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Religion is a Mental Illness

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Tribeless. Problematic. Triggering. Faith is a cognitive sickness.
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By: Jill Tucker

Published: Feb 3, 2024

A Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is spending $250,000 in federal money for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression and remove those barriers to learning.
The Woke Kindergarten sessions train teachers on concepts and curriculum that’s available to use in classrooms with any of Glassbrook Elementary’s 474 students. The sessions are funded through a federal program meant to help the country’s lowest-performing schools boost student achievement. 
But two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit company, student achievement at Glassbrook has fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well-spent given the needs of the students, who are predominantly low-income. Two-thirds of the students are English learners and more than 80% are Hispanic/Latino. 
English and math scores hit new lows last spring, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and just under 12% at grade level in English — a decline of about 4 percentage points in each category.
Efforts to reach the organization were not successful, with an automated response saying the founder, who also provides the training, was recovering from surgery.
District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, and that the school was no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle that the school was not only still on the list but also had dropped to a lower level.
The decision to bring in Woke Kindergarten, rather than a more traditional literacy or math improvement program, aligns with the belief by some parents and educators that the current education system isn’t working for many disadvantaged children. 
The solution, these advocates say, is for educators to confront legacies of racism and bias in schools, and to talk about historic white supremacy, so that students feel safe and supported. As such anti-racism programs have spread, several more conservative state legislatures have moved to restrict or ban them. 
At the same time, some education experts say struggling schools need research-based literacy and math interventions that ensure all students have the basic skills to succeed. Examples of success include San Francisco’s John Muir Elementary, which has piloted a math intervention program that has led to a more than 50% proficiency rate, up from 15% prior to adopting the coaching and student-led coursework.
Woke Kindergarten, aimed at elementary-age students, is founded on the relatively new concept of abolitionist education, which advocates for abolition, or “a kind of starting over,” said Zeus Leonardo, UC Berkeley education professor. The idea is that certain things can’t be reformed, tweaked or shifted, because they are inherently problematic or oppressive. It’s not about indoctrinating or imposing politics, “but making politics part of the framework of teaching,” Leonardo said. 
But some Glassbrook teachers have questioned the decision to bring in the program, saying Woke Kindergarten is wrongly rooted in progressive politics and activism with anti-police, anti-capitalism and anti-Israel messages mixed in with the goal of making schools safe, joyful and supportive for all children.
This tension is reflective of the nation’s ongoing culture wars, where the right and the left battle to influence what happens in classrooms. 
The Woke Kindergarten curriculum shared with schools includes “wonderings,” which pose questions for students, including, “If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?”
In addition, the “woke word of the day,” including “strike,” “ceasefire” and “protest,” offers students a “language of the resistance … to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.”
Teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley said he supports discussing racism in the classroom, but found the Woke Kindergarten training confusing and rigid. He said he was told a primary objective was to “disrupt whiteness” in the school — and that the sessions were “not a place to express white guilt.” He said he questioned a trainer who used the phrasing “so-called United States,” as well as lessons available on the organization’s web site offering “Lil’ Comrade Convos,” or positing a world without police, money or landlords.
Craven-Neeley, who is white and a self-described “gay moderate,” said he wasn’t trying to be difficult when he asked for clarification about disrupting whiteness. “What does that mean?” he said, adding that such questions got him at least temporarily banned from future training sessions. “I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?”
Another Glassbrook teacher said Woke Kindergarten offered one perspective on issues and that there was no tolerance for questions. “It slowly became very apparent if you were a dissenting voice that it’s not what they wanted to hear,” said the teacher, who requested anonymity for fear of pushback at the school. 
The teacher did not find the training helpful or productive. “Our reading scores are low,” they said. “That could have gotten us a reading interventionist.”
Hayward Superintendent Jason Reimann said the decision to hire Woke Kindergarten, which was approved by the school board, was made by the school community, including parents and teachers, as part of a federal improvement plan to boost student achievement by improving attendance.
The school community, including parents, teachers and staff, identified a provider to help them do that, Reimann said. He noted a subsequent improvement in student attendance, with 44% of students considered chronically absent last year, down from 61% the year prior. A similar improvement  was seen districtwide.
Glassbrook has been on the state’s Comprehensive School Improvement list since 2020, slightly improving in 2022 and then being reassigned to the lowest-performing level this school year.
Reimann said the district didn’t hire Woke Kindergarten for its politics, but rather its work in restorative practices, helping eliminate suspensions and removals from classrooms while luring more students back into seats.
“We are in favor 100% of abolishing systems of oppression where they hold our students back,” he said. “What I do believe is we should pick providers based on their work and how effective they are.”
The superintendent said Woke Kindergarten wasn’t hired to improve literacy and math scores, but that “helping students feel safe and whole is part and parcel of academic achievement.” He added, “I get that it’s more money than we would have liked to have spent.”
Woke Kindergarten was founded by former teacher Akiea “Ki” Gross, who identifies as they/them and describes themselves as “an abolitionist early educator, cultural organizer and creator currently innovating ways to resist, heal, liberate and create with their pedagogy, Woke Kindergarten.”
They established the for-profit company in 2020 in Maryland, although the Woke Kindergarten website says it is “primarily community sustained” and relies “primarily on donations.”
Education policy experts said that while the name of Gross’ organization and the words “abolitionist education” were provocative, many parents, teachers and others are feeling politically empowered after pandemic battles over masking and when to reopen schools.
“It doesn’t feel necessarily new, but more common right now is that some schools and some leaders are being intentionally provocative,” said Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institute, a nonpartisan policy think tank. It feels, he said, like people are “leaning into these culture battles in schools,” whether on the left or right, although he said he couldn’t speak specifically about Woke Kindergarten.
And to a degree, these battles — whether over book bans, LGBTQ issues or the war in Gaza — are expected given schools are largely under local control, meaning they reflect their communities, said Joseph Kahne, professor of education policy at UC Riverside.
“How loud particular groups have become on the left and right and how organized and commercialized these agendas have become, that seems new,” said Bruce Fuller, a UC Berkeley education professor. 
Julie Marsh, a professor of education policy at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, cautioned that it can be “problematic when teaching strays too far into the political ideology realm. It’s just a big distraction from some of the bigger purposes of education and what we should be focusing on.”
Craven-Neeley, the Glassbrook teacher, said he had experienced the pull of the nation’s culture wars from both sides of the political spectrum. As a veteran teacher in Modesto, he sued the school district after it prevented him from talking about his husband, or talking about LGBTQ history, including gay rights icon Harvey Milk. He said he settled out of court.
Woke Kindergarten “had a lot of good things. I think race should be addressed. Children should be aware if they are being discriminated against,” he said. “But as a teacher of Hayward Unified, I shouldn’t have to get on the bandwagon of defunding police or insulting our country.”

