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> At my law school, one of the top ones in the country, the Dean got up and declared himself a “white supremacist” at a town hall meeting To explain this a bi

by pfraze 5y ago

> At my law school, one of the top ones in the country, the Dean got up and declared himself a “white supremacist” at a town hall meeting To explain this a bit more: there was a fairly wide conversation during 2019/2020 about systemic advantages for white people in America. One observation was that systemic racism which favors a specific race could be described as inherently supremecist - in this case, white supremecist. If you accept that argument then benefitting from the system admits sympathy with white supremacy, and so saying “I’m a white supremecist and I’m trying to do better” is a way to admit to systemic problems and to state a desire to rectify them. If anybody remembers the blowup at the Basecamp all-hands meeting, this was the conversation that happened there. Unfortunately the line of logic is hard to communicate because “white supremecist” typically suggests an active intent to displace or destroy other races, which is why the dean’s statement seems so bizarre without context.

eli_gottlieb 5y ago
No, the line of logic is hard to communicate because the people proclaiming themselves white supremacists keep their jobs instead of replacing themselves with a black person and going to work as cashiers or Uber Eats drivers.
escapedmoose 5y ago
All of these conversations and examples are practically worthless without heaps of context, imo. The topic is too nuanced to look at a high-level list of events and draw general conclusions. It almost feels like our culture hasn’t developed a nuanced enough shared vocabulary to even be sure we’re talking about the same thing half the time. And that environment makes it incredibly easy to obscure truth with facts.
- pfraze 5y ago
  The metaphor I like to use is image resolution. In mass-communication, we communicate with 2x2 pixel images. Among friends with a lot of trust, we speak in 1080p. 2x2 communication just can't carry the context that we bake into each word during a conversation. I think this is an inherent property of mass communication and you really have to tailor your 2x2 message if you want to take it outside of high-bandwidth conversations.
  - escapedmoose 5y ago
    Wow, great metaphor! I’ll be saving that one for later
throwaway894345 5y ago
It doesn’t help that many of the people who advocate for this milquetoast definition (and CRT more generally) also drive the blurring of lines by persecuting ordinary people as though they were conventional white supremacists, invoking Nazi and KKK imagery, etc. Roughly the same group did the same thing with “feminism” earlier in the decade (“‘feminism’ just means ‘gender equality’”) and then again with “racism” (“you are against racism, aren’t you?”). It’s really remarkable how often so many CRT folks stumble into motte and bailey rhetoric relative to the wider population. You say “unfortunately it’s hard to communicate”, but I think it would be absolutely trivial to avoid overloading words in the first place or failing that, to use words consistently. It definitely feels like the confusion is a feature of CRT discourse rather than a bug.
- soundnote 5y ago
  > You say “unfortunately it’s hard to communicate”, but I think it would be absolutely trivial to avoid overloading words in the first place or failing that, to use words consistently. It definitely feels like the confusion is a feature of CRT discourse rather than a bug. It is a feature. If the ideology is splintered into many subfields, and has a legion of names, but all have broadly the same thrust, it's hard to talk about the phenomenon in a way that's easy to grasp. And in any case, you will have to give it a stable name you can refer to because the advocates themselves will just switch what name they're using, while the underlying ideal and methods stay the same. This is one reason people are so angry at Rufo for pulling the CRT stunt and calling related things CRT. Is it wrong? Yes, in detail, but not in substance. And importantly, it is right in the part that matters and caught on, so people are losing their minds over it. Notice how they're not in the least visibly upset about, say, Wesley Yang calling wokeness "the Successor Ideology" - it never caught on, never managed to give people a name for the wrongness they could see with their own eyes. There is a rhetorical strategy coined the motte and bailey, which gets its name from the motte and bailey fortification setup with a fortification (the motte) in the center and a broad, lucrative field around it. The idea is you can live in the lush bailey and expand it, and if attacked retreat to the more defensible motte to frustrate attackers. Once they are defeated or leave, you resume work in the broader field that can't be defended as well. The motte and bailey rhetoric works the same way: When not pressed, you advance shakier, ambitious claims people might want to challenge, but when pressed equivocate that you're just talking about something unobjectionable. As one example, second and third wave feminism unquestionably had an entire history and culture around them, with detailed theories of society w/ patriarchy, sex vs. gender and all - this wide, deep culture and spreading it is the bailey. Press people on some of the more tenuous aspects of this, and they'd retreat about "feminism being about equality" - this is the motte fortification, since barely anyone in the West is against equality at least in some form or another. Once the attacker goes away, back to spreading theories of patriarchy and oppression it was. The modern wokeness runs this strategy all over the place. Want to curtail what you see as a blinkered approach to teaching history? You clearly don't want people learning about slavery or segregation, and so on. Racism is simultaneously the ordinary state of affairs in a country people actively want to immigrate to, and Klansmanship.
ss108 5y ago
Yeah that definitely needed context lol
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
The dean didnt actually say (or write) that. The article links to the tweet screenshot which shows what they did say. (I have no idea if they 'stood up' while typing it). Someone else said something a little closer to that, but still not that. I've also linked to the Dean's response elsewhere in the thread.
rayiner 5y ago
I'm aware that left-wing activists use the term "white supremacy" to refer to a range of things other than what people understand as being "white supremacy." But it's not an academic term--it confuses rather than clarifies by taking a word that most people understand to refer to explosive racist animosity and applying it to inanimate "systems." It's an activist term, under which every white person is a "white supremacist," which was deliberately chosen for the resulting inflammatory effect. So I'm at a loss how you think that the "context" helps. The whole point of the article is that law schools have adopted radical activist ideology. The fact that folksy faculty members of a Midwestern law school are using radical activist rhetoric (which, as you acknowledge, seems "bizarre" to the 95% of folks who are unfamiliar with the terminology) seems to support the article's thesis.

