|
|---|
|
|---|
Alex Wong/Getty Images
|
|---|
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
MARKETS: YEAR-TO-DATE - Morning Brew 06-07-2021 (Globalist Tax Regulators)
I'm (kind of) changing my mind about CRT. -TANGLE 6-8-21
I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum — then “my take.” This is a free look at one of Tangle’s subscribers-only Friday editions.
Today’s read: 9 minutes.
Sometimes, you get it wrong.
Every day, I publish anywhere from 3,000 to 4,000 words in Tangle. A good bit of that writing is my own opinion — either in “my take” or in answers to reader questions. And in those writings I’ve repeatedly heralded the capacity of some people to have their minds changed by new evidence or new arguments, and yet I too rarely demonstrate that exercise for my readers.
I’d like to give it another swing today.
Last week, I wrote about the fight over critical race theory. If you missed that piece, I’d suggest reading it now. But if you’d rather not, I’ll briefly summarize it:
Critical race theory is an academic movement that recognizes systemic racism in American society and examines how that racism impacts the law, institutions and outcomes. It argues that many social problems are influenced more by racial inequity in societal structures than individual or psychological factors. CRT teaches that racism is an everyday experience for people of color, and that white supremacy maintains its power through our systems of government and law.
Many race-related movements, organizations and ideas have grown out of CRT. One of them, today, is the anti-racism movement, which often leans on the teachings of CRT for historical perspectives. Although the two are distinct, they’re conflated all the time. CRT teachings, however, are not just having a resurgence in academia, but are spreading to the corporate world, social clubs, your social media feeds, and into K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities.
In response to CRT “infiltrating” some schools, Republicans have proposed (and in some cases passed) a wave of restrictive legislation across the United States. Some have framed it as “bans on critical race theory teachings,” while others have described the legislation as protecting children from being compelled into self-loathing over their race.
Last week, after summarizing competing arguments from each side, I essentially took the position that banning anything in academic settings was bad, that states were overstepping, summarized positive experiences I’ve had in engaging CRT ideas, wrote that these bills banning its teaching were solving for a problem that doesn’t currently exist (i.e. CRT in K-12 schools is not common), and wrote that U.S. education could improve by engaging in honest conversations about race — and our country’s history with it — more often and not less often.
After writing that piece, I was inundated with emails — from liberals, conservatives, Black school teachers, white school teachers, historians, Constitutional scholars, and just your average parents with kids moving through their public school systems all over the country. I even heard from a couple of K-12 students.
Their emails provided all sorts of different arguments, evidence, and pushback on what I had written (many, too, wrote supportively of my position — which is why I feel especially compelled to “update” some of what I wrote here). Many, many good points were made, and I’d like to address and integrate them here into my own thinking.
First, the left’s view was not properly represented. Many people felt that the “what the left is saying” section was misleading or at least incomplete. They rightly noted that I did not include a single piece of liberal dissent on CRT, despite the fact its presence in schools — and its resurgence more widely — is something many prominent liberals also object to. John McWhorter, for instance, wrote a whole book about the flaws of anti-racism work and critical race theory. I also did not include any dissent from Black thinkers or people of color, when McWhorter is hardly alone. I’ve referenced many of those thinkers before in this newsletter — Richard Loury, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, Thomas Chatterton Williams, etc. — and at least one of them should have gotten space in last week’s edition.
There are also progressives who have called out their peers to do more to fight back on critical race theory in schools, while some Democrats worry that arguing America is racist to its core is simply a bad political play. And there are polls that have shown a combination of Americans simply not knowing what critical race theory is or being opposed to ideas — like the concept of white privilege — being taught to young kids (a note of caution that some of these polls are being conducted by overtly political groups).
Finally, quite a few people on the left have written about the way critical race theory — and some of the ideas born out of it — have harmed Asian Americans. I, regretfully, did not include any of these voices in my original piece.
