A Guest Post on "Wokeness" caused a stir.
"What next, Peter, a Guest Post from the KKK?"
I am writing about the Guest Post published Friday, "Why I fight wokeness."
Some issues are too hot to address. The question the Guest Post addressed was whether the goal of equity, meaning accommodations for pre-existing disadvantages, is fair, just, and realistic. Equity confronts another American value, that of equality. The instant blowback from the left from Friday's post is a problem for Democrats. Equality and equity raise serious issues of jobs, public benefits, and education. Politics is how we resolve conflicts, but the communication needed to do politics is perilous. No one has standing. Everyone has identity characteristics that both qualify and disqualify. Equity is about measuring out victimization and compensations. Somebody wins, somebody loses. The winners feel entitled, the losers feel cheated. The message of Dr. Martin Luther King, which once unified Democrats, now divides them.
The political right has a message vacuum in which to frame the issue to their advantage: The woke left wants to screw you and other smart, hard-working normal people so they can give your job and tax money to others.
Democrats are conflicted. They want both equality and equity, but talking through the nuances and contradictions triggers opposition from one's friends. The image used in the Guest Post last Friday to explain equity is in widespread use by proponents of equity. It is the example of a just society. The image skirts the problem. Boxes are cheap. There is room for all three of them. No one seems to care that they are avoiding the game box office.
The Guest Post on Friday was a gift to Democrats. He put the problem of human differences on the table for discussion. Liberty and respect for the individual are core values of Americans. Thomas Jefferson wrote that individuals are free and equal, with autonomy to pursue happiness.
There is an opportunity for a Democratic politician to form a message of nuance on this issue of equity and equality. He or she would reaffirm respect for individuals and liberty as Democratic party values as well as American values. That Democrat will catch hell for it, at first at least. The Democrat would be seen to be downplaying identity and intersectionality. It is possible a White male simply cannot do this. He has White male privilege! He cannot possibly understand! He is defending oppression! It may take a woman of color to open the door. Possibly a LGBTQ woman of color. But once open, there is opportunity for all Democrats to talk about liberty and personal choice. Embrace diversity of the individual, not just of groups.
I am hopeful that Biden chooses not to run for re-election. That would throw open the Democratic primary to several dozen aspirants. There will be TV cameras in New Hampshire exposing Americans to a new generation of Democrats. Some candidates will say the un-sayable. Some of them will rise to the top. Then the hard work of political adjustment and compromise can move forward.
Tomorrow: How Artificial Intelligence deals with messaging on "wokeness."
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13 comments:
If I had a blog, would not/never entertain a guest blog from someone with such loathsome and destructive views. Hitler, Osama bin Laden, the Traitor in Chief, Putin and other vile, hate-filled figures would be proud.
If you are looking for another hot topic, try reparations. Your favorite "moderate" California governor (former mayor of that "moderate" city, San Francisco, as I recall) is working on that, perhaps with the help of his First Partner.
Often, race-focused conversations derail because people are using the same terms in different ways. For example, the guest post was on “wokeness.” “Woke” means being aware of and attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice. To white nationalists, woke is a racist dog whistle. To Republicans in general, it’s become a derogatory term for anything they don’t like, from Black history to corporations that promote respect for everyone. According to Tucker Carlson, even M&Ms are “woke” (I am not making this up).
Equality simply means everyone is treated the same way, regardless of need or any other individual difference. Equity means everyone is provided with what they need to succeed. The gross disparities between Blacks and Whites in wealth, incarceration rates, access to healthcare and other social indicators make it all too clear that Blacks have neither equality nor equity. Trying to correct these disparities is a good thing. Attributing them to the inferiority of Blacks is called racism. In fact, racism is their cause.
So no, "wokeness" does not present a danger to America. It presents a danger to the racism that has afflicted our nation from the start and prevented it from achieving its ideals. May it succeed soon.
It used to be obvious that merit is part of achieving the American dream. But like it’s doing to so many self-evident things, the left is attempting to destroy this idea as it pursues a Sovietesque system of “equity.”
Parents might not see merit’s decline as a more pressing concern than their children being told they can be any gender they choose from day to day. Most kids are academically average. Why fight over merit when there are so many other ideological fights to be had?
Parents have to see merit as part and parcel of the left’s push to impose its ridiculous concepts on our kids.
The idea that everyone can have an equal outcome has been tried again and again in failed socialist countries. When the left succeeds in ending merit in a school, you can be sure the rest of the woke ideas parents abhor have already taken over the curriculum.
Beyond that, our schools’ loss of rigor has dumbed down our country, and the retreat from pursuing merit has slowed success for so many kids.
This isn’t theoretical. Nor is it accidental.
As soon as I entered the field of computer programming, it was clear to me that I was very good at it. Through graduate school and my first two jobs afterwards, I was always among the best. It felt like my mind was a starship that I could fly through the universe of code.
Then, in 1980, I got a job at Xerox in Palo Alto, where everything we have now was invented: windows on the screen, mice, scalable fonts, local area networks, laser printers, etc.
Down the street from where I worked was Xerox PARC, where all of this had been invented. My organization was tasked with taking what the geniuses had invented and making a commercial product based on it, which was released in 1981 as Xerox Star.