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"Woke Kindergarten"'s website is clear up front: their primary goal is to conduct a revolution. And well educated, well read, language and math-literate students are antithetical to an uprising. What revolutions want and seek is people who are illiterate, uneducated, scared and angry.

The mistake is thinking the decline in scores was a bug or accident. It's not. It's a feature.

Source: twitter.com
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Note: Eli Steele is the son of Shelby Steele.

How dare people notice that Claudine Gay's academic career is based on years of blatant fraud? And that she oversaw the active suppression of disfavored views in the name of DEI, then turned around and cried "free speech" to defend the antisemitism on campus? They must be racists!

Source: twitter.com
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"Research."

Source: trust me bro.

Danish people having literature and culture is racism, apparently.

Considering Robin DiAngelo is the woman who declared that "the question is not 'did racism take place?' but rather 'how did racism manifest in that situation?'" and "no one is ever done," perhaps it's more racial OCD. Or, why not both? Either way, she's clearly unwell.

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Kendi is not the first. He won't be the last.

... as we know from the war on drugs and the war on terror, for those in the business of providing protection, high threat levels are bread and butter. Likewise, for those in the business of healing race relations, racial division is your sworn enemy but your secret friend—so much so that wounding and healing become part of the same operation. -- Dr. Lyell Asher, "Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults"

Learn to spot them.

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By: Adam B. Coleman

Published: Sep 18, 2023

The real measure of an individual’s character isn’t what he portrays to the public but how he treats people in private.
Truly righteous people treat others with respect and dignity when there is no one else around and no social credit to be earned for doing the right thing.
This distinction matters — especially for people who’ve made a career lecturing others on the appropriate way to treat people, especially those perceived as having less power in society.
But when no one was looking and nothing was to be gained, it seems Ibram X. Kendi used his power and privilege as the director of a think tank to exploit and mistreat the people who worked under him as if they were people who are beneath him.
Amid confirmation of layoffs being made at Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, former and current faculty have spoken out about Kendi’s mismanagement, “exploitation” and enrichment.
“There are a number of ways it got to this point, it started very early on when the university decided to create a center that rested in the hands of one human being, an individual given millions of dollars and so much authority,” stated Spencer Piston, a BU political science professor. 
A Former assistant director of narrative at the center and a BU associate professor of sociology and African American and black diaspora studies, Saida Grundy, also described a lack of structure, leading to her working additional hours that were unreasonable, especially for the pay she was receiving.
“It became very clear after I started that this was exploitative and other faculty experienced the same and worse,” Grundy lamented.
With tens of millions of dollars flowing in from major donors shortly after the center’s founding in 2020 from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, the Rockefeller Foundation and biotech company Vertex, Grundy also saw the missed opportunity to directly help black students at Boston University. 
“Those donations could have been going to benefit black students.”
Grundy is correct that much of the donation money could have been utilized in objectively more helpful ways to serve the people Kendi claimed to be advocating for. But the line between rhetoric and action was a line that Kendi never had any intentions of crossing.
Kendi used the dogma of antiracism to project a new moral standard at a time when many Americans momentarily questioned their behavior and culpability.
As he demanded that everyone should check their privilege and feel socially accountable for the exploitation of people, he was simultaneously exploiting the emotions of a nation to solidify his nobility status among the upper class in academia.
Kendi’s boutique moral philosophy on historical events and human interaction has only made him notable among the upper class.
Those elites declare racial enlightenment over the naïve majority who prefer to treat people like they’d want to be treated.
The antiracism think tank operated more like an antiracism piggybank with only one man listed as its financial beneficiary.
Kendi’s interests have become clearer as time has gone on: His “research center” was for the benefit of one black person, not black people.
Remember the $90 million windfall Patrisse Cullors and the Black Lives Matter organization scored and their frivolous spending habits with donation money, buying mansions and funneling cash to board and family members?
Activist Shaun King has also repeatedly been accused of raising money for recipients and causes that never saw it.
This is a similarly disappointing realization after tens of millions of dollars have been placed in the hands of an advocate who has shown little regard to produce a return for his bold aspirations.
Kendi had systemic control over his own research center yet used his position to take advantage of the people whom he was leading and continued to reap the academic clout that legitimizes his profiting in over $32,000 a speech.
Kendi suggests that people should become more race-conscious to be better anti-racists, but I believe it’s more important to be elitist-conscious.
We need to be aware of the behavioral patterns and condescending rhetoric of the people who think they know better than us about everything.
If we were all good anti-elitists, we’d ignore the utopian rhetoric of social progressives and anti-racists and focus on their behavior.
This readjustment would help us quickly realize that race is a tool to distract us from noticing they are getting rich from dividing us into categories of human characteristics.
The only remedy to moral elitism is moral anti-elitism: This is how we have an anti-elitist society.
Adam B. Coleman is the author of “Black Victim to Black Victor” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. Follow him on Substack: adambcoleman.substack.com.

