PODCLUB: The Intellectual Roots of Wokeness

I have heard some pretty ridiculous and nonsensical ideas for getting rid of ‘systemic racism’ in certain areas. For example, one solution I have seen proposed to the fact that African American students perform worse in SATs than other ethnic groups is to abolish the tests. I can’t see how that will do anything to reduce educational disparities, but would be a very appealing policy to propose by someone with an agenda to abolish the tests anyway.

I was interested in the analogy for systemic racism used: about avoiding broken glass and falling into the path of a car.

The comparison was that no one was directly to blame, except maybe the person who had historically dropped the broken glass, but that a set of linked circumstances 'a system' was responsible?

What I felt was missing was: what if much more broken glass was found in particular areas of a city where certain groups lived,, so there were many more accidents there?

We'd then have uneven outcomes for a particular group. So we'd be looking for causes which could be historical, or lack of intervention for broken glass in that area of the city.

Isn't this what systemic racism is? Where unequal outcomes can be attributed, at least in part, to unequal treatment in the past impacting on ongoing response cycles (both within the historically oppressed group and the historically oppressive outgroup.)

I guess what I'm not understanding is why this cannot be labelled systemic racism. Yes it's changing the meaning of racism away from meaning direct beliefs and acts of an individual, but doing so overtly and redefining it as something which can be more than that and be connected cycles and interactions which have developed over time.

I don't have a problem with that - I feel I can see that clearly, e.g. in numbers of incarcerations of black men.
My problem is more: what is the solution to this? and this is where no discussion is tolerated apart from acknowledgment of the oppressor/ oppressed dynamic, which cannot be challenged (as material reality not important) but which in itself provides no way forwards apart from division, and destruction of what exists.

I know I'm taking this away from the theory, but I'm trying to think through my unease with the current identity politics and ground this in the theory.

Thanks TheRealMcKenna I'll get Cynical Theories, each time I read or listen I'm finding my understanding is growing and I'm making links.

I feel the issue with intersectionality is that while it can make some useful data observations at a group level, these cannot be applied at an individual level and then assumptions about causation cannot be made e.g. through 'phobias' and 'isms', although they might be factors.

e.g. Black women at GM were obviously experiencing discrimination as a group, probably indirectly, but that does not mean that every black women who may have applied for a job there did not get it due to racism. But given what the data shows this should be considered as a potential cause, but there could be many other reasons in a particular case.

There seems to be a missing link about the intersectionality of every multifactorial individual and circumstance and the group identities to which they belong.
I don't know if that makes any sense?

So relating intersectionality back to theory, it's taking science based material data to make intergroup comparisons, but then applying a critical theory to this that only allows for an oppression/oppressor analysis, and a post modernist stand point that the individual can define and label their own oppression as they wish and it has validity?

BabyItsAWildWorld I really would suggest getting a copy of Cynical Theories if you want to understand the evolution and practical application of these ideas. It is easy to navigate and understand, even if the underlying philosophies aren’t. I’ve got the Kindle version (the audiobook isn’t out yet on Audible), which is great for being able to highlight key parts.

From what I am starting to understand (I think), Critical Race Theory had its origins in a more materialist application of new Marxism which is still rooted in ideas that there is a ‘truth’ and reality to the world. Because it came to prominence through Law departments, it’s fundamentally clear in meaning and always had actionable outcomes. It also saw ‘race’ as a stable characteristic.

Queer theory, on the other hand, is much more closely derived from postmodernism. It was more concerned with philosophy and critical analysis of the arts and literature. it didn’t start off as a particularly ‘activist’ movement, so wasn’t really concerned with what was real and actionable. It is deeply cynical about modern methods of arriving at truth claims through evidence gathering and data analysis and instead weighs up the cultural position of the ‘speaker’ to determine the validity of a claim.

The issue with the way intersectionality has evolved is that it has integrated postmodernist ideas about how we arrive at truth, settle on stable definitions and weigh up arguments into an otherwise useful concept. If the use of data analysis and the scientific method is ‘problematised’ as white supremacist, how can we accurately determine whether a identity’s perception of being oppressed is true and, if so, why and to what extent. Instead, we are utterly reliant on the ‘authentic voice’ of someone within that identify category which cannot be questioned.

There are countless examples of this everywhere and regarding all identities. Just about anything can be ism-phobic and if it can’t be pinpointed then it’s called a ‘dog whistle’. The person with the identity just ‘knows’ that they are being oppressed and to even question it is to be guilty of the ism-phobia.

The problem is that this movement doesn’t offer any practical solutions to establishing cause/effect/strategies and just involves listening to authoritative voices with the right identity.

It’s working well for Kendi. He’s minting it at the moment.

individual oppression should say.

My thoughts about intersectionality are that it can provide a useful and material analysis of some particular shared group experiences, which could confer negative or positive experiences, such as the GM example.

But the problem with it is when this becomes the dominant, or only way of viewing individual experiences, and does not allow for the many other factors apart from the shared group analysis to be considered.

Also when used in this way, it will just continually bifercate, into never ending shared identities and experiences, until all that is remaining is the individual but as defined by shared identities, and so eventually negates that idea of any group analysis in the first place, except to leave us with a hierarchy of a ladder of individual suppression on which you can place yourself.