The bills banning CRT are doing more than “solving a problem that doesn’t exist.” If I could take back a single sentence from my original piece, it’d probably be this one: “Not only that, but most of these bans are solving a problem that doesn’t currently exist.”
There were two reasons why this was a bad argument. The first one is that, even if critical race theory was not particularly common in K-12 schools, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth addressing before it becomes one. If you’re working from the place where you see CRT as a dangerous school of thought, or being applied in dangerous ways, then it’d be a bizarre and silly thing to say that we should wait until it’s a problem to address it. Framing it as solving a problem that doesn’t exist, rather than a worthwhile preventative measure, was an unfair way to raise the issue.
Second is that, based both on my reader responses and some of the supporting evidence they sent in, I think it was unfair of me to say CRT is not common in our schools. The truth is I don’t know how common it is. My writing cited the work of Christopher Rufo, who has been logging some of the more bizarre and troubling applications of anti-racism or CRT in schools. But plenty of parents (parents of color and white parents!) also wrote in with stories about their kids, some in elementary school, being needlessly “segregated” during school hours, or being shamed for the crimes of their ancestors, neither of which are healthy or productive applications of critical race theory to me.
And it’s clear it’s not just them. Teachers and parents
Not all the bills are the same, and generalizing them misses the mark. One other mistake I made in my original piece was not being more intentional about parsing out the specifics of these bills. Bari Weiss hosted two conservative thinkers, David French and Christopher Rufo, on her podcast for a fascinating and illuminating debate about these bills. The conversation showed that there is some division on the right about this as well. It also drove home two other important points:
One, a lot of these bills — both proposed and passed — are vastly different, and it would have been worth my exploring how in greater detail. A New Hampshire proposal, for example, was so broad as to seemingly prohibit the discussion and debate of divisive topics. It has since been updated, and now explicitly protects the teachings of something like critical race theory. “Nothing in this subdivision shall be construed to prohibit racial, sexual, religious or other workplace training based on the inherent humanity and equality of all persons,” the bill now says, and continues; “Nothing in this subdivision shall be construed to limit the academic freedom of faculty members of the university system of New Hampshire and the community college system of New Hampshire to conduct research, publish, lecture or teach in the academic setting.”
But the bill also says:
No public employer, either directly or through the use of an outside contractor, shall teach, advocate, instruct, or train any employee, student, service recipient, contractor, staff member, inmate or any other individual or group, any one or more of the following…
That an individual, by virtue of his or her age, sex, gender identify, sexual orientation, race, creed, color, marital status, familial status, mental or physical disability, religion, or national origin is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive whether consciously or unconsciously.
The problem with a bill like this is how it splits hairs so closely. For instance, I don’t think anyone is “inherently” racist or sexist, and I agree that shouldn’t be taught to kids (though I do think inquiring about such a question in high school or college is fine). I also think there is a fascinating and important discussion to be had about whether we all carry unconscious racism or sexism — and I think it’s okay to be exploring those ideas in school. So by the letter, this bill may not be an issue, but it’s also running so close to a prohibition on teaching controversial ideas that it still concerns me (so that part of my position hasn’t really changed).
The second thing I was reminded of by Rufo and French’s debate was that there is another free speech angle to this, which is that some students are being compelled to say things they may not believe. There are entire books and legal cases about this, but the simple point is your free speech rights protect you not only from being silenced by the government, but also from being compelled by the government to express something. If public school teachers, who are government employees, are, for instance, forcing white students to express their status as oppressors, that becomes a serious issue. My previous writing didn’t address this at all.
French, a former lawyer who (like me) has serious concerns about these Republican bills, made the point that such an instance could be grounds for a lawsuit, even if a bill to try to prevent those instances was misguided and redundant. Rufo disagreed, strongly, that these bills would be shot down as unconstitutional. Which brings me to another point…
Voluntary vs. mandatory. Quite a few people took issue with my personal story about my positive experience with critical race theory, only to note that there was a difference between me voluntarily engaging these ideas and students being forced to engage in them. In other words: school is compulsory in America. And if students are being forced to go to school, and teachers at that school are teaching critical race theory as “truth,” then these students are effectively being indoctrinated.