==

It was never about doing anything useful. It was always akin to buying indulgences from the Catholic Church.

Source: twitter.com
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By: Erec Smith

Published: Jun 17, 2023

The apparent goal of contemporary anti-racism activism — which is not the activism of the civil-rights era — is not to end racism but to perpetuate it.

At a former university where I taught and served as a diversity officer (yes, that happened), I had a meeting with the school’s black-student union. Toward the end of the meeting, I asked something to the effect of “Is your goal to be obsolete in the near future?”

Most of the students insisted that they didn’t understand the question. One student, who seemed to be the de facto leader of the group, expressed that he did understand and answered that the group would live on even if, ideally, racism went away. I didn’t have time for a good follow-up question, such as “Would your mission change and how?” But I did wonder.

Today, this question occupies my mind even more. Seemingly permanent organizations and protocols are being created that strongly suggest racism is here to stay. This seems inconsistent with the traditional discourse about civil rights, which has focused on ending racial discrimination once and for all. The apparent telos (or ultimate goal) of contemporary anti-racism activism — which is not the activism of the civil-rights era — is not to end racism, but to perpetuate it.

Why would I say this? If an activist group has no intention of ever being obsolete — i.e., if it doesn’t have a sacrificial telos according to which it conceives of its own end — it is not an activist group. It is, at best, a special-interest group, and a dishonest one at that.

I think it is only fair that I use my own endeavors as an example. As a member of Free Black Thought, an organization that celebrates viewpoint diversity within the black collective, I believe that race essentialism — the tendency from within and without a particular group to think each member experiences and interprets the world in identical ways — is a problem I’d like to see solved.

Currently, mass media present and represent viewpoints from black people, but only those who fit the popular narrative imperative to the politics of pity. Free Black Thought is here to showcase the fact that groups are made of individuals with separate goals, pursuits, interests, values, etc.

However, if we ever succeed in bringing about a world where people are judged individually and not by their membership in a particular racial group, our mission would be outdated. If race essentialism, or the very concept of race, period, were overcome, Free Black Thought would no longer be needed. Free Black Thought wouldn’t fold, necessarily; but our mission would have to change. Because our original mission would have been fulfilled, staying with it would be performative and dishonest. If race essentialism were overcome, we would not be needed. We would either fold or adopt a new mission.

Clearly, other organizations dealing with race relations do not understand their missions similarly. Ibram X. Kendi provides two examples.

First, he is the director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, which states that its mission is “to convene researchers and practitioners from various disciplines to figure out novel and practical ways to understand, explain, and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice.” He adds, “We are working toward building an antiracist society that ensures equity and justice for all.”

This is a noble endeavor, but what would happen if inequality and injustice were eradicated? There is a fine line between “intractable” and “immutable.” The website says the center is still developing, but part of that development is an affiliates program connecting faculty and students into a network that may be difficult to undo.

It may be hasty to assume that ending institutional racism is not the true goal of the Center for Antiracist Research. But another brainchild of Kendi’s lends weight to the notion that perpetual racism serves the interests of Kendi and other DEI professionals. Kendi has written that he wants the United States government to pass a constitutional amendment to “establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees.” He elaborates:

The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

If you look carefully enough, you may see that the statement’s precarious nature could easily have the department functioning in perpetuity. A governmental department created as a result of a new constitutional amendment is not something anyone would plan to dismantle in the near future. In order to justify the perpetuation of such an entity, one would need to perpetuate racism.

A nongovernment organization like the Center for Antiracist Research is one thing; an addition to the current federal system is something else entirely.

Of course, Kendi is not the only culprit; other phenomena point to the false telos of racial harmony. Many major universities have created graduate programs in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). That is, advanced if not terminal degrees are being given to people who plan to make a career out of DEI initiatives. The University of Maryland-Baltimore, the University of Pennsylvania, and Tufts University are just a few. But if one’s livelihood consists of fighting racism, wouldn’t the end of racism spell trouble? Wouldn’t the perpetuation of racism be the very thing putting food on the table? This also goes for the explosion of administrative positions in DEI in colleges, corporations, and other institutions.

Jane Kellogg Murray of Indeed.com — a job site that assists people in finding employment — writes about the rise of DEI (She calls it DI&B: diversity, inclusion, and belonging) in the American job force:

Between September 2019 and September 2020, Indeed job postings in diversity, inclusion and belonging have risen 56.3% — from 140 jobs per million to 219. More significantly, after the U.S. economy declined in Spring 2020, the DI&B industry recovered quickly, with job postings rising by an astonishing 123% between May and September.

That sounds like a large number of people with jobs that literally depend on racism, the very thing the jobs are meant to eliminate. So a dip in racism could have a correlation with a rise in unemployment.

Of course, missions can change. Perhaps at racism’s end, these positions would be transformed into something more relevant, or the people occupying those jobs would move into other fields of employment. We cannot know for sure. However, the fact that these employees have skills directly connected to ending a particular thing like racism suggests that fighting racism is their area of expertise. What happens to diversity, equity, and inclusion officers when society actually becomes diverse, equitable, and inclusive?

