E-Pluribus | Mar. 3, 2021
Here is a round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
David French: Is There a Civil Rights Remedy for Toxic Wokeness?
David French suggests in his latest French Press at The Dispatch that civil rights laws may have a part to play in fighting against illiberalism in the media, academia and the workplace. French draws on his experience as a litigator in the last decade or so taking on college campus free speech infringements.
I’m convinced that litigation was the precipitating event that forced change. Simply put, universities kept losing and losing lawsuits. In fact, no university has ever won a speech code challenge on the merits. The policies were a legal disaster, and schools collectively paid millions of dollars in legal fees after mounting fruitless and futile defenses to clearly unconstitutional policies.
Why bring this up? Because it just might be time for an equivalent effort aimed at the most illiberal and hyper-woke elements of critical theory in the workplace, in academia, and in the media. It is increasingly clear that many elements of modern academic and workplace orthodoxy (including punitive actions) are incompatible with the plain text and obvious meaning of federal civil rights laws.
[ . . . ]
The bottom line is clear: The more that courts ban all forms of sex discrimination or all forms of race discrimination that actually harm members of a protected class, the less room exists for explicitly race- or sex-conscious workplace or academic policies that are designed from the ground-up to be punitively race-conscious and/or punitively racially discriminatory. There should be, for example, no room in Title VII or Title VI for attacks on “whiteness” or harmful (invidious) discriminatory treatment of any racial group.
The distinctions are often a matter of common sense. It’s one thing to engage in diversity training that celebrates the benefits of inclusion. It’s another thing to teach a segment of your employees that their race or ethnicity is inherently laced with toxicity. It’s one thing to engage in affirmative action hiring designed to ameliorate documented past racial discrimination. It’s another thing entirely to impose rigid, higher standards on a different racial minority to limit their advancement or to impose different disciplinary standards on employees by race or sex.
Moreover, successful litigation has a prophylactic effect. It’s not as if litigation has to be won employer by employer. A few successful suits can set an example for the whole. During my litigation career, we sued dozens of universities, yet hundreds adjusted their policies.
The bottom line is clear. The more that hyper-left and hyper-woke policies and practices divide employees and students into distinct identity groups, and the more they enforce workplace policies and practices on the basis of those group differences, the more those policies and practices will collide with the plain language of federal anti-discrimination statutes — at the exact moment that the plain language is growing more important in the interpretation of statutory law.
Read more at The Dispatch.
Dan McLaughlin: Against Canceling Dr. Seuss
In the context of Dr. Seuss and six of his books that will no longer be published, Dan McLaughlin at National Review takes a shot at defining “cancel culture” with a five-point test:
“The term “cancel culture,” like “political correctness,” is hated by progressives, ostensibly because it is vague but actually for the opposite reason: because it gives a name to a real phenomenon, and naming a thing is the first step to organizing resistance to it. The best way to kill an idea is to prevent the language in which it can be expressed. While those of us horrified by cancel culture should be rigorous and fair in how we apply the term, we should not shy away from calling it out by name. The campaign against Dr. Seuss is cancel culture of the worst kind.
Cancel culture is not simply the act of pointing out offensive words, deeds, and images and holding people to account for them. It has five hallmarks. One, it starts by defining “offensive” to include a vast array of things that the political Left disapproves of (some legitimately offensive, others obviously sane and true), while normalizing and defending things that genuinely offend others. Two, its list of offenses is constantly growing and changing, such that even the most politically attuned people can never know what will be grounds for cancellation next. Three, it lacks a sense of proportion or context: everything is judged not only as if it just happened in the present time, but as if it is the only thing the offender ever did. Four, it treats the reader or listener as mentally fragile and incapable of learning or nuance, such that he or she must be protected from exposure to uncomfortable things — an unreasonable way of treating children, let alone adults. And five, it lacks mercy: The living must be made to issue groveling apologies and Maoist self-flagellations and sacked from jobs having nothing to do with their offenses, and the dead are beyond redemption.”
