8 ms·

Lifting for those who don't read the comments in the post: > Scott Says: Comment #12 April 17th, 2023 at 11:26 pm So, why shouldn’t I cheer the destruction of

Lifting for those who don't read the comments in the post: > Scott Says: Comment #12 April 17th, 2023 at 11:26 pm So, why shouldn’t I cheer the destruction of universities, if they’re full of woke ideologues who hate me? One might just as well ask: why shouldn’t I cheer the destruction of the earth, if it’s full of assholes, and morons, and antisemites who’d probably kill me if they got a chance, and wild animals that would rip me to shreds? In both cases, the answer is simply: because this is my world, and nearly everything I love and cherish is here along with nearly everything I hate, and I believe that the former ultimately outweighs the latter, and if people don’t mind, I’d like to continue living in this world.

Spivak 4y ago
I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people. Such a thing is practically the anthesis of what it even means to be part of that group. I'm in no way saying this means they're good people or that their legislative direction is good public policy but the only time hippie liberals push back at all is when someone tries to hurt one of their own. Liberals for the past decade have been entirely on the defensive. In my state there are 14 bills right now in the state legislature that explicitly target vulnerable populations. The democrats and our chapter of the ACLU can barely do anything but try to stop them.
- a3n 4y ago
  "what kind of person feels like" It's a quest for victimhood to justify hate.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Maybe, there is plenty of fodder out there for #persecutionfetish but someone who is calmly like, "yeah they might hate me but I still don't wish them ill" feels pretty good faith. They can still be wrong but I don't believe for a second this person in particular would be like "and because they hate me I'm justified in x, y, z."
- localplume 4y ago
  [dead]
- iosono88 4y ago
  [dead]
- quantified 4y ago
  Regular people. I've been, long ago, at college, before "woke" was coined I believe. To be honest the vitriol was over the top, I found it funny. Just my experience, not proxy for anyone else's.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    What was your experience? Genuinely curious. I've definitely experienced the "economic" prejudice since college was when I found out the hard way that my family was poor. I had a friend who had to deal with insecure butthurt white folks being mad that the kid from China swept them in exams. I was not at his level but we bonded because I was the only girl in class. Dude is legit gonna be one of those mathematicians where every other theorem is named after him. Oh god and the computer science shit. Fuck that "make me a sandwich" nonsense. That was the subject where I had the upper hand but you'd never know come project time when nobody wanted to work with me because they thought I wouldn't pull my weight.
    - quantified 4y ago
      An ex-girlfriend had shifted deeper into women's studies, had spent a week or so chuckling over the fact that you could castrate by crushing, and in a bit of anger over my not living up to her ideals (we were still friends) called me "a racist sexist homophobe" which was the worst insult she could think of. Women have dealt with a lot of shit, so I understand the enjoyment of misery, but my testicles recoiled. At 20 or so, I was more of the latter two than I am now, not at all the last one that I can tell and conscious of my failings at the second one. Product of Chicago in the 70's. The insult came, if I remember the sequence of events correctly, after I said that in my experience white people can come by racism from daily experience, not just other people spewing it. I was mugged five times from 5th grade through high school, jumped for fun once, had an older girl say "come here little white boy, let me set your hair on fire" holding matches when I was in second grade, and had a crowd of 5 or 6 follow me and a friend home chanting "honky" and running up to almost touch us, I think around 6th or 7th grade. I've never been anonymously attacked by a white person, just a statistic but it's mine. I've also had plenty of black friends over the years. When I was in college I did a small thesis on race riots in Chicago. To my suprise, most have been whites rioting against blacks, especially moving onto a white block, and they were mostly not reported on in the papers to avoid spreading the word. I gained total sympathy for the shit they went through, and of course their kids would grow up feeling the burn too and trying to maybe even the score. It just creates a cycle that sucks. Gandhi and King were right, though progress hurts while the cycle is getting stopped.
