Wow you guys are brave! You’re going to be crucified for it too. It is so obvious that discrimination based on race is immoral and ineffective in long term benefits. It cannot be fair for example to give a black an advantage over a non-black anymore than to give a non-black an advantage over a black. In the long run, it weakens the group that doesn’t have to work as hard.
People will call bullshit when it is in their perceived self-interest to do so. As things stand, they are making a calculation - they expect more of a hassle from defying the mob than from kowtowing to it. Also, the people described here are largely white, which I'm told by the wokerati is the most terrible thing one can be. They fear backlash, perhaps partly because it is sure to come and also because of a moral cowardice that precludes them from saying, "it's not your call to make."
The people who recognize nonsense tend to not make a federal case of each instance of it. They do not corral the social media horde or go to people's homes and protest or otherwise make fools of themselves. Maybe they should. On occasion, they boycott a company or talk about boycotting it, but again, people have no incentive to change their behavior until it becomes advantageous to do so. The number of people who have done what Glenn suggests is very small.
Always love to hear your thoughts John. Never tire from expressing them . Because when your voice stops and the conversations cease, the relationships soon end. Let us all speak and keep speaking so that we exist.
The people I know who stuck to their guns wound up walking out of a job in an AP high school department. Apparently High School students are too emotionally sensitive for Huckleberry Finn. Same people will say NWA was an authentic expression of self and deserves an Oscar. Picking one and not the other is what gets my goat.
I agree with many things McWhorter says, but I still don't quite understand his hostility and contempt towards Trump and DeSantis. He's undoubtedly on the left, but can we please recognize their accomplishments with some degree of honesty and truth? Are we able to set aside politics and ego, and recognize the obvious?
It's exceptionally difficult to reshape the NYC skyline. It is true Fred Trump built an empire, but they were predominantly developers in queens. They had no real estate in Manhattan, and the Manhattan elite looked down upon his family. They were not "insiders". They were outsiders, competitors of the elite, and they were targeted viciously by the city councilors, who were working on behalf of the establishment, and who sought to take his family down a peg or two. In short, they were not respected, never respected by the powers that be in NYC, except for his uncle who was a scholar at MIT, and for this reason his father told him to NEVER develop properties there. Despite this warning, and despite the tremendous battle with city officials, and much to the chagrin of the elite, he was very successful.
It's also worth pointing out that when Tesla died, the FBI called on Trumps uncle to review the documents found in his hotel room. And as the old saying goes, the apple doesn't fall that far from the tree.
Desantis, on the other hand, is a Harvard educated lawyer.
There is nothing stupid about negotiating a billion dollar property development, in which you have to convince, and often bribe, ten different parties to agree. Anyone who visits his properties can see that they are some of the most fantastic developments in the world. I think the people of this country would be much less divided if we could have constructive dialogue around DJT; people have every right to dislike him, and to dislike his politics, but let's stop propagating a fantasy world of fiction.
Liam, if there's one thing I could ask John, it would be this: "As the objective analyst par excellence that you usually are, why do you then find it so hard to separate Trump the obnoxious grandstander from Trump's policies? Why have you never acknowledged that one of Trump's First Acts liberated more than 5600 black men who had been incarcerated beyond reasonable time for minor crimes? Why do the Trump-created opportunity zones get blithely disregarded by you? Why does the assured federal funding for HBCUs, an unprecedented occurrence until then, fail to resonate with you? Why did the employment of more Black people than ever before, and their subsequent rise to the next rung of the economic ladder not seemingly matter to you? Why does asking for voter ID seem racist to you, in a country of 10 million illegal immigrants with the power to turn an election? When juxtaposed with a candidate who offered an effusive, glowing eulogy at the funeral of Robert Byrd, infamous Grand Kleagle of the KKK not too long ago, why would you, an educated Black man, consider this person the superior candidate? Why would you, an academic who claims to consider living in Mars as preferable to living in a culture where society is brainwashed by a media hellbent on determinedly viewing everything through a lens of race, succumb to the same media claptrap when it comes to Trump? Why did you convince yourself (and later, Glenn) that J6 was an intolerable threat to our nation, when in reality, it was a ragtag bunch of half-witted idiots, with more hair than sense, dressed in ill-fitting costumes bought at the Dollar store prancing through the Halls of Congress, before being summarily ejected within a couple of hours, seem more of a dastardly threat than the businesses of thousands of Black shop-owners in Portland and Minneapolis burnt and looted and robbed out of existence?"
I can understand an abstention from voting, but to vehemently excoriate a candidate with such passion, seems terribly out of character.
Your question about Trump is the right one. The people who claim he's a traitor or criminal can never offer a single example to back up either claim. He's been investigated by half the country and nothing has happened; instead, we find out that things like the collusion story were false. Yes, he's obnoxious. He's always been obnoxious. He was obnoxious when Oprah had him on, when Morning Joe couldn't stop interviewing him, when various politicians went to him hats in hand, etc. He's the one guy of whom no one can claim to be surprised at what we got.
