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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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This might all be true, but it smacks of blaming cartels for smuggling drugs into the U.S. Sure, they are the ones literally bringing it over the border, but they don't do it because smuggling is an exciting challenge, or because they want to spread the Gospel of Heroine, they do it because there are a lot of American citizens who really, really like to snort coke and smoke meth. So it is with the black grifter class. If white Americans ignored them, they'd have close to zero power. But high-status white Americans are dying to hear about the latest totally real hate crime or revisionist history or whatever masochist nonsense, so the black grifters are just supplying where there's demand.

It seems to me that there is an elite black class that was raised on the Civil Rights movement that can't move on.

Even worse, there's also a PMC-elite white class who not only was born too late to get covered in the glory of the Civil Rights movement, but who also was born with the original sin of Whiteness for which there is no final atonement or forgiveness. And unlike the black elite, this is the class that controls our institutions.

Right, as soon as the black mascots they hire start saying the wrong things, they're immediately oatracized. Their blackness is worth nothing unless they are telling white liberals what white liberals want to hear. Their power is largely illusory and dependent on the supremacy of liberal whites.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim? Can you name me some examples of black DEI hires/commissars who “started saying the wrong things” and were ostracized for doing so? What is it that “white liberals want to hear” against which specific progressive black activists have transgressed? And what were the penalties for doing so?

This case comes to mind:

Compact Magazine: A Black DEI Director Canceled by DEI

This month, I was fired from my position as faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, Calif.—a position I had held for two years. This wasn’t an unexpected development. From the beginning, my colleagues and supervisors had made clear their opposition to the approach I brought to the job. Although I was able to advance some positive initiatives, I did so in the face of constant obstruction.

What made me persona non grata? On paper, I was a good fit for the job. I am a black woman with decades of experience teaching in public schools and leading workshops on diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism. At the Los Angeles Unified School District, I established a network to help minority teachers attain National Board Certification. I designed and facilitated numerous teacher trainings and developed a civic-education program that garnered accolades from the LAUSD Board of Education.

My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled. This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions. When I interviewed for the job in August 2021, there was no indication that I would be required to adhere to this particular vision of social justice. On the contrary, I was informed during the interview process that the office I would be working in had been alienating some faculty with a “too-woke” approach that involved “calling people out.” (After I was hired, this sentiment was echoed by many faculty, staff, and administrators I spoke to.) I told the hiring committee that I valued open dialogue and viewpoint diversity. Given their decision to hire me, I imagined I would find broad support for the vision I had promised to bring to my new role. I was wrong.

Of course, most of the time people who disagree with core SJW tenets don't get hired for DEI positions in the first place. This case is unusual not in that they demanded ideological homogeneity, but in that they didn't demand it as part of the original hiring process. Plenty of academic institutions now require diversity statements from prospective hires for any position, let alone positions related to DEI, statements evaluated in a way that would probably exclude someone like her if she was open about her beliefs.