The riots that occurred in early June of 2020 reflect certain ideas in practice. To understand this, one must understand the role of ideas in historical events. Ultimately, the dominant ideas in a society have certain consequences. This is true even if the ideas being pushed by most intellectuals today expressly state that ideas have no correspondence to the facts, and therefore have no consequences. In 1964, Ayn Rand gave a speech that was subsequently transcribed into an article. She addressed a common question presented to her:
“Is ‘Atlas Shrugged’ a prophetic novel -or a historical one?” (Rand, Ayn, et al. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “Is Atlas Shrugging?”, Penguin Publishing Group, 1986.)
Since her last novel’s publication in 1957, her fans would write Miss Rand letters pointing to parallels between it and current events. Bad economic ideas were leading to bad events. She explained in her Ford Hall Forum speech that Atlas Shrugged is a novel about ideas, and when those ideas are implemented, there will be certain probable results. As she put it:
“Are you inclined to believe that [bad] theories of this kind will have no results in practice?” (Rand, Ayn, et al. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “Is Atlas Shrugging?”, Penguin Publishing Group, 1986.)
Rand believed that good ideas in a social system would tend to have good results, and bad ideas would have bad results. At root, this was a reflection of her concept of “objectivity”. Rand believed that some ideas have more or less correspondence to reality than other ideas:
“Objectivity is both a metaphysical and an epistemological concept. It pertains to the relationship of consciousness to existence. Metaphysically, it is the recognition of the fact that reality exists independent of any perceiver’s consciousness. Epistemologically, it is the recognition of the fact that a perceiver’s (man’s) consciousness must acquire knowledge of realty by certain means (reason) in accordance with certain rules (logic). This means that although reality is immutable and, in any given context, only one answer is true, the truth is not automatically available to a human consciousness and can only be obtained by a certain mental process which is required of every man who seeks knowledge -that there is no substitute for this process, no escape from the responsibility for it, no shortcuts, no special revelations or privileged observers -and there can be no such thing as a final ‘authority’ in matters pertaining to human knowledge.” (Rand, Ayn, The Voice of Reason, “Who Is the Final Authority On Ethics?”; https://courses.aynrand.org/works/who-is-the-final-authority-in-ethics/)
Furthermore, Ayn Rand believed that ideas have life and death significance. Good ideas are good because they correspond to reality, and thereby allow man to discover the nature of reality, and enact the necessary principles of action and behavior that will promote his long-range survival:
“Most people…think abstract thinking must be ‘impersonal’-which means that ideas must hold no personal meaning, value or importance to the thinker. This notion rests on the premise that a personal interest is an agent of distortion. But ‘personal’ does not mean ‘non-objective’; it depends on the kind of person you are. If your thinking is determined by your emotions, then you will not be able to judge anything, personally or impersonally. But if you are the kind of person who knows that reality is not your enemy, that truth and knowledge are of crucial, personal, selfish importance to you and to your own life -then the more passionately personal the thinking, the clearer and truer.” (Rand, Ayn Philosophy: Who Needs It, “Philosophical Detection”)
For Rand, historical and current events therefore tend to be a reflection of the dominant ideas held by people. A nation or culture that holds good ideas will tend to succeed and thrive, while a nation or culture with bad ideas will tend to fail. Baring natural disasters, over the long-run, historical events tend to be driven by the ideas men hold:
“…Contrary to the prevalent views of today’s alleged scholars, history is not an unintelligible chaos ruled by chance and whim—historical trends can be predicted, and changed—men are not helpless, blind, doomed creatures carried to destruction by incomprehensible forces beyond their control. There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man’s rational faculty—the power of ideas. If you know a man’s convictions, you can predict his actions. If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society, you can predict its course. But convictions and philosophy are matters open to man’s choice. There is no fatalistic, predetermined historical necessity.… Since men have free will, no one can predict with certainty the outcome of an ideological conflict nor how long such a conflict will last…” (Rand, Ayn, et al. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “Is Atlas Shrugging?”, Penguin Publishing Group, 1986, emphasis added.)
This does not mean that everyone is an originator of the ideas they hold. Most people are not. Especially as children and young adults, they tend to accept the ideas they hear from their parents, teachers, elders, and the media uncritically:
“You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions—or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew….
Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted.” (Rand, Ayn, Philosophy: Who Needs It.)
Briefly, and by way of contrast, other philosophers have interpreted history differently, and not primarily as a result of the ideas that people hold, either consciously or subconsciously. They have seen history as the unfolding of circumstances in their environment, or other factors beyond their control. For instance, Marx views your behavior as governed by your “material circumstances”, and that your ideas are mere rationalization. This reflects the “postmodern” attitude after Kant that the concept of objectivity is illusory. As a result, ideas have no correspondence to “things in themselves”. What you hold as “objective fact” is “distorted” by your consciousness:
“The ‘phenomenal’ world, said [Immanuel] Kant, is not real: reality, as perceived by man’s mind, is a distortion. The distorting mechanism is man’s conceptual faculty: man’s basic concepts (such as time, space, existence) are not derived from experience or reality, but come from an automatic system of filters in his consciousness (labeled ‘categories’ and ‘forms of perception’) which impose their own design on his perception of the external world and make him incapable of perceiving it in any manner other than the one in which he does perceive it.” (Rand, Ayn, For The New Intellectual, Signet, 1963; http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/kant,_immanuel.html)
In practice, the ideas people hold become a “matter of opinion”, without any correspondence to reality under this viewpoint. But, in reality, ideas have consequences, including this one.
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What ideas have been dominant in Europe and its various “offshoot” civilizations, like the Americas and Australia? “Western civilization” is the term used to distinguish this civilization from others in both time and place. What Ideas underlie Western Civilization?