Yes, Alex, Trump's larger-than-life persona positively reveled in stirring controversy, but to be fair to him, the media never let up on him from the word go, so it was somewhat understandable. What's really surprising is the reaction of people like John, and later Glenn, who claim to abhor CRT, support school choice, reject the 1619 project, denounce wokeness and tech censorship, and yet not realize that they were actually in total agreement with Trump on all those issues, in contrast to Biden who is vehemently against the same issues! It's all the more inexplicable as John and Glenn are not your average Joe, but remarkably intelligent academicians who are not usually taken in by media hype.
Dr. Glenn writes, "So why haven’t we seen more pushback from these leaders, a refusal to cave to the often unreasonable demands of race activists?"
Simple answer, really. What matters to those in power? Reputation! And Good paper! Easier to NEVER stand for a principle that is even mildly divisive. No, better to cultivate Smiley faces and preserve one's own reputation. There are no bonus checks for those who stand for principles. There are no bonus checks for those who die on a hill, defending a principled position. Easier to simply jive talk them with a PR confession and throw the opposition a few crumbs.
I mean, really. What administrator --- from a K-12 district, or a Big 10 school, will ever fight for principles of The Enlightenment or Western Civilization? Leadership positions rarely have tenure. EVERY administrator is walking the plank. Bad paper? Controversial history in "managing" anything and your reputation is canceled.
No mystery. Cancel culture is real. Your professional life is over. Prepare for your new career: selling real estate.
Until 1965, administrators did not labor under the illusion of defending principles. They internalized them. They reified the goals of Western Civilization. But after the anti-war protests began; after demands for ethnic studies exploded across the land, successful, responsible administrators leaned that "compromise" and "sensitivity" were the new watchwords for peace on campus. The calculus changed. Proportionality, quotas, and racism became the markers of "success."
A few days ago I wrote a post where I listed different categories of responses to wokism in the university setting, from true believers thru to people keeping their heads down. You seem to place most senior administrators in the category of cynical opportunists. I agree these people exist and were fast adaptors, using woke ideology to advance themselves.
But I think there are many more honest, reasonable administrators who don’t like the direction things are going in, yet find themselves in a jam. I know plenty of people like this. If some issue spins out of control on their watch, it is as you say, they are in deep trouble. I know this, too. The irony is that in protecting themselves they contribute to the very environment that threatens them.
It is the classic tragedy of the commons. Action taken at the individual level to improve the commons leads to a detriment to the person taking the action without necessarily improving the commons in the short term. Classic over-fishing analogy. It is a tough spot to be in.
I just have one quibble each for our esteemed hosts:
Prof Loury sez in re the utter spinelessness of our academic admin class that "if they stuck to their guns and did refuse to cave—refused, for example, to implement equity-based hiring policies and instead hired whoever they judged to be the best candidate, regardless of race—they might find as much or more public support as they do approbation."
But people don't perform for or seek recognition from the general public but from their peer group and/or tribe. And the peer group of upscale professional academics is of course other upscale professional academics and also the general NYT/NPR liberal class that they live amongst and share a sacred worldview with. All of these people have essentially embraced a theology where Race Gender Sexuality is the new Holy Trinity (as we all know since John wrote a book about it) and expecting them to become heretics isn't just expecting them to face professional consequences but also social consequences (a la the Weinsteins or Cristakises) and possible career death, and not just for them but for their spouses and children also.
Crit Theory is simply the new sacred theology of American academia and expecting any of the leaders of these seminaries to denounce or renounce their faith is like expecting someone in the College of Cardinals to become a Satanist.
And Prof McWhorter wonders how there's one young black staffer "And yet we're gonna let that person decide whether or not the world experiences this piece because antiracism". But think about the enormous power this person is vested with. One bigotry accusation, one Twitter call-out, one anonymously circulated petition, and whoever's in the crosshairs is branded with the scarlet R (the blasphemy charge of our time) and there is no washing it off, no proof or argument to counter it.
Poof! They'll be destroyed, and just like in that Twilight Zone episode where the evil children can destroy any adult with one glance, all these people know that one misstep and today's Red Guard would happily destroy them, their careers, their futures.
Our culture has simply been captured by a cadre of fundamentalist zealots and there will be no restoration of sanity or comity until somehow they are dethroned.
I agree mostly with this. Professors do look to the their community of peers nationwide, or even worldwide rather than the physically present community. And yes one complaint from a SJW is often enough to derail someone’s career. Sometimes the NY Post or Fox News picks up the story but the vast majority of everyday cancellations do not see the light of day. Where I disagree is that CRT is now mainstream. I don’t see that. It is clearly dominating, but the true believers are still in a very small minority except for certain academic departments. Most people are just trying to cope.