Read more at National Review.
John McWhorter and Sergiu Klainerman on Race and Math
Princeton Professor Sergiu Klainerman at Bari Weiss’ Common Sense and John McWhorter at It Bears Mentioning both have good and lengthy discussions about the idea that math, as it is currently taught in schools, has some innate racial component.
First, Klainerman:
Attempts to “deconstruct” mathematics, deny its objectivity, accuse it of racial bias, and infuse it with political ideology have become more and more common — perhaps, even, at your child’s elementary school.
This phenomenon is part of what has been dubbed “The Great Awokening.” As others have explained powerfully, the ideology incubated in academia, where it indoctrinated plenty of bright minds. It then migrated, through those true believers, into our important cultural, religious and political institutions. Now it is affecting some of the country’s most prominent businesses.
Unlike the traditional totalitarianism practiced by former communist countries, like the Romania I grew up in, this version is soft. It enforces its ideology not by jailing dissenters or physically eliminating them, but by social shaming, mob punishment, guilt by association, and coerced speech.
When it comes to education, I believe the woke ideology is even more harmful than old-fashioned communism.
Communism had a strong sense of objective reality anchored in the belief that humans are capable of discovering universal truths. It forcefully asserted, in fact, the absolute truth of dialectic materialism, as revealed by its founders Marx, Engels and Lenin. Communist ideology held science and mathematics in the highest regard, even though it often distorted the former for doctrinal reasons.
Mathematics was largely immune to ideological pressure, and thus thrived in most communist countries. Being skilled in math was a source of great societal prestige for school children. And it was a great equalizer: those from socioeconomically disadvantaged families had a chance to compete on equal footing with those from privileged ones.
Like children all over the world, I was attracted to mathematics because of its formal beauty, the elegance and precision of its arguments, and the unique sense of achievement I was able to get by finding the right answer to a difficult problem. Mathematics also granted me an escape from the intoxicating daily drum of party propaganda — a refuge from the crushing atmosphere of political and ideological conformity.
The woke ideology, on the other hand, treats both science and mathematics as social constructs and condemns the way they are practiced, in research and teaching, as manifestations of white supremacy, euro-centrism, and post-colonialism.
From McWhorter:
There is a document getting around called Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction, a guide put together by a group of educators. It has a black boy on the cover.
The idea is to show us how our racial reckoning of late ought change how we expose black kids to math. I suppose the counsel is also intended for kids of other types of melanin, but this is in essence a document that could be called “Math For Black Kids.”
[ . . . ]
More to the point is that this entire document is focused on an idea that making black kids be precise is immoral.
Yes, the document pays lip service otherwise, claiming at one point to seek to “teach rich, thoughtful, complex mathematics.” And rather often, the word praxis is used. But the thrust of this pamphlet is that:
1. a focus on getting the “right” answer is “perfectionism” or “either/or thinking;”
2. the idea that teachers are teachers and students are learners is wrong;
3. to think of it as a problem that the expectations you have of students are not met is racist;
4. to teach math in a linear fashion with skills taught in sequence is racist;
5. to value “procedural fluency” — i.e. knowing how to do the fractions, long division … — over “conceptual knowledge” is racist. That is, black kids are brilliant to know what math is trying to do, to know “what it’s all about,” rather than to actually do the math, just as many of us read about what physics or astrophysics accomplishes without ever intending to master the math that led to the conclusions;
6. to require students to “show their work” is racist;
7. requiring students to raise their hand before speaking “can reinforce paternalism and powerhoarding, in addition to breaking the process of thinking, learning, and communicating.”
You may wonder if this is a cartoon but no, this is real! This is actually what this document tells us, again and again. This, folks, is the “Critical Race Theory” that so many of us are resisting, not a simple program for “social justice.” To distrust this document is not to be against social justice, but against racism.
Around Twitter
Partial thread from FIRE’s Greg Luckianoff on “corporatism” on college campuses:
