RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/john-mcwhorter-rejecting-the-tokenism?utm_source=email#details

John McWhorter is back again for the latest installment in our ongoing, nearly decade-and-a-half-long conversation. Let’s get into it.

John starts out telling us about his current whereabouts: a Dirty Dancing-style bungalow in the Catskills. We move on to a developing story out of Princeton, New Jersey, where a group of parents has written an open letter protesting the school district’s “dumbing down” of the math curriculum in the name of DEI.

John and I are on the same page on this one: How much longer are we going to pretend that this is doing any good for the students? The way that the Princeton school district went about implementing these curriculum standards was, at best, deceptive. 

Don’t parents have the right to know how decisions that affect their kids are being made? Of course, DEI is a business, one that has created thousands of jobs for administrators and consultants who spend their days rooting out racism. And as John points out, if someone’s job depends on finding instances of racism, they’re going to “find racism,” whether it’s really there or not.

This incentive structure makes John despair. He also suggests that my theory of social capital may provide the conceptual underpinnings for some present-day arguments in favor of affirmative action. But I point out that, while social capital may partially explain disparities in outcome, it doesn’t excuse disparities in outcome.

After all, we can see that, some historically disadvantaged groups regularly over-perform when high academic performance is incentivized within their community. But incentives for middling academic performance tend to produce middling academic performance, and I fear that we’re incentivizing middling academic performance in our young black students.

Is there a way out of this mess? Is John right to despair? I close on a note of hope from my Brown University and Heterodox Academy colleague John Tomasi.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/06/expanding-a-feminist-professors-education/

Twitter has many things to answer for, from users’ freedom to engage in anonymous abuse to the censoring of off-narrative opinions and personalities by what must be an enormous squad of woke censors at the social media giant’s head office. But every now and again — not often, but it does happen — something worthwhile figures in the threads.

Below is one such exchange, prompted by Professor Danna Young, who is paid to teach her brand of ‘journalism’ at the University of Delaware. By way of background, the professor describes her specialty thus: “Dannagal G. Young (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, 2007) is a Professor of Communication and Political Science … studies the content, audience, and effects of nontraditional political information.” Earlier this week, she posted this tweet:

My teen told me something that’s been haunting me for weeks.

He said “I think almost every white middle school boy is in the alt-right pipeline -at some point-until something/someone pulls them out.”  
                                                        — Dr. Danna Young (@dannagal) June 18, 2022

The response was quick, with the Twitter mob initially endorsing the professor’s appraisal of boys as problems — largely, one gathers, because it is their great misfortune (and a curse on everyone else)  that they are not girls. Wading into this stream of woke drek came 18-year-old  Daniel Schmidt, a freshman at the University of Chicago. His series of tweets, copied from the originals lest Twitter’s censors take down the thread for the crime of making too much sense, are reproduced below. Each horizontal line indicates a fresh tweet in the series.

https://www.city-journal.org/grade-inflation-equity-and-educational-integrity

People these days worry about the rising prices of gasoline and milk, but there’s another destructive inflation that has gone unchecked for years: grade inflation. Just like monetary inflation, which makes your bank account look great until you’re rudely awakened by the reality that you can’t buy as much as you used to, grade inflation makes your transcript look great, until you discover that you haven’t learned as much as you thought. And though grade inflation is not new, its recent intersection with “equity” bodes ill for the integrity of our schools.

It’s hard to deny the reality of grade inflation at America’s colleges. As Times Higher Education reported in 2016, “A is by far the most common grade on both four-year and two-year college campuses (more than 42 per cent of grades). At four-year schools, awarding of As has been going up five to six percentage points per decade and As are now three times more common than they were in 1960.” Three years later, Forbes reported that “in the early 1960s, 15 percent of all college grades nationwide were A’s. Today, that number has tripled—45 percent of all grades are A’s. The most common grade awarded in college nationwide is an A.” As a sign of how deeply entrenched grade inflation has become, note that two prestigious institutions—Princeton University and Wellesley College—that put the brakes on grade inflation in 2004 have since been forced to rescind their efforts (Princeton in 2014, and Wellesley in 2019). No other universities had followed their lead, and they did not want to continue bearing the brunt of student complaints.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/education-flows-for-parents-ebbs-from-the-left

Democrats are fighting on behalf of their teacher union paymasters to prevent parents from choosing the right education for their children. The party of the Left, of course, seeks to limit freedom across a wide policy spectrum, but the salience of education as a political issue is being sharply underscored with midterm congressional elections drawing near. Fortunately, it is a debate the Left is losing.

An overwhelming majority of parents , 82%, say they’ll consider switching allegiance on Election Day to vote for candidates of a party that shares their views on education. This includes 79% of Republicans, 81% of Democrats, and 88% of independents. Whatever lessons they think should be taught, parents agree that the decision is theirs to make. They don’t want to be dictated to or have their children taken as ideological hostages.

