Yeah, somebody else pointed me in Tim Wise's direction a couple of months ago (I'd never heard of him before that), and I'm just as unimpressed now as I was then. What a collection of baseless assertions and faulty reasoning, pretty much from the first line. I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to say malicious intent though. At least I didn…
Yeah, somebody else pointed me in Tim Wise's direction a couple of months ago (I'd never heard of him before that), and I'm just as unimpressed now as I was then. What a collection of baseless assertions and faulty reasoning, pretty much from the first line. I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to say malicious intent though. At least I didn't see it.
This article is a classic example of something I'm seeing increasingly often from the far left (which is especially frustrating as I'd consider myself at the very least left-leaning), namely that they assert the most evil possible intentions for anybody who is even slightly further to the right than they are, and use that as justification for whatever agenda they feel like pushing.
An especially common tactic is the deep dive back as far as *1786!!* for the most emotive, awful examples of racism possible, because then it can be conflated with racism today, and anybody who dares question the bait and switch is obviously a genocidal racist monster...or something.
I don't really know what to say about articles like this. They're stupid, dishonest, cynical attempts to stir up emotion and tell people that anybody who disagrees with them is evil. They basically boil down to "racism is everywhere, all of the time and is basically the same as it was 150 years ago. Being a black person is a living nightmare that I am bravely trying to save them from. And if anybody disagrees with me, the only possible explanation is that they're an evil racist."
I can't fully express how worthless I think articles like this are, and how much I think the people who write them suck.
Steve, I don't agree with a lot of his conclusions, but I don't see either baseless assertions or faulty reasoning in this article. Could you elaborate?
Just kidding. My reply to Paul wasn't a general critique of Tim's work, as I said, I've only heard of him recently, and the one Paul linked was only the second article of his that I've every read, but I'll run through a few key criticisms.
First of all, right in the second paragraph he claims that "conservatives" want to "ban anti-racist curriculum in schools" which is demonstrably false (sadly it lays the foundation for everything that follows). The bills don't ban anti-racist teaching at all, in fact, some of them actively encourage it. They just stipulate that that education shouldn't teach certain obviously racist ideas, such as that one race is superior to another etc.
I've yet to have anybody explain what the problem with this is, other than that "the right want it so it must be bad".
Then he simply asserts things like this without any evidence:
"The right wishes to paper over injustice in the nation’s past or present, thereby helping to rationalize whatever inequities continue to face us."
and this:
"By downplaying racism as an ongoing force, they hope students will shrug at disproportionate police violence against unarmed Black people, unequal housing access, or disparities in income and occupational status, concluding that such things are somehow the fault of those victimized by them."
There are a whole bunch of serious allegations here, directed at the nameless, faceless "right", and yet he doesn't even try to defend them. He just asserts them so that we know who the bad guys are, and moves on, assuring us that "of course the conservatives would deny this, but never trying to give an honest representation of the opposing position. It's incredibly lazy.
Next he invokes abortion, anti-vax/anti-mask people and Satan himself as justification for suggesting that we should teach children whatever the hell we feel like. Presumably because if they're already being screwed up, what's the harm in making things a little worse?
A little later, as I mentioned to Paul, he goes all the way back to 1786 to dredge up the worst examples of racism he can find without in any way acknowledging how little they have to do with the present day. I'm especially annoyed by this one because it's such a lazy, transparent trick. Of course, talking about racist history is important. But making no attempt to contextualise it is a hack move.
Of course contextualising it makes it harder to make his next argument which is essentially that because very young black children experienced racism 250 years ago, it's fine to teach today's kids about violence and bigotry that I'd agree they aren't ready to grapple with. This is just a ridiculous, callous leap of reasoning.
If you want to teach very young children about racism, that's great, but there are many more valuable ways to do so than talking about injustice which they're obviously to young contextualise. Jane Elliott's "brown eyes, blue eyes" experiment always springs to mind. One of my teachers did a version of it with my class when I was little, and it stuck with me right through to today. I was probably about six or seven.
Tim's whole article is built on the premise that "the right" is this collective of unalloyed racist evil, and everything they say should be interpreted in the worst, most disingenuous, most bigoted light possible. This is childish reasoning at best. And worse, I suspect he's actually smart enough to realise that.
