Oppression Is In!
Jonathan Haidt gave a talk for Manhattan Institute on "The Age of Outrage: What the current political climate is doing to our country and our universities."
There's an edited version of it at City Journal. Check out this bit on "intersectionality" and the mess that American universities have become with "safe spaces, microaggressions, trigger warnings, bias response teams, and the climate of fearfulness, intimidation, and conflict that is now so prevalent on campus."
Here's intersectionality:
The term and concept were presented in a 1989 essay by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA, who made the very reasonable point that a black woman's experience in America is not captured by the summation of the black experience and the female experience. She analyzed a legal case in which black women were victims of discrimination at General Motors, even when the company could show that it hired plenty of blacks (in factory jobs dominated by men), and it hired plenty of women (in clerical jobs dominated by whites). So even though GM was found not guilty of discriminating against blacks or women, it ended up hiring hardly any black women. This is an excellent argument. What academic could oppose the claim that when analyzing a complex system, we must look at interaction effects, not just main effects?But what happens when young people study intersectionality? In some majors, it's woven into many courses. Students memorize diagrams showing matrices of privilege and oppression. It's not just white privilege causing black oppression, and male privilege causing female oppression; its heterosexual vs. LGBTQ, able-bodied vs. disabled; young vs. old, attractive vs. unattractive, even fertile vs. infertile. Anything that a group has that is good or valued is seen as a kind of privilege, which causes a kind of oppression in those who don't have it. A funny thing happens when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side of each binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling; it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose.
And here's the strategically brilliant move made by intersectionality: all of the binary dimensions of oppression are said to be interlocking and overlapping. America is said to be one giant matrix of oppression, and its victims cannot fight their battles separately. They must all come together to fight their common enemy, the group that sits at the top of the pyramid of oppression: the straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied Christian or Jewish or possibly atheist male. This is why a perceived slight against one victim group calls forth protest from all victim groups. This is why so many campus groups now align against Israel. Intersectionality is like NATO for social-justice activists.
This means that on any campus where intersectionality thrives, conflict will be eternal, because no campus can eliminate all offense, all microaggressions, and all misunderstandings. This is why the use of shout-downs, intimidation, and even violence in response to words and ideas is most common at our most progressive universities, in the most progressive regions of the country. It's schools such as Yale, Brown, and Middlebury in New England, and U.C. Berkeley, Evergreen, and Reed on the West Coast. Are those the places where oppression is worst, or are they the places where this new way of thinking is most widespread?
Key question. Key, key question.
The bullies are running the academy.
The good news, as Haidt points out at the end of the piece, is that people are beginning to stand up. For example:
Carol Christ, the new chancellor of U.C. Berkeley, is clearly mortified by what happened to her school's reputation last spring, and she has taken a very strong and public stand, saying that U.C. Berkeley supports freedom of speech and will pay to protect speakers. Robert Zimmer, the president of the University of Chicago, has been consistently excellent. I have spoken with several other college presidents who would like to stand up publicly but still feel that the illiberal factions on their campuses are too strong. But if a few more presidents stand up, and if applications to schools like the University of Chicago surge this year, then I think we'll see the floodgates open, possibly next fall.
So, the fact that I worked for forty years to have a nice home and car is do to privilege; and the fact that you at twenty with no work ethic do not have what I have means that I am oppressing you?
To use a technical psychological term, "You are full of shit!"
Jay at December 26, 2017 4:07 AM
This is what I keep saying -- that it's a move to have unearned power over people. All of the po-mo/"values don't matter!" stuff is as well as the new rules they've replaced them with.
Strength and achievement don't matter. What matters is what skin color you are and how many oppression check boxes you can tick off. This is the height of racism and discrimination -- and it's baldly (and boldly) used to shame people of the "wrong" race, etc.
Amy Alkon at December 26, 2017 5:21 AM
Good on Drs. Christ and Zimmer (I assume they have the degrees). But it could take just one or two well-publicized office sit-in protests to "shame" them into resigning. The fight ain't over yet.
bkmale at December 26, 2017 6:21 AM
This is why so many campus groups now align against Israel.
