John McWhorter

The Slippery Slope of the Subjective Left | Mark Goldblatt

Published by Papa Giorgio

Glenn Loury and John McWhorter talk with Mark Goldblatt about the mistaken epistemological premises of wokeism, which prioritizes subjective experience over objective fact.

The following is with a hat-tip to and an “adding to” Mark Goldblatt’s book, “I Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism“ (New York, N.Y.: Bombardier Books, 2022), 40-43.  

I will be adding links and graphics to the post… the graphic is linked to a larger one upon clicking it.

Why then do CRT advocates simultaneously reject the real­ity of racial categories yet embrace racial essentialism (a contra­diction that would be deadly except in an avowedly postmod­ern movement)? Because they need to account for the failure of black people to measure up to non-black people in a number of statistically significant ways; they therefore need to argue that the criteria of measurement themselves reflect a bias against black people. To make that case, however, you must presup­pose that black people are in some sense essentially distinct from non-black people. You must presuppose that, on a fundamental level, black people are wired differently.

Think about it. If black people are wired differently, you have a ready-made narrative of victimization. To take the most obvious example: you have a full explanation for why the scores of black kids lag behind others on standardized tests, and you have compelling proof of how past racism–in this case, the assumption of “white wiring” as the intellectual norm—contin­ues to hold back black people.

The normalization of the way white minds work thus becomes a quintessential tool of white supremacy. That’s the premise behind the notorious “Whiteness” education portal sponsored by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The original centerpiece of that portal was a chart (later withdrawn, after a public outcry) titled Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture. [RPT says see NATIONAL REVIEW, WASHINGTON TIMES, and the WASHINGTON EXAMINER for more.] What “aspects” and “assumptions” are we talking about? Here’s a partial list:

  • Objective, rational, linear thinking
  • Cause and effect relationships
  • Quantitative emphasis
  • Hard work is the key to success
  • Work before play
  • Heavy value on ownership of goods, space, property
  • Plan for the future
  • Delayed gratification
  • The nuclear family: father, mother, 2.3 children is the ideal social unit
  • Follow rigid time schedules
  • Decision-making
  • Written tradition
  • Be polite

VIA: Where Progressives and the Alt-Right Meet: How vicious racial stereotypes got repackaged as “anti-racism.”

These, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, are essentially white things. Black people cannot be expected to adapt to them or value them in the same way white people do; it’s not in the nature of black people to do so.

Of course, the notion that black people are just different didn’t spontaneously evolve in the halls of the Smithsonian. It’s commonplace among critical race theorists. So, for exam­ple, we hear educational consultant and Columbia University Professor Maria Tope Akinyele explain:

Black people, we are relational people. We are people of context. Like, it’s very Western and European to dissect and analyze and take apart things, whereas [in] Afrocentric schooling or Afrocentric spirituality or African epistemology or ways of knowing, everything is connected. So this is why education is not working for so many students of color because we are context-driven people. We can’t tell a story without telling the ten things that happened that led up to that moment. There’s no such thing as like thinking in isolation—isolating yourself from nature, from your family. It’s just not part of our ways of knowing and being in the world. So when we tap into the ways that we understand the world, students are able to make wonderful connections and unleash their brilliance and their wisdom. (Black on Black Education)

Sounds like a straightforward endorsement of racial essen­tialism. Except twenty minutes later, in the same You Tube talk, she recounts a training session she held for a group of predomi­nantly white instructors at which, “….about seventy percent of them did not know that race was a made-up thing. Like did not know! And I was like, ‘Who is teaching you?’ This is disrespect!”

CRT, again, has three legs: Collective grievance. Subjective historiography. And racial essentialism. The glue that holds it together is the postmodernist rejection of rationality as an arbi­ter of truth. Postmodernism is the reason it’s fruitless to point out that Professor Akinyele is contradicting herself. What possi­ble difference would that make to her? What difference could it make within a CRT framework?

THOMAS SOWELL DEBUNKS LIES ABOUT BLACK EDUCATION

THE ORIGIN OF THE LEFT’S WAR ON WHITE PEOPLE IN AMERICA

Glenn Loury on Tucker Carlson & w/John McWhorter

Published by Papa Giorgio

A QUICK CLIP w/McHorter

Glenn Loury recounts his experience as a guest on Tucker Carlson Today.

TWITTER QUICK CLIPS

The Down Side Of Egalitarian Anti-Racism

Published by Papa Giorgio

John McWhorter discusses the harms of anti-racism.