But worst of all, speaking as a writer, is that the article doesn't *say* anything. At least nothing deeper than; "the right is racist and evil" and "it's fine to teach children ideas they're not ready for because some of them are exposed to other ideas that they're not ready for." If you don't already completely agree with him, there's nothing to take away from it, because he's shamelessly strawmanned the opposing argument.
So yeah, this ended up much longer than I planned, but those are my main problems with it 😅
OK, I see your point. I wasn't really focused on his attacks on conservatives, because I was more interested in what he was proposing as teaching methods. It is ridiculous to infer that the Moms for Liberty thought it was OK that horrible things happened to black children because they didn't want their children to hear about them. And his attacks on conservatives in general are pretty scattershot. There is probably at least one conservative somewhere who believes each of these extreme positions, but that doesn't justify attributing them to all conservatives. This unfortunately is the strategy that is used equally on both sides these days: Find one person somewhere on the other side who says something crazy, and then claim that everyone on the other side believes that. Most of the time when conservatives say "you do it too", the liberals legitimately say they are creating false equivalences. ("If you like your doctor, you can keep her" is not equivalent to "the 2020 election was stolen" ) But on this issue I think there is something like a real equivalence.
Take a look, for example, at the various positions that Paul Fiery attributes to Tim on this page. None of them are explicitly stated by Tim, in fact some of them Tim explicitly denies at great lengths. (see my replies to Paul on this page) but Paul says we must attribute them to Tim anyway. Tim at least might be technically correct, because he is making a vague claim, attributed to no one in particular. But Paul puts phrases into Tim's mouth that he never said, and in fact specifically denies. Paul is doing the same thing that he accuses Tim of: Refusing to see Tim as an individual, by assuming that he must believe everything that all the other woke people "of his ilk" believe.
Tim at least does get specific when he talks about the Moms of Liberty's rejection of the teaching of certain historical facts. According to his sources, The Moms were not confronting a school that was teaching "other individuals who merely look like the transgressors ought to be punished because they are white." They were trying to stop the teachers from talking about racist history, which we both agree needs to be done. This does indicate that in some cases at least some of these laws are leading to actual suppression of historical facts, not just of Anti-white racism. (Although his source does say that the Mom's attempts were rejected by the courts)
I don't want to be too hard on Paul here. this is just a blog where we are all thinking aloud, not a published and peer reviewed article. Paul and Tim are both unfortunately following the current methods of "Trial by Lack of Context". Most of the horror that comes from reading the facts they dig up is inspired by the speculations that spring to mind when one reads cherry-picked factual claims. In your response above, you often say things of the form "of course this could be done right if he did X". But you can't really be sure he isn't doing X just from looking at those quotes. There is relatively little detail in this one article but that's largely because he goes into greater detail in this article that is linked to it.
This comment at first only partially got posted, so I wrote an apologetic comment to explain this, at which point the rest of the comment belatedly posted itself, and I had to delete the two apologies.
Sure wish Substack had an edit function in the comments. Then I would add to this post that Tim's article gives a detailed and plausible description about how you can get small children to really understand the impact of racism without traumatizing them. That's what I liked about the article, and why I tended to ignore the vague attacks on Whiteness.
“Sure wish Substack had an edit function in the comments“
Haha, yeah, you and me both.
Yeah, as I said, I’m not trying to make a critique of Tim in general. I know far too little of his work for that. But again, Tim (like many other writers on Medium) seems perfectly satisfied to preach to the converted. In my opinion this is not only a waste of time, it’s detrimental to your message.
Many, many people won’t ignore Tim’s attacks on “whiteness” a concept which is vague and, let’s face it, racist. So any value in what he’s saying is lost to them.
I will never understand this concept of attacking the people you’re trying to reach. Honesty, clarity, forthrightness, absolutely. But leading with “you suck” is very unlikely to convince the people who most need convincing.
