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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31615 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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This is rather silly. History education is not just teaching about the 'objectively' most important things in the world, otherwise British schools wildly under-study Asia and over-study British history, or at any rate certainly pre-Industrial revolution British history. Clearly, race and slavery has been enormously significant in American history, being possibly the biggest running issue in American politics for the first half of the nineteenth century, and certainly for a few decades before the Civil War, and of course being the cause of the Civil War itself.

The course is either going to be about soul food, Tulsa race riots, and rap music or be a crt/Marxist indoctrination.

It's so blindingly obvious you have almost no history education. Yeah, soul food and rap music is the sum total of the impact of race and African-Americans in American history.

Ok so tell me what important things have African Americans done?

Also we are talking high school history not college level. High School still has a need to teach basic things like why Democracy is important and how it developed etc. We aren’t talking about a college elective.

Also it’s not motte appropriate to say someone has no history education. Which isn’t true but you need to flesh out what you mean by that.

Ok so tell me what important things have African Americans done?

Well for starters until the Civil War they formed the basis of one half of the country's economic system, and thereafter were a crucial element in industrialisation. And aside from African-Americans as a group, there are countless individuals who are easily worthy of inclusion in any high school history education.

Also we are talking high school history not college level

Well race is one of the most important themes in American history across many centuries; even in high school that seems like a reasonable basis for an elective course; it's not compulsory after all.

So you can’t even name one important thing African Americans did and accused me of not knowing history?

Being a day laborer (farmer/factory worker) is no different than being a cow in the field. We don’t study horses in history class.

Race literally doesn’t matter to me. It’s not an important thing.

Being a day laborer (farmer/factory worker) is no different than being a cow in the field. We don’t study horses in history class.

Come on, man. Even if not being specifically directed at black people, this violates the rule to write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

We probably do not have a lot of day laborers who post here, but don't assume there are none, or at least people who are former day laborers or have family members who are. You can make your argument without literally equating people with cows in the field.

Curious: How would you rewrite his post to avoid a redname post in response while making the same general point (that low-class laborers, though perhaps not literally equated to them, may in some cases be as important to history as cattle, which is generally not included in recountings of it)? (If you take out any reference to cattle then I think you defang the rhetorical potency of this particular formulation of the point, so ideally you leave it in.)

We probably do not have a lot of day laborers who post here, but don't assume there are none, or at least people who are former day laborers or have family members who are. You can make your argument without literally equating people with cows in the field.

Tbf, while that guy is probably not a bricklayer etc., he's also probably not a Congressional Representative or high-flying CEO, so I'd be curious to know if he thinks a 'cow in the field' is a fair description of him, and if not why not.

Being a day laborer (farmer/factory worker) is no different than being a cow in the field. We don’t study horses in history class

Completely wrong. Social history is one of the biggest disciplines of the field.

The fact that they were regarded as no different than a cow in a field in a nation that claimed to be for liberty is arguably a huge deal that deserves plenty of attention no?

Nobody here is saying it shouldn’t be a part of an American history course. The point is there’s not a lot of world changing achievements coming from African American history.

And the cow in a field reference I would also use to describe Russian serfs or Irish peasants or basically anyone whose existence was much more than subsistence farming. In history you study kings not peasants.

In history you study kings not peasants.

If you get your idea of history from Medieval sagas, perhaps. In history as practiced by actual historians, social organization, mass migrations, cultural and political shifts, adoption of technology, and other such things that necessarily involve large collections of people are fundamental. Even if we know few specific individuals from a social group, it definitely does not mean the group as a whole cannot have played an important role in history. Can you name a single Sumerian scribe? And yet we owe them one of the most important inventions in the history of our species. As the poem goes, kings deliver little if they don't have servants, soldiers, and quite a lot of peasants doing the actual work for them.

By the way, even actual horses are, in fact, extremely important objects of study in history, having played a fundamental role in many important events (cases in point: the Indo-European expansion, the Germanic migrations into Roman Europe, the Medieval agricultural revolution, the Eurasian steppe empires, the European conquest of the Americas).