I'm not sure i said that Crit Theory (not just CRT but the whole New Left corpus) was mainstream, just that it is the official ideology/theology of our ruling elite, most esp in academia and culture.
The True Believers (and I believe this is true for any movement) don't have to be numerically dominant to get their way, they just have to be committed to seizing and maintaing power and to making it difficult to dissent or oppose them without paying serious conseqences.
I think in most ideological takeovers the True Believers are never the majority, just the most zealous. And after them come the careerists and other opportunists, then the rest of us who (like you said) just want to live our lives.
My feeling is that the New Left has succeeded so well because they have positioned themselves as morally superior/unimpeachable (that is, by convincing people that disagreeing with them is "punching down" on the underdog Marginalized) but that is a whole different conversation I won't bore you w.
I see. I took your statement about not expecting leaders of academia to renounce their faith as meaning some large number of these people were true believers.
It is fascinating how totalitarian impulses are cloaked as being sensitive and caring, and therefore any criticism is easily turned back onto the critic as a monster. Many decades ago when I was an undergraduate I used to joke about “the tyranny of the warm and fuzzy” and loved calling out people who tried to control others under the guise of sensitivity. I always had ready listeners. Those days are long gone.
"It is fascinating how totalitarian impulses are cloaked as being sensitive and caring, and therefore any criticism is easily turned back onto the critic as a monster."
Protecting a house of cards requires such maneuvers.
I still think it’s reasonable to read Wright at the level of Dostoevsky. Is Baldwin being a bit of a Nabokov in writing off Native Son as a protest novel? Let us not forget that Dostoevsky is a highly political and moral writer. Native Son and Crime and Punishment are comparable at least in terms of plot. Wright is even using some Joyce talking about the snow in Chicago. We could be obvious about it and say the snow means white oppression, or we could read it as Joyce in Dubliners using snow as an image of death. This doesn’t have to be either/or Native Son is layered enough it can be both.
This certainly rings true. I think this way of looking at art is really a cover for philistinism.
Probably the greatest novelist of African descent is the Brazilian writer Machado De Assis. He was a mixed-race man and the grandson of ex-slaves. He lived in 19th century Rio De Janeiro when the institution of slavery was still in effect. He was widely acclaimed in his own lifetime and although he was born poor and had almost no formal schooling, he ascended to the top of Brazilian society and was given a state funeral upon his death.
He wrote two novels that are considered masterpieces. His best work is the novel entitled The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881). It is told in the first person by a narrator who is dead. The main character is a nobleman who reflects sardonically on the failures of his life from beyond the grave. You get a very vivid portrait of fin de siecle Rio de Janeiro with its affairs and intrigues, as well as a satirical depiction of the Brazilian political class of Machado's day. It is a thoroughly enjoyable novel that anticipates modernism and the magical realist tradition.
He read many languages and his work is clearly a product of the Western European canon.
He was a committed aesthete who was intent on putting Brazil on the literary world map. The critic Harold Bloom has called him 'the greatest black literary artist to date'. Yet, even a lot of serious readers in the US have never heard of him. I feel fairly certain that if his work was more fiery and polemical in its denunciation of white supremacy, he would be better known in the US. His work is probably too ambiguous, witty and satirical to be of much interest to committed ideologues.
There seem to be hardly any African Americans who have championed his work. The scholar Henry Louis Gates who presented a whole PBS program about 'black Brazil' did not mention him once. Despite the fact that Brazilians consider him to be their finest novelist.
A great many of the American writers and critics who have praised Machado's work in print have actually been Jewish. They include Woody Allen, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag and Benjamin Moser.
I strongly urge everyone to read him. You will be greatly enriched by the experience and I think that his life is one of the best examples of cream rising to the top.
But John, I have read "A Strange Loop" although it has not come here yet. It is NOT that. Usher will tell you that he is trying to write a piece of Black art that is more intellectual and I am confused about exactly what being Black meant to him other than a set of stifling codes about emotional expression and his family. The kind of thing Brandon Taylor wants to do is not that. I think the market will sort this out by the institutions finding that there is an educated Black audience who will not go for simplistic protest art. They are not particularly going for simplistic protest TV.
"We're not gonna talk about it. But I'm beginning to want move to Mars, because this stuff is getting frightening. Of course I've written about it. This stuff is getting frightening to me."
John - I am worried about you - that deep wellspring of pragmatic optimism seems to be depleting at an alarming rate! Remember Hemingway "Write hard and clear about what hurts" and keep the reservoir filled!
It was ever thus, with people subordinating their enterprise - a business, a university, a cultural institution, or in my case a hospital - to outside interests: a religion, some patriotism, an ethnicity, a gender, various New Thoughts and Old Thoughts. That doesn't make it acceptable, of course, and those who served their calling often provided better service to their church, country, or sex than those who were blown about by the winds. For Christians, the Spirit of the Age is always the primary temptation.
Excellent excerpt. It's ironic that Prof. McWhorter references James Baldwin's early essay, "Everybody's Protest Novel." Baldwin himself fell prey to some of the very tendencies of protest literature he critiqued.
Albert Murray details such points in his constructive critique of Baldwin in his essay, "James Baldwin, Protest Fiction, and the Blues Tradition" in The Omni-Americans:
"Baldwin’s criticism of Native Son was essentially valid. The people, the situations, and the motivation in that quasi-realistic novel were more than oversimplified. They were exaggerated by an overemphasis on protest as such and by a very specific kind of political protest at that. Oversimplification in these terms does lead almost inevitably to false positions based on false assumptions about human nature itself. Every story whatever its immediate purpose is a story about being man on earth. This is the basis of its universality, the fundamental interest and sense of identification it generates in other people.
If you ignore this and reduce man’s whole story to a series of sensational but superficial news items and editorial complaints and accusations, blaming all the bad things that happen to your characters on racial bigotry, you imply that people are primarily concerned with only certain political and social absolutes. You imply that these absolutes are the sine qua non of all human fulfillment. And you also imply that there are people who possess these political and social absolutes, and that these people are on better terms with the world as such and are consequently better people. In other words, no matter how noble your mission, when you oversimplify the reasons why a poor or an oppressed man lies, cheats, steals, betrays, hates, murders, or becomes an alcoholic or addict, you imply that well-to-do, rich, and powerful people don’t do these things. But they do."
That is such a good point, Greg. It only took Irish Americans eight generations or so, after escaping the English yoke and boot, to be perceived as somewhat respectable, if they’ve ever even achieved that: Just speak to some wealthy WASPS and see how they perceive the Irish. I believe they see them as genetically inferior. We had a JFK only because his father would do anything for a buck, and he did, including graft and bootlegging. When “everything is bullshit”, you get expressions like “money talks and bullshit walks”.
You might not realize that “everything is bullshit” until enough doors are slammed in your face, and then you begin to see the power of money.
But beyond repression and suppression, some people are just born with an instinct that tells them how the world is structured and that it’s just not fair (even if they can’t articulate it any better than I can) . . . and they rebel.
Some, like Bin Laden, are born with all the wealth any man could ever need, become revolutionaries or freedom fighters, or to us, just crass terrorists who threaten our way of life.
Some others don’t have any idea why they’re doing what they’re doing, it’s just easier than stepping on the treadmill and working for the man your whole wife to little avail. They don’t want to comply.
I was raised among waving fields of grain in an idyllic rural location with no neighbors within eyesight. This instinct was somehow born in me and manifested itself around eighth grade when to me it became apparent that “everything is bullshit”, The great philosophy of the working class regardless of race, creed, or culture.
If you want to play in the bullshit game you have to comply, and some people just do not like to comply.
When you’re poor and destitute, wether Black or Irish or anyone else, you’re going to break the law in order to survive. That points directly to the human condition: it is what is expected of you.
But if you have the means to thrive, but you just don’t want to comply, then that’s also part of the human condition.
It may be fair to say that life is more unfair for some citizens than for other citizens simply based on their heritage and the course of history.
But I also agree that Woke is Broke, and it causes incredible resentment among people who are not in the less than 13% of our population who are Black.
What a great disservice the small percentage of woke race activist are doing to our African-American population whom I think simply want to be seen and treated as ordinary human beings.
Heads of educational institutions cave in to the "race above everything else" school of thought, not because they crave public support (they couldn't care less) but because it's personally and politically expedient! Let me explain: at the Univ. of California, it currently takes 75% of Black UC students 7 or more years to finish an undergraduate degree, that too with many of these students changing majors midway to something way less rigorous, and likely far less viable career-wise. Asking why this phenomenon occurs, as a precursor to finding a solution, would be way too uncomfortable! Instead, it's so much easier and comfortable all-round to attribute it all to 'racial inequity', thus absolving authorities of any responsibility in the matter. Why else would the UC Board of Regents choose to ban the SAT's, when the UC Academic Senate unanimously voted to keep it? The one truly objective yardstick to judge student ability has now been removed from the admissions process, thus enabling admissions officials to boost Black admission rates unhindered, on supposedly holistic criteria (that dreaded word that covers a multitude of sins!) and thereby "proving" that racial equity practices have worked! Next, how to ensure said Black students graduate in increasing numbers without giving the lie? Why, "equitable grading policies" of course! And so on the fable goes, with no one daring to point out that the emperor is, in fact, stark naked.
Wow you guys are brave! You’re going to be crucified for it too. It is so obvious that discrimination based on race is immoral and ineffective in long term benefits. It cannot be fair for example to give a black an advantage over a non-black anymore than to give a non-black an advantage over a black. In the long run, it weakens the group that doesn’t have to work as hard.
People will call bullshit when it is in their perceived self-interest to do so. As things stand, they are making a calculation - they expect more of a hassle from defying the mob than from kowtowing to it. Also, the people described here are largely white, which I'm told by the wokerati is the most terrible thing one can be. They fear backlash, perhaps partly because it is sure to come and also because of a moral cowardice that precludes them from saying, "it's not your call to make."
The people who recognize nonsense tend to not make a federal case of each instance of it. They do not corral the social media horde or go to people's homes and protest or otherwise make fools of themselves. Maybe they should. On occasion, they boycott a company or talk about boycotting it, but again, people have no incentive to change their behavior until it becomes advantageous to do so. The number of people who have done what Glenn suggests is very small.
Always love to hear your thoughts John. Never tire from expressing them . Because when your voice stops and the conversations cease, the relationships soon end. Let us all speak and keep speaking so that we exist.
The people I know who stuck to their guns wound up walking out of a job in an AP high school department. Apparently High School students are too emotionally sensitive for Huckleberry Finn. Same people will say NWA was an authentic expression of self and deserves an Oscar. Picking one and not the other is what gets my goat.
You must walk on eggshells but we are free to be bulls in a China shop.
That’s basically what I told him. It does beg the question, why would anyone want that job?
I agree with many things McWhorter says, but I still don't quite understand his hostility and contempt towards Trump and DeSantis. He's undoubtedly on the left, but can we please recognize their accomplishments with some degree of honesty and truth? Are we able to set aside politics and ego, and recognize the obvious?
It's exceptionally difficult to reshape the NYC skyline. It is true Fred Trump built an empire, but they were predominantly developers in queens. They had no real estate in Manhattan, and the Manhattan elite looked down upon his family. They were not "insiders". They were outsiders, competitors of the elite, and they were targeted viciously by the city councilors, who were working on behalf of the establishment, and who sought to take his family down a peg or two. In short, they were not respected, never respected by the powers that be in NYC, except for his uncle who was a scholar at MIT, and for this reason his father told him to NEVER develop properties there. Despite this warning, and despite the tremendous battle with city officials, and much to the chagrin of the elite, he was very successful.
It's also worth pointing out that when Tesla died, the FBI called on Trumps uncle to review the documents found in his hotel room. And as the old saying goes, the apple doesn't fall that far from the tree.
Desantis, on the other hand, is a Harvard educated lawyer.
There is nothing stupid about negotiating a billion dollar property development, in which you have to convince, and often bribe, ten different parties to agree. Anyone who visits his properties can see that they are some of the most fantastic developments in the world. I think the people of this country would be much less divided if we could have constructive dialogue around DJT; people have every right to dislike him, and to dislike his politics, but let's stop propagating a fantasy world of fiction.
Liam, if there's one thing I could ask John, it would be this: "As the objective analyst par excellence that you usually are, why do you then find it so hard to separate Trump the obnoxious grandstander from Trump's policies? Why have you never acknowledged that one of Trump's First Acts liberated more than 5600 black men who had been incarcerated beyond reasonable time for minor crimes? Why do the Trump-created opportunity zones get blithely disregarded by you? Why does the assured federal funding for HBCUs, an unprecedented occurrence until then, fail to resonate with you? Why did the employment of more Black people than ever before, and their subsequent rise to the next rung of the economic ladder not seemingly matter to you? Why does asking for voter ID seem racist to you, in a country of 10 million illegal immigrants with the power to turn an election? When juxtaposed with a candidate who offered an effusive, glowing eulogy at the funeral of Robert Byrd, infamous Grand Kleagle of the KKK not too long ago, why would you, an educated Black man, consider this person the superior candidate? Why would you, an academic who claims to consider living in Mars as preferable to living in a culture where society is brainwashed by a media hellbent on determinedly viewing everything through a lens of race, succumb to the same media claptrap when it comes to Trump? Why did you convince yourself (and later, Glenn) that J6 was an intolerable threat to our nation, when in reality, it was a ragtag bunch of half-witted idiots, with more hair than sense, dressed in ill-fitting costumes bought at the Dollar store prancing through the Halls of Congress, before being summarily ejected within a couple of hours, seem more of a dastardly threat than the businesses of thousands of Black shop-owners in Portland and Minneapolis burnt and looted and robbed out of existence?"
I can understand an abstention from voting, but to vehemently excoriate a candidate with such passion, seems terribly out of character.
Really good points! What say you John?!
Your question about Trump is the right one. The people who claim he's a traitor or criminal can never offer a single example to back up either claim. He's been investigated by half the country and nothing has happened; instead, we find out that things like the collusion story were false. Yes, he's obnoxious. He's always been obnoxious. He was obnoxious when Oprah had him on, when Morning Joe couldn't stop interviewing him, when various politicians went to him hats in hand, etc. He's the one guy of whom no one can claim to be surprised at what we got.
Yes, Alex, Trump's larger-than-life persona positively reveled in stirring controversy, but to be fair to him, the media never let up on him from the word go, so it was somewhat understandable. What's really surprising is the reaction of people like John, and later Glenn, who claim to abhor CRT, support school choice, reject the 1619 project, denounce wokeness and tech censorship, and yet not realize that they were actually in total agreement with Trump on all those issues, in contrast to Biden who is vehemently against the same issues! It's all the more inexplicable as John and Glenn are not your average Joe, but remarkably intelligent academicians who are not usually taken in by media hype.
I have a different perspective.
Dr. Glenn writes, "So why haven’t we seen more pushback from these leaders, a refusal to cave to the often unreasonable demands of race activists?"
Simple answer, really. What matters to those in power? Reputation! And Good paper! Easier to NEVER stand for a principle that is even mildly divisive. No, better to cultivate Smiley faces and preserve one's own reputation. There are no bonus checks for those who stand for principles. There are no bonus checks for those who die on a hill, defending a principled position. Easier to simply jive talk them with a PR confession and throw the opposition a few crumbs.
I mean, really. What administrator --- from a K-12 district, or a Big 10 school, will ever fight for principles of The Enlightenment or Western Civilization? Leadership positions rarely have tenure. EVERY administrator is walking the plank. Bad paper? Controversial history in "managing" anything and your reputation is canceled.
No mystery. Cancel culture is real. Your professional life is over. Prepare for your new career: selling real estate.
Until 1965, administrators did not labor under the illusion of defending principles. They internalized them. They reified the goals of Western Civilization. But after the anti-war protests began; after demands for ethnic studies exploded across the land, successful, responsible administrators leaned that "compromise" and "sensitivity" were the new watchwords for peace on campus. The calculus changed. Proportionality, quotas, and racism became the markers of "success."
A few days ago I wrote a post where I listed different categories of responses to wokism in the university setting, from true believers thru to people keeping their heads down. You seem to place most senior administrators in the category of cynical opportunists. I agree these people exist and were fast adaptors, using woke ideology to advance themselves.
But I think there are many more honest, reasonable administrators who don’t like the direction things are going in, yet find themselves in a jam. I know plenty of people like this. If some issue spins out of control on their watch, it is as you say, they are in deep trouble. I know this, too. The irony is that in protecting themselves they contribute to the very environment that threatens them.
It is the classic tragedy of the commons. Action taken at the individual level to improve the commons leads to a detriment to the person taking the action without necessarily improving the commons in the short term. Classic over-fishing analogy. It is a tough spot to be in.
I just have one quibble each for our esteemed hosts:
Prof Loury sez in re the utter spinelessness of our academic admin class that "if they stuck to their guns and did refuse to cave—refused, for example, to implement equity-based hiring policies and instead hired whoever they judged to be the best candidate, regardless of race—they might find as much or more public support as they do approbation."
But people don't perform for or seek recognition from the general public but from their peer group and/or tribe. And the peer group of upscale professional academics is of course other upscale professional academics and also the general NYT/NPR liberal class that they live amongst and share a sacred worldview with. All of these people have essentially embraced a theology where Race Gender Sexuality is the new Holy Trinity (as we all know since John wrote a book about it) and expecting them to become heretics isn't just expecting them to face professional consequences but also social consequences (a la the Weinsteins or Cristakises) and possible career death, and not just for them but for their spouses and children also.
Crit Theory is simply the new sacred theology of American academia and expecting any of the leaders of these seminaries to denounce or renounce their faith is like expecting someone in the College of Cardinals to become a Satanist.
And Prof McWhorter wonders how there's one young black staffer "And yet we're gonna let that person decide whether or not the world experiences this piece because antiracism". But think about the enormous power this person is vested with. One bigotry accusation, one Twitter call-out, one anonymously circulated petition, and whoever's in the crosshairs is branded with the scarlet R (the blasphemy charge of our time) and there is no washing it off, no proof or argument to counter it.
Poof! They'll be destroyed, and just like in that Twilight Zone episode where the evil children can destroy any adult with one glance, all these people know that one misstep and today's Red Guard would happily destroy them, their careers, their futures.
Our culture has simply been captured by a cadre of fundamentalist zealots and there will be no restoration of sanity or comity until somehow they are dethroned.
I agree mostly with this. Professors do look to the their community of peers nationwide, or even worldwide rather than the physically present community. And yes one complaint from a SJW is often enough to derail someone’s career. Sometimes the NY Post or Fox News picks up the story but the vast majority of everyday cancellations do not see the light of day. Where I disagree is that CRT is now mainstream. I don’t see that. It is clearly dominating, but the true believers are still in a very small minority except for certain academic departments. Most people are just trying to cope.
