This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Think you are forgetting the amount of education of a high school grad even one going to an elite school.
Africans just haven’t figured into the big world events that high school kids don’t know. They’ve had zero influence on major ideologies, political systems, communism versus capitalism etc. The course is either going to be about soul food, Tulsa race riots, and rap music or be a crt/Marxist indoctrination.
The former I think high school kids need training in bigger things or the latter is just woke training.
This is rather silly. History education is not just teaching about the 'objectively' most important things in the world, otherwise British schools wildly under-study Asia and over-study British history, or at any rate certainly pre-Industrial revolution British history. Clearly, race and slavery has been enormously significant in American history, being possibly the biggest running issue in American politics for the first half of the nineteenth century, and certainly for a few decades before the Civil War, and of course being the cause of the Civil War itself.
It's so blindingly obvious you have almost no history education. Yeah, soul food and rap music is the sum total of the impact of race and African-Americans in American history.
Ok so tell me what important things have African Americans done?
Also we are talking high school history not college level. High School still has a need to teach basic things like why Democracy is important and how it developed etc. We aren’t talking about a college elective.
Also it’s not motte appropriate to say someone has no history education. Which isn’t true but you need to flesh out what you mean by that.
Well for starters until the Civil War they formed the basis of one half of the country's economic system, and thereafter were a crucial element in industrialisation. And aside from African-Americans as a group, there are countless individuals who are easily worthy of inclusion in any high school history education.
Well race is one of the most important themes in American history across many centuries; even in high school that seems like a reasonable basis for an elective course; it's not compulsory after all.
So you can’t even name one important thing African Americans did and accused me of not knowing history?
Being a day laborer (farmer/factory worker) is no different than being a cow in the field. We don’t study horses in history class.
Race literally doesn’t matter to me. It’s not an important thing.
The fact that they were regarded as no different than a cow in a field in a nation that claimed to be for liberty is arguably a huge deal that deserves plenty of attention no?
Nobody here is saying it shouldn’t be a part of an American history course. The point is there’s not a lot of world changing achievements coming from African American history.
And the cow in a field reference I would also use to describe Russian serfs or Irish peasants or basically anyone whose existence was much more than subsistence farming. In history you study kings not peasants.
If you get your idea of history from Medieval sagas, perhaps. In history as practiced by actual historians, social organization, mass migrations, cultural and political shifts, adoption of technology, and other such things that necessarily involve large collections of people are fundamental. Even if we know few specific individuals from a social group, it definitely does not mean the group as a whole cannot have played an important role in history. Can you name a single Sumerian scribe? And yet we owe them one of the most important inventions in the history of our species. As the poem goes, kings deliver little if they don't have servants, soldiers, and quite a lot of peasants doing the actual work for them.
By the way, even actual horses are, in fact, extremely important objects of study in history, having played a fundamental role in many important events (cases in point: the Indo-European expansion, the Germanic migrations into Roman Europe, the Medieval agricultural revolution, the Eurasian steppe empires, the European conquest of the Americas).
This attitude is why Henry Ford said "history is bunk". Here is his famous quip in full context, that is usually omitted to show him as brute primitive.
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-resources/popular-topics/henry-ford-quotes
Studying heroic slaughters of kings and nobility and treating 99.9999% people who ever lived as cattle of the field was indeed what history Henry Ford was taught when he was young, and he was right to call it bunk.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link