Thread by @drvolts

If you hire a bunch of people whose jobs & status depend on hyping & demonizing "wokeism," they will never run short of material. It's a giant, diverse country we live in -- you can tell *any* story with anecdotes if you invest enough energy.

https://twitter.com/RottenInDenmark/status/1462281678425051142

Similarly, if every newspaper & cable channel hired reporters whose job was to find & elevate examples of routine racism denying certain people job opportunities or places to live or positions in prestigious professions, they too would have no shortage of material.

People in media hate admitting it, but they are not simply mirrors, documenting events. They make choices; they decide what's worth our attention, what *matters*.

They have decided that "wokeism" matters more than the still-ubiquitous baseline racism & sexism in the US.

It's impossible to defend that choice when it's stated plainly, so instead we have these roudabout bad-faith proxy discussions. Like, "oh you *approve* of the verbiage in paragraph 4 of Alanis Morissette's opening musical number?!" Why the fuck are we talking about this.

"Oh, so you *approve* of this one ridiculous line in this one obscure anti-racist training seminar that was seen by a dozen or so people on some school board somewhere?" No my opinion is who gives a fuck the country has real problems.

What if NYT hired an inequality reporter whose sole job was to cover examples of the endless legal & financial hassles that face poor people in the US, which wealthy people totally escape? I bet they could find lots of anecdotes!

Or, to wrap this rant up: what if NYT hired a team of reporters & pundits whose sole job was to document the nationwide, escalating assault on democracy from the right? That seems like a pretty important story. Not like, paragraph-4-of-an-Alanis-song important, but important!

OK, a teensy bit more rant. Consider the following two beliefs/propositions:
1. Punctuality & hard work are white supremacy.
2. Black people are intrinsically dumber & lazier than whites.

To me, both are ridiculous & fly in the face of all kinds of evidence & good sense.

But insofar as I am part of the media, charged with informing the US public, I need to go beyond "they're absurd." I need to think about how widely each is believed & what tangible effect that belief has on average peoples' lives. I need to assess their *relative significance*.

I'd be surprised if you could find a dozen people in the country who genuinely believe No. 1 (even the ones giving the trainings). And you'd have an *extremely* difficult time trying to find cases where that particular belief translated to action of any significance or impact.

By contrast, No. 2 is believed by, if not a majority of Americans, something close. And it translates into racist behavior in thousands of ways, large & small, in businesses & communities & governments, every single day, and has for centuries.

So even if you restrict your field of coverage to "obviously false beliefs about race that impact US public life," you'd STILL be hard pressed to justify the obsessive focus on wokeism.

Shit, even if you restrict your field of coverage to "obviously false beliefs about race that impact US public life *within academia*," I think you'd still have to prioritize old-fashioned racism. Contra the Anti Woke Industrial Complex, academia is still racist AF.

And ... scene.