Long story short: In 1969 when I was with Upward Bound at Claremont Colleges, we encountered this same nonsense. Rather than learn good study habits to help minorities succeed in college, the Victimolgists insisted that Blacks should not do homework but instead should have dances every night as their African heritage and do peyote. The White and Black Victimologists enlisted the help of several Black juveniles from the Probation Camp as their intimidators and enforcers. They had a plan to take over the program and institute some program more to their liking.
We called Probation and had all the probationees returned to camp and then fired the Victimologists and called the police in case they preferred to have their rooms searched rather than leave. They left. Our program was judged the most academic West of the Mississippi.
Sometimes, it is easier than one thinks to stand up to the bullies. Whether it is easy or hard, it has to be done.
And what is a glaring concurrence between reconstruction racism and progressive racism? The Democratic Party. It is quite a tragedy that many black people are loyal to the party that fought a war to keep our ancestors enslaved — largely based on false promises of wealth redistribution from innocent people, patronage, gaslighting, and scapegoating. The Democratic Party has never ceased to exploit black people; it has just altered its methods. The vast majority of black people have been exploited on behalf of the heirs of the Party. The black political faction that promotes racial tribalism has greedily joined the party that fought a war to keep our ancestors enslaved for scraps of power and money. The Democratic Party certainly cares nothing about “objectivity” — that can be clearly seen by how it presents its own history.
I published a substack blurb on attacks on “objectivity” by progressive racists 2 years ago.
Jun 28, 2023·edited Jul 3, 2023Liked by Free Black Thought
I have downloaded this essay and listened to it 3 times via text to speech software and it has pushed a number of buttons. I won a National Merit Scholarship and went to college for Electrical Engineering but I don't know whether I have a valid opinion on "Black Excellence" or not, and don't care all that much.
I am kind of old and assume that "Woke" is just another bullshit pseudo-intellectual fad. I remember when Black Americans were arguing about Black versus Negro. Negro is nothing but Latin for black. Like arguing over which honky language to use was intelligent. But how much of "education" is really just the psychological conditioning of children?
My mother sent me to a Catholic grammar school though she taught me to read when I was 3. I recall straining to keep from crying getting ready for school in 3rd grade wondering how I would get through another day of abyssmal boredom. Getting through grade school was like putting up with Archie Bunker. I had to learn to "stifle myself".
Fortunately I stumbled across science fiction in 4th grade. The nitwit nuns never taught science. My sister told me that a nun said that "science and religion don't mix". Maybe intellectually challenged White people and science don't mix.
But now we have what I call The Twin Towers Affair.
The Laws of Physics do not care about White people.
The Laws of Physics do not care about Black people.
The 100 tallest buildings in the world are all more than 333 meters tall. The Twin Towers were 414 meters. But doesn't gravity work the same way all over the planet?
The essay mentions:
“objective, rational linear thinking,” and “a quantitative emphasis” (that is, math)
Math is not physics but it is pretty difficult to figure out the physics without doing the math, but even more difficult to do the math without the data. Think about the shape of the Eiffel Tower. How is the 10,000 tons of wrought iron in the ET distributed? Where is the data on how the 100,000 tons of steel in the North Tower was distributed? It is not in the 13,000 page NCSTAR1 report by the NIST. I downloaded it and searched it in 2007. They don't even specify the total amount of concrete in the towers.
Is "Black Excellence" nothing but getting good grades in courses specified by White people? MLK got a PhD in Theology. What did he ever say about the Ethiopian Bible? What has Neil de Grasse Tyson ever said about the physics of the Twin Towers collapses? HE WAS THERE! He sent out a public letter on 9/12/2001. What does he know about physics?
Water towers need more metal bands toward the bottom because gravity produces more water pressure with greater depth. I am not aware of Tyson applying that same logic to skyscrapers around NYC, especially the ones that are no longer there.
Do Black people need "Intellectual Segregation" from European Culture to have "Black Excellence"?
I got straight D's in religion my freshman year in high school alongside my straight A's in mathematics. A curious thing about European Culture is that double entry accounting is 700 years old and invented in Italy. Therefore it is older than Shakespeare's plays, and older than Beethoven's symphonies but when do you hear educators suggesting that it be mandatory in high schools as part of European culture? Even for White kids.
