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Back in the 2020's polarizing summer of rage, there was a moment of outrage that was uncharacteristically unifying: The Smithsonian's "White Culture" infographic.
As I wrote at the time, the lessons imparted by this purportedly "anti-racist" infographic are virtually indistinguishable from what real life white supremacists would argue. The List immediately offended everyone and the Smithsonian quickly walked back, claiming it was misunderstood.
Fast forward to a few days ago when Ryan Grim published an exclusive interview with Tema Okun, the original creator of The List, claiming that everyone got it "all wrong." If the goal was to get me to click well it fucking worked because I listened to the entire podcast episode and...I have no idea in what way Okun's work was at all misinterpreted or otherwise gotten "wrong".
Let's start at the beginning. I previously tried to track down The List's origin but gave up after I only found xeroxed pamphlets. Turns out that Okun wrote The List in a fit of frustration, without any research whatsoever:
So she just pulled this out of thin air, but notice what she considers as validation that she was onto something (emphasis mine):
The burning question on my mind throughout, a curiosity Grim apparently does not share, is what makes any of this part of "white" culture? They finally try to address a concrete example, sort of, when they discuss how "urgency" as a value of "white culture" is lampooned. Grim sets the stage by citing examples of how The List is weaponized by bad actors seeking an excuse to shirk at work (e.g. "deadlines are white culture"). But as proof that urgency is a value of white culture, Okun cites a non-sequitur story about how some lawyers at a legal nonprofit got distracted from a anti-racist workshop to address an activist's arrest. The conceit on display here is jaw dropping, Okun is literally complaining about an emergency interrupting* her own anti-racist workshop*:
I don't know if I'm stating the obvious here, but nothing about this tells us that "urgency" is bad per se, let alone how any of it is a value of "white culture" specifically. It seems at least possible that the activist's arrest was more important than her training, even from the narrow perspective of "perpetuating racism", but Okun appears incapable of entertaining that idea.
Ryan Grim is not someone I would have recognized as wary of critiquing leftist shibboleths, but I have no explanation for the uncharacteristic lack of pushback he displayed throughout the interview with Tema Okun. If anyone was looking for evidence that the DEI industry is and has been a sham with self-perpetuation as its primary measure of success, Okun's own words are the rotary excavator digging its hole.
She's upset at her own work being "interrupted", but of course her own work "interrupted" the day of the people who went to her seminar. Urgency is only a problem when people are not being urgent about her.
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There, to my mind, are basically two ways to read this- DEI is about self promotion for overproduced elites and those elites take precedence over everyone and everything, and the alternative hypothesis that woke is a religion with all this DEI and the like as it’s rituals. A genuine religious ritual can’t be interrupted for any reason, including a major emergency. You can read the Catholic martyrology if you’d like unusually well documented examples in a more conventional religion.
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There's a certain obvious and probably inevitable professional deformation that occurs in people in Academia (some fields more than other). Consider, for example, a philosopher. His career trajectory, his current social status and salary, are pretty much entirely determined by the opinions of his peers and superiors. If they think that he's cool, his salary will increase. Then he goes and spends his paycheck buying food and stuff, and is upset that he can't buy everything he wants.
Now, in theory, if asked, he probably could explain that the food he buys is produced by real people, delivered to the supermarket by the real people, there's a lot of effort required for all that, there's a limited amount of effort available to the society, so you can't just set everyone's salary at a million dollars per month and let them have anything they want. But his world--all his lived experiences--scream at him that you definitely could, his paycheck is a meaningless number not connected to anything in reality and set by other people who could just as well double it if they wanted, and the goods on supermarket shelves are conjured from thin air by extradimensional aliens for all he can tell.
This has obvious consequences. For example, his gut tells him that communism is totally viable and money was invented by evil people for the sole purpose of causing suffering in their lessers. His mind knows about supply-demand curves (hopefully) but in his gut he knows that it's bullshit invented by evil people, look, you take a piece of cheese from the supermarket shelf and tomorrow there's another piece of cheese there, what supply and demand? It's like when you scoop some water from a river with a bucket and it's immediately replaced with more water, sure, someone might try to charge your for that, and you might yield due to the social pressure, but in your gut you know that it's unnecessary and unfair.
