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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32428 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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It's well established that there has long been a concerted effort by the left to narrow the definition of racism to ONLY apply when the discrimination is done against an oppressed racial minority. Under the revised definition, "anti-white racism" cannot be a thing. Although this redefinition may be fashionable among certain circles, it has never been reflected in anti-discrimination law within the United States. All the relevant civil rights laws I am aware of prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, full stop, without any qualifiers. Yet the "racism = power plus prejudice" crowd appears to be under the mistaken impression that discrimination against white people is legal.

A significant portion of the contemporary DEI training curricula is blatantly anti-white, and I've been curious why there have not been more legal challenges on that front. Part of it, I assume, is that any plaintiff who takes on this role will be subjected to a vicious public campaign of hate, as happened with Abigail Fisher in 2016, derided with nicknames like "Becky with the bad grades" and so on.

We haven't really had a case that dealt with the particular type of DEI training that became prominent after the 2020 summer protests/riots. One lawsuit recently filed in Seattle might be an interesting test case for this. Robby Soave covers this:

According to Diemert, a supervisor berated him for refusing to step down and yield his job to a person of color. He says he was asked, "What could a straight white male possibly offer our department?" And he says he was frequently made to participate in RSJI training, which involved insulting games and activities designed to address his alleged complicity in white supremacy.

[...]

RSJI's explicit mission statement was to inject race-based considerations into government work. One document summarizing the initiative's priorities listed colorblindness, not as a positive thing, but as a hindrance to be overcome. Another described colorblindness as "centering whiteness." Diemert says that his former colleagues took this mission very seriously. In fact, he discovered that one coworker had rejected a qualified white applicant from a public assistance program specifically because of the applicant's race. "I asked her, well, this doesn't make sense to me," he recalled. "Why did you deny this person? And she said, well, because they have white privilege." Diemert says he reported the matter to his supervisor—it was, in his view, obvious racial discrimination—but nothing was done about it.

I don't believe the legal system is a panacea, but it can offer a useful contrast in terms of how arguments that may be popular on Twitter get handled inside a courtroom. A related example that comes to mind was when a leftist activist tried to use a copyright lawsuit as a pretext to punish Sargon of Akkad but instead lost badly and was forced to pay $38k in attorney's fees. So I'm excited to see a real life lawyer try to defend Seattle's anti-white training in court. Should be fun.

A couple years back, several red state legislatures adopted bills designating certain employees (in particular, public university employees) as "mandatory reporters" of sexual discrimination under Title IX. At first it seemed a bit odd because normally boosting the Title IX office isn't a Republican priority, but in thinking about it, it seems that it was likely done at least partially to hang a nice-sounding Sword of Damocles over anyone attempting to run such a curriculum.

I don't know if I can comment on it's success, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it expanded to include racial discrimination in the future. There is also that outstanding SCOTUS case about affirmative action that may substantially shake things up.

Can you provide examples of the legislation you're describing? I've never heard of it before. By making Title IX employees mandatory reporters, was the hope that they'll start focusing on discrimination against men? Why would anyone think this was a viable plan? Just yesterday Stanford University denied a request to open a Title IX investigation into Professor Michele Dauber for bias against males despite fairly blatant evidence.

The example that came to mind was Texas with SB212. I can't immediately find matching legislation or executive policy in other states, but requiring almost all employees be mandatory reporters seems a common-but-not-universal setting. There is even a controversial effort by the federal DOE to make this universal, so perhaps it's not as polarized a notion as I thought.

On the other hand, I don't really have a good explanation why Texas decided to pass SB212, although I suppose it could also be related to the student-athlete scandal at Baylor a few years back.

Texas politics is conservative but doesn’t always fall on clear partisan lines, and attempting to model broadly popular legislation based on the assumption that republicans unilaterally control every step of the process(they don’t) or have a plan to achieve conservative goals with every piece of legislation(also not true) would simply result in confusion.

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