Most of the White people are supposed to be losers in the Economic Power Games too. So when are Lowry and Mcwhorter and Tyson going to logically conclude that excellence means Black people thinking for themselves? I will probably always wonder if MLK ever heard of the Ethiopian Bible. Education is what palefaces decide that it is.
We live in a world where economists with PhDs cannot talk about the depreciation of durable consumer goods while I have not been to an auto show in 40+ years because to me planned obsolescence is blatantly obvious.
I worked for IBM. I had to write my own benchmarks to test a new computer because I never saw the word "benchmark" on any IBM documentation.
I have to wonder how much you really understand about how strangely the world is working.
See: The Screwing of the Average Man (1974) by David Hapgood
A person doesn't need to get good grades in schools to excel in the "rational arts". But, if schools express contempt for them or the ability for black people to excel them, it is not generally going to be good for the development of excellent abilities in the rational arts for "black people". While schools may want to be the gatekeepers and arbiters of excellence, they are not worthy of that status. Excellence can be exemplified and certified in many ways, and schooling is frequently not sufficient; nor is it necessary.
Jun 27, 2023·edited Jun 27, 2023Liked by Free Black Thought
Great post.
This - "While it is important to remember and honor the trauma that black people have endured, it is even more important to celebrate our achievements."
I actually think, after 30 years of reading about slavery, and slaveries, it would be better to not over-remember it or overdo the emphasis on trauma. We've been teaching about the Atl Slave Trade for 40 years in the US, regardless of baseless claims its skipped over. It should of course be taught, but put in context of other histories, and of the time under discussion, whether 1619 or 1819- given the diversity of the US. (If the US was 1950s Alabama, a white supremacist elite racially abusing almost all blacks, this would be different, but thats not the US today)
This would do two things, offer honest, broad, global history to our students, black or otherwise, putting that portion of it in context of other global oppressions and their normativity. Second, it would avoid the creation, I fear we are amid, of a generation of mentally beaten African-American kids. It would show them their story is one they should be proud of, to come from such circumstances, but it would not create a culture of victimhood and hopelessness; it would show them that their fellow students, with families from Guam, Poland, El Salvador, Congo, Ireland, Korea, Afghanistan etc etc, even those from powerful nations, have traumas too, personal, familial, and historical.
I second Jeffrey Peoples' applauding Dmitri Shufutinsky's analysis. Objectivity and subjectivity have their own ground rules and value; there are quirky overlaps -- and we shouldn't confuse how each operates. My own approach framed the perverse approach to objectivity as Orwellian. It also looks closely at the California case: Racial Newspeak Comes to the Classroom - Minding The Campus
George Orwell mentioned Stuart Chase in an essay on politics. Chase wrote The Tyranny of Words and A New Deal and became a member of FDR's brain trust.
I have never heard Mcwhorter mention General Semantics by Alfred Korzybski which Chase's Tyranny of Words is a summation of. Korzybski's Science and Sanity is a much more difficult read.
Robert Heinlein, a famous science fiction writer, became interested in General Semantics in the late 1930s. It is about how language affects and possibly inhibits thinking. Faulty thinking in a world getting more complicated certainly looks like a recipe for disaster.
determinism (language controls thought -- think of languages that may lack a subjunctive tense or languages the slice and dice time differently) versus soft determinism (where linguistic differences can influence expression, but not determine it). Linguistic anthropology picked up those threads in studies in semantics. So, we do need to consider the interplay of language and thought across cultures as well as poets and musicians who trip hop expression.
How much does language affect thinking? This has been an idea brought up in science fiction many time due to imagined aliens with unhuman languages. The 2016 movie Arrival was the first time I saw it in an SF movie thpugh.
Obviously the same thing applies to a lesser degree with human cultures but also with the changes in science and technology. We must create new words for new aspects and perspectives of reality.
How much of "reality" is subjective? Is Catcher in the Rye 'great literature'? I refused to read it. C. P. Snow's Two Cultures essay is a culture conflict within Western culture that impacts education.
Labeling the contradictory gibberish that underlies progressive [race] ideology “Newspeak” is valid. It seems to me that it is now capturing more and more government, academic, and corporate institutions.
The Republican Party, though is not the solution. Especially in California. California needs a new party.
