I think you're exactly right here, the largest proponents of this stuff tend to be white and left wing (mostly women). In a way I find them extremely racist. To me, they're acting just like OP says. They don't think certain groups are intelligent enough to bring themselves out of squalor and everyone MUST believe like they do; that skin color is an impediment. So, they need the white savior to come rescue them.
Anyone who's been to Sunday school can tell you this isn't a new concept, and is at least two millennia old (almost certainly longer, since Judaism has an even longer shared tradition). Christians have continued riding the coattails of their martyrs and "oppression" for centuries after they became the dominant force. If anything, the modern "woke victimhood" is merely the cultural legacy of evangelical Christianity that was (and arguably still is) deeply engrained in US culture.
Kinda seems like you're justifying the current action of "woke" people by discussing past injustices? Isn't the whole idea of the "woke" DEI initiative to fix injustices in our society?
We have an entire country now that was founded based on legitimate religious persecution that devolved in the ~200 years since it's founding to go on to oppress others. We can and should do better.
Simply pointing out that victimhood has always existed serves no purpose at all in response to my original comment.
"This is, imo, what things like intersectionality begin to address."
How? All intersectionality does is create a competition for the most oppressed. You will never be enough of a victim. Nothing good comes of a society that focuses specifically on how oppressed they are and vies for the most oppressed group or person.
"We have an entire country now that was founded based on legitimate religious persecution"
Name a country where this hasn't happened. There are many where this is still happening and to a further extent than anything in the US.
Ironically, you're right in weird roundabout way that I do not think you fully comprehend. EVERYONE has been a victim of some sort so it's irrelevant and we shouldn't spend one iota more of our short lives trying to discern who the highest victims of our society are. What a waste and it does nothing to improve the supposed oppressed.
This occurs to this day. I do agree that repeating bad patterns doesn't do us any favors but if you'd like to move that needle, you need to sign on the largest groups first.
> All intersectionality does is create a competition for the most oppressed
This is not true. I can't give you a hip pocket introduction to intersectionality in a thread, but I can at least clarify things for you. There is no "hierarchy of oppression" in intersectionality. Not at least in any reading I've done, but as in all philosophies - beware who you read. The best short description I've found is this, "Intersectionality is the acknowledgement that everyone has their own unique experiences of discrimination and oppression and we must consider everything and anything that can marginalise people – gender, race, class, sexual orientation, physical ability". The key takeaway here is that oppression is just oppression, the topic makes no inclination as to what's worse. Someone who got bullied for having a southern accent in a northern state could've had a measurably worse experience than someone who was marginalized for their physical ability. Point being, intersectionality doesn't make a distinction between them. Instead, intersectionality promotes meeting people where they are and attempting to be thoughtful about how you approach those cases.
While I do agree that perpetual victimhood is not good, there is no accepted timeline to stop seeing yourself as a victim of something. Rather, the steps you can take after you stop seeing yourself as a victim are far more profound in your happiness.
> Name a country where this hasn't happened. There are many where this is still happening and to a further extent than anything in the US.
I can't. I'm not sure there's a point here on your end. We had high minded goals, saying we should do better is a reminder of those high minded goals and our own roots as Americans. It's not to rub your nose in some dirty history. Anyone that expects a perfect society is already starting from the wrong place.
Your last statement veers onto intersectionality tracks and then derails suddenly. The reason intersectionality matters isn't to promote the most suffered people on the planet to the top. It's so that you as a human can understand them and they can understand you without your significantly different life experiences making you think each other are aliens or villains.
Except reality has proven you wrong. We've never lived in a time where people are more well fed, have more personal belongings, longer life spans etc.
It is in fact, objectively, not a pointless game.
Ignoring this body of work makes the linked article a straw man argument with some cherry picked examples that don’t even make a point (why am I supposed to care that AOC tweets about some people at the exclusion of others?)
If your point is that not all leftists are intersectionalists and not all people who use intersectionalist words actually have the values, then I'd respond with, "duh".
Intersectionality isn't about telling one person's story or exemplifying one person's pain. It's about showing that these things are interconnected and effect people differently, and ways in which you probably wouldn't expect. It does the absolute opposite of a hierarchy.
