The hard Left analysis of wokeness -- that it is neoliberal Astroturf whose purpose is to divide any movement to contest the will of capital along racial lines while preserving a radically unequal status quo -- is a bit too coarse for my taste, but it has aged quite well
Corporations and high net worth individuals have donated more than $10 billion to racial justice orgs since March 2020
This analysis suggests that what was once done through racism can also be effectuated through putative "anti-racism".
Of course I see it as an emergent, opportunistic process rather than a conspiracy, though it became policy once a certain class identified the opportunity...
Anybody watching the Never Trumpers, the establishment coalescence around Biden, and the messaging around the summer of protest should by now be sensitized to the cunning of the establishment in appropriating and deploying radicalism toward its own ends
It's quite crude, blatant, and easy to see through, if you have the right context to understand what's going on -- but also amazing how an inattentive public can be taken in entirely.
The coordinated way that every speaker at the Democratic National Convention called the protests "good trouble" really impressed me
When people refer to "whiteness" and "white supremacy", it's alas literally true in some contexts that they mean "literacy", and it's alas distressingly the case that one of those contexts is K-12 education
So "worship of the written word" means something beyond "being able to read", but characterizing what happens in K-12 schools as "worship" surely implies that a primary emphasis on literacy (as opposed to orality) is racist
And no, this is not a half-clever plot by white supremacists to keep minorities down. It is what professional "anti-racist" educators who oppose "white supremacy" in its many guises (including "worship of the written word") earnestly believe.
It's more than just a galactic self-own. It underscores a reality: meritocracy is being dismantled *at the precise moment when women are becoming dominant in academe* ; their dominance in turn hastens that dismantling...
NYC teachers union passes "Black Lives Matter at School" resolution calling for, among many other things, "disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family."
Calling it an act of liberation from Western oppression is what's (relatively) new.
Stating that collective care should happen "to the extent that mothers, parents and children are comfortable" is a curious touch.
The recently introduced framework for the "Culturally Sustaining-Responsive Education" that the resolution affirms seeks a transformation of the way students are taught with a heavy emphasis on "power and privilege," and "decentering dominant ideologies" nysed.gov/common/nysed/f…
Which fact you select to put in the headline colors the tone of the whole piece. The truth is: the definition is not uniform, the reporting is not close to comprehensive, the overall numbers are so low that what amounts to statistical noise can be made to seem large
Odd to juxtapose these two poll findings against one another. I think the difference in wording -- "legitimately" -- accounts for the difference, and suggests that it's more of a "not my President" phenomenon at work.
The contrast suggests that the typical Trump voter sees the expansion of mail-in voting as inherently illegitimate at the macro-level, without necessarily glomming on to "stolen election" conspiracy theories
It's self-evident that universal mail-in voting diminishes election security relative to in person voting by some significant margin