The US seems to elect some of the most conservative politicians in the Western world, but has perhaps the wokest institutions. Civil rights law makes all major institutions subject to the will of left-wing bureaucrats, activists, and judges at the expense of normal citizens.
By the time this post goes up, I expect a lot of you will have seen Hanania’s piece. Somehow, over the course of the 1960s the culture managed to go from lots of anti-black racism to lots of anti-white racism without stopping at “color-blind.” Hanania blames the civil rights bureaucracy. Indeed, that bureaucracy might be an iconic example of a self-licking ice cream cone, in that its institutional survival is inversely related to its effectiveness at addressing the problem.
Note that Shelby Steele would blame white guilt. I would caution against any simple cause-and-effect story.
Finally, this amusing comment from a prior post.
DEI is a fad, and will disappear like the Macarena.
Imagine a world in which universities and corporations had set up organizational units dedicated to the Macarena. It would be better than the world we got.
The USDA, the Pentagon, the diversity bureaucrats…as tenacious as barnacles.
I found the piece by Hanania quite enlightening. Unfortunately.
Differential outcomes may be more important than the bureaucracy. After several generations of affirmative action, college admission preferences, etc, we find black Americans still underperform white Americans on lots of metrics people care about. The progressive left obviously can’t draw the conclusion asdf and others do, so something like DiAngelo’s or Kendi’s worldview follows naturally, if not necessarily.
Let’s say we banned disparate impact through Executive Order, much like Trump banned CRT. Could the next administration not just reverse it, much like Biden reversed Trump on Day 1?
Or let’s say there is some overwhelming democratic referendum (like affirmative action in CA recently). Can’t the decision makers just ignore it (UCLA ditching the SAT so it can keep discriminating based on race)?
Don’t get me wrong, we should always and every fight this battle and it’s an important one with a clear and worthy goal.
But as you say, absent some acceptable explanation for performance gaps people are always going to feel like its “just wrong” and that they need to “do something” about it. This impulse could temporarily be channeled into other “do somethings” like joining Teach for America, but when these things don’t bear fruit people get frustrated and move on to alternative explanations, however ridiculous.
P.S. I think the best thing most people can do is vote in their local school board elections, but I think it’s an error to make the election just about CRT. There are lots of things a school board has to do, and you need to have a complete platform and not be one note. With everyone pissed off about school closures this shouldn’t be that hard a time to push out incumbents.
“P.S. I think the best thing most people can do is vote in their local school board elections”
Yeah, thanks for doing all of the heavy lifting to impart this insight.
P.S. if you’d like to see what a winning formula looks like, try this:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/how-southlake-texas-won-its-battle-against-critical-race-theory/
Hint: it takes more than voters to make it happen. It takes $, legal experts and a rolling up of the sleeves to do the hard work.
The primary goal from the article is to win school board seats because that is who sets the agenda.
I think if you want to win school board seats in blue areas rather than red areas you need a comprehensive plan that goes beyond criticizing CRT. In a red area that might be enough to win an election by default, but not in a blue area.
For instance, schools still have to make kids wear masks and socials distance around here, and since kids won’t be fully vaccinated by the fall, I suspect they will force that on the kids this fall. Even if they open (still an if) it will be hellish to make kids go through that bullshit again.
That’s what I’d be focusing on in my school district elections if I wanted to win, but the CRT crowd is silent on it. I wouldn’t even make school board elections in a blue area primarily about CRT, even if it was an important part of my platform.
They also do a lot of advertising for private christian schools…but the whole point of this is to fix our public schools. What message is this sending…give the hell up and pull your kids out? It’s weird.
People do need to “do the work”, but having a circle jerk at the local Republican Party meeting isn’t productive work so much as activity.
Lastly, I think the biggest impact you could have is to overturn laws that make petition signatures public information. The elections around here are recall elections because it will be years before their terms are up. Recalls require signatures, but everyone knows that if you put your signature on a recall petition then your kids and yourself will get targeted (you might even lose your job).
That’s what I’d focus on if you want to win in blue areas. It’s going to take more then just campaigning on a culture war issue most of a red area already agrees with.
Mask mandates were a big deal over here as well. A lot of angry parents showed up at school board meetings to have them overturned. They were successful and the mandates were lifted towards the end of the school year that just ended.
Separately, CRT is incredibly unpopular and not just among the red folks. I’m too lazy to find the polling on this, but our host posted about this a few weeks ago. Also, as you know, have a look at the Prop 16 defeat in crazy blue CA.
Lastly, as soon as the blue parents figure out that CRT also means the potential end of AP, gifted and other accelerated programs, the support plummets even further.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1405173417129611264
Most relevant on this issue:
Reps and Independents Strongly against CRT, but Dems 86% support.
This makes CRT ban likely in red and purple areas, but difficult in blue ones.
The best path in all cases is to run a complete school board platform rather than single issue campaign, but more relevant in blue areas.
Like all politicians I’d talk about what the group I’m in front of wants to talk about. Out here we have lots of Asians so focus on AP courses, etc when in front of them.
The “disparate impact” idea was and is much favored by business and other interests. It stopped highly risky litigation.
This in effect legalized racial quotas which then became another predictable and therefore manageable cost of doing business, which could be passed on to others in the form of lower wages to employees and higher prices to customers. Anyone familiar with large business enterprises know that they all have quite a few incompetent minority employees that they otherwise would not employ, who are put in sinecure positions where they can’t do much harm. It is sad for them, since they know why they are there, and it has to be demoralizing. Also for the minority employee who actually does perform but is faced with colleagues always wondering whether he is one of the drones.
> DEI is a fad, and will disappear like the Macarena.
