Another Seuss Cancellation Thread (Summer 2023)

[marshwiggle]

Wax says things that----as with the diversity officers who consistently harp on "white privilege"----have no point but to alienate and make people angry.  There is nothing really to accomplish by pointing out that top law school graduates are generally white unless one has a method for equalizing the disparity. 

It appears that Wax just wants to vent her bigotry.  Fine.  Let her.  And let her face the cultural backlash she generates. 

The one caveat to this is when these statements are a response to accusations of discrimination from the other side. So if other people claim that the lack of a proportional representation of students of group X in the top of the class of graduates is evidence of discrimination, then the unpleasant, but realistic answer may be that the incoming preparation, as shown by their incoming grades, of group X was below average, and their performance is consistent with students of other groups with the same incoming grades.

Even saying this as diplomatically as possible is no doubt going to rile people up. Amy Wax seems to not care much regardless.

[Wahoo Redux]

The one caveat to this is when these statements are a response to accusations of discrimination from the other side. So if other people claim that the lack of a proportional representation of students of group X in the top of the class of graduates is evidence of discrimination, then the unpleasant, but realistic answer may be that the incoming preparation, as shown by their incoming grades, of group X was below average, and their performance is consistent with students of other groups with the same incoming grades.

Even saying this as diplomatically as possible is no doubt going to rile people up. Amy Wax seems to not care much regardless.

Yeah, but I don't think Wax said anything like that.

I agree that a hard truth is a hard truth----like white privilege.  White privilege is a truth that makes a lot of irrationally angry people.  It's how you use it.

But while she has some ideas which bear listening to, I think her understanding is also so limited and idealistic that it can only make people angry.

[Wahoo Redux]

Tennessee Triples Down on Targeting 'Divisive Concepts'

Republican lawmakers in multiple states have listed and taken aim at certain theories or beliefs that they often associate with pushes for diversity, equity and inclusion.

[nebo113]

Tennessee Triples Down on Targeting 'Divisive Concepts'

Republican lawmakers in multiple states have listed and taken aim at certain theories or beliefs that they often associate with pushes for diversity, equity and inclusion.

Ah yes:  Pro white christian male

[Langue_doc]

NPR Suspends Editor Whose Essay Criticized the Broadcaster
Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, said the public radio network's liberal bias had tainted its coverage of important stories.

Uri Berliner's article in The Free Press. Toward the end of the article, Berliner writes:

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to "start talking about race." Monthly dialogues were offered for "women of color" and "men of color." Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR's internal website suggested, the groups were simply a "great way to meet like-minded colleagues" and "help new employees feel included," it would have been one thing.

But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR's union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to "keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups" and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.

In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.

Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what's notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.

And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.

[dismalist]

You can hardly expect individual institutions to harbor viewpoint diversity. Institutions, including media companies, universities, schools, and firms down to the retail establishment, develop or harbor their own cultures to reduce the cost of trying to figure out what to do. If the Times or Harvard had viewpoint diversity, you'd have knife fights all day, every day.

Viewpoint diversity can only exist through competition between institutions, not within institutions.

We have Fox as well as the Times, talk radio as well as NPR. In Economics Departments, e.g., we have the commies at the New School, the Americanized German Historical School in -- of all places -- Texas, and more mundanely in Macroeconomics, the Sweetwater flavor in Chicago and Minnesota, and the Saltwater flavor in Harvard, MIT, and the others on the coast of the Northeast.

So long as all this is possible, there is no problem.