Its origins lie in Ancient Greece:
“The Greeks, as the founders of Western civilization, drew freely upon the older civilizations of the Middle East. Especially through their contacts (chiefly commercial) with the Persian Empire, they absorbed much of the cultural heritage of both Mesopotamia and Egypt.” (“A Brief History of Western Man”, 3d Ed., Greer, Thomas, 1977 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., Chapter 2: “The Greek Beginnings of Western Civilization”, Pg. 41)
“What was this Greek way? How did it differ from the oriental way? The cardinal distinction lay in the Greek view of the individual. In the ancient cultures of the Middle East, ordinary people were of small account. The ruler of Egypt, the pharaoh, owned and regulated the land and its inhabitants through divine right. Guided by priests and working through an army of agents and bureaucrats, he ordered the pattern of existence for everyone. The idea of personal liberty had little meaning to the mass of his subjects, and no one in authority regarded them as capable of governing themselves.
The Greeks would be slaves to no person and to no state. They believed in law and in an orderly society protected by the gods, but they generally insisted on a substantial measure of freedom and political participation (for adult males)….the Hellenes believed, all free and intelligent Greeks were capable of enjoying this good life. They did not take the view, more characteristic of the Orient, that individuals must resign themselves to a fate beyond their control. In a qualified way, the Greeks were optimistic about the world and about what a man could do on his own -if he did not presume too far. During the Golden Age, at least, they showed tremendous zest for living. The struggle, the contest, the game -even when lost- seemed exciting and challenging.” (“A Brief History of Western Man”, 3d Ed., Greer, Thomas, 1977 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., Chapter 2: “The Greek Beginnings of Western Civilization”, Pg. 52, emphasis added.)
The Ancient Greeks developed systems and methods of thinking that resulted in modern, Western societies:
“Aristotle accepted Plato’s general notion of the existence of Ideas (Forms), but he held that physical matter also is a part of reality and not to be despised. Matter, he thought, constitutes the ‘stuff’ of reality, through its shapes and purposes come from the Forms that Plato had postulated. By logical thinking, men can gain knowledge of the purposes of things and of their interrelations, knowledge that will give meaning and guidance to their lives…To Aristotle, logic is the indispensable key to truth and happiness. For this reason, he worked out precise and systematic rules for logical thinking, rules that have been respected for centuries.” (“A Brief History of Western Man”, 3d Ed., Greer, Thomas, 1977 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., Chapter 2: “The Greek Beginnings of Western Civilization”, Pg. 60, emphasis added.)
The Romans took Greek systems of thought and implemented them, and spread Ancient Greek civilization throughout the Mediterranean world. (“A Brief History of Western Man”, 3d Ed., Greer, Thomas, 1977 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., Chapter 3: “The Roman Triumph and Fall”, Pg. 79)
Roman civilization flourished until the Dark Ages, when Western Civilization turned away from the Ancient Greek emphasis on this world and towards the afterlife. This state of affairs lasted for about a thousand years until the Renaissance in the 1300’s. Eventually the rediscovery of Ancient Greek ideas led to further innovations in thinking, which reflected the Enlightenment, and the start of what can be considered “modern” Western Civilization:
“In philosophy, modernism’s essentials are located in the formative figures of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Rene Descartes (1596-1650), for their influence upon epistemology, and more comprehensively in John Locke (1632-1704), for his influence upon all aspects of philosophy.” (Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Focault, Hicks, Stephen R.C., Chapter 1: “What Postmodernism Is”, Pg. 7, ISBN 978-0-9832584-0-7)
In essence, “Western” or “Modern” Civilization reflects the following ideas:
(1) Ideas ultimately come from observation, and reasoning is the method of expanding our awareness beyond what is immediately perceived. (2) The individual has primacy. Society is merely a number of individuals who live in society because it is beneficial to their own, personal lives. Life is for the living, and not for the service of some other-worldly authority. There is no reason men should live for others.
Three historic events resulted from these ideas: (1) The Renaissance, which was a movement away from a church-ordered society, and a “rebirth” of Ancient Greek ideas, including a focus on man’s life in the here and now; (2) the Enlightenment, which led to scientific, systematic methods of thinking aimed at comprehending reality; and (3) the Industrial Revolution, which was the material product of the previous two events.
Today, “Western Civilization” is somewhat of a misnomer, since it is no longer exclusively “Western” in geographic scope. The Japanese are a traditionally non-Western people that seem to have successfully integrated our culture into their own. A study of Japanese history since the mid-1800’s reveals a people who made a very conscious effort to adopt Western Civilization:
“…the new government [of Japan] carried out policies to unify the monetary and tax systems, with the agricultural tax reform of 1873 providing its primary source of revenue. Another reform was the introduction in 1872 of universal education in the country, which initially put emphasis on Western learning.” (https://www.britannica.com/event/Meiji-Restoration)
“Japan’s leaders in that era [the late 1800’s] held up the West in general, and the United States in particular, as examples to be emulated. Western technology was imported and Japanese students were sent to study in the West. The English language began to be taught in Japanese schools and there was even a suggestion at one point that English be made the national language…” (Black Rednecks & White Liberals, Sowell, Thomas Pg. 259.)
The level of Japanese dedication to Western ideas and ways in the period of the late 1800’s is like no other. The nation went from a fairly backwards, feudalistic system of government and economy to a world power in less than a hundred years, despite the fact that the Japanese started out from systems of thinking and ways of life that were radically different.
Japan is a success today because the ideas the Japanese chose to implement corresponded more closely to realty than the ideas that they discarded or modified to fit with Western Culture:
“…the Japanese recognized their own initial backwardness and were determined to overcome it. They began by learning all that they could from the West and emulating the West until they reached the point when they had amassed the knowledge, skill, and experience to take their own independent direction.” (Black Rednecks & White Liberals, Sowell, Thomas Pg. 260.)
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Western culture is not entirely consistent. There are other strands of thought running through it besides reason, egoism/individualism, and free market capitalism. The Middle and Dark Ages reflected the more Platonic and religious elements of Western Civilization. Those elements still exist today. Additionally, since about the mid-1700’s, another set of ideas has become dominant. These ideas start with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who ushered in a sort of “counter-Enlightenment” with the express goal of denying “…knowledge in order to make room for faith.” (See Second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant.)
