John McWhorter: The Neoracists

> John McWhorter is not a MAGA hack.

From reading the piece, he seems more of a Friedman/Brooks hack (much more common in the mainstream media), but still a hack.

> This article is the very definition of a straw man. Absolutely no one subscribes to the position it critiques.

McWhorter seems to be really keen (not just in this piece) on adapting the old and problematic waves of feminism model and applying it, badly and without much basis, to “antiracism”.

> What no one has yet done is provide an actual reference to anyone going on the record to endorse the ten-point position that McWhorter calls "third-wave anti-racism."

I doubt you could find much support for people supporting any of them (except maybe #3, which is perfectly internally consistent without even superficial contradiction, and #10, in which the implication of contradiction is based entirely in the fallacy of division, like, come to think of it, much racism.)

Most of them have superficial resemblance to things people actually believe, but have been subtly twisted to make strawmen.

As one example, McWhorter’s number 2 is:

> Black people are a conglomeration of disparate individuals. “Black culture” is code for “pathological, primitive ghetto people.” But don’t expect black people to assimilate to “white” social norms because black people have a culture of their own.

An actual real thing many antiracists believe is:

> Black people are a conglomeration of disparate individuals. Reference to a singular “Black culture” is code for “pathological, primitive ghetto people.” But don’t expect black people to assimilate to “white” social norms because black people have cultures of their own.

The differences are subtle in terms of the change in words, but gigantic in terms of change of meaning.

Just because a slogan is "all over" doesn't mean that people actually believe in its literal meaning. It's kind of like the difference between "black lives matter" and "all lives matter". The literal meaning of both of these slogans is clearly true and so on their face they are not at odds with each other. But there is a sub-text to both slogans that pits them against each other.

Likewise, "Silence is violence" doesn't literally mean what it says. What the people who recite it actually mean, I suspect, is that if you do not actively speak out against racism then you are complicit in it, which is a not-entirely-unreasonable position.

But McWhorter was not talking about the slogan. His wording presents it as a literal truth.

> Then, with respect, you are not listening to and understanding the people to the left of you

Yeah, no, as someone fairly far to the left on race issues, I'm going to agree that lisper is right and McWhorter is a strawman-beating hack selling the kind of pro-elite concern-trolling progressives-are-ruining-progressivism narrative that's always been a lazy but effective way to make money as a commentator in the establishment media.

> George Washington is not being removed from school names because there is a tail problem with bigotry that we’ve made progress on

Yes, he is.

> They believe they must deny Washington any place of honor, so that BIPOC children feel safe enough to succeed.

These aren't different things. The reason why honoring Washington ha become seen as a barrier to further progress and an impediment to feelings of safety is precisely because of the manner in which reverence for the founders and the conditions established at the founding, including Washington, has been integrated into a deeply racist quasi-religious civic cult model of what America means, largely in direct response to and as a tool to impede further progress on racial equality.

EDIT: Personally, I like the kind of positive adaptive syncretism represented by things like Hamilton better than destructive iconoclasm as a response to this, but that doesn't stop me from understanding where it comes from.

> But it is not a straw man to point out the false religion of the iconoclasts claiming to have a solution.

It is when both the religion and the claim to have a solution is something you've just completely invented out of whole cloth.

The modern antiracist movement, like the antifascist movement, and like Jeffersonian antityranny denies (or at least, does not hold out for) a solution, but instead posits that the problem it addresses can only, at least as best as we can tell right now, be held in check by eternal, and adaptive, vigilance.

The original post never mentions the n word or social media. What are you even trying to say?

Gentrification's indo-european word root derives cognates in indo-aryan e.g. that literally mean "race" (janas) [1]. Incidently, India, Iran, and everyone else has staggering amounts of institutional racism and other kinds of discrimination. You might think that it hardly matters.

However, gens in the Roman republic concerned nobility of certain families, often only in name and different degrees. So it is not the 20th century black and white kind of racism, but something a little more particular, what is very much related to oligarchic nepotism, land ownership rights, and yes, nationalism and racism.

