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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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I thought people were reacting to the woke reverse discrimination policies and systemic racism discourse that are driven by the argument that because "blank slatism" is obviously true, we need to be obsessively following societal outcomes by race and interpret any disparity as necessary proof of racism. Charles Murray says this is the reason he wrote Facing Reality, the guy Hanania is chiding claims that the woke "equality thesis" leading to unending recriminations about white racism as long as outcome disparity remains is why he's writing his stuff.

Most people seem like they would be happy to go back to a 1990s style color blindness detente, assuming it was applied evenly. You don't talk about race and intelligence publicly and you don't do racial grievance identity politics. What we got instead is that people took "there are no racial differences in intelligence" as the implicit uncontroversial truth, and drew up the whole intellectual edifice of systemic racism from that. What this has already cashed out in practice has been a complete travesty of "evaluating people on the basis of individual ability/merit", and this shows no sign of stopping. People just go "what can you do, we must keep fighting against systemic racism until it goes away".