Learning how much progressive education policies consistently fail--and how blatantly their advocates ignore the data on the results--has been a brutal awakening and source of despair these past few years. It is the same in Britain. Thank you for writing about it!
I'm a volunteer advocate for Lives In the Balance. I read a fair amount of research about the behavior of teachers and students in classrooms. One recent study found that teachers observing the same behavior in a white child and a black child punished the black child more severely. I think these “liberal voices” that you mention are a big part of the problem. We need to have high expectations for all students! Interestingly, the other group punished more severely is disabled children - who are also grossly underestimated in our schools. If schools were actually designed for the benefit of children’s learning (instead of adult desire for control and compliance), every child would have a much healthier school experience. Thank you for sharing what you see in our society. Those of us who see these things will be the catalysts for change.
There are always hustlers and fools in the world of education policy. However, as someone who regularly works with academically ambitious African-American teenagers in the middle of a Middle America, I see no effect, zilch, of these crazy policies in the real world. Work yourself into a tizzy if you wish. Scream and pull your hair out if that makes you feel better. Just don’t think that that you are actually advancing anything but your own emotional needs.
When it comes to politics, discussing the issues and sharing thoughts and feelings with others is part of the process of building momentum for change and resistance. It is also valuable for people to know that other people share their concerns and desires. It advances not just political activity, which includes conversation, but also the “emotional needs” of others, which you seem to have a despicable contempt for.
Trivializing this essay simply reflects your sympathy for the garbage the author is criticizing, or perhaps just the party that is serving it. Your attitude actually demonstrates the need for more people to write and speak in a similar way as the author.
If you don’t see the effects of the educational ideology, I suspect you are willfully blind.
I was once an African American teen, and the educational culture of the schools I attended affected me, insofar as I can imagine they could have been a lot better or lot worse in cultivating my talents and interests and provided a place where I felt supported. Furthermore, the political ideology that has captured much of academia played a direct role in my decision not to attend graduate school after completing my undergraduate degree.
The suggestion that because you work with some”academically ambitious” black teens somewhere in middle america, wherever that is, and because you see “zilch” effects in your world there is therefore no effects in the “real world” is poor reasoning. Hopefully those teens have access to better intellectual resources than yourself.
There is no police brutality problem. There is a resisting arrest problem. There is no mass incarceration problem. There is a black crime problem. Tell the truth.
In fact, the very best research on police violence, conducted by Roland Fryer (Harvard, Economics) shows that while there is no disparity in police officers' disposition to shoot black people, there *is* a significant difference in their disposition to physically manhandle and do nonlethal violence to black people, even black people whom the police themselves admit were fully cooperative:
Quote/
• There are large racial differences in police use of nonlethal force. My research team analyzed nearly five million police encounters from New York City. We found that when police reported the incidents, they were 53% more likely to use physical force on a black civilian than a white one. In a separate, nationally representative dataset asking civilians about their experiences with police, we found the use of physical force on blacks to be 350% as likely. This is true of every level of nonlethal force, from officers putting their hands on civilians to striking them with batons. We controlled for every variable available in myriad ways. That reduced the racial disparities by 66%, but blacks were still significantly more likely to endure police force.
• Compliance by civilians doesn’t eliminate racial differences in police use of force. Black civilians who were recorded as compliant by police were 21% more likely to suffer police aggression than compliant whites. We also found that the benefits of compliance differed significantly by race. This was perhaps our most upsetting result, for two reasons: The inequity in spite of compliance clashed with the notion that the difference in police treatment of blacks and whites was a rational response to danger. And it complicates what we tell our kids: Compliance does make you less likely to endure a beat-down—but the benefit is larger if you are white.
There is no "ongoing epidemic of police brutality." As for "mass incarceration," when we live in a country in which many people commit many crimes, we should expect and want such people to be incarcerated.
Long story short: In 1969 when I was with Upward Bound at Claremont Colleges, we encountered this same nonsense. Rather than learn good study habits to help minorities succeed in college, the Victimolgists insisted that Blacks should not do homework but instead should have dances every night as their African heritage and do peyote. The White and Black Victimologists enlisted the help of several Black juveniles from the Probation Camp as their intimidators and enforcers. They had a plan to take over the program and institute some program more to their liking.