Microaggression Break

Columbia University linguist John McWhorter on the Jussie Smollett hoax, Donald Trump, and “antiracism” as a new secular religion. (Mind you, while I thoroughly enjoy Doc McHorter, I disagree with some of his positions. But he is a sane moderate voice.)

American’s Should Not Kneel/Kowtow Before Provably False Ideas

Published by Papa Giorgio

KOW-TOW

  • DEFINITION: To kneel and touch the forehead to the ground in expression of deep respect, worship, or submission, as formerly done in China…. To show servile deference. synonym: fawn.

Vietnamese mandarins kowtowing before the Governor-General of Tonkin

AMERICAN THINKER has an intro to the below Tucker Carlson video I wish to excerpt from before you watch the video:

…Back in the 1960s, authority figures also collapsed before the black mob.  Shelby Steele, in WHITE GUILT, describes how his college president, the quintessential white liberal who gave to all the Civil Rights causes, backed down like a deflated balloon:

Dr. McCabe simply came to a place where his own knowledge of American racism—knowledge his personal integrity prevented him from denying—opened a vacuum of moral authority within him. He was not suddenly stricken with pangs of guilt over American racism. He simply found himself without the moral authority to reprimand us for our disruptive behavior. He knew that we had a point, that our behavior was in some way connected to centuries of indisputable injustice. So he was trumped by his knowledge of this, not by his remorse over it, though he may have felt such remorse. Our outrage at racism simply had far greater moral authority than his outrage over our breach of decorum. And had he actually risen to challenge us, I was prepared to say that we would worry about our behavior when he and the college started worrying about the racism we encountered everywhere, including on his campus.

And this is when I first really saw white guilt in action. Now I know it to be something very specific: the vacuum of moral authority that comes from simply knowing that one’s race is associated with racism. Whites (and American institutions) must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed of it, but once they acknowledge it, they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice, poverty, and so on. They step into a void of vulnerability. The authority they lose transfers to the “victims” of historical racism and becomes their great power in society. This is why white guilt is quite literally the same thing as black power. 

Steele, Shelby, White Guilt [Kindle Locations 370-374]. HarperCollins; emphasis mine.

In the 1960s, thanks to Jim Crow and endemic racism in the Northeast, whites had good reason to feel guilty.

But what about whites in 2020? Well, that’s where the Big Lie comes in….

Why Are Americans Surrendering To Violent Mobs?
Because They’ve Been Told They Have To

Here is an excellent CITY-JOURNAL article that Heather Mac Donald draws sensible reactions to these outliers:

 …Many protest supporters have expressed frustration with the attention being given to a relative handful of agitators driving the violence and looting—behavior, they say, that distorts the image of what is largely a peaceful movement. Their frustration is understandable but also ironic: the narrative that has driven thousands into the streets is itself a distortion. Just as the violence that has alarmed the American public does not represent the peaceful protesters exercising their right to air their grievances, the police violence depicted in viral videos does not characterize the institution of law enforcement.

This is not to say that police are perfect, or that officers never abuse their power; they are not perfect, and some do succumb to what can be an intoxicating sense of authority. This is a truth I’ve personally experienced. Nor is it to say that there is no room to improve policing and to make police-citizen encounters both safer and less fraught. But if there is to be any hope for peacefully bridging the gap so strikingly represented by the glass-covered asphalt separating rioters and police, destructive hyperbole needs to be recognized for what it is.

[….]

This is in line with other data I highlighted in these pages two years ago—namely, a 2018 study published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, which analyzed more than 114,000 criminal arrests made across three midsize police departments, finding that more than 99 percent of arrests were carried out without the use of physical force. In 98 percent of the cases in which those officers did use physical force, suspects “sustained no or mild injury.”

Historical context is important, too. In 1971, New York City Police discharged their firearms 810 times, wounding 221 people and killing 93. By 1990, those numbers were down to 307, 72, and 39, respectively. In 2016, police discharged their weapons just 72 times, wounding 23, killing 9. This is real progress; but it would come as news to anyone observing the mobs that have spent the last few days hurling insults, rocks, and Molotov cocktails at exhausted and demoralized members of the NYPD.

