The seriousness of individual and systemic racism is undercut by the un-seriousness of wokeness

 Time to do this for real.  The state of our public discourse on issues of race and other matters of identity, prejudice and discrimination is distressing.  The loudest voices in the room are generally not the representative voices in the room, but they do dominate the discourse, and consequently the policy discussion.  The "both sides" thing can be problematic, and the Trump era put those who fall back on the "both sides" rhetorical device in a corner, because Trump himself was so far outside the bounds of what we often call, "Western liberal democracy."  The "both sides" rhetorical device can be a cop-out to avoid noting when one side is qualitatively worse than the other.  Yet there comes a point when our discourse really does go far off track because, yes, both sides have made a mess of it.

We have reached that point on matters of what we may generally call "social justice."  I will not bother, in this post, to explain the problems in the discourse on the right.  To deny the existence of racism, for example, is a nonstarter.  We can measure it social scientifically.  Yet something has been happening on the left in recent years that has taken left-wing discourse so far from reason that in contrast with, say, ten years ago, discourse is no longer a debate between those who measure racism and those who deny it.  Instead, it is between those who define it in absurd ways, and those who deny it.  The position of reason-- the position of a cautious definition, empirically measured-- has disappeared from the discourse because the side that used to adhere to that process has abandoned it, and engaged in a broad array of tactics that similarly undermine healthy public discourse.  And when the alternative-- the right-- is a side which denies racism and other bigotry entirely, discourse itself cannot occur.

So here I am, shouting into the void with frustrated satire about Cthulu's potential appeal to Ibram X. Kendi, because when the loudest voices are Ibram X. Kendi-types and Tucker Carlson-types, I'm having auditory hallucinations of Susan Powter shouting "Stop The Insanity!"

Fair warning, I'm-a-gonna ramble.

My claim: wokeness undercuts discourse, and indeed, undercuts our ability to address matters of what proponents call, "social justice."  In order to make this argument, I need to define "wokeness" for the purposes of the claim.  The term comes from the notion that there are those who are unaware of racism, racial biases, and the general structure of American society-- people who are metaphorically asleep, who must be awakened.  Those who are awakened are, "woke."  I am using the term here to reference the belief that American politics, economics and civil society, and perhaps even all social structures, can be explained by the politicized components of "identity."  (Note the term, "politicized."  One might ask, as I did earlier, why height is not politicized.  Do you have height privilege?)  To a critical race theorist, all of the social world is a function of race, and the difference between those who are woke and those who aren't is awareness of this underlying premise.  To a gender theorist, all of the social world is a manifestation of gender.  The difference between the woke and the non-woke is awareness of this underlying premise.  There is a variation for heteronormativity, and we can keep going.  To an intersectional theorist, you understand the world by finding the precise box in which to place people by categorizing everyone using the politicized forms of identity that our intersectional theorist deems permissible, height not being a permissible box unless the theorist setting the rules is short.

What separates "wokeness" in this definition from one who simply measures racial bias, gender bias, and so forth, is the "I have a hammer" phenomenon.  As the old line goes, to a two-year-old with a hammer, everything is a nail.  To measure the racial biases, gender biases, or any other biases in a system makes you a social scientist.  To assert, as a matter of doctrine, that you must understand all of American society as a matter of race-- see Ibram X. Kendi, for example-- makes you woke.  Similar fallacies exist for the related variations of wokeness.  It is the difference between having a tool kit, and having a hammer.  One allows you to fix problems.  The other allows you to fix some problems, and break a lot of things.

Last Sunday, I put up a relatively brief post on The Labyrinth Index, by Charles Stross.  It is the ninth book in the "Laundry Files" series, and the central plot involves a conspiracy by the American occult intelligence agency to bring forth Cthulu.  I concluded with the observation, only semi-facetious, that Cthulu meets Ibram X. Kendi's definition of "anti-racist," in contrast with Donald Trump.  Cthulu would wipe out all of humanity, and thereby end all racial inequality.  Cthulu is therefore not racist.  Cthulu is therefore anti-racist.  By Kendi's definition, everything is either racist or anti-racist, and that which reduces or eliminates racial inequality is anti-racist, so behold your eldritch horror, and paragon of anti-racism:  Cthulu.

The structure of this argument is reductio ad absurdum.  The problem is that reductio ad absurdum is so easy because the arguments, and indeed, the practices are already so absurd.  And this is a problem.  As I indicated, one of the loudest voices on the left has redefined racism in a way that carries no logical nor moral weight.  The racist/anti-racist division, in all its Manichaean simplicity, should be dismissed quickly by any mind capable of basic reason.  Else... Cthulu.  A silly argument?  Yes, but he isn't worth the time for a serious argument.

Solving real problems requires grappling with complexity, and this thing called "reality."

So let's talk about some problems.  Since I am motived here primarily by racism, and my inability to take Ibram X. Kendi seriously, let's focus on some of the more serious problems with race that we need to address at a policy level.  I have written about these before, and I will write about them again.  They matter.  And wokeness is not helping our ability to address these issues.

The Georgia voting restrictions are a problem.  I wrote some analysis recently about the election law surrounding those restrictions, and it is more complicated than left-wing rhetoric suggests.  Much of the restrictive approach is raw partisanship rather than race, with the complication being the principle in Cooper v. Harris that race and partisanship are so closely linked in the South that distinguishing between the two, or hiding behind partisanship, becomes problematic as it relates to the Voting Rights Act.  Nevertheless, the law is a problem, because democracy matters.  I don't take positions on small things.  I take positions on big things.  Like... democracy.  Democracy matters because it is a precondition for that which matters.  And yes, race is tangled up in that law.  Of course, there is a difference between telling churches that they can't bus people to the polls and lynching people for trying to vote.  Let's be honest.  That is far from a defense of a vile law, but we do need to be honest.

I write regularly about one of the things that bothers me deeply regarding educational policy-- the fact that schools are funded by local property taxes.  That creates all sorts of racial effects, and the term, "systemic racism," is the best analytic term for the consequence.  Education matters.  However, we still need math education.  I will return to that theme.

Why do I comment on electoral law and the educational system?  OK, it's not just that I have arrived at the conclusions that schools matter, and that democracy matters.  I am a professor, who studies elections, so education and democracy are the two primary things layin' around my wheelhouse.  And race is tied to both.

We cannot understand either of these without understanding the role of racism, not just at the individual level, but in "systemic" terms.  I regularly implore people to read science fiction by authors from a variety of backgrounds.  Jemisin, Butler, Okorafor, LaValle, Le Guin, Martine, Carey, Muir, Pinsker...

There are real issues.  Important issues.  We need policy.  We need policy debate.  We need policy debate to proceed in something like a fact-based manner.  The problem with wokenss is that the I-have-a-hammer mentality produces arguments that range from silly to toxic, and as a result, these very serious policy matters are not going addressed.  Yes, the left is trying to fight back against that Georgia law, ineffectually, and with weak arguments.  That matter of schools?  Yeah... that ain't changin'.  Like... ever.  And there are so many real issues that those of the woke persuasion just don't touch.

When I say, "arguments that range from silly to toxic," what do I mean?  Let's examine a few.

Recently, the San Francisco Board of Education became a parody of itself, Poe's law embodied, when it decided that Abraham Lincoln must go the way of Jefferson Davis.  His name must be removed from schools, he can no longer be honored in any way, because he, too, is a horrible, horrible monster who doesn't meet modern standards of wokeness.

NK Jemisin, the author of one of the best science fiction series ever-- the Broken Earth trilogy-- not only joined a dogpile on Isabel Fall-- a trans woman who dared to write a story about being trans in a way that non-trans, Nora, didn't like or read--, she recently got involved in a dustup over whether or not Dungeons & Dragons is racist.  Remember the Kendi doctrine-- everything is either racist or anti-racist.  If D&D isn't anti-racist, it must be racist, so obviously it's racist.  Of course the SJWs call it racist.  What does Jemisin say about D&D?  "Orcs are human beings who can be slaughtered without conscience or apology."  Here's a rather irritating Wired article on the most frivolous demonstration of anti-racist virtue-signaling I have ever seen, with the Jemisin quote.  Somehow, the brain behind The Fifth Season, one of the best books I have ever read, is also the brain behind than infantile quote about orcs in D&D.  Of course, Isaac Newton was an alchemist, so...  At one point, I considered a long-form post about the absurdity of the D&D/racism thing, but... seriously?  The point is how stupid the question is.  So instead, I'll just make the observation here.  Consider that shark thoroughly jumped.

The stakes are higher when woke ideology, in its most ludicrous form, undercuts our educational system.  I wrote something a while back about math education, and the problems that ensue when postmodern ideology (perhaps a better descriptor than postmodern "philosophy," since the root of that word is "love of reason") takes over math education.  The problem is that postmodernism is a rejection of the concept of objectivity, and postmodernists, and specifically critical race theorists, assert that objectivity is a white supremacist construction.  Therefore, anyone who promulgates arguments based around a philosophy of objectivity is promoting white supremacy.  As mind-numbingly fuckwitted as that sounds, it is actually what is being promoted in "anti-racist" educational circles, leading to the assertion that when math educators emphasize the goal of getting the right answer, they are being white supremacist.  If these people weren't in positions of power over curriculum, we would be able to laugh at this, but Poe's law strikes again.  Donald Trump went from entertainingly cartoonish to dangerous as dupes imbued him with power.  The same may be said for the purveyors of such anti-intellectual educational curriculum.

