We just got in from the whole family shoveling snow, with some drifts up to three-and-a-half feet. Here’s the recovery formula:
- Six ounces of mid-roast Starbucks espresso out of the machine
- Mix in a shot (or so…) of Mister Katz’s Rock & Rye whisky
- Put on Miles Davis Kind of Blue
- Light a candle
- Choose to be fully present in the moment, observing it with all my senses, and feeling God’s presence in it
As I’ve been finishing off some chores while catching up with podcasts during the blizzard, a thought that’s been forming for a while struck home very clearly.
In general, we’ve got two approaches to understanding our existence: top-down and bottom-up. Top down is more concerned with meaning and teleological understandings of purpose. From this approach, it makes perfect sense to respond to the question of why there are biological cells by pointing out that they’re needed in order to explain us.
Bottom-up is more the approach of science. Whether one believes in divine intention or randomness and chance as the fundamental explanation for all things, the bottom-up approach starts at the beginning of time and winds things forward. Particles form atoms form molecules form compounds form cells form organs form us.
Sorting all that out will be the work of many essays, probably on Dust in the Light. Today’s Ripple-level thought had to do with something one doesn’t often find strongly enough stated from either perspective. Namely, the very core of existence, utterly essential to being and understanding, is relationships.
That’s a disconcerting conclusion for a periodically intemperate introvert who seems to have a knack for rubbing people the wrong way!
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Going through links I’d flagged for comment, I came across a Fox News article by Danielle Wallace after Winsome Sears — “the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia’s history” — won her campaign for lieutenant governor:
[She] attributed her victory to voters being sick of seeing Black and White people pitted against each other.
“They’re tired of the Black against White and the Asian against Latino,” Winsome said of those who voted for her during a “Fox News Sunday” interview. “They’re tired of it, and they’re tired of politicians who won’t let the wounds of the past heal.”
“I’ve just always assumed whatever room I’m in, I belong. Whatever I want to pursue, it’s mine for the taking,” Winsome told host Chris Wallace. “Nobody is denying that we don’t want to hear all the history, least of all me. I certainly don’t want the sins of the past to be repeated. We don’t have to tear one person down in order to build another up. That’s no way to be. That’s not America.”
Amen. It’s nothing but a malicious talking point from progressives that anybody actually wants to cover over the racist scars in American history. Scars are a reminder for the bearer and a lesson for others. What we need to do, however, is to let the wounds heal.
The unexpected reality is that the wounds were healing right up to the time that America elected its first black President, Barack Obama. The easy (facile) explanation that anybody on the Left will likely recite is that American racists realized they had to redouble their efforts and, in doing so, leveraged the subconscious discomfort of a “systemically racist” population. They can almost construct a coherent story along these lines pointing to obscure “alt-right” figures and drawing conspiratorial flow-charts to President Trump.
The problem with this theory is that it evaporates the moment you look up from the page. News of overt racism is almost always news of a racial hoax. The high-profile cases of racism (or alleged racism) are high profile because they are so rare, yet so valuable to the progressives promoting them. The pieces of the theory just don’t connect.
A contrary explanation, to which I subscribe because I find there to be much more evidence and much more coherence between pieces, is that Obama’s election brought two related developments. The first was the proof he embodied that one of the Left’s greatest levers (racial division and animosity) was slipping away. A black president was proof that the American promise was true, and American progressives are largely animated by a deep desire that it not be true.
Then, when Obama (a progressive academic) took office, he leveraged his power during a financial crisis, with an unimaginable mass of money to be spent in the name of “stimulus,” to fund and otherwise reinvigorate the radical movement. A decade after this comet of cash crashed into the sea of progressive activism, tsunamis of critical race theory and queer theory engulfed our coastal elites.
The metaphor suggests the solution: We have to get to higher ground until the waters recede, while saving as many people as we can from drowning in the madness and preventing the cascade of calamities such events can cause.
The good news is that the solution is ultimately a choice. Survival as a society is a choice.
Featured image by L. Filipe C. Sousa on Unsplash.