The line between forthrightness and "you suck" is not easy to draw. I am reminded of the fact that in the Monty Python argument sketch, the argument parlor is right next to the abuse parlor. I think a lot of Paul's posts on Tim definitely spend too much time in the abuse parlor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpAvcGcEc0k
I think he sees only color. He doesn't see individuals. And therefore, because Black has been traumatized, White deserves to be traumatized. This seems to be a formulation of "an eye for an eye" and can be denounced just on that basis alone, if one believes the purpose of justice and law is to protect people from people who cause damage, as against the biblical idea of retributive justice that has involved torture intended to "even the score." But there is a worse thing at work here: the denial of individuality. For Tim Wise, it is perfectly legitimate that random white children should be subjected to the same traumas as black children have experienced. This is one step further on the scale of malevolence, for now it's not a question of whether the transgressing individual(s) should be punished or merely kept away from others. Now it's a question of whether other individuals who merely look like the transgressors ought to be punished. And for Tim Wise, the answer is, "Yes, of course, because they are white."
He's an educator - a teacher of teachers. He's not hugely influential in his own person, but it is likely he has multiplied his influence through his effect upon teachers. There are probably some hundreds who act out his warped concept of collective racial retribution in schools far and wide. And there are many more education bureaucrats like him. We will see the result in the form of continued individual racism through at least the next two generations.
"I think he sees only color. He doesn't see individuals. And therefore, because Black has been traumatized, White deserves to be traumatized."
I mean, the thing about that is, he's white!😅 So what the hell is going through his mind? Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I think he's just another one of those people who's discovered that he can earn money and get attention by beating this particular drum:
Let's all pretend that it's still 1800 and black people are being murdered in the streets for fun and denied the most basic opportunities in life. Ignore the black billionaires and the black president and now vice-president. They're the wrong kind of black person. Never mind the (psychologically crippling and demonstrably untrue) message this sends to young black people! Anybody who doesn't want them to entirely define themselves by the colour of their skin is a racist.
Yes, he is white. I first encountered this syndrome about 4 years ago. I know white academics who are, as I eventually realized, playing moral one-upmanship by denouncing any and all other white people for the most minute deficiencies of wokeness.
It's a mess of contradictions: If you are white you must confess to your racism, but the issue is "systemic" racism and "we are not blaming any particular person," except that "whiteness" is a disease you have if you are white and until you confess you are a racist, you are an unrepentant racist, which is worse, but not as bad as claiming you aren't a racist because then you definitely are a racist. Etc.
The highest moral ground attainable here is to be the one that points out the other white racists. It's not that unusual, we saw it under Nazism where the best way to improve your own situation was to denounce everyone you knew. In this case though, the stakes go as high as what Robin D'Angelo has "achieved".
I don't think he's a cynical grifter. I think he's 100% sincere.
"I don't think he's a cynical grifter. I think he's 100% sincere."
Hmm, I'm not sure which possibility is more depressing 😅.
I think you're spot on when you say that "the highest moral ground is to be the one who points out the other white racists," I'm just not sure this is necessarily sincere. I think it's driven by ego and a desire to be seen as "one of the good ones," rather than any deep conviction.
It's easy to learn the things you're supposed to say and parrot them for your daily dose of moral superiority. I've come across people like that many times before:
Yes, I could go with this. We may both be right. There are people who have no sense of identity beyond how (they think) others see them. In this case the desire to be seen as one of the good ones may be the greatest depth of conviction available to them.
So Godwin's law strikes again. I figured it was about time for Hitler's name to pop up. The problem is that the Nazis were evil in so many different ways you can always find some resemblance between the Nazis and someone you hate. This article demonstrates how: https://teedrockwell.medium.com/some-people-i-disagree-with-are-not-nazis-399808857282
Yes, sure, and if this is so, then I guess we can just toss out any argument from anyone that refers to some illustrative example in history! I actually was going to refer to Stalin, but most Americans are more familiar with Hitler -- who I did not actually name, BTW. And my reference to Nazis is not merely "because they are both evil," but specifically to the phenomenon of people who would denounce their friends to the Nazis (same with Stalin), as a way to keep themselves safe from persecution.
What I do suspect is that those white individuals who point at other white people and call them racists and who trade in the collectivist smear of "whiteness" may be themselves actually guilty of racism, or of living off of profits derived by their family from explicit racist policies. I personally know of one such finger-pointing person who eventually revealed to me his own direct history of this, but of course this one fact isn't sufficient to prove anything. Nevertheless, I do suspect this is so. It's a hypothesis that would explain much.