Starting with Kant, our culture has increasingly moved from “modern” to what is commonly described as “postmodern”:
“The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality -or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material from reality…or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti- reason camps…the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason.” (Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Focault, Hicks, Stephen R.C., ISBN 978-0-9832584-0-7, Pg. 28)
“Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality -real, noumenal reality- is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products….Limited to knowledge of phenomena that it has itself constructed according to its own design, reason cannot know anything outside itself.” (Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Focault, Hicks, Stephen R.C., ISBN 978-0-9832584-0-7, Pg. 29)
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What has been the result of this “postmodern” turn from objectivity and individualism in modern times? The early weeks of June 2020 have revealed just how far the culture has devolved. The rioters have revealed an intellectual rot that I didn’t think existed just a couple of months ago. Throughout the Obama administration, there was rioting centered around allegations of police brutality. (The merits of these allegations of widespread misbehavior by the police, I question, but that can be a debate for another time.) There have also been past debates about the extent to which various statues of Confederate leaders should be taken down, or moved, especially in large Southern cities, which tend to be controlled by black leaders, and to be Democratic.
It wasn’t particularly surprising when Confederate statues in Richmond were vandalized or destroyed. (https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876124924/in-richmond-va-protestors-transform-a-confederate-statue) What caught me by surprise with the recent unrest was the speed with which the rioters turned from destroying Confederate statues to destroying and vandalizing statues of past leaders who had nothing to do with the Southern Confederacy. I’ve been aware of the irrational hatred of the college-educated for Christopher Columbus for some time. When a statue of that historical figure was destroyed in Boston, it was expected. (https://www.nbc12.com/2020/06/09/christopher-columbus-statue-torn-down-thrown-lake-by-protesters/) But, the rioters managed to surprise even me when they went after a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the General who led the Union army against the Confederacy:
“Several videos surfaced on social media Friday of statues of St. Junípero Serra, Ulysses S. Grant and Francis Scott Key being torn down in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.” https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/demonstrators-topple-statues-in-san-franciscos-golden-gate-park/2312839/
Now, there are calls to take down statues of Abraham Lincoln for “racial insensitivity”:
“Some UW-Madison students of color want the university to remove one of its most iconic landmarks, a statue of Abraham Lincoln, because of what they see as the former president’s anti-Indigenous and anti-Black history despite Lincoln’s legacy of ending slavery in the U.S.”
https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/university/uw-madison-students-call-for-removal-of-abraham-lincoln-statue-on-bascom-hill/article_b12c83c9-38a1-5e68-9964-beabe4046d02.html
“…a rally at the base of the Emancipation Monument in Lincoln Park, calling for the removal of the statue….Marcus Goodwin, a D.C. native and candidate for an at-large seat on the D.C. Council, started an online petition, saying the statue stirred up a lot of thoughts and emotion about racial inequality in America and imagery that depicts African Americans as inferior to others.”
https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/emancipation-statue-removal-called-for-in-lincoln-park-protest/65-33bb9f8a-ee02-4b0e-a244-f45fe8aab2bb
The destruction of statues, burning down buildings, and the looting wasn’t even the worst of it. Early on, rioters in Atlanta, Georgia turned on the press, specifically, the CNN building:
“CNN Center, the cable network’s Atlanta headquarters, came under attack Friday night during protests over police brutality…CNN correspondent Nick Valencia began reporting on the frightening scene from a stairway inside the building, behind a phalanx of SWAT officers in the lobby, with an angry mob standing on the other side of the broken and missing plate glass. ‘I have a daughter and wife I want to get home to tonight,’ Valencia told anchor Chris Cuomo….Protesters lobbed objects at the windows and into the lobby, and at least one officer was struck. What appeared to be a flash-bang device landed in front of police and large gusts of smoke went up into the air.”
(https://www.thedailybeast.com/furious-demonstrators-swarm-cnn-center-in-atlanta-during-protest-of-george-floyds-death)
The majority of the news media, and certainly CNN, was on the side of the protestors, but this wasn’t good enough. The attack on the CNN building was an assault on a core Western value. This freedom is the key distinction between a free society and a totalitarian state. The rioters and their cheerleaders in academia aren’t just opposed to a few statues of Confederate Generals they consider to be “insensitive”. Their attack on journalism exhibits an intent to destroy a fundamental tenant of modern, Western Civilization: the freedom of speech.
Prior to the rioting and the attacks on the media, there had been a “prequel” of things to come in New York and New Jersey. In December of 2019, members of the “Black Hebrew Israelite” movement, a black racial collectivist group that hates Jews and whites murdered three people in a Kosher market in New Jersey. (https://nypost.com/2019/12/11/jersey-city-shooting-suspects-were-lovers-who-lived-in-a-van/ ) This was followed by other attacks on Jews in the New York area, mostly by blacks, although you wouldn’t know that from reading the papers. (https://www.nbcboston.com/news/national-international/were-going-to-win-this-african-americans-jews-in-brooklyn-reject-return-to-1990s-tensions/2064425/ ) These represented another attack on a foundational aspect of modern, Western Civilization: respect for the rights of others, regardless of their viewpoint or origin. When objectivity is rejected as illusory, men can have no recourse to reason and the facts. The Kantian/Marxist rejection of the concept of objectivity means a rejection of persuasion in favor of feelings, and the naked use of force.
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What were the motives of most of the rioters? Were they aware of the ideas of Kant or Marx? Probably not explicitly. These ideas are simply picked up from their parents, the schools, movies, and on TV. (Today, the Internet.) The ideas of the intellectuals ultimately “trickle down” to the masses, where they are often adopted uncritically without much thought:
“In the brain of an anti-conceptual person, the process of integration is largely replaced by a process of association. What his subconscious stores and automatizes is not ideas, but an indiscriminate accumulation of sundry concretes, random facts, and unidentified feelings, piled into unlabeled mental file folders.” (Rand, Ayn, Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, “The Age of Envy”, Penguin Group, 1999, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anti-conceptual_mentality.html )
In that sense, the rioters are just unwitting cogs serving postmodern intellectuals. They are less guilty. The intellectuals, on the other hand, have provided cover and rationalization for the rioters because it is consistent with what they believe:
“…looting is a lashing-out against capitalism, the police, and other forces that are seen as perpetuating racism…. Others, meanwhile, see looting as a form of empowerment—a way to reclaim dignity after decades of abuse at the hands of police and other authorities…. as soon as the CVS burned in Baltimore, the whole world watched.” (The Atlantic, “Why People Loot”, Olga Khazan, June 2, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/why-people-loot/612577/ )
Democratic politicians made it clear they’re with the rioters, too:
“‘Yes, America is burning. But that’s how forests grow,’…” (https://commonwealthmagazine.org/criminal-justice/healey-america-is-burning-but-thats-how-forests-grow/ ; https://www.politico.com/newsletters/massachusetts-playbook/2020/06/03/massachusetts-playbook-489410 ; https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/george-floyd-democrats-police-deroy-murdock )
“’Young people, they have a whole new definition for ‘looting,’’ the 81-year-old congresswoman said. ‘They say ‘looting’ is predatory lending in, you know, minority neighborhoods, where they’re paying 300 and 400 percent on loans by these payday lenders. … You know, on and on and on. They have a different definition for it.’”
