"And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow." chimamanda.com
and if you fell down the rabbit hole after reading the whole piece, this is the person CNA is talking about in part one:
This piece by @karpmj in the new @Harpers is sensational. On the right we have lost sight of our complex history and in many precincts of the elite left we have been utterly blinded by its glare. harpers.org/archive/2021/0…
🔑"unlike an older generation of new-left radicals, [today's] sit not at the margins but near the core of the American cultural elite, writing for the nation’s most influential journals, winning its most prestigious prizes and receiving acclaim from its most powerful politicians"
The paradox of the new, elite left is that it frames the past as *determining* the present yet also somehow demands transformational change––even as it rejects class analysis in favor of what seems like identity essentialism and pseudo-religious original sin.
From a 2017 introduction to critical race theory. This helps explain why the label CRT is becoming an insufficient one to describe the scale of the paradigm shift:
As far as I can tell I provided everything that is required of a journalist. Name on masthead of @NYTmag and official website linking to account. Clarification would be welcome. Retweets of the above post would be appreciated 🙏🏽
I never used @Twitter regularly when verification was a free-for-all in the past, so never requested. But now that I do and @verified opened up again, I see it as a basic issue of fairness.
Writing is not basketball or, better yet, a one-on-one sport like tennis. People like to invoke decorations as though they're ironclad. But winning a prize for one's writing is not an objective measure of anything. Winning prizes is also political.
Some of the best writers of the past 100 years have never won any number of the most coveted prizes.
James Baldwin never won a National Book Award, Pulitzer or MacArthur.
What an incredible essay by a student who is not just clever but wise: "I didn’t feel good. It felt as if I were trying to gain pity. I knew what I went through was tough and to overcome those challenges was remarkable, but was that all I had to offer?" nytimes.com/2021/05/09/opi…
"this was an experience not talked about enough: students of color trying to become poster children for trauma and pain."
"I felt like the college system was forcing us to embody something that was less than what we are. Were colleges just looking for a check on a checklist? Were they looking for a slap on the back for saving us from our circumstances?"