Similarly, in this case Tema Okun probably lives in an academic bubble detached from the reality where stuff is made by someone, and where if all those someones suddenly decide that urgency is a useless value, she will discover that supermarket shelves stay empty and starve to death.
There's something ... vaguely true about this, but isn't it undercut by observing the consistent support of many working-class people for things like communism / welfare / gibs? Other past varieties of leftists are union members/organizers, or the activist who donates his time to helping the poor and raising class consciousness - both of these think the money supply is evil and the rich are thieves, even though they're both viscerally exposed to how things aren't free.
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I think you’re on to something with the intuitive decoupling of abstract work from physical rewards.
I don’t believe it’s an obvious explanation for communism or such. Socialist fantasies arise from a more prosaic observation: he has all the money, and that’s unfair. It was labor first and foremost. The association between bourgeois academics and communism is only so prominent because of how badly labor fared over the 20th century.
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O hai, that's my comment =)
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At the risk of strawmanning or picking out particularly egregious commentators, there is a genuine lack of agricultural awareness. Recall the fellow who remarked on the pretty inexplicable patterns in the countryside from his aircraft: https://twitter.com/KyleKulinski/status/1190737140688326656
A more serious and tragic example is the Sri Lankan government banning fertilizer, leading to an economic disaster: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-decimates-sri-lankan-crops-government-popularity-ebbs-2022-03-03/
Perhaps instead of raising awareness of mental health or climate change, there should be awareness-raising of the importance of fertilizer in agriculture, of the need to produce nitrates and various pesticidal chemicals in factories, of the need for cheap energy supplies to sustain industrial civilization?
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To be a little uncharitable, having not listened to the podcast, past experience indicates that the best argument against Tema Okun is listening to Tema Okun. If you start pushing back, she may retreat into the Motte whereas if you let her talk without opposition, she'll hang herself.
I've heard this possibility floated by others but it doesn't seem plausible in this instance. There was virtually no pushback I could identify, and we instead got a LOT of obfuscation over the core issue.
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If you take a business course on cross-cultural differences, you might get a table that tells you how late your counterparts are supposed to show up to a meeting, from + 24 hours in morocco to - 10 minutes in germany. They will also tell you how uncommon the WEIRD individualism is, along with a number of peculiarities represented in that infographic, like no emotion, large personal space etc . So that's three, the woke, white supremacists, business travelers, all agree, so they might make a tiger.
But to be fair, people genuinely all love the barbie look, and the japanese at least thought our clocks were neat straight away. And ok, sometimes a chinese man works hard, respects authority, and ends up in a nuclear family, it's been known to happen in the wild without direct white oversight.
I work for a large international corp with people all over the world. As we want our business to be successful we enforce punctuality with in iron fist. You'll notice a direct correlation in that list between punctuality and economic health.
To editorialize if I may, if someone tells you they will meet you at a certain time, they don't do it, they have lied to you. The cultures that don't respect punctuality really have a high tolerance for dishonesty and you see it everywhere in the culture, not just in issues of being "on time". I work in anti-fraud and our algorithms consider, among many attributes, the nation the transaction originates in. If you made a list of countries that are permissive with being late and another list of countries by likeyhood of fraud, its largely the same list.
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It kinda looks like she’s calling the hajnal line white and claiming this makes it bad.
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I agree with Okun, the things your society deems valuable and appropriate, it will reproduce via its institutions. If you don't belong to that culture, then you will have to either fit in or struggle. You can certainly try to alter what is considered valuable, that's much harder and not guaranteed to succeed. I also agree that there's no objective definition of what makes for a better culture in all aspects.
But the problem with the focus on talking about how "White Culture" reproduces its values is the terrible fucking optics of being so blind to the broader perspective. Not all truths are pleasant, but this is a case where it would be worthwhile for Okun to start asking about how valuable those things are in the first place. Okun certainly doesn't seem to be very positive about them, but I suspect that they are pretty damn important to most people. If I asked people "All else equal, would it be better for everyone to do their absolute best to be timely?" or the same for objectivity, I suspect I would nearly universally get affirmation. I'm aware that in some cultures, not being timely is considered at the very least acceptable, but I have yet to see anyone argue that those people think it is a good practice.
What? No! Absolutely not!
This sentiment belies a total failure to understand why people sometimes aren't timely: because it's more important for them to spend time with their loved ones / doing the things they love, than to arrive on time for your sterile business meeting at a possibly Bullshit Job that didn't need doing anyway.
The tyrrany of the schedule is profoundly inhumane, never mind anti-white.
We'd all have more time for the important things in life if everyone else was more timely. Show up to work on time so we can all leave on time.
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I really don’t understand this comment. If the meeting takes 1 hour it takes one hour of your time if it starts now or if it starts 10 minutes late. In fact, for all the other attendees it may now take 1hr10m of their time.
If the meeting is just wasteful and could be accomplished in 10 fewer minutes that is a separate problem.
But sticking to a schedule minimizes wasted time for everyone involved and thereby maximizes family time. This comment is the Motte going full-retard anti-PMC/bullshit jobs hot take
The comment is downvoted, so I would say that it's really just one person's bad take and not the site as a whole.
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This is ridiculous, by being late to scheduled meetings you are actually reducing the aggregate time everyone has for spending time with their loved ones and doing the things they love. If the meeting is bullshit that's its own problem but being timely strictly increases this thing you seem to think is in contest.
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It's not just about the job. It's about timeliness in everything. Being on time for the end of your kid's soccer practice. Being on time so your spouse can do something else while you handle whatever they need.
In practice, I've seen this play out constantly. People set parties for 6 with the expectation no one will be there until 6:30 or even 7.
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This is a cost of getting too deeply into the social construction worldview. If you see something as literally not having value separate from its role in maintaining social hierarchy, it's definitionally impossible for you to ask how valuable those things are in the first place. The role in in maintaining the hierarchy is axiomatic to the value judgment.
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I think it's just another in a long list of things that are entirely controversial because they are named incredibly poorly. If it were just called western or American culture it would at least be something people could reason about. But you drag the racial dynamic in and it's impossible. Okun can't accept that aspects of it are good because it would mean they're affirming the "white" culture over the "black/other" culture and they're constitutionally unable to do that.
Problem is that more accurate naming might undermine the activists' goal of sowing racial grievences/division that can than be used to justify more activism.
I think it's worse than that. I think that if you have 99 infographics that talk about the values of western culture, and 1 infographic that talks about the values of white culture, the one about white culture will go viral and the rest will be ignored.
If there was a Coalition of Activists, and the Coalition of Activists had decided that the best way to achieve their goals was to sow racial grievances, then it would in principle be possible to convince the leadership of the Coalition of Activists not to do that. If it's "the most divisive stuff goes viral" though, you would have to convince every single activist to refrain from creating divisive stuff. There would be no single person, or small group of people, you could reason into making it stop.
I think we live in the latter world, and "can then be used to justify more activism" is attributing far more agency than actually exists to the structures that cause this sort of stuff to enter the discourse.
In the case of this particular infographic, there was in fact a hierarchical organization involved: The Smithsonian. The infographics in question were presumably selected, vetted, and approved, presumably by something approaching a "Coalition of Activists", who at least hypothetically could be "reasoned with to stop". I think in this case, a lot of why it's going viral is the number of failsafes it evidently blows through without apparent effort, not merely the content itself.
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This college course material suggests some advantages to lower emphasis on time.
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Wait, I'm not going to listen to the damn podcast episode but isn't this part pretty straightforward? The Smithsonian's infographic helpfully reports its origins:
They co-occur in other contexts, like this memo on White Culture on seattle.gov website:
Here's Katz's original, and as one can easily see it is essentially cited verbatim in the infographic. I don't know what Okun's contribution even is.
Katz is, in my opinion, making very fair and logical arguments for the case that white culture provides advantages to her fellow writes:
Indeed! In a culture where adherence to rigid time schedules, hard work, protecting property, self-reliance, objective rational linear thinking etc. are not only less valorized but held to be cringe and fascist, would whites have any advantage? I suspect that they'd still have some. But elevate a few equally important dimensions for which White culture couldn't even develop nuanced enough concepts – e.g. sassiness, swag, chutzpah, assabiyah, ghayrah, cha bu duo, jugaad, shikata ga nai, ponyatiya – and you'll see them first fall behind, then run away in shame to their ancestral homelands.