We called Probation and had all the probationees returned to camp and then fired the Victimologists and called the police in case they preferred to have their rooms searched rather than leave. They left. Our program was judged the most academic West of the Mississippi.
Sometimes, it is easier than one thinks to stand up to the bullies. Whether it is easy or hard, it has to be done.
Yup.
And what is a glaring concurrence between reconstruction racism and progressive racism? The Democratic Party. It is quite a tragedy that many black people are loyal to the party that fought a war to keep our ancestors enslaved — largely based on false promises of wealth redistribution from innocent people, patronage, gaslighting, and scapegoating. The Democratic Party has never ceased to exploit black people; it has just altered its methods. The vast majority of black people have been exploited on behalf of the heirs of the Party. The black political faction that promotes racial tribalism has greedily joined the party that fought a war to keep our ancestors enslaved for scraps of power and money. The Democratic Party certainly cares nothing about “objectivity” — that can be clearly seen by how it presents its own history.
I published a substack blurb on attacks on “objectivity” by progressive racists 2 years ago.
https://minorityreport.substack.com/p/objectivity-and-seeking-the-right
It’s unfortunate that it seems to me that in many places, such as California, this shit is just getting worse.
I have downloaded this essay and listened to it 3 times via text to speech software and it has pushed a number of buttons. I won a National Merit Scholarship and went to college for Electrical Engineering but I don't know whether I have a valid opinion on "Black Excellence" or not, and don't care all that much.
I am kind of old and assume that "Woke" is just another bullshit pseudo-intellectual fad. I remember when Black Americans were arguing about Black versus Negro. Negro is nothing but Latin for black. Like arguing over which honky language to use was intelligent. But how much of "education" is really just the psychological conditioning of children?
My mother sent me to a Catholic grammar school though she taught me to read when I was 3. I recall straining to keep from crying getting ready for school in 3rd grade wondering how I would get through another day of abyssmal boredom. Getting through grade school was like putting up with Archie Bunker. I had to learn to "stifle myself".
Fortunately I stumbled across science fiction in 4th grade. The nitwit nuns never taught science. My sister told me that a nun said that "science and religion don't mix". Maybe intellectually challenged White people and science don't mix.
But now we have what I call The Twin Towers Affair.
The Laws of Physics do not care about White people.
The Laws of Physics do not care about Black people.
The 100 tallest buildings in the world are all more than 333 meters tall. The Twin Towers were 414 meters. But doesn't gravity work the same way all over the planet?
The essay mentions:
“objective, rational linear thinking,” and “a quantitative emphasis” (that is, math)
Math is not physics but it is pretty difficult to figure out the physics without doing the math, but even more difficult to do the math without the data. Think about the shape of the Eiffel Tower. How is the 10,000 tons of wrought iron in the ET distributed? Where is the data on how the 100,000 tons of steel in the North Tower was distributed? It is not in the 13,000 page NCSTAR1 report by the NIST. I downloaded it and searched it in 2007. They don't even specify the total amount of concrete in the towers.
Is "Black Excellence" nothing but getting good grades in courses specified by White people? MLK got a PhD in Theology. What did he ever say about the Ethiopian Bible? What has Neil de Grasse Tyson ever said about the physics of the Twin Towers collapses? HE WAS THERE! He sent out a public letter on 9/12/2001. What does he know about physics?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VAn5xYpbVR8
Water towers need more metal bands toward the bottom because gravity produces more water pressure with greater depth. I am not aware of Tyson applying that same logic to skyscrapers around NYC, especially the ones that are no longer there.
Do Black people need "Intellectual Segregation" from European Culture to have "Black Excellence"?
I got straight D's in religion my freshman year in high school alongside my straight A's in mathematics. A curious thing about European Culture is that double entry accounting is 700 years old and invented in Italy. Therefore it is older than Shakespeare's plays, and older than Beethoven's symphonies but when do you hear educators suggesting that it be mandatory in high schools as part of European culture? Even for White kids.
Most of the White people are supposed to be losers in the Economic Power Games too. So when are Lowry and Mcwhorter and Tyson going to logically conclude that excellence means Black people thinking for themselves? I will probably always wonder if MLK ever heard of the Ethiopian Bible. Education is what palefaces decide that it is.
