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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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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 surprised that the author of this article is surprised, since there's a lot of critical theorist writing that dovetails well with what is happening in these anti-racist workshops.

For context, I've been reading a bunch of critical theorist scholarship recently. While it's been aggravating because much of it has been written in intentionally long-winded and obfuscatory language and almost all of it describes an underlying belief system so inherently objectionable that I'm convinced exposure to it is inevitably going to damage people's sanity, I've found it's been useful in understanding what this particular cohort of ideologues believe. It's become abundantly clear that the beliefs espoused in these workshops don't start and end with some radical, offended grievance-obsessed students, this insanity exists at the very core of Critical Social Justice ideology.

For example, this:

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.

This is an idea that has cropped up multiple times. I'm sure everyone here already knows about the infamous infographic that labels "objective, rational linear thinking" as a quality of "whiteness" and "white culture". This is, however, not new: the seed of this idea can be traced back very far in critical race scholarship. For example, here's an article by John Calmore called "Critical Race Theory, Archie Shepp, and Fire Music: Securing an Authentic Intellectual Life in a Multicultural World", which came out in the early 1990s. It was so influential it got included in a compilation book called "Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement" by critical race theorist par excellence Kimberlé Crenshaw. I first found it cited in this video and initially struggled to find the text online so I could read it, but eventually managed to download the full text from this admittedly seedy-looking file upload site.

In the article, Calmore declares: "As a form of oppositional scholarship, critical race theory challenges the universality of white experience/judgment as the authoritative standard that binds people of color and normatively measures, directs, controls, and regulates the terms of proper thought, expression, presentment, and behavior." So you can see here the expression of the idea that the standards that white people create in their societies are the standards that people of colour are bound to follow, and CRT stands in opposition to this because adapting to these standards supposedly renders people of colour inauthentic. "Hence, a major theme of critical race theory reflects the colored intellectual's persistent battle to avoid being rendered inauthentic by the pressures of adapting to the white world and to take instead an oppositional stance by relying on one's true existential life, which is rooted in a world of color even though not stuck there."

With that covered, Calmore begins attacking the expectation of objectivity and neutrality in scholarship as one of these dictates and pressures that supposedly prevent Black folx and other people of colour from being authentic, and what he instead endorses is an approach characterised by the production of intentionally biased scholarship personal expression: "As a reflection of authenticity, critical race scholarship also rejects the traditional dictates that implore one to write and study as a detached observer whose work is purportedly objective, neutral, and balanced. In the classic sense of “professing,” critical race scholars advocate and defend positions. Fran Olsen points out that traditional scholarship's appearance of balance presupposes a status quo baseline that hinders both understanding and social change. Critical race theory tends, in response, toward very personal expression that allows our experiences and lessons, learned as people of color, to convey the knowledge that we possess in a way that is empowering to us and, it is hoped, ultimately empowering to those on whose behalf we act. Those of us who profess critical race theory are, in simplest terms, trying to be true to ourselves."

And here's the author disparaging neutrality in legal discourse. "When people of color deemphasize an individuality that tries to transcend color—when we attempt, in other words, to express valid generalizations generated out of race consciousness—we challenge the underlying inadequacy of dominant legal discourse, that which Kimberlé Crenshaw has labeled “perspectivelessness.” This position of perspectivelessness holds that legal analysis is possible without taking into account various conflicts of individual values, experiences, and world views. According to Crenshaw, by stripping away the analysis of any particular cultural, political, or class characteristic, this perspectivelessness is presented as the objective, neutral legal discourse, with a corollary of “color blindness,” used to reduce conflict and devalue the relevance of our particular perspectives."

The text then launches into an incessant, repetitive lament about how black intellectuals supposedly often uncritically bend to the pressures of dominant white academia and white culture, and eventually at the end advocates that "As African Americans in dominant white society, we must guard against institutional co-optation that socializes us away from our own identities and value systems."

In other words, the critical theorist view is that these academic and scholarly virtues we're familiar with have no value in and of themselves, they are only considered to have value by white academia (this is also true for other aspects of "dominant white American culture"). Critical race theorists think this is racist, they think that "Black thought" or the deprioritisation of objectivity and other such values in favour of Black experience and Black racial consciousness is equally good (or in fact better), but that it is denigrated and devalued simply because of White society. And when coloured scholars and intellectuals endorse and practice "white virtues", they consider them to be people who have lost their racial identity and who are just inauthentically capitulating to the pressures that White society places on them. So being a person of colour doesn't save you from criticism.

The Telluride professor seems bewildered by Keisha, but really all she was doing in her workshops was teaching them ideological tenets that have long existed in critical race theory. As James Lindsay notes in his criticism of critical theory, objectivity is thought of in critical theorist circles as a "myth that’s used to marginalize other ways of knowing and uphold dominant systems of power." The reason why these students reacted to the citation of incarceration statistics in that way is because they think this is an invocation of (white!) objectivity to silence and devalue Black voices and Black subjective experience, and is thus problematic. It's entirely consistent with the worldview and is a fantastic example of the mind-rot that critical theory cultivates in the minds of its believers.

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