I don’t find that argument particularly convincing, namely because I think the overwhelming number of teachers are making good-faith attempts at providing a holistic look at issues of race, law, history, etc. However, I do think it’s a good critique of my argument to note that comparing my voluntary participation in certain anti-racism workshops as an adult is not the same as K-12 kids facing mandatory teachings on CRT in public school.
States have a right to do this. This was more of an omission than anything else. A lot of people wrote in to note that determining what curriculum should or shouldn't be taught in public schools is actually a primary responsibility of the states. So again, if you’re working from the position that CRT is dangerous, or that it is being applied in damaging ways, it would be a dereliction of duty for state legislators not to do anything about it.
This, too, is a sound argument. It’s quite possible that some states are going to ban certain kinds of practices in schools and others won’t, and even if I disagree with that, it’s part of life in America that individual states will address these issues differently. To put a fine point on this, a few readers noted that when I disparaged my high school education in Pennsylvania for omitting so much history, they said the education I received sounded nothing like the one they received — i.e. they were taught all about race, slavery, indigenous people and the crimes of European colonizers, and that the fact I wasn’t was more of a reflection of Pennsylvania’s education system than of American education as a whole.
Putting a pin in it. There are two things I want to dig my heels in on, even after reading all your feedback and continuing to look into these bills for the last week.
One, I do not think critical race theory is particularly dangerous on its own. On the contrary, it’s a really valuable and important piece of academia. Like any critical theory, it has its flaws, but in simple terms, it really is just an academic theory that explores the way race (and racism) are embedded in our society’s laws and structures. One issue with writing about CRT is that it seems to mean something different to everyone. To me, CRT is about an academic exploration of the very real and very important ways race impacts different facets of society, and has throughout our history. That is a fairly innocuous thing. To someone else, CRT might be about a return to segregation, race essentialism, and the practice of defining everyone and everything first and foremost by their race. I’d argue that my definition is far closer to the truth, and the latter is about how sloppily “anti-racism” work is being applied by (I hope!) well-intentioned teachers in our schools.
Two, on the whole, I still believe these bills banning CRT are more dangerous than helpful. I haven’t seen one yet that I’d personally vote for. If K-12 students are being taught that they are inherently inferior, superior, or racist, based on their race — or otherwise being compelled to espouse those ideas — they are already protected by our country’s laws. And they can use those laws to seek recourse. On the contrary, some of these bills, the ones that are overly simplistic and broad, have already resulted in the cancellation of a university summer class, while teachers are expressing new fears about addressing issues of race because of this legislation (this was something many teachers expressed to me privately, too).
The things I got wrong and omitted — and the arguments that moved my position — were more about my own naivete about the impact some of this is already having. I shouldn’t have generalized all these bills as equally dangerous or counterproductive. Some are closer to being redundant than radioactive, simply restating prohibitions that already exist on defining anyone by their race, gender, or religion.
I was also wrong to frame the issue as being beyond the power of the states; I was wrong to say that it solved a problem that didn’t exist, or that even if that was true, that made the bills unworthy of our time; I was wrong to frame it as a purely right vs. left issue when a lot of liberals are rightly opposed to the ways CRT or anti-racism is being handled in schools; I was wrong not to acknowledge that CRT has been criticized loudly and effectively by plenty of people of color; I was wrong not to spend more time fleshing out the differences between CRT itself (which, again, I find innocuous) and how CRT is being applied in public schools across the country (which, again, I sometimes find inappropriate).
