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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell

Very interesting longform article about how a professor had a summer seminar for high school students taken over by his radical TA, in a course focusing primarily on anti-blackness - this despite Dr. Vincent Lloyd's confused self description:

I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.

What's striking about this is how miserable it seems to have made everyone involved:

Furthermore, in the 2022 community, afternoons and evenings would no longer be spent having fun and doing homework. Two college-age students called “factotums” (led by one I will call “Keisha”) were assigned to create anti-racism workshops to fill the afternoons. There were workshops on white supremacy, on privilege, on African independence movements, on the thought and activism of Angela Davis, and more, all of which followed an initial, day-long workshop on “transformative justice.” Students described the workshops as emotionally draining, forcing the high schoolers to confront tough issues and to be challenged in ways they had never been challenged before.

From the initial “transformative-justice” workshop, students learned to snap their fingers when they agreed with what a classmate was saying. This practice immediately entered the seminar and was weaponized. One student would try out a controversial (or just unusual) view. Silence. Then another student would repeat a piece of anti-racist dogma, and the room would be filled with the click-clack of snapping fingers.

hilariously, two of the asian students ended up being 'expelled' from the program, for reasons that were not shared with the professor.

During our discussion of incarceration, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy. Outside of the seminar, I was told, the black students had to devote a great deal of time to making right the harm that was inflicted on them by hearing prison statistics that were not about blacks. A few days later, the Asian-American student was expelled from the program.

Finally, about halfway through the seminar, the TA led a struggle session where all the students accused the professor of doing a lot of anti black harm to them, and then they all did their own thing without his involvement.

I emailed the students and Keisha with this decision, and with an offer to read and respond to any written work the students produced—and I never heard back. No one sent written work. None indicated a desire to attend a meeting where I would be a “guest speaker.” The students had almost two weeks left. With the seminar canceled, did they go home? Did they tell their parents? Did Keisha lecture to them all day? I don’t know. I had extricated myself from the abusive relationship, but nine students remained captive.

Keisha speaks for me: She says everything I think better than I ever could

This sounds suspiciously like ‘Everything chairman Mao says is true. One of his words will overcome 10,000 of ours.’ And realistically she appears to be brainwashing teenagers(this step is not difficult) into making a power grab for her. It is a notable feature of wokeness that there is functionally no way to push back against this: Keisha might be an observable bad actor, but she is also a well credentialed black woman with appropriate ideological views, and telluride is so open minded it’s brain fell out and got replaced by woke.

That's exactly what is going on: bully and harass the non-black students about their privilege and their guilt for being complicit in systemic racism, where the only way to be spared is to agree with everything Keisha says and to support her no matter what. That way, she'll pick a different victim to bring down (like the two students she got kicked out of the seminar). Terrorise them into fear of saying even a single wrong word so that a slip-up means being hounded as a villain, and they'll soon learn to shut up and not dare say anything but "Keisha is right, what Keisha says goes".

Do you want Voldemorts? Because that’s how you get Voldemorts.

Radicalization is dangerous, and it’s less worrying than it should be because America has little history of radical militias publicly swelling their ranks and taking over areas like Boko Haram or ISIS. There is a chance we’re about to see the collapse of civil peace. If California actually puts reparations in a bill and brings it to a vote, either way things will go badly. If voted down, I predict Beverly Hills will burn.

I doubt it. The 2020 riots happened because of 1) a very prominent set of videos with extremely poor optics relating to a specific issue(police use of force) 2) a large set of relatively violent people with obvious reasons to care about this issue and 3) outside support from organized left wing interests who turned it into a self reinforcing cycle by offering things like looting as a reward for showing up and fighting.

I would not expect that the median member of the underclass(who did the actual rioting) particularly thinks of reparations as a hill to die on, and I wouldn't expect voting down reparations to have the same terrible optics as George Floyd or Jacob Blake. Writers for Vox are not the same thing as violent underclass teens and poor youth don't particularly listen to Vox writers.

I mean, I understand why a certain breed of out of touch leftist thinks of underclass youth as being at the beck and call of antifa, but these people also think that the median accused murderer was peacefully composing slam poetry about the inner power of black women. I don't understand why right wingers seem to think the same thing; the crips and bloods are happy to coordinate with antifa to stage protests that demand changes to police use of force rules, but that doesn't make them reliable allies to lefty direct action. They're not showing up to defend homeless encampments from being cleared out or to protect drag shows from protestors or to protest in favor of abortion, all things that antifa generally favors and regularly protests about.

Your #3 should be #1, and your #1 should be #3, because that is the order in which the causality flows.

It’s not intended to be in any particular order.

If voted down, I predict Beverly Hills will burn.

No, Beverly Hills will be protected. But the little streets will burn, and the ordinary guy - black, white or brown - trying to run a business or work a normal job will be the one to suffer.

Do you want Voldemorts? Because that’s how you get Voldemorts.

Sure, why not? Gives you an enemy to rally against an an excuse to implement even harsher measures.

If California actually puts reparations in a bill and brings it to a vote, either way things will go badly. If voted down, I predict Beverly Hills will burn.

So it burns, and we get a new vote. State capacity today in the First World is far too great for whatever minor civil disturbance comes up to actually change anything; they're basically the equivalent of cattle prods to get the proles to in the correct direction. If the vote goes the other way, either nowhere burns and the white people just suck it up, or they get crushed by the state.