On the misuse of the observation that race is constructed as a way to silence discussion of racism.

This could have been written today, but it’s from Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness (1995), 255.

I think this illustrates a conflation of race and racism that Fields talks about — but instead of making the ostensible fact of “race” an alibi for the effects of racism, it uses the constructed nature of race as an excuse to treat racism as imaginary or historically irrelevant.

It also shows the important role that misconstruing “socially constructed” as “not real” or “malleable at will” plays in these and related arguments. This is not a mere misunderstanding; it’s essential to the point.

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Ted McCormick

@mccormick_ted

13 Mar

Meet the “oppressed” parents and students Bari Weiss wants to save from marginalized people

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

@Paul_E_Cohen

h/t @Paul_E_Cohen

Full disclosure here: I went to a boarding school in Massachusetts for most of high school, so (while accumulating substantial student debt there and at subsequent levels of US education) I’ve also benefited from this system. It does not need to be saved from “wokeism.”

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Ted McCormick

@mccormick_ted

10 Mar

It's probably no surprise to anyone familiar with the genre, but it's remarkable that in a piece supposedly worried about curriculum, almost every source for curricular content decisions is characterized at second hand, mostly via hostile sources.

(As an aside, it's also funny that in this purportedly skeptical, critical, free-thinking tale of rebellion against elitist orthodoxy, the idea that a handful of small, expensive private schools *should* be tasked with educating "America's elite" is assumed throughout.)

This bit of silliness has rightly come in for mockery -- there was always more to physics than Newton -- but it's worth noting that *at no point* is the actual source of the change identified, much less the rationale stated. We just get the student's impression... maybe

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Ted McCormick

@mccormick_ted

10 Mar

So the defenders of Western Civ are now railing about noted anti-racist SJW, Napoleon.

Just like they rail about celebrated left-winger, Hitler.

Just like they praise that great anti-slavery movement, the British Empire.

Imagine if they put this energy into learning something.

Imagine treating an intellectual tradition you claim to revere in the shallowest, silliest way possible. Imagine making transparently ludicrous alternative histories the basis of your worldview.

Imagine the highest goal of your intellectual efforts being to waste other people's time, and perhaps make them a little more ignorant and a little less curious about the world.

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Ted McCormick

@mccormick_ted

9 Mar

To join the chorus: "socially constructed" does not mean "unreal" or "malleable at will." Among the many obvious social constructions anti-constructionists habitually discuss as real and durable are rights, progress, property, capitalism, science, the Enlightenment, and The West.

Others are money, law, interlibrary loan, and breakfast. Just about the only thing uniting these is that they are created by human beings acting in a social context. The contrast is not with what is "real," or with what is "malleable," but with what occurs outside such a context.

Not even Richard Dawkins, at least after some thought, maintains that scientific claims are made or tested outside of social context. No one thinks money predated society, nor that that makes it unreal. Conversely, all manner of natural things are "malleable" and studied as such.

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