This reminds me of Trans Lifeline and how the founders embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars in an attempt to build a Waco-style compound in the desert before getting quietly axed. I asked a bunch of trans media personalities to cover it and no one was interested. One of them actually plugged TLL on her Twitter feed a few days after I messaged her. What happened to "silence is violence"?
I'm really afraid of somewhere like Breitbart finding out about this and running with it.
It is disappointing that breitbart could run with it, but even more disappointing that it's happening. For me personally and I'm sure for many others, I'm finding that I'm generally less apt to donate to anything I haven't already vetted. And that's sad because I'm sure I'm passing up many orgs who are doing good things. But there are just so many of them, it's hard to vet them quickly, and when you've been grifted enough it's just really hard to read any of those pleas with an open mind.
lol fascinating I had not heard about this. It looks like the founders still run it?
I remember when everyone was donating to them, feeling vindicated about ignoring that. There's definitely a spirit of...separatism or something among some people in the queer community ("we take care of our own") that I have never liked and leads to stuff like both giving money to sketchy non profits and nonsense fantasies by google engineers of building queer compounds in the desert.
The more you write about this topic, the more it becomes clear that the current awokening (to use crit theory language) centers the voices of white people who want to be (or stay) on top and feel guilty about it, and (to use crit theory language semi-facetiously again) believe that black bodies and voices are junior varsity bodies and voices.
Hey Freddie, I know you get disappointed when your media criticism and your criticism of social justice politics draws huge clicks, likes, and comments whereas your other kind of writing doesn't, and I understand your frustration.
But damn it, I can't help it. This lunatic social media fueled woke movement is so extreme and so alienating and so wrapped up in a style that feels like right-wing evangelical bullies of yore that I can't help but be fascinated by it. My damn brain lights up whenever you write about this stuff. As a long time left-of-center person, I feel like I've been going crazy the past 5 years. So I really need this. A lot of us do.
So well put. I have the exact same feeling. Every time I read an article like this I get a dopamine rush. It literally feels delicious for smart people like Freddie to push back on this ideological movement which indeed has “white” liberals (and I say this as a liberal, who’s skin is indeed “white”) pissing their pants with fear. (Again, me included. I can’t afford to lose my job.)
My only worry is that this addiction to pieces like this might be similar to the nation’s addiction to Trump. I broke that one. I haven’t read an article or seen a clip of Trump since January 20th. I refuse too. I feel SOOOO much better!
I wonder if wallowing in this culture war garbage is just generally unhealthy for us all. Know what I mean?
It is more than culture-war garbage. Think about it: you say you are afraid of losing your job if you critique this "ideological movement". This, in a country (I presume you are in the US) which is (still) a functioning democracy with a constitutional right to free speech! This is truly and legitimately terrifying!
This movement openly advocate a totalitarian racist regime: read Kendi's proposal for an "anti-racist" (an Orwellian word if ever there was one) amendment to (actually a wholesale repeal of) the US Constitution to see what kind of country they want you to live in.
This is real. They can win. They ARE winning, in that so many of us are already scared to speak out. I wouldn't be writing these words here if I was not anonymous.
I agree with you overall. But to be clear, by "garbage" I meant the whole topic. "Race" is a garbage topic. As is "Trump". As is "gender". They are all garbage. They shouldn't even be conversations. There's SOOOOO many more important things to talk about! NO ONE should talk about this garbage. That's what I mean.
And while I agree with you about how horrible the movement is, I don't agree with you that they're winning. Warren (my choice for her financial plans) lost bigly (as 45 would say, ha!) because she took a knee for the wokesters. A black centrist ex-cop is winning the Mayoral election in NY because no one wants to "Defund the police". So they're not winning. Yet.
Just like Trump wasn't winning. 'Till Morning Joe started having him on every day in 2015. And Huff Post starting putting his every retarded utterance on the front page.
Us Americans love a panic. Islamists, Trump, Wokeism, Covid. It's all rubber necking. I'm not saying these aren't problems. But in the same way BLM doesn't actually help "black" people, I'm not sure articles about how stupid woke ideas are helps stop wokeism.