- skissane 4y ago
  > I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people. In December 2014, Scott posted a comment [0] in a discussion on his blog about how, as an adolescent, he had struggled greatly with anxiety issues, and how he believed that some messages some feminists were broadcasting had contributed to his mental health problems. And in response, a huge number of online feminists decided to publicly denounce him in a massive pile-on; Amanda Marcotte's contribution is representative [1] Ever since then, some "woke" people have been convinced that he's a "bad person". And he's said other things to upset them since, e.g. publicly disagreeing with proposals that his field (quantum computing) abandon some of its technical terminology ("quantum supremacy"), which some claim "makes women and minorities uncomfortable in our field" [2] So yes, Scott really is on the receiving end of a lot of online hate from certain people, and it has never stopped–including trolling campaigns against his blog [3], demands sent to his department that he be fired/disciplined, etc. And Scott calls the people behind this campaign against him "woke" (or even, as he does in this blog entry, "wokesters"). I know a lot of people have an allergy to that word, but can you see how it makes sense from his perspective? Why shouldn't he use it? [0] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2091#comment-326664 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2091#comment-326664 [1] https://www.rawstory.com/2014/12/mit-professor-explains-the-real-oppression-is-having-to-learn-to-talk-to-women/ https://www.rawstory.com/2014/12/mit-professor-explains-the-... [2] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4450 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4450 [3] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6552 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6552
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    A sample of the "woke" people that are attacking him: > And oh, your wife? I lookrd her up Scott and… She’s maybe a 3 on a good day. You know, maybe a 6 at a MAGA rally where all the other chicks are fat midwestern racists. She’s got that TERF Karen look Scott. Let’s be real, you wish you could have bagged one of those hot blondes instead but that’s what you ended up with. I really doubt that’s satusfying enough to keep you from lusting after your younger hotter students. God you’re such a fucking sexist creep. Sounds like an obvious troll to me (and to some of his other commenters). But he replies in full earnestness to him. Probably a mistake, but I'd still put the blame on the troll rather than the victim.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  There are people who actively wish ill on all kinds of groups and the “woke” are no exception. Plenty of people hate their political enemies and have no great concern if they are hurt and some take real joy in the idea. Yale invites speakers who talk about their fantasies of killing white people. Mainstream feminist websites do backflips trying to sugarcoat that they think every single man is a threat. > Yale speaker says comment about killing White people was meant to spark deeper talk about race https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/09/yale-lecturer-talks-about-killing-white-people/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/09/yale-lec... > But the socialization of men is such that even a good man – a supportive man, a respectful man, a trusted man – has within him the potential for violence and harm because these behaviors are normalized through patriarchy. > And as such, we know that even the men that we love, never mind random men who we don’t know, have the potential to be dangerous. Surely, all people have that potential. But in a world divided into the oppressed and the oppressors, the former learn to fear the latter as a defense mechanism. > So when you enter a space – any space – as a man, you carry with yourself the threat of harm. https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/10/yes-actually-it-is-all-men/ https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/10/yes-actually-it-is-all-... More narrowly the demographic that loves censorship is of the left now. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/professor-terminated-art-history-paintings-muhammad-2238922 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/professor-terminated-art-h... > In a controversial move, an adjunct professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, has lost her job after showing her class Medieval paintings depicting the Prophet Muhammad, founder of the Islamic religion. Ezra Klein supports laws he believes will lead to miscarriages of justice because of the political consequences. > "Yes Means Yes" is a terrible law, and I completely support it > For that reason, the law is only worth the paper it's written on if some of the critics' fears come true. Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that's necessary for the law's success. It's those cases — particularly the ones that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair, the ones that become lore in frats and cautionary tales that fathers e-mail to their sons — that will convince men that they better Be Pretty Damn Sure. https://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6966847/yes-means-yes-is-a-terrible-bill-and-i-completely-support-it https://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6966847/yes-means-yes-is-a-te...
  - 4y ago
- klyrs 4y ago
  > Such a thing is practically the anthesis of what it even means to be part of that group. "Woke" is a synonym of "enlightened." Don't trust anybody who claims to be enlightened, or rails against enlightenment.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Oh I completely agree which is why I put it in quotes. I've never found anyone on any side of the political spectrum actually self-identify with that label except ironically. Right now today it just seems to be pejorative-de-jour for people who are vaguely liberal.