(I could care less about AOC. She was like 1% of content of the article I posted.)
> 0 results
So to answer my question, no you can't provide a source.
(Also identity politics and intersectionality aren't the same thing, despite the right's habit of using them as meaningless scare words)
It is a bit weird overall. It decries conservatism, but is very heavy on fundamentalism. It is far more conservative than other groups it indicts with sexism/racism. And mostly these accusation are also false.
This is probably the best description I’ve seen of the parallel:
> wokeness is racialized neo-Marxism that uses collapsed mainline Protestantism as its leverage point, manipulating the guilt of the remnant elite and capturing the institutions that they have abandoned.
Marxism is distinguished as an ideology by totalizing class consciousness. That's the opposite of wokeness, which ratifies identity politics. In fact, "wokeness" is a fault line in modern leftist Twitter thinking, between the populist "dirtbag left" that eschews DEI-speak and the university left. Just how much work is the word "neo" doing in that name?
Most "DEI wokesters" are the farthest thing from Marxists. They're jealous and enthusiastic beneficiaries of the mortgage interest tax deduction.
"Collapsed mainline Protestantism"? Explain! Does being a Catholic draw me closer to or further away from "wokeism"? Because I have things to say about the intersection of DEI culture and Catholicism.
It's an ideology that replaces Marxism's "totalizing class consciousness" with a "totalizing race consciousness."
> Just how much work is the word "neo" doing in that name?
A lot, and the "Marxism" is doing very little. It's a clumsy construction. But the meaning is clear in context.
> "Collapsed mainline Protestantism"? Explain!
It’s a religious revival, but without Jesus. They’re descendants of Puritans who don’t believe the theology anymore, but have the same religious zeal, sense of moral universalism, and faith that America's institutions belong to them. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbbxQqKXUIk (warning: offensive period language). I’ve had several experiences with woke whites where, when I pointed out that the minorities they purport to speak for disagreed with them about this or that, they responded with the same sentiment as Matt Damon in the final line of that clip.
The meaning is clear in context because you know who he's talking about. But you just called this "the best description you've seen", and it's not a description in the least.
I don't care that you disagree with DEI types and with wokeism in general. I have my own qualms! But don't elevate hucksters like Rufo. And stop following him on Twitter. He's a clown.
Correct, and in fact, many Marxists are virulently against CRT/wokeness, because it distracts from class as the central conflict in society.
Critics crudely call CRT/wokeness "Marxist" because it's a conflict perspective.
(I think we agree, just writing it down to clarify my thoughts).
It's interesting that calling CRT "Marxist" gives the Fox News watchers a familiar enemy to fulminate against, and it gives the CRT peddlers themselves unearned credibility as dangerous dissidents, so it's a misidentification that serves everyone but the dwindling number of actual Marxists, and pedants bent on accuracy.
In Marxist terms, when your opponent disagrees with you, you don't engage with their argument on its merits, but look for deeper structural factors that have led them into such serious ideological error, factors that render your opponent incapable of understanding the truth of your correct argument. In Marxism, these center around the person's class background, their internalized class interest, petty bourgeois thinking, etc. They may be conscious or unconscious, but in all cases they are the ultimate motive force behind the person's wrong beliefs.
In modern elite ideology (whatever name we give it), the role of class background is replaced by the cross-product of various -isms and forms of oppression that prevent the privileged from being able to admit deep truths that are obvious to the marginalized.
In both cases, it's a kind of nihilistic structuralism which asserts that the only meaningful way to evaluate an argument is by examining the identity, circumstances, and background of the person making it, as those factors relate to societal networks of power and oppression. In this form of debate, you counter what someone is saying by pointing out who they are, and whose interests they represent.