It depends on how you define "winning". Woke people never win by being popular. They basically can't win elections even in the most Democrat cities. But they do successfully take over institutions. If you run universities and the NYTimes and the HR departments of major corporations, haven'y you sort of won even most people hate you?
(looks like the tweet still says $10.6 billion to me)
Only somewhat related but I work at a decent sized tech company that has hired a series of DE&I leaders and consultants over the past several years, the leadership is always eager to post solemnly in company channels about the latest disturbing events in our country, and DE&I is one of the company's "highest priorities" that is discussed at almost every company wide meeting.
But funnily enough, their transgender healthcare coverage was almost non existent when I joined and their parental leave and adoption and some other policies weren't very inclusive of gay couples. After years of myself and others getting quite confrontational with HR to improve things it's a little better, but there are still a lot of things that should be improved at a company that is quite literally a money factory.
I bring that up not to pose a rivalry between BLM and LGBT progress, but it's been a good learning experience for me about how appealing it is for our CEO to metaphorically do the Nancy Pelosi in the Kente Cloth thing and bend the knee as we all solemnly nod our heads. It's not quite as appealing to quietly spend more money on healthcare and give gay fathers parental leave to spend with their kids like straight couples would get. Healthcare and time off costs money, we gotta make sure the money factory is churning at full speed.
I can think of two counter-examples - criticism of Shaun King and the coverage of Samaria Rice's criticism of activists. I suspect, though I'd want to check to be sure, that both of those were much more covered by Black writers.
Honestly, I feel like a lot of the problem is the way the political system is just completely closed off, and there's not enough money for media covering actual things any more. So it turns out to be discourse about discourse. It's a problem with both old media titans and people like Greenwald and Taibbi- there's so much focus on media talking about each other's takes, or just media-on-media stuff that serves mostly as a bunch of fire for nothing.
As you might notice, the media on media stuff ends up being more engaging for a lot of people, hitting on those other people you hate rather than firing up numbers or long, boring anecdotes. A sick dunk for a sclerotic liberal order on Kendi or DiAngelo, who himself doesn't really challenge much, but it reads harsh enough to feel real is a lot more appealing than some numbers on average rents in an area.
I don't think movements can really rely on media any more, anyway. There's little to be won there, one way or the other.
"There’s this absolutely bizarre incuriosity about this world, about whether it’s working, about whether there is internal dissent about what is best to do and why, about who should lead, about how critics of these movements should be treated…. Why? Aren’t these basic and essential questions?"
Yeah, these are basic and essential questions - if you're curious. Mainstream journalism selects against curiosity, the ability to think critically... really, against the ability to do anything but regurgitate whatever the last person with a microphone said.
Still relevant to this day, Chomsky to Andrew Marr in 1996 (full transcript available, just Google for it, fascinating read):
Marr: “How can you know that I’m self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are..”
Chomsky: “I’m not saying you're self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
Many of us learned this in the 1960s, there are always posers who are in it for the fame and money. We learned, too, that the Vietnam war was bullshit and so did most of the boys who were drafted and sent to fight, as well as many who volunteered. Yet Iraq 2 comes around and none of the lessons were remembered (not even the important one, guerrilla warfare from hidden locations tends to triumph over massive war machine sitting in open and marching across the fields in their red coats (oops, revolutionary war). New generations continually suffer from historical amnesia, in part because they think they were the first people to discover sex but mostly because of psychological myopia, and in this instance, the fact that history is racist so why read it.
The trouble is, the insurgency in Iraq didn’t win - while at a substantial cost, we won as soon as we surged troops in in 2007. Unfortunately, because 11 deaths a month in exchange for relative peace and stability, (and heaven only knows how many lives saved) we pulled out - and got ISIS, because we weren’t there. In my opinion, the lesson from Vietnam and Iraq was simple - don’t half ass two things, whole ass one thing.