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Having recently fallen into an argument about the overlaps between history, housing, and racism, I couldn’t do otherwise than take note of a GoLocalProv article headlined, “Black Homeownership in RI Is as Low as It Was in the 1960s.”
In Rhode Island, just 6% of homes are owned by Black households. And, becoming a new homeowner is ever more difficult as the prices of homes continue to spike. The median price of a single-family home is now $375,000 in Rhode Island.
The numbers are not improving despite the perception that economic opportunities for Blacks have improved over the past 60 years.
Homeownership for Blacks was at the same level as before the federal Civic Rights Act passed, redlining was commonplace and housing rights laws were non-existent.
There is no intrinsic reason that black homeownership rate should be significantly lower than that of the population overall. Even a lower average income should be mitigated by the availability of lower-cost options.
That said, we must be careful about the too-easy conclusion that this outcome results simply from “systemic racism.” If that assumption turns out not to be correct, or if we misidentify which parts of “the system” are to blame, we’ll only prolong the disparities, stoke hostility, and therefore make the problem worse, perhaps provoking a resurgence of actual racist conflict.
Straight-up racism and historical accidents put black Americans in a disadvantaged position, absolutely, but a failure to improve since the ’60s is not merely a continuation of that history. Rather, the “systemic racism,” if there is such a thing, is to be found in progressive policies around education and economics, which suppress the ability of those who do not begin with advantages (most especially the advantage of growing up in a stable, nuclear family). Such policies naturally harm demographic groups that are disproportionately in need of the stability that such families provide and the opportunity that free-market capitalism creates.
From this perspective, the notion in the GoLocal article that the color of realtors is laughable, and the following from Nelson Taylor of “upscale real estate group” Mott & Chace Sotheby’s International is insultingly racist:
“Black people need more professionals in the housing world that they can trust. The amount of black real estate agents in this country percentage-wise is almost less than half than the percentage of black people in this country,” said Taylor.
Evidence that white realtors are untrustworthy racists ought to be required before an assertion like that is deemed credible.
The reality is that, if you want to increase black homeownership, improve education (which means we must stop allowing the teachers unions and education insiders to stymie reform), help minorities integrate into the free-market economy (which means we must stop insisting that everything is racist and instead encourage cooperation and self-responsibility), and increase the stability of their family lives (which means stopping the progressive destruction of the traditional family structure).
That a blue state like Rhode Island hasn’t improved in half a century should inspire reflection that maybe improving the lives of minority families is not the number one goal of the progressives who dominate the state, but rather that activists are more interested in taking advantage of minorities’ plight in order to push the very policies that are harming them.
The incentives paint a very clear picture.
Featured image by Mattia Faloretti on Unsplash.
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The stories of the Rhode Island nurses featured in videos that their union is producing to promote COVID vaccination are compelling, but I have to wonder what their real purpose is.
If the designers sat down for even a short meeting and gave real thought to who it is that isn’t getting vaccinated, I don’t see any way they’d conclude that guilt-trip and scare videos would be the best solution. Consequently, the videos seem targeted at the union’s core audience, which is probably almost entirely vaccinated. So what is the real purpose?
If the videos are genuinely targeted toward the unvaccinated, then hopeful testimony about better outcomes and the safety of the vaccines would be better. If the videos are meant as a bank-shot move to pressure authorities to increase the number of nurses and their pay, then playing into the blame-game against people who aren’t vaccinated is the wrong move.
Maybe the folks behind such videos really aren’t capable of understanding people who don’t follow their lead.
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The topic of the podcast was tangential to my point with this post, but listening to Jordan Peterson speak with infrastructure academic Rick Geddes and writer and Democrat messaging consultant Gregg Hurwitz recently made me wish Westerners could get back to working together.
Lately, I find that the people with whom I come into disagreement fall within two groups. Some will simply not acknowledge or engage ideas outside a narrow window. In media, especially, such engagement used to be acknowledged as something you just do for healthy intellectual etiquette, but especially since 2016, they guardians of public attention seem to have given themselves permission to shut people out.