In history as practiced by actual historians,

This isn't the own you may think it is. Democrat voting history professors outnumber republican voting history professors 17.5 to 1. That leftists prefer to study the masses more than the elites, the quantity over the quality, is in line with their ideology.

In some other time the correct faith or race, or lack thereof, was used to explain success or failure. Today, unreconstructed marxists claim it is class.

As the poem goes,

Given that this is by a man who accepted an award difficult to top in how ironic its name is, Stalin Peace Prize, I find it difficult to accept his praise of the Labourer over the Leader as Stalinism examplified cult of personality to extent comparable with any monarchy.

But more on point, masses without a plan are a mob equally incapable of greatness. Only if a man steps forward and harnesses their power can a project grander than building a single family house come into fruition. This project can be good (defeating nazi Germany) or bad (occupying eastern Europe).

Great men, good and bad, don't pop into existence from thin air like the players in a world full of NPCs. They arise from the masses and their character is shaped by the same forces that move the masses, just refracted in a different way. Yes, most of them actually arose from the hereditary elite classes, but even the hereditary elites are rarely completely disconnected from the masses. That kind of disconnect is usually remarked on as unwise and fragile.

In history you study kings not peasants.

This attitude is why Henry Ford said "history is bunk". Here is his famous quip in full context, that is usually omitted to show him as brute primitive.

"When I went to our American history books to learn how our forefathers harrowed the land, I discovered that the historians knew nothing about harrows. Yet our country has depended more on harrows than on guns or speeches. I thought that a history which excluded harrows, and all the rest of daily life, was bunk. And I think so yet."

https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-resources/popular-topics/henry-ford-quotes

Studying heroic slaughters of kings and nobility and treating 99.9999% people who ever lived as cattle of the field was indeed what history Henry Ford was taught when he was young, and he was right to call it bunk.

That seems a rather parochial view. In history of agriculture you would want to cover peasants for example. In the history of Ireland how the farmers were treated during tenancy was a driver to anti-English sentiment.

Likewise land enclosure in the UK has a huge impact on reducing the rural population and had massive impacts on politics, and the development of urban centers driven by the migration of peasants which had a downstream impact on the industrial revolution itself.

Inn some history you eant to study kings, in others how the peasants of the day lived is much more useful, interesting and indeed applicable to the average person today.

When i learned histories of WW1 and 2 we spent time on politicians but we also spent time on common soldiers experiences and on the impacts to the average person in the Blitz. In the history of the Industrial revolution we learned how inventions like the seed drill affected farming yields and traditions. Sure we spent time on Jethro Tull the inventor but also how those changes affected farm workers and agrculturalists.

The idea that in history you study kings not peasants is simply factually incorrect.

While I don't agree with the poster you responded to we already have an AP course that covers all of these topics, it's called AP US History or APUSH and it's probably the most widely taken AP class. All of these topics are covered in it. You can find a list of AP courses here, an African American studies course does seem kind of out of place. An African History course on the lines of AP European History would fit much more with the rest of what's on offer.

My point is that I don't see the problem with an elective course that takes a closer look at one of the most important themes in American history. If it's out of place I'd say that's an argument for adding other similar AP classes looking at one aspect of history in more depth, for instance say a class in economic history.

AP courses aren't really about being electives, they're for college placement. Whether or not highschool students will choose to study this or not has very little to do with their interest and much more to do with how it will impact their college application.

That's a shame, but that's more a problem with the American school system than it is a problem with offering an elective class on African-American history.

You could offer an elective black studies course without it being an AP course. Different schools handle it differently but Advanced Placement courses generally are considered a whole letter grade higher for calculating GPA and give college credit at most institutions.

If colleges are going to start requiring some diversity BS elective, maybe this knocks it out as an AP class in high school, saving students later time and money?