This sort of media-criticism seems, at least to me, to suggest that you think this system can be shamed into improving, but it seems like it plays an intended role perfectly well.
Efficacy and Honesty in media would sound a lot more like your last post on the profit motive, but I don't think anyone would sincerely try to pressure media to be honest in that way because that would be deeply misunderstanding the purpose of the media and also misunderstand the motive of the media, profit, only incidentally things like efficacy and honesty.
What I don't really get is why you would think the examples you cite here are a really different. You've got the honesty, sure, but the very nature of media criticism seems to by necessity ignore efficacy, at least in a profit-driven setting
or if not "shamed into improving", it at least suggest that you think media-criticism plays a role in the effort to make the media more honest and efficacious. I'd maybe lay this thinking out more explicitly, because I think it'd be an interesting thing to see someone try to defend
It can help media consumers - readers and viewers - understand that if they're having a nagging feeling that the stories don't add up, that they are not crazy and they can in fact believe their lying eyes. Restaurant reviews are written for diners first and restaurants second, after all.
I think you're right to make the comparison to another consumer feedback arena. Insofar as we are consumers of media (in the economic sense, not just the intake sense), we can only 'vote' with our dollars, which is the real issue when it comes to media.
The latent idea here seems to be we can achieve some real honesty and efficacy from media via consumer advocacy, which is a coherent position, but not one that I would expect from someone like Freddie who is ostensibly an anti-capitalist
That's a bit unfair on Freddie. He's very consistent on this: he is a Marxist but also recognizes that we live in a certain type of society. It's like how he is an advocate for renter's rights, fair rent etc. I'm quite sure his vision of a better New York simply wouldn't involve private landlords at all, and wouldn't need people out holding signs to demand housing. These things would instead be provided by the State. But he doesn't live in such a New York, so he has to make do with what he has. So it's less being in favor of market forces, and more recognizing that he can't sit on the shore and turn back the tide.
So it is with media. Working independently on Substack and hoping for improvement from the capitalist media are quite separate from saying "yep, this is the best it can ever be and I fully endorse the system that made it possible."
Inasmuch as it's a position I wouldn't expect... personally speaking, I think it's a bit misguided when the media is by and large a loss-leader for plutocrats. What's it to Jeff Bezos if the Washington Post makes a profit or not? I mean he loves money so it would be *ideal* if it did, but it's first and foremost a propaganda organ for Amazon and its associated government contracts.
I think media criticism as advocacy is a reasonable, here-in-our-fallen-world sort of approach in the form of agitprop or rallying people to do something, but I guess I don't understand the analysis of power that motivates, say, this sort of posting by him. Seems just like entertainment to me (at least this is my motivation for subscribing to this substack)
I don't think it's reasonable to expect media to reform itself. But sometimes criticism is in itself sufficient justification. I don't know if pointing out that somebody is full of crap is going to reform them but there is sometimes just intrinsic value in pointing it out.
I'm an academic and I see this tendency among my white colleagues (I'm white, fyi). A few months ago a group of black colleagues floated a very costly and very flawed proposal for diversity hires. I was the only white person to point out its flaws. When I expressed frustration in a union committee meeting, I was told by white faculty (there were no black faculty present) that my criticism was valid and valued but that our black colleagues were too traumatized and tired to face public scrutiny of their proposal. To be fair, I have witnessed black students play on white faculty guilt to argue for (undeserved) better grades and wildly extended deadlines for submitting assignments. Many faculty capitulate. Some know they're being played; others are patronizing and condescending to the point that they believe the play. It's painful to witness. But then again, so much about academe is painful right now.
All good points. Except the "I'm white" line. No you're not. And your colleagues aren't "black". It's all bullshit. We've got to stop this fake labeling. Is it a privilege to say "I'm not white"? Yes. One we need to flex. Not check. #StopRaceCraft
I know. I'm being a bit "performative" as the kids say. But if sex is just being "assigned" at birth, then race is too. It's way more of a construct than gender. It literally means nothing. That's my current take anyway.