As troubling as cases like that of George Floyd are, we must remember that they are outliers. That knowledge won’t bring comfort or justice to those harmed or killed by police who use unjustifiable force, or their families; but it can help lower the temperature in an environment that is about as inhospitable to reasonable discussion as can be imagined. … 

THE DAILY CALLER weighs in:

…However, this destructive delusion has been completely demolished by a recent study that demonstrates there is no epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black people, that black citizens are not more likely to be shot by white officers, and that the shooting of unarmed people of any race is extraordinarily rare. In fact, an individual American citizen is substantially more likely to be struck by lightning than he is to be shot by the police while unarmed.    

In the article, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Joseph Cesario of Michigan State University and David Johnson of the University of Maryland assess hundreds of fatal police shootings since 2015. Their groundbreaking study exposes what is, at least for the anti-police mythmakers, an inconvenient truth indeed — that police shootings of citizens are not motivated by race or racism.

Here are the facts: 55% of all people fatally shot in America by the police are white — more than double the number of black (27%) or Hispanic (19%) individuals. Those police critics who accept at least this fact are generally quick to point out that black citizens are 27% of the people shot and killed by the police despite making up only 14% of the U.S. population. They say this disparity provides statistical proof of “systemic racism and bias,” but this superficial explanation doesn’t stand up. There are racial disparities in police shootings, but the disparities are not caused by racism.

According to Cesario and Johnson, who analyzed crime data from more than 200 U.S. counties, the strongest predictor of being shot by the police isn’t a person’s race, but whether the person is engaging in violent criminal behavior. Disparities across the major races in rates of police shooting are almost entirely consistent with the rates at which members of these different races are accused by victims of committing violent crimes. In other words, the greater the number of crimes committed by white individuals in a county, the more likely a white person will be shot by the police. And poor white Americans in Appalachia, for example, often are involved in police shootings. But, the greater number of crimes committed by black individuals in a county, the more likely it is that a black person will be shot by the police. The same is true for Hispanic individuals.

It’s not “systemic racism” that makes it more likely that a person will be shot by the police; it is how mathematically likely that person is to be committing crime. An individual’s behavior, not his race, is the determining factor.

The claim that racial bias on the part of individual officers is the cause of racial disparities in police shootings was also specifically found to be untrue. The researchers determined that: “The race of the officer doesn’t matter when it comes to predicting whether a black or white citizen will be shot.” White officers are no more likely to shoot a black person than are black or Hispanic officers. Not only is racial bias on the part of individual officers not a significant predictor of police shootings of black people, but also, remarkably, police officers off all races are statistically less likely to shoot a black than a white person under the same circumstances….

AGAIN, for good measure:

Here is Heather Mac Donald’s WALL STREET JOURNAL article in full [I believe] with thanks to PECKFORD 42:

Hold officers accountable who use excessive force. But there’s no evidence of widespread racial bias.

By Heather Mac Donald
June 2, 2020

George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis has revived the Obama-era narrative that law enforcement is endemically racist. On Friday, Barack Obama tweeted that for millions of black Americans, being treated differently by the criminal justice system on account of race is “tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal.’ ” Mr. Obama called on the police and the public to create a “new normal,” in which bigotry no longer “infects our institutions and our hearts.”

Joe Biden released a video the same day in which he asserted that all African-Americans fear for their safety from “bad police” and black children must be instructed to tolerate police abuse just so they can “make it home.” That echoed a claim Mr. Obama made after the ambush murder of five Dallas officers in July 2016. During their memorial service, the president said African-American parents were right to fear that their children may be killed by police officers whenever they go outside.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz denounced the “stain . . . of fundamental, institutional racism” on law enforcement during a Friday press conference. He claimed blacks were right to dismiss promises of police reform as empty verbiage.

This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.

The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was PUBLISHED in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” they concluded.

A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.

The false narrative of systemic police bias resulted in targeted killings of officers during the Obama presidency. The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots. Police precincts and courthouses have been destroyed with impunity, which will encourage more civilization-destroying violence. If the Ferguson effect of officers backing off law enforcement in minority neighborhoods is reborn as the Minneapolis effect, the thousands of law-abiding African-Americans who depend on the police for basic safety will once again be the victims.

The Minneapolis officers who arrested George Floyd must be held accountable for their excessive use of force and callous indifference to his distress. Police training needs to double down on de-escalation tactics. But Floyd’s death should not undermine the legitimacy of American law enforcement, without which we will continue on a path toward chaos.

