Yasna wrote:linguoboy wrote:It's not "whataboutism" to fault someone for not properly situating their critique in the larger context.
Please. You questioned the existence of the woke revolution, and I provided an article documenting it with specific examples. You live in the US, work at a university, and read the news. That should provide all the context you need.
And since I read the news, I'm already familiar with Bari Weiss and her shtik. I don't need to register on some site I've never heard of to read another of her screeds.
Here's what I think you're not getting about "context": If you're going to position something as a "revolution", as a sea change in society, you have to show that what is does is fundamentally different from what went before. That's where this piece fails. She frames ours as a frightening new era where civil discourse is replaced with shaming and facts trump feelings. But it was ever so in USAmerican politics. Read some history: there was no golden era where politicians were all unfailingly civil with one another, policies were always based on empirical truths, and persuasion by rational argument was how ordinary folks were enticed to accept them. It's always been a big shouting match.
All that's really changing is who's shouting and what their shouts accomplish. Previously, when people shouted bad things about queers and Blacks, it was the queers and Blacks (and those who supported them) who usually got cancelled as a result. Now, it's more likely to be the shouters. This is definitely a societal shift, but to call it a "revolution" is hysterical nonsense--particularly when only five years ago a man shouting these things managed to shout his way to the presidency.
Yasna wrote:Give me concrete, well-founded examples, not histrionic generalities.
In fact the article has numerous concrete examples, many based on
her own reporting. Christopher Rufo has also done much of the heavy lifting in
documenting the woke revolution.
If you actually read through those old columns and look past the laundry lists of examples to the conclusions, you'll see the Weiss' collaborator Leightwood Woodhouse doesn't agree that this is a true "revolution" and says as much:
The anti-racism movement was spearheaded by academics and incubated in the upper echelons of America’s cultural hierarchy: universities, legacy media, Hollywood, Silicon Valley....It is funded by the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country. It has all the aesthetic trappings of “justice,” but race-based reforms aren’t really about that. They’re about protecting institutions that, in an age of rampant inequality and simmering populism, are rapidly losing their legitimacy. They’re meant to bring an aura of cosmetic righteousness to the American aristocracy — recasting that aristocracy as the vanquishers of the very hierarchy they preside over, and in so doing, preserving their waning moral authority. It is much easier to throw a few crumbs at social-media-savvy activists peddling anti-racism than it is to make big, structural reforms that might actually do something....It’s about propping up the old, morally bankrupt order in an effort to keep out the new. It’s about resisting real progress — a progress that does something about the hollowing out of America and doesn’t attempt to distract us with a culture war that both major political parties benefit from.
You can read pretty much the same analysis from any leftist author. The major criticism of "wokeism" as practiced by major institutions is that it's "performative"--all about grand gestures which sound good but accomplish little.
And that's exactly the problem I'm having in my home institution. It talks the talk but won't walk the walk. At its core, it's a corporate entity with corporate interests ("a hedge fund with a side business in education", as someone once described Harvard before this "Harvard model" was adopted wholesale by elite universities) doing the minimum necessary to protect its brand image, which--as an elite liberal-arts institution--means projecting the values that folks who pay thousands to attend elite liberal-arts institutions claim to care about. But--as their response to the pandemic made abundantly clear--it's all a sham.
And that's why any talk of a "woke revolution" gets a cynical guffaw from me. As Woodhouse says, it amounts to rearranging the seats around the captain's table while doing nothing to get the ship back on course.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons