In a recent anti-racist symposium conducted by Towson University in Maryland, teacher/author April Baker-Bell expounded on the thesis of her book on “linguistic justice,” descrying the teaching in American schools of proper English grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc., as but another form of White oppression. “The way black language is devalued in schools,” she said, “reflects how black lives are devalued in the world.” Her critique is comparable to suggesting that the teaching of proper Arabic in Saudi Arabia is a moral abomination!
Given that one of George Orwell’s oft invoked themes was the way tyrants use “double-think” to justify their tyranny, it is ironic beyond belief that the National Council of Teachers of English gave Baker-Bell its 2020 Orwell Award for her contributions in the realm of education. As does she, the Council apparently endorses Postmodern Relativism, the notion that all cultural values are equal, that no one way of relating to the world is superior to any other. It is the demonstrably stupid idea that pervades the narrative of Systemic White Racism!
Cultural Norms, the Principles and Values which inform any given Civilization, demonstrably, unequivocally, have an impact on the existential performance of its citizens, both in the economic and moral realms. Obviously this does not mean that every member of a society which endorses what I would term truly positive values will necessarily act in accord with those values. But Culture counts, is indeed a fundamental determining factor in the historical narrative.
2500 years ago the Greeks deemed Man to be an Intelligent/Volitional Being fully responsible for the course of his existence. It is an assumption that has informed Western Civilization, in one way or another, for all of its history. While I am generalizing about a dynamic of perhaps ineffable complexity, one can identify certain Principles and Values that emerged from the European Enlightenment to become the bedrock of Canadian and American Culture as established by English Colonialists several hundred years ago. While these Norms are disparaged today as merely White Patriarchal eccentricities, this valuation would have been dismissed by those colonialists as an idiotic violation of common sense.
So what are those “White” Principles and Values “systemically” oppressing the non-White citizens of our Western Democracies? Enlightenment philosophers saw the application of Reason to the Empirical Evidence of the Natural World as key to the understanding of that realm. However difficult to ascertain, they deemed there was an Objective Reality which Man could not simply redesign to suit his needs. Oddly, the Romantics of the 19th Century, the precursors of our contemporary state of Cultural Decline, gave preeminence to Man’s Imagination, actually preaching that he could re-make Reality to suit his needs. But the Rational Humanist [i.e., the “conservative”] sees the acknowledgement of Reality as a basic existential obligation born of our capacity for Reason, the key to both Man’s understanding of the Self, a fundamental prerequisite to a Moral mode of Being, as well as to his understanding of the Phenomenal World whose pragmatic demands cannot simply be willed into non-existence.
So Western Humanist Man values Reason and Empirical Observation over Superstition and Wishful Thinking. He sees self-control and hard work as essential to success in the economic realm. He sees self-knowledge as essential to the curtailment of those primitive, self-indulgent impulses which are the very source of Human Evil. Black “conservatives” agree, seeing both the “Protestant work ethic” as well as the institution of the “nuclear family” not as White racial constructs but as effective, pragmatic responses to the human condition. This may appear to be simple common sense but the scam of “systemic racism” is utterly devoid of common sense.
In a video entitled “Five Things You Didn’t Know Were Racist,” a young lady who calls herself “Roaming Millennial” points out that an Inclusion Awareness course at Clemson University contends it is racist to demand those who have come from cultures not particularly concerned with punctuality, to show up on time. Similarly, she says, a couple of professors from the University of North Iowa are teaching that the standards of civility we expect of each other here in the West ought not to be imposed on others, politeness also being just a Western eccentricity.
What the “anti-racist” crowd brazenly ignores is that if the values cited above are “systemic” to the Nations of Western Europe, Australia and North America, it is because those Nations were founded upon those very values. In no way racist in intent, they simply reflect who we are. While they are of course subject to criticism, their actual substance is rarely the focus of Leftist critics. But how could it be otherwise? Who in their right mind would argue that rationality, hard work, self-awareness, self-control, verbal fluency, punctuality and a friendly social demeanor are in any way negative values? No one!
The “anti-racism” espoused by Ibram X. Kendi and ludicrously endorsed by a good many White “liberals,” is in fact racist to its very core. It is not the substance of the cultural norms “systemic” throughout the West that angers Kendi et al., but the fact that they are the product of White, Western European Civilization. But what is even more appalling than this outrage that is in fact rooted in an ugly xenophobia, is that it encourages poor American Blacks to ignore the very principles and values that might rescue them from their poverty while at the same time absurdly inciting them to blame their “White oppressors!”
A young male from some “other” culture has a job interview with a White employer at 2 P.M. to which he arrives at 2:45, unapologetic, decidedly unfriendly, barely coherent, clearly resentful that he has to work at all, yet convinced by White, Western “intellectuals” that he is entitled to all of the above. Truly absurd!
Thought I was finished but awoke this morning to a video posted by Candace Owens that is too delicious to ignore. Apparently Bill Gates is willing to invest more than one billion dollars in the pursuit of a more equitable math curriculum within the American educational system, one that doesn’t prioritize, with typical White arrogance, correct answers over all else. One wonders what might be the state of his multi-billion dollar empire had he hired thousands who saw math as just a Western Patriarchal peccadillo, who were perfectly comfortable with the conclusion that 2+2 = a watermelon! One truly wonders at the sanity of Gates, Zuckerberg and the rest of the “woke” Left!