Whites have to make an explicit argument as to why rules prioritizing their culture are better for everyone.
My impression is that woke activitists assume that there is functionally infinite seedcorn and that they can complete the worldwide revolution before people begin (literally and metaphorically) starving and they themselves get eaten. That things like a healthy social fabric and functioning economy and strong military just spring out of the ground, or at least America's versions of those things are resilient enough to never fail.
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Well, obviously it'll do so by succeeding with the universal cultural takeover against all major competitors to begin with, and also – possibly – by guilt-tripping the cream of the crop of «white culture» inferiors into maintaining automatic weaponry and such. I suppose that's the plan.
That doesnt really sound like retreating to ancestral homelands to me.
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I can't believe I'm saying this, but it is lucky for humanity that the Chinese don't care about western morality.
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If the legal and enforcement apparati are all filled with the swaggilicious and biased against the objective hard workers, the crushing goes the other way.
What swaggy beat cop is gonna take orders from some old-ass captain?
If the orders comport with what the beat cop wants to do anyway, it doesn't matter where the orders come from.
Sure it does. Obedience implies submission, which is not swag.
...I'm not sure that most people's thought processes are that formalized or sophisticated.
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I thought we sorted all this out back in the day. We let the Maxim gun do the talking, determined whose culture was best in a fair and objective fashion. Japan copied our notes and everyone else got wrecked.
At no point has anyone challenged our physical mastery of the environment, it's only these niggling mental/psychic attacks that are doing us in. It's unfair in a sense for the Mule to take over the First Foundation, he never contested them strength to strength. Of course, he got his way since mind control overmatches physical power. No argument is more important than success. But it's not that he had some greater organizational skill, some superior knowledge of technology, he had no powerful energy source... He was never operating on the same metrics of strength and success as they were.
Losing to China would be a noble defeat, in the sense that the PLA storming the last redoubts in Washington and London proves that we failed at our own standards of military efficiency and technical sophistication. But getting culture-broken by Katz and her kin is something else entirely. No argument is more important than success, yet some successes are better than others.
But have you considered that the focus on «fairness» is scrub mentality, and ironically at odds with «Win at all costs» value that Katz attributes to Whites? That «we wuz» attitude is deservedly mocked by people with the strongest white identification, too? You cannot rest on your laurels and simply demand admiration, appealing to some objective truth. Will you whip out your Maxim guns again? A word to another descendant of Aaron regarded as a great teacher in the West, the author of one of my favorite poems:
Sure, some successes are more important than others. And the point of winning is to define which is which.
I admitted that winning is the key thing and we are clearly not winning. The kind of 'fairness' I was talking about is lesser to winning.
I was thinking about some kind of right-to-rule mechanism but couldn't quite articulate it. The First Foundation had a better understanding of physics than the fringes who struggled maintaining their atomics, they were better organized than the declining Empire on Trantor. That gave them legitimacy since they were more efficient in using external resources, that's where they got their power from. Because of that strength, they could run society better. They were fairly happy and prosperous, everyone else was declining. The Mule wasn't better at using external resources, he had the power without the legitimacy. If he showed up in Ancient Egypt he could only rule Ancient Egypt, he couldn't improve it significantly. If the Foundation arrived in Ancient Egypt, they could. And the Mule was worsening the Foundation during his brief rule I think, he crushed their creative spirit with his mind control.
That's only a fiction but it captures what I'm trying to say. Winning is the most important thing, but it is not everything. Winning through actual superior strength, through a more advanced understanding of the universe is better than winning because of your wordcel skills and the tolerance of your victims.
Being punctual, precise, professional, rational, hard-working and so on are closer to the universal norms of efficiency. Just because Katz and co pull some mental judo trick that makes good things unfashionable, it does not follow that they're actually worse. There's not some kind of cultural relativism where all values are equal. Some actually do work and others fail. Even if the good values have dysfunctional predators, they're still good and they still work. Maybe all we needed was the ability to ignore all these naysayers and whiners, the ability to say 'compelling argument, now face the wall'. We were 95-99% right, just missing the error-protection code that prevents these cancers emerging.
