Once again, Taibbi is spot on. He ends his blistering critique of the "anti-racist" left with this: "Ambrose Bierce once wrote there were “two instruments worse than a clarinet — two clarinets.†What would he say about authoritarian movements?"
Taibbi now publishes in a variety of places, but his writing "day job" is now on his own website here. I highly recommend subscribing, in that his writing is never tethered by party politics and is always analytically sharp and permeated with his creative wit.
The following is an excerpt from Taibbi's article, "The Left is Now the Right," where he puts a laser beam on the Smithsonian Museum racism, among other things:
Take the Smithsonian story. The museum became the latest institution to attempt to combat racism by pledging itself to “antiracism,†a quack sub-theology that in a self-clowning trick straight out of Catch-22 seeks to raise awareness about ignorant race stereotypes by reviving and amplifying them.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture created a graphic on “Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture†that declared the following white values: “the scientific method,†“rational, linear thinking,†“the nuclear family,†“children should have their own rooms,†“hard work is the key to success,†“be polite,†“written tradition,†and “self-reliance.†White food is “steak and potatoes; bland is best,†and in white justice, “intent counts.â€
The astute observer will notice this graphic could equally have been written by white supremacist Richard Spencer or History of White People parodist Martin Mull. It seems impossible that no one at one of the country’s leading educational institutions noticed this messaging is ludicrously racist, not just to white people but to everyone (what is any person of color supposed to think when he or she reads that self-reliance, politeness, and “linear thinking†are white values?).
The exhibit was inspired by white corporate consultants with Education degrees like Judith Katz and White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, who themselves echo the work of more consultants with Ed degrees like Glenn Singleton of Courageous Conversations. Per the New York Times, Courageous Conversations even teaches that “written communication over other forms†and “mechanical time†(i.e. clock time) are tools by which “whiteness undercuts Black kids.â€
The notion that such bugbears as as time, data, and the written word are racist has caught fire across the United States in the last few weeks, igniting calls for an end to virtually every form of quantitative evaluation in hiring and admissions, including many that were designed specifically to combat racism.
Based on the protests raging on the streets, one might mistakenly think that there is only Black viewpoint and that it is represented by the purported political aims of Black Lives Matter.
Brett Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist who, on his DarkHorse Podcast, has made a habit of doing deep dives into thorny topics. On this episode, Weinstein hosts a roundtable with seven highly accomplished Black writers and intellectuals. If you like good-natured self-critical discussions where the facts matter and where the participants actively seek to learn from each other, you are going to find this two-hour discussion fascinating. I found myself taking notes throughout and having my faith in humanity restored as this lively discussion unfolded.
At the Wall Street Journal, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes that many of the most vocal players in our re-energized race debates are incentivized to maintain conflict rather than seeking solutions. I have seen what Ali has seen about the the resistance to facts and statistics when these things are inconvenient to the narrative of choice by those supporting the Black Lives Matter political agenda (which is separate and distinct from the idea that Black lives do, of course, matter). Whenever there is such a disconnect between narrative and evidence, that is a big red ultra-suspicious flag.
Here are a few dozen other issues and facts courtesy of Sam Harris (Making Sense Podcast Transcript: "Can We Pull Back From the Brink") that the reform movement not only ignores, but intensely refuses to consider. Why doesn't BLM's website take a careful look at available statistics regarding policing on its website? Â If it did, BLM would find significant support for the claim that police harass Blacks more often than non-Blacks, but they would not find evidence that police use lethal force against Blacks disproportionately.
If the people insisting on reform refuse to first discuss the facts on the ground--a vigorous exploration the facts, pro and con--why should the rest of us--the country at large--trust that movement?
Although I am a black African—an immigrant who came to the U.S. freely—I am keenly aware of the hardships and miseries African-Americans have endured for centuries. Slavery, Reconstruction, segregation: I know the history. I know that there is still racial prejudice in America, and that it manifests itself in the aggressive way some police officers handle African-Americans. I know that by measures of wealth, health and education, African-Americans remain on average closer to the bottom of society than to the top. I know, too, that African-American communities have been disproportionately hurt by both Covid-19 and the economic disruption of lockdowns.
Yet when I hear it said that the U.S. is defined above all by racism, when I see books such as Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility†top the bestseller list, when I read of educators and journalists being fired for daring to question the orthodoxies of Black Lives Matter—then I feel obliged to speak up.
The problem is that there are people among us who don’t want to figure it out and who have an interest in avoiding workable solutions. They have an obvious political incentive not to solve social problems, because social problems are the basis of their power. That is why, whenever a scholar like Roland Fryer brings new data to the table—showing it’s simply not true that the police disproportionately shoot black people dead—the response is not to read the paper but to try to discredit its author.
