It is important to note that this article was written by a black man, a contributing editor to The Atlantic. John McWhorter is not a MAGA hack.
That being said...
This article is the very definition of a straw man. Absolutely no one subscribes to the position it critiques.
On the other hand, a fair number of people (including myself) subscribe to the position that, although things are not nearly as bad as they have been in the past, there is still a latent undercurrent of actual racism in the U.S. which sometimes bubbles to the surface and manifests itself in various harmful ways, up to and including (but far from limited to) black people being systematically disenfranchised, and publicly tortured and killed by authorities, often with impunity. To people like me, straw-man arguments like the one in TFA (and F does not stand for Fine in this case) are offensive because I of course agree that the position being critiqued is risible. Whether or not it was the author's intent, some people will surely read it as saying, tacitly, there is no problem, and anyone who says there is a problem is being hysterical or otherwise detached from reality.
Well, there is a problem, and there has been for hundreds of years. We have made a lot of progress towards solving this problem. But we have not yet solved fully solved it, and anyone who says that we have, particularly when they say it in such a condescending way, is part of the problem.
[UPDATE] A lot of people are disputing my claim here. What no one has yet done is provide an actual reference to anyone going on the record to endorse the ten-point position that McWhorter calls "third-wave anti-racism." Lots of anecdotes. Zero data.
Then, with respect, you are not listening to and understanding the people to the left of you. They deny that there is a mere undercurrent of latent intentional bigotry by those in power (racism).
Rather, they affirm that America is a system of power and social relations that keep the underclass just as effectively subjugated as slavery, without the need for intentional bigotry. And they intend to undo it.
George Washington is not being removed from school names because there is a tail problem with bigotry that we’ve made progress on. They believe they must deny Washington any place of honor, so that BIPOC children feel safe enough to succeed.
Of course we have not “solved racism.” But it is not a straw man to point out the false religion of the iconoclasts claiming to have a solution.
The article in question provides several examples of public figures making these points.
I've personally encountered people and organizations that . Several who, for instance, decried white flight on one hand but on the other hand criticized whites (and Asians) moving into poor neighborhoods in San Francisco. One company I worked at set up a system of reserving headcount specifically for underrepresented demographics, while simultaneously declared that any notion that the company extended preferential treatment to said groups was hateful and not acceptable.
I think these people are well-intentioned but are too scared to confront controversy or navigate nuance in their views. So they resort to this sort of contradiction to try and avoid it.
Surely you agree some are held by significant numbers of people. Take his #3 for example. You haven’t heard people claiming “Silence is violence?” While decrying the Karens’ inability to just listen?
All of them except #3 and #10, and neither of those are contradictions (the idea that #10 is involves the fallacy of division, the idea that #3 is...IDK what the shortest route to that would be; mistaking “a > b” for “b = 0”, metaphorically, I guess.)
And that's for “mainstream among radical antiracists” not, mainstream-mainstream.
For what my anecdote is worth, I have seen sentiment like this across lots of social media, and it has gotten louder since the protests in June. I have even seen echoes of it on Facebook Workplace, where there has been a clear and strong encouragement to become more 'antiracist'. I do not think that this is hyperbole.
Just because a slogan is "all over" doesn't mean that people actually believe in its literal meaning. It's kind of like the difference between "black lives matter" and "all lives matter". The literal meaning of both of these slogans is clearly true and so on their face they are not at odds with each other. But there is a sub-text to both slogans that pits them against each other.
Likewise, "Silence is violence" doesn't literally mean what it says. What the people who recite it actually mean, I suspect, is that if you do not actively speak out against racism then you are complicit in it, which is a not-entirely-unreasonable position.
But McWhorter was not talking about the slogan. His wording presents it as a literal truth.
> But McWhorter was not talking about the slogan. His wording presents it as a literal truth.
You're making that up. This is everything he said about the slogan: "3. Silence about racism is violence. But elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own." There is absolutely nothing to suggest that he is forcing a literal meaning of the phrase.
Originally you said "I am highly skeptical that a significant number of people profess to believe this." Now that your claim has been proven false, you're moving the goal posts to "people don't believe in its literal meaning" and trying to pretend that McWhorter suggested otherwise. Yet you accuse McWhorter of strawmanning. Ironic.
> There is absolutely nothing to suggest that he is forcing a literal meaning of the phrase.
Actually there is: the inclusion of the words "about racism". "Silence is violence" is a catchy slogan. "Silence about racism is violence" is less catchy, so it is not at all implausible that he did not intend it to be read as a slogan, but rather an actual literal assertion.
I'm at a loss to see how one could rationally arrive at that conclusion. It's self-evident from the article that McWhorter meant the phrase in the same sense as it's commonly understood. Anything else would be pointless, since he's discussing contemporary usage of the phrase.
One should generally try to figure out what the author's intended meaning was, rather than twist the meaning into something that's easy to argue against but the author would never approve of.
I followed all of your links. In the first two, the word "violence" appears nowhere in the text. There is a photo of a cardboard sign with the slogan "White Silence is violence" but that proves nothing. I can find photos of all kinds of crazy slogans on signs.
The Houston Chronicle story does feature an interview with Cherry Steinwender, executive director of the Center for Healing Racism, explicitly endorsing this point of view. That is the first actual data point I have seen.
The Google Scholar search brings up a lot of articles containing the phrase "silence is violence" but a lot of them are red herrings having nothing to do with the matter at hand.