A. A significant amount of that 10b was or will be squandered
B. The 'we're on side BLM' media doesn't want to investigate because the resulting story would look bad for BLM
C. This also would put a target on the back of whoever is doing it
But...BLM is still more of a brand than a movement with concrete end goals, which means there's not some clearly correct way to spend the 10b to achieve those end goals. OTOH the brand can be tarnished. Until the goals turn into something concrete and the movement gets real structure to it, it seems reasonable that anyone who 'supports BLM' would want to play protect the queen with the brand.
The other reason there has been no mainstream criticism of BLM is because BLM is altogether ineffective. Were it as prominent and powerful as the civil rights leadership under MLK, you bet white liberal media would take notice and be critical of it.
I think it's partly "BLM the concept" and "BLM the official nonprofit" getting conflated (probably intentionally?) There's obviously not going to be much debate in liberal circles about "black people are subjected to a racist criminal justice system", which then bleeds into not thinking about the organization. Like how many people are even aware that BLM the nonprofit is essentially a group of social climbers that usurped the organization after the original Ferguson activists were assassinated? And that these people were highly critical of the Derays of the world that were parachuting in?
We live in a country where almost everything can be considered illegal and police generally operate with no oversight. It's why when the US was founded we had not standing police force of military. While both have become necessary, they realized that both are a significant threat to a free society operating under a Constitutional set of protections.
couldn't agree with you more! great article
I see this more and more.
This is great. The Ben Smith photo comment pushed me over the top to become a paid subscriber.
I was already a paid subscriber. But the Ben Smith photo line was indeed hilarious.
Freddie is a cheeky scamp; that's one of the things I like about him.
This reminds me of Trans Lifeline and how the founders embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars in an attempt to build a Waco-style compound in the desert before getting quietly axed. I asked a bunch of trans media personalities to cover it and no one was interested. One of them actually plugged TLL on her Twitter feed a few days after I messaged her. What happened to "silence is violence"?
I'm really afraid of somewhere like Breitbart finding out about this and running with it.
A link to the tax form that confirms the embezzlement: https://www.translifeline.org/financial/2017-990.pdf The most relevant parts are on pages 34 and 39.
It is disappointing that breitbart could run with it, but even more disappointing that it's happening. For me personally and I'm sure for many others, I'm finding that I'm generally less apt to donate to anything I haven't already vetted. And that's sad because I'm sure I'm passing up many orgs who are doing good things. But there are just so many of them, it's hard to vet them quickly, and when you've been grifted enough it's just really hard to read any of those pleas with an open mind.
lol fascinating I had not heard about this. It looks like the founders still run it?
I remember when everyone was donating to them, feeling vindicated about ignoring that. There's definitely a spirit of...separatism or something among some people in the queer community ("we take care of our own") that I have never liked and leads to stuff like both giving money to sketchy non profits and nonsense fantasies by google engineers of building queer compounds in the desert.
The more you write about this topic, the more it becomes clear that the current awokening (to use crit theory language) centers the voices of white people who want to be (or stay) on top and feel guilty about it, and (to use crit theory language semi-facetiously again) believe that black bodies and voices are junior varsity bodies and voices.
Hey Freddie, I know you get disappointed when your media criticism and your criticism of social justice politics draws huge clicks, likes, and comments whereas your other kind of writing doesn't, and I understand your frustration.
But damn it, I can't help it. This lunatic social media fueled woke movement is so extreme and so alienating and so wrapped up in a style that feels like right-wing evangelical bullies of yore that I can't help but be fascinated by it. My damn brain lights up whenever you write about this stuff. As a long time left-of-center person, I feel like I've been going crazy the past 5 years. So I really need this. A lot of us do.
Fascinating article. Thanks!
So well put. I have the exact same feeling. Every time I read an article like this I get a dopamine rush. It literally feels delicious for smart people like Freddie to push back on this ideological movement which indeed has “white” liberals (and I say this as a liberal, who’s skin is indeed “white”) pissing their pants with fear. (Again, me included. I can’t afford to lose my job.)