In the UK, it's worse.  If you are an American, you are likely unfamiliar with the term, "non-crime hate incident," but here is a thing that actually, seriously happens in the UK.  People get offended by an act of speech, which is not in any way a crime, but they report it to the police anyway.  The police, despite the fact that no crime has been committed, go and harass the person who has been reported for the "non-crime hate incident," which can range from a tweet made by an underage child to obvious satire when the intent is clearly stated to be the opposite of the interpretation taken by the reporting person.  The most infamous line comes from the case of Harry Miller.  He committed no crime, but the police showed up to talk to him about a "non-crime hate incident"-- a tweet-- and told him that they needed to "check your thinking."  As a professor who assigns science fiction novels to help people understand politics, I have a reading recommendation for these people.  It's even British!

Note some common threads, the most important of which is dualism.  The reductive mentality of wokeness produces a kind of dualism that, taken to its logical extreme, gives you not only Harry Miller, but one step past that.  Fortunately, we are not there.  (Yet.)  But when a cop tells you that he needs to "check your thinking," if that doesn't scare you, then do I have to tell you the title of that book?  It's not a happy-fun-time book.  I can recommend some of those, if you'd like, but people with hammers, and only hammers tend to go around smashing shit.

And there's work to do.  Much of it on matters of race.  I'll circle back there, but I'm going to take a brief detour, in order to address the importance of argumentation.

Racism is not the most important issue.  I'm sorry, but it's not.  Climate change is.  Fail to deal with climate change, and racism will go away.  Why?  'Cuz we'll all be fucked, in the long run.  Maybe Kendi should cheer on climate change as the long-term solution to racism, because if it brings down modern human civilization, at least that'll immiserate everyone, so yay for racial equality.

Anyway, suppose that you are a climatologist who has crunched the numbers and seen impending disaster.  Yet the only other people talking about climate change are hippy-dippy, new age-types, spouting a bunch of mystical drivel about gaia and spirits and shit.  You can't tell if they've taken too many drugs to speak comprehensibly, or if what you think you heard from them is an auditory hallucination because someone slipped you some drugs, but either way, drugs are involved because those words cannot be put together in a sentence in the absence of substances that diminish cognitive capacity.

That'd make the job of rallying people to the cause a tad more difficult, yeah?  Every time one of those peyote-tripping loons starts rambling about channeling messages from gaia, you'd crack a joke, right?  And then you'd get pissed that you have to make fun of the idiocy of the people who claim to be working towards the protection of the planet, but are too busy puking their guts out because of all the peyote, and you wind up sounding like an oil company executive when you crack those jokes, but you can't help it because at least the oil company executives don't have puke breath because seriously, who the fuck takes peyote?!

That went someplace slightly different from where I intended, but it works.  The point is, you want the people whose general goals are correct, broadly speaking, not to be fuckin' loons, right?  Because when they are fuckin' loons, and when everything they say is insane, it becomes harder to construct a majority coalition around a goal.  That's how math works, and yes, political goals are all about math.  Getting to 50%+1.  To be sure, you don't get there by writing the way that we, professors write in an academic journal, and you probably don't get there the way I write on this blog, where I shout into the void venting annoyance and reveling in snark, but you also don't get there cranking up the lunacy and toxicity.

You don't get there by calling Abe racist, ranting about how D&D is racist, telling everyone that math and objectivity are white supremacist, having cops knock on peoples' doors to "check your thinking," and I truly could keep going for a long time.

Of course, there is a high likelihood that this is the first you have heard of the D&D thing because what kind of loser over the age of 13 follows anything about D&D?

Hi!*

The question, then, is what dominates our headlines?

Right now, it is a criminal trial.

Is Derek Chauvin guilty?  Yeah.  The law is a Rube Goldberg device by which lawyers justify their own existences, taking basic, empirical matters, like a fucking video, and making them far more complex than they need to be.  Watch the video.  That motherfucker is a murderer.

But of course, in a country of 330,000,000, we do not sit, rapt by every murder trial.  Why this one?  Because events followed, and two issues are related.  First, when a cop kills a citizen, the cop is an agent of the government.  A murder committed by a private citizen is a failure of policy, because the government failed to stop it.  When the government kills a citizen, the government just fucking did it.  Yet that's not why George Floyd's murder, and Derek Chauvin's trial are so much in the spotlight.

Race.