So that's one valid data point. Better than nothing, but still a long way from a self-evidently mainstream point of view as McWhorter claims.
That antiracism can be meaningfully analyzed in waves and that, if it is, what McWhorter describes as Third Wave Antiracism is meaningfully one of them are all, for that matter.
AFAICT “Third Wave Antiracism” is just something McWhorter latched on to because it provides an excuse to dust off the template of standard establishment and right-wing critiques of Fourth Wave Feminism, including the implicit acknowledgement that the previous waves were good, and deploy them in defense of the continued neglect of the marginalized by elites in favor of victim and advocate blaming.
There are two references in the TFA. Both of them are books. I haven't read them, so I will concede that these two books endorse the point of view being described.
However, McWhorter makes the claim that third-wave racism is mainstream. The existence of two books endorsing a point of view is not evidence that this point of view is mainstream, or even widespread. If it were, then flat-eartherism would be mainstream.
>I haven't read them, so I will concede that these two books endorse the point of view being described.
Better yet, read them! They answer your question.
>The existence of two books endorsing a point of view is not evidence that this point of view is mainstream.
Since "mainstream" is a judgement call, I don't think anyone can directly demonstrate that to your liking. If you're genuinely curious about this subject, this would be a good time to do some reading.
> Better yet, read them! They answer your question.
What question is that? I don't see how reading these books could possibly persuade me of anything other than there are two people who espouse some overly extreme ideas with regards to racism. And I will happily concede that without reading them. So I was wrong when I said that "absolutely no one" believes this crap. Two people believe it. Maybe even 100. Maybe even 1000.
But McWhorter claims that third-wave anti-racism is mainstream (his word) and so far I have seen zero evidence of that.
Between The World and Me spent over 100 weeks in the NYT bestseller list. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the other book cited, wrote another book, How To Be An Antiracist, which was a bestselling book in the U.S. 2020. Another bestselling book in this vein was White Fragility. Check out the sales figures from May-June here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/07/22/sales-o...
>reverence for the founders and the conditions established at the founding, including Washington, has been integrated into a deeply racist quasi-religious civic cult model of what America means, largely in direct response to and as a tool to impede further progress on racial equality.
I think this fairly makes my point. The left-left doesn't think of a few "leftovers of racism" as much as "eternal and adaptive vigilance" against a "deeply racist quasi-religious civic cult" of American meaning that identifies with the founders.
> The left-left doesn't think of a few "leftovers of racism" as much as "eternal and adaptive vigilance" against a "deeply racist quasi-religious civic cult" of American meaning that identifies with the founders.
No, the antiracist left (which is not the same as the “left-left”; the relation between degree of leftism and priority to antiracism is not simple) thinks of significant (but relatively smaller compared to what was present before—for most of the antiracist left, there's diversity on this point to be sure) remaining racist features supported and defended by a deeply racist quasi-religious civic cult, which has been deliberately constructed by reactionaries, as I said, in response to and as a means to block further progress on race issues.
Please elaborate and cite. You dismiss the entire article (i.e. the subject of discussion) with the wave of a hand before diving into your own battle against straw men.
For instance:
> publicly tortured and killed by authorities
In 2016, 266 black people were killed by police in the U.S. [1] In 2020, that value is estimated to be 233 [2]. That is out of 46 million black people in the U.S., or approximately 0.0006%. No data available on "public torture". While I would agree that any death at the hands of police is unfortunate (though NOT unavoidable), I think most reasonable people would agree that 0.0006% is hardly representative of a widespread or systemic issue that typifies the policing of black people.
> there is no problem
Another straw man. McWhorter states explicitly:
> [This article] is not an argument against protest
> I am calling for [black people] to be treated with true dignity
> I am not arguing against the basic premises of Black Lives Matter
> In 2016, 266 black people were killed by police in the U.S. [1] In 2020, that value is estimated to be 233 [2]. That is out of 46 million black people in the U.S., or approximately 0.0006%. No data available on "public torture". While I would agree that any death at the hands of police is unfortunate (though NOT unavoidable), I think most reasonable people would agree that 0.0006% is hardly representative of a widespread or systemic issue that typifies the policing of black people.
I see a few flaws in your argument.
1. Death statistics likely do not represent the entire problem, but rather the tip of the iceberg. Deaths/murders are rare overall, but hard to hide.
2. Your 0.0006% is calculated in a way to give one of the smallest possible magnitudes, and doesn't really offer any useful comparison. You can do similar to minimize any issue. If you wanted to make an argument against there being a systemic issue here, you really ought to compare per-capita black deaths-by-police to per-capita white deaths-by police or something. This paper [1] (first result of my Google search) give such a comparison and states:
> The highest levels of inequality in mortality risk [from police use of force] are experienced by black men. Black men are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police over the life course than are white men. Black women are about 1.4 times more likely to be killed by police than are white women.
To update you with an actual source on some of the points, you can start with Robin DiAngelo's book "White Fragility". Most of the points are argued in the book. DiAngelo's books have been many weeks on the NYT's best seller lists. She sells her diversity training courses to many Fortune 500 companies and is held in high regards in progressive circles.
> Unlike Kendi, who boldly defines racism, DiAngelo is endlessly deferential--for her, racism is basically whatever any person of color thinks it is. In the story she tells about the world, she and her fellow white people have all the power, and therefore all the responsibility to do the gruelling but transformative spiritual work she calls for. The story makes white people seem like flawed, complicated characters; by comparison, people of color seem good, wise, and perhaps rather simple.