I have no objection to the statement “black lives matter.†But the movement that uses that name has a sinister hostility to serious, fact-driven discussion of the problem it purports to care about. Even more sinister is the haste with which academic, media and business leaders abase themselves before it. There will be no resolution of America’s many social problems if free thought and free speech are no longer upheld in our public sphere. Without them, honest deliberation, mutual learning and the American problem-solving ethic are dead.
What would you think if a Fortune 500 Corporation Human Resources Director walked up to a podium and announced the following to a big crowd: "Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups of are compared.”
Say what?
Assume further that this HR Director then announced that the following are the “common characteristics of most U.S. White people most of the time”:
White people are self-reliant;
White people are independent and they highly value autonomy;
White people use the Scientific Method, with objective rational linear thinking, cause-and-effect relationship and quantitative emphasis;
White people delay gratification and follow rigid time schedules.
White people believe the ideal social unit is the nuclear family of father, mother and 2.3 children;
The children of white people have their own rooms and they are independent;
White people believe hard work is the key to their success and they believe “work before play”;
White people plan for the future by delaying gratification and they follow rigid time schedules.
Upon hearing this list, you would strongly suspect that you were listening to a white supremacist or that you had unwittingly stepped into a time warp that threw you back 200 years. Upon reminding yourself that this is actually the year 2020, you would conclude that this big corporation should be sued out of existence based on civil rights violations for creating a hostile work environment for its Black employees.
How does one even begin to articulate the many problems with these ideas? How should concerned people respond when false information is being used to divide us. What is the solution when a public museum dedicated to African American history mocks the words of Martin Luther King?
I write this article fully acknowledges that racist conduct can still be found in many places in 2020 and that this bigotry should be dealt with aggressively through civil rights laws and social condemnation. We must condemn all real instances of racism, but we must simultaneously question the foundational concept of "race" from which the possibility or racism sprouts. In short, anyone who wants to eviscerate racism needs to fight a two-front war. NMAAHC's "Whiteness" page doubly fails to fight this two-front war on racism.
Advocating that we should treat people differently based on skin color (as NMAAHC is enthusiastically doing) is throwing gasoline on our racial fires. The "Whiteness" page is stunningly divisive and it is factually unhinged. I would no more expect NMAAHC to be teaching us to be racist than I would expect the American Museum of Natural History to be teaching us that the earth was created 6,000 years ago and that modern humans co-habited our planet with the dinosaurs.
It is demonstrably false that people are born color-coded such that others can determine their personalities, habits and skills by noticing their skin color. That's because immutable traits of individuals, such as skin color, do not determine personality, resilience, aesthetics, capacity for empathy, intelligence, aspirations, parenting skills or any of the other human traits discussed on the NMAAHC "Whiteness" webpage. Skin color doesn't dictate content of character any more than the many other things over which we have no control, things such as eye color, hair color, whether we have six toes, our birth date or the types of bumps we have on our heads. Constricting the way we evaluate people by using an Overton Window of black versus white uses the exact same flawed approach used by astrology and phrenology, which also proclaim content of character by reference to equally irrelevant observations.
Many of the human traits listed on the museum’s website ("work before play" and "rational thinking") are demonstrably not true of many “white” people. Many of these same traits are compellingly true of (and embraced as valuable by) many successful Blacks.
By analyzing the genes of present-day Africans, researchers have concluded that the Khoe-San, who now live in southern Africa, represent one of the oldest branches of the human family tree. The Pygmies of central Africa also have a very long history as a distinct group. What this means is that the deepest splits in the human family aren’t between what are usually thought of as different races—whites, say, or blacks or Asians or Native Americans. They’re between African populations such as the Khoe-San and the Pygmies, who spent tens of thousands of years separated from one another even before humans left Africa.
Nor is there any meaningful basis for declaring that there is any unified "white culture" or a unified "Black culture." No people of any color all think the same. Not even close. No person has been authorized by all whites or all Blacks to speak on their behalf. Not even close. "Race" is a stunningly unscientific concept.
[W]hen scientists set out to assemble the first complete human genome, which was a composite of several individuals, they deliberately gathered samples from people who self-identified as members of different races. In June 2000, when the results were announced at a White House ceremony, Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”
This cleverly edited video (click the image), attributed to Robert Weide and Larry David, intersperses excerpts from a Robin DiAngelo lecture with a podcast where DiAngelo's book was discussed by Glenn Loury and John McWhorter (the DiAngelo video was not part of the podcast).
For anyone offended by this video, I'd recommend that you take the time to read DiAngelo's book so you can see for yourself that she is in need of some serious coaching and should not be lecturing others on how to deal with race issues.
Here is the entire July 2 podcast featuring Glenn Loury and John McWhorter. Topic: "The Unraveling." As always Loury and McWhorter offer an invigorating analysis of Woke culture.
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Erich Vieth
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