At which point the blame lies upstream. But just looking at my own bookshelf, I could teach a state college freshman elective (how I'd rate an AP class) on African American Thought from Doughlass through Du Bois to Baldwin and McWhorter Next Week. The idea that there "isn't enough material" is absurd, and meant to say something else.

Clearly, race and slavery has been enormously significant in American history, being possibly the biggest running issue in American politics for the first half of the nineteenth century, and certainly for a few decades before the Civil War, and of course being the cause of the Civil War itself.

This is the correct answer. Of course African American history is important to know, so simply offering the class as an elective is perfectly legitimate. I would prefer a more general ethnicity course, which covers the issues relevant thereto globally, not just in the US, but still.

Well, I said ethnicity, not skin tone. Regardless, the question is not whether the experience is "coherent." It whether examining

and comparing data from a variety of societies is likely to be more analytically fruitful. I think the answer is yes. Works like this one, work on middleman minorities, and John Ogbu's work on immigrant social mobility certainly benefited from that approach.

Edit: Added links.

This whole thread makes me think that we have people who think that it's "woke" to portray African-Americans, or black people in general, doing anything interesting, important or notable, so I'm going to use it as a point to discuss something else I've thought about for the last couple days...

Some days ago I noticed that there is going to be a new movie called "Chevalier" on a black composer/musician in 18th century France. The way I saw this was noting that far-right social media persons like Lana Lokteff were yukking up how ridiculous the mere idea that such a person might have existed is. "We wuz and shieet" and other trite catchphrases in full display, declarations that wokes are now going to claim that Mozart was black (because the post Lokteff is quoting talks about him as "black Mozart"), that the only reason why this movie is made is anti-white hatred (because the composer is portrayed as facing racism) etc.

Of course, even a modest amount of Googling would show that this movie is indeed about a real person, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. The trailer does not appear to show anything that would majorly clash with the Wikipedia article - Chevalier de Saint-Georges did indeed enjoy fame in prerevolutionary France, was an accomplished swordsman, at least was rumoured to have an affair with a female aristocrat, experienced racism (because of course he would, this was an era when there was still slavery in the French colonies, and of course a biopic is going to show the subject facing adversity) and was involved in the French Revolution.

He's not supposed to be a literal black version of Mozart, and the trailer does not even refer to Mozart - it obviously happens in France, and if you know literally anything about Mozart, you know he's an Austrian. Based on the Wikipedia article and other stuff I've read about him, he was a fascinating man, and the only weird thing about there being a movie about him is that no-one has made one sooner. The only weird thing about the trailer is that there's no obvious reference to his duel with Chevalier D'Eon, which would of course have the potential to take accusations of preposterous wokery to stratosphere.

Some comments (not necessarily in Lokteff's thread, maybe in one of the quote threads) indicate that it's still odd that someone would make a movie about such an obscure character(???) or that they doubt Chevalier de Saint-Georges even existed, because, well, apparently 18th-19th century Frenchmen would invent a black composer just so that someone could make a woke movie about him in 2023 to foment white genocide.

This seems also remarkable in the way that if there's one thing where even anti-black racists have sometimes acknowledged black talent to exist, it would be music. Apparently the whole narrative about black accomplishments and innovations just plain don't exist as reached the point where a large portion of the "race realist" sphere recoils at portraying black people as anything beyond literal A. Wyatt Mann caricature types.

Oh, hey, I wrote a paper about that guy in high school French, all the way back in 2004. TBH, I didn't even remember he was black, but vaguely remember the other stuff. If I still have that essay on a jumpdrive backup of my HS nettwork drive, ...' I probably won't read it, because I remember barely squeezing out something I thought I could get away with turning in, but I am at least a little confused that I'd forget almost everything but the guy's name.

still odd that someone would make a movie about such an obscure character(???)

His oeuvre isn't notable, private life par for the course for someone of his time, place and class.

