My article, Do Critical Race Theorists Know What Racism Is?, inspired a range of reactions. Some people, as we saw a couple of weeks ago, felt that a teacher’s right to teach racism (as opposed to teaching about racism) should override a child’s right to an education free from it. Some (most?) were as mystified as I was that race education has reached such a low point that we’re debating whether kids should be learning that one race is superior to another.
Usually the "everyone who disagrees with me is stupid" people have PHD after their name and mention critical thinking. This is different. She's like the crackheads in the Quick-Trip parking lot near the methadone clinic asking for money. I'm not going to read it twice and I confess that I skimmed. Thanks for the laugh on an otherwise bad day.
Yeah, there's a sub-genre of the "everyone who disagrees with me is stupid" crowd who don't want to go to the trouble of getting a PhD, so they just hide their ignorance behind word salad and condescension. Sadly they get called on it rarely enough that it's a workable strategy on the internet.
Did a search of Makayla on Medium and found this comment attached to a story that is no longer available. "Wow MaKayla! This is a masterpiece. What i can say is you have a great set of storytelling skills. I was caught up reading your story and it just seemed perfect to me.". I think this does refer to the same Makayla, judging from the fact that she deleted her article. No accounting for taste, I guess.
Yeah, she’d actually written a few articles. They were as coherent as you’d expect from her comments here, but a few people seemed to like them. As you say, no accounting for taste.😅
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.
"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.
"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:
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
After reading one of his books I found no reason to read another or his Medium articles. It's over thing to drone on about a problem without a genuine attempt at a viable solution. That is common today. I objected to his give up, it's futile message. A Grand Wizard Klansman would love the guy. Dave your money.
It seems to me that what you call reading with "discernment and with one's critical faculty fully engaged." is actually projecting opinions on to him based on how he reminds you of other people "of his ilk". What you are saying is true of writers like DiAngelo and Walter Rhein. But at least one of the positions you attribute to him is specifically contradicted in the very article you cite above. You say "the white child learns that they have sins to atone for, not because they've done anything but because of their white skin." Tim Wise says. "we could easily short-circuit such guilt by teaching students about white anti-racist allies from the colonial era to the present. Such persons prove that whites have joined in solidarity with people of color to fight racism. This, in turn, undermines the notion that whites are inherently oppressive, providing an antidote to any potential white shame." He has a link at this spot to an article titled "How to teach about racism without guilt or shame", which lists numerous historical examples of whites who have fought racism in the past, and says their stories must be included in any history of racism or slavery. So not only does he reject the idea that all white people are evil, he provides documented arguments proving that they aren't.
Usually the "everyone who disagrees with me is stupid" people have PHD after their name and mention critical thinking. This is different. She's like the crackheads in the Quick-Trip parking lot near the methadone clinic asking for money. I'm not going to read it twice and I confess that I skimmed. Thanks for the laugh on an otherwise bad day.
Yeah, there's a sub-genre of the "everyone who disagrees with me is stupid" crowd who don't want to go to the trouble of getting a PhD, so they just hide their ignorance behind word salad and condescension. Sadly they get called on it rarely enough that it's a workable strategy on the internet.
It pains me to see the approach I experienced in school gaining momentum, though it makes sense.
The Atlantic has been doing a great series of articles on this that maybe you’ve seen. Here’s one: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/should-black-lives-matter-agenda-be-taught-school/618277/
Yeah, Conor Friedersdorf has been doing great work on this and other topics. Definitely a fan of his.
Did a search of Makayla on Medium and found this comment attached to a story that is no longer available. "Wow MaKayla! This is a masterpiece. What i can say is you have a great set of storytelling skills. I was caught up reading your story and it just seemed perfect to me.". I think this does refer to the same Makayla, judging from the fact that she deleted her article. No accounting for taste, I guess.
Yeah, she’d actually written a few articles. They were as coherent as you’d expect from her comments here, but a few people seemed to like them. As you say, no accounting for taste.😅
I put her last line of word salad into Google, ans got a whole bunch of sites about the Klingon language. So apparently that's Klingon.
I can't believe I didn't even think to do that! Bonus points to you. Which may or may not be good news once I figure out what they're worth.😁
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.
"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.
"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
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
I bought one of his books years ago. My review. https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1YI4BI8DA0FEM/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0051BN2GC
After reading one of his books I found no reason to read another or his Medium articles. It's over thing to drone on about a problem without a genuine attempt at a viable solution. That is common today. I objected to his give up, it's futile message. A Grand Wizard Klansman would love the guy. Dave your money.
Sorry about the wrong words thanks to swipe on my phone. Save your money, but it's ok to give it to Dave if you like ;0)
Here are two more examples of Tim's more nuanced writing.
Sure Black Folks can be racist, but there's a catch.
https://timjwise.medium.com/sure-black-folks-can-be-racist-but-theres-a-catch-dc19a7337a71
Stop Fetishizing Protest — The Movement is More Than Marching
https://gen.medium.com/stop-fetishizing-protest-the-movement-is-more-than-marching-39c58c8f82c5
It seems to me that what you call reading with "discernment and with one's critical faculty fully engaged." is actually projecting opinions on to him based on how he reminds you of other people "of his ilk". What you are saying is true of writers like DiAngelo and Walter Rhein. But at least one of the positions you attribute to him is specifically contradicted in the very article you cite above. You say "the white child learns that they have sins to atone for, not because they've done anything but because of their white skin." Tim Wise says. "we could easily short-circuit such guilt by teaching students about white anti-racist allies from the colonial era to the present. Such persons prove that whites have joined in solidarity with people of color to fight racism. This, in turn, undermines the notion that whites are inherently oppressive, providing an antidote to any potential white shame." He has a link at this spot to an article titled "How to teach about racism without guilt or shame", which lists numerous historical examples of whites who have fought racism in the past, and says their stories must be included in any history of racism or slavery. So not only does he reject the idea that all white people are evil, he provides documented arguments proving that they aren't.