Racism - systemic, personal, or otherwise, is wrong.
Firing someone for something they did not do, is wrong.
The current sociocultural phenomenon of identity politics and its attendant empowerment of marginalized discourses is, as Foucault would be the first to point out, an ideology meant to advance the urge to power of those who adhere to, and advance, said ideology.
It is the unfortunate nature of any ideology, that its adherents tend to become convinced that they, and only they, are in possession of 'The Truth'. As such, any and all who argue in favor of ideas which run counter to the ideology, are reflexively branded as wrong, or somehow evil, seen as a threat to the ideology's proponents veiled urge to power, and dispatched with accordingly - cancelled, deplatformed, fired, shadow-banned, what have you. Tolerance of difference of opinion has disappeared from the national conversation. Freedom of speech has followed it down that memory hole.
There is no effort to debate the issues as part of a rational discourse. Nietzchean/Foucaultian will to power is not about being rational. It is a romantic notion of the primacy of the will - voluntarism, not reason. Power is its own reason, as it were, and, as in the rough and tumble of Statecraft, might, as we know, makes right.
Hopefully the day will come when reasoned debate, as opposed to partisan speech, will resume in this country. However, observing events as they have been unfolding on our campuses, in our media, in our politics, in our social media feeds, that day seems, sadly, yet a rather long way off.
"Do I think Sellers should have been fired? Well, all I can say is that in our current climate I don’t see how she could teach effectively"
Unfortunately the hypersensitivity has turned into hysteria and I'm afraid you might be right. I am concerned for the time when the courts will start to call a reaction like this "reasonable".
I agree there is hypersensitivity in our current climate. However, after realizing that that her own students were listening as she was speaking about them -- hmm.....I question her professional judgment. First, she should have a business practice of confirming her conversation is private. Second, she seemed to be speaking to a colleague so casually about her students. Even if her observations were not racist (we don't know enough about her teaching practices to know if she is prejudiced in her teaching or grading -- it may be that she gives even more effort to her lower performing students than her high performing students, including her Black students and perhaps even favor her Black students in effort expenditure), she really should not have spoken in this manner, especially on Zoom. If she is concerned about admissions policies, she must go through proper channels -- do her comments belong in the category of gossip? What was the reason for expressing these observations (no matter whether they were subjective or objective)? Its just odd. I read her apology and it was scripted with the same contents as all the recent apologies for "harm." These apologies are creepy. They all are the same.
Even if her observations were correct, students should not have to hear that their professors think they are likely to perform badly. She was reporting on past experience -- and there seemed to be an implicit anticipation of a supposed trend (You will likely be low performing because you are Black). There is fodder here for an argument that affirmative action policies cause an anticipation of continued low performance and thus create "implicit bias." Not arguing one way or another here. The point is: no matter what you believe about affirmative action, or freedom of speech, there was a public embarrassment of Black students who were admitted to Georgetown. Once admitted to the school, don't students have a right to full confidence? The public aspect of the incident was accidental. Sharing her private thoughts with her colleague seemed like a bit of therapy session, and now her students are privy to her sufferings ("angst") as well as the general public.
Some students will perform at the bottom. That's the way bell curve works. If the majority are Black, so be it. In another day, the majority of low performers would have been white.
Black students are entitled to be anywhere on the bell curve. I think these students already know where they are on the curve and most are there to give it their best efforts. This does not mean they will succeed.
Thing is, Sellers may have been cheering for her Black students all these years and just wants them to excel and wants to feel successful as a professor. If she likes to teach, odds are she really wants everyone to succeed, if we give the benefit of the doubt. We just don't know her actual thoughts (due to the mandated creepy woke apology). It also may be she was lamenting Georgetown's recruiting efforts. Maybe she thinks the higher performing Black students are choosing other schools. Maybe her "angst" emanates from being judged as a teacher by the performance of Affirmative Action students.
As for hysteria, I think her observations are not cause for hysteria. Nobody died. And, these are law students. I hope they are tough enough to survive this! The courtroom of public opinion and crude speech. Revealing her students' performance in the public sphere is what is cause for hysteria. Haven't we had enough invasion of privacy? Hopefully, these students will use this incident as a springboard to press on. It seems that all sorts of accommodations are being made for the students in her class as all her assessments in that class and previous classes have been deemed suspect. I wonder if Sellers should just be very honest about what she thinks rather than say the creepy pre-written woke-style apology. Her harmed students may benefit more from an authentic response.
First and foremost, I'm left wondering why it is so difficult for anyone (of any color) to address underperformance of students (of any color) for the purpose of coming to understand just what it is that stands in the way of any student (of any color) and a successful completion of an education.
The more I contemplate this the more I'm convinced that there is indeed, a beast to feed, and it is the nature of that beast (that appears to be growing an ever increasing appetite) that requires understanding. Well, we know at least what the beast feeds on: academics flattened like pancakes by being thrown under the proverbial bus. Please don't pass the Aunt Jemima. But genuine maple syrup would be nice.
This brings to mind the imagery of an Aztec priest (or some sort of holy man) flinging his victim (someone poor, marginal, arrested, perhaps enslaved) off of a rather high pyramid, for said purposes of placation of some god or other, for good harvests, health, and success in war, among other things. The priest has a very clear idea of what he is about, and the wherefore and the why.
The victim is just a hapless measure of circumstance. Could have been anyone (of that ilk.)
I suspect there is an incredibly thin skin about, that itches and chafes without scratch or salve, ointment or any other kind of relief except one: sniping at and otherwise picking off sacrifices. I cannot blame the skin at all (suffering from my own species of itchies) but yet still - this has gone far beyond parlor sport, or any soft sort of gamble gaming. Because anyone anywhere at any time can be at risk. As if none but a sooner or later eventually shows up. As if that were inevitable.
C'mon John. You're not sure it's fair that she was fired? I'm pretty sure you're VERY sure it's not fair. I'm kind of surprised you won't say that. And I'm pretty sure Glenn is too. And you've got to love the previous comment from TK who criticizes the professor for not just doing her job but doing "nothing to remedy the situation". Maybe It was a mistake that she cared about the issue at all. I'll bet she feels that way now.
Professor Sellers should not be fired for being racist, but for incompetence. She has identified an issue with her teaching and does nothing to remedy the situation. She feels angst, but no motivation to do something about it. This is typical of professors today who know the answer to the question they are asking and give A's to those who have decoded what they want. If there is a problem, the professor believes it is with the student.
If she looked into the issue, she might find there are some simple answers. One is her teaching is the cause. Another answer is that you always have students in law school who will obsessively work to get good grades. But you also have those students who realize all this extra work does nothing for you. Law School does not teach you how to pass the bar. This is why people spend so much money for bar review courses - after paying so much money for law school. Sellers teaches mediation. Why work hard to get an A in a class that has no practical application to anything you plan to do.
High achieving white kids will always work hard to get A's, but as a friend said (who is dean of engineering at a top ten engineering school) "A" students work for "B" students. Kids from all races are at the bottom of Sellers class because they figured out that all that extra time and effort does not pay off. What do you get if graduate at the bottom of your class at Georgetown Law? A JD. Pass the bar and you are a lawyer. Get a job and your GPA means nothing.
A number of these comments are plainy wrong. Just a couple examples:
"Law School does not teach you how to pass the bar. This is why people spend so much money for bar review courses - after paying so much money for law school."
-There's a study that examined this exact question and you're wrong.
"What do you get if graduate at the bottom of your class at Georgetown Law? A JD. Pass the bar and you are a lawyer. Get a job and your GPA means nothing."
-The implication that one's class rank has little to no relation with one's likelihood of passing the bar is false and refuted by data. As is the implication that law school grades have some near orthogonal relationship to one's prospects on the job market.