I try to be sensitive to the possibility that I’ve said or done things to offend the individuals involved. However, that can’t be the case for everybody who would express opinions like mine, and in any event, this explanation does not address the feeling of having been cast into the abyss without the possibility of redemption.
Those in the second group will engage with the likes of me only to be hostile. They don’t look for areas of agreement or assume genuine disagreement or even error. They seek things to justify aggression and assume all disagreements and errors are knowing and malicious. It gets very, very tiring trying to maintain conversation in such cases.
In either case, there is no hope of meeting halfway. The former group will only acknowledge the disagreeables when we reinforce their view on something, whether of proof that their belief is so obvious that even we agree with it or as a reminder that we bogeymen are out there. The latter group will neither make nor acknowledge concessions; they are always on the advance.
Often, the impression is that they will not permit themselves to consider ideas anywhere near some taboo area. I’ve remarked periodically that the radical woke types seem to regard “white supremacy” as a viciously contagious virus among white people. Maybe they do so in order to keep these wide barriers around the taboos. Giving conservatives a forum is abetting “white supremacy,” which through the transitive property of wokeness means the host of that forum must be a “white supremacist.”
It’s difficult to see how we get away from this mess without largescale conversions or replacements of the people involved.
Featured image by Stefano Stacchini on Unsplash.
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Isn’t it curious how things that aren’t this are decried when Republicans are in office, but things that are this are not decried when Democrats are in control?
Besty Woodruff Swan and Daniel Lippman broke the details this week of a new Capitol Police initiative that involves deep dives into the speech, background, and lifestyle details of who members of Congress are meeting with, including donors, Hill staff, mayors, state legislators, and other Americans exercising their First Amendment right to petition their government. …
The Capitol Police have provided no detailed justification. Nor have they said what they are doing with the records, how long those records are being stored, or what other purposes they have. The agency is only subject to congressional oversight — not to public records requests.
Federalist writer Rachel Bovard goes on to describe how easy it is “to imagine” this practice becoming politicized, but come on. We all know this is political in its intent and its formation. We also know supposed watchdogs will cease to tolerate this if access to such powers switches partisan hands.
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We’re thoroughly within one of those episodes in history that future generations read about and wonder how anything so foolish could have been tolerated.
Remember when Republicans complained it was inappropriate for President Obama to use Marines to hold his umbrella? Remember when Democrats scrutinized President Trump’s descent down a potentially slippery ramp to discern frailty? Well, here’s Joe Biden handing his COVID mask to a sitting Supreme Court Justice, while talking about him, as if he’s an assistant, and then walking off without his mask.
At the end of his event, Biden handed Justice Breyer his mask, which Breyer then put in his pocket, and Biden walked away maskless.
Amazing how clueless this man is. pic.twitter.com/6F1QhwkRxT
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) January 27, 2022
It is cataclysmically dangerous to have this guy in the White House.
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Parents and other Americans have plenty of reasons to oppose the activities of teachers unions, but Randi Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is adding one more, and it’s a doozy of abuse of access:
In a partnership announced this week, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) said it will purchase licensed copies of NewsGuard’s “anti-misinformation” browser extension for the union’s 1.7 million members, who will then be able to share it with the tens of millions of students they serve. …
NewsGuard says it employs a team of “trained journalists and experienced editors” to review and rate each site based on nine criteria of journalistic practice, such as whether the site repeatedly publishes false content, whether it regularly corrects or clarifies errors, whether it avoids deceptive headlines, and whether it discloses who owns and is financing the website.
The NewsGuard tool awards weighted points for each criterion to produce an overall score on a scale of zero to 100. A score of less than 60 earns a “Red” rating, while a score of 60 and above earns a “Green” rating.
How a school or a district chooses to handle the thorny challenge of Internet access is a question best left local. Perhaps by policy, one district will pick a particular tool while another authorizes teachers to set classroom standards and choose their own tools. Having such obviously partisan and political organizations as teachers unions pushing particular tools through their members’ classroom access is absolutely inappropriate.
