Wrongthink on Race with Glenn C. Loury – by Bari Weiss – Common Sense with Bari Weiss
BW: The word racism has been redefined, particularly by Ibram X. Kendi. First of all, it’s no longer about personal bigotry. It’s about any system that results in disparity. So if you have any kind of disparity between racial groups in any given institution, school culture system, it is evidence in and of itself that racism is present.
GL: That is exactly what Kendi is saying. He’s not mincing words about it. What it brings to mind is George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language, in which he talks about how words and the meaning of words fall in the service of political programs. And people think they can make reality by playing with words. I don’t know why anybody takes Ibram X. Kendi seriously. That’s a silly book, How To Be an Anti-Racist. Kendi s formulations are sophomoric. They don’t bear up under the least bit of serious, rigorous social scientific scrutiny. He’s not standing on any literature. He’s not citing any intellectual development that has any deep roots in anything. It’s pablum. It’s froth on the intellectual surface of our life. And it behooves us all to think pretty hard about why it is that we’re content with that kind of analysis. When civil disorder in American cities is consuming the lives of black people like a machine, our political leaders and intellectual class and journalistic representatives haven’t got a word to say about it. Black Lives Matter is almost completely irrelevant to what matters in black lives.
BW: And yet corporations and the entire elite establishment has taken up the cause of Black Lives Matter. And the cynic in me would say it s just about the cheapest and easiest thing that they could possibly do.
GL: Nothing that Black Lives Matter is about has any intersection with the things that actually matter in black lives. What about education? The gap in the cognitive development of the human potential of African-American youngsters relative to others in this country widens. It’s a yawning chasm.
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