Bill Maher Is Right
We’re going batshit crazy on the Left.
Bill Maher’s last week “New Rule” is worth listening to: Cancel Culture Is Over Party — thus the title of this short piece.
Another case in point — last Sunday’s Washington Post opinion piece by Matthew Yglesias titled Not every anti-racist idea is a good one. Subtitled “On some topics, progressives prefer pointing out right-wing hypocrisy to debating substance.”
It is — he says clearing his throat — a topical, on-target article. It’s somewhat larded with qualifiers–undoubtedly to stave off the counterattacks, though I wonder how successful that strategy will turn out to be. Leftists can be downright mean when you challenge their ethics — like poking a bear.
So I’ll poke at one point among others Yglesias makes about cancel culture.
“Ibram Kendi, author of the bestseller “How to Be an Antiracist,” argues for an extremely expansive concept of racism that pushes the boundaries of structural analysis to the limits. According to Kendi, any racial gap simply is racist by definition; any policy that maintains such a gap is a racist policy; and — most debatably — any intellectual explanation of its existence (sociological, cultural and so on) is also racist. He has famously argued that anything that is not anti-racist is perforce racist.
“This reaches its most radical form in Kendi’s conflation of measurements of problems with the problems themselves. In his book… he denounces not the existence of a large Black-White gap in school performance but any discussion of such a gap. Kendi writes that ‘we degrade Black minds every time we speak of an academic-achievement gap based on standardized test scores and grades.’
From Washington Post’s Not every anti-racist idea is a good one by Matthew Yglesias
Are test scores and grades racist? Perhaps they aren’t the all-in-one guaranteed way to test intellect and more meaningfully one’s worth, but calling them racist strikes me as little more than checking a box to prove the book author’s bona fides for the ‘cause.’
The book is a best seller according to Yglesias, so at least one person has profited from the befuddled logic.
And I admit I haven’t read Kendi’s book. Matthew Yglesias says it’s the rage in academia. It’s always possible Yglesias has cherry picked the choicest parts, but if we can’t speak to real issues in education, how will anything be ever fixed? Saying there’s an ‘academic-achievement gap’ isn’t racists; it’s aspirational telling us we need to do better.
I’m proud that my South Carolina high school Class of ’67 was the first to be integrated, and prouder that our class valedictorian was a Black girl —sorry, but at seventeen she and I were kids. She came from parents who valued education as did my own. Both her parents held the title of Doctor; my mother had the title of secretary.
Lucy worked hard and earned the title. She also was a quiet, gentle person who smiled passing between classes. She seemed to like me well enough— irrelevant to the current subject, but I remember her fondly.
This education stuff doesn’t come to us in the drinking water; it comes from our parents, and from those rare others who seek to educate us. It won’t come from claiming you can never speak of the different places we start from.
Bill Maher chooses to mock cancel culture; Yglesias takes a harder tone for an important issue. They each are more right than wrong — aspiring to be real progressives.