https://www.westernjournal.com/maxine-waters-scorched-claiming-real-looting-predatory-lending/ ; http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0620/murdock060820.php3 ; https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/george-floyd-democrats-police-deroy-murdock )
“’Colleagues, I hope we’re all saying we understand why that destruction happened and we understand why people are upset.’” (https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/george-floyd-democrats-police-deroy-murdock )
Despite the attack on journalists, they were some of the rioter’s biggest supporters:
“So what do you do when you’re fed up with an unjust system? When the boiling point has reached Fahrenheit levels that don’t even exist? You use that heat to burn it all down.” (Burn It All Down, Essence Magazine, By Yesha Callahan May 28, 2020 https://www.essence.com/op-ed/burn-it-all-down-minneapolis-riots/, emphasis added. )
“’Riots are, at their core, a choice made by those in power, not people who participate in them,’ The Atlantic’s Amanda Mull said via Twitter. ‘If you build a society that exhausts and abuses people and privilege [sic] capital over human life, I’m not sure which other imaginary ‘civil’ options you expect people to exercise.’” (https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/george-floyd-democrats-police-deroy-murdock)
Even CNN seemed to believe it got what it deserved, in a stunning display of masochism:
“Please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful…”
(https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/06/04/cnns_chris_cuomo_who_says_protests_are_supposed.html ; https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/federal-judge-says-new-york-officials-were-wrong-to-limit-worship-services-while-condoning-protests )
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If historical events are ultimately driven by ideas, what ideas have many of the intellectuals accepted that lead them to support the violence?
I’ll provide you with an example of two of the postmodern intellectuals that I believe have been driving many of the ideas that brought us to the riots of 2020. These are just two, and I’m sure there are many, many more. Unfortunately, they are a very representative sample of college liberal arts departments. These two are no better or worse than many college professors. My intent here is not to single them out, but to give the reader a “flavor” of contemporary academia.
First is Cheryl Harris, currently a law professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. ( https://www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/cheryl-i-harris#! )
In 1993 Professor Harris wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review called: “Whiteness as Property” According to this article:
“The origins of property rights in the United States are rooted in racial domination.” (“Whiteness as Property”, Harris, Cheryl I., Harvard Law Review, Volume 106 June 1993, Number 8, https://sph.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/Harris_Whiteness%20as%20Property_106HarvLRev-1.pdf)
In the article, she analyzed a 1978 case called “Regents of the University of California v. Allan Bakee, 438 US 265, https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/438/265 ) In Bakee, the plaintiff, a white person, sued a California public medical school, because he was denied admission over less-qualified minority applicants, based on the Medical College Admissions Test. (MCAT) Every year, there were 100 slots for the medical school, but 16 of the slots were reserved for members of racial minority groups, although minorities could compete for any of the other 84 slots as well. Bakee said this violated his right to equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. He eventually won after an appeal to the US Supreme Court.
Professor Harris’ analysis of Bakee rests in the postmodern rejection of objectivity:
“Bakke had a specific right to be admitted to medical school based on a ‘universal’ definition of merit. This reductive assessment of merit obscures the reality that merit is a constructed idea, not an objective fact… Nor is it certain that this standard was neutral or colorblind; commentators have claimed that the MCAT and other standardized tests are biased against racial minorities, and that the tests were deployed to ensure white dominance and privilege…” (“Whiteness as Property”, Harris, Cheryl I., Harvard Law Review, Volume 106 June 1993, Number 8, emphasis added.)
By Professor Harris’ reasoning whites cannot assert or expect any legal rights in the face of minority violence because of their “white privilege”. During her analysis of Bakee, Professor Harris criticized the decision because it demanded equal protection of the law for whites. Why? Because there are whites whose ancestors owned slaves. This history, supposedly, gives whites living today “privilege” that should be destroyed by denying whites the equal protection of the law:
“Expectations of privilege based on past and present wrongs, however, are illegitimate and are therefore not immune from interference.” (“Whiteness as Property”, Harris, Cheryl I., Harvard Law Review, Volume 106 June 1993, Number 8.)
The fact that presently living whites are innocent of long-past wrongs is irrelevant to Professor Harris. When talking about another affirmative action court challenge, City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469 (1989), she says it is a “questionable normative premise” that whites living today cannot be punished for past slavery:
“In the majority’s view, whites cannot be burdened with rectifying inequities that are the product of history. But even if one accepts this questionable normative premise…” (“Whiteness as Property”, Harris, Cheryl I., Harvard Law Review, Volume 106 June 1993, Number 8, emphasis added.)
In other words, to her, it’s “questionable” that individual, presently living white people deserve justice or are entitled to have their rights respected. She goes on to say that:
“The inability to see affirmative action as more than a search for the ‘blameworthy’ among ‘innocent’ individuals is tied to the inability to see the property interest in whiteness.” (“Whiteness as Property”, Harris, Cheryl I., Harvard Law Review, Volume 106 June 1993, Number 8.)
In other words, to Professor Harris and her intellectual cohorts, all white people are to blame due to their “white privilege”, and individual whites can be treated unjustly. Whites that are not initiating physical force against blacks can still be made to suffer because of their “privilege”, and they have no basis for complaint. It would appear that to Professor Harris, when the rioters come and burn down your business or home, or attack you because you’re white, you have no right to legal protection from the police. Insisting on such protection would be “white privilege”. Do you think this is an exaggeration?