As an employee of Xerox, I had access to Xerox PARC. In particular, I could go to lectures there, in a room furnished with nothing but beanbags, and hear the geniuses describe what they had invented and how they had done it.
I had thought I was flying a starship; what I discovered in that room was that I was like a little kid with a toy starship, sitting on the curb and watching the real starships go by in a parade. It was both humbling and a relief. I was still a very good programmer, but it was obvious to me that I had risen to my appropriate level in the world of programming, and I did not have the mental horsepower to rise any higher. It allowed me to stop trying to go higher and to be happy with where and what I was.
So I know from personal experience that people have different levels of mental horsepower, or IQ, or talent, or whatever you might want to call it. I have seen the limits of my own mind, and encountered people with abilities far beyond what I am capable of.
Wokenes implicitly, and sometimes, explicitly, denies all of this. Everyone is capable of everything, they claim; it’s just a matter of giving each person what they need to achieve that potential. One time time at the community college where I used to teach, I said something in a meeting about how students in computer science needed the mental horsepower that the subject requires. A dean who is now still there at a much higher level of management accused me of advocating “social Darwinism,” and said that ideas like mine should have no place in an educational institution; woke ideology in its purest form, expressed by a liberal arts major who couldn’t write a line of code to save his life,
Wokeness, if allowed to become dominant, will destroy the intellectual integrity of my field. If a computer science student doesn’t succeed, it’s our fault. We didn’t give them enough boxes. Mentioning that we don’t have a box with 20 extra IQ points is taboo; it would be a social faux pas equivalent to noticing that the emperor has no clothes and saying it out loud.
And that’s why I continue to fight wokeness.
Funny how things change...a short while ago I was absolutely certain Biden would not run, now I'm not so sure.
While polling suggests that he would beat Trump, again, he's vulnerable to almost any other Republican. So we are all waiting to see if Trump actually becomes the candidate, something I'm not sure even he wants.
Neither party has much of a bench, so short of those two it's a crapshoot.
Harris/Haley?
Manchin was ever so coy on MTP yesterday. (A Republicrat!)
On and on...
I was also very good at what I did. Hurray for me.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and his ilk think that Black history, which they call woke ideology, might make White kids feel uncomfortable. Waaaah.
Just as extremists have used the Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election to undermine American democracy, far-right advocates of privatizing public education are using Big Lies to undermine public schools. First, they concoct lies, smears and distortions that stoke fear and anger, such as that eight-year-old white students are being taught to hate themselves because they are responsible for slavery, and that kindergarten teachers are grooming five-year-olds. Then, extremist state politicians champion national vouchers to “solve” the manufactured “outrage,” often under the banner of “parents’ rights.” This is what the war on woke is really all about.
A well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy. A high percentage of our electorate are unable to tell fact from fiction. It's no accident.
Can we move on from the incorrigible, grandiose person with an overly inflated ego and sense of importance who thrives on negative attention and arguing for the sake of arguing? It's really a waste of time and energy. Racist and sexist views are nothing new, so why bother?
My point about how I thought I was such a good programmer was that eventually I ran into people who were so much better than me that it was just absolutely amazing. I said all of that in support of the proposition that people come in various degrees of intelligence/smartness, and to demonstrate that I am willing to understand and acknowledge that even when it doesn’t put me at the top of the hierarchy.
My beef with wokenesss is that it tries to force us all to believe that there are no differences in innate abilities among different individuals. Or that if there are differences, they are all the result of oppression or privilege.
But not everyone, no matter how much “privilege“ they have, is going to be a math prodigy or piano virtuoso at the age of six. We aren’t all Einstein when we are born.
Equity = everyone gets a trophy. The purpose of government shouldn’t be to provide boxes for every individual who is “short” on some quality, but to remove the fence - the barriers to improving themselves by their own efforts. I would call this access rather than equality or equity…
That individuals have different abilities is obvious. That it has anything to do with their race is a crock, except for the bigotry holding some races back.
The purpose of government, among other things, is to promote the general welfare (according to the Constitution). That would include providing people what they need to succeed, such as equal educational and employment opportunities.
I hope Peter is right and a Democrat comes along who is not in thrall to wokeness. A Democrat like that could possibly get my vote.
Woke doesn’t just mean “being aware of and attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice.” Woke is also an agenda that seeks to obliterate any recognition of differences in individual talent and intelligence.
Woke could take us to the world of Harrison Bergeron if we don’t stand up to it.
I'll go with Merriam-Webster, but I realize the far-white prefers to make up its own facts.
I could describe how my friend's grampa had his farm split apart, and distributed to peasants in Peru (have no fear; the peasants were ignorant of profitable farming practices, and grampa eventually got his land back) But I won’t, since this discussion doesn’t really apply, I don’t think.
WOKE, from dictionary.com
adjective
having or marked by an active awareness of systemic injustices and prejudices, especially those involving the treatment of ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities:
In light of incidents of police brutality, it’s important to stay woke.
He took one African American history class and now he thinks he’s woke.
This generation of kids is trying to make woke choices in life.
Disparaging. of or relating to a liberal progressive orthodoxy, especially promoting inclusive policies or ideologies that welcome or embrace ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities.
Slang. aware of the facts, true situation, etc. (sometimes used facetiously):
The moon landing was staged. Stay woke!
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