The irony of the matter is that gentrification in its current public image concerns people being priced out of the inner cities where their families have been living for gen-erations.

On the other hand, besides pricing, it might implicate discriminatory practices for who's being given a room, and a job, a place to study, who creates the jobs, and who gets the chance to raise a kid without toiling away as a wage slave on no income after rent.

Gosh, that's only the word's root and I'm not even totally sure about that one. Genious and gene (drift) are related as well, but I typically like to compare rhymes which on the face of it are unrelated, like centri, because it's entertaining to speculate how they could be related. See, old classical Latin had no G but used C (or Cu, whence the practice of transcribing hard G as Gu in French, e.g. Guernica); Greek and everyone else had /g/ in the alphabet where Latin has C and I have it from a good source that place value was rather more structly observed than one would think, at least since Egyptian. Classical Syriac (Aramaic) has qentron, qantron(?), which is thought to be a related loan, and the q (ܩ 'qoph') does imply to this Semitic novice a sound quite different from /k/.

Centrum is commonly thought to be a loan from Greek, and kentrom would typically reconstruct a voiceless palatal velar, whereas gen- reconstructs a voiced palatal, thus AGr. genos and kentrom cannot be cognate in the traditional theory under the assumption that both words are inherited. The assumption is myopic though, because Ancient Greek is known to have a lot of external influence and kentron itself has too few cognates to establish heritage with any amount of significant probability. It may therefore be an open question, if it was a loan word, where it came from. Although the question would appear fatuous if the semantic distance is easy to bridge that first looks implausible from AGr. "spike" to Lat. "middle" but looks more plausible if cast as "pointed tool" and "middle (of a circle" (eg. via maths, if you can imagine it). It is all the more ridiculous to go so far before "gentrification" was coined--rather recently, I presume. Yet it makes sense to contrast gentry with the peasents, and pitch fork with the ruling stem or tribe. On a rather theoretical level it is at the very least not implausible to hask for each of the roots individual internal derivation, but I'll spare you the rest which invariable devolves into world-conspiracy theory at the latest when Semitic is involved, much worse in fact when racisim was the topic, while I'm sure a more trivial argument can explain why "something with a sharp point" had to be borrowed into languages so diverse as Latin, Aramaic, Georgian, Armenian, whereas my information basis is too poor and thus biased to see ghosts in the noise, such a trade marked compass needle cartell.

Nevertheless I hope you (and Maybe McWorther if he should read this thread with interest) can appreciate the ironic saecasm that, if I was into something, then gentrification would in effect protest the centrification of the city centre. That's literally circular reasoning.

The idea that city centres are Haram (forbidden, holy, thus also Harem) is quite old actually. I think that's what we are looking at in the abstract, although in the conclusion it seems more like the industrialisation and beaurocratization of the home stead. It is a self similar problem, because it may lead to urbanization of the outer rim, and thus the gentrification of villages, which I have experienced in my own time, though to a profitable effect so far. The flip side is desertification and geront- (oficitation?) of rural areas, "Landflucht", when the youth looking for work flees to the city. Migration is topical on a global scale of course, and racism plays a huge role in that topic no doubt, be it in Texas, the Mediteranean, China, or Dubai (where the term "wage slavery" is no hyperbole, and nepotism the name of the game, I suppose), the list goes on and on. So you have to consider aglomeration between world cities, too, which is what I mean with self similarity.

In result it--whatever it really is--is a problem so complex I cannot disagree about racism not being the root cause, despite the copious evidence in the word root itself.

But I do disagree that it is about money, which is only symbolic and begets the question what it symbolized, if not the head figures depicted on the obverse. I do think cost is a more relevant term (a homophone and either way not totally secure; rhymes with caste if you mumble, and with κεστός "girdle, belt; stitched, embroidery" which is a cognate to kentron, haha, I could go on all day).

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...