This is precisely what a Democratic City Council Member in Minneapolis said. Democratic politicians and left-wing intellectuals around the country have been calling for “dismantling the police”. The obvious question has been: who will protect us from criminals without police? In response to this question, Lisa Bender of the Minneapolis City Council had the following exchange with a CNN reporter:
“What if in the middle of the night my home is broken into. Who do I call?” CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota asked Bender after the city council president laid out her vision for a post-police city.
‘I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors, and I know — and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege,’ Bender responded.” ( “Minneapolis City Council President Claims Fear of Dismantling Police ‘Comes From A Place of Privilege” Zachary Evans, National Review•June 8, 2020 https://news.yahoo.com/minneapolis-city-council-president-claims-145054422.html , emphasis added)
White people who desire not to be robbed, raped, and murdered are “speaking from a place of privilege” according to Democrats, who got such notions from people like Professor Cheryl I Harris of UCLA College of Law.
Why do postmodernist law professors go on and on about “white privilege”? Because they don’t believe in such “Euro-centric” concepts as “justice” and “individual rights”. They believe that your “material circumstances” or your “racial circumstances” determine the content of your mind. They do not believe concepts have any actual connection to reality, which, per Immanuel Kant, is not really knowable. “Truth” is a “white male prejudice”. Like Marx, they believe governmental functions like the police and the courts are really just an exercise of raw power by the white majority, and must be done away with, no matter how many whites get killed in the process.
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Another postmodern intellectual that is usually on the tip of every college student protestor’s tongue is Robin DiAngelo. In a recent interview, DiAngelo had the following to say:
“We don’t understand that objectivity and individuality are privileges. These are not granted to everybody.”( https://www.wktv.com/content/news/571084272.html )
“Justice” is objectivity applied to the appraisal of human beings in order to live your life:
“What fact of reality gave rise to the concept ‘justice’? The fact that man must draw conclusions about the things, people and events around him, i.e., must judge and evaluate them. Is his judgment automatically right? No. What causes his judgment to be wrong? The lack of sufficient evidence, or his evasion of the evidence, or his inclusion of considerations other than the facts of the case. How, then, is he to arrive at the right judgment? By basing it exclusively on the factual evidence and by considering all the relevant evidence available. But isn’t this a description of ‘objectivity’? Yes, ‘objective judgment’ is one of the wider categories to which the concept ‘justice’ belongs.” (Rand, Ayn, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, “Definitions”, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/justice.html )
Objectivity means the correspondence of an idea to reality. Some concepts, like “ghosts” or “witches” have less correspondence to reality than others, such as “atoms” or “men”. By being “objective”, that is, conforming the content of your ideas to reality, you improve your chances of survival and flourishing as a living organism. People who believed in atoms develop life-saving drugs. People who believed in witches burned other people at the stake in Salem.
DiAngelo, on the other hand, is certain that the concept of objectivity is false and a lie:
“In theories of discourse, language is not conceptualized as a “pure” or neutral transmitter of a universal reality or truth (Allen, 1996). Rather, language is conceptualized as the historically and culturally situated means by which we construct reality or truth and thus is dependent on the historical and social moment in which it is expressed.” (InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1), “Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Antiracist Education”, DiAngelo, Robin J, Publication Date: 2010-01-25, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fm4h8wm , emphasis added.)
DiAngelo sees concepts like “truth” and “objectivity” as nothing but weapons of the “ruling classes”:
“Discourse, because it constructs social relations and social positioning, is infused with relations of unequal power. As Allen (1996) states, language and discourse are not “theory neutral ‘descriptors’ but theory-laden constructs inseparable from systems of injustice”” (InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1), “Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Antiracist Education”, DiAngelo, Robin J, Publication Date: 2010-01-25, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fm4h8wm )
“Discourses that become dominant do so because they serve the interests of those in power.” (InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1), “Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Antiracist Education”, DiAngelo, Robin J, Publication Date: 2010-01-25, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fm4h8wm , emphasisa added. )
Who is the “ruling class” according to DiAngelo? White people, of course:
“Whites are taught to see their perspectives as objective and representative of reality (McIntosh, 1988). The belief in objectivity, coupled with positioning white people as outside of culture (and thus the norm for humanity), allows whites to view themselves as universal humans who can represent all of human experience.” (“White Fragiltiy”, DiAngelo, Robin, The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, Vol 3, No 3 (2011), http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/249/116 , emphasis added.)
The denial of objectivity is nothing new. DiAngelo is taking the “postmodern party line” when it comes to “concepts”, “truth”, and “objectivity”, which is that they are not possible. “Concepts” are a result of your class, race, or nation, and have nothing to do with whether they conform to reality or not to the Postmodern. Words are just one more tool to be used, actually misused, in the quest to destroy the hated “privileged”:
“For the postmodernist, language cannot be cognitive because it does not connect to reality, whether to an external nature or an underlying self. Language is not about being aware of the world, or about distinguishing the true from the false, or even about argument in the traditional sense of validity, soundness, and probability. Accordingly, postmodernism recasts the nature of rhetoric: Rhetoric is persuasion in the absence of cognition…Most other postmodernists, however, see the conflicts between groups as more brutal and our prospects for empathy as more severely limited than does Rorty. [A “moderate” postmodernist.] Using language as a tool of conflict resolution is therefore not on their horizon. In a conflict that cannot reach a peaceful resolution, the kind of tool that one wants is a weapon. And so given the conflict models of social relations that dominate postmodern discourse, it makes perfect sense that to most postmodernists language is primarily a weapon.
