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Anthony's avatar

This is such a good and important piece. So many people (often maliciously, often innocently) conflate criticizing the specific efforts to address a problem like racial or gender inequality with denial of the existence of the problem. But, the key point that you've identified is that however real and important a problem is, once you create a Department of Solving the Problem and employ a dozen people whose income, health insurance, and retirement savings are tied to being employed by the Department of Solving the Problem, you've created a perverse set of incentives to prioritize identifying new iterations of the problem over doing anything to actually solve it.

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MarkS's avatar

>"Eugene Chung is a bellwether, and I don’t know how liberals could complain about his situation with a straight face. This is the world you created."

Please, Freddie, terminology matters, and "liberals" is highly misleading here. I am a classical Liberal and Democrat. I strongly oppose the racism against Eugene Chung. And there are plenty of people like me. In the 2020 election in California, Biden won 63% to 34%, and in the same election, a proposition to restore affirmative action failed, 56% to 44%. This means that at least 30% of Biden voters voted against affirmative action. I was one of them.

I did so because of the pernicious and growing politicization of race preferences. If racial preferences continue, at some point we will need precise legal definitions of "black", etc. What are those definitions going to be, exactly? Will we see the return of the one-drop rule?

The only way out, in my view, is a full-on embrace of classical race-blind, sex-blind, gender-blind, every-person-is-unique-with-individual-rights, Liberalism. That's what this political philosophy is called. It utterly rejects the social-justice-warrior racism (cleverly rebranded as "anti-racism", a bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu that Orwell would surely regard as paradigmatic).

So: don't call the SJWs "liberals". They are not.

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