Maintaining vigilance could be a new mission. That is, when racism is finally defeated, DEI officers can work to make sure it never comes back. However, this is also problematic. Maintaining an anti-racist society would get pretty boring without racism. Might such a mission make frequent use of the concept of microaggressions or the idea that, when it comes to racism, impact always outweighs intention? If bias is considered implicit, then a fine line separates DEI officers from “thought police.” To show they are not expendable, it is in their best interest to “find” racism, but what happens when there is no racism to be found?

I stopped wanting to be a diversity officer when I realized how ineffective it was — I came to this insight before contemporary “wokeness” took hold. But DEI work was a secondary job for me; I still intended to remain a professor and scholar of rhetoric. What would have happened to me if DEI were my full-time job? Would I go the way of Kendi, or would my fate be more like that of Tabia Lee, who was fired for not abiding by the current narrative that deems racism a permanent problem?

I don’t know, but I do know that all people in such positions should aim toward a sacrificial telos, which would eventually deem those positions unnecessary. If you are a DEI officer and your main goal is not to render your job obsolete as soon as possible, you are enacting the very definition of a grift.

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When the demand exceeds the supply. The fact that an entire industry of DEI bureaucracies (complete with bogus credentials) have, and still are, being built up as racism itself has never been lower - and yes, even in the current hypersensitive era we occupy - gives the game away.

[As] we know from the war on drugs and the war on terror, for those in the business of providing protection, high threat levels are bread and butter. Likewise, for those in the business of healing race relations, racial division is your sworn enemy but your secret friend—so much so that wounding and healing become part of the same operation.

Now you know why "microaggressions" were invented: because the industry had grown too big for the remaining problem, but there's money to be made if only the right product could be marketed.

It's the same thing as the church. Being "right with Jesus" is a subscription plan. You can't just perform the soul-cleaning ritual and you're done. If that was the case, they'd do themselves out of a job and out of power. So instead, you have to come back next week and tithe again.

Same thing again with organizations like Stonewall, HRC and GLAAD. After the last big battle of marriage equality had been won, they didn't know what to do with the large organizations they'd built up. It was either scale down, or pivot to a new mission. Which is when they took on the anti-gay mission.

Source: archive.is
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By: Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder

Published: Aug 5, 2020

U.S. colleges and universities will be embracing diversity training with renewed vigor this fall.
In response to the killing of George Floyd, the massive Black Lives Matter protests and pressure from students, dozens of colleges and universities have made public commitments to new anti-racism initiatives.
The University of Florida will require all students, faculty and staff to undergo training on “racism, inclusion and bias.” Northeastern University will institute “cultural competency” and “anti-racism training” for every member of the campus community. And Ohio Wesleyan University will mandate “universal diversity, equity, and inclusion training.”
Given the vital importance of confronting past and present racism, we believe it is imperative that colleges and universities address racial disparities and discrimination in higher education head-on. However, as scholars who study race and social inequality, we know that diversity training suffers from “chronically disappointing results.” Recent research in psychology even suggests that diversity training may cause more problems than it solves.
What diversity training looks like
Called into a typical diversity training session, you may be told to complete a “privilege walk”: step forward if “you are a white male,” backward if your “ancestors were forced to come to the United States,” forward if “either of your parents graduated from college,” backward if you “grew up in an urban setting,” and so on.
You could be instructed to play “culture bingo.” In this game, you would earn points for knowing “what melanin is,” the “influence Zoot suits had on Chicano history” or your “Chinese birth sign.”
You might be informed that white folks use “white talk,” which is “task-oriented” and “intellectual,” while people of color use “color commentary,” which is “process-oriented” and “emotional.”
You will most definitely be encouraged to internalize an ever-expanding diversity lexicon. This vocabulary includes terms such as Latinxmicroaggressions and white privilege.
It also features terms that are more obscure, like “adultism,” which is defined as “prejudiced thoughts and discriminatory actions against young people, in favor of the older.”
Disappointing results and unintended consequences
In terms of reducing bias and promoting equal opportunity, diversity training has “failed spectacularly,” according to the expert assessment of sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev. When Dobbin and Kalev evaluated the impact of diversity training at more than 800 companies over three decades, they found that the positive effects are short-lived and that compulsory training generates resistance and resentment.
“A company is better off doing nothing than mandatory diversity training,” Kalev concluded.
Some of the most popular training approaches are of dubious value. There is evidence, for example, that introducing people to the most commonly used readings about white privilege can reduce sympathy for poor whites, especially among social liberals.
There is also evidence that emphasizing cultural differences across racial groups can lead to an increased belief in fundamental biological differences among races. This means that well-intentioned efforts to celebrate diversity may in fact reinforce racial stereotyping.
With its emphasis on do’s and don’t’s, diversity training tends to be little more than a form of etiquette. It spells out rules that are just as rigid as those that govern the placement of salad forks and soup spoons. The fear of saying “the wrong thing” often leads to unproductive, highly scripted conversations.
This is the exact opposite of the kinds of debates and discussions that you would hope to find on a college campus.
The main beneficiaries of the forthcoming explosion in diversity programming will be the swelling ranks of “diversity and inclusion” consultants who stand to make a pretty penny. A one-day training session for around 50 people costs anywhere between US$2,000 and $6,000. Robin DiAngelo, the best-selling author of “White Fragility,” charges up to $15,000 per event.
In this belt-tightening era of COVID-19, should colleges and universities really be spending precious dollars on measures that have been “proven to fail”?

[ Continued... ]

==

Con artists always find a vulnerability.