If you look a little bit, you will find many stories that fit into the 10 points. One of my favorite examples is how an (Asian American) reporter got fired for quoting from an interview from an African American man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Fang#The_Intercept).
> In June 2020, Fang was accused of racism by Akela Lacy, a colleague at The Intercept. This occurred after Fang shared a Martin Luther King Jr. quote about remaining non-violent and tweeted out an interview in which a black man at a George Floyd protest expressed concern about black-on-black crime.
The best part of the story? The person who set of the Twitter storm to get Fang fired, then a colleague of Lee Fang at the Intercept, is (to my knowledge) a white woman pretending to be Black.
> you will find many stories that fit into the 10 points
I don't doubt that. In a nation of 300+ million you can find someone who believes just about anything. But it's still a very long way from there to the conclusions that the conjunction of those ten points is a mainstream point of view, which is what McWhorter claims.
Nonetheless, thanks for the references and the considered response.
Regarding "but is it really mainstream": Difficult question. I believe the answer is a "yes" with many caveats and clarifications.
How to define "mainstream"? Maybe your definition is "among the entire US population, less than 10 % believe the 10-points" or something similar. I think McWhorter has another frame of reference: (non-right wing) media, (higher) education, (non-right wing) politics and a subset of economical organisations (think Silicon Valley). Within these organisations, you should not be surprised to witness an adherence to at least some of the 10-points, and receive punishment if you loudly oppose them.
A recent data point: The New York Times has fired an acclaimed science reporter (specialized on COVID, nonetheless), because in 2019 he dared to utter the N-word in the following context: A student asked him for an example of egretious racism, to which he replied with saying "If somebody said the N-word". He dared to utter the word actually, leading to the recent events (https://quillette.com/2021/02/09/with-a-star-science-reporte...). Just like in Harry Potter, the mere utterance of a word has magic effects. To me, this is literally a regression to the Dark Ages. The word is the thing, saying it out loud stirrs the evil.
Of course this is just one anecdote, but there are many similar anecdotes. At which point does it become a trend? Here it becomes important to note that there is no need for a majority to command social change. Instead, small but determined minorities are extremely successful in getting what they want. The mechanics behind that are currently a hot topic of debate (https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...).
However, the important takeaway is that critical race theory ("white fragility") is not the only "this cannot be real" movement taking hold of universities, social media, established media outlets and politics. In places of higher education you may find yourself drastically punished if you insist that sex has a biological basis, that vocational interests are not evenly distributed between genders, that the American Civil War indeed aimed at freeing slaves, or that hiring decisions should be primarily based on merit of the applicants.
From your other comments I gathered that you are relatively new to "this", whatever this is. I suppose your priors were calibrated in a time certain tenets of humanism such as the value of truth, rationality and the universality of human experience were common place, especiall among the left. The tectonic shift we are witnessing today is that these tenets are declared to be false and even imoral, and that the proponents of such views are gaining the upper hand. I will sound dramatic, but I fear that the progress won by the period of enlightenment is in grave danger.
I probably have not convinced you that what I am saying is actually happening, but that's ok. This would take a longer discussion, there is a lot to unpack here. Perhaps you can consider it as a possibility, and adjust your priors for future events.
> But we have not yet solved fully solved it, and anyone who says that we have, particularly when they say it in such a condescending way, is part of the problem.
I just finished reading this article in its entirety, and I think I might’ve missed this part. My impression was that the author is describing a proselytizing ideology that happens to be based on skin color and draws legitimacy from historical perfidies. Actual progress on racism seemed to me to be orthogonal to what the author was talking about.
Yes, I read the whole article. And yes, I agree that "Actual progress on racism [is] orthogonal to what the author was talking about." But that's not what I'm critiquing. I'm critiquing his premise, that this thing he calls "third wave anti-racism" and whose characteristics he describes in his ten-point characterization is actually representative of the views of people who are concerned about racism today. I don't believe they are. They are certainly not representative of my views or of anyone I know. And he doesn't actually cite any sources. He just states it as if all this were common knowledge and beyond reasonable dispute.
I see. I’m on a college campus in the United States right now, and I can confirm what he describes exists here exactly as he describes it. There may be a generational or geographical gap between our experiences.
OK, I'll take your word for it. But I have a hard time imagining what that experience could even look like. I mean, do people go around quizzing each other on their anti-racist credentials? In my world, this doesn't even come up in day-to-day conversation. The only reason it's on my radar screen at all is that I wrote a blog post about it a few months ago that ended up blowing up in my face.
I don't know about quizzing each other, but when my youngest sibling, an unemployed community college dropout, got super involved in the Portland antiracist scene, to the point that they stopped talking to our family (because we represent white oppression, basically what the author described) it has been really rough to see our love for them weaponized to push this particular cult. Having a family member join a cult doesn't make day-to-day problems (they don't even speak to us anymore), but that doesn't mean it's not a major social trend
If it sounds cartoonish, that’s because it is. The manifestation I’ve seen around me is that groups of 3–4 will pretend to befriend unsuspecting victims, inviting them to events and parties etc., then yell at/berate/abuse them at the first un-“woke” comment (no matter how innocuous), command that person to be better, and then completely cut contact. A person will think they have new friends, then a switch is flipped out of nowhere and those friends are gone.