    - uxp100 4y ago
      Which is kind of funny, since if you asked me 10 years ago about the cultural associations of “woke,” they’d be, uh, more scattered. Black nationalists of the wacky “Beethoven? Oh yeah, he was black” sort, but at the time I also saw a neo-nazi using the term. Almost always in the “woke to” formulation. Nazis were “woke to the JQ”, but maybe some special type of weirdo would be “woke to big foot” or “woke to the templars”. So basically I think it was appropriated from a specific black culture to general extremist/conspiracy culture, if such a thing truly exists, and maybe was re-appropriated into modern discourse. And now I find my self using the term occasionally to describe a set of views without really engaging with them. Such as when someone showed me some pictures from their cruise (which was neat, they’re an engineering nerd and carefully detailed some elements of the ship) but had to give me a cruises are evil disclaimer before uh, saying well I went on one anyway, family, and so on. “the typical woke reasons.”
    - yarg 4y ago
      They're not liberals, they're authoritarian leftists.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  >I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people. An arbitrary example I saw yesterday: An elderly white man was leaving a parking lot with one-way traffic flow. A young white woman was standing in the road talking with a friend. He pulled few feet away from them, waited, then politely asked them to move when they didn't. One woman started accosting him about entitlement, white privilege, male privilege, and refused to move. The scene went on for a while until he was able to reposition the car and barely drive by her brushing her with the car. These are the "woke" people who are poisoning the well for others. They just use it as a pretext to rage and hate on strangers simply because of their race, age, or gender. I'm not saying this is typical behavior, just an interaction where someone probably felt targeted. In a more general sense, I have been told by hiring managers and recruiters that white males shouldn't bother applying for some jobs. That certainly made me feel angry and targeted by ideologs.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - HybridCurve 4y ago
    This isn't "woke", this is just being an asshole. The term "woke" is supposed to be related to awareness of racial injustice and inequality. Not one group exercising prejudice and bias and against another based on ethnicity. Furthermore, this term has become a label associated with loaded language employed by the conservative right to vilify opposition. It is a reflexive control word and propaganda device to used to focus hatred and resentment from conservatives towards any aspect of culture or ideology contrary to their interests, regardless of it actual relevance to racial injustice. So when you start calling assholes "woke", I am not sure if you are conflating the meaning of it because you are a victim of this propaganda or if you are intentionally using the term to foster resentment against others. Either way, claiming that people "who are aware of racial injustice" direct hatred, resentment, and prejudice against others because of their race, age or gender is so blatantly contradictory that it is absurd.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
- rayiner 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - tptacek 4y ago
    Critical theory does not in fact "center discrimination against Black people at the center of the political universe".
    - rayiner 4y ago
      CRT places black people in the center of the political universe in the same way that Marxism places the proletariat at the center of the political universe. (I’m not using the comparison to Marxism pejoratively, it’s simply apt.) That’s the whole point. It is by design a framework for criticizing the failure of traditional liberal principles to remediate the disadvantages facing black people in America. When CRT purports to address other non-white races, it does so only by treating them as another kind of black person. Hence the term “people of color,” which is just a way to project how the CRT framework conceptualists black people onto all non-whites. (And on the front it’s wrong. It’s central premise that racism is a structural problem requiring a structural solution is wrong as applied to Latinos and Asians just as it did not apply to Italians.) That focus carries through to the “pop” version of CRT manifested by folks such as Ibram Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones. In “how to be an anti-racist” Kendi doesn’t grapple with any of the implications of his ideas beyond the hoped-for effect on black people. In the quote from Hannah-Jones, she reduces “nearly everything truly exceptional about America” to slavery. It also manifests in how ordinary liberals today talk about political theory. For example, despite the obvious advantages of federalism for a multi-ethnic democracy (which is why India has a federal structure) it’s impossible to get ordinary liberals to approach federalism except from the perspective of how it was used to uphold segregation. Similarly, critiques of the Senate invariably mention that it empowers primarily white states as if people’s skin color is the problem. This is of course not a critique of CRT. It’s an analytical framework designed to analyze and solve the challenges facing the specific group that created it. But when it’s adopted as a generalized political theory, it leads to the antagonism noted above.
