E-Pluribus | Mar. 24, 2021
Here is a round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Matt Taibbi: A Biden Appointee’s Troubling Views On The First Amendment
Matt Taibbi is concerned about some of the views of Biden appointee to the National Economic Council Timothy Wu, a Columbia law professor. Wu has on more than one occasion expressed doubts that the First Amendment has aged well and may no longer be able to handle the internet-based media environment that is today’s reality. It is Wu’s apparent nostalgia for the 1950s “media environment” that saw something of an unholy alliance between government and corporate media that especially raises red flags for Taibbi.
Wu’s comment about “returning… to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s” is telling. This was a disastrous period in American media that not only resulted in a historically repressive atmosphere of conformity, but saw all sorts of glaring social problems covered up or de-emphasized with relative ease, from Jim Crow laws to fraudulent propaganda about communist infiltration to overthrows and assassinations in foreign countries.
The wink-wink arrangement that big media companies had with the government persisted through the early sixties, and enabled horribly destructive lies about everything from the Bay of Pigs catastrophe to the Missile Gap to go mostly unchallenged, for a simple reason: if you give someone formal or informal power to choke off lies, they themselves may now lie with impunity. It’s Whac-a-Mole: in an effort to solve one problem, you create a much bigger one elsewhere, incentivizing official deceptions.
That 1950s period is attractive to modern politicians because it was a top-down system. This was the era in which worship of rule by technocratic experts became common, when the wisdom of the “Best and the Brightest” was unchallenged. A yearning to return to those times runs through these new theories about speech, and is prevalent throughout today’s Washington, a city that seems to think everything should be run by people with graduate degrees.
Visit Taibbi’s Substack to read it all.
Zaid Jilani: White People Don’t Have a Monopoly on Hatred
Bari Weiss gave Zaid Jilani the opportunity to address her 40,000 strong subscriber base as a guest writer for her Common Sense Substack. Jilani, a Pakistani-American Muslim, writes of a school administrator from his formative years who helped him face his own culturally-absorbed hatred and stereotyping. Jilani argues that current conventional thinking on racism in general, and Critical Race Theory in particular, robs minorities of the chance to take responsibility for their own prejudices and thus also robs them of the chance to take full ownership of the power they are often told they are denied in this country.
So why are so many self-described liberals embracing an ideology that seems to insist that white racism is the only kind of racism? That bigotry only counts when the perpetrator comes from a “powerful” group? That denies that the same person can be both a victim and a victimizer?
I suspect that many white liberals — ridden with guilt over American history and biases that still exist among the white majority — believe they are doing minorities like me a favor by denying us the responsibility of addressing our own prejudices. Critical race theorists often argue that the true definition of racism should be prejudice plus power, implying that only whites can be racist But hidden within that construction is the assumption that minorities can never be powerful.
My high school administrator disagreed. He looked at me and saw a young man full of potential. I wasn’t some domino set in motion by centuries of white supremacy. I was a human being with critical thinking skills and agency. And because he forced me to take responsibility for my own prejudices, I was able to become the person I am today — a journalist whose words carry the weight of social influence and power.
Read it all at Bari Weiss’s Common Sense Substack.
Alexandria Brown: How Labeling Books As “Diverse” Reinforces White Supremacy
The author’s bio says of author and librarian Alexandria Brown that “[d]iversity, equity, and inclusion set the foundation of all her work.” But in this August 2020 blog post, Brown expressed strong reservations about being too free with labels in an attempt to elevate or promote literature by BIPOC individuals (Black, Indigenous, and Person of Color.) Though Brown’s writing is heavily infused with “woke” language, her observations point out a key flaw in some of today’s conventional thinking about how we can achieve greater equality, tolerance and acceptance, and a true appreciation of the diversity that exists in our society.
Although people often use “multicultural,” “diverse,” and “POC” as if they were synonyms, they aren’t. “Diverse” or “diversity” can relate to almost anything: gender, sexual identity, romantic identity, religious beliefs (or lack thereof), citizenship, place of birth, political affiliation, ability, age, etc. “Multicultural” is exactly what it says on the tin: different cultural groups sharing a space. Neither are inherently about race, though both are frequently used to imply that race is a factor. “POC” stands for “people of color.” I prefer to use the term BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and Person of Color). Indigenous people are not people of color; furthermore, “POC” is often used as a way to avoid saying “Black” and because of that many Black people (including me) prefer being called Black instead of POC.
If you plan to use labels with the words “multicultural,” “diverse,” or “POC” on them, are you using those terms correctly? How narrowly will you define multicultural? Will you include books by white authors and/or about white characters? If not, why not? Whiteness is a racial affinity and cultural identity. Before you even get to the labeling stage, how will you determine whether or not a book is “multicultural,” “diverse,” or “POC?” Who will do the physical labor of creating the relevant criteria? Who will evaluate, pull, label, reshelve, and update the catalogue?
But wait — there’s more! Are you labeling based on the author, the main character, or both? What if the book has a large cast but not all are BIPOC? Would you add a label to books about BIPOC by white authors like The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow or Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire? What about racially problematic books like American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins or The Help by Kathryn Stockett? Would you label books written by BIPOC that feature main characters that aren’t BIPOC like The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu?
Read it all at The Open Book Blog at Lee and Low Books.