> and whose characteristics he describes in his ten-point characterization is actually representative of the views of people who are concerned about racism today.
OK, this just isn't credible.
> Silence about racism is violence. But elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own.
You've never heard the slogan "Silence is violence"?
> Show interest in multiculturalism. But do not culturally appropriate. What is not your culture is not for you, and you may not try it or do it. But—if you aren’t nevertheless interested in it, you are a racist.
You didn't see the national outrage over a girl wearing a Chinese dress to prom?
> When whites move away from black neighborhoods, it’s white flight. But when whites move into black neighborhoods, it’s gentrification, even when they pay black residents generously for their houses.
You've never heard of "white flight" or "gentrification"?
I simply don't believe you if you are saying the arguments put forth in his ten-point characterization are uncommon.
As for me, I certainly recognize several of the positions he describes, so I don't think it's a complete straw man. But I also haven't observed several of the attitudes he describes.
Seems to me maybe what he's seeing is not a religion where people are required to hold two incompatible beliefs in their head, but the result of public discourse where basically rational and consistent, yet angry, people fall on different sides of an issue and their voices in concert become incoherent.
In which case, the solution is perhaps: don't get sucked into the sturm und drang based on everything you read on Reddit. Be compassionate. Pay attention to what's around you. Look for opportunities to make a difference.
I return your claim of an infamous intellectual fallacy with another. The 'Motte-and_bailey'. IE. A large sub-section of the community advances this exact strawman, while retreating to a conventionally accepted meaning of racism when truly challenged.
I'll address the biggest names that have risen during this new movement. Kendi's and DiAngelo's books are written exactly as McWhorter puts it. Coates's is more heartfelt, but ends on an incredibly nihilistic note. Kendi and DiAngelo are the Beyonce and JayZ of the diversity training world. They are the ones moving indefensible goal posts.
The common reply to my claims is that Kendi and DeAngelo are media faces and that 'real' academics have more principled approaches. However, these same academics fall in line when the media faces conjure a mob movement without a word of dissent. Any critics are immediately labelled as conservative/racist and bigots. Part of the reason John can say the things he can, is because he is a black academic and has established a long history of goodwill towards the black community in the US. Else, he would have been character assassinated twice over.
> anyone who says that we have, particularly when they say it in such a condescending way, is part of the problem.
Aren't you strawmanning John now? He never claims that racism is over. He has also seen every institution cover in fear towards this new prescriptive dogma without so much as whimper. He gets talked down to and is increasingly put under greater scrutiny than his intellectual opposition. I find it entirely fair that his tone is colored with condescension.
I know that expectations are different between 1st and 3rd world nations. But, here goes nothing.
Back home in India, people frequently die on the streets and 50% of the children are malnourished. It is odd to see Americans get passionate to the point refusing to engage with the opposition on issues. Especially when the problems do not seem as major when put in perspective with the problems facing 3rd world nationals.
I live in an international community house and the difference between European and American progressives is quite stark. The Europeans are economically quite left and socially progressive, but cannot empathize with the American culture war at all. Macron and Le Pen voters can enjoy a drink together. This new anti-racism movement specifically stumps most of us non-Americans, many of whom are minorities and from ultra-liberal communities ourselves.
Engaging sincerely with someone in opposition reveals an incredibly amount of nuance that most difficult issues have. Prescriptive politics of coercion is often brought down by blind spots that could have been avoided had they only been less pigheaded about it.
> This article is the very definition of a straw man. Absolutely no one subscribes to the position it critiques.
I've seen people argue every point listed there. Not at the same time, but still.
> We have made a lot of progress towards solving this problem. But we have not yet solved fully solved it
Sure. There's a lot of racism to fight. But that doesn't mean we should just ignore people pushing bullshit under antiracism banners.
> and anyone who says that we have, particularly when they say it in such a condescending way, is part of the problem.
Going too far with antiracism is possible and just as harmful. If you go far enough you make young people think all antiracism is a joke. Then they just stop thinking of racism as something bad in general. In some countries this point isn't far in the future.
We can argue where the line is (for me the concept of "cultural appropriation" is already absurd enough), but the fact that there is a line should be pretty obvious.
> But we have not yet solved fully solved it, and anyone who says that we have...
McWhorter doesn't say that we have solved it. In fact, in the linked essay he outright says that he supports protesting for civil rights in general and he approves of aspects of the BLM movement.
>Absolutely no one subscribes to the position it critiques.
That's demonstrably false. Ibram X. Kendi is the most notorious counterexample. A cursory google search will reveal activist groups organized against these principles.
And these are just the ones who explicitly subscribe to the position.
The lower classes fight amongst themselves, while the establishment gets richer every second.
Ask yourself why you even think about these trivial issues like who is racist?
Ask yourself why the establishment media doesn’t talk about who owns and controls the vast wealth in this country? Which has more impact and can benefit people of all races.
Some have theorized along this line by suggesting that the id politics movement switched into overdrive after Occupy Wall Street. Although they had different analyses, both the left and the free market right were aligned against crony capitalism.
> This article is the very definition of a straw man. Absolutely no one subscribes to the position it critiques.
The article critiques a position that consists of multiple beliefs. While it is true that ~nobody subscribes to all of them, each individual belief is very well-represented amongst the "anti-racists." As a consequence, to anyone under attack by a Twitter mob, the situation looks exactly as McWhorter describes: you're being hit from all directions by the entire span of mutually contradictory nonsense.