A lot of anti-CRT rhetoric is clearly trying to use the Marxism link to discredit, out-of-hand, CRT. American politics has always been like that--guilt by association with Socialism. I understand the reflexive instinct to push back against that. But if you try to deny that the links exist, all you're doing is discrediting yourself and others, bolstering those pundits arguments; the links absolutely exist and are substantial. The nuance is that they're not substantial in the ways that the cheap rhetoric implies. (It's like if you took Christianity and replaced Jesus with Santa Claus. You couldn't possible claim the new religion wasn't an offshoot of Christianity, and much of it would be indecipherable without understanding historical Christianity and Jesus. But it would simultaneously be true that the new religion would in some of its most fundamental dimensions be entirely incompatible and incomparable to Christianity.)
If anybody wants to have an informed opinion on these debates, they could do much worse than actually reading Frantz Fanon. IMO CRT begins and ends with Frantz Fanon. If you read his seminal work, Black Skin, White Faces, you've read all you'll ever need to read regarding the ideological underpinnings of not only CRT but much of modern liberal identity politics. I found it a very powerful and enlightening book. (I first read it 20 years ago, before CRT entered mainstream liberal discourse, and before I had any knowledge of CRT as a school of thought or movement. When I did learn of CRT, the parallels to Fanon's ideas were immediately obvious.) But Fanon takes the ideology to its logical conclusion, which is permanent apartheid, and therefore lays bare the stark choice being made when one adopts liberal identity politics. I can't refute Fanon's ultimate conclusion that black-skinned minorities will never be able to find equality among a white-skinned majority (or, presumably, vice-versa if the historical script were flipped), but I choose to believe that there must exist some way to get there; otherwise as Fanon persuasively argues, all identity politics can possibly do is mitigate some of the worst injustices, but ultimately never eradicate the fundamental inequities. And therein lies much of Fanon's motivation for his Marxism advocacy--he thought the only way forward was for black countries to go their own way, and that necessarily involved adopting Marxism as capitalist systems would ultimately benefit the white establishment at the expense of black countries and communities.
Notably, though I've never read any of Malcolm X's works in full, AFAIK he ultimately came to similar (in a very, very rough sense) conclusions as myself. Earlier in his life Malcom X believed it was categorically impossible for black communities to ever live equitably among white majorities. But later on he changed his opinion. It was a choice he made, to choose to believe despite so much evidence to the contrary that there's a path forward offering both diversity and equity, rather than carry on with the dismal axioms that logically pointed to their irreconcilability. Making that choice doesn't require denying all that has happened and continues to happen, it just requires denying a worldview that ultimately makes it inevitable--essentializing racial identity is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Also, FWIW, modern Marxist scholarship provides some of the most vehement and technical opposition to CRT for precisely the reason you hinted at--replacing class conflict with racial conflict is anathema to Marxism. But when you read that scholarship, it's also instantly obvious that CRT and Marxism use nearly identical language. CRT is indisputably descended from the culture of Marxist scholarship.
Would Crenshaw agree that Fanon is the beginning and end of CRT? Race, Reform, and Retrenchment[1] contains an extended, detailed critique of Critical Legal Studies for instrumentalizing and superficializing Black struggle, and for the premise that in a conflict between avoiding legitimizing the dominant class (in the broader Gramscian sense) and advancing Black material interests, it's Black interests that need to give.
For that matter, you can go back to Crenshaw's Demarginalizing the Intersection[2] and see that (a) it is in the main a par-for-the-course case-by-case legal case study like lots of other law articles, and not an inscrutable blob of woke jargon, and (b) not especially Marxist? (Amusingly, this article was weaponized, with Crenshaw's approval, by Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders).
[1]: https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Cren... [2]: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
I get that there are trolls out, including professional trolls, who weaponize innuendo and have zero interest in engaging in honest debate. But the reason for abstaining from quick dismissals is for the benefit of the people they're targeting, not the trolls. I guess what I should have written was: CRT absolutely has deep connections with Marxist thought. See, e.g. Frantz Fanon. So what?
[1] Only half using that phrase facetiously.
Again, just back to Crenshaw, who wrote at length about how Critical Legal Studies loses the plot about racism in its zeal to reconsider the entire liberal legal structure.
I promise I'm just writing this because, like many HN comments, it is a sort of rhetorical burp I just have to get out.