So what’s there to do? That’s a better and more difficult question. I don’t have a clear, clean answer, but I think continuing to highlight instances where CRT teachings go too far in schools is a good start. I also think engaging the criticisms of CRT, and ensuring they are part of any discussion about CRT in schools, is critical (if you’ll excuse the play on words). And perhaps most importantly, I think we need to continue to avoid the trap of race essentialism — of assuming our Black neighbors have some monolithic opinions on race and politics or that our white neighbors are all thoughtless oppressors.
This debate has illuminated the fact that neither one is true, and that the continued pursuit of nuance, as well as the open debate about challenging ideas born from theories like CRT, are our best chances at moving the country forward in a positive way.
Thursday, June 3, 2021
Wednesday, June 2, 2021
Uncle Joe Unites America: Equate Tulsa Black Wall Street Massacre to Jan 6th
CHILLING: Biden's Tulsa Massacre Speech Should Set Off Alarm Bells
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden commemorated the Tulsa race massacre, a horrendous white mob attack on the Black Wall Street in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Okla. White mobs attacked black citizens, burned their businesses, and even dropped bombs from planes overhead. The massacre killed at least 39 people (26 black and 13 white) and hospitalized more than 800 between May 31 and June 1, 1921.
Biden took the opportunity to compare this heinous attack to… the Capitol Riot on January 6 and Republican election integrity efforts. The president tried to connect the Tulsa massacre to the Charlottesville riot in 2017 and then the Capitol riot.
“We must address what remains the stain on the soul of America,” Biden declared. “What happened in Greenwood was an act of hate and domestic terrorism, with a through-line that exists today.”
Recommended: Tracing the Roots of the Left’s New Domestic ‘War on Terror’
“Just close your eyes and remember what you saw in Charlottesville four years ago on television. Neo-Nazis, white supremacists lighted torches, the veins bulging as they were screaming. Just picture what it was,” he began.
Then Biden quoted Viola Fletcher, known as “Mother Fletcher,” one of the last survivors of the Tulsa massacre who recently turned 107.
“Well, Mother Fletcher said, when she saw the insurrection at the Capitol on January 9 [sic], it broke her heart,” Biden said, mis-stating the date of the riot. “A mob of violent white extremists, thugs. She said it reminded her of what happened here in Greenwood 100 years ago.”
Biden did not dwell on the comparison of the Tulsa massacre (which killed at least 39 people and injured more than 800) to the Capitol riot (in which only one person got shot, one died of an overdose, and three died of natural causes, while 140 people got injured). However, he did use this comparison to bolster his call for a crackdown on domestic terrorism.
Biden tied Charlottesville and the Capitol riot to the harassment that Asian Americans and Jewish Americans face, as if all of these disparate events had the same cause.
“Look around at hate crimes against Asian-Americans and Jewish Americans. Hate never goes away. Hate only hides,” Biden said. After the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, the president said, “I thought we had made enormous progress.”
“But you know what? I did not realize hate is never defeated; it only hides. It hides. And given a little bit of oxygen… it comes out from under the rock as if it never went away. So, folks, we can’t, we must not give hate a safe harbor,” he insisted.
“As I said in my address to the joint session of Congress, according to the Intelligence Community, terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today. Not ISIS, not al-Qaeda, white supremacists. That is not me. That is the intelligence community,” he insisted. “My administration will soon lay out our broader strategy to counter domestic terrorism and the violence driven by the most heinous hate crimes and other forms of bigotry.”
Recommended: Biden DHS Issues Domestic Terror Alert Warning of ‘Objections’ to ‘Governmental Authority’
Biden did not explicitly state the contention that the same white supremacist hate behind the Tulsa race massacre inspired the Charlottesville riot and the Capitol riot and continues to threaten America today, but he did heavily suggest such a claim.
Tuesday, June 1, 2021
The Coming of Age, Fifteen Years Late - Mark Steyn
The Coming of Age, Fifteen Years Late
by Mark Steyn
Steyn on Culture
 |
Happy Whit Monday to my Commonwealth cousins throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific, and to our readers in much of Continental Europe. And of course to my fellow Canadians a happy if locked down Victoria Day. Enjoy it while you can.