His arguments read exactly the same as Clarence Thomas’ on race and African Americans - to paraphrase a recent biography “that life is too easy for them and we are coddling them”.
PBS did a great documentary on Clarence Thomas recently. Was interesting to see him portrayed as a person and not just the farce that media seems to usually make him out to be.
I heard Corey Robin interviewed on the radio when he released The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. I could not find that link but here is the author's website.
https://coreyrobin.com/enigma/
I was honestly gobsmacked by Robin's revelations, at first unbelieving, then acceptance after the words from Thomas that Robin had on command to back his thesis - it explains Thomas' rulings like nothing else. The New York Times Book Review quote matches my reaction exactly after listening to the author.
I provided a link to the biography writer's website in an adjacent comment. It was released in 2019. The author said something close to what I wrote in a paragraph or two and I rejected it, then over the course of an hour long interview on the radio he convinced me. YMMV. The full book reference 700 writings by Clarence Thomas.
You obviously didn't read the article if you think it's a straw man. He quotes Ibrahim Kendi, funded by Jack Dorsey as an exemplar of the new faith. If Dorsey and Kendi aren't mainstream, just to start, I don't know what is.
I'm so tired of getting gaslit about this. My opinion on neoracism is the reason I am posting with a throwaway.
Thank you John Worter for helping to rebrand so-called "Antiracism" to what it really is. Neoracism.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Most commenters in this thread have done a good job—a surprisingly good job—of staying in communication with each other across this divide. Your comment here is a noticeable step into hell. Please step the other way while on this site.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful. In addition to the flamewar aspect, "you obviously didn't read the article [etc.]" is explicitly against the rules.
just to be clear here, if you can sum it up in one phrase, Racism is the assumption that some racea are inferior, and antiracism holds that race is a concept that has no place in reality!?
If labeling it anti- then because it only needs mention when contradicting racism, but it can be an independent position held by anyone who simply disregards at least the name, or one of the various concepts attached. This has befuddeld me for a long time because via exposure I thought anti racism was the norm, but accademia frequently dabbles in racist topic (though without making value judgements). One reason to reject it is that drawing differences invariably leads to a sense of competition and all that follows. Vice versa, I pressume, that denying actual differences can also lead to losses (disenfrenchise) may then appear as new racism.
Branding that as racism is simply incivil, because it ascribes intent or lantent aggression where there is none. It's not all about name-calling, but abstractly speaking it is. So, please don't defend an abstract position without accurately describi g it (in case I misinterpreted anything), because that really is indistinguishable from a scarecrow.
In a proper English construction "antiracism" literally means "against racism." Note, this is not arguing that race has no "place" in perceived reality. But that racism has no place in our society. Being against racism is the norm.
The problem is with using the word "Antiracist" as a label or name. There is a movement that tries to use the word as a name, but is a case of a wolf in sheep's clothing. This movement is attempting to rewrite history. To teach that, for example, Lincoln was evil, didn't do enough, and should be erased. This is despicable and destructive. McWhorter simply, rightly, calls them wolves.
Thanks for your reply. I'm not sure why it's being downvoted, perhaps your definition is too narrow and definitely not authoritative (and why should you care).
Post mortem: Yes, I frequently neglect that sense of anti-, and rebracket such compounds differently. I could go on in the same sense of manipulation on the word level. Is an anti-anti-anti-racist position tennable?
I see 10 tenets that are extremely disagreeable posed as a mainstream ideology, and as far as I can tell, he just made them up. So he can fuck off, imo.
I don't especially like Kendi. Here's what he says about kendi in the article though.
> Ibram X. Kendi has written a book on how to raise antiracist children called Antiracist Baby.
...
That's it. He says he wrote a book called Antiracist Baby. That name drop does not do anything to strengthen his position. Unless I'm missing something there's not even a cherry picked quote out of context. It's just implied to self-evidently support his position.
At work, there are emails going around that list all of those tenets. How to apologize, how one should not speak unless one is "appropriately diverse," how one should believe in their own guilt or victim-hood.
This email (unofficial) has the title "How to Be Antiracist." The only thing McWhorter did was to reorder the bullets, putting some next to each other.
None of those are made up.
The very next sentences after your quote discusses the book. The next paragraph also says this:
> Talking of Antiracist Baby, I am especially dismayed at the idea of this indoctrination infecting my daughters’ sense of self. I can’t always be with them, and this anti-humanist ideology may seep into their school curriculum. I shudder at the thought: teachers with eyes shining at the prospect of showing their antiracism by teaching my daughters that they are poster children rather than individuals.
> This email (unofficial) has the title "How to Be Antiracist." The only thing McWhorter did was to reorder the bullets, putting some next to each other.
> None of those are made up.
By definition they are made up. The question is by whom. I cannot find these tenets by googling them. The first link to "third wave antiracist tenets" is this very article. The fact that someone sent you an email is pretty irrelevant, and frankly dubious. I'm open to being proven wrong, but if these aren't published by a noteworthy source, they're utterly irrelevant. I don't like Kendi. I think his work is opportunistic and stuck in semantics. But I don't think he's going to write dumb shit like what the author anchors everyone on baselessly. And even if he did, I feel confident that 99% of americans would say they're not accurate portrayals of their views.
edit: on a reread, it sounds like you're saying there's just a separate email with different content. Just because this author uses the words "antiracist" doesn't mean his portrayal of another person's portrayal of the word are the same, or that either are salient.
