Anti-racism

Thursday

Madeline Fry Schultz

The great Poetry Foundation shakedown

In late spring, when every corporation and nonprofit in America was releasing statements about how racism is bad, the Poetry Foundation joined in the chorus of self-preservation. On June 3, it released a statement announcing that it stands ‘in solidarity with the Black community’ and denounces ‘injustice and systemic racism’.It continued: ‘We believe in the strength and power of poetry to uplift in times of despair, and to empower and amplify the voices of this time, this moment.’ Imagine some poor foundation employee posting that statement to their website and wiping his brow. Crisis averted. It took all of three days for social justice campaigners to respond in a fury.

poetry foundation

Monday

Douglas Murray

Why should The Strand survive?

On Friday book-loving New Yorkers got a shock as the city’s largest bookstore — The Strand — announced that it risked going out of business. A post on Twitter from the company said: ‘We need your help. This is the post we hoped to never write, but today marks a huge turning point in The Strand's history. Our revenue has dropped nearly 70% compared to last year, and the loans and cash reserves that have kept us afloat these past months are depleted.’ https://twitter.com/strandbookstore/status/1319686649798905856 What followed included an appeal to the public to return to the store to ensure that the 93-year-old business could keep trading. Prominent writers and pundits rallied around, and in recent days lines have appeared outside.

strand

Monday

Melissa Chen

Yelp’s anti-racist social credit nightmare

It’s seven in the evening and you’re working late. You’re interrupted by the soft rumble of hunger pangs, an unmistakable reminder that you haven’t eaten dinner yet. There’s this newish fusion restaurant a couple of blocks away that you’ve been wanting to try, but haven’t had the chance to. Every time you’ve walked past, it’s buzzing with activity. So you look the restaurant up on Yelp to see if it’s worth your time and money. You launch the app and search, only to be hit with an alert emblazoned with an ominously large exclamation point: ‘Business Accused of Racist Behavior’ The R word. It’s the new scarlet letter. You’re so taken aback that you almost forget that you’re hungry.

yelp

Wednesday

Will Lloyd

Is your baby racist?

Babies, look at them: waddling about the place, falling over, crying, needy. Those racist bastards. Yeah that’s right, you heard me. Babies are racists too, they always have been. Unless you start doing the work, they always will be. Haven’t you noticed? Don’t you have a toddling daughter, a farting son, a drooping nephew, a drooling niece? Haven’t you noticed the obvious: these days, babies are all racist bastards. When you’re not looking, your baby is secretly cutting eye-slits in a white bed sheet. When you’re in the kitchen, making their soft, puréed dinner, your baby is skulking by the letterbox, quietly waiting for a delivery of Mein Kampf. Babies are hanging out on 8Chan.

antiracist baby children

Sunday

Solveig Lucia Gold

American Athens

I never understood why Plato wrote so harshly about democracy. Was he simply bitter over the death of his beloved mentor Socrates? And could his criticism of direct democracy in ancient Athens apply to a representative democracy like ours? Right now, the United States is looking increasingly Athenian. Plato characterized the birth of Athenian democracy as a rejection of expertise. The masses, previously content to defer to experts who knew what was good for the city, were led to believe that they could determine the good for themselves — and that the ‘good’ was whatever they subjectively found pleasurable.

athens

Wednesday

Will Lloyd

We are all Rachel Dolezal now

As late as 2014, most Americans felt there was no need for the country to make any changes to address black-white inequality. 2015 was the year the future arrived. Donald Trump rode down the escalator. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World and Me was a publishing sensation. Freddie Gray died in Baltimore. The ‘Great Awokening’ — the journey of white liberals to the left of every other group in American society on racial issues — began. And in Spokane, Washington, there was the case of Rachel Dolezal. Like the Trump campaign, or Coates’s writing, or Gray’s death, the inglorious circus that surrounded Dolezal, a white woman caught pretending to be black, X-rayed American race relations. Dolezal was not sui generis.

rachel dolezal

Tuesday

Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay

What anti-racism really means and how to talk about it

How do you navigate conversations with people when the default assumption is that you’re a racist? What do you do when calmly and sincerely stating that you are not a racist is taken as evidence of your guilt of racism? First, understand what the terms mean, where they come from, and who are the proponents. ‘Anti-racism’ means being against racism, except for one important detail. What anti-racist advocates mean when they use the word ‘racism’ isn’t the same as what most people mean.‘Anti-racism’ comes directly from the academic scholarship of Critical Race Theory. In Critical Race Theory, ‘racism’ means ‘systemic racism’, which is said to be ‘the ordinary state of affairs’ in the United States.

anti-racism