I'm sorry but this is completely wrong. Law is one area where grades are EXTREMELY important. Every new law graduate has zero experience practicing law (since it is illegal to practice law before you graduate and gain admission to the bar), and therefore hiring is based primarily on grades. Sure, if you graduate from an Ivy League/Top Ten law school, you will probably be able to get a job even with poor grades, but virtually all desired jobs are grades based: clerkships, law firms, government jobs. Most firms have a set criteria where they only interview people with grades above a certain threshold, i.e. in the top 10% or top quarter or top half of the class. Law schools are still producing more graduates than the industry needs to absorb each year, so the herd is culled by sorting based on grades.
And unlike in engineering or MBA programs, the point of a JD is to become a lawyer. Not to become an entrepreneur or start a business where the "A" nerds work for the gutsy B students. You can't even legally have ownership in a law firm unless you're a practicing lawyer. I have sat on law firm hiring committees for over a decade and interviewed countless law students and grades are *absolutely crucial*. This is also made apparent to law students, so it isn't as if it's a secret. You may think this is a dumb way to hire, but that's how it works. Lawyers are fundamentally all nerds and they've created a system for nerds. There aren't even any set criteria or programs you need to get into law school in the first place, other than high grades in any undergraduate major and a high LSAT score.
Also, virtually every law school assigns grades on a curve and issues class rank for resumes. Grades are issued with a screened system where the professor does not know what student they are grading -- you are given an ID number for each exam and paper you submit, which no one but you and administration know, and is associated with your name only AFTER the professor has assigned the grade to the ID number. In this way, grading is done "blind" and without professor bias. When I read the fired professor's quote, I assumed she was expressing her dismay at finding out each semester, after submitting her grades and finding out which students were assigned which grades, that her black students had disproportionately clustered towards the bottom of the curve. However, it appears that the class she taught did have 25% of the course grade assigned based on class participation -- this is unusual since most law school courses are graded entirely based on exams. If she gave one-quarter of the grade for participation, then that quarter clearly was not "blind" and therefore could have been subject to her bias.
By the way, performance on the bar exam is extremely correlated with law school grades, which is not surprising since law school grades are almost entirely based on exam performance and the bar exam measures the same thing, i.e. test-taking skills. I have never heard of students who receive high grades in law school failing the bar exam unless they had some kind of life issue where they just blew off the test. Generally it is the students clustered on the low end of the curve who have trouble with the bar exam and end up having to take it multiple times or never pass at all.
I agree that those students interested in the most desired jobs need to have high grades. But not everyone wants those jobs or can get them. If you have not attended a T14 or T1 law school, your options are limited. If you have a low GPA your options are limited unless you can qualify as a diversity hire. My point was that by the end of 1L year you probably know whether you can make the top 25% (or the top 50%) and adjust your plans accordingly.
I do know people who are making a lot of money despite attending an unranked law school and getting low grades. You are not practicing the type of law most lawyers want to practice - think family, evictions, DUIs - but you can still charge $350 and hour and if your associates get their 2000 hours you are doing well.
They had blind scoring at my crappy law school. Your final was your grade. I don't understand this "participation grade". They had it at my daughter's law school - she went to a T1 school, but I don't think the professors used it much. Or maybe they didn't for her. We had cold-calling every class - which I guess is becoming a thing of the past - so everyone participated.
I think that you bring up an excellent point about the bar exam. I think that getting a JD with a low GPA from Georgetown is worth more than a graduating from lower ranked law school with a higher GPA. But this presupposes that you have passed the bar. Georgetown has a high bar pass rate but you are doing a great disservice to people if they graduate from your law school and cannot pass the bar.
Absolutely, it is a huge disservice to admit students and get them into debt for what will be a worthless degree if they won't be able to pass the bar exam (and I'm guessing LSAT score is probably highly correlated with bar passage results). There was a student in my class who was always ranked in the bottom for grades, and he tried three times to pass the bar exam before he committed suicide, in despair at his debt and humiliated. Someone should've taken him aside after the first semester of his 1L year and counseled him whether continuing for another three years was the right path for him.
Poor performance couldn’t possibly result from bending the standards to admit unprepared students, could it? We can’t admit affirmative action is no panacea, now could we?
Pressure to force positive results out of an imposed disaster may account for Prof Sellers “angst.” Maybe she should have just gotten with the program and handed out better grades. Who would know? What’s the harm?
Serious question. I believe that I heard John/Glenn say that “Black” is the appropriate term. I hesitate every time I need to decide among Black or African American. Honestly, African American seems forced and labored. I’m sure people think I’m silly when I use it at a sports or casual event. 7 syllables vs 1! But now JM is saying it’s graceless to say “Black” under certain conditions. Ugh, what?
No, he said it’s graceless to refer to the Black population as “Blacks.” It sounds bad if you say, “Blacks believe X” or “The Blacks...” You can definitely say, “Black people” or describe someone as “Black.” In fact, I think most Black / African American people prefer that now. It has many positive associations like Black Lives Matter, Black is Beautiful, Black Power, etc.
Well, except for the fact that "black" is reductive and inaccurate. "Black" is an absolute. Americans-of-African-Ancestry (MORE awkward! Yay!) are not a monochromatic, pigment-undifferentiated mass.
I've often wondered if "black" wasn't chosen for that very reason, as it serves the political and aspirational agenda of some to *treat them* as if they were, politically, an undifferentiated mass as opposed to a set of individuals tied together by certain phenotypical traits.
Something confounding about "woke as religion" is that the arguments deployed differ so much from typical liberal political arguments. I've found adapting some of Jonathan Haidt's moral pillars helpful; typically liberal arguments focus on the care/harm principle and ideas of fairness/cheating (e.g. healthcare, immigration, taxes, welfare).
It seems many of the arguments following these racial dust ups may facially address these two moral pillars but the better way to think about them is in terms of sanctity and loyalty. First, Sellers pointed out a fact which caused revulsion among the elect. This is NOT a rational response. Imagine you began a conversation with a Catholic friend with "you know, that generic wafer you take at communion cannot possibly be transubstantiated into the body of Christ." Now, what you are saying may be factual, but my guess is the listener will react with instinctive revulsion as you've just insulted her traditions and community. Certain arguments and "the word" produce revulsion first, rationalizing for the revulsion second.
Second, many religions enforce standards (or perhaps dogmas) with appeals to group loyalty. Who is at the moral nadir of many religions? The worst punishments are typically not for infidels (i.e. Prof McWhorter), but for apostates. The worst for the traitor in our midst. I am sure Sellers said all the right things about BLM and George Floyd over the past year. By treating Sellers words with maximum punishment, the apostate serves as a warning to others who might deviate.
What we are seeing is the inversion of thirty year old arguments about prayer in school and before city committee meetings and other political gatherings. Christianity contains much moral good, so how can spreading its reach be wrong? When the left argued for traditional liberalism, the right often reacted with offense, feeling the sacred was diminished. The religion of diversity may have significant moral goods, but it has simply moved beyond the political realm of "making sense."
The culture demands silence or woke dogma. Think about that and the implications. A person can be canceled without even a cursory discussion of the issue. The issue persists, and person who may have been a truly effective teacher is gone.
I shared this with a friend who made a good comment that had me going into all kinds of scenaria. His comment was: "What is the thing that gives her angst?" She teaches the class, some students do well, some poorly as expected, what is the angst about? Does she feel bad that a lot of the students doing badly are of a particular race? Why? Or is she feeling pressured by the department to somehow "help" their grades so that they graduate? Is it a mixture of both, i.e. she's woke herself and doesn't like what she's seeing / tries to "help" but she knows it's not fair and in a moment of frustration, the truth slips out of her lips and bang, she's getting punished for it?
I'm pretty certain Sellers was expressing frustration at the depressing persistence of a racial achievement gap — and at the multifarious, nebulous reasons for it. That is not racism in my book; I have frequently felt the same way. I agree her expression of that frustration was graceless, but who among us hasn't sounded graceless in private?
The clue is in what she's saying: "‘Oh, come on.’ You know. Get some really good ones..."
She's complaining that the admissions officers get black students who are not performing. The admission officers, however, are just tools. They do what the university administrators have ordered them to do, which is to perform affirmative action.
As Tom Sowell so clearly described, affirmative action is a policy that hurts black students. He, too, noticed that black students were over-represented at the bottom of the class as a result of affirmative action. As he pointed out, these students would have done wonderfully in lesser colleges. Instead, many bright black students drop out or come out with a crashed ego which is no good, while they would have flourished in a school better matched to their abilities.
OR, the black students who might have done well at a lower-level institution find solace in a "black studies" or CRT class, where their failures are excused.
What we are seeing is poor implementation of affirmative action.
Get more black kids in college? Great.
Remedial instruction to compensate for poor schools? Fine.
More in-class help as necessary? Good.
Instead, what we are seeing is that these admissions are done for the benefit, and to signal the virtue of, the Administrators. And it results in black kids who may have overcome difficult home circumstances, poor schools and peer-group ridicule and bullying...being put into schools where they are unlikely to succeed. No wonder they are often angry or resentful, though it would take yet another act of near-heroism for them to accurately analyze and direct that anger.
All the wholly admirable effort by these black kids, to attain that level of achievement...wasted to satisfy some woke white liberal's desire to *be seen* to be properly enlightened. Not a fair trade.
My hunch grows ever stronger that these 'High Priests' do not now, nor possibly have ever really cared about these kids. And you know - it is not such a very difficult thing to do, to actually care about them. The problem is in itself, no doubt caring about something else, more.
Just to be sure readers understand law school grades: For most courses, grading is anonymous, that is, students are assigned an exam number, so that the professor reading the exam does not know whose exam they are reading and grading (much less the student's "race"). At many law schools, grades are then ranked on a curve. There are some courses where law professors are aware of the identity of the students they are grading, for example, oral advocacy. Without knowing more about the courses Professor Sellers was teaching, I understood her to be lamenting that many Black students were not doing well in courses where grading is blind.
I watched the video. I don't think there was anything racist about what Sellers or her colleague Baston said. In fact, I find their conversation to be the logical consequence of our currently obsessively racialized society. I grew up in the South Bronx in the 90's and am now in my late 30's and I have never had to deal with racism, being black, what my blackness means to me and to society at large, and issues like systemic racism and unconscious bias in my entire life combined as I have in the past year or two. My husband (who is also black) works in the corporate HQ of a large company and in the past 5 months, he has had to do multiple diversity, inclusion, and equity seminars, complete surveys, have team meetings to discuss "race," and unconscious bias trainings. I would wager that Sellers has had to do much the same and now finds herself in the unenviable position of having to confront the very real problem at Georgetown and colleges and universities all across the country, of the disproportionately poor performance of black students. Her use of the word angst to describe her feelings on the matter has been completely ignored, as well as the truth of what she is saying. Sellers and Baston seemed genuinely concerned and uncertain as to the cause of this phenomenon. If we don't want to actually identify and address problems and try to find solutions, then all this focus on race and racism is just kabuki theater. The demand for racism and racists to blame for all societies ills massively exceeds the supply, and now almost anyone can be accused of being racist for almost any reason and have their lives and careers destroyed. And it accomplishes nothing except to make some people feel morally righteous, but does not alter reality or change facts.
The more I contemplate all that moral righteousness, the more I can imagine that a growing number of people love the power they have to cancel out people (such as Sellers) far more than they love the students on whose behalf they work up such an instant outrage. The reality and the unchanged hard facts in the lives of these kids is untouched as always.
The true definition of racism is the belief that ALL black humans are inferior to ALL white humans (or apply any other colors in whatever order.) Today this is obviously false, but was accepted scientific thinking for centuries right up to the end of WW II. Now, as you point out, racism has been redefined to mean anything that might offend a black person. What ought to be labeled "racial prejudice" or "racial insensitivity" is instead called racism. Since conservatives have abandoned the linguistic playing field, we're probably never going to force a return to the real meaning of the word, unfortunately. Instead of asking for a more logically rigorous examination of an event such as this we need to look for a different motivation. If your goal is to destroy America as we know it because the whole of American society is a cesspool of racism, imperialism, greed, and oppression, and replace it with a socialist utopia -- well, then this is just one small incident that helps put the wrecking crew in charge. When they can get the Dean of a major law school to fire a professor for almost any reason, they are growing their control over American institutions. That's the real problem, and long discussions of black performance at law school are really beside the point.
I think John makes a lot of good points about “The Elect” as he calls them and I also agree that certain aspects of trying to enshrine white guilt and promote cancel culture are problematic and should be criticized, as he is doing. So, I applaud him for being up those points. Where I think John is dangerously not seeing the forest for the trees gets back to his previous post and his presumed dispute with “excuse E of the Elect”: “The real problem is the right-wing, racist zealots who stormed the Capitol Building calling for the blood of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi.” John goes on to belittle the Jan. 6 event as a bunch of incompetent Keystone Cops boobs who couldn’t even get an insurrection right, so why worry about them? All fears of a right-wing takeover of the government are overblown? I wish we had the luxury of cancel culture being the most important issue of the day as the right wing would have us all believe. Insurrectionists came close to getting their hands on actual members of Congress which certainly would have led to injuries and possibly deaths. Would that have been enough to change John’s mind that the right wing problem is a much worse problem in this country? What will it take? Armed insurrectionists stormed the Michigan capitol last year, armed to the teeth to try to intimidate the Democrat administration into giving them what they wanted. Still overblown? Militia members were planning to kidnap the Michigan governor to force her to convert her by threat of violence to their misguided and ruinous beliefs. I don’t see this kind of tendency to violence on the left, no matter how many canards we hear about “antifa” from GOP politicians. How about the hundreds of bills being passed through Republican-controlled state legislatures right now that are trying to restrict voting rights back to the days of Jim Crow? John claims that the Elect problem is worse because they are actually affecting our institutions like universities and some workplaces. But I would take mandatory diversity training any day over conservative restrictions over the voting process. When a GOP minority has locked in political power at the federal and many state levels for a generation, are you going to console yourself that “at least I raised awareness about some university professors who were unfairly penalized”. That’s a worthy cause and should be discussed and criticized where merited, but to put concerns like that ahead of the attempted right-wing takeover of our political institutions seems foolish. And it seems like exactly the kind of thing that the right-wing is hoping we will all be focused on, while they try to steal our country away from the rest of us.
"John claims that the Elect problem is worse because they are actually affecting our institutions like universities and some workplaces. But I would take mandatory diversity training any day over conservative restrictions over the voting process."
I would suggest that it is not an either or situation. You can work to resist voter suppression and the efforts of the Elect at the same time.
Ask yourself what you will do when your child comes home from school and informs you that her lesson today was that her parents are racist.
Will you comply or resist? Will you dare to resist? What will your resistance cost you?
I agree, it is not an either or situation. We can fight against both a political right-wing takeover of this country as well as criticize an overly harsh mindset among many liberals that can’t bear to hear opinions they don’t agree with. If my child comes home from school in that situation, you bet I’ll resist. I just hope while I’m busy worrying about that eventuality, a right-wing extremist party, who mishandled the pandemic resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and attempted to overthrow a legitimate American election, won’t have taken the opportunity to steal the country while I was distracted about Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head.
