@RandomRanger comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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ymeskhout 1yr ago

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:

I went to a meeting and it was a very frustrating and horrible meeting. And I came home and I sat in front of the computer. And the article literally came through me onto the computer. It was not researched. I didn't sit down and deliberate. It just came through me. And I've never had that experience with my writing, before or since.

So she just pulled this out of thin air, but notice what she considers as validation that she was onto something (emphasis mine):

The tragic relevance of the list was reinforced a few years later when I was co-facilitating a workshop at a national conference of progressive attorneys and law students. We asked participants to work in small groups, looking for ways in which these characteristics show up in their personal and organizational lives. Asked to report, one young student spoke for her group, sharing that the list represents all the characteristics taught by law schools as essential to success in the profession. And that's exactly the point -- our institutions not only value these characteristics, they to some extent require them and constantly reproduce them in order to benefit from them, which is why they are so prevalent in our culture and institutions.

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*:

And when we as facilitators tried to say: Can we take a pause, and just sit down together and figure out what we're going to do in a way that meets this dynamic that we've just been talking about? The answer was: No, we don't have time, we can't possibly do that, we don't have time, no, no, no.

So in the middle of a workshop meant to help and support them to deal with the ways in which their culture was perpetuating racism, they were unable to stop. And that's what I mean by There's just the sense that things are so urgent, we can't possibly pause for anything. So we lose the ability to pause for anything. And people get run over in that situation. And it just keeps things in place.

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.

Context

DaseindustriesLtd late version of a small language model ymeskhout 1yr ago

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

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:

Image: © NMAAHC, All Rights Reserved. Download PDF. Data Source: "Some Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture in the United States", by Judith H. Katz, ©1990. The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

They co-occur in other contexts, like this memo on White Culture on seattle.gov website:

White Culture description comes from many sources, including: Tema Okun-White Supremacy Culture, 2001. Judith Katz –Some Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture in the United States, 1985. Robette Ann Dias - Transforming Institutional Values: Revisited, 2008. Joseph Barndt – Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century Challenge to White America, 2007. p. 234. Barbara Major – Chapter 7 - How does White Privilege Show Up in Foundation and Community Initiatives?, from Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building.

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:

When the participants finally were able to move through the layers of denial, avoidance, shame, and confusion, they began to generate in their groups a fairly consistent listing of dimensions that characterize White Culture in the United States. While it was clearly understood that not all whites believe in the same set of assumptions and values, it was also clear that White Culture forms the underpinnings of what many whites believe is “appropriate” behavior in many organizations. White Culture I the lens through which many white people view, evaluate and judge themselves and others regarding what is “professional” and “normal” behavior in many contexts.

These assumptions, as stated above, get baked into the policies, practices, and norms or our organizations. When that occurs it puts whites at advantage – cultural advantage – and all other groups at a disadvantage. It creates “Affirmative Action for Whites,” i.e., a playing field that is slanted to our advantage.

If our organizations are going to be fair for all so we can leverage the diversity of the workforce, we as whites must expose the positive cultural bias that organizations have for us to the light of day. We must make it visible and acknowledged and known. We must ensure that white cultural aspects are utilized when they are appropriate and add value for the benefit of all. And we also must ensure that they are not utilized when they prevent some groups from making their full added-value contribution.

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.

RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! DaseindustriesLtd 1yr ago

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.

DaseindustriesLtd late version of a small language model RandomRanger 1yr ago

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.

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:

Any system you contrive without us will be brought down

We warned you before

and nothing that you built has stood

Hear it as you lean over your blueprint

Hear it as you roll up your sleeve

Hear it once again

Any system you contrive without us

will be brought down

You have your drugs

You have your guns

You have your Pyramids your Pentagons

With all your grass and bullets

you cannot hunt us any more

All that we disclose of ourselves forever is this warning

Nothing that you built has stood

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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