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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29306 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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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:

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.

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.

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.

If it were just called western or American culture it would at least be something people could reason about.

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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