      - 4y ago

Spivak 4y ago

I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people. Such a thing is practically the anthesis of what it even means to be part of that group. I'm in no way saying this means they're good people or that their legislative direction is good public policy but the only time hippie liberals push back at all is when someone tries to hurt one of their own. Liberals for the past decade have been entirely on the defensive. In my state there are 14 bills right now in the state legislature that explicitly target vulnerable populations. The democrats and our chapter of the ACLU can barely do anything but try to stop them.

a3n 4y ago
"what kind of person feels like" It's a quest for victimhood to justify hate.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Maybe, there is plenty of fodder out there for #persecutionfetish but someone who is calmly like, "yeah they might hate me but I still don't wish them ill" feels pretty good faith. They can still be wrong but I don't believe for a second this person in particular would be like "and because they hate me I'm justified in x, y, z."
localplume 4y ago
[dead]
iosono88 4y ago
[dead]
quantified 4y ago
Regular people. I've been, long ago, at college, before "woke" was coined I believe. To be honest the vitriol was over the top, I found it funny. Just my experience, not proxy for anyone else's.
- Spivak 4y ago
  What was your experience? Genuinely curious. I've definitely experienced the "economic" prejudice since college was when I found out the hard way that my family was poor. I had a friend who had to deal with insecure butthurt white folks being mad that the kid from China swept them in exams. I was not at his level but we bonded because I was the only girl in class. Dude is legit gonna be one of those mathematicians where every other theorem is named after him. Oh god and the computer science shit. Fuck that "make me a sandwich" nonsense. That was the subject where I had the upper hand but you'd never know come project time when nobody wanted to work with me because they thought I wouldn't pull my weight.
  - quantified 4y ago
    An ex-girlfriend had shifted deeper into women's studies, had spent a week or so chuckling over the fact that you could castrate by crushing, and in a bit of anger over my not living up to her ideals (we were still friends) called me "a racist sexist homophobe" which was the worst insult she could think of. Women have dealt with a lot of shit, so I understand the enjoyment of misery, but my testicles recoiled. At 20 or so, I was more of the latter two than I am now, not at all the last one that I can tell and conscious of my failings at the second one. Product of Chicago in the 70's. The insult came, if I remember the sequence of events correctly, after I said that in my experience white people can come by racism from daily experience, not just other people spewing it. I was mugged five times from 5th grade through high school, jumped for fun once, had an older girl say "come here little white boy, let me set your hair on fire" holding matches when I was in second grade, and had a crowd of 5 or 6 follow me and a friend home chanting "honky" and running up to almost touch us, I think around 6th or 7th grade. I've never been anonymously attacked by a white person, just a statistic but it's mine. I've also had plenty of black friends over the years. When I was in college I did a small thesis on race riots in Chicago. To my suprise, most have been whites rioting against blacks, especially moving onto a white block, and they were mostly not reported on in the papers to avoid spreading the word. I gained total sympathy for the shit they went through, and of course their kids would grow up feeling the burn too and trying to maybe even the score. It just creates a cycle that sucks. Gandhi and King were right, though progress hurts while the cycle is getting stopped.