Given that Galois still lacks a movie, despite his professional accomplishments being notable in their own right while his non-mathematical behaviour is quite cinematic (involved in the French revolution (1830), spent .5 of a year behind bars, once released get into a duel over women, die in said duel aged only 21), means biopics aren't made in descending order of interestingness of the person depicted.

This whole thread makes me think that we have people who think that it's "woke" to portray African-Americans, or black people in general, doing anything interesting, important or notable, so I'm going to use it as a point to discuss something else I've thought about for the last couple days...

Some days ago I noticed that there is going to be a new movie called "Chevalier"

What % chance is this movie made if its about a straight white male? What other French 18th century minor celebrities have gotten movies in the last 20 years? The selection of the character was obviously made for woke reasons. Its not even clear he is the most prolific 18th century composer named "Chevalier". There are 3.

Its not even clear he is the most prolific 18th century composer named "Chevalier".

Chevalier here is not a name but a title (rendered in English as "knight")

Speaking of accomplishments of black people in 18th century Europe, for anybody familiar with Russian history, there's this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Petrovich_Gannibal

English Wiki unfortunately doesn't do full justice to his fascinating biography - he was captured and gifted as a slave to Peter The Great, got education, was freed and grew up to be a man of many talents, who took active role in Russian politics, served under several emperors (or empresses, as it were), was exiled to Siberia and then brought back, got highest military rank in Russia, was overseeing the whole army's engineering corps (there's a joke somewhere here about the army engineering works being so corrupting you need to bring a person from far away Africa to effectively manage it), introduced Russia to the concept of eating potatoes (they were known before, but not as common food), and was a great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, considered the founder of modern Russian literary tradition.

Interesting parallel with Alexandre Dumas, author of The Count of Monte Cristo, whose father was also a black general (son of a slave and a french aristocrat). A little suspicious. Did these authors make up an illustrious and exotic ancestry in their diversity essay?

I think you are pointing to a real thing. I do find the whole dynamic frustrating and perhaps you're only addressing the right wing side of it because you think it's what this community, especially in the context of this thread, needs to hear. But it does feel quite incomplete without addressing that it is in response to what really does seem like an obsession among progressive creatives to add representation to every type of media. No, that some right wingers fell for it does not say volumes about their enemies or however that quote goes but this might be a good time to look at the whole dynamic from a top down view to better understand why partisans believe what they do.

The argument/values conflict at play I think is the left with "representation matters" and the right with either "You're retconning our culture and we don't appreciate that" or "This is not actually an accurate representation" or even "Hey this stuff is starting to look really cynical, it's starting to seem like you don't care at all about the myths you're rewriting".

To steelman the Left's representation narrative.

  1. Straightforwardly representation just matters. It's important for young minority kids to be able to see themselves as agents in society capable of anything. Majority people don't have this problem and cannot easily understand how disempowering it is to grow up never seeing anyone who looks like you represented in the media you consume. The epitome of this is that reddit story of the black kid seeing Mile Morales and exclaiming "He looks like me!". This is the kind of story that ultimately melts ours hearts and even my black cynical heart lightens three shades at the thought*. It costs very little to get minorities this representation and many of us just straight up find joy in it for its own sake even if it might be partially vicarious.

  2. There already is an overwhelmingly large amount of white representation in society. It's not hard to find images like this poking fun at the concept. Just for the sake of variety exploring other identities and cultures is valuable. Most of the super heroes are cis hetero white dudes as is historical canon, as are contemporary figures just because of demographics. And if your for some reason want to watch all white media you can settle for merely 40% of new content or look to the back catalogue.

  3. These media products always had ideological components and preachiness, you just didn't notice because it was preaching your ideology. Did you not notice how every villain for a decade was a cell of brown middle eastern terrorists?

To Steelman the Right's 'stop shoe horning' narrative

  1. Our culture and myths actually matter, cynically retconning aspects of them completely divorced from their context is cheap and the outcome is almost always mediocre because you're prioritizing ideological soap boxing over quality.

