Whiny Little Bitches
“Whiny little bitch.” - Bill Maher, describing Donald Trump in May, 2016.
“Irrational, pouty, vain, thin-skinned, hysterical and just not that bright, does that sound like anyone we know today?” he added.
Aside from the admittedly gratuitous pleasure I take in these quotes, they remind me of the incessant bitching about “wokeness” and political correctness. While my blog audience surely skews anti-Trump, the balance of this post will likely draw some dissent.
A New York Times Op-Ed this week, written by a conservative Princeton student, opined that the far left’s insistence on DEI, political correctness on campus, stifling of conservative voices, etc., was pushing everyone further to the right. He worries that “reasonable” Republicans (an oxymoron if ever there was one) are moving toward Trump/DeSantis to escape the suffocating righteousness of progressives.
The author and many of the supposedly left-leaning commenters cited their difficult experience with “dogmatic” diversity training or the instances of discomfort they felt speaking against progressive orthodoxy in classrooms or offices.
Political correctness” is termed that way because it is “correct” to be considerate, generous and sensitive to others. DEI training seeks a more just and inclusive community. Consideration, generosity, sensitivity, justice and inclusion should not be threatening concepts.
One seldom-considered dimension of the issue is that those who bristle most vehemently against “wokeness” have suffered nothing at all. In a legal sense, they wouldn’t have standing because there is no demonstrable injury. They just don’t like it. For example, can you cite one instance of transgender kids harming Ron DeSantis or a Florida legislator?
The column trotted out the Halloween incident at Yale a few years back, when an administrator was excoriated for suggesting that students should be able to choose whatever costumes they pleased. This, of course, was in response to students of color and others objecting to cultural misappropriation or offensive stereotyping.
The idea that requesting sensitive costume choice is suffocating political correctness is just one example of arrogant privilege. It has little to do with First Amendment freedom and everything to do with entitlement. It is saying, “I don’t think you should be offended, and if you are, it’s your problem.” Obviously, in this trivial instance, the entitled little whiners could select from any of hundreds of other costume options. But, in their stunted judgment, the right to offend is a profound principle, and the feelings of the offended are dismissed.
In another recent Times piece, David French proposed that government sanctions on speech were being supplanted by private sanctions, aka cancel culture, imposed by individuals and organizations. His piece was reasonable, but wrong, as it conveyed a very dangerous false equivalence that infects too much political and media analysis.
Yes, the temperature is high on both sides of the so-called “culture wars.” But the expressions are not equivalent. Using explicit racist language may be a right, but it’s not the equivalent of angry protests about racist language. Using hateful language about transgender folks and passing laws that strip them of health rights and dignity are not equivalent to the justifiably angry responses those acts draw.
The author of the first piece wrote, as an example of what pisses conservatives off, “Diversity training sessions blatantly endorse progressive ideas: Espousing a colorblind ideal, for example, is deemed a ‘microinvalidation.’”
Well, yes. The ”colorblindness” nonsense is indeed a “microinvalidation.” On second thought, “colorblindness”is a macro invalidation. It permits the “colorblind” individuals to invalidate the lived experiences of Black folks and deny the toxic impacts of systemic racism.
Diversity training often challenges white participants to acknowledge their own privilege. Resistance to this concept is not equivalent to the concept itself. White privilege is the flip side of racism. You can’t have one without the other. Training that might insistently press for acknowledgement of both racism and its corollary privilege is not shoving progressive ideology down anyone’s throat. It’s trying to shove uncomfortable truth into a closed mind.
French’s column suggests empathy as a way to soothe all this rancor. Again, a very dangerous false equivalence is implied. I certainly agree that empathy might help bigots, homophobes and trans-haters to reconsider their words and actions. But is that remotely equivalent to asking me to have empathy toward the low-information cretins who humiliate vulnerable transgender youth?
Both Times articles and comments in response referred to the overwhelmingly liberal or progressive consensus in higher education. Perhaps it is because a majority of folks in higher education are thoughtful and openminded. But yes, students (and a few faculty members) who feel uncomfortable expressing their conservative viewpoints have a valid point. That’s an educational issue. When I taught in a very progressive school I welcomed conservative views and, if no student could articulate such an idea, I would raise it myself.
Testing one’s progressive values against an intelligent counter-argument is necessary. It can strengthen your resolve or cause reconsideration. Either outcome is productive.
But the vast majority of backlash to so-called “wokeness” is not intelligent counter-argument. It’s whiny bitching.
Steve, I strongly suggest you re-read your piece here as if someone else wrote it and you were charged with pointing out any rhetorical or logical flaws. If you do so, you may find that you're guilty of a very common fault pervading liberal/progressive thinking and arguing these days: smugness grounded in the assumption that one's own bad behavior, even when it parallels the same bad behavior of one's opponent(s), is above reproach, either because it's indeed pure, honorable, and decent, or because "God" is on your side, your cause is just, and thus the ends justify the means.
They do not.
