One of the most irritating terms of our time must be “gaslighting”. It sounds so serious, but is just another of those pseudo-criminal charges that people fling around online, as though it has a well-known application in the real world. Loose in definition, assumed by the user to be understood by all, it is merely a form of elite jargon, known and understood only by a few.
Nice Racism—and the “anti-racism” consulting business—rakes in the bucks while losing hearts and minds.
We are, especially here in Brooklyn, living in Robin DiAngelo’s world. And yet she seems so unhappy about it.
The five-minute walk to my neighborhood bookstore to buy DiAngelo’s new book Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm is filled with totems signaling the continued ascendancy of the self-styled anti-racist movement.
No one should be forced to account for the historic atrocities of their ‘race’.
A few weeks ago, researcher Christopher Rufo was asked what he likes about white people or about being white, during a polite but heated conversation with television host Marc Lamont Hill. Rufo – who, for the record, I know and like – politely demurred. He said that he considers himself Italian-American rather than ‘white’, and that he doesn’t see much point to the broad labels that modern Americans insist on applying to racial groups.
Traditionalist and conservative America once was the U.S. military’s greatest defender.
Bipartisan conservatives in Congress ensured generous Pentagon budgets. When generals, active or retired, became controversial, conservative America usually could be counted on to stick with them.
Seems that was the goal.
Not happening in schools at all. https://t.co/8Klb2D1L2N
— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 1, 2021
Oxfam worker says she feels ‘under attack for being white, English and voting Leave’ as staff vent their anger at being asked to fill in ‘whiteness’ survey
An Oxfam worker said she felt ‘under attack for being white, English and voting Leave’ as staff vented their anger at being asked to fill in a racial justice survey.
Staff members in the UK were asked if they would describe themselves as non-racist, anti-racist or none/neither in the questionnaire, written by a four-person strong working group and sent to 1,800 employees.
Along with the questions – which also ask participants to state their ethnicity – the survey states that ‘all echelons of power, to some degree, exist to serve whiteness (whether by legacy, the presence of neo-colonialism or cultural imperialism)’.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley says he is interested in theory. This past week, he defended teaching critical race theory in U.S. military academies because he thinks our troops should understand “white rage.” He said that he himself wants to understand why the American families who send their children to serve under him are angry.
And so he believes that it’s a good thing to read books by authors like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi who call white Americans racist. He says it’s good for the military and the country, but, in fact, it’s just good for Milley and the rest of the senior officer class that’s making its retirement plans.
Meet the CRT burghers
“… When someone like Simon Campbell summons the US Constitution and the First Amendment to his side of the table, he has a point. CRT and its progeny are a doctrine aimed at delegitimizing America. These doctrines aim to unseat the US Constitution as a racist document. They see the First Amendment as protecting white supremacy by giving white people exclusive control over public speech. And they treat the whole dynamic of the county as a contest over ‘power’. In that contest, censorship by the proponents of CRT is fully warranted, since they are battling the unfair advantages of the white racist regime.”
How did an obscure diversity trainer from an impoverished background become one of the most influential thinkers in the world? Last summer, at the peak of the George Floyd protests, Robin DiAngelo’s slim volume White Fragility, which was already a bestseller in America, became the number one selling book on Amazon’s website: it sold so many copies it soon ran out of stock.
A headmaster has warned that teachers are becoming ‘incredibly anxious’ of being pounced on by pupils over micro-aggressions.
Nicholas Hewlett, head of St Dunstan’s College private school in southeast London, said staff were worried by a ‘righteous generation’ of children who were looking for their teachers to ‘trip up’ on even ‘small, persistent slights’.
Mr Hewlett made headlines earlier this year when he announced he was ‘happily gay and in a same-sex relationship’ during a school assembly.
British schools should not teach the term “white privilege” unless they explain that it is a “highly contentious” concept, because it is divisive and “unnecessarily antagonistic,” a UK government minister has warned.
Writing in The Telegraph, Kemi Badenoch, Britain’s equalities minister, said, “The intense focus on race over the last year is leading to an increased racialisation of issues and incidents across society.”
The overarching ideology of Pentagon officials is larger military budgets and ongoing permanent war posture. Their new war target, explicitly, is domestic “white rage.”
For two hundred forty years, American generals have not exactly been defined by adamant public advocacy for left-wing cultural dogma. Yet there appeared to be a great awakening at the Pentagon on Wednesday when Gen. Mark Milley, the highest-ranking military officer in the U.S. as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified at a House hearing. The Chairman vehemently defended the teaching of critical race theory at West Point and, referencing the January 6 Capitol riot, said, “it is important that we train and we understand … and I want to understand white rage. And I’m white.”
Free to Learn is a new non-profit that is taking a non-partisan approach to highlighting the damage politicized content like critical theories are doing to our children and the quality of the education they receive. The group’s mission is to support parents, caregivers, and grassroots community organizations fighting to rid their schools of political content and to refocus on core skills.
The executive order “establishes an ambitious, whole-of-government initiative that will take a systematic approach to embedding DEIA [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility] in Federal hiring and employment practices,” according to a White House fact sheet. In practice, it will ensure that federal agencies employ tenets associated with Critical Race Theory (CRT) within their hiring practices and day-to-day activities.
The fight over critical race theory has consumed American media. Conservatives have rallied against an ideology that seeks to divide the country into the racial categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed.” Liberals have defended it as a “lens” for understanding vague buzzwords like “systemic racism” and “racial equity.”