Source: twitter.com
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[ Source. ]

"Racism is not dead, but it is on life support - kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as "racist."
-- Thomas Sowell

Racism has been on the decline in the west, including the US, for decades. No, it hasn’t gone away, and probably never will, but few black Americans regard it as one of their top issues.

Just as the Church invented “sin” and made it inescapable to foster constant guilt, even when you’re not even doing anything wrong and even as societies become more peaceful and less crime-riddled, rather than actually cure you of this undetectable illness, sell you on your need of the Church’s ongoing tithing-priced aura soul-cleansing and tune-up services...

... so too have race grifters like DiAngelo seen the demand for racism outstrip the supply and declared it, like sin, to be ever-present and inescapable. Her special formulation doesn’t even require the black person to have even been offended, nor the white person to have actually done anything wrong; it operates completely independent of people, and yet contradictorily, requires subjecting people to her preachments. So that she can sell you a training course or a book, not to actually resolve it, but so you can undertake “a lifelong commitment to an ongoing process of self-reflection, self-critique, and social activism.” “No one is ever done.”

Third-wave “antiracism,” like “salvation,” is a premium subscription service.

And there are few people less qualified to lecture others about racism than DiAngelo.

Source: twitter.com
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By: Jesse Singal

Published: Dec 5, 2017

At the moment, you may have heard, the field of psychology is grappling with a so-called “replication crisis.” That is, certain findings that everyone had assumed to be true can’t be replicated in follow-up experiments, suggesting the original findings were the result not of actual psychological phenomena, but of various flawed methodologies and biases that have crept into the scientific process.

One of the major contributing factors to the replication crisis, which is centered mostly on social psychology, is human nature. Humans, being humans, do not like hearing that ideas they’ve worked on for a long time might have to get tossed in the bin, or at the very least revised significantly. That’s why some researchers — though by no means all of them — have responded to good-faith critiques of their work by attempting to derail the conversation, calling their critics crazy or mean or attributing to them dark ulterior motives. The researchers who attempt such derailings tend to be established, well-respected ones who have benefited from the old regime — the regime that led the field into its current, precarious situation, and which is now threatened by a growing reform movement.

The implicit association test, co-created by Harvard University psychology chair Mahzarin Banaji and University of Washington researcher Anthony Greenwald, is an excellent example. Banaji and Greenwald claim that the IAT, a brief exercise in which one sits down at a computer and responds to various stimuli, measures unconscious bias and therefore real-world behavior. If you score highly on a so-called black-white IAT, for example, that suggests you will act in a more biased manner toward a black person than a white person. Many social psychologists view the IAT, which you can take on Harvard University’s website, as a revolutionary achievement, and in the 20 years since its introduction it has become both the focal point of an entire subfield of research and a mainstay of diversity trainings all over the country. That’s partly because Banaji, Greenwald, and the test’s other proponents have made a series of outsize claims about its importance for fighting racism and inequality.

The problem, as I showed in a lengthy rundown of the many, many problems with the test published this past January, is that there’s very little evidence to support that claim that the IAT meaningfully predicts anything. In fact, the test is riddled with statistical problems — problems severe enough that it’s fair to ask whether it is effectively “misdiagnosing” the millions of people who have taken it, the vast majority of whom are likely unaware of its very serious shortcomings. There’s now solid research published in a top journal strongly suggesting the test cannot even meaningfully predict individual behavior. And if the test can’t predict individual behavior, it’s unclear exactly what it does do or why it should be the center of so many conversations and programs geared at fighting racism.

One striking thing about the process of reporting that article was the extent to which Banaji tried to smear her critics, suggesting to me in an email she believed that critiques of the test could be explained by the fact that the IAT “scares people who say things like ‘Look, the water fountains are desegregated, what’s your problem.’” She also accused the test’s critics of having a “pathological focus” on black-white race relations and the black-white IAT for reasons that “will need to be dealt with by them in the presence of their psychotherapists or church leaders.”

This is the definition of a derailing tactic — shift the focus from critiques of the IAT itself, some of which in this case appeared in a flagship social-psych journal, to the ostensible moral and psychological failings of the critiquers.

A couple days ago, Quartz published its own article on the IAT, by Olivia Goldhill. The article covers similar ground and comes to similar conclusions as mine, and adds some new insights and analysis: The headline, “The world is relying on a flawed psychological test to fight racism,” captures things pithily. Goldhill’s piece clearly shows that Banaji and Greenwald are still trying to deflect and derail rather than fully engage with the process of evaluating their test:

It’s highly plausible that the scientists who created the IAT, and now ardently defend it, believe their work will change the world for the better. Banaji sent me an email from a former student that compared her to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bryan Stevenson, and Michelle Alexander “in elucidating the corrosive and terrifying vestiges of white supremacy in America.” || Greenwald explicitly discouraged me from writing this article. “Debates about scientific interpretation belong in scientific journals, not popular press,” he wrote. Banaji, Greenwald, and Nosek all declined to talk on the phone about their work, but answered most of my questions by email.

The idea that journalists shouldn’t write about scientific controversies would have been highly questionable even before the replication crisis exploded onto the scene, but it’s hard to fathom why anyone would take this argument seriously in 2017. After all, the replication crisis was spurred in part by opaque research and peer-review processes, by people not sharing data, by social and professional structures that sometimes had the effect of short-circuiting real debate about the merits of ideas — particularly popular ones of the sort that often get glowing write-ups in, well, the “popular press” (Greenwald, of course, doesn’t appear to have any problems with positive coverage of the IAT). Journalism, when it’s done well, can serve as a useful check on all these tendencies. To be fair, Greenwald isn’t the only one who thinks that science should only be critiqued by those very close to a given controversy — this is an idea that seems to sometimes pop up among defenders of the old, deeply flawed social-psychological ways — but that isn’t how things should work.