Perhaps the matter would look different if the unions really were purely service providers to teachers, but they aren’t. They are deeply engaged in elections, backing a single party almost without exception, and wherever there’s a far-left cause, they are always major supporters and usually funders. As I’ve said many times, whatever they may once have been, teachers unions are nowprogressive activist organizations that provide labor services as a mechanism for fundraising and gaining access.
Schools and communities should insist on boundaries to that access. If teachers want to walk in lockstep supporting political candidates, that’s up to them, but organized access to children for predictably political reasons crosses the line by a giant step.
Featured image by Chris Yang on Unsplash.
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Providence teacher and North Kingstown mother Ramona Bessinger posted an image of the documents she received when she asked to see her hometown school district’s “equity audit” proposal. The featured image of this post is representative. The district redacted the entire document.
At this point, they’re simply making a mockery of the Access to Public Records Act (APRA), which means they’re making a mockery of your rights as a resident.
Let’s take note of something relevant. As data in Anchor Rising’s People’s Data Armory show, North Kingstown schools continue to serve children who are mostly (83%) white. Just 2% of the students are black. The remainder are Hispanic (7%), multi-racial (5%), and Asian (2%).
The district should serve all of these students to the best of its ability, without bias or favor, but that isn’t what “equity audits” typically call for. As we’ve explored in this space related to Portsmouth and Westerly, “equity” in this context can mean changing curricula to better suit the learning needs of minority students.
We should absolutely challenge the premise that children of different races require wholly different approaches to education, but if the premise is true that learning styles are different, then one would hope that the 83% majority of North Kingstown would continue to be taught in the way that best serves their needs.
Maybe that’s part of the “equity audit,” and maybe it isn’t, but North Kingstown schools don’t want anybody to be able to come to their own conclusions beforehand. That’s why they’re hiding the facts. That gives some clues about the answer.
More clues can be found on the webpage of the district’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Sub-Committee. Part of the “purpose” of the sub-committee is to “harness[]… the history and backgrounds of [students’] families and the entire North Kingstown community.” One question that is nowhere answered, but ought to be asked, is whether the histories and backgrounds of white families should be “harnessed” for the benefit of students.
That question ought to be asked, but it doesn’t really need to be. The answer is “no.” The histories and families of white students are to be repudiated and maligned, clearly.
How do we know this? Well, first, because part of the definition of “educational equity” on the sub-committee’s page is “raising marginalized voices.” This goal requires “challenging the imbalance of power and privilege,” which means challenging “the histories and backgrounds” of white families. This is a straightforward reading of the materials that the district freely provides.
For more clues, click the link for “Color Blindness.” The radicalism of this content would be difficult to understate, and the summary deserves a deep-dive analysis of its own. In the context of this post on North Kingstown’s “equity audit,” however, consider these paragraphs:
Understanding how white parents teach their children about race is important because whites remain the numerical majority in the United States. What is more, they wield significant political, economic and social power. If racial equality is to be achieved, it will require white recognition that racism continues and white support of policies and initiatives designed to redress past and present racial inequities.
Most white parents who speak with their children about race adopt a colorblind rhetoric, telling their children that people may “look different” but that “everyone is the same.” They also emphasize the importance of treating “everyone the same.” While these kinds of statements appear laudatory because they advance a racially egalitarian message, many sociologists point to what these statements ignore — enduring systems of stratification that privilege whites and disadvantage people of color.
One might conclude, from this, that the purpose of an “equity audit” is to investigate how “white parents teach their children” in North Kingstown, in order to disrupt those parents’ message and promote unequal distribution of resources and changes to curricula that favor minority students in order to “redress past and present racial inequities” in and out of the North Kingstown school district.
In terms of the education that North Kingstown children receive, that means moving the emphasis away from core missions like literacy and numeracy and toward the sub-committee’s radical vision of social justice.
Again, we don’t know how directly that reading aligns with this proposal, because the government agents imposing the agenda won’t let the public know what they’re doing. Frankly, it seems clear enough that any moral resident of good will who is not a radical extremist should sweep the fanatics out of public office and replace them with reasonable people who care about the children that the district is actually serving.
The fact that they’re hiding their work suggests that they know that’s exactly what voters would do if they weren’t being lied to.
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