  2. It's very uncomfortable that your idea of progress seems to, at all times, consist of minimizing the existence and representation of people like me. It may be unfortunate that other races/gender/ect have less representation than us but it was never an explicit goal of ours**. It's tremendously difficult to shake the frame of "us vs them" when your absence is celebrated by 'them'.

  3. There seems to be a kind of cynical element where you are going out of your way to offend us as a marketing technique. You release some new revision of an old IP custom designed to be maximally antagonistic towards us hoping that there is a backlash, and sometimes generating one yourself, in order to trick people into thinking consuming low quality corporate produced slop is meaningful political action.

Conclusion

Now this 'Chevalier' movie actually sounds pretty solid and like it doesn't deserve the scrutiny from the right it got. But for every Chevalier that seems to be a half dozen 'Velma's. In a better world without this culture war front I don't think it would have gotten that scrutiny. But we don't live in that world.

I'd appreciate refinements on the basic generalized arguments on each side of this debate. I think there is a kernel of truth in both but they're kernels deep in the center of massive irritated swellings of culture war.

*My black cynical heart refuses to let me get through this without a foot note that the The Walt Disney Company trademark probably paid good money for me to see this reaction on reddit.

**ours being contemporary mainstream conservatives. Please don't quote me some historical racist diatribe about keeping undesirable out of the film industry that zero mainstream conservatives today would endorse.

arguing against both steelmen

I don't think representation matters for either 'empowering' or improving outcomes of minorities in an already anti-racist society. In terms of being motivated or moved by media, consider how anime, which is thoroughly culturally japanese, is loved by whites, blacks, and others worldwide.

On the other hand, 'minimizing white people' is only really bad to the extent it represents confused or malicious tendencies among those minimizing them - by the same logic above, it doesn't really do anything other than that. So directly and vocally pushing back against black representation isn't effective, and just makes you look kinda dumb like "LESS BLACKS IN VIDEO GAMEZ".

And it seems unlikely imo 'offending as a marketing technique' is a contributor to even 10% of casting lots of ethnic minorities, or 'woke themes' in shows generally - it seems like a big change for a small effect, I haven't seen any internal-to-production accounts of that (whereas I have seen some internal accounts of cartoons or tv shows being written or cast by 'crazy wokes'), and the explanation of 'people who really want diversity' is much simpler

Did you not notice how every villain for a decade was a cell of brown middle eastern terrorists?

I did notice how for approximately one decade, the demographics of terrorism were accurately portrayed (in the ballpark of 75% Muslim) on a small number of TV shows (24 and Homeland being the only notable ones) which likely gained popularity for that reason. Note that "accurate" is perhaps overstating things; from what I recall, seasons 2-5 of 24 (season 1 was pre 9/11) had about 50% Islamic terrorists. The primary terrorists on Homeland (at least in season 1) were 50% white.

Both of these shows were both heavily criticized for this.

I'll also note that even on these TV shows, the portrayal always very carefully exemplified the George W. Bush ideal that the problem was Islamic terrorism, not Islam. Frequently Islamic terrorists were merely pawns of evil Dick Cheney-ish white people (season 2 of 24 - Halliburton engineered the attacks to start a war in the middle east and sell weapons) and Muslim anti-terrorist agents were nearly always included in the cast. Characters who were unreasonably suspicious of good Muslims were frequently portrayed.

I also noticed that before and after that, most terrorist villains were explicitly made European to avoid offending people.

Your post reminds me of the archetype of a 'centrist' movie/video game critic persona found on various blogs and Youtube channels that would go on tirades against Anita Sarkeesian and the like for 'pointing out sexism' and whatever else. To the point they would be denying reality itself just to rebuke every word ever written by a feminist.

Just like the reason for the main character in a video game being a guy is sexist and the reason the women in the game are dressed to sexually provoke men is sexist, the reason for this movie existing is racist. There is no lack of fascinating men in the world. The reason this fascinating man is getting a movie is because he was black.