My only worry is that this addiction to pieces like this might be similar to the nation’s addiction to Trump. I broke that one. I haven’t read an article or seen a clip of Trump since January 20th. I refuse too. I feel SOOOO much better!
I wonder if wallowing in this culture war garbage is just generally unhealthy for us all. Know what I mean?
Cookies taste good. Too many? You puke. Right?
It is more than culture-war garbage. Think about it: you say you are afraid of losing your job if you critique this "ideological movement". This, in a country (I presume you are in the US) which is (still) a functioning democracy with a constitutional right to free speech! This is truly and legitimately terrifying!
This movement openly advocate a totalitarian racist regime: read Kendi's proposal for an "anti-racist" (an Orwellian word if ever there was one) amendment to (actually a wholesale repeal of) the US Constitution to see what kind of country they want you to live in.
This is real. They can win. They ARE winning, in that so many of us are already scared to speak out. I wouldn't be writing these words here if I was not anonymous.
I agree with you overall. But to be clear, by "garbage" I meant the whole topic. "Race" is a garbage topic. As is "Trump". As is "gender". They are all garbage. They shouldn't even be conversations. There's SOOOOO many more important things to talk about! NO ONE should talk about this garbage. That's what I mean.
And while I agree with you about how horrible the movement is, I don't agree with you that they're winning. Warren (my choice for her financial plans) lost bigly (as 45 would say, ha!) because she took a knee for the wokesters. A black centrist ex-cop is winning the Mayoral election in NY because no one wants to "Defund the police". So they're not winning. Yet.
Just like Trump wasn't winning. 'Till Morning Joe started having him on every day in 2015. And Huff Post starting putting his every retarded utterance on the front page.
Us Americans love a panic. Islamists, Trump, Wokeism, Covid. It's all rubber necking. I'm not saying these aren't problems. But in the same way BLM doesn't actually help "black" people, I'm not sure articles about how stupid woke ideas are helps stop wokeism.
There's no bad publicity. That's all I'm saying.
It depends on how you define "winning". Woke people never win by being popular. They basically can't win elections even in the most Democrat cities. But they do successfully take over institutions. If you run universities and the NYTimes and the HR departments of major corporations, haven'y you sort of won even most people hate you?
(looks like the tweet still says $10.6 billion to me)
Only somewhat related but I work at a decent sized tech company that has hired a series of DE&I leaders and consultants over the past several years, the leadership is always eager to post solemnly in company channels about the latest disturbing events in our country, and DE&I is one of the company's "highest priorities" that is discussed at almost every company wide meeting.
But funnily enough, their transgender healthcare coverage was almost non existent when I joined and their parental leave and adoption and some other policies weren't very inclusive of gay couples. After years of myself and others getting quite confrontational with HR to improve things it's a little better, but there are still a lot of things that should be improved at a company that is quite literally a money factory.
I bring that up not to pose a rivalry between BLM and LGBT progress, but it's been a good learning experience for me about how appealing it is for our CEO to metaphorically do the Nancy Pelosi in the Kente Cloth thing and bend the knee as we all solemnly nod our heads. It's not quite as appealing to quietly spend more money on healthcare and give gay fathers parental leave to spend with their kids like straight couples would get. Healthcare and time off costs money, we gotta make sure the money factory is churning at full speed.
I can think of two counter-examples - criticism of Shaun King and the coverage of Samaria Rice's criticism of activists. I suspect, though I'd want to check to be sure, that both of those were much more covered by Black writers.
Honestly, I feel like a lot of the problem is the way the political system is just completely closed off, and there's not enough money for media covering actual things any more. So it turns out to be discourse about discourse. It's a problem with both old media titans and people like Greenwald and Taibbi- there's so much focus on media talking about each other's takes, or just media-on-media stuff that serves mostly as a bunch of fire for nothing.
As you might notice, the media on media stuff ends up being more engaging for a lot of people, hitting on those other people you hate rather than firing up numbers or long, boring anecdotes. A sick dunk for a sclerotic liberal order on Kendi or DiAngelo, who himself doesn't really challenge much, but it reads harsh enough to feel real is a lot more appealing than some numbers on average rents in an area.