This explains the harsh nature of much postmodern rhetoric. The regular deployments of ad hominem, the setting up of straw men, and the regular attempts to silence opposing voices are all logical consequences of the postmodern epistemology of language. Stanly Fish, as noted in Chapter Four, calls all opponents of racial prefernces bigots and lumps them in with the Ku Klux Klan….With such rhetoric, truth or falsity is not the issue: what matters primarily is the language’s effectiveness.” (Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Focault, Hicks, Stephen R.C., Chapter 6: “Postmodern Strategy”, Pg. 176-178, ISBN 978-0-9832584-0-7)
In her 2011 article “White Fragility”, DiAngelo says that white people hold certain belief systems that make them incapable of recognizing that they are collectively guilty. One of these is their insistence on individualism and on seeing everyone as a human being:
“…whites are taught to see their interests and perspectives as universal, they are also taught to value the individual and to see themselves as individuals rather than as part of a racially socialized group. Individualism erases history and hides the ways in which wealth has been distributed and accumulated over generations to benefit whites today. It allows whites to view themselves as unique and original, outside of socialization and unaffected by the relentless racial messages in the culture…Given the ideology of individualism, whites often respond defensively when linked to other whites as a group or “accused” of collectively benefiting from racism…” (“White Fragiltiy”, DiAngelo, Robin, The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, Vol 3, No 3 (2011), http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/249/116 ,emphasis added. )
DiAngelo sees “…relentless racial messages in the culture…” because she is a racial polylogist. Like all postmoderns, she rejects objectivity. This, in turn, means she rejects justice, which is the objective judgment of people based on their chosen character. From there, she rejects individualism. If a person is not the author of his or her own soul, then they are clearly attached to some collective group, which, for DiAngelo, is their race. She is a racial collectivist, who happens to think the majority race should sacrifice itself to the minority race. America’s ideology of individualism must therefore be destroyed:
“In my years as a white person co-facilitating anti-racism courses for primarily white audiences in a range of academic, corporate, and government institutions across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, I have come to believe that the Discourse of Individualism is one of the primary barriers preventing well-meaning (and other) white people from understanding racism.” (InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1), “Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Antiracist Education”, DiAngelo, Robin J, Publication Date: 2010-01-25, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fm4h8wm , emphasis added.)
DiAngelo also sees white people as “privileged” by enormous benefits that come from being white. She is never very specific about what these “privileges” are. In one article she says:
“…only whites have the collective group power to benefit from their racial prejudices in ways that privilege all members of their racial group regardless of intentions (McIntosh, 2004;…” (InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1), “Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Antiracist Education”, DiAngelo, Robin J, Publication Date: 2010-01-25, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fm4h8wm )
DiAngelo cites to Peggy McIntosh, a professor of Women’s Studies at Wellesley College, who appears to be one of the originators of this idea. ( https://www.wcwonline.org/Active-Researchers/peggy-mcintosh-phd )
In her article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, McIntosh gives twenty-six examples of “white privilege”. Most of these “privileges” break down into what I see as three categories: “Economic Privilege”, “Self-Esteem Privilege”, and “Immunity From Bad Acts of Others Privilege”. (These categorizations and labels are my own characterization.) For instance, McIntosh believes that:
“I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.” (“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, McIntosh, Peggy, Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August 1989, https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf )
I take this as an “economic privilege” of white people, since a black person could easily arrange to be in the company of only other black people, if he or she wanted to. Just move to Detroit. I think, implicitly, what McIntosh is saying here is: If you are a black person who wants to have any sort of economic opportunity in life, you will have to associate with a lot of white people, because too many black people are too poor and lacking in fundamental life skills to form a functioning social and economic order.
Another example of a more “clear-cut” “economic privilege” from McIntosh’s article might be:
“If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I want to live.” (“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, McIntosh, Peggy, Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August 1989, https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf )
But, how this is an example of “white privilege”, as opposed to just having wealth, she doesn’t expressly say. She implies that black people are, on average, poorer than whites, which is true, but she doesn’t tie that fact in to some sort of animus against black people. It could just as easily be a result of average IQ’s amongst black people being lower for genetic reasons, or due to the cultural differences between the two groups. (Or both.)
About eight of McIntosh’s examples of white privilege are what could be characterized as “self-esteem gained from race solidarity”. For instance:
“I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.” (“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, McIntosh, Peggy, Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August 1989, https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf )
In these instances, white people supposedly get a big “mental boost” or “good feelings” from being in the racial majority. Once again, black people in a free society could all choose to live together in one area, and only associate with each other, if they chose. The fact that they don’t suggests that they get some benefit in associating with white people. Additionally, I doubt that the average white American ties their self-esteem to the fact that they can see other white people. It’s precisely because white Americans tend to be individualists that this is going to be irrelevant to them. I think most whites derive their self-esteem from individual accomplishment, and improving their own character, not from seeing a lot of other whites.
The third category of “white privilege” that McIntosh seems to be describing is what I would call, “immunity from the bad acts of others privilege”. For instance, she says that when she moves to a new location:
“I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.” (“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, McIntosh, Peggy, Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August 1989, https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf )
In other words, McIntosh thinks there are large numbers of white people out there in America who will be “unpleasant” to black people or at least not be “neutral” towards them when they move into their neighborhood. Since the majority of Americans passed laws outlawing housing discrimination, her premise of large numbers of “unpleasant” white neighbors with respect to blacks is faulty to begin with. Otherwise, those laws couldn’t have had the broad societal support needed to become law. However, assuming that is the case for a second, note how she wants to place the blame of “unpleasant neighbors” onto people who would not be “unpleasant” towards blacks. In other words, innocent white people should take the blame for the bad acts of other white people. They are somehow responsible for the actions of others.
What I think McIntosh is actually referring to in this example is the phenomena of “white flight”.
This occurs when a neighborhood reaches a certain “tipping point” of the ratio of blacks to whites living there. In essence, when too many blacks move in, whites have a tendency to move out.
First, I think “white flight” is probably rational. The whites may not be leaving primarily due to the skin color of the people coming into the neighborhood, but due to different cultural values that tend to come with that skin color. Those different cultural values lead to reductions in property values. Black residents, on average, don’t take care of their houses as well. The schools start to fail as more black children come in, because they are not raised with the same study-habits and work-ethics as the average white child. Blacks, on average, commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. In some years, blacks commit close to 50% of all murders, despite being only 13% of the population. “White flight” can also be as simple as wanting to associate with people who have the same “middle class” values that whites are more likely to have.