To borrow an argument from Anita Sarkeesian: It's not that you can't make a game about men and scantily clad women without it being sexist. It's that the reason for these things existing today as they do and the cultural context surrounding them is sexist, and it's worthwhile to recognize that and point it out for what it is. The same is true here. It's not that you can't, in theory, make a movie about a black man beating the odds in white society. It's that you can't do it today and not recognize it for what it is and most importantly why it is.

Actually, the argument makes a lot more sense for black people headlining movies than men in video games. Because most of the audience for those games is made up of men. (Statistics showing that many women play "video games" misleadingly lump all types of video games together. The types of video games that people like Sarkeesian complain about and which star men have a largely male audience.)

It would be better for students spending an entire year reading (1) Paine, (2) Declaration, (3) Articles of Confederation, (4) federalist papers, (5) anti-federalist papers, (5) constitution, (6) Jefferson and Adam’s correspondences, and (7) key early cases (eg Marbury, Gibbons). That provides a much more detailed American history background compared to…AA history.

I think this a narrow and parochial view of American history that almost no contemporary scholars would subscribe to. High politics is, of course, very important, but so is economic history and social history. A student who has a detailed knowledge of the federalist papers and related debates in the early republic, or in later periods congressional debates etc. still has a fundamentally incomplete understanding of American history if that's all they know about.

It's an elective. They will be taking this course in addition to a US History survey course, not instead.

Scarcity is a thing. Doing this means doing less of other things including an in depth review of more important American history.

My guess is a lot of the things I list are covered only in a cursory manner. Do high school students read all the federalist papers? Do they know there are anti federalist papers? Do they understand the importance of the constitution in relation to foreign bond holders?

Scarcity is indeed a thing, but no student will ever get a complete and in depth understanding of every period of American history, that's just not realistic. So there are going to have to be some somewhat arbitrary decisions on what to cover and what not to cover, elective classes just means students are choosing what they cover in depth, which is fine.

Well my point is it makes sense in scarcity to prioritize the important items.

What I'm saying is that there isn't really such thing as 'objective' importance in history. Is the high politics of the early republic more or less important than, say, the experience of small farmers or urban workers or slaves in the same period? Who is 'objectively' worth more class time, Roosevelt or Wilson? Washington or Lincoln? There are no correct answers to these questions, it's just preference really.

US constitution is indeed far more important and in the States interest to make sure citizens learn it. It’s literally why we have public schools.

And yea there are correct answers to these questions.

I don't deny that there are some things definitely important enough that all children should learn about them, in America the constitution and its creation obviously being one of them. However, there isn't a strict heirarchy of importance, even if there are some things clearly worth teaching, and in circumstances with a finite time available for learning what you cover can come down to preference more than anything else.

And yea there are correct answers to these questions.

What are they then, and how do you arrive at them. How does one decide which Presidents, for instance, deserve 'objectively' more coverage than others?

Hard disagree. But I think we will need to agree to disagree on this one

You seem to be arguing that the mandatory US History survey course should be two years, which is fine. But that leaves less room in student schedules for all AP classes, not just this one. Do you oppose offering AP Stats or AP Bio for the same reason?

I would probably reduce ELA specific classes (writing can be learned in say history) and keep AP stats and Bio.

But yes, I think we need to be more critical of curriculum in general and these more non central classes in specific. Especially given that some of what is covered in these non central classes would be covered in say American history (you will be investigating some slavery in general American history). But I think the current scheme is woefully under serving students.

My sister in law went to an allegedly good high school and a fine university. She didn’t know what the 3/5 compromise was. What we have right now isn’t working.

I would probably reduce ELA specific classes (writing can be learned in say history)

YES, YES, YES. See my comments in this thread, where someone was arguing against HS history altogether.

It would be fascinating to arrange the Federalist and Antifederalist Papers as a Reddit-style discussion tree. I’d definitely read them that way.

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