skissane 4y ago
> I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people. In December 2014, Scott posted a comment [0] in a discussion on his blog about how, as an adolescent, he had struggled greatly with anxiety issues, and how he believed that some messages some feminists were broadcasting had contributed to his mental health problems. And in response, a huge number of online feminists decided to publicly denounce him in a massive pile-on; Amanda Marcotte's contribution is representative [1] Ever since then, some "woke" people have been convinced that he's a "bad person". And he's said other things to upset them since, e.g. publicly disagreeing with proposals that his field (quantum computing) abandon some of its technical terminology ("quantum supremacy"), which some claim "makes women and minorities uncomfortable in our field" [2] So yes, Scott really is on the receiving end of a lot of online hate from certain people, and it has never stopped–including trolling campaigns against his blog [3], demands sent to his department that he be fired/disciplined, etc. And Scott calls the people behind this campaign against him "woke" (or even, as he does in this blog entry, "wokesters"). I know a lot of people have an allergy to that word, but can you see how it makes sense from his perspective? Why shouldn't he use it? [0] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2091#comment-326664 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2091#comment-326664 [1] https://www.rawstory.com/2014/12/mit-professor-explains-the-real-oppression-is-having-to-learn-to-talk-to-women/ https://www.rawstory.com/2014/12/mit-professor-explains-the-... [2] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4450 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4450 [3] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6552 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6552
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  A sample of the "woke" people that are attacking him: > And oh, your wife? I lookrd her up Scott and… She’s maybe a 3 on a good day. You know, maybe a 6 at a MAGA rally where all the other chicks are fat midwestern racists. She’s got that TERF Karen look Scott. Let’s be real, you wish you could have bagged one of those hot blondes instead but that’s what you ended up with. I really doubt that’s satusfying enough to keep you from lusting after your younger hotter students. God you’re such a fucking sexist creep. Sounds like an obvious troll to me (and to some of his other commenters). But he replies in full earnestness to him. Probably a mistake, but I'd still put the blame on the troll rather than the victim.
barry-cotter 4y ago
There are people who actively wish ill on all kinds of groups and the “woke” are no exception. Plenty of people hate their political enemies and have no great concern if they are hurt and some take real joy in the idea. Yale invites speakers who talk about their fantasies of killing white people. Mainstream feminist websites do backflips trying to sugarcoat that they think every single man is a threat. > Yale speaker says comment about killing White people was meant to spark deeper talk about race https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/09/yale-lecturer-talks-about-killing-white-people/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/09/yale-lec... > But the socialization of men is such that even a good man – a supportive man, a respectful man, a trusted man – has within him the potential for violence and harm because these behaviors are normalized through patriarchy. > And as such, we know that even the men that we love, never mind random men who we don’t know, have the potential to be dangerous. Surely, all people have that potential. But in a world divided into the oppressed and the oppressors, the former learn to fear the latter as a defense mechanism. > So when you enter a space – any space – as a man, you carry with yourself the threat of harm. https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/10/yes-actually-it-is-all-men/ https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/10/yes-actually-it-is-all-... More narrowly the demographic that loves censorship is of the left now. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/professor-terminated-art-history-paintings-muhammad-2238922 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/professor-terminated-art-h... > In a controversial move, an adjunct professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, has lost her job after showing her class Medieval paintings depicting the Prophet Muhammad, founder of the Islamic religion. Ezra Klein supports laws he believes will lead to miscarriages of justice because of the political consequences. > "Yes Means Yes" is a terrible law, and I completely support it > For that reason, the law is only worth the paper it's written on if some of the critics' fears come true. Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that's necessary for the law's success. It's those cases — particularly the ones that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair, the ones that become lore in frats and cautionary tales that fathers e-mail to their sons — that will convince men that they better Be Pretty Damn Sure. https://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6966847/yes-means-yes-is-a-terrible-bill-and-i-completely-support-it https://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6966847/yes-means-yes-is-a-te...
- 4y ago
klyrs 4y ago
> Such a thing is practically the anthesis of what it even means to be part of that group. "Woke" is a synonym of "enlightened." Don't trust anybody who claims to be enlightened, or rails against enlightenment.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Oh I completely agree which is why I put it in quotes. I've never found anyone on any side of the political spectrum actually self-identify with that label except ironically. Right now today it just seems to be pejorative-de-jour for people who are vaguely liberal.