I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a majority-black area for these reasons. Even if there are individual blacks I encounter who are perfectly fine to deal with, when I am amongst a large number of blacks, the probabilities of my becoming a crime victim goes up. Short of being at a convention of black accountants or engineers, it’s not in my rational self-interest to be in a majority-black area. But, the issue of “white flight” for me is primarily cultural, not racial. Blacks, due to a different history, tend to have different values and attitudes, and therefore behave differently.
McIntosh also doesn’t address why a disproportionate number of blacks are poorer. She assumes “racism” is the answer, and then says white flight is just more of the same “racism”. Fundamentally, this is because McIntosh and DiAngelo are “multiculturalists”. If they were not, then they would see that there may be a small grain of truth in what they are saying, even though they are not recognizing the essence of the problem.
The fundamental problem for blacks is internal, having to do with the content of the minds of many black people. It is the common methods of thinking, habits, and attitudes that tend to predominate within that racial group that is their fundamental problem.
The common methods of thinking, habits, and attitudes of a given group of people constitutes their “culture”. A culture can have bad ideas. In the past, ancient physicians believed that people were made up of four substances: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. They saw sickness as an imbalance of these things, and they’d try to “rebalance” the body by draining “excess blood”. This was known as “bleeding”. ( https://www.bcmj.org/premise/history-bloodletting )
Bloodletting for this reason was a bad idea. In most contexts, it is likely to kill a patient, not make them better. Bloodletting was a bad idea because it was usually not consistent with the requirements of human life, which is the standard by which ideas should be judged. Ideas that enhance and promote human life are good. Those that do not are bad. (And, reality is what it is, so some ideas correspond to it, and are therefore life-enhancing.)
In addition to explicit practices like bloodletting, a culture can have certain mental attitudes and habits that can either help it succeed, or fail. One of the best academics I have found on the role of culture in social progress and failure is Thomas Sowell:
“Each group trails the long shadow of its own history and culture, which influence its habits, priorities, and social patterns, which in turn affect its fate.” (Black Rednecks & White Liberals, Sowell, Thomas Pg. 264.)
In his book, “Black Rednecks & White Liberals”, Sowell presents the thesis that what is considered “urban” or “ghetto culture” within a certain subsegment of the black population in America today is actually a reflection of a Scotts-Irish heritage that white Southerners brought with them before the Scottish were a fully civilized people. This culture was then “transferred” to Southern blacks through interaction with white Southerners. White southerners largely abandoned this culture, but it remained alive in the urban ghetto.
Regardless of whether one agrees with Sowell’s thesis, the underlying point he makes in this and other books is that culture matters to the success or failure of a people because ideas matter to success or failure.
This is where there may be a “grain of truth” in what postmodern academics like McIntosh and DiAngelo are getting at when they speak of things like the white “invisible knapsack”. The “invisible knapsack” is a better set of ideas that represent a superior culture.
It’s even possible that the culture adopted by the majority of American blacks today is a product of slavery. Perhaps the mental habits, ideas, and work-ethic of a significant segment of the American black population is a result of the way their ancestors lived on the plantations. I think it’s also possible they carry part of the culture from Africa. American black ancestors came from significantly more primitive civilizations than the Europeans. It’s also could be a combination of both. (It’s possible Thomas Sowell is right. He certainly makes a compelling argument.) What is important to see is that ideas, beliefs, and attitudes tend to determine an individual’s success or failure in life, and most individuals adopt the attitudes, ideas, and beliefs of their elders by “default”. The solution is to change minds, and to educate and persuade them with better ideas.
But, DiAngelo and her ilk will not accept this solution because they are “multiculturalists”. DiAngelo even comes close to acknowledging that better education of black children could change things in one of her articles:
“Consider for example the ways in which schools are funded through the property tax base of the community they are situated in. Given that due to systematic and historical racism, youth of color disproportionately live in poor communities and their families rent rather than own, youth of color are penalized through this policy, which ensures that poor communities will have inferior schools.” (InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1), “Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Antiracist Education”, DiAngelo, Robin J, Publication Date: 2010-01-25, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fm4h8wm , emphasis added.)
Education, when done right, involves instilling the right set of ideas in children. Schools provide them with the knowledge and mental skillsets to succeed as adults. Certain ideas are taught because they advance human life. By complaining about inadequate school funding for black children, DiAngelo is implicitly acknowledging that objectivity matters -that some ideas are true, and others are false. She is implicitly saying we need schools to teach black children the right ideas. However, DiAngelo is also a multiculturalist, so she follows the above paragraph with this:
“Other examples of institutional racism that reinforce the ways that schools reproduce inequality include: mandatory culturally biased testing; “ability” tracking; a primarily white teaching force with the power to determine which students belong in which tracks; cultural definitions of intelligence, what constitutes it, and how it is measured; and standards of good behavior that reflect dominant white norms…” (InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1), “Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Antiracist Education”, DiAngelo, Robin J, Publication Date: 2010-01-25, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fm4h8wm , emphasis added.)
She doesn’t want more funding so that black students can be instilled with a better set of ideas. To her, all ideas, no matter how damaging they are to the lives of blacks, are equal. There is no such thing as objectivity to DiAngelo. She claims that tests are “biased” against blacks, that intelligence is just a “cultural definition”, and that standards of good behavior “reflect dominant white norms”. True to her “postmodern roots”, DiAngelo believes that one can never know “true reality”. The mind “filters” reality through its cognitive processes, and the black mind “filters” reality in a different way. No ideas are better than any other ideas because there is no such thing as objectivity. If a lot of white people are succeeding while a lot of black people are failing, it’s because the whites “exploited” or “cheated” black people. To DiAngelo, white people have somehow managed to “rig reality” such that their culture, their set of ideas, is dominant, and they have stolen all the wealth.
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The rejection of objectivity by DiAngelo, Harris, and other postmodern intellectuals also explains why they spend such an enormous amount of time focused on past wrongs like slavery in Western Civilization, but pass over, almost without comment, slavery when it occurred in non-Western, and non-white civilizations. Thomas Sowell has noted this phenomena:
“None of this means that the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade should be ignored, downplayed, or excused. Nor have they been. A vast literature has detailed the vile conditions under which slaves from Africa lived—and died—during their voyages to the Western Hemisphere. But the much less publicized slave trade to the Islamic countries had even higher mortality rates en route, as well as involving larger numbers of people over the centuries, even though the Atlantic slave trade had higher peaks while it lasted. By a variety of accounts, most of the slaves who were marched across the Sahara toward the Mediterranean died on the way.” (Black Rednecks & White Liberals, Sowell, Thomas Pg. 125-126, emphasis added.)