Yeah, somebody else pointed me in Tim Wise's direction a couple of months ago (I'd never heard of him before that), and I'm just as unimpressed now as I was then. What a collection of baseless assertions and faulty reasoning, pretty much from the first line. I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to say malicious intent though. At least I didn't see it.
This article is a classic example of something I'm seeing increasingly often from the far left (which is especially frustrating as I'd consider myself at the very least left-leaning), namely that they assert the most evil possible intentions for anybody who is even slightly further to the right than they are, and use that as justification for whatever agenda they feel like pushing.
An especially common tactic is the deep dive back as far as *1786!!* for the most emotive, awful examples of racism possible, because then it can be conflated with racism today, and anybody who dares question the bait and switch is obviously a genocidal racist monster...or something.
I don't really know what to say about articles like this. They're stupid, dishonest, cynical attempts to stir up emotion and tell people that anybody who disagrees with them is evil. They basically boil down to "racism is everywhere, all of the time and is basically the same as it was 150 years ago. Being a black person is a living nightmare that I am bravely trying to save them from. And if anybody disagrees with me, the only possible explanation is that they're an evil racist."
I can't fully express how worthless I think articles like this are, and how much I think the people who write them suck.
Steve, I don't agree with a lot of his conclusions, but I don't see either baseless assertions or faulty reasoning in this article. Could you elaborate?
Ugh, you're going to make me read it again?!😁
Just kidding. My reply to Paul wasn't a general critique of Tim's work, as I said, I've only heard of him recently, and the one Paul linked was only the second article of his that I've every read, but I'll run through a few key criticisms.
First of all, right in the second paragraph he claims that "conservatives" want to "ban anti-racist curriculum in schools" which is demonstrably false (sadly it lays the foundation for everything that follows). The bills don't ban anti-racist teaching at all, in fact, some of them actively encourage it. They just stipulate that that education shouldn't teach certain obviously racist ideas, such as that one race is superior to another etc.
I've yet to have anybody explain what the problem with this is, other than that "the right want it so it must be bad".
Then he simply asserts things like this without any evidence:
"The right wishes to paper over injustice in the nation’s past or present, thereby helping to rationalize whatever inequities continue to face us."
and this:
"By downplaying racism as an ongoing force, they hope students will shrug at disproportionate police violence against unarmed Black people, unequal housing access, or disparities in income and occupational status, concluding that such things are somehow the fault of those victimized by them."
There are a whole bunch of serious allegations here, directed at the nameless, faceless "right", and yet he doesn't even try to defend them. He just asserts them so that we know who the bad guys are, and moves on, assuring us that "of course the conservatives would deny this, but never trying to give an honest representation of the opposing position. It's incredibly lazy.
Next he invokes abortion, anti-vax/anti-mask people and Satan himself as justification for suggesting that we should teach children whatever the hell we feel like. Presumably because if they're already being screwed up, what's the harm in making things a little worse?
A little later, as I mentioned to Paul, he goes all the way back to 1786 to dredge up the worst examples of racism he can find without in any way acknowledging how little they have to do with the present day. I'm especially annoyed by this one because it's such a lazy, transparent trick. Of course, talking about racist history is important. But making no attempt to contextualise it is a hack move.
Of course contextualising it makes it harder to make his next argument which is essentially that because very young black children experienced racism 250 years ago, it's fine to teach today's kids about violence and bigotry that I'd agree they aren't ready to grapple with. This is just a ridiculous, callous leap of reasoning.
If you want to teach very young children about racism, that's great, but there are many more valuable ways to do so than talking about injustice which they're obviously to young contextualise. Jane Elliott's "brown eyes, blue eyes" experiment always springs to mind. One of my teachers did a version of it with my class when I was little, and it stuck with me right through to today. I was probably about six or seven.
Tim's whole article is built on the premise that "the right" is this collective of unalloyed racist evil, and everything they say should be interpreted in the worst, most disingenuous, most bigoted light possible. This is childish reasoning at best. And worse, I suspect he's actually smart enough to realise that.
But worst of all, speaking as a writer, is that the article doesn't *say* anything. At least nothing deeper than; "the right is racist and evil" and "it's fine to teach children ideas they're not ready for because some of them are exposed to other ideas that they're not ready for." If you don't already completely agree with him, there's nothing to take away from it, because he's shamelessly strawmanned the opposing argument.