TDS distracts from reality. You can disagree with conservatives and dislike Trump’s tweets but please disconnect from the craziness and deal honestly with the difficult issues. There may be people to fear, Trump and Republican voters are not them. People fixated on Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potatohead might be more worrisome.
You provide a slanted, hysterical and extremely exaggerated version of each of the events you describe. I have seen no credible evidence that any Congressperson was at risk of "capture". The threat to the governor of Michigan was internet posts, and your statement "Armed insurrectionists stormed the Michigan capitol last year" describes a peaceful protest against lockdowns that resulted in neither violence nor arrests. You dismiss Antifa violence for which we have video records by the thousands (not shown on network news) as "canards", and invoke Jim Crow at the slightest attempt to ensure accurate voter registration lists.
You appear to have no interest in the truth at all. You're either a liar or auditioning for a CNN news job. Simply put, you are part of the problem, as is the fantastic "nation full of white supremacists" you project.
If such diversity training, as a living and morphing emblem of ultra-wokeness, harms Black people, in that it weakens them as individuals, and consequently as an organizing force or "system," and if what we care about in this conversation is the economic, emotional, societal (cultural?) health of Black people, then yes, the mindset that enforces such diversity trainings (a la White Fragility) can be construed as a worse problem than the ultra-right. No one in the US is in support of what happened at the Capitol or Charlottesville. Our country is, except for the strange (albeit dangerous) few, mobilized against these actual white supremacists. Our government is investigating and jailing people. These supremacists are on notice and will be squashed. We will play whack-a-mole with rooting out such extremists, but that is the way it is with extremists. Black people as a whole will not suffer because of the Capitol insurrection -- the country is aghast. The enemy is now visible. This unified reaction to such an upheaval cannot be compared to the nonreaction to the ultra-woke (amounting to acceptance) -- we are all running around trying to figure out how to comply, and be good. As a result of this White Fragility campaign, we are asking ourselves what we have said wrong today, what we have thought wrong today -- which isn't an inherently terrible activity if losing one's job or being shunned weren't possible punishments. Those people at the Capitol, as dangerous as they were/are, WERE nincompoops -- the lowest rung on our society. Shame on us for thinking our country was too smart, modern, and civil for such people to exist. And it will be shame on us if we don't heed the lessons of The Crucible. Two years ago, I would not have said any of this. Is firing people the new diversity training? Is shunning colleagues who ask hard questions acceptable? Is running people out of their long-held jobs a good thing for society? Good for Black people? Is a human who is capable of a faux pas equivalent to a white supremacist?
You make some good points about the use of white fragility/false victimhood/promotion of cancel culture as an answer to opinions we disagree with. Totally with you there. My response was to the downplaying by McWhorter of the threat from the right wing to political freedom in this country. It appears you may agree with this to some extent. But although cancel culture run amok is a real problem and needs to be dealt with, it is not the same as attempts at a political coup by the reactionary conservative element in our country. Yes, the insurrectionists were disorganized, ignorant, and possessing of a vague acquaintance with the facts. But they were spurred on by a president and a political party that genuinely tried to overthrow a legitimate election for the purposes of retaining political power. These people who misled the insurrectionists with their lies and distortion are not nincompoops and the threat they pose beats cancel culture any day. It was only because a few Republican election officials and judges (and all of the Democrats) stood up to these efforts that this attempt was foiled. This has not happened in the modern history of this country. These same partisans are attempting to pass numerous election restriction laws in numerous states that will try to suppress voting amongst those voters who Republicans don’t like. If successful, these efforts could lock in minority rule for a generation in numerous state houses and possibly the federal government as well. This was the same political party that treated a once-in-a-century pandemic as another political game, actively campaigned against the advice of public health officials, and their mismanagement and incompetence resulted in multiple 100,000’s more deaths than the U.S. should have had. The idea of these forces gaining more power, as they are attempting to do right now, and will use any legal and illegal means at their disposal, scares me way more than being asked to be nicer to minorities at work. Now can and should both problems be addressed at the same time? Absolutely. But one is not in the ballpark of the other.
Those multiple hundreds of thousands of extra deaths beyond (whatever standard of measurement...)
Be careful what you wish for and the numbers used for illustration of the point.
No doubt within one, or two or three years from now there will be well-researched accounts in great detail telling us something far closer to the true story than we now know. I'm used to this. I've worked in a top grade academic science and medicine library for the past 22 years. Things show up on the bookshelves sooner or later.
And it was exactly a century ago, that a pandemic far, far worse than anything we've seen regarding this one, was finally subsiding and waning away.
Too true - that threats to freedom can come from either side of the political aisle. Rudimentary domestic history tells us all we need to know about that. Therefor real threat to freedom is ultimately a non-partisan affair, and very much an affair of identity worship. Otherwise known as "my side speaks and your side shuts up."
These issues will ultimately wind up on everybody's plate. It remains to be seen whether the wind blows divisive, or cooperative.
And are these insurrectionists and their faux leaders the same people that we should all train to be “nicer to Black people”? Or is it you and I who should be “nicer”? What Sellers has discovered is what goes on in the public school system. Teachers are regularly required to pass students who have not earned grades, for various political reasons and community pressure to graduate students. This is an abuse of students. Abuse. All students deserve to treated kindly and to be developed to their fullest. It is. It the professors responsibility to do remedial work. There is a point I time when you’ve missed the boat. Children need to be developed in elementary, middle, and high school, and somewhat in undergrad. Law school is brutal. It’s supposed to be. No law professor should be doing remedial tutoring or coddling students. Let Georgetown have their graduates create core curriculum for public schools. So that the professors don’t have to be worried about learning to be “nice” instead of having angst when it’s too late. So all law students can be strong enough to keep nincompoops out of office.
The professor states the obvious, which today is actually a triumph of intellectual honesty. This is why he is so excellent. I am not sure what systemic racism is TODAY, but it includes affirmative action. To deny our history is not crammed with systemic racism is of course ridiculous. And it’s impact is obviously present today. But we need to look forward. If most white kids can only get in New York Law, for example, it hardly seems like racism to match all students with schools that match their capabilities.
White guilt, affirmative action, keep the clash going. Yes, as a group that one is part of cannot get into Harvard without affirmative action has to grate. But as individuals who graduate from a state law school, no one will question their abilities relative to their classmates. It seems easy. But if it were it would have been done already. There is an element of reparations in affirmative action thinking. As Milton Friedman said a few times, if we must use government more than is optimal, the least damaging way is to just pay citizens money.
Personally, I think the brilliant Professor still misses a big point. Who cares what white people think? Who cares about Harvard. Who cares about what caused us to be where we are today? All we can do is move forward. Screw them all-“I will simply do my best” —-just stop doing things for me and to me—and I will figure out the rest.
Harvard may well have value but what is it worth if the value is given and not earned? Who is helped if an individual is dropped into a situation for which they are unprepared to function?
There is much to do but it will be done at the level of the individual. There are no shortcuts; you can’t hurry a butterfly out of it’s cocoon without damaging it. Dr. Loury is right to emphasize development.
Sadly, "who cares about Harvard" must be answered "Anybody who wants to be "in" the ruling class. Anybody who wants to network with our oligarchs-to-be."
So, in the case of the Ivies, academic achievement is nice, is achieved by certain people in certain subjects, but is secondary to the vetting of our future plutocrats. And they clearly intend to let some black (and brown, and, as with Jewish people in the past, not too many Asians) people in.
I contend that a more inclusive or diverse ruling class is less improvement in our society than we need.
Racism - systemic, personal, or otherwise, is wrong.
Firing someone for something they did not do, is wrong.
The current sociocultural phenomenon of identity politics and its attendant empowerment of marginalized discourses is, as Foucault would be the first to point out, an ideology meant to advance the urge to power of those who adhere to, and advance, said ideology.
