Sep 29, 2022·edited Sep 29, 2022Liked by Free Black Thought
The sad thing is children have to be taught to see race. They might notice that their friend looks different from them, but they won't weigh skin color any more than they weigh hair color or eye color. In fact, they won't think anything much of it at all until the adults in their lives teach them to see that friend as BEING different.
I do not mean to imply any sort of moral equivalency here, just to note a commonality, but that being said:
The modern Identity-obsessed Left has set up a system of totalizing racial classification that I don't think I've seen anywhere since the antebellum/Jim Crow South.
If you read about the South in those times a person's race was the most important thing about them, and you needed to know their race before you could decide what they were allowed to say or do, what was their social and moral value, where they were allowed to live and who they were allowed to date, which schools they went to, and this was on top of classifications by blood: the one-drop rule, octoroons and quadroons, etc.
Now of course I'd prefer to live in a society dedicated to antiracism rather than its opposite, but both societies/ideologies make it impossible to get past the idea of racial categories and racial divisions, both foment division and suspicion, and both deny the idea of a human as individual and not defined by their race. And both slap a racial label on every aspect of existence and then add a moral judgment, whereby your race makes you inherently Good or Bad depending upon the ideological lens applied.
And both also have this last commonality: the people most dedicated to racial classification and racial policing claim higher social and moral motives, but really use race as a way to divide and conquer, as a way to accrue power and set people against each other for their personal benefit.
"The racialization of the world has to be the most unexpected result of the anti-discrimination battle of the last half-century. It has ensured that the battle continuously recreates the curse from which it is trying to break free." — Pascal Bruckner
I was reading something recently about the Civil War etc and the obsessive racial classification of everything and everyone, when it suddenly started to seem eerily familiar...
(but as i said before, it would be silly to make a moral equivalence, antiracism (no matter how reductive or aggressive) is vastly superior to its opposite.)
What I find important, beyond the arguments themselves, is the supporting documentation. The moral compass is compelling as well. Who are we and who do we want our children to become? What are the metrics? How does our pedagogy function? And is 'race' real and if not will we fall into some other illusion of difference and sameness? Great article.
The word "unsettling" in the title doesn't even begin to describe the utter madness of these ideas. It seems like these people took all their craziest and most destructive ideas and compiled them to a "K12 curriculum."
This is the time to stand up to this madness. If we don't counteract, these curricula will turn children into bigoted racists and sexists or depressed victims unable to live on their own. In any case, it will not make them smarter.
The sad thing is children have to be taught to see race. They might notice that their friend looks different from them, but they won't weigh skin color any more than they weigh hair color or eye color. In fact, they won't think anything much of it at all until the adults in their lives teach them to see that friend as BEING different.
I do not mean to imply any sort of moral equivalency here, just to note a commonality, but that being said:
The modern Identity-obsessed Left has set up a system of totalizing racial classification that I don't think I've seen anywhere since the antebellum/Jim Crow South.
If you read about the South in those times a person's race was the most important thing about them, and you needed to know their race before you could decide what they were allowed to say or do, what was their social and moral value, where they were allowed to live and who they were allowed to date, which schools they went to, and this was on top of classifications by blood: the one-drop rule, octoroons and quadroons, etc.
Now of course I'd prefer to live in a society dedicated to antiracism rather than its opposite, but both societies/ideologies make it impossible to get past the idea of racial categories and racial divisions, both foment division and suspicion, and both deny the idea of a human as individual and not defined by their race. And both slap a racial label on every aspect of existence and then add a moral judgment, whereby your race makes you inherently Good or Bad depending upon the ideological lens applied.
And both also have this last commonality: the people most dedicated to racial classification and racial policing claim higher social and moral motives, but really use race as a way to divide and conquer, as a way to accrue power and set people against each other for their personal benefit.
"The racialization of the world has to be the most unexpected result of the anti-discrimination battle of the last half-century. It has ensured that the battle continuously recreates the curse from which it is trying to break free." — Pascal Bruckner
These are trenchant observations!
Thanks!
I was reading something recently about the Civil War etc and the obsessive racial classification of everything and everyone, when it suddenly started to seem eerily familiar...
(but as i said before, it would be silly to make a moral equivalence, antiracism (no matter how reductive or aggressive) is vastly superior to its opposite.)
Appreciate your excellent work.
Thank you for compiling. This all started in the demoralized Ivy League struggle sessions decades ago: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-groom-commissars
What I find important, beyond the arguments themselves, is the supporting documentation. The moral compass is compelling as well. Who are we and who do we want our children to become? What are the metrics? How does our pedagogy function? And is 'race' real and if not will we fall into some other illusion of difference and sameness? Great article.
Thank you!
The word "unsettling" in the title doesn't even begin to describe the utter madness of these ideas. It seems like these people took all their craziest and most destructive ideas and compiled them to a "K12 curriculum."
This is the time to stand up to this madness. If we don't counteract, these curricula will turn children into bigoted racists and sexists or depressed victims unable to live on their own. In any case, it will not make them smarter.