Front page news from yesterday's New York Times:
World Is Facing First Long Slide in Its Population
Me in my international bestseller fifteen years ago:
The single most important fact about the early 21st century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than any has ever aged... These countries – or, more precisely, these people – are going out of business.
The Times front page yesterday:
All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore.
Me in 2006:
The salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia is that they're running out of babies. What's happening in the developed world is one of the fastest demographic evolutions in history... This isn't a projection: It's happening now. There's no need to extrapolate, and if you do it gets a little freaky, but, just for fun, here goes: By 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noël Coward remarked in another context, 'Funiculì, funiculà , funic yourself.'
The Times yesterday:
Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can't find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks.
Me fifteen years ago:
[In Japan] the shortage of children has led to a shortage of obstetricians...
[China's] population will get old before it's got rich...
The 'experts' of the western world are slower to turn around than an ocean liner, and in Europe they were still yakking about the 'population explosion' even as their 1970s schoolhouses, built in anticipation of traditional Catholic birthrates, were emptying through the Nineties and Oughts...
One can talk airily about being flushed down the toilet of history, but even that's easier said than done. In eastern Germany, rural communities are dying, and one consequence is that village sewer systems are having a tough time adjusting to the lack of use. Populations have fallen so dramatically there are too few people flushing to keep the flow of waste moving...
The Times yesterday:
The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older...
Me a decade-and-a-half ago:
Speaking for myself... I'd rather date Debbie Reynolds than Angelina Jolie. But even to put it in those terms is to become aware of how our assumptions about a society's health – about its innovative and creative energies - are based on its youthfulness. Picture the difference between a small northern mill town where the mill's closed down and the young people have moved away and a growing community in the Sun Belt. Which has the bigger range of stores and restaurants, more work opportunities, better school choice? Which problem would you rather have - managing growth or managing decline..?
In theory, those countries will find their population halving every thirty-five years or so. In practice, it will be quicker than that, as the savvier youngsters figure there's no point sticking around a country that's turned into an undertaker's waiting room. Not every pimply burger flipper wants to support entire old folks' homes single-handed...
Everything The New York Times finally got around to yesterday, I said in 2006. My book was an international bestseller, including on the Times' own Top Ten list. Yet it did not bother reviewing America Alone, mentioning it only in the context of "hate" in Canada or as evidence of how literary darling Martin Amis had gone to pot.
It's actually rather difficult to write a bestseller about demography. On at least three continents, princes, presidents and prime ministers noticed the book and invited me to discuss it with them. And then they did nothing. Christopher Hitchens put my demographic thesis to Tony Blair and asked him if, at get-togethers with EU leaders, it was part of "the European conversation". And the PM replied that it was part of "the subterranean conversation" - ie, within the norms of 21st-century political discourse, there was no way to bring up the subject in public.
And now, a generation after one Canadian's book went unreviewed by The New York Times, no fewer than five Times reporters were needed to write a front-page story saying nothing Times readers couldn't have been apprised of in the autumn of 2006.
In the above sentence I'm using "generation" in the Afghan or Sudanese sense. If you have one designer child at the age of forty, generations are a little more leisurely. And, that being very common these days, all that has changed since 2006 is that America has now joined Europe in the demographic death spiral.
A final point: When I say that demography is "the single most important fact about the early 21st century", I mean it. As I've commented over the last year, it partially explains the fearful reaction to ChiCom-19. As I put it in America Alone:
Aged societies, by their nature, are more cautious and less dynamic: old people weigh exposure to risk more than potential for gain.
And so since March 2020 we have prioritized "exposure to risk" over life itself. And for a year we walled up our dwindling number of young 'uns in small flats with no school chums, no stimulation, no physical activity: that's a society whose "assumptions" are old.
And in the end the old people died anyway...