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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29307 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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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.

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