I don't think movements can really rely on media any more, anyway. There's little to be won there, one way or the other.
"There’s this absolutely bizarre incuriosity about this world, about whether it’s working, about whether there is internal dissent about what is best to do and why, about who should lead, about how critics of these movements should be treated…. Why? Aren’t these basic and essential questions?"
Yeah, these are basic and essential questions - if you're curious. Mainstream journalism selects against curiosity, the ability to think critically... really, against the ability to do anything but regurgitate whatever the last person with a microphone said.
Still relevant to this day, Chomsky to Andrew Marr in 1996 (full transcript available, just Google for it, fascinating read):
Marr: “How can you know that I’m self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are..”
Chomsky: “I’m not saying you're self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
Many of us learned this in the 1960s, there are always posers who are in it for the fame and money. We learned, too, that the Vietnam war was bullshit and so did most of the boys who were drafted and sent to fight, as well as many who volunteered. Yet Iraq 2 comes around and none of the lessons were remembered (not even the important one, guerrilla warfare from hidden locations tends to triumph over massive war machine sitting in open and marching across the fields in their red coats (oops, revolutionary war). New generations continually suffer from historical amnesia, in part because they think they were the first people to discover sex but mostly because of psychological myopia, and in this instance, the fact that history is racist so why read it.
>"New generations continually suffer from historical amnesia, in part because they think they were the first people to discover sex"
+1
The trouble is, the insurgency in Iraq didn’t win - while at a substantial cost, we won as soon as we surged troops in in 2007. Unfortunately, because 11 deaths a month in exchange for relative peace and stability, (and heaven only knows how many lives saved) we pulled out - and got ISIS, because we weren’t there. In my opinion, the lesson from Vietnam and Iraq was simple - don’t half ass two things, whole ass one thing.
This sort of media-criticism seems, at least to me, to suggest that you think this system can be shamed into improving, but it seems like it plays an intended role perfectly well.
Efficacy and Honesty in media would sound a lot more like your last post on the profit motive, but I don't think anyone would sincerely try to pressure media to be honest in that way because that would be deeply misunderstanding the purpose of the media and also misunderstand the motive of the media, profit, only incidentally things like efficacy and honesty.
What I don't really get is why you would think the examples you cite here are a really different. You've got the honesty, sure, but the very nature of media criticism seems to by necessity ignore efficacy, at least in a profit-driven setting
or if not "shamed into improving", it at least suggest that you think media-criticism plays a role in the effort to make the media more honest and efficacious. I'd maybe lay this thinking out more explicitly, because I think it'd be an interesting thing to see someone try to defend
It can help media consumers - readers and viewers - understand that if they're having a nagging feeling that the stories don't add up, that they are not crazy and they can in fact believe their lying eyes. Restaurant reviews are written for diners first and restaurants second, after all.
I think you're right to make the comparison to another consumer feedback arena. Insofar as we are consumers of media (in the economic sense, not just the intake sense), we can only 'vote' with our dollars, which is the real issue when it comes to media.
The latent idea here seems to be we can achieve some real honesty and efficacy from media via consumer advocacy, which is a coherent position, but not one that I would expect from someone like Freddie who is ostensibly an anti-capitalist
That's a bit unfair on Freddie. He's very consistent on this: he is a Marxist but also recognizes that we live in a certain type of society. It's like how he is an advocate for renter's rights, fair rent etc. I'm quite sure his vision of a better New York simply wouldn't involve private landlords at all, and wouldn't need people out holding signs to demand housing. These things would instead be provided by the State. But he doesn't live in such a New York, so he has to make do with what he has. So it's less being in favor of market forces, and more recognizing that he can't sit on the shore and turn back the tide.
So it is with media. Working independently on Substack and hoping for improvement from the capitalist media are quite separate from saying "yep, this is the best it can ever be and I fully endorse the system that made it possible."