Even more surprising, though, is an email Greenwald wrote to Goldhill which read, “The IAT can be used to select people who would be less likely than others to engage in discriminatory behavior.” This might come across as a fairly banal defense of his research project, but it isn’t: It’s the continuation of a very slippery pattern I identified in my article.

As I noted, in their 2013 best seller Blindspot, which helped the IAT carve out an even bigger place in the public imagination than it had already achieved, Banaji and Greenwald wrote that the test “predicts discriminatory behavior even among research participants who earnestly (and, we believe, honestly) espouse egalitarian beliefs,” and “has been shown, reliably and repeatedly” to do so. In fact, this is a “clearly … established” “empirical truth.” But then, just two years later, they argued in an academic paper unlikely to be read by the general public that due to the test’s methodological weaknesses, it is “problematic to use [it] to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination,” and “attempts to diagnostically use such measures for individuals risk undesirably high rates of erroneous classifications.”

I referred to this as a “Schrödinger’s test” situation in which the test both does and doesn’t predict behavior at the same time. When the test’s creators are addressing lay audiences unfamiliar with its problems, it does predict behavior; when they’re addressing academic audiences familiar with what is now a years-long controversy, they acknowledge that it doesn’t. Greenwald’s quote to Goldhill just marks the latest example.

In other words:

Banaji and Greenwald in 2013, to the public: Our test has been shown, reliably and repeatedly, to predict behavior.

Banaji and Greenwald in 2015, to academics: Our test doesn’t predict behavior.

Greenwald in 2017, to the public: Our test predicts behavior.

So, once more: I disagree with Greenwald. Society desperately needs more open scrutiny of scientific claims, not less, whether in scientific journals, the media, or anywhere else. Especially when it comes to claims that seem to change every two years.

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“tHe IaT iS bAsEd On ScIeNcE!!1!”

No, it’s based on ideology, and perpetuated by a multi-billion dollar church of DEI through faith by priests whose careers don’t exist without it.

The IAT is measuring your thetans, reading your aura, or determining your criminality by feeling the bumps on your head.

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By: Matt Johnson

Published: Sep 27, 2022

Identity politics has long been a contested concept. Some people survey the history of campaigns for civil rights, feminism, gay marriage, etc. and ask how the subject could even be up for debate. They’d say that Americans from marginalized groups have always needed to unite around their identities in order to push for social change. In his 2020 book Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein argues that “the term ‘identity politics’ has been weaponized” to discredit the political movements of historically marginalized groups. More than that, Klein says these groups face a conspicuous double-standard:

“If you’re black and you’re worried about police brutality, that’s identity politics. If you’re a woman and you’re worried about the male-female pay gap, that’s identity politics. But if you’re a rural gun owner decrying universal background checks as tyranny, or a billionaire CEO complaining that high tax rates demonize success, or a Christian insisting on Nativity scenes in public squares—well, that’s just good, old-fashioned politics.”

While it’s true that many of the people most incensed about identity politics have their own identitarian attachments, Klein’s argument that “everyone engaged in American politics is engaged in identity politics” is evasive. He’s ignoring the deep divisions over the political salience of identity—divisions that have become increasingly apparent in recent years. Meanwhile, the innocuous definition of identity politics as any form of political mobilization which focuses on marginalization and inequality (such as the Civil Rights Movement) fails to address the radically divergent political strategies deployed by members of those movements. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael both fought for civil rights, but the latter did so with explicit appeals to racial sectarianism while the former did so by appealing to Americans’ sense of common humanity and citizenship.

One of the most prominent anti-identitarian writers in recent years was the Anglo-American polemicist and journalist Christopher Hitchens. “Beware of identity politics,” Hitchens wrote in his 2001 book Letters to a Young Contrarian. “I’ll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics.” Klein may be right that the term “identity politics” has been weaponized to dismiss the concerns of historically marginalized groups, but that’s not how Hitchens used it. For him, identity politics was a hindrance, not an asset, to the cause of real social justice. Consider this argument from his opening statement during a November 2001 debate on whether reparations should be paid to the descendants of slaves:

“In my hometown of Washington, D.C., there’s hardly one official brick piled on another that wasn’t piled there by unpaid labor under the whip. And that dead labor becomes dead capital and dead souls—dead money. And it’s piled, actually, in the Treasury Department and the federal financial system, who took that free labor, those dead souls, and turned it into capital. And it’s back pay, and it’s owed, and it’s overdue.”

Just a month before that debate took place, Letters to a Young Contrarian was published. In it, you’ll find this passage:

“We still inhabit the prehistory of our race, and have not caught up with the immense discoveries about our own nature and about the nature of the universe. The unspooling of the skein of the genome has effectively abolished racism and creationism, and the amazing findings of Hubble and Hawking have allowed us to guess at the origins of the cosmos. But how much more addictive is the familiar old garbage about tribe and nation and faith.”

Hitchens went beyond incredulity at the persistence of racial tribalism in the twenty-first century—he even argued that the idea of race itself should be discarded: “To be opposed to racism in the postgenome universe is to be opposed to the concept.” In God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, he says the concept of race should be thrown “into the ashcan” along with creationism. “People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with,” he argued in a 2008 essay. “One does not banish this specter by invoking it.” There are many today who would view Hitchens’s position on identity politics as perfectly contradictory—any talk about transcending race must contend with the fact that there are still vast racial disparities in socioeconomic status, healthcare, incarceration rates, and so on. These critics might observe that an argument in favor of reparations is an admission that racism hasn’t, in fact, been “abolished.” Meanwhile, if we’re serious about addressing the consequences of racism, they might ask, don’t we have to start by acknowledging the reality of race?

