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A voice calling out in the wilderness
h/t Instapundit...My argument about political correctness is not tendentious or partisan ‐ it's analytical. The core of the argument is that when groups care a lot about maintaining conformity of belief on some matter of critical interest to them, then the hunt for heretics is always ongoing. We're always looking for deviants. The willingness to speak in certain ways can be a sign of deviance, because if speakers know that punishment awaits them for speaking in particular ways, the only speakers willing to take the risks are indeed people who are not reliable on whatever the core belief or value is. ...Take affirmative action. We're not supposed to notice that Asians are being turned away in droves from the elite universities. We're not supposed to notice that blacks are included on the basis of some silly argument about diversity. At Brown, we call them "historically underrepresented groups," as if observing the historical underrepresentation constitutes in and of itself an indictment of the institution and not of the groups themselves. We're 50 years past the civil rights movement and blacks, to get to Harvard or Princeton or Brown, still depend upon being judged by different standards than other people. And people are called "bigots" if they ask questions about this? This is trivial, and it's not engaging real arguments. ...My problem with the use of the term "structural racism" is not with the observation that there are struggles that are deeply embedded within the American political economy that have implications for racial inequality. My problem is with the claim that such structural differences are indicted as racist simply because there are racial disparities. Laws are structurally racist in that respect. Is it structurally racist if I end up with more black people in prison because there are more black robbers? Is that structural racism? It's structure, to be sure, but whether it's racism is an argument that remains to be made. ...I think, ultimately, that we have to get out of the blame game and start getting practical about what interventions will change the facts on the ground. We can talk about housing policy. We can talk about education policy. We can talk about what kind of social safety nets we want in this country. There are big arguments to be had about those things. If we get concrete and specific about the interventions that we're going to get behind that would remedy some of these problems, that seems to me a productive conversation. ...So [Ta-Nehisi] Coates's historical account is a lie. It tells only one part of the story. It erases the responsibility that African Americans have for our own condition. I refuse to accept that we don’t have responsibility for our condition. I refuse to accept that we're not free-acting agents able to determine our own future. Ironically, he imputes more agency and more capacity for judgments to white people in his argumentation than he does to black people. Black people are merely puppets at the end of the string that whites are pulling in his narrative. Confused by the racist Algebra Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2017-09-26 |
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