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Opportunistic people have realized by now that it's better to join this movement than to risk appearing to oppose it. Corporations have created new positions an

Opportunistic people have realized by now that it's better to join this movement than to risk appearing to oppose it. Corporations have created new positions and new departments to seem like they're part of this movement. In our forever-online, forever-catalogued, hyperconnected world, people are smart to recognize shame as an existential threat, and movements are smart to recognize shame as the ultimate weapon. If we suppose that outside opposition will harden the movement, then the only way it will falter is if its ostensible beneficiaries -- by the terminology, 'people of color' -- renounce it as not speaking for them. Perhaps McWhorter can plant the seeds of this examination and sustain it before he's swiftly vilified by those among the movement with the most to lose. If the past is any indication, movements tend to be generational. The next generation will come along and discover for themselves the crises affecting their world. If this movement is incapable of delivering a better outcome for the people it purports to benefit, then it will be challenged by another one. And if it does deliver a better outcome for people of color, but at a profound psychological cost to their sense of self, then it will be challenged just the same.

leereeves 6y ago
> Corporations have created new positions and new departments to seem like they're part of this movement. That trend seems to be shifting. Google was one of the first to accept the movement, and yet they very publicly stood up to it when they accepted Timnit Gebru's threat to resign. > If we suppose that outside opposition will harden the movement Hardening isn't the same as strengthening. The "harder", more extreme, more authoritarian the movement becomes, the more it will drive people away, and opportunists who only joined out of expediency or fear won't defend it when it's seriously challenged. I don't think we'll have to wait a generation for this movement to end, just as it didn't take a generation for its closest recent analogue, McCarthyism, to end.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Perhaps McWhorter can plant the seeds of this examination and sustain it before he’s swiftly vilified by those among the movement with the most to lose. McWhorter has been making the Cosby-esque “blame American blacks for their disadvantaged condition” since at least 2001, and the natural corollary argument that antiracism advocates are to blame for racism and/or more than racists for maintaining the adverse conditions of black Americans for at least as long, though over time the latter argument seems to have taken primacy for him over the former. If he were to be “vilified” for those arguments in a way which reduces the reach of his messages, it won’t have been a swift rejection.

leereeves 6y ago

> Corporations have created new positions and new departments to seem like they're part of this movement. That trend seems to be shifting. Google was one of the first to accept the movement, and yet they very publicly stood up to it when they accepted Timnit Gebru's threat to resign. > If we suppose that outside opposition will harden the movement Hardening isn't the same as strengthening. The "harder", more extreme, more authoritarian the movement becomes, the more it will drive people away, and opportunists who only joined out of expediency or fear won't defend it when it's seriously challenged. I don't think we'll have to wait a generation for this movement to end, just as it didn't take a generation for its closest recent analogue, McCarthyism, to end.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Perhaps McWhorter can plant the seeds of this examination and sustain it before he’s swiftly vilified by those among the movement with the most to lose. McWhorter has been making the Cosby-esque “blame American blacks for their disadvantaged condition” since at least 2001, and the natural corollary argument that antiracism advocates are to blame for racism and/or more than racists for maintaining the adverse conditions of black Americans for at least as long, though over time the latter argument seems to have taken primacy for him over the former. If he were to be “vilified” for those arguments in a way which reduces the reach of his messages, it won’t have been a swift rejection.