Inasmuch as it's a position I wouldn't expect... personally speaking, I think it's a bit misguided when the media is by and large a loss-leader for plutocrats. What's it to Jeff Bezos if the Washington Post makes a profit or not? I mean he loves money so it would be *ideal* if it did, but it's first and foremost a propaganda organ for Amazon and its associated government contracts.
I think media criticism as advocacy is a reasonable, here-in-our-fallen-world sort of approach in the form of agitprop or rallying people to do something, but I guess I don't understand the analysis of power that motivates, say, this sort of posting by him. Seems just like entertainment to me (at least this is my motivation for subscribing to this substack)
I don't think it's reasonable to expect media to reform itself. But sometimes criticism is in itself sufficient justification. I don't know if pointing out that somebody is full of crap is going to reform them but there is sometimes just intrinsic value in pointing it out.
I'm an academic and I see this tendency among my white colleagues (I'm white, fyi). A few months ago a group of black colleagues floated a very costly and very flawed proposal for diversity hires. I was the only white person to point out its flaws. When I expressed frustration in a union committee meeting, I was told by white faculty (there were no black faculty present) that my criticism was valid and valued but that our black colleagues were too traumatized and tired to face public scrutiny of their proposal. To be fair, I have witnessed black students play on white faculty guilt to argue for (undeserved) better grades and wildly extended deadlines for submitting assignments. Many faculty capitulate. Some know they're being played; others are patronizing and condescending to the point that they believe the play. It's painful to witness. But then again, so much about academe is painful right now.
All good points. Except the "I'm white" line. No you're not. And your colleagues aren't "black". It's all bullshit. We've got to stop this fake labeling. Is it a privilege to say "I'm not white"? Yes. One we need to flex. Not check. #StopRaceCraft
But that detail is necessary. Had I not been perceived as white, my comments about the diversity proposal would have been received much differently.
I know. I'm being a bit "performative" as the kids say. But if sex is just being "assigned" at birth, then race is too. It's way more of a construct than gender. It literally means nothing. That's my current take anyway.
Racism is real. Race is fake.
I think it's safe to assume that:
A. A significant amount of that 10b was or will be squandered
B. The 'we're on side BLM' media doesn't want to investigate because the resulting story would look bad for BLM
C. This also would put a target on the back of whoever is doing it
But...BLM is still more of a brand than a movement with concrete end goals, which means there's not some clearly correct way to spend the 10b to achieve those end goals. OTOH the brand can be tarnished. Until the goals turn into something concrete and the movement gets real structure to it, it seems reasonable that anyone who 'supports BLM' would want to play protect the queen with the brand.
The other reason there has been no mainstream criticism of BLM is because BLM is altogether ineffective. Were it as prominent and powerful as the civil rights leadership under MLK, you bet white liberal media would take notice and be critical of it.
I hadn’t thought of that point, but it’s solid. It reminds me of one of my favorite aphorisms: “nobody kicks a dead dog”
I disagree. White liberal media will no longer be critical of anything in the US that is not white.
I think it's partly "BLM the concept" and "BLM the official nonprofit" getting conflated (probably intentionally?) There's obviously not going to be much debate in liberal circles about "black people are subjected to a racist criminal justice system", which then bleeds into not thinking about the organization. Like how many people are even aware that BLM the nonprofit is essentially a group of social climbers that usurped the organization after the original Ferguson activists were assassinated? And that these people were highly critical of the Derays of the world that were parachuting in?
What’s this about Ferguson activists being assassinated?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/puzzling-number-men-tied-ferguson-protests-have-died-n984261
Sadly, this is pretty common. Police often target protestors who are acting legally at a later time to punish them for speaking up.
https://www.cnet.com/news/geofence-warrants-how-police-can-use-protesters-phones-against-them/
We live in a country where almost everything can be considered illegal and police generally operate with no oversight. It's why when the US was founded we had not standing police force of military. While both have become necessary, they realized that both are a significant threat to a free society operating under a Constitutional set of protections.