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I would say the first burden of proof is not on white people why rules that benefit their cultural values benefit everyone, but rather that these cultural values have anything to do with white people at all. Indeed i think that was the initial point of contention with the whole infographic thing. I would argue that hard work, urgency, rational and linear thinking, etc., regardless of how valuable they are, are values shared by people of a huge range of ethnicities/races/cultural backgrounds etc..
Towards the second point i would further say that this is the case largely because these values or whatever we want to call them are in fact better for the cultures that prioritize them. I think the short version of the argument for why this is the case is that history has sort of made this argument for us. Cultures throughout history that have valued these things have fared better, for the most part, than those that did not. Another would be that if you find yourself on an uninhabited island, devoid of any sort of society that may advantage or disadvantage you arbitrarily, it seems obvious that valuing urgency, hard work, and rational and linear thinking would on its own provide a pretty substantial advantage over not valuing those things (or over sassiness or some other example), in the face of predation, starvation, the elements, and all the rest.
There's a totally valid point to be made i think about how what values a culture prioritizes are a subset of the universe of ones that are valuable, and probably that the boundaries of this subset are to a degree a product of "white culture", whatever that actually is, at least the United States. But you can make that argument without denying non-white people any ownership in universally valued and valuable things like hard work or, for christs sake, rational thinking, which the unfortunate infographic failed to do.
Well that's the rub isn't it? The IdPol brain-worm seems to eat a person's ability to cleanly draw that distinction. A common thread that carries through both the woke left and the alt right is this weird prevarication/doublethink surrounding race and culture.
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It is difficult to write a comment here that isn't snark.
It's unsurprising that people in the DEI industry think organizations should prioritize spending time and money their services over all others, and it's equally unsurprising that those same organizations are able to prioritize other things that actually further their own goals. What's more interesting is why companies go for DEI trainings in the first place. They don't mitigate any legal risks AFAIK, and DEI workshops cost a pretty penny. It's also not something that attracts any employees: no one makes a choice to work somewhere because it subjects employees to these sessions. It doesn't even generate good PR for the company.
Is it really just expensive signalling? Or maybe it's a simple solution to managers when they're handed down a vague objective to improve DEI; there's really nothing meaningful to be done, so just write off a portion of your budget to fill in that checkbox with a known cost.
I expect the central answer to your question is limiting liability for management and/or the organization itself, in the context of bad publicity (and they can at least make the argument in harassment/hostile workplace environment suits, even if the workshops have no formal shielding effect). Management can point to the workshops as offsetting institutional responsibility, and throw whatever individual involved under the bus as needed.
Also, this shield against liability can be proactive in cases of blackmail. Jesse Jackson/Rainbow PUSH is a very early example of explicit blackmail, but just keeping an eye on implicit incentives can be good enough. If the activists running the workshops see you as a source of funding, they are less likely to go looking for problems in your backyard. (At least, for the grifters. The true believers might still go after you.)
Sometimes the corporation even goes looking for the activists--Coca-Cola hired the NAACP to denounce regulatory attacks on its product as "racist," for example.
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The whole thing makes me think of the amusing Ryan Long bit on Wokes and Racists agreeing on everything or the still tongue-in-cheek, but more serious Covfefe Anon formulation that The Woke Are More Correct Than The Mainstream. Personally, I don't see any assertions on the original poster that are exactly wrong, although I would object that many of those values are shared across other successful cultural and ethnic groups, not just American whites. My experience with black American culture (although not necessarily individuals) is that yeah, you're going to need to get used to diminished emphasis placed on punctuality, urgency, self-sufficiency, and men supporting the nuclear family. Frankly, I'd say the same about American borderers. The "white culture" being identified in the flyer is more of a Northern thing.
Of course, I can see why people find the whole thing incredibly offense and it certainly looks to me like a weird combination of saying the quiet part out loud and more or less advertising the benefits of white American culture, but I don't really see where it's particularly off base.
Both of those links are the same.
Thanks, fixed.
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