  - uxp100 4y ago
    Which is kind of funny, since if you asked me 10 years ago about the cultural associations of “woke,” they’d be, uh, more scattered. Black nationalists of the wacky “Beethoven? Oh yeah, he was black” sort, but at the time I also saw a neo-nazi using the term. Almost always in the “woke to” formulation. Nazis were “woke to the JQ”, but maybe some special type of weirdo would be “woke to big foot” or “woke to the templars”. So basically I think it was appropriated from a specific black culture to general extremist/conspiracy culture, if such a thing truly exists, and maybe was re-appropriated into modern discourse. And now I find my self using the term occasionally to describe a set of views without really engaging with them. Such as when someone showed me some pictures from their cruise (which was neat, they’re an engineering nerd and carefully detailed some elements of the ship) but had to give me a cruises are evil disclaimer before uh, saying well I went on one anyway, family, and so on. “the typical woke reasons.”
  - yarg 4y ago
    They're not liberals, they're authoritarian leftists.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
>I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people. An arbitrary example I saw yesterday: An elderly white man was leaving a parking lot with one-way traffic flow. A young white woman was standing in the road talking with a friend. He pulled few feet away from them, waited, then politely asked them to move when they didn't. One woman started accosting him about entitlement, white privilege, male privilege, and refused to move. The scene went on for a while until he was able to reposition the car and barely drive by her brushing her with the car. These are the "woke" people who are poisoning the well for others. They just use it as a pretext to rage and hate on strangers simply because of their race, age, or gender. I'm not saying this is typical behavior, just an interaction where someone probably felt targeted. In a more general sense, I have been told by hiring managers and recruiters that white males shouldn't bother applying for some jobs. That certainly made me feel angry and targeted by ideologs.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- HybridCurve 4y ago
  This isn't "woke", this is just being an asshole. The term "woke" is supposed to be related to awareness of racial injustice and inequality. Not one group exercising prejudice and bias and against another based on ethnicity. Furthermore, this term has become a label associated with loaded language employed by the conservative right to vilify opposition. It is a reflexive control word and propaganda device to used to focus hatred and resentment from conservatives towards any aspect of culture or ideology contrary to their interests, regardless of it actual relevance to racial injustice. So when you start calling assholes "woke", I am not sure if you are conflating the meaning of it because you are a victim of this propaganda or if you are intentionally using the term to foster resentment against others. Either way, claiming that people "who are aware of racial injustice" direct hatred, resentment, and prejudice against others because of their race, age or gender is so blatantly contradictory that it is absurd.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
rayiner 4y ago
[flagged]
- tptacek 4y ago
  Critical theory does not in fact "center discrimination against Black people at the center of the political universe".
  - rayiner 4y ago
    CRT places black people in the center of the political universe in the same way that Marxism places the proletariat at the center of the political universe. (I’m not using the comparison to Marxism pejoratively, it’s simply apt.) That’s the whole point. It is by design a framework for criticizing the failure of traditional liberal principles to remediate the disadvantages facing black people in America. When CRT purports to address other non-white races, it does so only by treating them as another kind of black person. Hence the term “people of color,” which is just a way to project how the CRT framework conceptualists black people onto all non-whites. (And on the front it’s wrong. It’s central premise that racism is a structural problem requiring a structural solution is wrong as applied to Latinos and Asians just as it did not apply to Italians.) That focus carries through to the “pop” version of CRT manifested by folks such as Ibram Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones. In “how to be an anti-racist” Kendi doesn’t grapple with any of the implications of his ideas beyond the hoped-for effect on black people. In the quote from Hannah-Jones, she reduces “nearly everything truly exceptional about America” to slavery. It also manifests in how ordinary liberals today talk about political theory. For example, despite the obvious advantages of federalism for a multi-ethnic democracy (which is why India has a federal structure) it’s impossible to get ordinary liberals to approach federalism except from the perspective of how it was used to uphold segregation. Similarly, critiques of the Senate invariably mention that it empowers primarily white states as if people’s skin color is the problem. This is of course not a critique of CRT. It’s an analytical framework designed to analyze and solve the challenges facing the specific group that created it. But when it’s adopted as a generalized political theory, it leads to the antagonism noted above.
    - 4y ago