site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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.

11
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

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.

On the sunny first day of seminar, I sat at the end of a pair of picnic tables with nervous, excited 17-year-olds. Twelve high-school students had been chosen by the Telluride Association through a rigorous application process—the acceptance rate is reportedly around 3 percent—to spend six weeks together taking a college-level course, all expenses paid.

These people live in such a bubble even by 'blue tribe' standards. He preaches inclusion yet the program has a a 3% acceptance rate. There is so much material abundance and prosperity that elites have to invent scarcity. Being a professional victim confers more status than inclusive equality and is easier than having to actually accomplish something useful.

He preaches inclusion yet the program has a a 3% acceptance rate.

I don't think that's a bad thing at all. What percent of highschool students do you really think would get a lot of value from a summer sociology seminar series? And larger class sizes make teaching harder to, it's a lot easier to try to bring 3 shy students in a class of 12 out of their shells than 20 shy students in a class of 80.

And it's not like the actual knowledge is particularly restricted. Tons of lectures are available on YouTube. It's just the time of experienced of teachers that's limited, which is still a scarce resource even today.

It's just another form of invented scarcity.

And it's not like the actual knowledge is particularly restricted.

That is the whole point of inventing scarcity. Because knowledge is so abundant that status is one of the few things that resists the trend of commodification seen everywhere else in life, whether it's knowledge or luxury goods.

So do you think the non-profit Telluride Society should just accept every student that applies for a summer class, and end up with class sizes in the hundreds? Or pay for 30x as many teachers to keep class sizes the same?

one possibility could be to make it an online seminar

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.

It is kind of hilarious how badly this statement would come off if you substituted prettymuch any other ethnicity or word for Black.

Really? I'm pretty sure you can do swap in "Jewish" or "Muslim" and the only thing that might be dicey would be "Afrocentric". Possibly true for Latino as well. Definitely acceptable for "Native American" or "First Nations" or "indigenous people". Possibly feasible for various Asian ethnicities.

Come to think of it, I think you'd only get in trouble for saying that you're from a white neighborhood, focus on eliminating anti-white racism, sent your kids to a Eurocentric school, and participate in organizations that further the goals of white Americans.

"Muslim" is a religious group, not an ethnicity. People often use "Jewish" and "Ashkenazi" interchangably, but strictly speaking the former is a religion strongly associated with a collection of distinct ethnic groups (Ashkenazi, Sephardic etc.) rather than an ethnicity in its own right.

What he fails to recognise is that 'Keisha' is a smart cookie who knows how the grift is operated and is grabbing all the attention and importance that she can. She's only a graduate herself, so if she wants to climb the slippery pole of academic promotion, she has to do exactly this kind of thing: shove the old guard out of the way and position herself as the face of anti-Blackness on campus. If it's a choice between our professor and the Keishas, the college administration will side with the Keishas because they can't afford the bad publicity that the Keishas know how to engender, exactly what kind of online mobs to whip up:

A recent graduate of an Ivy League university, mentored by a television-celebrity black intellectual, Keisha introduced herself as a black woman who grew up poor and “housing vulnerable,” whose grandmother’s limbs had been broken by white supremacists, and who had just spent four years of college teaching in prisons and advocating for prison abolition.

She's clearly ambitious, knows how to position herself, is making the right kind of networking connections (the TV celebrity) and our professor here has no clue what is going on.

Keisha's not a smart cookie, at least long term, because she'll get the same treatment only worse and faster. She'll have ten years of running the show, possibly less, and then lose control when she is ousted by a more nominally oppressed group, probably queer black transgenders, or a more radical counter-oppressive group who accept her premise that "the harm is urgent" and "can't be fixed" with civil discussion and so turn towards fedposting IRL.

She sees the grift but ignores the consequences of its iterations: a Cornell Autonomous Zone. And if by some miracle such a zone succeeded in establishing its sovereignty they would be faced with the perennial problems that face all territories of how to a) govern and b) relate to neighbouring territories. Of course there's more than two thousand years of existing scholarship on those matters, and institutions that exist to both study and apply their lessons, but that baby washes in the bathwater of inequity.

Keisha's not a smart cookie, at least long term, because she'll get the same treatment only worse and faster.

Oh I'm sure she knows that, which is why she's putting in the groundwork now to take over running these kind of white liberal guilt workshops, eventually build up enough of a 'name' for herself that she can pivot into the world of TV intellectual (like her mentor in the story, that the professor is hilariously sniffy about), and be gone from academia by the time the leopards come for her face.

Next year it won't be Professor Lloyd invited to host a seminar for Telluride; Keisha has won that round. And why was it important to win? He explains it himself in the piece:

The Telluride Association maintains a low profile, even in higher-education circles, but it has played an important role in shaping the US elite. Its alumni are ideologically diverse: queer theorist Eve Sedgewick and postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak (its first female member), Georgia politician Stacey Abrams and journalist Walter Isaacson, neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Francis Fukuyama (who served on Telluride’s board). Launched by mining entrepreneur L.L. Nunn in 1911, a few years before he founded Deep Springs College, Telluride aims to cultivate democratic communities among high-school and college students. It runs houses near Cornell and the University of Michigan, where students receive scholarships, govern themselves, and incorporate intellectual life and service work into their residential communities. In 1954, Telluride started its high-school summer program.

And the deep pockets are not immune to giving in on the grounds of white liberal guilt:

In the wake of the George Floyd protests, a group of black Telluride alumni pressured the association to examine the racism that, they claimed, was baked into the organizational culture. “We have all experienced anti-blackness within the association and through its programs,” their open letter said. The result was a redesign of the summer seminars: Telluride would now offer only “Critical Black Studies” and “Anti-Oppressive Studies” seminars. The former would “seek to focus more specifically on the needs and interests of black students.”

So now that Keisha has got her foot in the door and claimed her first trophy with Professor Lloyd's head mounted on her wall of anti-black violence, she can settle down to that prime opportunity of networking and getting prestigious names on her CV to build her career in the professional grievance studies grift. Lloyd can write all he likes about his past credits, but Keisha is the new generation elbowing him out of the way.

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.

That just made him a good target for Keisha to displace and take over from him.