Yet we cannot have a rational, fact-based discussion of the role of race in the murder of George Floyd without discussing Tony Timpa.  Without discussing the statistical patterns behind all of the Tony Timpas, and the cases you don't see.

Here, we see the toxicity of the Manichaean division.  Either the cops are racist and murders, or neither racist nor murders.

What if it's more complex than that?  That's the question introduced by Tony Timpa, and all of the other cases you don't observe, to which the woke people are as blind as the "Blue Lives Matter" crowd.

Every time you see a news story, my advice is to ask, what aren't you seeing?  Why?

The role of race in policing is complicated, and requires social scientific analysis.  Econometricians argue back and forth with each other about the proper statistical techniques to measure the racial biases in various outcomes.

Yet our dialog prevents any such discussion.  And the result right now?  We now have actual members of Congress pushing for the abolition of police.  Rashida Tlaib got the ball rolling, and not to be outdone when it comes to stupidity, Ocasio-Cortez rushed to her defense.

Democratic leadership is running as fast as possible from this shit.  For now.  Here's the problem.  There is an activist base that buys into this crap, and that takes signals from cranks like Ocasio-Cortez.  This is how a movement and a party go crazy.  And it is connected to a toxic dialog on race.

A healthy dialog on the murder of George Floyd would require us to examine it in the context of Tony Timpa.  However, the dictates of wokeness-- CRT variation-- state that everything is race.  Maintaining that prohibits any discussion of Tony Timpa, or the associated issues of his murder.  Instead, the Manichaean logic of the extreme-woke is driving its leaders, including Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib, to advocate abolishing the police, which has become less of a fringe position.

This is a position so absolutely stupid that I'm not going to bother explaining why I have such contempt for it.  For my purposes here, it is sufficient to observe that such advocacy accomplishes nothing, save to hand political advantages to the extreme right.

And that's sort of where we are.  "Wokeness"-- the belief that everything is race, or that everything is gender, or [insert demographic here]-- has driven the politically woke not only to make absurd claims, and absurd arguments, but to advocate the end of the most basic function of government.  Safety.  And why?  The dualism and lack of empiricism at the heart of their world view mean that they cannot even bear to look at the cases that challenge their beliefs.  Like Tony Timpa.

And while this happens, racial disparities in school funding continue.  Other real issues of systemic racism continue, but the policy process of addressing them doesn't garner the kind of attention that a video does.  Yet when I write about them, pedantic though my writing on such topics may be, I am also not subject to the Tony Timpa problem.  Why not?  Because I come to these conclusions based on data rather than datum.  Plural, rather than singular.  Or rather, I should say, data gathered in a social scientific manner rather than by watching the news.  The school funding issue is not a regular news story.  Which returns me to a basic point about politics and the news.

The paradox of news.  My term.  When an event is covered in the news, that is because it is sufficiently unusual to warrant news coverage, but that tricks your statistically disinclined brain into thinking that it is normal, when its presence in the headlines indicates the very opposite.  Normal things, by definition, don't get covered.  You must always ask yourself, when you read the news, what am I not seeing, and why not?  If you ever infer that what happens to a single person-- even if presented as a sequence of one person, then another, then another-- is normal, you have made a statistical error.  In a country of 330,000,000, events common could not be covered in this manner.  Only unusual events can be covered.  So what is not being covered?  Always ask that question.

Sometimes, what isn't being covered has been covered before, and the press has moved on because they can't figure out how to tell the same story, or it's boring, or technical, or there's just too much of it, or... there are many reasons.  But always ask that question.  It's not a conspiratorial question.  It's a statistical question.  Texting-and-driving accidents can't be covered in the national news media because there are too fucking many of them, but that puts a lot of other stuff into perspective when you think about it.  Why was there no coverage for Tony Timpa?  That's more complicated.

But there is an effect.  And part of the effect is the left, as demonstrated by Rep.s Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez, moving more towards the position of abolishing the police.  This is what happens when wokeness takes over the left.  Yes, it's funny, in a tragic way, when the San Francisco Board of Education proposes that we do a Two Minutes Hate for Abraham Lincoln, because that's symbolic.  But, there are real consequences when real policy is at stake.  We are getting to that point.

Are you on board with what Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez are selling?  If not, recognize that this follows from the reductivist ideology of wokeness.  Everything is either racist, or anti-racist.  If the cops are racist, get rid of 'em.  Of course, if they get rid of the cops, who's gonna check my thinking?  So at least there'll be that.  Maybe they'll create a special, new kind of police.  To check my thinking.  If only I could think of a name for it.  Harry Miller might be able to help me out on that.

How's about some music, after that?  Lonnie Johnson, "Woke Up With The Blues In My Fingers."

*I hate Beck, but Keller Williams and Larry Keel are both awesome.