When Africa Awakes by Hubert Henry Harrison
Black Man's Burden & Border, Breed nor Birth
by Mack Reynolds
All three in Project Gutenberg
this is very sad, Im sorry for you, as you sound defeated
LOL
We live in a world where economists with PhDs cannot talk about the depreciation of durable consumer goods while I have not been to an auto show in 40+ years because to me planned obsolescence is blatantly obvious.
I worked for IBM. I had to write my own benchmarks to test a new computer because I never saw the word "benchmark" on any IBM documentation.
I have to wonder how much you really understand about how strangely the world is working.
See: The Screwing of the Average Man (1974) by David Hapgood
I read it in 1976.
A person doesn't need to get good grades in schools to excel in the "rational arts". But, if schools express contempt for them or the ability for black people to excel them, it is not generally going to be good for the development of excellent abilities in the rational arts for "black people". While schools may want to be the gatekeepers and arbiters of excellence, they are not worthy of that status. Excellence can be exemplified and certified in many ways, and schooling is frequently not sufficient; nor is it necessary.
Great post.
This - "While it is important to remember and honor the trauma that black people have endured, it is even more important to celebrate our achievements."
I actually think, after 30 years of reading about slavery, and slaveries, it would be better to not over-remember it or overdo the emphasis on trauma. We've been teaching about the Atl Slave Trade for 40 years in the US, regardless of baseless claims its skipped over. It should of course be taught, but put in context of other histories, and of the time under discussion, whether 1619 or 1819- given the diversity of the US. (If the US was 1950s Alabama, a white supremacist elite racially abusing almost all blacks, this would be different, but thats not the US today)
This would do two things, offer honest, broad, global history to our students, black or otherwise, putting that portion of it in context of other global oppressions and their normativity. Second, it would avoid the creation, I fear we are amid, of a generation of mentally beaten African-American kids. It would show them their story is one they should be proud of, to come from such circumstances, but it would not create a culture of victimhood and hopelessness; it would show them that their fellow students, with families from Guam, Poland, El Salvador, Congo, Ireland, Korea, Afghanistan etc etc, even those from powerful nations, have traumas too, personal, familial, and historical.
Well done, young man. Well done, indeed.
I second Jeffrey Peoples' applauding Dmitri Shufutinsky's analysis. Objectivity and subjectivity have their own ground rules and value; there are quirky overlaps -- and we shouldn't confuse how each operates. My own approach framed the perverse approach to objectivity as Orwellian. It also looks closely at the California case: Racial Newspeak Comes to the Classroom - Minding The Campus
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2021/11/29/racial-newspeak-comes-to-the-classroom/
George Orwell mentioned Stuart Chase in an essay on politics. Chase wrote The Tyranny of Words and A New Deal and became a member of FDR's brain trust.
I have never heard Mcwhorter mention General Semantics by Alfred Korzybski which Chase's Tyranny of Words is a summation of. Korzybski's Science and Sanity is a much more difficult read.
Robert Heinlein, a famous science fiction writer, became interested in General Semantics in the late 1930s. It is about how language affects and possibly inhibits thinking. Faulty thinking in a world getting more complicated certainly looks like a recipe for disaster.
From my late night memory, there is a hard
determinism (language controls thought -- think of languages that may lack a subjunctive tense or languages the slice and dice time differently) versus soft determinism (where linguistic differences can influence expression, but not determine it). Linguistic anthropology picked up those threads in studies in semantics. So, we do need to consider the interplay of language and thought across cultures as well as poets and musicians who trip hop expression.
This is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/sapir-whorf-hypothesis
How much does language affect thinking? This has been an idea brought up in science fiction many time due to imagined aliens with unhuman languages. The 2016 movie Arrival was the first time I saw it in an SF movie thpugh.
Obviously the same thing applies to a lesser degree with human cultures but also with the changes in science and technology. We must create new words for new aspects and perspectives of reality.
How much of "reality" is subjective? Is Catcher in the Rye 'great literature'? I refused to read it. C. P. Snow's Two Cultures essay is a culture conflict within Western culture that impacts education.
Labeling the contradictory gibberish that underlies progressive [race] ideology “Newspeak” is valid. It seems to me that it is now capturing more and more government, academic, and corporate institutions.
The Republican Party, though is not the solution. Especially in California. California needs a new party.