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning essay for the New York Times 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones argues that the debt America owes its black citizens can never be repaid. She observes that “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country”—a country which “some might argue…was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.” This theme of permanent, inescapable racial animosity and division is pervasive among many commentators on racism today. In White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, for instance, Robin DiAngelo argues that the “forces conditioning us into racist frameworks are always at play,” which means “our learning will never be finished.” In other words, DiAngelo believes that resisting the concept of race amounts to a refusal to resist racism.

When Hitchens observed that scientific progress had “abolished” racism, he didn’t mean racism ceased to exist—he meant the pseudo-scientific justifications for it have now been discredited. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the argument that individualism (which DiAngelo strangely and insultingly describes as a “Western ideology”) and universal solidarity should steadily displace racial tribalism. The point isn’t that race doesn’t matter; it’s that our goal should be to strive for a society in which it no longer matters. But Hannah-Jones, DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi (author of the bestseller How to Be an Antiracist), and many other commentators on race and racism today regard this ambition as ignorant and quixotic—even duplicitous and bigoted. Hitchens demonstrates that this isn’t true—it’s possible to confront racial bigotry, the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and other forms of racial injustice without insisting that skin color will remain an indissoluble component of our social and political lives until the end of time.

In the final two decades of Hitchens’s life, he became increasingly averse to ideological labels. “I don’t have any allegiances,” he said in a November 2001 interview. “I don’t ask what people’s politics are. I ask what their principles are.” One of Hitchens’s core principles—which remained consistent throughout his life—was his commitment to universalism. For example, in a 1986 debate about the merits of socialism versus capitalism, here’s how Hitchens began his definition of the former: “It is necessary to hold, firstly, that all divisions of class, nation, race, and sex are, in the last resort, manmade—and can be man-unmade—are in no sense part of a divine or natural ordinance, and that we are members, like it or no, of one race, the human race.” Almost a quarter of a century later (when he was no longer a socialist), he made a similar point in an article for Slate:

“One of the great advantages possessed by Homo sapiens is the amazing lack of variation between its different ‘branches.’ Since we left Africa, we have diverged as a species hardly at all. If we were dogs, we would all be the same breed. We do not suffer from the enormous differences that separate other primates, let alone other mammals. As if to spite this huge natural gift, and to disfigure what could be our overwhelming solidarity, we manage to find excuses for chauvinism and racism on the most minor of occasions and then to make the most of them.”

Human beings aren’t just adept at finding excuses for chauvinism and racism—we also have a talent for constructing tribal identities around just about any characteristic. In Letters to a Young Contrarian, Hitchens cited Sigmund Freud’s expression the “narcissism of the small difference” to describe the instinct of defining ourselves in terms of narrower and narrower identity groups: “This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough.”

Hitchens was consistently critical of identitarianism of all stripes. He had a keen understanding of the ways in which right-wing demagogues could appeal to white Americans’ anxieties and prejudices—insisting that Barack Obama produce a birth certificate, for instance (one of Donald Trump’s political preoccupations at the time). As Hitchens put it, these demagogues “need and want to sublimate the anxiety into hysteria and paranoia. The president is a Kenyan. The president is a secret Muslim.” This was identity politics, too—a particularly noxious version of it. And nobody could accuse Hitchens of ignoring the ways that some segments of Christian America inflict their identitarian demands on the rest of the country.

Many of the loudest anti-woke crusaders today direct their condemnation of identity politics exclusively at left-wing movements like Black Lives Matter, but Hitchens almost certainly would not have done the same. However, the universalist principles that led him to criticize harbingers of Trumpism like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin made him loathe the insistence among some left-wingers that it was “enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic ‘preference,’ to qualify as a revolutionary.” Hitchens was alarmed when he witnessed this phenomenon gaining momentum on the left. As he noted in his memoir, Hitch-22:

“In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: ‘Speaking as a…’ Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old ‘hard’ Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when the Left lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.”

An emphasis on the “overwhelming solidarity” between human beings in spite of religious, national, and racial distinctions was once considered radical and progressive. For example, it’s no surprise that Hitchens described Bayard Rustin—an organizer of the March on Washington and one of the leading intellectuals and activists who fought for racial equality in the twentieth century—as the “...true genius of the civil-rights and democratic-socialist movements…” While Rustin was more acutely aware of the brutal and unfair conditions afflicting black America in the 1960s and 1970s than just about anyone, he was also suspicious of identity politics, which he regarded as a superficial and counterproductive form of political mobilization.

Rustin argued that the Civil Rights Movement “destroyed not simply the legal structure of segregation but also the psychological assumptions of racism.” The rapid dissolution of the old racial order created a new set of challenges, which is why Rustin believed it was time to focus on the “total society’s failure to meet not only the Negro’s needs, but human needs generally.” “It has become fashionable,” Rustin wrote, “in some no-win Negro circles to decry the white liberal as the main enemy (his hypocrisy is what sustains racism)...” This is what anti-racist activists like DiAngelo and Kendi do today. But to Rustin, what mattered was action—particularly sweeping economic and educational reforms that help all impoverished Americans. Achieving “full racial equality” as he conceived of it would include “overhauling our schools, clearing the slums, and really abolishing poverty.”