So yeah, this ended up much longer than I planned, but those are my main problems with it 😅
OK, I see your point. I wasn't really focused on his attacks on conservatives, because I was more interested in what he was proposing as teaching methods. It is ridiculous to infer that the Moms for Liberty thought it was OK that horrible things happened to black children because they didn't want their children to hear about them. And his attacks on conservatives in general are pretty scattershot. There is probably at least one conservative somewhere who believes each of these extreme positions, but that doesn't justify attributing them to all conservatives. This unfortunately is the strategy that is used equally on both sides these days: Find one person somewhere on the other side who says something crazy, and then claim that everyone on the other side believes that. Most of the time when conservatives say "you do it too", the liberals legitimately say they are creating false equivalences. ("If you like your doctor, you can keep her" is not equivalent to "the 2020 election was stolen" ) But on this issue I think there is something like a real equivalence.
Take a look, for example, at the various positions that Paul Fiery attributes to Tim on this page. None of them are explicitly stated by Tim, in fact some of them Tim explicitly denies at great lengths. (see my replies to Paul on this page) but Paul says we must attribute them to Tim anyway. Tim at least might be technically correct, because he is making a vague claim, attributed to no one in particular. But Paul puts phrases into Tim's mouth that he never said, and in fact specifically denies. Paul is doing the same thing that he accuses Tim of: Refusing to see Tim as an individual, by assuming that he must believe everything that all the other woke people "of his ilk" believe.
Tim at least does get specific when he talks about the Moms of Liberty's rejection of the teaching of certain historical facts. According to his sources, The Moms were not confronting a school that was teaching "other individuals who merely look like the transgressors ought to be punished because they are white." They were trying to stop the teachers from talking about racist history, which we both agree needs to be done. This does indicate that in some cases at least some of these laws are leading to actual suppression of historical facts, not just of Anti-white racism. (Although his source does say that the Mom's attempts were rejected by the courts)
I don't want to be too hard on Paul here. this is just a blog where we are all thinking aloud, not a published and peer reviewed article. Paul and Tim are both unfortunately following the current methods of "Trial by Lack of Context". Most of the horror that comes from reading the facts they dig up is inspired by the speculations that spring to mind when one reads cherry-picked factual claims. In your response above, you often say things of the form "of course this could be done right if he did X". But you can't really be sure he isn't doing X just from looking at those quotes. There is relatively little detail in this one article but that's largely because he goes into greater detail in this article that is linked to it.
https://aninjusticemag.com/how-to-teach-about-racism-without-guilt-or-shame-6326ca98c3b6
See also the two other articles that I have linked in my response to Paul above.
This comment at first only partially got posted, so I wrote an apologetic comment to explain this, at which point the rest of the comment belatedly posted itself, and I had to delete the two apologies.
Sure wish Substack had an edit function in the comments. Then I would add to this post that Tim's article gives a detailed and plausible description about how you can get small children to really understand the impact of racism without traumatizing them. That's what I liked about the article, and why I tended to ignore the vague attacks on Whiteness.
“Sure wish Substack had an edit function in the comments“
Haha, yeah, you and me both.
Yeah, as I said, I’m not trying to make a critique of Tim in general. I know far too little of his work for that. But again, Tim (like many other writers on Medium) seems perfectly satisfied to preach to the converted. In my opinion this is not only a waste of time, it’s detrimental to your message.
Many, many people won’t ignore Tim’s attacks on “whiteness” a concept which is vague and, let’s face it, racist. So any value in what he’s saying is lost to them.
I will never understand this concept of attacking the people you’re trying to reach. Honesty, clarity, forthrightness, absolutely. But leading with “you suck” is very unlikely to convince the people who most need convincing.
