Thread by @wesyang

Listened to an hour of NPR in the car while driving yesterday. 70 percent of what I heard was about race, including their TV critic who wrote the “Tom Hanks must become anti-racist” column declaring that In the Heights was colorist in its casting.

Another segment was about a black female scholar who turned her research into woman-led slave revolts into a graphic novel. They teased the next day's segment, an author of a book on how to be a better white ally.

The segments were fine, but in aggregate it felt a little much

Basically, this comment by a Times staffer has become the actual guiding principle of NPR coverage

https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1374069573188747276?s=20

Monomania is a terrible approach to the world.

NYT is trying to avoid total capture by the anonymous staffer with the occasional piece reporting on discrete social justice meltdowns and inquisitions in ways that show them to be excesses

What you can't do, though, is suggest that these discrete eruptions of persecutorial mania are in fact the primary product of the ideology.

It's one of those things where those in a position to do something about it won't understand this reality until they are no longer are a position to do anything about it. (May be there already.)

The ultimate goal of these inquisitions and meltdowns is of course to manufacture consent for "race conscious" policies (or, in Kendi's term "antiracist discrimination") that are widely unpopular and in many cases forbidden by federal civil rights law and 14th amendment

To explicitly commit yourself to enact "antiracist discrimination", or manufacturing consent around it (by inflicting social penalty on those who oppose it) is what it actually means for an institution to declare itself "antiracist" in 2021.