by pfraze 5y ago

eli_gottlieb 5y ago

No, the line of logic is hard to communicate because the people proclaiming themselves white supremacists keep their jobs instead of replacing themselves with a black person and going to work as cashiers or Uber Eats drivers.

escapedmoose 5y ago

All of these conversations and examples are practically worthless without heaps of context, imo. The topic is too nuanced to look at a high-level list of events and draw general conclusions. It almost feels like our culture hasn’t developed a nuanced enough shared vocabulary to even be sure we’re talking about the same thing half the time. And that environment makes it incredibly easy to obscure truth with facts.

pfraze 5y ago
The metaphor I like to use is image resolution. In mass-communication, we communicate with 2x2 pixel images. Among friends with a lot of trust, we speak in 1080p. 2x2 communication just can't carry the context that we bake into each word during a conversation. I think this is an inherent property of mass communication and you really have to tailor your 2x2 message if you want to take it outside of high-bandwidth conversations.
- escapedmoose 5y ago
  Wow, great metaphor! I’ll be saving that one for later

throwaway894345 5y ago

It doesn’t help that many of the people who advocate for this milquetoast definition (and CRT more generally) also drive the blurring of lines by persecuting ordinary people as though they were conventional white supremacists, invoking Nazi and KKK imagery, etc. Roughly the same group did the same thing with “feminism” earlier in the decade (“‘feminism’ just means ‘gender equality’”) and then again with “racism” (“you are against racism, aren’t you?”). It’s really remarkable how often so many CRT folks stumble into motte and bailey rhetoric relative to the wider population. You say “unfortunately it’s hard to communicate”, but I think it would be absolutely trivial to avoid overloading words in the first place or failing that, to use words consistently. It definitely feels like the confusion is a feature of CRT discourse rather than a bug.

soundnote 5y ago
> You say “unfortunately it’s hard to communicate”, but I think it would be absolutely trivial to avoid overloading words in the first place or failing that, to use words consistently. It definitely feels like the confusion is a feature of CRT discourse rather than a bug. It is a feature. If the ideology is splintered into many subfields, and has a legion of names, but all have broadly the same thrust, it's hard to talk about the phenomenon in a way that's easy to grasp. And in any case, you will have to give it a stable name you can refer to because the advocates themselves will just switch what name they're using, while the underlying ideal and methods stay the same. This is one reason people are so angry at Rufo for pulling the CRT stunt and calling related things CRT. Is it wrong? Yes, in detail, but not in substance. And importantly, it is right in the part that matters and caught on, so people are losing their minds over it. Notice how they're not in the least visibly upset about, say, Wesley Yang calling wokeness "the Successor Ideology" - it never caught on, never managed to give people a name for the wrongness they could see with their own eyes. There is a rhetorical strategy coined the motte and bailey, which gets its name from the motte and bailey fortification setup with a fortification (the motte) in the center and a broad, lucrative field around it. The idea is you can live in the lush bailey and expand it, and if attacked retreat to the more defensible motte to frustrate attackers. Once they are defeated or leave, you resume work in the broader field that can't be defended as well. The motte and bailey rhetoric works the same way: When not pressed, you advance shakier, ambitious claims people might want to challenge, but when pressed equivocate that you're just talking about something unobjectionable. As one example, second and third wave feminism unquestionably had an entire history and culture around them, with detailed theories of society w/ patriarchy, sex vs. gender and all - this wide, deep culture and spreading it is the bailey. Press people on some of the more tenuous aspects of this, and they'd retreat about "feminism being about equality" - this is the motte fortification, since barely anyone in the West is against equality at least in some form or another. Once the attacker goes away, back to spreading theories of patriarchy and oppression it was. The modern wokeness runs this strategy all over the place. Want to curtail what you see as a blinkered approach to teaching history? You clearly don't want people learning about slavery or segregation, and so on. Racism is simultaneously the ordinary state of affairs in a country people actively want to immigrate to, and Klansmanship.

ss108 5y ago

Yeah that definitely needed context lol

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

The dean didnt actually say (or write) that. The article links to the tweet screenshot which shows what they did say. (I have no idea if they 'stood up' while typing it). Someone else said something a little closer to that, but still not that. I've also linked to the Dean's response elsewhere in the thread.

rayiner 5y ago

I'm aware that left-wing activists use the term "white supremacy" to refer to a range of things other than what people understand as being "white supremacy." But it's not an academic term--it confuses rather than clarifies by taking a word that most people understand to refer to explosive racist animosity and applying it to inanimate "systems." It's an activist term, under which every white person is a "white supremacist," which was deliberately chosen for the resulting inflammatory effect. So I'm at a loss how you think that the "context" helps. The whole point of the article is that law schools have adopted radical activist ideology. The fact that folksy faculty members of a Midwestern law school are using radical activist rhetoric (which, as you acknowledge, seems "bizarre" to the 95% of folks who are unfamiliar with the terminology) seems to support the article's thesis.