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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45471 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I work at a very left wing college - you get inundated with messages supporting exclusively democratic positions. I agree with some, disagree with others, but overall abhor the general tone from my employer, as anyone should.

I'm wondering what the message will be if AA is overturned. They will need to comment AND change practices, which is very different from low-hanging fruit of virtue signaling (aside - I have to refrain from using the term "low-hanging fruit" at this institution).

I think their justification for race-based admission and discrimination against certain groups will be heavily weighted with critical theory - the "disadvantaging whites & Asians is equitable" approach.

At the end of the day, potential ending of AA opens a huge breach in the DEI. Will they circumvent it? Will there be 'sanctuary colleges' where admissions is allowed to be race-based?

My guess is yes, this will heat the culture war. We will be shown unequal outcome statistics, and hear discussion about the 'racism' of this Supreme Court decision, and resulting 'inequity' that comes from the boost in technical 'equality'. I do not believe I am being uncharitable in this description.

(aside - I have to refrain from using the term "low-hanging fruit" at this institution).

What's wrong with low-hanging fruit? I did a quick google, and found something that seems to indicate some people may associate it with lynching, but I couldn't find anything indicating exactly what the relationship is.

If I tell one student they have stumbled upon "low hanging fruit" when they have a decent response, but I do not say the same to another student, I have created an inequality in speech, a possible microaggression. If they are different races - which race should I be using "picking fruit off tree" metaphors, and which ones would that be offensive towards? I cannot remember where this was presented to me, maybe just a twitter hot take.

This is what microaggressions are purported to be from what I understand. They can be very flexible, which I think we all know..

There's no association. There's the Billie Holliday song "Strange Fruit", which IS about lynching. And of course it contains the word "hanging". But that's all there is. There's a whole lot of woke-forbidden phrases which really have nothing to do with whatever the supposed problem with them, but it doesn't matter because the objection is not really about whatever offense is claimed; it's language policing for its own sake.

Oh, wow. Now that you say that, I realize that the sites I Googled did sort of imply the reason the phrase was problematic was just because it contains the word "hanging". That logic is so stupid that I couldn't put two and two together, couldn't understand how stupid the link actually was. My God.

If we start banning words that in entirely different contexts could have something to do with something that is racist, that's a new level of banning, and I don't even know what would be left that we could say. Slave owners were known to eat food. Therefore we should refrain from mentioning food because we can't imagine what some people might feel upon hearing it mentioned.

Seems likely that if the conservative majority on the Supreme Court survives long enough to decide this case, and if they strike down affirmative action, it will almost certainly be effectively resisted by the universities. As with gun regulation, if SCOTUS leaves even the slightest loophole, they will fit their entire DEI/AA structure into the loophole, and there will have to be another multi-year court battle to decide that. If, miracle of miracles, Chief Justice Roberts actually reiterates his "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." and uses absolute language with no loopholes, the colleges will rig their measures -- drop objective ones, make up new "objective" ones which are skewed to favored minorities, and use subjective ones. And then there will be more multi-year court battles, after which the cycle repeats. As long as they cannot actually be punished for doing this, they will.

I'm not so sure there's no way to enforce - couldn't non-compliance end up in lawsuits? I agree, but there will be SOME ability to prevent it after a decision against AA.

Sure, lawsuits. There's always lawsuits. But if they win the lawsuit they go on as usual, and if they lose the lawsuit they change their language a bit and STILL go on as usual. Until they can actually be forced to stop (e.g. by a court-appointed supervisor over their day-to-day operations) or the persons making the decisions can be personally punished, they can go on spending public (and student, which amounts to the same thing given the college financing situation) money to defend against these lawsuits.

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