A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell

I miss the days when systemic racism was known more specifically as poverty. Poverty, combined with the war on drugs that incentivized violence, dads in jail, and a hostile learning environment. That was actually actionable...maybe a little too actionable. The institutional racism thing is just amorphous enough to pit the lower class against itself and preserve status quo. Alas I'm not sure students today appreciate the role of the war on drugs or comprehend the concept of class and so they just role play.

I don't understand how the socio-political stance to which I have ostensibly been subscribed my entire adult life has become so religious. It seems like there has been a bedrock shift from encouraging good behavior to witch-hunting bad behavior. In just a few short years, every topic of discourse has taken a similar path. From "do this good thing" to "don't do this bad thing" to "punish anyone who does this bad thing" to "punish anyone who doesn't punish people enough for doing this bad thing".

I recently read an interesting chapter in a book from the 60's that seems relevant. The chapter is "Reactionary Aspects in Black Power", and it's in Julius Lester's book "Revolutionary Notes". Here's a sample quote:

The liberal establishment realized that as long as blacks were talking about blackness, as long as blacks were cussing white folks, as long as blacks were only reclaiming themselves, they were not the threat which they could be. A threat did not exist until blacks moved from blackness to an understanding of White Power (the system) and organized to destroy it. Suddenly the Establishment began seeing virtue in blackness and began encouraging it, as did even funding groups, whose programs were essentially cultural. Too many blacks thought that having won the right to assert their blackness meant more than it actually did. Blackness became an end to be achieved, when in actuality blackness is only the starting point. It is one weapon in the liberation struggle. For too many blacks it has become the struggle itself.

Lester's insider theory (at least in this chapter) is that by the late 60's Black Power had already lost its way and was being actively encouraged toward a direction less dangerous to the established powers. To me at least, the effects sound parallel to what Lloyd describes here.

I couldn't find the chapter online as a standalone, but a scan of the book is available for free checkout if you sign up at Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/revolutionarynot00lest. It's a short chapter, and is on pages 104 to 108. It's a fun quick read even if getting to it is not trivial.

Every single element of this story is so far outside my experience that I have no idea what to think of it. Hours long summer seminars with a college professor? One who hosts them at his home and provides lunch?

17 year olds plotting a mutiny is the only thing in this that I can relate to.

This an opportunistic editorial choice, given the very solid conservative credentials of the journal staff: https://compactmag.com/about/

Certainly, the left is no way immune from cult dynamics. A recent example is Black Hammer, an organization devoted to the idea of a new black militancy that would rekindle the flame once tended by groups such as the Black Panthers in the 1960s. Their purity spiral was so tightly would that they were able to recruit rapidly but quickly developed an adversarial relationship with other radical left groups, before the organization imploded and the core membership ended up getting arrested. Wikipedia's summary of the organization's rise and fall is basically accurate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hammer_Party

Cult dynamics are a fixture of radical politics, there's an endless supply of new recruits burning with idealistic fervor that are ripe targets for recruitment into political-capital ponzi schemes (several of which launder the political capital back into financial capital). On the left you have the ReEvolutionary Communist Party (which operates a small network of bookstores) and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (which reliably turns out crowds at protests about The Current Thing and can be recognized by their distinctive signage and their practice of designating hot young girls as chant leaders. Those organizations finance 'revolutionary theorists' Bob Avakian and Gloria La Riva respectively, both of whom are holdovers from 1970s radicalism and maintain a relatively low public profile while providing members with wraparound ideological and activist infrastructure to keep them busy. There are numerous smaller ones, as well as large groups that are primarily ideological but significantly less centralized or cultish, like the Democratic Socialists of America, arguably the left's equivalent of the Libertarian party.

The radical right is also awash in cults, but supported by orders of magnitude more money and integration with institutions like churches and larger political organizations. This topic is abundantly covered in media nowadays due to the ascent of Trumpism, though often in a shallow and superficial way. Just as the worst aspects of the political left model the toxicity of authoritarian communism, many right wing radical groups peddle one variant or another of Christian nationalism, a transnational movement whose aggregate popularity encompasses about 1/3 of the US: https://www.prri.org/research/a-christian-nation-understandi...