Like the idea of transcending race, many progressive intellectuals scorn the dream of “full racial equality” as a dangerous mirage. And in one sense, they’re right. As Hitchens observed during the debate on reparations, “We can’t make up for the Middle Passage—for the uncounted millions of people who were captured and raped and tortured before they even made it across the Atlantic to be other people’s property. We can’t undo that. But we can refuse—we can decline—to forget it.” But neither should we allow this historical memory to license illiberalism and racial essentialism today. We should instead focus on our overwhelming solidarity as human beings. This was a point Hitchens never stopped making; it’s why he despised nationalism, religious prejudice, and racism—and it’s why he argued that identity politics was the wrong way to resist all the above.

Liberal intellectuals like Hitchens prized individualism and universalism above all else. Individualism is the best counterpoint to racism and bigotry of any kind, as it emphasizes the uniqueness of each human being rather than cramming people into crude demographic categories. Universalism is the natural corollary to individualism: the idea that a society should be organized around meeting the needs of all its members. Though this idea is often dismissed as deceptive or reactionary today, it’s difficult to think of a more radical proposition.

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Matt Johnson writes for Haaretz, Quillette, The Bulwark, Areo, Arc Digital, and many other publications. He is author of the forthcoming book How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment (Pitchstone Publishing, February 2023).

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One page of Hitchens is worth more than every page of DiAngelo, Kendi and Hannah-Jones combined.

Sheena Mason’s “Theory of Racelessness” follows a similar philosophy, that it’s past time to abolish “race” as being in any way meaningful.

This, of course, is the complete opposite of what Critical Race Theory demands, which is “equity” (discrimination to alter outcomes):

“But if racism is embedded in our thought processes and social structures as deeply as many crits believe, then the “ordinary business” of society—the routines, practices, and institutions that we rely on to do the world’s work—will keep minorities in subordinate positions. Only aggressive, color-conscious efforts to change the way things are will do much to ameliorate misery.”
-- Critical Race Theory (Third Edition), Delgado/Stefancic
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“The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. [..] The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
-- Ibram X. Kendi (aka Henry Rogers), “How to Be an Antiracist”

To rely upon the, ahem, “wisdom” of Kendi is to declare that you don’t take racism very seriously.

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“I think I’ll wear my favorite dress today” Racist or Antiracist? “I can probably get away with one more snooze button...” Racist or Antiracist? Can-openers. Racist or Antiracist?

Remind me again why we’re reordering society around the mental misfires of this intellectual potato?

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“Black People Are Not A Monolith” with Eric Smith - FAIR for All

“If a white professional were to announce that, whenever she speaks, she does so as a representative of all of white America, I imagine that—from New England to Palm Springs—we would hear the response that no one person can speak for all America’s 197 million white people.
The arrogance and stupidity of such a claim would diminish the claimant’s civic and professional reputation.
So why, when a black person claims to speak for all black Americans, is it accepted with so little pushback?
Black cultural essentialism—the belief that a particular ideology, mode of speaking or set of values, beliefs and attitudes is authentically black—is widespread today.
From 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah Jones arguing that “there is a difference between being politically black and being racially black” to Joe Biden claiming that if black Americans didn’t vote for him then they “ain’t black.”
These beliefs insult the diversity within the black community.
Even 60 years ago Malcolm X spoke for a very different segment of the black population than Martin Luther King, Jr. and, as King himself noted, socioeconomic distinctions within Americans with African ancestry made for significantly different views of the world.
Political, religious and social diversity among black people has grown substantially since then, rendering the idea of any single black spokesperson nonsensical.
Just as many black people disagreed with X or King back then, today, many black people disagree with Nikole Hannah Jones, Ibram Kendi, or Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Many black people do not subscribe to the principles of Critical Race Theory.
Yet those of us considered “the wrong kinds of black people” for not accepting such principles are often treated worse than problematic whites by those who do.
Our refusal to toe their line is seen as a betrayal, and they often even dare to accuse us of internalized racism or “multicultural Whiteness”.
Most “wrong” blacks expect pushback from black proponents of such views.
However, I will never forget the incredulous look a white university president gave me when I told him that black people are diverse in thought, politics, aesthetics and so on.
As a black man, being called a white supremacist by white people caused a cognitive dissonance that induced both laughter and horror.
The absurdity of the accusation is coupled with the historical taboo of being called “uppity,” a trope commonly heard in the Jim Crow South when a black person acted as an equal of whites.
Ironically, the idea that whites know what is best for blacks is central to much of contemporary so-called “anti-racist” activism.
Robin DiAngelo, the author of New York Times bestsellers “White Fragility” and “Nice Racism,” has made a name for herself by presenting black people as powerless, fragile people without agency.
Her popular reception suggests that many think it is okay for whites to perpetuate this narrow conception of blackness.
The attempt to erase and replace blacks who disagree with these positions should not be understood as a reality, but as a political tactic.
The existence of independent thinkers like us present a threat to their narrative.
Instead of engaging with our arguments on the merits, the very purpose of erasing and replacing is to forego engagement.
And when a prominent figure in a social justice movement chooses to erase and replace a perceived foe, sympathetic audiences may be motivated to comply.
But it’s impossible to be an ally to the black community without doing the work to understand the true range of opinions that reflects the actual reality of who we are.
Ironically, even as we champion diversity in America, we all but erase it within the black community.
Black people are not a monolith.
To assume that we are is the definition of prejudice; it is to flatten and stereotype us based on a falsehood.
The most anti-racist thing you can do is to see us as the unique individuals that we are.”

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“Antiracism” is just a brand name for neoracism.

Source: youtube.com
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