> The very next sentences after your quote discusses the book. The next paragraph also says this:
The quote you provided contains literally nothing from the book, just him doubling down that he doesn't like it.
If you want data, you need to specify what standard of evidence would be enough for you to consider that there actually are people who hold this position.
For instance, you won't find anyone simply stating without context to hold these 10 positions. If you're expecting that, you wouldn't find it no matter how many people actually held those opinions.
Another issue is that any data people _actually_ do bring you can dismiss as "non-representative", as you have not set your standards of evidence.
For instance, if you want scholarly research proving X% of Americans think so and so, you won't find any, for a plethora of reasons. That does not mean that X% of Americans don't think so and so.
I do believe your argument is coherent, and that McWhorter might be exaggerating and even strawmanning a bit - but if you want data, you need to specify in advance what's the standard of evidence you'll accept and people can then determine whether that's a reasonable standard.
> what standard of evidence would be enough for you
Well, I'll give you an example from a different but related issue: the question of whether the Confederate states seceded in order to defend slavery. Some people deny this, claiming that it was more about "states rights" or "heritage" or something like that. So here are some quotes from the Declaration of Causes of the Seceding States [1]:
"The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of this organization."
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world."
"She [Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time."
"...the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations..."
Then in the Bill of Rights of the Confederate Constitution [2] we read:
"4. No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."
So that seems pretty clear to me. When people mean something, they generally say it plainly.
From reading the piece, he seems more of a Friedman/Brooks hack (much more common in the mainstream media), but still a hack.
> This article is the very definition of a straw man. Absolutely no one subscribes to the position it critiques.
McWhorter seems to be really keen (not just in this piece) on adapting the old and problematic waves of feminism model and applying it, badly and without much basis, to “antiracism”.
> What no one has yet done is provide an actual reference to anyone going on the record to endorse the ten-point position that McWhorter calls "third-wave anti-racism."
I doubt you could find much support for people supporting any of them (except maybe #3, which is perfectly internally consistent without even superficial contradiction, and #10, in which the implication of contradiction is based entirely in the fallacy of division, like, come to think of it, much racism.)
Most of them have superficial resemblance to things people actually believe, but have been subtly twisted to make strawmen.
As one example, McWhorter’s number 2 is:
> Black people are a conglomeration of disparate individuals. “Black culture” is code for “pathological, primitive ghetto people.” But don’t expect black people to assimilate to “white” social norms because black people have a culture of their own.
An actual real thing many antiracists believe is:
> Black people are a conglomeration of disparate individuals. Reference to a singular “Black culture” is code for “pathological, primitive ghetto people.” But don’t expect black people to assimilate to “white” social norms because black people have cultures of their own.
The differences are subtle in terms of the change in words, but gigantic in terms of change of meaning.
Surely statistics might help us resolve to what extent things like public torture and killing of black people by authorities is a problem (as distinct from police brutality against all people generally). What do the statistics say?
Edit: This comment went from +7 to -1 in a matter of a page refresh. HN should be cognizant of brigading on threads like this. But moreso, the people doing it should also ask themselves why, especially on such a scientific and curious forum, they think the simple asking of certain questions should be so vehemently and anonymously punished.
I'm not sure that page shows what you want it to. It doesn't seem to account for the demographic distribution of people being caught committing crimes to begin with.
Here's a thread with numbers from 2019 claiming blacks are actually killed less:
Disproportionate relative to the general population. It is proportionate relative to the rates of violent crime committed.
Consider the fact that men are killed by police to an even more disproportionate extent than black people in America - 9:1 vs. black's 4:1 disparity. Is this evidence of misandry of magnitude even larger than racism? Are we supposed to ignore that there is a similar disparity in the rates at which men commit crimes relative to women?
Since so many people are replying to you with derision, I’ll link to the Washington Post database on police shootings which is considered to be pretty comprehensive and has a lot of work put into each case to determine the situation around it.
A lot of people are surprised to learn that the number of unarmed black men shot by police in recent years is often between 15-20 given the rhetoric around the issue.
The number is disproportionally higher than white men, but Roland Fryer’s research suggests that when taking into account context, such as crime rates, there is no statistical difference in police shootings based on race, though he did find a persistent difference in other types of police encounters.
Black Americans are disproportionately poor, disproportionately raised in single parent homes, disproportionately forced into poorly run schools, and disproportionately victimized by crime. Those issues are difficult to address and should all get a lot of attention because they are the context in which disproportionate encounters with police occur. While police reform is an important issue for everyone, the overheated rhetoric around racist cops is performative and distracting.
It's quite hard to come up with reliable statistics for police killings in the US. It's not that deaths aren't counted, it's that they're misclassified.
> Feldman used data from the Guardian’s 2015 investigation into police killings, The Counted, and compared it with data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). That dataset, which is kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was found to have misclassified 55.2% of all police killings, with the errors occurring disproportionately in low-income jurisdictions.
Seems hard to make an argument either for or against racial disparities in police shootings then, if the data is unreliable. In which case the answer is to not make assumptions, but collect better data.
A lot of people seem to take the approach of: the data's good if it says what I want; if it doesn't, it's probably wrong.
Hard doesn't mean impossible. There's been a lot of good reporting on this in the last half-decade. But it's required sustained effort from journalists, and insofar as statistics are getting better, it's not because the US has become more first-worldier than it was.