Victimhood Chic – Dr. John McWhorter

Published by Papa Giorgio
  • Only in an America in which matters of race are not as utterly irredeemable as we are often told could things get to the point that someone would pretend to be tortured in this way, acting oppression rather than suffering it, seeking to play a prophet out of a sense that playing a singer on television is not as glamorous as getting beaten up by white guys. That anyone could feel this way and act on it in the public sphere is, in a twisted way, a kind of privilege, and a sign that we have come further on race than we are often comfortable admitting. — John McWhorter

John McWhorter delivers some brilliant social commentary (a shining light into Don Lemon’s career):

THE ATLANTIC

….Notable in Smollett’s account is that he sought to come off as an especially fierce kind of victim—the victim as hero, as cool. “I fought the fuck back,” he told ABC’s Robin Roberts in an interview. Smollett has long displayed a hankering for preacher status. His Twitter stream is replete with counsel about matters of spirit, skepticism, and persistence that sounds a tad self-satisfied from someone in his 30s. His mother associated with the Black Panthers and is friends with the activist Angela Davis, and in interviews Smollett has identified proudly with the activist tradition.

The problem is that amid the complexities of 2019 as opposed to 1969, keeping the Struggle going is more abstract, less dramatic, than it once was. Angela Davis is on T-shirts; it seems less likely that, for example, the Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson will be. How do you make as stark and monumental a statement as a King or a Malcolm these days? With a touch too much thirst for glory, and a tad too little inclination for analysis, one might seek to be attacked the way they were.

In john ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, a newspaperman advises, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” One take on Smollett’s story, if he turns out to have orchestrated it, will be that it was true in essence—a teachable example of the very real phenomenon of hate crimes. For a long time, the enlightened black person was to pretend that O. J. Simpson was framed by the Los Angeles Police Department, out of concern about the way the LAPD actually had treated black people for decades. For similar reasons, even today the idea that Michael Brown in Ferguson died with his hands up, although soundly refuted by all lines of evidence, retains status as almost an “alternative fact” in some quarters.

However, Smollett, in crafting his own “legend”—if that’s what happened—is less channeling Simpson and Brown than Tawana Brawley and Rachel Dolezal.

In 1987, Brawley claimed that six white men had abducted her, raped her, and left her in the woods covered with feces. They had scrawled racial epithets across her torso. That account turned out to be as fictional as it now sounds, but Brawley claimed as late as 1997 that “something happened to me,” a deftly vague statement. However, a key difference between Brawley and Smollett, pointing up the difference between 1987 and 2019, is that while Brawley lied to escape the wrath of her mother’s boyfriend after she ran away from home for four days, Smollett may have lied to look good to the public.

Dolezal, white, spent years with a spray tan, “identifying” as black and even heading a local NAACP branch, and had fabricated episodes of racist discrimination against herself. As Bryan Cranston’s dentist character on Seinfeld adopted Judaism for the jokes, Dolezal, one might say, took on blackness for the victimhood. She felt that her existence was more meaningful while she was “playing” an oppressed black person than living as a white person despite all the attendant privileges. Few news events more perfectly illustrated that in our moment, a claim of victimhood from a black person is a form of power. Only in an America much further past the old days than many like to admit could a white person eagerly seek to be a put-upon black person out of a sense that it looked “cool.” A Dolezal would have been unimaginable until roughly the late 1990s.
One could imagine that Smollett, if he was playacting, had a similar motivation. For Smollett, being a successful actor and singer might not have been quite as exciting as being a poster child for racist abuse in Trump’s America.

Assuming, again, that the reports are accurate, Smollett’s clumsiness would be an especially poignant indication of how deeply this victimhood chic has taken hold—almost as if he thought this was such an easy score that he didn’t even need to think too hard about the logistics. This story has been reminiscent, again, of Brawley, except that she was 15 and Smollett is, at 36, more than twice her age then. Consider, for example, this saliently implausible detail: If thugs put a rope around your neck, your first impulse when they were gone would be to remove it, but he still had it on when police first made contact. Really?

Smollett told Robin Roberts, amid initial skepticism about his account, that people would have been more open to his story if he had said the attackers were black or Muslim—missing, apparently, that the attackers’ being white made the story the most interesting possible one to all the people he was seeking to reach. Then, suddenly, even an actor is awkward in playing his part. He addressed an audience recently using note cards and callowly compared himself to Tupac Shakur, unaware that all of this is the hallmark of someone making something up, speaking from a script—telling a story, as it were……