principals; a black deputy chief of police; a self-conscious enclave of wealthy black bankers and black lawyers; and accomplished black residents, from a world-famous jazz bassist to a former head of Homeland Security. Montclair is more racially, socially, and economically diverse than any neighborhood in New York City. Yet cries of Montclair’s systemic racism have now swept the town, as well as its public school curricula.... 

... We are now living in a new golden age of American racism. So long as you talk the proverbial talk—and, if you really need extra cover, make the obligatory accusations and issue the compulsory condemnations—you can actually indulge racist impulses. You can inveigh against racism at your local school board meeting and then, a year or two later, quietly move your children into the whitest private school you can find. You can fawn so fulsomely over your white daughter’s black friend that the friend will never return to your house. You can be so excessively polite yet calculatedly distant with black people that you will ensure that none will enter your life. If you are a Coca-Cola executive, you can declaim against the new Georgia voting laws, even as you market your product extra-aggressively in poor black neighborhoods, where the obesity and diabetes caused in part by regular soda consumption has by now afflicted generations of black children. Maybe the hope among Coca-Cola executives is that, thanks to the new rhetoric of morally superior denunciation, you can start addicting liberal white kids in the suburbs, too: “Woke Goes Better with Coke.” And why not? Apple tells me that in order to “protect the environment,” it will no longer include a power adapter and earphones at no extra charge with its new phones. However, Apple will gladly sell them to me.

Excellent piece (emphasis added).

Keep reading.

Anti-Racism at Berkeley and UCLA

The "big lie" of university admissions --- and it's hurting the life chances of black and brown students.

Here's John McWhorter, on Substack:

No more SAT at the University of California? Classic racist antiracism, and it's not going to end well.https://t.co/S5AxQRCV7f

— John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) July 25, 2021

The Contradictions of Ibram X. Kendi

Actually it's Ibram Henry Rogers, so I guess that's more authentic, considering his shtick. 

Shoot, I'm surprised he doesn't wear a dashiki. *Shrug.*

At New York magazine, "How Anti-Racist Is Anti-Racism?":

Ibram X. Kendi’s work takes dead aim at those convenient fictions [of the mainstream interpretations of U.S. history]. The historian and pop-theoretician of “antiracism” seeks to disrupt white America’s complacency about racial progress by spotlighting Black-white disparities in incarceration, wealth, and other social ills. And he seeks to stigmatize victim-blaming accounts of Black social disadvantage by insisting that all racial disparities derive from a history of white supremacy (not a “culture of poverty”). Kendi is especially concerned with the way superficially non-racist ideas and policies can serve the function of fortifying racial hierarchy. His solution is to adopt a consequentialist definition of racism: A policy or idea is racist to the extent that it “produces or sustains racial inequity,” and antiracist to the extent that it reduces the same.

Kendi’s ideas have both influenced and internalized broader intellectual currents on the social-justice left. And, collectively, antiracist thinkers and activists have had great success in reshaping mainstream discourse. Today, statistical testaments to racial inequity are a staple of Democratic oratory, while pathologizing calls for Black men to “pull up their pants” and raise their children are largely absent. Mainstream news outlets, meanwhile, rarely report on social problems without conveying pertinent racial disparities. And much of corporate America has invested resources into monitoring and mitigating racial gaps in pay, hiring, and promotions.

All of which is to the good. Today’s discourse about race is surely more conducive to egalitarian reform than yesterday’s (better for the liberal media to fixate on racial disparities than “welfare queens”). Given that anti-Black discrimination in hiring remains prevalent in the U.S., corporations that feel compelled to diversify their workforces for brand reputation’s sake are preferable to ones that don’t. Further, one could reasonably argue that Kendi-esque antiracist advocacy has already facilitated meliorative changes in public policy. Had such advocates not heightened the salience of racial inequity among white liberals, debt relief for disadvantaged Black farmers might not have made it into The American Recovery Act. And it’s also plausible that antiracists’ stigmatization of “welfare queen” narratives enabled the Democratic Party’s recent embrace of unconditional cash assistance to low-income families; until this year’s CTC expansion, Democrats had designed their anti-poverty programs to leave out America’s poorest children so as to punish their parents for being unemployed, a convention that disproportionately harmed Black families.

This said, the scale of reform necessary for eradicating Black disadvantage remains far beyond the bounds of political possibility. Enact Joe Biden’s entire agenda, and millions of African Americans will still lack affordable housing, remunerative employment, and health insurance. Meanwhile, an increasingly authoritarian far-right party controls a majority of U.S. states, and is well-positioned to retake Congress, if not full control of the federal government, within the next four years. Building the America that the Civil Rights Movement demanded — one that would guarantee economic security to all of its citizens — will require transforming our nation’s politics.

Within blue America, there is much debate about whether the discourse of antiracism is conducive to such a transformation...

Keep reading. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Rails Against Opponents of Critical Race Theory

At Fox News, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rails against CRT opposition: Teachers should be 'fluent in how to dismantle racism': 'Why don’t you want our schools to teach anti-racism?'"