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I think you raise interesting points, and I agree with much of your perception of the "successor ideology" filling a religion-shaped void and your suggested prescription of reining it in under the same mechanisms that our society evolved to deal with plurality of traditional religion, but at the same time I bristle against your offhand conflation of all atheism and secularism with the successor ideology. This strikes me as wrong in both straightforward (I'm an atheist who is not woke) and implicational (there are major secularist countries that have not so far shown a tendency to evolve towards anything obviously shaped like Abrahamic religions at all, such as China, and in much of continental Europe the religion-shaped thing that grew to fill the void absent American influence was environmentalism, not racial wokeness) ways.
Moreover, it resembles another important instance where I've been under the impression that American right-wingers sabotage their persuasiveness by being unable to let go of old grudges, which compels them to argue that the new enemy is actually just a guise over an old ancestral enemy and if you had listened to them back then when they said the enemy must be eradicated then you wouldn't have this problem now - that instance being the insistence of labelling wokism with various versions of "Marxism" or "Leninism". To the yet-unpersuaded reader, that just winds up sounding like a barely-concealed "the actual problem with BLM is that you aren't letting us have child labour uranium mines and totalitarian company towns", and this sounds like "the actual problem with BLM is that you aren't letting us have Jesus Camp where the creepy pastor beats kids with a switch for having impure thoughts".
This is an absolutely bizarre take, given that the actual academic, theoretical basis for the constellation of ideas popularly called wokeness is explicitly Marxist and was conceptualized by self-identified Marxists. These Marxists - who, again, are not subtle or covert about their Marxist analytics framework - then cultivated and recruited a legion of protégés and catspaws to populate a vast network of entities, both public- and private-sector, to institute this ideology on a mechanical policy level.
You can look up the Frankfurt School and its roots in Gramsci, or you can look up Paulo Freire (about whom I have previously spoken in this forum) and his profound and wide-reaching impact on modern “woke” education. You can look up Rudi Dutschke and his advocacy for a decentralized “march through the institutions” which was then implemented throughout North America and later Europe. These things are not difficult to research, and the only way these people’s explicit Marxist convictions and methods are not better-known is that they’re counting on people like you not to put in the effort of trying to learn about it.
It really seems like you don’t want to know about it. You have formed mental associations between anti-Marxism as an ideology on one hand, and your outgroup on the other hands. You’ve pattern-matched “hates Marxism and is vigilant about it” with “mustache-twirling villains and theocrats”, which is precisely what Marxists want you to do. They want you to continue to associate “socialism” with “lovely middle-class Sweden in the 80’s” instead of “Maoist Red Guards” and you seem to be perfectly comfortable with not seeking out the information that would undermine that association.
This is the Moldbug fallacy A descends from B, therefore A is B, you don't like A therefore you must also not like B. Ideas are all interconnected if you applied this principle rigorously you could refute western thought all the way back to aristotle, the trick is picking an arbitrary place to stop.
Wokism does descend from marxism but in a sense it also represents disillusionment with it, with the failure of class consciousness to materialize in the west and with the fall of the URSS simultaneously. Marxism says little about race and gender and is very preoccupied with economic class; wokeism is basically the opposite, to the point where you can make a corporate friendly version of it that disregards class entirely. Marxism is, in principle, materialist, wokeism is not.
Well said. This, above, is how DiAngelo came up with the term “white fragility”. She, being seemingly blind to economic class, could genuinely not understand why American workers would dislike their bosses requiring them to attend meetings where they were psychoanalyzed in front of their coworkers, with the penalty for not submitting themselves to her quackery being running afoul of HR in a country where affordable health insurance in bundled with employment.
Robin DiAngelo didn't come up with anything per se. She just published and popularized a very salient critique against white liberal/progressive/leftist inaction in the face of the enormous gaps between blacks and whites in the US. A critique that had been floating about in academia for a while. (It should come as no surprise that she cites Noel Ignatiev & friends a lot.)
Most people don't understand what the term "white fragility" means and what it's useful for. White Fragility is not just about skin color. It's about your stated beliefs + your skin color. To give an example, if you are unapologetically racist and white you are not fragile. But if you are white and believe yourself not to be racist? Well... Why aren't you helping the blacks more? From that point onward every word that exits your mouth is white fragility in action. Why do you think blacks are poorer? Have worse educational outcomes? Have worse jobs? Everything you say here that isn't explicitly racist is either white fragility or an invitation for DiAngelo to ask you why you aren't doing more to help. And every answer you give to that question that isn't 'Yes Mam' followed by extensive plans for action is white fragility in action.
Robin DiAngelo walks into institutions filled to the brim with white self-described anti-racists and tears them a new one for not actually being anti-racist. And she is right. A person who says they care about racism and all the gaps between blacks and whites but doesn't do anything about it is either a hypocrite or a liar. Why shouldn't a group full of self-described anti-racists be called out on their lack of action? Black people are literally dying whilst you fret over what is for lunch.
Robin DiAngelo isn't breaking any rules here. Why shouldn't people who say they care about matters of race and the oppression be forced into action? Why should the plight of one overprivileged fragile white person who loses their job and healthcare matter more than the plight of millions of black people? Why should their personal worries be allowed to act as a bulwark against real anti-racist action? Why should the free market system that ties jobs with healthcare be used as a rhetorical moral shield for white people when it has been used as a sword against black people for centuries?
Because people aren't being hypocrites for fun; they're being hypocrites because they're forced into it. Attacking hypocrites under these circumstances is just adding more force.
Forced at what stage?
If they are forced into identifying as anti-racist then they are just racist cowards. Why shouldn't we apply more force to racist cowards?
In any case it seems you are valuing the comfort of white inaction above the suffering, oppression and death of black victims.
That's like saying that if you have to be forced to obey the Patriot Act, you're a non-patriotic coward.
The demands that you have to follow in order to be an "anti-racist" and keep your job have little to do with actually being anti-racist.
According to privileged white people who have overseen decades of oppression over blacks. Robin DiAngelo is there to remind you that your white privilege does not hold more value than black suffering just because you are currently benefiting from it.
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