Learning how much progressive education policies consistently fail--and how blatantly their advocates ignore the data on the results--has been a brutal awakening and source of despair these past few years. It is the same in Britain. Thank you for writing about it!
I'm a volunteer advocate for Lives In the Balance. I read a fair amount of research about the behavior of teachers and students in classrooms. One recent study found that teachers observing the same behavior in a white child and a black child punished the black child more severely. I think these “liberal voices” that you mention are a big part of the problem. We need to have high expectations for all students! Interestingly, the other group punished more severely is disabled children - who are also grossly underestimated in our schools. If schools were actually designed for the benefit of children’s learning (instead of adult desire for control and compliance), every child would have a much healthier school experience. Thank you for sharing what you see in our society. Those of us who see these things will be the catalysts for change.
So what is "Black Excellence" and to what extent is it in conflict with "White Supremacy"?
My primary emphasis is economics and how technology affects that.
Good Article
Thank you. This was a very interesting piece.
There are always hustlers and fools in the world of education policy. However, as someone who regularly works with academically ambitious African-American teenagers in the middle of a Middle America, I see no effect, zilch, of these crazy policies in the real world. Work yourself into a tizzy if you wish. Scream and pull your hair out if that makes you feel better. Just don’t think that that you are actually advancing anything but your own emotional needs.
When it comes to politics, discussing the issues and sharing thoughts and feelings with others is part of the process of building momentum for change and resistance. It is also valuable for people to know that other people share their concerns and desires. It advances not just political activity, which includes conversation, but also the “emotional needs” of others, which you seem to have a despicable contempt for.
Trivializing this essay simply reflects your sympathy for the garbage the author is criticizing, or perhaps just the party that is serving it. Your attitude actually demonstrates the need for more people to write and speak in a similar way as the author.
If you don’t see the effects of the educational ideology, I suspect you are willfully blind.
I was once an African American teen, and the educational culture of the schools I attended affected me, insofar as I can imagine they could have been a lot better or lot worse in cultivating my talents and interests and provided a place where I felt supported. Furthermore, the political ideology that has captured much of academia played a direct role in my decision not to attend graduate school after completing my undergraduate degree.
The suggestion that because you work with some”academically ambitious” black teens somewhere in middle america, wherever that is, and because you see “zilch” effects in your world there is therefore no effects in the “real world” is poor reasoning. Hopefully those teens have access to better intellectual resources than yourself.
This is excellent, thank you!
There is no police brutality problem. There is a resisting arrest problem. There is no mass incarceration problem. There is a black crime problem. Tell the truth.
In fact, the very best research on police violence, conducted by Roland Fryer (Harvard, Economics) shows that while there is no disparity in police officers' disposition to shoot black people, there *is* a significant difference in their disposition to physically manhandle and do nonlethal violence to black people, even black people whom the police themselves admit were fully cooperative:
Quote/
• There are large racial differences in police use of nonlethal force. My research team analyzed nearly five million police encounters from New York City. We found that when police reported the incidents, they were 53% more likely to use physical force on a black civilian than a white one. In a separate, nationally representative dataset asking civilians about their experiences with police, we found the use of physical force on blacks to be 350% as likely. This is true of every level of nonlethal force, from officers putting their hands on civilians to striking them with batons. We controlled for every variable available in myriad ways. That reduced the racial disparities by 66%, but blacks were still significantly more likely to endure police force.
• Compliance by civilians doesn’t eliminate racial differences in police use of force. Black civilians who were recorded as compliant by police were 21% more likely to suffer police aggression than compliant whites. We also found that the benefits of compliance differed significantly by race. This was perhaps our most upsetting result, for two reasons: The inequity in spite of compliance clashed with the notion that the difference in police treatment of blacks and whites was a rational response to danger. And it complicates what we tell our kids: Compliance does make you less likely to endure a beat-down—but the benefit is larger if you are white.
https://archive.md/2022.10.27-121455/https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/what-the-data-say-about-police-11592845959
/Quote
When you deny these facts or rationalize them away, you make yourself complicit in death and destruction of the next summer of BLM riots.
ummm, this is also not true, nuance matters!
There is no "ongoing epidemic of police brutality." As for "mass incarceration," when we live in a country in which many people commit many crimes, we should expect and want such people to be incarcerated.