No.
This just window dressing for anti-semitism.
I R A Darth Aggie at December 26, 2017 6:34 AM
The rot starts much earlier than college.
Why can't Johnny read? Because his teachers can't.
Walter WIlliams examines what it takes to be certified as a teacher these days. He examines teacher certification test questions and concludes that a reasonably-educated eighth grader should be able to pass the test.
"My guess is that these are questions that an eighth- or ninth-grader with a good education ought to be able to answer. Such test questions demonstrate the low bar that states set in order for one to become a certified teacher. Even with such low expectations, college graduates have failed these and similarly constructed teacher certification tests."
So, how should one learn to teach? His solution, one I've advocated in the past, comes from "talking to a headmistress of a private school. She said she doesn't hire education majors. She said that if she hires a teacher to teach chemistry, math, English or any other subject, the person must have a bachelor's degree in the discipline. Pedagogical techniques can be learned through short formal training, coaching and experience."
Meanwhile, New York's public education system no longer tests prospective teachers for literacy.
"Citing the fact that an outsized percentage of black and Hispanic candidates were failing the test, members of the New York state Board of Regents plans to adopt a task force's recommendation to eliminate the literacy exam, known as the Academic Literacy Skills Test, given to prospective teachers."
"A December 2016 study by the National Council on Teacher Quality found that 44 percent of the teacher-preparation programs it surveyed across the country accepted students from the bottom half of their high school classes."
Conan the Grammarian at December 26, 2017 6:43 AM
Obama, for all his talk of divisiveness and how much he's so weary of it, will be remembered as the most divisive president in history.
He has set demographics against each other. He could have used his platform to promote racial harmony.
But then, I can cut him a little slack. Every time he tries to make some constructive suggestion to the black community, he experiences some sort of backlash. Like when he told black fathers to step up and be fathers, Jesse Jackson threatened to castrate him.
Still it is encouraging to find that colleges are starting to wake up. Maybe Trump's threat to cut federal funding to colleges who censor had something to do with it.
And maybe, when these out-of-control student groups, start getting expelled from college and even arrested for causing injury to speakers and destroying private property, colleges will get back to exposing students to ideas they might not necessarily agree with.
Patrick at December 26, 2017 7:55 AM
He says: "Anything that a group has that is good or valued is seen as a kind of privilege, which causes a kind of oppression in those who don't have it." This is a key idea, that merely having some advantage is oppression to those who do not have it. It is not oppression in the old sense of red-lining or Jim Crow laws. And if you merely believe you are oppressed (thinking for example that cops are killing all the black men when it is only a tiny fraction of black men killed), then you are oppressed.
But everyone has some advantages and disadvantages in the game of life. Being taller or better looking is an "unfair advantage" but is it "oppression"? No, life is simply unequal, unfair, by its nature. The belief that there can ever be a level playing field is simply mistaken. I remember years ago watching Eddie Murphy do standup and thinking that I would happily be black if I could be him. A short, fat, bald, ugly white guy has a lot of disadvantages, but if you are Danny DeVito you become a success anyway. And just in case that isn't convincing, go to Walmart and check out all the white people working there--how are they privileged and who are they oppressing?
cc at December 26, 2017 9:28 AM
Intersectionality is an admission that defining a person's worth depending on membership in a group does not work. They will have to create ever smaller subgroups to accommodate the multiple dimensions of each person until they have defined people as individuals. This defeats their whole program of using group conflict to exercise control.
iowaan at December 26, 2017 1:29 PM
And just in case that isn't convincing, go to Walmart and check out all the white people working there--how are they privileged and who are they oppressing?
Well, obviously the poor kid whose dad is a coal miner from West by God Virginia is oppressing the middle-upper middle black kids who are growing up in a tony neighborhood in New York, or DC, or Atlanta.
I R A Darth Aggie at December 26, 2017 3:15 PM
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