This shows once again that people who are willing to brush aside many issues as “just politics” that they can safely ignore do not take the same laissez-fair attitude on the question of their children’s learning. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) demonstrated the political potency of this distinction when he knocked off Terry McAuliffe to win last year’s election in Virginia.

But President Joe Biden refuses to learn the lesson. Just three months ago, long after the implications of the Virginia parental rebellion should have sunk in, his administration issued a new rule that could force some public charter schools to close by denying them federal funds if they contract operations to for-profit educators.

The practice is widespread, and Robert Eitel, president of the Defense of Freedom Institute, said at the time, “This is confirmation that the Democratic Party has shifted hard to the Left on education … it would have a chilling effect on new charter schools and make it difficult for existing ones to continue.”

https://www.commonsense.news/p/they-questioned-gender-affirming?utm_source=email.

On May 25, Paul and Rebeka Sinclair pulled their minivan over to the side of the road, just north of Lake Tahoe, and logged onto a Zoom with Katherine Dinh, the head of the Marin Country Day School.

“Today was the last day of school for your children, Charlotte and Carter,” Dinh informed the couple. The Sinclairs—she’s 37; he’s 51—had been driving home from a vacation to celebrate their anniversary. Dinh appeared to be reading a script. Two MCDS board members joined her on the call but stayed quiet. “Please do not contact any other school employees, particularly Charlotte and Carter’s teachers, as your reaching out to them will cause them further stress,” Dinh continued. “The two of you are not to be on campus again.”

It was the closing act of a year-long drama between the Sinclairs and MCDS, which charges $40,000 per student per year and had been teaching first and second graders about “deconstructing the gender binary”—the idea that there’s no such thing as girls or boys, just a spectrum of relative girlness and boyness. 

The Sinclairs weren’t the only parents who had protested the new gender-identity curriculum—most families in their daughter’s class were upset and had been talking about it among themselves. But the Sinclairs had been unwilling to stay quiet. As a result, administrators had suggested that they were homophobic and accused them of tarnishing MCDS’s reputation. (An MCDS attorney had accused the Sinclairs of “defamation” for accusing MCDS of “predatory ‘grooming’ of children.” The Sinclairs never made that accusation.) Friends had stopped replying to their texts. Teachers said they felt unsafe around them. When word got out about why Charlotte, 8, and Carter, 5, had been kicked out, the Sinclairs had to decide whether they could stay in the Bay Area. 

“I had no problem being a pariah in Marin,” Beka said. “We were worried about raising our kids long term in an area that was embracing these destructive ideologies.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/06/manufacturing_social_justice_warriors_on_an_industrial_scale.html

For over a half century, American institutions of higher education have been guilty of promoting oikophobia — hatred of one’s own people and, more generally, Western civilization. Instruction initially only occurred in traditional academic disciplines like English and Sociology where youngsters learned about America’s racism, sexism, and multiple other sins. Within a few years, America-bashing had its very own departments, notably Women’s Studies, Black Studies, and other “grievances studies” departments.  

Remarkably, despite the plain-to-see pernicious impact of this “education,” it continues to thrive and expand. America-hating academics resemble drug addicts unable to achieve highs from the original dose and thus must move on to ever-larger amounts. At some point, alas, this addictive pursuit may prove fatal, and the same may be true in education as our schools continue to demonize America.

The latest installment of this national suicide on-the-installment urge is the burgeoning field of “social justice” as a separate academic major. This is not just sneaking in some criticism of Americas in a traditional history course; nor some freshman orientation lecture to exorcize white privilege. Far worse. This is ROTC for the woke.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-assault-on-childrens-psyches

Patricia (a pseudonym) is the mother of a teenage girl who in recent years has come to identify as transgender. She lives in California, considers herself progressive, votes Democrat, and leads a group for parents of children with rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)—that is, youth who suddenly experience distress with their bodies and believe that undergoing medical “transition” will make them whole again. When I spoke to her recently, she recounted how her daughter’s at-first-lesbian and then trans identity emerged in response to feelings of shame about being white.

I have since spoken to more than a dozen ROGD parents and parent-group leaders who tell a similar story. Their schools compulsively tell their children how awful it is to be white, how white people enjoy unearned “privilege,” how they benefit from “systems” put in place by and for white people for the sole purpose of oppressing “people of color.” Plagued by guilt, the children—almost all of them girls—rush to the sanctuary of “LGBTQ+” identity. Once there, they are catapulted into hero status. According to Patricia, some teachers at her daughter’s school are more forgiving toward “queer” and “trans” kids who hand in their homework late.