This is small comfort. At my Tadpole’s daycare centre, I found them teaching the Macarena to small children.
There are a number of reasons why the US did not “stop at color blind”. Part of it was law professor’s development of the idea of “disparate impact” and the Supreme Court’s adoption of it in Griggs v. Duke Power in 1971. Griggs essentially reversed the burden of proof whenever there were fewer black employees than the courts thought there were eligible applicants. Plaintiffs didn’t have to show the employers had discriminated. Employers had to show they hadn’t. But it went even further: employees had to prove to the judge’s satisfaction that any selection criteria that had a “disparate impact” was absolutely necessary. This was an interpretation of the the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibition of racial discrimination. It was unanimous and written by the “conservative” Chief Justice Warren Burger.
But statutes can be changed and I lay a tremendous amount of blame on Richard Nixon. He never complained about Griggs. And he tried to be clever. If Democrats had their blacks, he’d create some Republican ones with things like the Office of Minority Business Enterprise. The name makes it clear that color-blindness was not the policy of the administration.
Perhaps if he had declared over and over, “Racial discrimination is wrong, anywhere and any time, by anyone for any reason, we wouldn’t be where we are today, where racial discrimination is illegal and wrong (very wrong!) if done by the wrong people for the wrong reasons but legal and good (very good!) if done by the right people for the right reasons.
I think you have a way too US-centric view of wokeness. This thing is running rampant in most places of Europe, too. Legislation here is different e.g. in my country it is illegal to fire someone for their political opinions (originally established to protect unions), yet we get the same wokeness. This is foremost a cultural issue.
Yes, people wonder how this is spreading worldwide overnight: it’s the internet, stupid. Any time we have an entirely new medium, some people are going to test its limits with new frights and scares that the credulous masses unused to the medium will take seriously.
How many people have ever seen a person overdose after swallowing a bag of fentanyl? I and most people never have, so when that smartphone raw footage hit our eyes, it could be spun as blatant racism by the cops. Combine that with various Woke theories like CRT bubbling up in academia for decades to try and explain the black underperformance Justin mentions, the DNC itching for a scandal to pin on Trump, and pent-up frustration because of the worldwide lockdowns, and you had all the kindling for a racial bonfire, that was then carefully sparked and fanned by Woke activists, politicians, and the media.
It will burn itself out, partially because enough people have been inoculated against such stupidity but more importantly the rot has already set in at most of these institutions and they’re dying anyway.
Dying? Universities get more money every year and just about every parent wants their kid to go, and if someone else can pay for it, that’s just great–insuring the money train will continue. The NYT Times is one of the few successes in journalism, making lots of money and still believed by lots and lots and lots of successful and otherwise intelligent people.
Try to keep up:
– Marginal colleges keep shrinking or closing and everybody expects the same massive collapse that happened to newspapers to hit colleges next.
– Newsroom jobs at newspapers dropped 51% over the last decade and other stats
Yes, Harvard and the NYT will hold out the longest, as the flagships with the most money and reputation, but they will die too, as that entire model is outmoded now that we have the internet. You are right that the only thing that will sustain them long past their sell-by date is their masses of credulous customers, but most will wander away with time.
You are absolutely right that “marginal” colleges are shrinking or closing. But as the word describes, they are marginal, usually small and private. Then, their campus often gets bought by another bigger college, frequently the local state university. The business is shrinking but is mostly just rearranging.
Last years experiment with “distance learning” has probably made the model even stronger.
Newspapers are indeed hemorrhaging newsroom personnel but the news business is pretty robust. The local tv newses make money, as do even the network newses. The morning shows are still money printers. And many of the people employed in those places take their cues from the Times and the Post.
> The business is shrinking but is mostly just rearranging.
So far… that’s how the newspapers consoled themselves when their ad revenue flatlined from 1989-2005, then real competition came in, and they collapsed. The colleges know that online learning will similarly take off one day and demolish them too.
> the news business is pretty robust.
No, the legacy news business is in panic, as radio and papers have been decimated and TV is starting on the same downslide. Of course, there will always be a “news business” online too, but it will look much more like Substack than the current MSM.
Radio and newspapers have indeed been major hurt. I think it is inevitable that there will be fewer reporter jobs in the future than there were in the past. But that doesn’t mean the business will die, or even become marginal. Capitalism is all about rearrangement, “creative destruction” in Schumpeter’s words.
Last year was a year of “distance learning”, aka “online learning”. The reaction of students and parents was generally negative. To expect it to “take off” any time soon is, I think, overoptimistic.
> I think it is inevitable that there will be fewer reporter jobs in the future
On the contrary, I think online reporting will boom, at blogs and platforms like Substack or Ghost. It just won’t be printed on paper, and other broadcast technologies like radio and TV will die out too.
> Last year was a year of “distance learning”, aka “online learning”. The reaction of students and parents was generally negative.
I’ve heard more of a mixed reaction, but you’re right that current college-goers are not going to be the early adopters. It’s going to be the kids who couldn’t afford the ridiculous college tuitions or the bright kids who couldn’t get into the name-brand schools. Starting with that disaffected niche, online learning will grow till it kills off legacy academia.
I can’t say precisely when that happens, as nobody would have predicted that it would take more than a decade since the introduction of the web for newspaper ad revenue to plunge, but that is what happened. It takes time for these new trends to gain momentum, and then all of a sudden they’re unstoppable and the old institutions collapse. It is inevitable that academia will collapse during the next decade or two, but impossible to say precisely when.
Price-sensitive kids (and parents) could start a big switch to online. Or the federal government could increase student aid once again. I’m not happy about it but I see the latter as more probable.