The line between forthrightness and "you suck" is not easy to draw. I am reminded of the fact that in the Monty Python argument sketch, the argument parlor is right next to the abuse parlor. I think a lot of Paul's posts on Tim definitely spend too much time in the abuse parlor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpAvcGcEc0k
I think he sees only color. He doesn't see individuals. And therefore, because Black has been traumatized, White deserves to be traumatized. This seems to be a formulation of "an eye for an eye" and can be denounced just on that basis alone, if one believes the purpose of justice and law is to protect people from people who cause damage, as against the biblical idea of retributive justice that has involved torture intended to "even the score." But there is a worse thing at work here: the denial of individuality. For Tim Wise, it is perfectly legitimate that random white children should be subjected to the same traumas as black children have experienced. This is one step further on the scale of malevolence, for now it's not a question of whether the transgressing individual(s) should be punished or merely kept away from others. Now it's a question of whether other individuals who merely look like the transgressors ought to be punished. And for Tim Wise, the answer is, "Yes, of course, because they are white."
He's an educator - a teacher of teachers. He's not hugely influential in his own person, but it is likely he has multiplied his influence through his effect upon teachers. There are probably some hundreds who act out his warped concept of collective racial retribution in schools far and wide. And there are many more education bureaucrats like him. We will see the result in the form of continued individual racism through at least the next two generations.
"I think he sees only color. He doesn't see individuals. And therefore, because Black has been traumatized, White deserves to be traumatized."
I mean, the thing about that is, he's white!😅 So what the hell is going through his mind? Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I think he's just another one of those people who's discovered that he can earn money and get attention by beating this particular drum:
Let's all pretend that it's still 1800 and black people are being murdered in the streets for fun and denied the most basic opportunities in life. Ignore the black billionaires and the black president and now vice-president. They're the wrong kind of black person. Never mind the (psychologically crippling and demonstrably untrue) message this sends to young black people! Anybody who doesn't want them to entirely define themselves by the colour of their skin is a racist.
Yes, he is white. I first encountered this syndrome about 4 years ago. I know white academics who are, as I eventually realized, playing moral one-upmanship by denouncing any and all other white people for the most minute deficiencies of wokeness.
It's a mess of contradictions: If you are white you must confess to your racism, but the issue is "systemic" racism and "we are not blaming any particular person," except that "whiteness" is a disease you have if you are white and until you confess you are a racist, you are an unrepentant racist, which is worse, but not as bad as claiming you aren't a racist because then you definitely are a racist. Etc.
The highest moral ground attainable here is to be the one that points out the other white racists. It's not that unusual, we saw it under Nazism where the best way to improve your own situation was to denounce everyone you knew. In this case though, the stakes go as high as what Robin D'Angelo has "achieved".
I don't think he's a cynical grifter. I think he's 100% sincere.
"I don't think he's a cynical grifter. I think he's 100% sincere."
Hmm, I'm not sure which possibility is more depressing 😅.
I think you're spot on when you say that "the highest moral ground is to be the one who points out the other white racists," I'm just not sure this is necessarily sincere. I think it's driven by ego and a desire to be seen as "one of the good ones," rather than any deep conviction.
It's easy to learn the things you're supposed to say and parrot them for your daily dose of moral superiority. I've come across people like that many times before:
https://steveqj.substack.com/p/my-goal-is-to-make-sure-the-white-170
Yes, I could go with this. We may both be right. There are people who have no sense of identity beyond how (they think) others see them. In this case the desire to be seen as one of the good ones may be the greatest depth of conviction available to them.
So Godwin's law strikes again. I figured it was about time for Hitler's name to pop up. The problem is that the Nazis were evil in so many different ways you can always find some resemblance between the Nazis and someone you hate. This article demonstrates how: https://teedrockwell.medium.com/some-people-i-disagree-with-are-not-nazis-399808857282
Yes, sure, and if this is so, then I guess we can just toss out any argument from anyone that refers to some illustrative example in history! I actually was going to refer to Stalin, but most Americans are more familiar with Hitler -- who I did not actually name, BTW. And my reference to Nazis is not merely "because they are both evil," but specifically to the phenomenon of people who would denounce their friends to the Nazis (same with Stalin), as a way to keep themselves safe from persecution.
What I do suspect is that those white individuals who point at other white people and call them racists and who trade in the collectivist smear of "whiteness" may be themselves actually guilty of racism, or of living off of profits derived by their family from explicit racist policies. I personally know of one such finger-pointing person who eventually revealed to me his own direct history of this, but of course this one fact isn't sufficient to prove anything. Nevertheless, I do suspect this is so. It's a hypothesis that would explain much.