It is the unfortunate nature of any ideology, that its adherents tend to become convinced that they, and only they, are in possession of 'The Truth'. As such, any and all who argue in favor of ideas which run counter to the ideology, are reflexively branded as wrong, or somehow evil, seen as a threat to the ideology's proponents veiled urge to power, and dispatched with accordingly - cancelled, deplatformed, fired, shadow-banned, what have you. Tolerance of difference of opinion has disappeared from the national conversation. Freedom of speech has followed it down that memory hole.
There is no effort to debate the issues as part of a rational discourse. Nietzchean/Foucaultian will to power is not about being rational. It is a romantic notion of the primacy of the will - voluntarism, not reason. Power is its own reason, as it were, and, as in the rough and tumble of Statecraft, might, as we know, makes right.
Hopefully the day will come when reasoned debate, as opposed to partisan speech, will resume in this country. However, observing events as they have been unfolding on our campuses, in our media, in our politics, in our social media feeds, that day seems, sadly, yet a rather long way off.
"Do I think Sellers should have been fired? Well, all I can say is that in our current climate I don’t see how she could teach effectively"
Unfortunately the hypersensitivity has turned into hysteria and I'm afraid you might be right. I am concerned for the time when the courts will start to call a reaction like this "reasonable".
I agree there is hypersensitivity in our current climate. However, after realizing that that her own students were listening as she was speaking about them -- hmm.....I question her professional judgment. First, she should have a business practice of confirming her conversation is private. Second, she seemed to be speaking to a colleague so casually about her students. Even if her observations were not racist (we don't know enough about her teaching practices to know if she is prejudiced in her teaching or grading -- it may be that she gives even more effort to her lower performing students than her high performing students, including her Black students and perhaps even favor her Black students in effort expenditure), she really should not have spoken in this manner, especially on Zoom. If she is concerned about admissions policies, she must go through proper channels -- do her comments belong in the category of gossip? What was the reason for expressing these observations (no matter whether they were subjective or objective)? Its just odd. I read her apology and it was scripted with the same contents as all the recent apologies for "harm." These apologies are creepy. They all are the same.
Even if her observations were correct, students should not have to hear that their professors think they are likely to perform badly. She was reporting on past experience -- and there seemed to be an implicit anticipation of a supposed trend (You will likely be low performing because you are Black). There is fodder here for an argument that affirmative action policies cause an anticipation of continued low performance and thus create "implicit bias." Not arguing one way or another here. The point is: no matter what you believe about affirmative action, or freedom of speech, there was a public embarrassment of Black students who were admitted to Georgetown. Once admitted to the school, don't students have a right to full confidence? The public aspect of the incident was accidental. Sharing her private thoughts with her colleague seemed like a bit of therapy session, and now her students are privy to her sufferings ("angst") as well as the general public.
Some students will perform at the bottom. That's the way bell curve works. If the majority are Black, so be it. In another day, the majority of low performers would have been white.
Black students are entitled to be anywhere on the bell curve. I think these students already know where they are on the curve and most are there to give it their best efforts. This does not mean they will succeed.
Thing is, Sellers may have been cheering for her Black students all these years and just wants them to excel and wants to feel successful as a professor. If she likes to teach, odds are she really wants everyone to succeed, if we give the benefit of the doubt. We just don't know her actual thoughts (due to the mandated creepy woke apology). It also may be she was lamenting Georgetown's recruiting efforts. Maybe she thinks the higher performing Black students are choosing other schools. Maybe her "angst" emanates from being judged as a teacher by the performance of Affirmative Action students.
As for hysteria, I think her observations are not cause for hysteria. Nobody died. And, these are law students. I hope they are tough enough to survive this! The courtroom of public opinion and crude speech. Revealing her students' performance in the public sphere is what is cause for hysteria. Haven't we had enough invasion of privacy? Hopefully, these students will use this incident as a springboard to press on. It seems that all sorts of accommodations are being made for the students in her class as all her assessments in that class and previous classes have been deemed suspect. I wonder if Sellers should just be very honest about what she thinks rather than say the creepy pre-written woke-style apology. Her harmed students may benefit more from an authentic response.
First and foremost, I'm left wondering why it is so difficult for anyone (of any color) to address underperformance of students (of any color) for the purpose of coming to understand just what it is that stands in the way of any student (of any color) and a successful completion of an education.
The more I contemplate this the more I'm convinced that there is indeed, a beast to feed, and it is the nature of that beast (that appears to be growing an ever increasing appetite) that requires understanding. Well, we know at least what the beast feeds on: academics flattened like pancakes by being thrown under the proverbial bus. Please don't pass the Aunt Jemima. But genuine maple syrup would be nice.
This brings to mind the imagery of an Aztec priest (or some sort of holy man) flinging his victim (someone poor, marginal, arrested, perhaps enslaved) off of a rather high pyramid, for said purposes of placation of some god or other, for good harvests, health, and success in war, among other things. The priest has a very clear idea of what he is about, and the wherefore and the why.
The victim is just a hapless measure of circumstance. Could have been anyone (of that ilk.)
I suspect there is an incredibly thin skin about, that itches and chafes without scratch or salve, ointment or any other kind of relief except one: sniping at and otherwise picking off sacrifices. I cannot blame the skin at all (suffering from my own species of itchies) but yet still - this has gone far beyond parlor sport, or any soft sort of gamble gaming. Because anyone anywhere at any time can be at risk. As if none but a sooner or later eventually shows up. As if that were inevitable.
C'mon John. You're not sure it's fair that she was fired? I'm pretty sure you're VERY sure it's not fair. I'm kind of surprised you won't say that. And I'm pretty sure Glenn is too. And you've got to love the previous comment from TK who criticizes the professor for not just doing her job but doing "nothing to remedy the situation". Maybe It was a mistake that she cared about the issue at all. I'll bet she feels that way now.
Professor Sellers should not be fired for being racist, but for incompetence. She has identified an issue with her teaching and does nothing to remedy the situation. She feels angst, but no motivation to do something about it. This is typical of professors today who know the answer to the question they are asking and give A's to those who have decoded what they want. If there is a problem, the professor believes it is with the student.
If she looked into the issue, she might find there are some simple answers. One is her teaching is the cause. Another answer is that you always have students in law school who will obsessively work to get good grades. But you also have those students who realize all this extra work does nothing for you. Law School does not teach you how to pass the bar. This is why people spend so much money for bar review courses - after paying so much money for law school. Sellers teaches mediation. Why work hard to get an A in a class that has no practical application to anything you plan to do.
High achieving white kids will always work hard to get A's, but as a friend said (who is dean of engineering at a top ten engineering school) "A" students work for "B" students. Kids from all races are at the bottom of Sellers class because they figured out that all that extra time and effort does not pay off. What do you get if graduate at the bottom of your class at Georgetown Law? A JD. Pass the bar and you are a lawyer. Get a job and your GPA means nothing.
Just wrong.
A number of these comments are plainy wrong. Just a couple examples:
"Law School does not teach you how to pass the bar. This is why people spend so much money for bar review courses - after paying so much money for law school."
-There's a study that examined this exact question and you're wrong.
"What do you get if graduate at the bottom of your class at Georgetown Law? A JD. Pass the bar and you are a lawyer. Get a job and your GPA means nothing."
-The implication that one's class rank has little to no relation with one's likelihood of passing the bar is false and refuted by data. As is the implication that law school grades have some near orthogonal relationship to one's prospects on the job market.