The students, especially the girls, absorb this messaging. They are acutely sensitive to how identity affects their social status and academic fortunes. They want the warmth that comes with queer/trans identity, but above all they don’t want to be thought of as vicious oppressors. Lacking maturity and self-confidence, they fail to put “anti-racist” indoctrination in its proper context. They do not appreciate its ahistorical, anti-intellectual, and anti-humanist foundations, nor are they aware of the incentives leading teachers and administrators to foist it on them. Being white is not something these teenagers can escape, but they can mitigate its social costs by declaring themselves part of an oppressed group.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/compelling-diversity-and-punishing-dissent-richard-l-cravatts/

As more evidence that universities continue to be obsessed with race and are in thrall with the pursuit of racial “justice” and “equity,” the Board of Directors of California Community Colleges has decided that the system will now grade its employees, including, of course, faculty, on the extent to which they promote “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility.” The guidelines of a March proposal “include DEIA competencies and criteria as a minimum standard for evaluating the performance of all employees,” and, in case a staff or faculty member was disinterested in this mandatory thinking about race, the rules firmly “provide employees an opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of DEIA and anti-racist principles.”

The California Community Colleges system is not the first to mandate DEIA “competence” and adherence as a component of hiring and tenure decisions. A recent report by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) found that “DEI criteria were found in tenure standards at 21.5 percent of institutions.” 

In April, as one recent example, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced that it will demand diversity-contribution statements in which faculty must profess their allegiance to goals of diversity and inclusion as part of the process of tenure and promotion.

Unsurprising, UC Berkeley instated a similar policy, portentously entitled “Guidelines for Assessing Faculty Candidate Contributions to Advancing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Berkeley,” which has as its broad mission to advance “diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are responsibilities of all Berkeley faculty through their research, teaching, and/or service.”

https://www.nas.org/blogs/statement/regime-change-repelling-the-dei-assault-on-higher-education?utm_

Criticism of American society for its inequitable treatment of blacks and other minority groups has become a focal point of American education at every level of instruction. Sometimes this criticism is historically well-grounded and tempered by recognition of social, political, and economic complexity. But more often this criticism veers into simplistic claims and fictions presented as fact. The latter sort of critique has become conspicuous in many of the nation’s public schools and has aroused opposition from esteemed historians and parents of all races and ethnicities who object to curricula and teaching practices that treat American society as fundamentally racist and therefore illegitimate. Similar complaints have been leveled at colleges and universities, including graduate schools of law, education, and medicine. But objections to the so-called “anti-racist” agenda in post-secondary education has not drawn nearly as much attention as it has in K-12 schools. In this essay I intend to address the critique of America on racial grounds mainly at the college and university level, but problems in the public schools will necessarily come into the picture.

Words Matter

America’s racial critics often disarm their opponents by using a vocabulary whose unassuming or technical demeanor hides radical meanings. Because many of these words and phrases are ambiguous, I will start by setting out these terms as I shall use them.

Anti-racism is a word contrived by Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi. It looks as if it means ‘opposed to racism,’ but Kendi and his followers use it to mean racial favoritism towards blacks, deliberate discrimination against whites aimed at compensating for “systemic” racial injustice, and the suppression of all speech and action opposed to their preferred policies.

Systemic racism refers to the supposedly omnipresent racially disparate treatment built into institutions such as law, the real estate market, medical practice, and education. The proponents of the concept of systemic racism argue that it generally operates outside the awareness of white people or other beneficiaries of the privileges it confers on one group at the expense of another. Even individuals who decry racism and are free from any personal racial animus are thus part of systemically racist institutions.

Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) is a branch of neo-Marxist social analysis formulated by Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell in the late 1970s and further developed by his colleague, Kimberlé Crenshaw. Bell and Crenshaw argued that the Civil Rights Movement had failed to reform American society in any fundamental way and that, rightly seen, all American institutions are systemically racist. CRT found a niche in academe among social theorists who hold that participants in a society seldom understand how the social order is actually structured and why it is that way. Most consequentially, CRT achieved substantial influence among scholars focusing on education, and in the curricula of education schools. Proponents of CRT see themselves as liberating people from their illusions by showing them that American institutions are built on and continue racial oppression. They also believe they have a duty to subordinate all activities of life, and especially education, to CRT’s dis-illusioning project.

Diversity was a doctrine first articulated by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in a 1978 decision. Powell argued that colleges and universities might engage in some racial favoritism towards black students if the schools could show that this would advance the “intellectual diversity” of college classes and thus benefit all students regardless of race. Powell’s opinion was not supported by any other Justice at the time and thus lacked the force of law, but colleges and universities soon began to justify racial preferences in admissions by citing diversity. In time, the idea that racial “diversity” was a means to achieve “intellectual diversity” gave way to the widespread assumption that racial diversity is an end in itself. In 2003, the Supreme Court in a majority decision in the case of Grutter v. Bollinger agreed that “diversity” was an acceptable reason for racial preferences in college admissions, provided that the use of preferences was somewhat disguised.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) is the contemporary expansion of the diversity doctrine. “Equity” replaces the older idea of individual equality under the law with the idea that all social goods should be distributed in proportion to each ethnic group’s size relative to the total population. “Inclusion,” which violates the principles of freedom of association and individual merit, requires the extension of group-identity quotas to every part of society, public and private. This fixation on group-identity extends beyond race, as the proponents of DEI increasingly write “gender identity” into institutional policy. DEI ideologues share with their “anti-racist” peers the habit of suppressing their critics rather than answering their criticisms.