The “postmodern civil rights advocates” obsessively focus on the past wrongs of whites because to them, that is evidence of why whites are ahead of blacks. They view slavery and “colonialism” as the causal factor for why whites are ahead of blacks. Whereas, I say the superior methods of thinking of the average white, as embodied in Western Civilization’s commitment to objectivity, science, individualism, free markets, and individual rights, is why whites are ahead. White people, along with some Asian countries like Japan, have embraced a better culture. (At least better until the postmodern intellectuals came along.)
To the postmoderns, all ideas are ‘equal’ because of their Kantian view of concepts. This view holds that you are not gaining information about actual reality when you reason. For example, to a postmodern intellectual, faith healing is equally as valid as modern medicine. If one leads to health and one doesn’t, it’s because the group practicing modern medicine is exploiting or cheating the other group. Then, if any member of the group practicing modern medicine ever happens to do anything bad to someone in the group practicing faith healing, it is the postmodern’s “proof” for why the group practicing modern medicine is living longer. It’s not about better ideas, because, to the postmodern multiculturalist, there is no such thing as a better idea. That would imply an objectivity they reject.
The postmodern will find some past injustice committed by the “oppressor group” and assert that as the causal factor for why they are ahead, when, in reality, that past injustice, although an injustice, has nothing or very little to do with why the “oppressor group” is ahead. You can see this by looking at some of the trivial examples of “white privilege” that Professor McIntosh gives in her article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”:
“…I can sear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race….
I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race….
I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group…
I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion….”
(“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, McIntosh, Peggy, Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August 1989, https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf )
These are supposedly some of the causal factors for why black people are, on average, poorer than white people. The first three are, at worst, examples of slight “borishness”. (The fourth sounds more like a problem that is “internal” to black people, who expect each-other to know something about Africa, and Africans.)
Examples like these are considered causal by McIntosh for why blacks are economically behind whites, not the methods of thinking of black people. The real causal factor are methods of thinking that are not fully in line with Western Civilization. For instance, there are academic articles studying the “conspiratorial thinking” of large segments of the black population, and how it causes them not to seek medical care or to practice safe sex:
“… medical mistrust increases risk for HIV. Among Black men, research has linked HIV conspiracy beliefs with negative attitudes towards condoms, which in turn are associated with lower likelihood of using condoms consistently (Bogart & Thorburn, 2005). Conspiracy beliefs may relate to mistrust of information from public health officials regarding HIV, including how to reduce risk of transmission.” ( Earnshaw, Valerie A et al. “Stigma and racial/ethnic HIV disparities: moving toward resilience.” The American psychologist vol. 68,4 (2013): 225-36. doi:10.1037/a0032705 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3740715/ , emphasis added.)
In other words, significant segments of the black population believe that doctors encouraging condom use are part of a conspiracy to cause them harm.
The authors of the above-quoted article will likely call these attitudes on condom use “internalized racism”, but really, what they mean is blacks have a culture of mistrusting doctors and medical science that is causing them to avoid using condoms. The lack of condom use amongst blacks due to “conspiracy beliefs” is but one small example of massive cultural differences between the average black and the average white that are causing blacks to be, on average, poorer. What black people need is a better understanding of the concept of objectivity, and its application to their lives, which means better, more “Eurocentric” education. But, DiAngelo and McIntosh repudiate this as “cultural bias” or “racism”, which has real consequences for blacks that get HIV and die.
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In the end, all ideas have consequences, because reality is what it is. Postmoderns can say all ideas are equally valid, but they cannot make it so.
The behavior of the rioters in the inner cities in North America and Europe is not new. It has been going on since at least the late 1960’s. My concern is with the level of appeasement I see in the media, and amongst our cultural and political “leaders”. They’ve been “softened up” by intellectual snake-oil salesmen like Robin DiAngelo and Cheryl Harris.
You might wonder if Robin DiAngelo “actually believes” what she’s saying, or if it’s just a cynical confidence game. This misses the point entirely. She expressly rejects objectivity. To her, there is no difference between a con-artist, and a college professor. She’s got the “mental tools” to evade the question in her own mind, altogether. Those of us who want to live cannot afford to do the same. We must squarely address the root of the problem when it comes to disproportionate amounts of black crime and black poverty. The cause lies in a different set of ideas and methods of thinking. It lies in cultural patterns that must be rejected by more black Americans, if living and prospering is important to them.
The destruction of businesses and property doesn’t matter to the rioters or UCLA law professor Cheryl I Harris because justice for individuals doesn’t matter, just racial aggregates. Every white person is guilty because of their “privilege”, and they have no right to expect that their property or lives will be protected. The police will be defunded to stamp out “privilege”, no matter how many law-abiding people are slaughtered by criminals.
The rioters started with Confederate statues and moved on to destroying statues of leaders of the Union Army. If Grant and Abraham Lincoln don’t “make the cut”, then nothing will. I’ve often wondered where they would “draw the line” when it came to what statues they would let stand. Now I see all will be razed, if things continue down this path. The rioters have been taught by postmodern intellectuals that objectivity is a myth. For them, the idea of even “drawing a line” smacks of “Eurocentrism”.
Recent events have the feel of crossing a cultural Rubicon. I hope I’m wrong. Maybe there is still a “silent majority” of North Americans, Australians, and Western Europeans out there who are at least capable of recognizing that the ideas many on the political left, in academia, and in the media are pushing will result in our cultural and political suicide -in the destruction of what freedom, representative government, capitalism, prosperity, and legal rights we have left. At root, the rioters and their “intellectual cheerleaders” aim at the destruction of fundamental concepts found in Western Civilization that account for its success. Statue-destruction by rioters is almost metaphorical: They can’t raise individuals up. Each of us must do that for ourselves. All they can do is tear the rest of us down.