I'm very open to specific critiques of specific statistics. Data collection and aggregation are hard problems!
General claims that the statistics are wrong (all of them?) don't seem particularly helpful, especially if the implication is that we should follow anecdotes or preconceived ideas instead of statistics.
I have the same point view as you. Can someone show non-fringe like credible examples of any of the 10 points?
And it seems obvious that even if people magically had no more racists thoughts or decisions starting in 2021, as if a side effect of COVID was ending racist beliefs, the intergenerational effects would mean the effects of racism would continually disadvantage large swathes of people. As a society, we should work to reduce the impact of past mistakes, should we not?
Indeed the strawman is so huge it is tempting to translate the purported 10-tenet list into what reasonable people may actually believe.
> 1. When black people say you have insulted them, apologize with profound sincerity and guilt. But don’t put black people in a position where you expect them to forgive you.
Yeah, indeed if anyone feels insulted it's quite a natural first reaction to apologize. On the other hand, unless you're having a bad day, try to have a thick skin yourself.
> 2. “Black culture” is code for “pathological, primitive ghetto people.” But don’t expect black people to assimilate to “white” social norms.
This one... wtf? And no, I don't expect anyone to pretend they're white.
> 3. Silence about racism is violence. But elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own.
So is the author arguing that silence about racism is a good thing then? And we generally want expert voices elevated on specific topics. I do think many black people know quite a bit about experiencing racism.
> 4. You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people. But you can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.
Replace black by science and racist by stupid. Not so illogical then, is it?
> 5. Show interest in multiculturalism. But do not culturally appropriate.
Oh come on. All people ask is things like: don't do blackface, it's dumb. Like dressing up as an SS. Fully legal, as it should be, but really dumb.
> 6. [...] But seek to have black friends. If you don’t have any, you’re a racist.
>> 5. Show interest in multiculturalism. But do not culturally appropriate.
> Oh come on. All people ask is things like: don't do blackface, it's dumb. Like dressing up as an SS. Fully legal, as it should be, but really dumb.
I saw this document[1] making the rounds on twitter recently. Do you think the proposals in the document are good ones that all people should adhere to, or do you think they are completely ridiculous and worthy of ridicule? Or somewhere in between? I'm specifically speaking of the AAVE section.
The people who I saw sharing it were definitely serious about it and not ridiculing it.
> Why does this document even matter?
There is a massive discussion thread here, with multiple people saying "No one believes <unreasonable thing X>; it's really about <reasonable thing Y>". As in, "no one believes using a 100 emoji is cultural appropriation; people are just saying don't wear blackface". But every single bit of evidence (which includes things like best-selling books, essays in the prestige press, statements by government officials, etc) is dismissed as not real evidence that a substantial number of people believe something.
I suppose it's not something that can be resolved by Internet argumentation, only time. In a couple years we'll know whether this document is indeed ridiculous, or whether it's obvious that non-Black people should not use AAVE slang online.
Point 2 is almost surely a reference to a famous incident where the African-American History Museum published a chart which identified things like hard work, self-reliance, and planning for the future as aspects of "white culture". (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/artic...)
That's a misleading summary. The graphic defined ideas like rugged individualism and Protestant work ethic. Saying self reliance is part of rugged individualism doesn't mean every other philosophy opposes it.
> Absolutely no one subscribes to the position it critiques.
Have you been on Twitter or a college campus lately? There absolutely are people who believe those things to their core. I have spoken to many people who subscribe to those positions both online and off.
I am not saying we should throw the baby out with the bathwater but disregarding the extremists in the anti-racism movement is just burying your head in the sand.
I haven't been to a college campus lately, but my professor and student friends tell me that there are very few extremists. I don't think that what the Intellectual Dark Web folks imply is mainstream really is.
> Have you been on Twitter or a college campus lately?
No. I live in a bubble. And no, I am not being facetious. I really have not been to a college campus for a long time, and I really don't read Twitter. Nonetheless...
> There absolutely are people who believe those things to their core.
I have a very hard time believing this. Can you point me to some evidence on the record that is longer than 140 characters?
So you admit that you're completely ignorant on the subject, yet claim with certainty that the article can't be true? People like you are part of the problem. These topics can't even be discussed without people jumping to discredit things they know nothing about.
No, I admit I am partially ignorant. Twitter is not the entirety of reality, notwithstanding that some people seem to think that it is. If third-wave anti-racism were really widespread I would expect to see evidence of it somewhere other than Twitter, and I don't.
In particular, I would expect someone to point me to a reference where the point of view that McWhorter describes is actually endorsed by someone other than McWhorter.
Fair warning: the creator of that video has a dog in this fight. To be fair, he's not exactly trying to come across as impartial. But this might not be the best source for someone trying to learn about this issue.
Well, I started watching this, but I stopped after "Evergreen was the most experimental of experimental colleges." I don't see how an anecdote from a setting like that could possibly inform a discussion of what is and isn't a widely held view in today's society.
Seriously? Have you not been keeping up with current events? Have you heard of George Floyd? The attempts by the Trump administration to overturn the 2020 election?
Have you heard of Tony Timpa? He was murdered by the Dallas police in the same fashion as George Floyd. Great body cam footage capturing them laughing at him as he begged for his life and screamed that he couldn't breathe. No consequences for the police officers involved.
How about Daniel Shaver? Gunned down in cold blood. Again, incredible body cam footage of him being made to crawl on the ground, sobbing and terrified, before being shot. His murderer, Officer Philip Brailsford, was acquitted.