This ideological split long predates social media and is (arguably) rooted in dichotomies and interregional antagonisms that precede the founding of the US. While legislative action is only a proxy for these competing social tendencies, it's a somewhat useful one and the long-term nature of teh conflict is startlingly well-visualized here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I suspect that the breakdown occurred higher up in the organization. The TASPs ran quite well for almost 70 years, and there was a process around them.

They were originally created as a way to identify great HS students and funnel them into the Telluride House at Cornell, and for many years students regularly turned down Harvard and Yale to go do this; many of them became College Scholars, and the Telluride House had a reputation for having many of the best students on campus.

The endowment did quite well (they were early adopters of indexing and the Yale model) and they started the TASS programs. This created a different funnel of almost exclusively black students not recruited based on a standardized test score or 'elitist' credentials, and this group gradually took over the organization and co-opted the giant pot of money. This led to a schism where the 'elitists' left, and the result is the current groupthink as well as the difficulty in recruiting factota (the college students who help the HS students).

> From Wild Wild Country to the Nxivm shows to Scientology exposés, the features of cults have become familiar in popular culture. There is sleep deprivation. Ties to the outside world are severed. The sense of time collapses, with everything cult-related feeling extremely urgent. Participants are emotionally battered. In this weakened state, participants learn about and cling to dogmatic beliefs. Any outsider becomes a threat.

This sounds exactly like having a baby

On reading this, sadly I thought the title would more appropriately be "A Black Professor Trapped in a Racist Hell".

> Experiencing hardship conveys authority.

> There is no hierarchy of oppressions—except for anti-black oppression, which is in a class of its own.

> Trust black women.

> Prison is never the answer.

> Black people need black space.

> Allyship is usually performative.

> All non-black people, and many black people, are guilty of anti-blackness.

> There is no way out of anti-blackness.

Of these, I'd say 1, 4, and 5 make sense with caveats. The rest are spot on from what I know.

1. Experience does convey some authority on what you experienced, but making apt use of it requires thought.

4. I'd say American prison is seldom the answer. Once we get to a point where inmates aren't treated like cattle, I'd agree with this otherwise.

5. If we construe 'black space' as a space in which one's culture and history can be appreciated absent external influence, I'd say that makes sense. But white people shouldn't be scared to talk to a black person because they're afraid of intruding on their space. That's just fucked up.

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There are parents who are rich/powerful and are able to prepare their children for similar power, there are parents who live vicariously through their children; and unfortunately there are parents who are both. This leads to children holding the reins of entire institutions like colleges, and we pride ourselves in their emotionality towards important issues, but we forget that they're still children. The logic is knee-jerk, it's emotional, and it's not well thought out.

As an example saying the n-word is unilaterally banned in most contexts (in the eyes of these 𝚠̶𝚑̶𝚒̶𝚝̶𝚎̶ elite). And not as a curse word, but as a hate crime. Nevermind that the person who is most likely to use that word, is probably black. So all this is doing is preserving the delicate sensibilities of the person in power and forcing the black person, again, to conform.

I have hope for the coming generation that treats race as a joke, but not its history. But until it's normal to stop taking skin color so seriously on every aspect of human experience, and we can have a conversation about black racism, we've still some work to do.

Read/listen to John McWhorter

> The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy.

What is the end goal of a lunacy like this? Who is served by convincing people that objective fact does not exist?

I vouched this out of dead because it was an intriguing story. I'm not really sure the resulting discussion will be productive, but it is at least ostensibly a thought-provoking piece regarding culture in academia whose author seems to be an earnest person. The publication may be crap, but I guess a story like this may have trouble finding a publication willing to run it, given that it is naturally going to be controversial.

This appears in a publication that also earnestly argues that Pfizer and the FDA literally rigged the election, by skipping a testing step that would have shown the vaccine was extremely effective (subtle!) and thus depriving Trump of a press cycle just before the election that would have enabled him to take credit for ending the pandemic. In other words: Pfizer apparently deliberately tanked their own vaccine marketing, in collusion with Deep State Democrats, to hurt the Republicans.

Seems like a legit source.