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Alex's avatar

Good essay. However, it needs to focus more on one important point: there are a huge number of technocrats whose employment is based on racism as mysticism and feelings. It’s not just film directors and Times columnists and Joy Reid. If we changed to a materialist framework that sought more redistribution (which I agree the Left is much healthier focusing on) there is a huge swath of entrenched ersatz elites who are out of jobs. Also a lot the enthusiasm for Kendi and DiAngelo never felt real - it felt astroturfed, coming out of zombie media outlets, foundations, and corporate HR departments. No one likes this stuff and few people think it’s a good idea, so we should give more thought to why it is so prevalent.

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dd's avatar

As a side note, I read excerpts from Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility". From those excerpts I was astonished when old familiar bells started to ring and I realized that her enterprise was in essence a racialized version of gay conversion therapy. (I am 65 and gay.)

By that I mean that the shaming, the scorning, the guilt inducement, the weird anecdotes, the term "fragility" itself, and the non-falsifiability were almost one with mid-20th century or so pathologizing psychological/theological literature against homosexuals and homosexuality.

(And btw, that literature was in itself a very thinly disguised displacement of the discomfort those fields felt against women. In fact, it wasn't homosexuality on trial, it was effete and effeminate men,)

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