I'm not sure i said that Crit Theory (not just CRT but the whole New Left corpus) was mainstream, just that it is the official ideology/theology of our ruling elite, most esp in academia and culture.
The True Believers (and I believe this is true for any movement) don't have to be numerically dominant to get their way, they just have to be committed to seizing and maintaing power and to making it difficult to dissent or oppose them without paying serious conseqences.
I think in most ideological takeovers the True Believers are never the majority, just the most zealous. And after them come the careerists and other opportunists, then the rest of us who (like you said) just want to live our lives.
My feeling is that the New Left has succeeded so well because they have positioned themselves as morally superior/unimpeachable (that is, by convincing people that disagreeing with them is "punching down" on the underdog Marginalized) but that is a whole different conversation I won't bore you w.
I see. I took your statement about not expecting leaders of academia to renounce their faith as meaning some large number of these people were true believers.
It is fascinating how totalitarian impulses are cloaked as being sensitive and caring, and therefore any criticism is easily turned back onto the critic as a monster. Many decades ago when I was an undergraduate I used to joke about “the tyranny of the warm and fuzzy” and loved calling out people who tried to control others under the guise of sensitivity. I always had ready listeners. Those days are long gone.
"It is fascinating how totalitarian impulses are cloaked as being sensitive and caring, and therefore any criticism is easily turned back onto the critic as a monster."
Protecting a house of cards requires such maneuvers.
I still think it’s reasonable to read Wright at the level of Dostoevsky. Is Baldwin being a bit of a Nabokov in writing off Native Son as a protest novel? Let us not forget that Dostoevsky is a highly political and moral writer. Native Son and Crime and Punishment are comparable at least in terms of plot. Wright is even using some Joyce talking about the snow in Chicago. We could be obvious about it and say the snow means white oppression, or we could read it as Joyce in Dubliners using snow as an image of death. This doesn’t have to be either/or Native Son is layered enough it can be both.
That’s the obvious reading for simpletons Mr. Good Grief. Let me guess snow in a book just means it’s snowing for you.
This certainly rings true. I think this way of looking at art is really a cover for philistinism.
Probably the greatest novelist of African descent is the Brazilian writer Machado De Assis. He was a mixed-race man and the grandson of ex-slaves. He lived in 19th century Rio De Janeiro when the institution of slavery was still in effect. He was widely acclaimed in his own lifetime and although he was born poor and had almost no formal schooling, he ascended to the top of Brazilian society and was given a state funeral upon his death.
He wrote two novels that are considered masterpieces. His best work is the novel entitled The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881). It is told in the first person by a narrator who is dead. The main character is a nobleman who reflects sardonically on the failures of his life from beyond the grave. You get a very vivid portrait of fin de siecle Rio de Janeiro with its affairs and intrigues, as well as a satirical depiction of the Brazilian political class of Machado's day. It is a thoroughly enjoyable novel that anticipates modernism and the magical realist tradition.
He read many languages and his work is clearly a product of the Western European canon.
He was a committed aesthete who was intent on putting Brazil on the literary world map. The critic Harold Bloom has called him 'the greatest black literary artist to date'. Yet, even a lot of serious readers in the US have never heard of him. I feel fairly certain that if his work was more fiery and polemical in its denunciation of white supremacy, he would be better known in the US. His work is probably too ambiguous, witty and satirical to be of much interest to committed ideologues.
There seem to be hardly any African Americans who have championed his work. The scholar Henry Louis Gates who presented a whole PBS program about 'black Brazil' did not mention him once. Despite the fact that Brazilians consider him to be their finest novelist.
A great many of the American writers and critics who have praised Machado's work in print have actually been Jewish. They include Woody Allen, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag and Benjamin Moser.
I strongly urge everyone to read him. You will be greatly enriched by the experience and I think that his life is one of the best examples of cream rising to the top.
But John, I have read "A Strange Loop" although it has not come here yet. It is NOT that. Usher will tell you that he is trying to write a piece of Black art that is more intellectual and I am confused about exactly what being Black meant to him other than a set of stifling codes about emotional expression and his family. The kind of thing Brandon Taylor wants to do is not that. I think the market will sort this out by the institutions finding that there is an educated Black audience who will not go for simplistic protest art. They are not particularly going for simplistic protest TV.
"We're not gonna talk about it. But I'm beginning to want move to Mars, because this stuff is getting frightening. Of course I've written about it. This stuff is getting frightening to me."
John - I am worried about you - that deep wellspring of pragmatic optimism seems to be depleting at an alarming rate! Remember Hemingway "Write hard and clear about what hurts" and keep the reservoir filled!
