RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/against-the-commodification-of-blackness?token=

Recently, Bari Weiss was kind enough to have me as a guest on her podcast, Honestly. We had a wide-ranging conversation that covers my path to academia, my personal struggles, my work as an economist, education, and of course, race in the US.

BARI WEISS: Glenn, if one really cared about black lives and one wanted to insist on a movement that actually fulfilled the promise of black lives mattering, what would be the top three priorities of that movement?

GLENN LOURY: I think self-determination and some sense of what we mean by taking responsibility for our lives. That’s in the Shelby Steele ballpark that we started this interview talking about. I’d say education. I’m sorry, and this is partisan, but the public school unions are poorly serving—on the whole, in the places where black students congregate—the intellectual needs of those students. Now, there are other people to be faulted as well. Opening up that system to innovation is absolutely imperative to improving the quality of black life in this country.

And people are going to dismiss me. They are going to say I’m anti-union, and they’re going to say I’m a right-wing ideologue. I’m going to say I’m looking at failure. I’m looking at multigenerational failure and the public safety piece of this narrative that the police are out to get black people, this contempt for law, the lawlessness of the George Floyd protests, the celebration of that lawlessness, the silence in the face of it.

Patriotism, and by that I don’t mean blind loyalty to a flag salute. I mean seeing yourself as an integral part of the American project. This is our country. We don’t stand off from it. There is no United Nations where black claims will be negotiated. We must make our peace with our fellow citizens here. That has corollaries. Two national anthems is a terrible idea. Reparations for slavery is a mistake. It wrongly places the nature of the moral problem. It creates these parties as between which a negotiation and a deal is being cut. There are not two parties here. There’s only one party.

I have to say, on the last one, I feel very, very torn about the issue of reparations. Because I feel, in lieu of some kind of organized government-run reparations program—and let’s put aside the incompetence of the government and the rest—instead, what’s happening is a kind of piecemeal hand-to-hand patchwork reparations program that is actually stoking incredible contempt and suspicion and tension among racial groups right now.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/vast-majority-of-incidents-cited-by-school-board-group-to-justify-federal-intervention-didnt-involve-threats/

In a memorandum issued this week, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI to collaborate with state U.S. attorneys and federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies to probe and potentially prosecute violent threats against teachers and administrators in school districts nationwide.

The notice comes after the National School Board Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the Biden administration, asking it to investigate and determine whether the increasing number of confrontations between angry parents and school boards qualify as domestic terrorism under the Patriot Act.

“Threats and acts of violence have become more prevalent — during public school board meetings, via documented threats transmitted through the U.S. Postal Service, through social media and other online platforms, and around personal properties,” the organization claims, citing what it considers egregious episodes in 23 school districts over the last several months.

However, the vast majority of incidents referenced by the NSBA don’t qualify as threats of physical violence, according to local news reports cited in the group’s letter — nor is it obvious what the federal government’s role would be in responding to them.

Out of 24 incidents cited by the NSBA, 16 consisted of tense verbal exchanges between parents and school-board members that did not escalate to threats of physical violence. In many of these cases, the aggravated parents disrupted school-board meetings by angrily objecting to their districts’ mandatory masking policies and/or embrace of critical-race-theory curricula.

In other cases, parents picketed outside school-board meetings, wielding signs and chanting politically charged slogans. In some instances, the angry parents shouted over school-board members or exceeded their allotted speaking time during the meeting’s public-comment period. In some of these incidents, the police intervened to eject parents who refused to wear masks or were being otherwise unruly. In none of these cases was a threat of physical violence issued.

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/08/high_schoolers_say_they_are_afraid_to_speak_up_in_class__110645.html

Whether it’s climate change, criminal justice, immigration, the global pandemic, or government reform, there is often little agreement on how to manage the most pressing issues of our time. Though differences on these issues are often intense, we can create positive civic change only by discussing and debating them across multiple perspectives.

Unfortunately, this kind of broad-ranging dialogue too rarely happens in our high school classrooms. Viewpoint diversity is not alive and well, and students often lack the ability to speak openly and question freely without worrying about repercussions. Politically correct speech codes have had a chilling effect on open discourse in many high schools, public and private, in New York City, where the two of us live and work. 

As educators, we are very concerned about young people’s development and identities being stunted by the suppression of their ability to express ideas outside a narrow orthodoxy. While one of us identifies as liberal and the other as more conservative, we agree that narrowing of speech is harmful to everyone.

It was from this concern that Balaban worked with high school students to create Next Generation Politics (Next Gen Politics) in the spring of 2017, in the wake of a divisive presidential election and in recognition of the need for dialogue across political, socioeconomic, and cultural divides to strengthen a fraying social fabric. Next Gen focuses on high school, a time of peak identity formation when it is of vital importance to be exposed to the broadest possible range of ideas.

If we don’t want to replicate the polarization playing out among older adults today, putting teens in dialogue with peers whose points of view they might not otherwise share – and enabling them to listen to, argue with, and learn from one another – is of vital importance to creating the increase in civility we deeply need. 

As such, Next Gen Politics brings diverse high school youth together to grapple with complex civic issues and current events to help them become informed, engaged citizens. Participants focus on perspective-taking, critical thinking, and civil discourse, striving to build a cross-partisan movement of young people committed to building bridges through deliberative dialogue.