More seriously: it is somewhat frustrating that any serious analysis of oppressor/oppressed systems can be dismissed as "Marxist" because of Gramsci and hegemony, because oppression is obviously a real thing (ask any evangelical Christian) but neo-Marxism is principally trotted out when the oppressed are disfavored. But then, lots of academics who pretty clearly aren't Marxist are happy to use Gramscian neo-Marxism as a tool, so, sure, maybe you're just right about this.
It’s so funny that criticism of Rufo always revolves into this esoteric academic debate. I’m a plebe and I’ve never heard of any of those people. Rufo came to my attention because he leaked material that was given at a teacher training in Loudoun County, right next to where I grew up. As far as I can tell the bulk of his journalism is just publishing these leaks.
Maybe a better comparison is to the imams in madrasas teaching young Muslim kids that they’re oppressed by the west? Who knows? Whatever you label it, these materials shouldn’t be in the same building as kids, and the people who green lighted that should be out of a job.
1. A schema of the world as an unfair arrangement of oppression and coercion
2. The claim to a correct understanding of how this system operates and perpetuates istelf
3. The belief that contrary thoughts and beliefs, however sophisticated they sound, are a simple product of these more fundamental power relations, which must be unmasked
4. A plan for how to make everything better through transformative change, which includes a radical remodeling of the self to expunge wrong belief and wrong thinking
5. A totalizing belief that everything falls within this ideological universe of discourse. You can't go off and study butterflies or Taylor series and tap out of the battle.
This is the shape of the "thing" that makes people see a similarity between modern elite belief and Marxism. I'm not familiar enough with fascist ideology to answer your question, but consider that fascism was a pretty incoherent and fast-changing target, while the core beliefs of Marxism have shown remarkable staying power despite a body count that would have doomed lesser belief systems (like fascism!). Note also that, with small changes, the schema I gave above is a religious schema; part of the power of totalizing ideology is that it plugs into the mental and spiritual machinery of religious faith.
(a) Trace it back to Gramsci, call it neo-Marxist, and then accuse anyone who ever bought an Robin DiAngelo book and performatively left it on their desk at work of being a neo-Marxist, and
(b) Seriously argue that the phenomenon is not only a religion, but is simultaneously the result and cause of the ordination of women in the Episcopalian church --- which is absolutely part of Rufo's subtext.
I do not want to get in the line of fire between anybody and Ibram X Kendi. I get that there's lots to criticize. It's not that I think there isn't a lot of frankly silly Marxist stuff happening in, like, the "institutional" Black Lives Matter movement. I just dispute that Chris Rufo knows what he's talking about, or cares, and that his summary of "wokeism", the one quoted above, makes sense.
Prepared to be wrong about all of this, but don't need to nerd out about it any more than you want to.
I've heard this called the racism of low expectations. It's disgusting.
I think that's a inaccurate and misleading description. I think the correct term is "colorism" not "racism," and it sounds like those distinctions were more significant within the black community than outside of it. I don't think a stereotypical anti-black racist would accept a black person into a social club if his skin was as light as a paper bag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Paper_Bag_Test:
> "The Brown Paper Bag Test" is a term in African-American oral history used to describe a colorist discriminatory practice within the African-American community in the 20th century, in which an individual's skin tone is compared to the color of a brown paper bag....
> The Brown Paper Bag Test was heavily documented and normalized with historically black fraternities and sororities (especially among sororities) and historically black social clubs founded before 1960, whose members selected others who resembled themselves, generally those reflecting partial European ancestry.[8][9] Some privileged multi-racial people of color who came from families freed before the American Civil War attempted to distinguish themselves from the mass of freedmen after the war, who appeared to be mostly of African descent and from less privileged families.
In some communities, colorism is a byproduct of racial categorization based on color. But in many places it’s just an aesthetic preference. Colorism in Asia and Africa long predates colonialism or contact with white people. An important thing to note is that in these societies, colorism doesn’t imply that white people are seen as the most beautiful. A person can be too light, just as they can be too tall or too skinny.
So in order to keep their ideology consistent in the face of clear and present racism throughout the non white communities as well, they had to invent the term "colorism".
So yes colorism is just racism.