It was ever thus, with people subordinating their enterprise - a business, a university, a cultural institution, or in my case a hospital - to outside interests: a religion, some patriotism, an ethnicity, a gender, various New Thoughts and Old Thoughts. That doesn't make it acceptable, of course, and those who served their calling often provided better service to their church, country, or sex than those who were blown about by the winds. For Christians, the Spirit of the Age is always the primary temptation.
Excellent excerpt. It's ironic that Prof. McWhorter references James Baldwin's early essay, "Everybody's Protest Novel." Baldwin himself fell prey to some of the very tendencies of protest literature he critiqued.
Albert Murray details such points in his constructive critique of Baldwin in his essay, "James Baldwin, Protest Fiction, and the Blues Tradition" in The Omni-Americans:
"Baldwin’s criticism of Native Son was essentially valid. The people, the situations, and the motivation in that quasi-realistic novel were more than oversimplified. They were exaggerated by an overemphasis on protest as such and by a very specific kind of political protest at that. Oversimplification in these terms does lead almost inevitably to false positions based on false assumptions about human nature itself. Every story whatever its immediate purpose is a story about being man on earth. This is the basis of its universality, the fundamental interest and sense of identification it generates in other people.
If you ignore this and reduce man’s whole story to a series of sensational but superficial news items and editorial complaints and accusations, blaming all the bad things that happen to your characters on racial bigotry, you imply that people are primarily concerned with only certain political and social absolutes. You imply that these absolutes are the sine qua non of all human fulfillment. And you also imply that there are people who possess these political and social absolutes, and that these people are on better terms with the world as such and are consequently better people. In other words, no matter how noble your mission, when you oversimplify the reasons why a poor or an oppressed man lies, cheats, steals, betrays, hates, murders, or becomes an alcoholic or addict, you imply that well-to-do, rich, and powerful people don’t do these things. But they do."
That is such a good point, Greg. It only took Irish Americans eight generations or so, after escaping the English yoke and boot, to be perceived as somewhat respectable, if they’ve ever even achieved that: Just speak to some wealthy WASPS and see how they perceive the Irish. I believe they see them as genetically inferior. We had a JFK only because his father would do anything for a buck, and he did, including graft and bootlegging. When “everything is bullshit”, you get expressions like “money talks and bullshit walks”.
You might not realize that “everything is bullshit” until enough doors are slammed in your face, and then you begin to see the power of money.
But beyond repression and suppression, some people are just born with an instinct that tells them how the world is structured and that it’s just not fair (even if they can’t articulate it any better than I can) . . . and they rebel.
Some, like Bin Laden, are born with all the wealth any man could ever need, become revolutionaries or freedom fighters, or to us, just crass terrorists who threaten our way of life.
Some others don’t have any idea why they’re doing what they’re doing, it’s just easier than stepping on the treadmill and working for the man your whole wife to little avail. They don’t want to comply.
I was raised among waving fields of grain in an idyllic rural location with no neighbors within eyesight. This instinct was somehow born in me and manifested itself around eighth grade when to me it became apparent that “everything is bullshit”, The great philosophy of the working class regardless of race, creed, or culture.
If you want to play in the bullshit game you have to comply, and some people just do not like to comply.
When you’re poor and destitute, wether Black or Irish or anyone else, you’re going to break the law in order to survive. That points directly to the human condition: it is what is expected of you.
But if you have the means to thrive, but you just don’t want to comply, then that’s also part of the human condition.
It may be fair to say that life is more unfair for some citizens than for other citizens simply based on their heritage and the course of history.
But I also agree that Woke is Broke, and it causes incredible resentment among people who are not in the less than 13% of our population who are Black.
What a great disservice the small percentage of woke race activist are doing to our African-American population whom I think simply want to be seen and treated as ordinary human beings.
Heads of educational institutions cave in to the "race above everything else" school of thought, not because they crave public support (they couldn't care less) but because it's personally and politically expedient! Let me explain: at the Univ. of California, it currently takes 75% of Black UC students 7 or more years to finish an undergraduate degree, that too with many of these students changing majors midway to something way less rigorous, and likely far less viable career-wise. Asking why this phenomenon occurs, as a precursor to finding a solution, would be way too uncomfortable! Instead, it's so much easier and comfortable all-round to attribute it all to 'racial inequity', thus absolving authorities of any responsibility in the matter. Why else would the UC Board of Regents choose to ban the SAT's, when the UC Academic Senate unanimously voted to keep it? The one truly objective yardstick to judge student ability has now been removed from the admissions process, thus enabling admissions officials to boost Black admission rates unhindered, on supposedly holistic criteria (that dreaded word that covers a multitude of sins!) and thereby "proving" that racial equity practices have worked! Next, how to ensure said Black students graduate in increasing numbers without giving the lie? Why, "equitable grading policies" of course! And so on the fable goes, with no one daring to point out that the emperor is, in fact, stark naked.
Thank-you for the insight; I truly didn’t know the angles you described.