Of course, there's a difference between standing up for those being bullied and abused, but that's not an excuse for taking people of good will over the coals, as so often has happen when political correctness becomes dominant within a culture. Standing up to "bad actors" is one thing. Vicious bullying of strangers whose alleged evil doing is questionable, to put it mildly, is quite another. I'm intimately aware of how this process works because I was in the middle of it in the late 1960s as part of a very far left political group (operating out of Boston and other urban centers). Frankly, I wouldn't want to see anyone else put through the politically correct wringer we set up for others (and ourselves). It was cruel and ugly and deeply destructive, and it operated without mercy or, to use your word, "empathy."
The fact is that if there will ever be a successful leftist revolutionary movement in this country, we're going to have to learn empathy, sympathy, non-violent language skills (a la Marshall Rosenberg), and a fundamental ability and willingness to listen to people who may speak "badly" and "incorrectly," but whose class interests make them potential allies, not human garbage for us to taunt.
Maybe some intellectual conservatives are disingenuously complaining about wokeness these days in the way political correctness was sometimes attacked in the past. But there is also reason for people to fear some of the "enlightened" smugness too many people who self-identify as "left" routinely exhibit these days. If you doubt that exists, try wading into a Facebook group or some other social medium, and take even a very mild dissenting position from current "woke" gospel. See how quickly you're attacked by a host of people who will not listen to anything you say once you're labeled as unclean, and who will launch a series of rhetorical attacks that are clearly drawn from an unwritten but still very real playbook of accusations and epithets. Happens to me daily, just as I pretty much daily am accused by some right-wingers of a litany of sins from their perspective. It's not easy, unless one is inured to it characterologically (as am I) or has trained oneself to let these attacks bounce. Trying to do the latter is no kind of fun, and it never gets as good again as it was at the beginning of the verbal assaults.
I'm not going to try to do a thorough takedown of diversity training (nor will I go down the twists and turns of the "colorblind" rabbit hole. Personally, I don't seek colorblindness nor expect that it exists in any first world country or country where racism had a major toehold in the past. We are all tainted by historical and current racism. But I have to say that diversity training is a con and a grift on the part of many of the trainers and experts sucking up the corporate and institutional bucks being paid for such "training." Even training that isn't of the "white guilt" and "white fragility" sort, which is actually offensive to the intelligence of people regardless of ethnicity, is dull and a wasteful exercise in virtue signaling and keeping real concerns and feelings locked up. But it's vital to understand why corporate culture is so welcoming and enthusiastic when it comes to diversity training. I strongly suggest you listen to/read some of what U of Penn. emeritus professor Adolph Reed and/or his son, Touré have to say about the subject: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/white-fragility-plus-adolph-reed-on-identity-politics/id1476110521?i=1000482386839
Much if not all of this training is actively welcomed by corporate culture because it allows ownership to tell the public that any racist or other biased behavior in their organization is due to a few bad apples who have been identified and either re-educated or fired. What's never addressed is the corporate culture and the capitalist culture that promoted the bad behavior in the first place. Bad apples don't just "happen." They're made, not born, and if we didn't have crucial elements in our country on a fundamental and pervasive cultural basis, such people would fade away because there simply wouldn't be enough impetus for them to thrive: quite the contrary, in fact.
So diversity training becomes a (relatively) cheap bandaid to throw over very real problems of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., that essentially requires no fundamental changes in the capitalist system that gives birth to and nourishes those mindsets and behaviors. Money is thrown at the problem, the bad end unhappily, the good are rewarded. That is what fiction means (paraphrasing the great Oscar Wilde's brilliant, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST).
It may be that some of right-wing criticism of diversity training and other woke notions and solutions is done in bad faith. I don't care. Because it's nonetheless true that there are deeply divisive and ultimately useless elements to the entire enterprise. That put the onus on some pariahs (see Scott Adams this week, idiot though he may be) while demanding little or nothing that will actually improve matters across the board or make the economically powerful feel uncomfortable. Fingers are pointed (rarely if ever at the top), and life goes on in corporate America, which remains safe and well-rewarded in its boardrooms and elite clubs and restaurants.
I think you err in this piece in dismissing those with some bad behaviors in favor of those who've learned to say the right words at the right time, even if those words are accompanied by another flavor of mean-spiritedness and, yes, hatred. You likely don't agree, but again I urge you to read your own piece with an editor's, rather than an author's eye. Tell me what you see.
A little bit hypocritical considering the title of your article on censorship don't you think?
Diversity training is essentially thought censorship. I work for the government of Canada, and in the mandatory training there are quiz questions that must be answered "correctly" in order to complete the training. An example of one of these questions is whether or not transgender women are real women. Based on what my definition of what a woman is I would say that no they are a transgender woman. Despite the beliefs I hold I was forced to censor my thoughts and attest that I agree with this ideology. According to you this is "not shoving progressive ideology down anyone’s throat. It’s trying to shove uncomfortable truth into a closed mind." If being denied the right to think for oneself is the "truth" then I can no longer ascribe any meaning to the term.
"Woke" culture has a habit of turning words into amorphous things such that buzzwords like "bigots, homophobes and trans-haters" have very little meaning today. No doubt by now the woke mob will have pulled out their heuristic toolbelt and labeled me with at least two of these disgust evoking words, and this proves the students point; if far-right, misogynist, racist, bigot, transphobe means just about anyone who espouses more traditional beliefs then I too will heuristically dismiss progressive as "bad" and conservative as "good".