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 …
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
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