I wish we could stop flagging posts like this. The discussion is thoughtful, and the topic is interesting.
Flagging is the digital equivalent of throwing a temper tantrum when the balance of your echo chamber has been disturbed.
John McWhorter: The Neoracists
91–100 of 261 posts
Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists
#92I'd recommend reading Ibram X. Kendi's counter to another piece by McWorther which demonstrates similar straw man rhetoric (pointed out by lisper) as this piece: agglomerating disparate positions from hundreds of people and pointing to a lack of internal consistency in such disparate points of view. Well yeah, if you assemble myriad opinions about racism in society in a long list, many of them won't be coherent. It's…
Why is it naive or calculating to look for coherence in a world-view?
Because a worldview isn't necessarily composed of all of possible opinions on one broad side of an argument.
Do you subscribe to the least and most extreme spectrum of your particular philosophy or political affiliation?
Do you think every conversation about progressing towards the mean should systematically be bogged down by the minimum and maximum? No matter how much they deviate from the standard?
Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists
#93I'd recommend reading Ibram X. Kendi's counter to another piece by McWorther which demonstrates similar straw man rhetoric (pointed out by lisper) as this piece: agglomerating disparate positions from hundreds of people and pointing to a lack of internal consistency in such disparate points of view. Well yeah, if you assemble myriad opinions about racism in society in a long list, many of them won't be coherent. It's…
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Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
What leads you to believe the statistics are gathered and reported accurately?
Literal death does not tend to be misreported in the first world.
Since so many people are replying to you with derision, I’ll link to the Washington Post database on police shootings which is considered to be pretty comprehensive and has a lot of work put into each case to determine the situation around it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
A lot of people are surprised to learn that the number of unarmed black men shot by police in recent years is often between 15-20 given the rhetoric around the issue.
The number is disproportionally higher than white men, but Roland Fryer’s research suggests that when taking into account context, such as crime rates, there is no statistical difference in police shootings based on race, though he did find a persistent difference in other types of police encounters.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-ana...
Black Americans are disproportionately poor, disproportionately raised in single parent homes, disproportionately forced into poorly run schools, and disproportionately victimized by crime. Those issues are difficult to address and should all get a lot of attention because they are the context in which disproportionate encounters with police occur. While police reform is an important issue for everyone, the overheated rhetoric around racist cops is performative and distracting.
Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH2WeWgcSMk
Fair warning: the creator of that video has a dog in this fight. To be fair, he's not exactly trying to come across as impartial. But this might not be the best source for someone trying to learn about this issue.
Well, I started watching this, but I stopped after "Evergreen was the most experimental of experimental colleges." I don't see how an anecdote from a setting like that could possibly inform a discussion of what is and isn't a widely held view in today's society.
Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see. I’m on a college campus in the United States right now, and I can confirm what he describes exists here exactly as he describes it. There may be a generational or geographical gap between our experiences.
OK, I'll take your word for it. But I have a hard time imagining what that experience could even look like . I mean, do people go around quizzing each other on their anti-racist credentials? In my world, this doesn't even come up in day-to-day conversation. The only reason it's on my radar screen at all is that I wrote a blog post about it a few months ago that ended up blowing up in my face.
If it sounds cartoonish, that’s because it is. The manifestation I’ve seen around me is that groups of 3–4 will pretend to befriend unsuspecting victims, inviting them to events and parties etc., then yell at/berate/abuse them at the first un-“woke” comment (no matter how innocuous), command that person to be better, and then completely cut contact. A person will think they have new friends, then a switch is flipped out of nowhere and those friends are gone.
Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's quite hard to come up with reliable statistics for police killings in the US. It's not that deaths aren't counted, it's that they're misclassified. > Feldman used data from the Guardian’s 2015 investigation into police killings, The Counted, and compared it with data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). That dataset, which is kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was found to…
Seems hard to make an argument either for or against racial disparities in police shootings then, if the data is unreliable. In which case the answer is to not make assumptions, but collect better data. A lot of people seem to take the approach of: the data's good if it says what I want; if it doesn't, it's probably wrong.
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Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists
#98I haven't read the article yet, but McWhorter is the mastermind behind Lexicon Valley, a linguistics podcast and perhaps my favorite podcast of all times. McWhorter is both a bona-fide expert and a thoughtful, funny communicator - a rare combination. Oh, and he's also into musical theater, as you will learn very, very quickly if you listen to any Lexicon Valley episode. https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley
Oh I'm definitely going to check that out. I've always been a fan of his writing and think he does a great job of making linguistics accessible to the general public. If I had been exposed to his writing in high school I definitely could see myself going into the field.
By chance have you ever listened to the Conlangery podcast? It's primarily about constructed languages but there's a lot of info and cool factoids about natural languages contained within.
Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then, with respect, you are not listening to and understanding the people to the left of you. They deny that there is a mere undercurrent of latent intentional bigotry by those in power (racism). Rather, they affirm that America is a system of power and social relations that keep the underclass just as effectively subjugated as slavery, without the need for intentional bigotry. And they intend to undo it. George Wash…
Reference(s)?
The article in question provides several examples of public figures making these points.
I've personally encountered people and organizations that . Several who, for instance, decried white flight on one hand but on the other hand criticized whites (and Asians) moving into poor neighborhoods in San Francisco. One company I worked at set up a system of reserving headcount specifically for underrepresented demographics, while simultaneously declared that any notion that the company extended preferential treatment to said groups was hateful and not acceptable.
I think these people are well-intentioned but are too scared to confront controversy or navigate nuance in their views. So they resort to this sort of contradiction to try and avoid it.
Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
"black people being systematically disenfranchised, and publicly tortured and killed by authorities, often with impunity" And it's ridiculous statements like this that keep fanning the racial tensions. 1) Please show the data - if you even took time to review police killings it is social class that is the biggest factor not race. In fact as a percentage white people of lower income status are killed more often than b…
> Please show the data Seriously? Have you not been keeping up with current events? Have you heard of George Floyd? The attempts by the Trump administration to overturn the 2020 election?
briane80 asked you to show the data, not anecdotes.