By Steve Sailer
07/15/2021
Earlier, by Steve Sailer: David French: If Anti-CRT Laws Pass, The Current Robust Debate Over Race In The Schools Will Be Shut DownFrom The Atlantic:
There Is No Debate Over Critical Race Theory
Pundits and politicians have created their own definition for the term, and then set about attacking it.
By Ibram X. Kendi
JULY 9, 2021About the author: Ibram X. Kendi is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and the director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. He is the author of several books, including the National Book Award–winning Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America and How to Be an Antiracist.
… Take the journalist Matthew Yglesias. In February, in The Washington Post, he wrote that I think that “any racial gap simply is racist by definition; any policy that maintains such a gap is a racist policy; and — most debatably — any intellectual explanation of its existence (sociological, cultural and so on) is also racist.” But nowhere have I written that the racial gap is racist: The policies and practices causing the racial gap are racist.
Zzzzzzing!
Nowhere have I stated that any intellectual explanation of the existence of a racial gap is racist. Only intellectual explanations of a racial gap that point to the superiority or inferiority of a racial group are racist.
Except for the moral inferiority of the white racial group. As goes without saying, the white moral inferiority behind systemic racism is the only possible nonracist explanation of why blacks lag behind whites on any measure of average behavior. For example, the only nonracist explanation for why blacks commit an order of magnitude more murders than do whites is because whites, being morally inferior, force blacks to. After all, you don’t see blacks forcing whites to commit an order of magnitude more murders, which proves that blacks are morally superior to whites.
Was Yglesias really arguing against me, or was he arguing against himself? What about the columnist Ross Douthat? In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, he did what GOP thinkers keep doing to Americans striving to construct an equitable and just society: re-create us as extremists, as monsters to be feared for speaking out against racism. Douthat accused me of “ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals,” comparing me to the late Rush Limbaugh. I’ve spent my career writing evidence-based historical scholarship and demonstrating my willingness to be vulnerable; Limbaugh had no interest in being self-critical, and for decades attacked truth and facts and evidence.
Douthat claimed that I have a “Manichaean vision of public policy, in which all policymaking is either racist or antiracist, all racial disparities are the result of racism — and the measurement of any outcome short of perfect ‘equity’ may be a form of structural racism itself.”
Where did he get perfect equity? In How to Be an Antiracist, I define racial equity as a state “when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing.” I proposed that an example of racial equity would be “if there were relatively equitable percentages” of racial groups “living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties.” By contrast, in 2014, 71 percent of white families lived in owner-occupied homes, compared with 45 percent of Latino families and 41 percent of Black families. That’s racial inequity.
Seriously, they’re not even trying to cover up that when they say “equity” they mean they want to get their mitts on your home equity.
… How should thinkers respond to monstrous lies? Should we mostly ignore the critics as Matsuda has, as I have? Because restating facts over and over again gets old.
Exhausting, in fact.
Reciting your own work over and over again to critics who either haven’t read what they are criticizing or are purposefully distorting it gets old. And talking with people who have created a monologue with two points of view, theirs and what they impute to you, gets old.
But democracy needs dialogue. And dialogue necessitates seeking to know what a person is saying in order to offer informed critiques.
But what’s happening now is something entirely different and destructive — not constructive. This isn’t a “culture war.” This isn’t even an “argument.” This isn’t even “criticism.” This is critics arguing with themselves.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.