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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27621 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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NPR very clearly has a mission of political advocacy. The angle on literally every single story is “how does it affect people of color/women/minorities”. Frequently, resulting in bizarre, inappropriate, or completely uninformative segments.

This is the segment when I turned off marketplace for good - which advocates for “prioritizing black women” via the “black women best” framework. In the whole segment, no policy position or course of action is actually advanced - at all. Very little evidence is offered to suggest that prioritizing black women will actually benefit everyone (trickle up) or that any interventions would be cost effective. The guest even goes as far as to suggest nothing at all will work:

The system of, like, systemic racism and just embedded discrimination in our economy is, it is multifacited, it is, like, self-reinforcing. I imagine that if somehow we could break it down it would, like, re-create itself. It’s so many things at once.

…with the only proscription being:

Jones: It really does have to be a true conversation about power. I think it’s a lot of people who are holding positions of power really just like being willing to share that, being willing to share that.

The segment is so off putting that I come away taking the position opposite than it advanced even though I agree it’s not great that black women have a higher unemployment rate.

https://www.marketplace.org/2020/09/01/why-centering-black-women-in-the-economy-could-benefit-everyone/

Planet Money is still (mostly) worth listening to, or at least they confine the woke talking points to the episodes that telegraph it in the title so you can skip them right from the start.

My turning point was in 2017 when they had a guest on that was advocating that parents put their privileged kids in the worst schools possible to help out the poor black kids. She was supposedly doing that herself, I wonder how it worked out? I think I even found the story. It was a "driveway moment" for me just because I was amazed at what this woman was saying out loud. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/509325266

Its easy to put your kid in a terrible school, its difficult to keep them there if you have the choice. Mommy forums back in 2020 were filled with anxieties about Covid affecting school choices and whether their precious darlings were going to be stuck in 'bad' schools. Liberal truisms about 'all kids are equal' tend to wither in the face of discipline realities in 'urban' schools.

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