I'm sorry but this is completely wrong. Law is one area where grades are EXTREMELY important. Every new law graduate has zero experience practicing law (since it is illegal to practice law before you graduate and gain admission to the bar), and therefore hiring is based primarily on grades. Sure, if you graduate from an Ivy League/Top Ten law school, you will probably be able to get a job even with poor grades, but virtually all desired jobs are grades based: clerkships, law firms, government jobs. Most firms have a set criteria where they only interview people with grades above a certain threshold, i.e. in the top 10% or top quarter or top half of the class. Law schools are still producing more graduates than the industry needs to absorb each year, so the herd is culled by sorting based on grades.
And unlike in engineering or MBA programs, the point of a JD is to become a lawyer. Not to become an entrepreneur or start a business where the "A" nerds work for the gutsy B students. You can't even legally have ownership in a law firm unless you're a practicing lawyer. I have sat on law firm hiring committees for over a decade and interviewed countless law students and grades are *absolutely crucial*. This is also made apparent to law students, so it isn't as if it's a secret. You may think this is a dumb way to hire, but that's how it works. Lawyers are fundamentally all nerds and they've created a system for nerds. There aren't even any set criteria or programs you need to get into law school in the first place, other than high grades in any undergraduate major and a high LSAT score.
Also, virtually every law school assigns grades on a curve and issues class rank for resumes. Grades are issued with a screened system where the professor does not know what student they are grading -- you are given an ID number for each exam and paper you submit, which no one but you and administration know, and is associated with your name only AFTER the professor has assigned the grade to the ID number. In this way, grading is done "blind" and without professor bias. When I read the fired professor's quote, I assumed she was expressing her dismay at finding out each semester, after submitting her grades and finding out which students were assigned which grades, that her black students had disproportionately clustered towards the bottom of the curve. However, it appears that the class she taught did have 25% of the course grade assigned based on class participation -- this is unusual since most law school courses are graded entirely based on exams. If she gave one-quarter of the grade for participation, then that quarter clearly was not "blind" and therefore could have been subject to her bias.
By the way, performance on the bar exam is extremely correlated with law school grades, which is not surprising since law school grades are almost entirely based on exam performance and the bar exam measures the same thing, i.e. test-taking skills. I have never heard of students who receive high grades in law school failing the bar exam unless they had some kind of life issue where they just blew off the test. Generally it is the students clustered on the low end of the curve who have trouble with the bar exam and end up having to take it multiple times or never pass at all.
A few points in response ...
I agree that those students interested in the most desired jobs need to have high grades. But not everyone wants those jobs or can get them. If you have not attended a T14 or T1 law school, your options are limited. If you have a low GPA your options are limited unless you can qualify as a diversity hire. My point was that by the end of 1L year you probably know whether you can make the top 25% (or the top 50%) and adjust your plans accordingly.
I do know people who are making a lot of money despite attending an unranked law school and getting low grades. You are not practicing the type of law most lawyers want to practice - think family, evictions, DUIs - but you can still charge $350 and hour and if your associates get their 2000 hours you are doing well.
They had blind scoring at my crappy law school. Your final was your grade. I don't understand this "participation grade". They had it at my daughter's law school - she went to a T1 school, but I don't think the professors used it much. Or maybe they didn't for her. We had cold-calling every class - which I guess is becoming a thing of the past - so everyone participated.
I think that you bring up an excellent point about the bar exam. I think that getting a JD with a low GPA from Georgetown is worth more than a graduating from lower ranked law school with a higher GPA. But this presupposes that you have passed the bar. Georgetown has a high bar pass rate but you are doing a great disservice to people if they graduate from your law school and cannot pass the bar.
Absolutely, it is a huge disservice to admit students and get them into debt for what will be a worthless degree if they won't be able to pass the bar exam (and I'm guessing LSAT score is probably highly correlated with bar passage results). There was a student in my class who was always ranked in the bottom for grades, and he tried three times to pass the bar exam before he committed suicide, in despair at his debt and humiliated. Someone should've taken him aside after the first semester of his 1L year and counseled him whether continuing for another three years was the right path for him.
Poor performance couldn’t possibly result from bending the standards to admit unprepared students, could it? We can’t admit affirmative action is no panacea, now could we?
Pressure to force positive results out of an imposed disaster may account for Prof Sellers “angst.” Maybe she should have just gotten with the program and handed out better grades. Who would know? What’s the harm?
You don’t have evidence that her teaching was the problem, do you?
Serious question. I believe that I heard John/Glenn say that “Black” is the appropriate term. I hesitate every time I need to decide among Black or African American. Honestly, African American seems forced and labored. I’m sure people think I’m silly when I use it at a sports or casual event. 7 syllables vs 1! But now JM is saying it’s graceless to say “Black” under certain conditions. Ugh, what?
No, he said it’s graceless to refer to the Black population as “Blacks.” It sounds bad if you say, “Blacks believe X” or “The Blacks...” You can definitely say, “Black people” or describe someone as “Black.” In fact, I think most Black / African American people prefer that now. It has many positive associations like Black Lives Matter, Black is Beautiful, Black Power, etc.
Okay, that makes sense.
Well, except for the fact that "black" is reductive and inaccurate. "Black" is an absolute. Americans-of-African-Ancestry (MORE awkward! Yay!) are not a monochromatic, pigment-undifferentiated mass.
I've often wondered if "black" wasn't chosen for that very reason, as it serves the political and aspirational agenda of some to *treat them* as if they were, politically, an undifferentiated mass as opposed to a set of individuals tied together by certain phenotypical traits.
True. And even if we adopt Black, there will be those that prefer something else. The question is which is the least risky - not which is perfect.
Something confounding about "woke as religion" is that the arguments deployed differ so much from typical liberal political arguments. I've found adapting some of Jonathan Haidt's moral pillars helpful; typically liberal arguments focus on the care/harm principle and ideas of fairness/cheating (e.g. healthcare, immigration, taxes, welfare).
It seems many of the arguments following these racial dust ups may facially address these two moral pillars but the better way to think about them is in terms of sanctity and loyalty. First, Sellers pointed out a fact which caused revulsion among the elect. This is NOT a rational response. Imagine you began a conversation with a Catholic friend with "you know, that generic wafer you take at communion cannot possibly be transubstantiated into the body of Christ." Now, what you are saying may be factual, but my guess is the listener will react with instinctive revulsion as you've just insulted her traditions and community. Certain arguments and "the word" produce revulsion first, rationalizing for the revulsion second.
Second, many religions enforce standards (or perhaps dogmas) with appeals to group loyalty. Who is at the moral nadir of many religions? The worst punishments are typically not for infidels (i.e. Prof McWhorter), but for apostates. The worst for the traitor in our midst. I am sure Sellers said all the right things about BLM and George Floyd over the past year. By treating Sellers words with maximum punishment, the apostate serves as a warning to others who might deviate.
What we are seeing is the inversion of thirty year old arguments about prayer in school and before city committee meetings and other political gatherings. Christianity contains much moral good, so how can spreading its reach be wrong? When the left argued for traditional liberalism, the right often reacted with offense, feeling the sacred was diminished. The religion of diversity may have significant moral goods, but it has simply moved beyond the political realm of "making sense."
The culture demands silence or woke dogma. Think about that and the implications. A person can be canceled without even a cursory discussion of the issue. The issue persists, and person who may have been a truly effective teacher is gone.
I shared this with a friend who made a good comment that had me going into all kinds of scenaria. His comment was: "What is the thing that gives her angst?" She teaches the class, some students do well, some poorly as expected, what is the angst about? Does she feel bad that a lot of the students doing badly are of a particular race? Why? Or is she feeling pressured by the department to somehow "help" their grades so that they graduate? Is it a mixture of both, i.e. she's woke herself and doesn't like what she's seeing / tries to "help" but she knows it's not fair and in a moment of frustration, the truth slips out of her lips and bang, she's getting punished for it?
It's an angle.
