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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.

It is kind of hilarious how badly this statement would come off if you substituted prettymuch any other ethnicity or word for Black.

Really? I'm pretty sure you can do swap in "Jewish" or "Muslim" and the only thing that might be dicey would be "Afrocentric". Possibly true for Latino as well. Definitely acceptable for "Native American" or "First Nations" or "indigenous people". Possibly feasible for various Asian ethnicities.

Come to think of it, I think you'd only get in trouble for saying that you're from a white neighborhood, focus on eliminating anti-white racism, sent your kids to a Eurocentric school, and participate in organizations that further the goals of white Americans.

"Muslim" is a religious group, not an ethnicity. People often use "Jewish" and "Ashkenazi" interchangably, but strictly speaking the former is a religion strongly associated with a collection of distinct ethnic groups (Ashkenazi, Sephardic etc.) rather than an ethnicity in its own right.

What he fails to recognise is that 'Keisha' is a smart cookie who knows how the grift is operated and is grabbing all the attention and importance that she can. She's only a graduate herself, so if she wants to climb the slippery pole of academic promotion, she has to do exactly this kind of thing: shove the old guard out of the way and position herself as the face of anti-Blackness on campus. If it's a choice between our professor and the Keishas, the college administration will side with the Keishas because they can't afford the bad publicity that the Keishas know how to engender, exactly what kind of online mobs to whip up:

A recent graduate of an Ivy League university, mentored by a television-celebrity black intellectual, Keisha introduced herself as a black woman who grew up poor and “housing vulnerable,” whose grandmother’s limbs had been broken by white supremacists, and who had just spent four years of college teaching in prisons and advocating for prison abolition.

She's clearly ambitious, knows how to position herself, is making the right kind of networking connections (the TV celebrity) and our professor here has no clue what is going on.

Keisha's not a smart cookie, at least long term, because she'll get the same treatment only worse and faster. She'll have ten years of running the show, possibly less, and then lose control when she is ousted by a more nominally oppressed group, probably queer black transgenders, or a more radical counter-oppressive group who accept her premise that "the harm is urgent" and "can't be fixed" with civil discussion and so turn towards fedposting IRL.

She sees the grift but ignores the consequences of its iterations: a Cornell Autonomous Zone. And if by some miracle such a zone succeeded in establishing its sovereignty they would be faced with the perennial problems that face all territories of how to a) govern and b) relate to neighbouring territories. Of course there's more than two thousand years of existing scholarship on those matters, and institutions that exist to both study and apply their lessons, but that baby washes in the bathwater of inequity.

Keisha's not a smart cookie, at least long term, because she'll get the same treatment only worse and faster.

Oh I'm sure she knows that, which is why she's putting in the groundwork now to take over running these kind of white liberal guilt workshops, eventually build up enough of a 'name' for herself that she can pivot into the world of TV intellectual (like her mentor in the story, that the professor is hilariously sniffy about), and be gone from academia by the time the leopards come for her face.

Next year it won't be Professor Lloyd invited to host a seminar for Telluride; Keisha has won that round. And why was it important to win? He explains it himself in the piece:

The Telluride Association maintains a low profile, even in higher-education circles, but it has played an important role in shaping the US elite. Its alumni are ideologically diverse: queer theorist Eve Sedgewick and postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak (its first female member), Georgia politician Stacey Abrams and journalist Walter Isaacson, neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Francis Fukuyama (who served on Telluride’s board). Launched by mining entrepreneur L.L. Nunn in 1911, a few years before he founded Deep Springs College, Telluride aims to cultivate democratic communities among high-school and college students. It runs houses near Cornell and the University of Michigan, where students receive scholarships, govern themselves, and incorporate intellectual life and service work into their residential communities. In 1954, Telluride started its high-school summer program.

And the deep pockets are not immune to giving in on the grounds of white liberal guilt:

In the wake of the George Floyd protests, a group of black Telluride alumni pressured the association to examine the racism that, they claimed, was baked into the organizational culture. “We have all experienced anti-blackness within the association and through its programs,” their open letter said. The result was a redesign of the summer seminars: Telluride would now offer only “Critical Black Studies” and “Anti-Oppressive Studies” seminars. The former would “seek to focus more specifically on the needs and interests of black students.”

So now that Keisha has got her foot in the door and claimed her first trophy with Professor Lloyd's head mounted on her wall of anti-black violence, she can settle down to that prime opportunity of networking and getting prestigious names on her CV to build her career in the professional grievance studies grift. Lloyd can write all he likes about his past credits, but Keisha is the new generation elbowing him out of the way.

I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition.

That just made him a good target for Keisha to displace and take over from him.

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