Yes there are plenty of people who want to sit at the top of the food chain by way of gathering a "diverse" crowd.
> DEI not only legitimizes, but actually encourages the above behavior. This seems problematic to me for two reasons: first, it creates a positive feedback loop for (at best) actions that make one feel self righteous without adding anything of real value, and second, it undermines the importance of critical thinking and analysis in engineering.
This is not a problem with DEI. Look at the landgrab that is enterprise management.
> In your opinion, do these changes have the intended effect? Are they meaningful and useful?
Your premise is off, so I can't answer this.
> * For those who don’t know, there used to be a racist practice by some fraternities, etc called a “brown bag test” where a brown bag was used to judge skin color for entry. This made brown bags racist, which in turn made brown bag lunches racist.
This isn't true. Paper bags were never racist. I don't know where you picked this from. This is a misleading description to make anti-racism seem absurd.
What do you mean by 'isn't true'? It's at least real to some extent, without regard to how widespread it was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Paper_Bag_Test https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2014/febr...
It's also the case that DEI groups want people to stop using 'brown bag lunch'.
The paper bag test doesn't make paper bags racist. It's a shade test.
> It's also the case that DEI groups want people to stop using 'brown bag lunch'.
I can't say that this hasn't happened. But if it is, this is one of the useless things that I take umbrage with in my original post.
> I can't say that this hasn't happened. But if it has, this is one of the useless things that I take umbrage with in my original post.
I sat in a meeting where two young, white colleagues informed another colleague that the term was racist and we should come up with a different one. I tried to push back gently, but I am a white man and as such have no standing in the DEI hierarchy. So it was decided in this meeting full of white people that we would no longer use the term as it might cause offense to someone, maybe. And the two young engineers were satisfied they had made the world a slightly better place. I found it disturbing but don’t know what to do.
Woah this suddenly made the behavior of some people who gave me the creeps but were doing "all the right things" make sense. Thanks.
On the brownbag thing, I've had someone tell me we shouldn't say "picnic" because of a racist etymology. When I showed her this etymology wasn't real, she said it didn't matter. We still shouldn't say it because it might harm someone. This doesn't make anti-racism absurd. I think there are real heroes there. But that interaction sure felt absurd.
Don't be anti-racist. Just don't be racist and call it out where you see it.
You won't get through life without being hurt and learning to understand the meaning behind people using words is a skill you cannot skip to acquire. Misunderstanding happen and you need strategies to deal with them. It can but rarely results in conflict. You cannot expect everyone only using thoughts, associations and words you are content with. It is a false strategy without solution.
I would argue it also gives an indication of how “mission creep” works.
(A well-used term like “tarball” now being deemed potentially offensive, presumably because it sounds like “tarbaby”, even though it’s obviously just referring to a bundle of files archived with the “tar” command.)
While the term refers to an archive that has been created with the tar command, it can be negatively associated with the pejorative term tarbaby."
https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguag...
I'm genuinely fascinated by how this came to be written. Were there brainstorming sessions where people threw out random word associations to show willing, combined with a fear from the rest of the group of accusations of racism for calling it out as arrant nonsense?
A more compelling reason is because demonstrating "leadership" in DEI is a prerequisite to getting a promotion or getting a management job. It's baked into many job listings now and is part of the executive interview process. If you don't check the DEI box on some tangible dimension, you don't progress to the next round, especially if you are white.
I think this is the real harm being done here. Being trained to accept irrationality and poor judgment bleeds into engineering decisions.
DEI not only legitimizes, but actually encourages the above behavior. This seems problematic to me for two reasons: first, it creates a positive feedback loop for (at best) actions that make one feel self righteous without adding anything of real value, and second, it undermines the importance of critical thinking and analysis in engineering.
So, all that being said, the justification is these changes help make black people in tech feel more included, a goal I support. In your opinion, do these changes have the intended effect? Are they meaningful and useful?
* For those who don’t know, there used to be a racist practice by some fraternities, etc called a “brown bag test” where a brown bag was used to judge skin color for entry. This made brown bags racist, which in turn made brown bag lunches racist.