Quite plausible, this. Damnation alley has an entrance and an exit. Either one leads to the same place.
Exactly what I thought. They’re eating their own.
Feeding the beast. Hunger ever grows.
I'm pretty certain Sellers was expressing frustration at the depressing persistence of a racial achievement gap — and at the multifarious, nebulous reasons for it. That is not racism in my book; I have frequently felt the same way. I agree her expression of that frustration was graceless, but who among us hasn't sounded graceless in private?
The clue is in what she's saying: "‘Oh, come on.’ You know. Get some really good ones..."
She's complaining that the admissions officers get black students who are not performing. The admission officers, however, are just tools. They do what the university administrators have ordered them to do, which is to perform affirmative action.
As Tom Sowell so clearly described, affirmative action is a policy that hurts black students. He, too, noticed that black students were over-represented at the bottom of the class as a result of affirmative action. As he pointed out, these students would have done wonderfully in lesser colleges. Instead, many bright black students drop out or come out with a crashed ego which is no good, while they would have flourished in a school better matched to their abilities.
OR, the black students who might have done well at a lower-level institution find solace in a "black studies" or CRT class, where their failures are excused.
What we are seeing is poor implementation of affirmative action.
Get more black kids in college? Great.
Remedial instruction to compensate for poor schools? Fine.
More in-class help as necessary? Good.
Instead, what we are seeing is that these admissions are done for the benefit, and to signal the virtue of, the Administrators. And it results in black kids who may have overcome difficult home circumstances, poor schools and peer-group ridicule and bullying...being put into schools where they are unlikely to succeed. No wonder they are often angry or resentful, though it would take yet another act of near-heroism for them to accurately analyze and direct that anger.
All the wholly admirable effort by these black kids, to attain that level of achievement...wasted to satisfy some woke white liberal's desire to *be seen* to be properly enlightened. Not a fair trade.
My hunch grows ever stronger that these 'High Priests' do not now, nor possibly have ever really cared about these kids. And you know - it is not such a very difficult thing to do, to actually care about them. The problem is in itself, no doubt caring about something else, more.
Just to be sure readers understand law school grades: For most courses, grading is anonymous, that is, students are assigned an exam number, so that the professor reading the exam does not know whose exam they are reading and grading (much less the student's "race"). At many law schools, grades are then ranked on a curve. There are some courses where law professors are aware of the identity of the students they are grading, for example, oral advocacy. Without knowing more about the courses Professor Sellers was teaching, I understood her to be lamenting that many Black students were not doing well in courses where grading is blind.
I watched the video. I don't think there was anything racist about what Sellers or her colleague Baston said. In fact, I find their conversation to be the logical consequence of our currently obsessively racialized society. I grew up in the South Bronx in the 90's and am now in my late 30's and I have never had to deal with racism, being black, what my blackness means to me and to society at large, and issues like systemic racism and unconscious bias in my entire life combined as I have in the past year or two. My husband (who is also black) works in the corporate HQ of a large company and in the past 5 months, he has had to do multiple diversity, inclusion, and equity seminars, complete surveys, have team meetings to discuss "race," and unconscious bias trainings. I would wager that Sellers has had to do much the same and now finds herself in the unenviable position of having to confront the very real problem at Georgetown and colleges and universities all across the country, of the disproportionately poor performance of black students. Her use of the word angst to describe her feelings on the matter has been completely ignored, as well as the truth of what she is saying. Sellers and Baston seemed genuinely concerned and uncertain as to the cause of this phenomenon. If we don't want to actually identify and address problems and try to find solutions, then all this focus on race and racism is just kabuki theater. The demand for racism and racists to blame for all societies ills massively exceeds the supply, and now almost anyone can be accused of being racist for almost any reason and have their lives and careers destroyed. And it accomplishes nothing except to make some people feel morally righteous, but does not alter reality or change facts.
The more I contemplate all that moral righteousness, the more I can imagine that a growing number of people love the power they have to cancel out people (such as Sellers) far more than they love the students on whose behalf they work up such an instant outrage. The reality and the unchanged hard facts in the lives of these kids is untouched as always.
The true definition of racism is the belief that ALL black humans are inferior to ALL white humans (or apply any other colors in whatever order.) Today this is obviously false, but was accepted scientific thinking for centuries right up to the end of WW II. Now, as you point out, racism has been redefined to mean anything that might offend a black person. What ought to be labeled "racial prejudice" or "racial insensitivity" is instead called racism. Since conservatives have abandoned the linguistic playing field, we're probably never going to force a return to the real meaning of the word, unfortunately. Instead of asking for a more logically rigorous examination of an event such as this we need to look for a different motivation. If your goal is to destroy America as we know it because the whole of American society is a cesspool of racism, imperialism, greed, and oppression, and replace it with a socialist utopia -- well, then this is just one small incident that helps put the wrecking crew in charge. When they can get the Dean of a major law school to fire a professor for almost any reason, they are growing their control over American institutions. That's the real problem, and long discussions of black performance at law school are really beside the point.
I think John makes a lot of good points about “The Elect” as he calls them and I also agree that certain aspects of trying to enshrine white guilt and promote cancel culture are problematic and should be criticized, as he is doing. So, I applaud him for being up those points. Where I think John is dangerously not seeing the forest for the trees gets back to his previous post and his presumed dispute with “excuse E of the Elect”: “The real problem is the right-wing, racist zealots who stormed the Capitol Building calling for the blood of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi.” John goes on to belittle the Jan. 6 event as a bunch of incompetent Keystone Cops boobs who couldn’t even get an insurrection right, so why worry about them? All fears of a right-wing takeover of the government are overblown? I wish we had the luxury of cancel culture being the most important issue of the day as the right wing would have us all believe. Insurrectionists came close to getting their hands on actual members of Congress which certainly would have led to injuries and possibly deaths. Would that have been enough to change John’s mind that the right wing problem is a much worse problem in this country? What will it take? Armed insurrectionists stormed the Michigan capitol last year, armed to the teeth to try to intimidate the Democrat administration into giving them what they wanted. Still overblown? Militia members were planning to kidnap the Michigan governor to force her to convert her by threat of violence to their misguided and ruinous beliefs. I don’t see this kind of tendency to violence on the left, no matter how many canards we hear about “antifa” from GOP politicians. How about the hundreds of bills being passed through Republican-controlled state legislatures right now that are trying to restrict voting rights back to the days of Jim Crow? John claims that the Elect problem is worse because they are actually affecting our institutions like universities and some workplaces. But I would take mandatory diversity training any day over conservative restrictions over the voting process. When a GOP minority has locked in political power at the federal and many state levels for a generation, are you going to console yourself that “at least I raised awareness about some university professors who were unfairly penalized”. That’s a worthy cause and should be discussed and criticized where merited, but to put concerns like that ahead of the attempted right-wing takeover of our political institutions seems foolish. And it seems like exactly the kind of thing that the right-wing is hoping we will all be focused on, while they try to steal our country away from the rest of us.
"John claims that the Elect problem is worse because they are actually affecting our institutions like universities and some workplaces. But I would take mandatory diversity training any day over conservative restrictions over the voting process."
I would suggest that it is not an either or situation. You can work to resist voter suppression and the efforts of the Elect at the same time.
Ask yourself what you will do when your child comes home from school and informs you that her lesson today was that her parents are racist.
Will you comply or resist? Will you dare to resist? What will your resistance cost you?
I agree, it is not an either or situation. We can fight against both a political right-wing takeover of this country as well as criticize an overly harsh mindset among many liberals that can’t bear to hear opinions they don’t agree with. If my child comes home from school in that situation, you bet I’ll resist. I just hope while I’m busy worrying about that eventuality, a right-wing extremist party, who mishandled the pandemic resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and attempted to overthrow a legitimate American election, won’t have taken the opportunity to steal the country while I was distracted about Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head.