This affects all races. Unfortunately it isn't political useful to frame it that way. Almost no one has heard of these two men because they were white. Does that seem problematic to you?
I think that's about right. And there's a more market-based take on this: McWhorter politics audience is swelling at the moment and he's trying to take advantage. There are a lot of broadly intellectual para-conservatives right now feeling cast out of the conventional conservative media environment (occupied as it is with fighting a civil war between the MAGA insurgents and traditional republicans). This site, in particular, is absolutely filled with them.
And a message like this, aimed squarely at the woke left and requiring no compromise on the part of a conservative reader, is pure mana for that audience. The Greenwald essay that spiked here (briefly) yesterday is in the same genre.
Basically: straw men arguments aimed at the seemingly ascendant left are going to be big business around here for the next few years.
[1] To be fair: he's also a professional linguist with a real day job as a professor at Columbia. Go find and read his Power of Babel book at some point, it's great.
Two passages jumped out at me as relevant not just generally, but potentially valuable to wokeists here at HN.
>Black people are a conglomeration of disparate individuals. “Black culture” is code for “pathological, primitive ghetto people.” But don’t expect black people to assimilate to “white” social norms because black people have a culture of their own.
>I write this viscerally driven by the fact that all of this supposed wisdom is founded in an ideology under which 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.
>And a message like this, aimed squarely at the woke left and requiring no compromise on the part of a conservative reader, is pure mana for that audience
Without knowing my identity, which compromises am I missing when I read this article?
> “Black culture” is code for “pathological, primitive ghetto people.”
That's the dumbest, most offensive thing I've read in quite a while. Perhaps among a certain set of people that is true (call those people "racists" as shorthand). But as an actual Black person, it's ridiculously offensive to define "Black culture" that way.
> 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
This belongs to a category of arguments that reset time to zero as the sentence is being written. As such, it's almost beneath rebuttal. (If you require rebuttal, any child who has lost her milk teeth can provide sufficient rebuttal.)
> which compromises am I missing when I read this article?
The compromise they do not have to make is that of realizing that the claptrap they read (some of which you quoted) is pandering to them and their infantile understanding of the United States.
I got that but the problem is that caricature is only presented in some views of pop culture. The Obamas, Kamala Harris, Beyonce, Viola Davis, and Chadwick Boseman are pop culture.
Anyone who chooses to present the pop culture caricature described by McWhorter is making a racially-guided editorial decision.
The most powerful part of the current antiracist movement is the Congressmembers and members of the current administration who are working on the systemic apparatus, for example by promoting a new Voting Rights Act. (Indeed, there is a certain obliqueness in his references to "The Elect" as a group of people while ignoring the role of elected officials. This, as over 100 bills wind through legislatures with the singular goal of reducing voting access for minority groups.)
McWhorter ignores the policy arm that makes a real difference in the lives of tens of millions in favor of elevating the critiques of a very narrow set of people. I can go the rest of my life without interacting with The Elect, but the laws this 116th Congress enacts me may follow me the rest of my life.
By elevating The Elect to a position they do not occupy outside of small niche areas like academia, McWhorter creates a straw man that he then proceeds to tear down. It's a pretty weak argument for an academic of his intellect to make.
I thought the passage was valuable because it made a point about individualism. If conservatives or liberals believe in that caricature, then the article is challenging their perception.
>Whether or not it was the author's intent, some people will surely read it as saying, tacitly, there is no problem, and anyone who says there is a problem is being hysterical or otherwise detached from reality.
I'm expecting 90% of the comments on this article to be some form of this. Many people think racism ended when we elected Obama.
Some people may think that racism ended, but I don't think most do. In fact, I'd say this is a 'straw man', to quote the parent. I think the problem people have is seeing racism enacted to combat racism, which is just going to result in a feedback loop producing more racism, tribalism, and division.
Hmm. The current approach of "combating racism" (quotas, preferences, "white fragility", etc.) almost has to produce tribalism, which, since it's tribalism on the axis of race, will almost certainly produce more racism down the road. Once you put it that way, it seems almost inevitable.
Do you remember how many people got upset when a black man knelt for the national anthem at a football game? Lots of people definitely think racism is over.
That being said...
This article is the very definition of a straw man. Absolutely no one subscribes to the position it critiques.
On the other hand, a fair number of people (including myself) subscribe to the position that, although things are not nearly as bad as they have been in the past, there is still a latent undercurrent of actual racism in the U.S. which sometimes bubbles to the surface and manifests itself in various harmful ways, up to and including (but far from limited to) black people being systematically disenfranchised, and publicly tortured and killed by authorities, often with impunity. To people like me, straw-man arguments like the one in TFA (and F does not stand for Fine in this case) are offensive because I of course agree that the position being critiqued is risible. Whether or not it was the author's intent, some people will surely read it as saying, tacitly, there is no problem, and anyone who says there is a problem is being hysterical or otherwise detached from reality.
Well, there is a problem, and there has been for hundreds of years. We have made a lot of progress towards solving this problem. But we have not yet solved fully solved it, and anyone who says that we have, particularly when they say it in such a condescending way, is part of the problem.
[UPDATE] A lot of people are disputing my claim here. What no one has yet done is provide an actual reference to anyone going on the record to endorse the ten-point position that McWhorter calls "third-wave anti-racism." Lots of anecdotes. Zero data.