Right on Target: Rufo on Doreen St. Felix and the New Yorker's Racialism Problem

I think this is just about exactly right.

   An important point: stop with the forced confessions. That's practically Maoist. Let Ms. St. Felix say what she wants. Better to know what such people are thinking than to pressure/bully them into silence or false compliance. We shouldn't go down the same road the soft-totalitarian left has gone down.

   Another important point--though this isn't quite what Rufo is saying, I think: people like St. Felix do have something of an excuse: a lot of her racist anger is probably a result of brainwashing at an elite university (Brown, in this case). I'm not sure how weighty that excuse is, but it's not weightless.

   In fact, this is one important reason it's so important to reform universities and move them back toward centrism and sanity: they are brainwashing people who, though not exactly kids anymore, are also not exactly adults.

   As for The New Yorker...well...it's much more difficult to find an excuse.

   "Antiracism" itself is/was an insidious thing. As with so many politically correct / woke ideas and terms, it's basically ambiguous. It sounds like it means being against racism. In fact, it's a crackpot, totalitarian idea that exaggerates the importance of race and the prevalence of racism. (Does it promote racism against whites? I'm not sure. Maybe. I don't care about that part so much.) Kendi's "antiracism" is built on a really stupid argument to the effect that, at every moment of your life, you must be opposing racism against blacks. Any moment you aren't spending doing that, you are being racist. This has led to insane ideas like "antiracist math:" any math class that doesn't include "antiracist" elements is racist. (Actually, it's not just about classes: any moment you spend, y'know, doing math (e.g. doing proofs) rather than antiracisting is a racist moment.) Of course what the progressive left refuses to recognize is that it actually entails that everything done in a "math" class (or anything else) must be "antiracist"...else it's racist. Which, of course, entails that math is racist--and that any time spent doing math is racist. There's no justification for chunking things up into classes--what matters is moments. A moment spent learning addition is a racist moment. And this, of course, goes for every subject--history, literature, philosophy, chemistry...and, in fact, everything else as well. A moment spent looking at the moon, walking in the woods, playing with your dog, joking around with your wife, working on your truck, digging up fossils, reading poetry, brushing your teeth...racist, racist, racist, racist. It's abject madness.

   I've explained in detail why Kendi's argument is stupid, but I'm too lazy to do it again here--and too lazy to look for the old posts. But the conclusion of the argument is so stupid that I don't even think it's very profitable to understand the details.

   It's astonishing to me that outfits like The New Yorker can be taken in by something like this--but they were. And not just a little bit.