TDS distracts from reality. You can disagree with conservatives and dislike Trump’s tweets but please disconnect from the craziness and deal honestly with the difficult issues. There may be people to fear, Trump and Republican voters are not them. People fixated on Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potatohead might be more worrisome.
So you would reject mandatory diversity training as well as the efforts of the far right?
You provide a slanted, hysterical and extremely exaggerated version of each of the events you describe. I have seen no credible evidence that any Congressperson was at risk of "capture". The threat to the governor of Michigan was internet posts, and your statement "Armed insurrectionists stormed the Michigan capitol last year" describes a peaceful protest against lockdowns that resulted in neither violence nor arrests. You dismiss Antifa violence for which we have video records by the thousands (not shown on network news) as "canards", and invoke Jim Crow at the slightest attempt to ensure accurate voter registration lists.
You appear to have no interest in the truth at all. You're either a liar or auditioning for a CNN news job. Simply put, you are part of the problem, as is the fantastic "nation full of white supremacists" you project.
If such diversity training, as a living and morphing emblem of ultra-wokeness, harms Black people, in that it weakens them as individuals, and consequently as an organizing force or "system," and if what we care about in this conversation is the economic, emotional, societal (cultural?) health of Black people, then yes, the mindset that enforces such diversity trainings (a la White Fragility) can be construed as a worse problem than the ultra-right. No one in the US is in support of what happened at the Capitol or Charlottesville. Our country is, except for the strange (albeit dangerous) few, mobilized against these actual white supremacists. Our government is investigating and jailing people. These supremacists are on notice and will be squashed. We will play whack-a-mole with rooting out such extremists, but that is the way it is with extremists. Black people as a whole will not suffer because of the Capitol insurrection -- the country is aghast. The enemy is now visible. This unified reaction to such an upheaval cannot be compared to the nonreaction to the ultra-woke (amounting to acceptance) -- we are all running around trying to figure out how to comply, and be good. As a result of this White Fragility campaign, we are asking ourselves what we have said wrong today, what we have thought wrong today -- which isn't an inherently terrible activity if losing one's job or being shunned weren't possible punishments. Those people at the Capitol, as dangerous as they were/are, WERE nincompoops -- the lowest rung on our society. Shame on us for thinking our country was too smart, modern, and civil for such people to exist. And it will be shame on us if we don't heed the lessons of The Crucible. Two years ago, I would not have said any of this. Is firing people the new diversity training? Is shunning colleagues who ask hard questions acceptable? Is running people out of their long-held jobs a good thing for society? Good for Black people? Is a human who is capable of a faux pas equivalent to a white supremacist?
You make some good points about the use of white fragility/false victimhood/promotion of cancel culture as an answer to opinions we disagree with. Totally with you there. My response was to the downplaying by McWhorter of the threat from the right wing to political freedom in this country. It appears you may agree with this to some extent. But although cancel culture run amok is a real problem and needs to be dealt with, it is not the same as attempts at a political coup by the reactionary conservative element in our country. Yes, the insurrectionists were disorganized, ignorant, and possessing of a vague acquaintance with the facts. But they were spurred on by a president and a political party that genuinely tried to overthrow a legitimate election for the purposes of retaining political power. These people who misled the insurrectionists with their lies and distortion are not nincompoops and the threat they pose beats cancel culture any day. It was only because a few Republican election officials and judges (and all of the Democrats) stood up to these efforts that this attempt was foiled. This has not happened in the modern history of this country. These same partisans are attempting to pass numerous election restriction laws in numerous states that will try to suppress voting amongst those voters who Republicans don’t like. If successful, these efforts could lock in minority rule for a generation in numerous state houses and possibly the federal government as well. This was the same political party that treated a once-in-a-century pandemic as another political game, actively campaigned against the advice of public health officials, and their mismanagement and incompetence resulted in multiple 100,000’s more deaths than the U.S. should have had. The idea of these forces gaining more power, as they are attempting to do right now, and will use any legal and illegal means at their disposal, scares me way more than being asked to be nicer to minorities at work. Now can and should both problems be addressed at the same time? Absolutely. But one is not in the ballpark of the other.
Those multiple hundreds of thousands of extra deaths beyond (whatever standard of measurement...)
Be careful what you wish for and the numbers used for illustration of the point.
No doubt within one, or two or three years from now there will be well-researched accounts in great detail telling us something far closer to the true story than we now know. I'm used to this. I've worked in a top grade academic science and medicine library for the past 22 years. Things show up on the bookshelves sooner or later.
And it was exactly a century ago, that a pandemic far, far worse than anything we've seen regarding this one, was finally subsiding and waning away.
Too true - that threats to freedom can come from either side of the political aisle. Rudimentary domestic history tells us all we need to know about that. Therefor real threat to freedom is ultimately a non-partisan affair, and very much an affair of identity worship. Otherwise known as "my side speaks and your side shuts up."
These issues will ultimately wind up on everybody's plate. It remains to be seen whether the wind blows divisive, or cooperative.
And are these insurrectionists and their faux leaders the same people that we should all train to be “nicer to Black people”? Or is it you and I who should be “nicer”? What Sellers has discovered is what goes on in the public school system. Teachers are regularly required to pass students who have not earned grades, for various political reasons and community pressure to graduate students. This is an abuse of students. Abuse. All students deserve to treated kindly and to be developed to their fullest. It is. It the professors responsibility to do remedial work. There is a point I time when you’ve missed the boat. Children need to be developed in elementary, middle, and high school, and somewhat in undergrad. Law school is brutal. It’s supposed to be. No law professor should be doing remedial tutoring or coddling students. Let Georgetown have their graduates create core curriculum for public schools. So that the professors don’t have to be worried about learning to be “nice” instead of having angst when it’s too late. So all law students can be strong enough to keep nincompoops out of office.
* typo correction -- it isn't the professors responsibility to teach remedial content
The professor states the obvious, which today is actually a triumph of intellectual honesty. This is why he is so excellent. I am not sure what systemic racism is TODAY, but it includes affirmative action. To deny our history is not crammed with systemic racism is of course ridiculous. And it’s impact is obviously present today. But we need to look forward. If most white kids can only get in New York Law, for example, it hardly seems like racism to match all students with schools that match their capabilities.
White guilt, affirmative action, keep the clash going. Yes, as a group that one is part of cannot get into Harvard without affirmative action has to grate. But as individuals who graduate from a state law school, no one will question their abilities relative to their classmates. It seems easy. But if it were it would have been done already. There is an element of reparations in affirmative action thinking. As Milton Friedman said a few times, if we must use government more than is optimal, the least damaging way is to just pay citizens money.
Personally, I think the brilliant Professor still misses a big point. Who cares what white people think? Who cares about Harvard. Who cares about what caused us to be where we are today? All we can do is move forward. Screw them all-“I will simply do my best” —-just stop doing things for me and to me—and I will figure out the rest.
Harvard may well have value but what is it worth if the value is given and not earned? Who is helped if an individual is dropped into a situation for which they are unprepared to function?
There is much to do but it will be done at the level of the individual. There are no shortcuts; you can’t hurry a butterfly out of it’s cocoon without damaging it. Dr. Loury is right to emphasize development.
Sadly, "who cares about Harvard" must be answered "Anybody who wants to be "in" the ruling class. Anybody who wants to network with our oligarchs-to-be."
So, in the case of the Ivies, academic achievement is nice, is achieved by certain people in certain subjects, but is secondary to the vetting of our future plutocrats. And they clearly intend to let some black (and brown, and, as with Jewish people in the past, not too many Asians) people in.
I contend that a more inclusive or diverse ruling class is less improvement in our society than we need.