Thank you for the link to this podcast, I think I'm going to have to listen to it a few times and reread this thread, as I'm struggling to pull it together to feel I've got a comprehensive understanding of definitions, links between theories, and how these have merged to current day identity politics.

I want to spend time trying to understand this as so much of identity politics and the social justice agenda has shaken me in the past few years; as someone who would have happily signed up to the SJ agenda a few years ago, and who in my approach to feminism was involved to some degree in identity political thinking, I find myself adrift now in both not understanding what I didn't know before, and trying to understand what that means now.

I also want to be able to understand this in a way that will allow me to articulate my concerns with current identity politics, in the circles I work and socialize in, but which I feel I can't fully articulate yet.

So I want to understand the theories which have influenced this for myself, and then be able to articulate this within concerns in the real world.

I was therefore very interested in the discussions about how to have difficult conversations, and have been reflecting on how I have approached this in the past, and how I could approach this differently going forward (although that might require a personality change too ).

I love the idea of 'let friends be wrong.' (or whatever the exact quote was!)

I’m not entirely sure that I’ve ever seen intersectionality used as anything other than a way to accuse someone of an ism-phobia for not being able to view someone as a sum of multiple oppressed identities.

A good example was a recent thread on that godawful ‘song’ known as WAP. A thread appeared in AiBU about how the song/video was mischaracterised as female empowerment.

One poster contributed that it was obvious that critics had no awareness of intersectionality and that they had no understanding of black female sexuality.

I was going to make a comment that this sounded really quite racist to me, but couldn’t be bothered.

How about this example of word salad from Postcolonial Theoriest Homi K Bhabha:

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline, soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

Apparently it means:

racist, sexual jokes are told by colonizers initially to control a subordinate group, but that, ultimately, they are attempts by colonizers to convince themselves that their own ways of talking about things make sense because they are secretly terrified that they don’t.

Translation courtesy of the ‘Rosetta Stone‘ that is Cynical Theories by H Pluckrose and J Lindsay.

‘They are not using language to communicate.
They are using language to impede, hamper and hobble communication.’

Yes of course. If you don’t respect other people’s attempts to honestly communicate with each other, a great way of derailing any human interaction is to throw a whole load of nonsensical verbose statements into the middle of it.

But most of the time people are attempting to communicate with each other

I think that the people James Lindsay calls the high priests of this movement; people like Judith Butler; are not using language for that purpose at all. They are not using language to communicate.
They are using language to impede, hamper and hobble communication. Douglas Murray quotes Butler:

The move from a structuralism account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetitive, convergence and rearticulation

It goes on in that ilk. Murray contrasts this with the writing of a theoretical physicist

He needs to communicate exceptionally complex truths in as simple and clear language as possible. When he weighs up the latest claim in string theory he concludes that it 'addresses none of our questions, makes no predictions and cannot be falsified

The reference to Popper's theory of falsifiability is significant. As Murray says of Butler:

Prose this bad can only occur when the author is trying to hide something

One of my issues with critical theory is that it makes everything about power. It takes any possible piece of communication and takes it apart to look for the power dynamic. But most of the time people are attempting to communicate with each other so they can be understood, intellectually and emotionally. It views every human interaction as the equivalent of animals engaging in dominance displays, but most of an animal’s social time is spent doing other things.

It has to be generally bad for someone’s mental health to constantly be viewing everything as a manifestation of power.

I am clearer now on what is meant by critical theory. I’m less clear on critical thinking, intersectionality and most of all identity.

I understand all the examples given on intersectionality. I just don’t understand why something so simple is brought up in every possible scenario.

queen

You know what is really incredible? Quite often, the overcoat of meaning that is painted on by the Social justice faction is the opposite of the word's actual definition. It is Orwellian. The only explanation I can offer is that this ideology functions like a religion and its acolytes are so high on self righteous zeal, they don't bother considering minutiae like cognitive dissonance, false narratives, incoherence etc.

newdiscourses.com/2020/03/critical-theories-virus-liberal-body-politic/?utm_campaign=meetedgar&utm_medium=social&utm_source=meetedgar.com

This might be useful, it was linked on James Lindsay's Twitter and discusses the Frankfurt school link. It is interesting that even the description 'critical theories' now implies a repudiation of critical thinking. The deliberate linguistic subversion is the recurrent theme, courtesy of post modernism.

Thus, and I mean this right down to the word they use to describe how they think, as Bailey observes here, critical theories are meant to look a lot like critical thinking while actually seeking to supplant critical thinking by modifying subtly what is meant by the word “critical.” Bailey tells us explicitly that the goal is to shift away from the rationalist, liberal, Enlightenment notion of criticism to adopt “neo-Marxian” ideas about “critical” thought. These come most specifically from the philosophy of Max Horkheimer in the Frankfurt School, a neo-Marxist and post-communist think tank that had the goal of advancing Marx’s thought by understanding his ideas culturally rather than economically and approaching them psychologically through the (unfalsifiable) psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. Horkheimer detailed the differences between a “Traditional Theory,” which, in brief, seeks to understand the phenomenon it describes, and a “Critical Theory,” which seeks to identify problematics within it according to the Neo-Marxist ideology. He did this in a 1937 treatise set perfectly to the purpose titledTraditional and Critical Theory, which sought to distinguish the two approaches. Critical Theory was named as such following the idea of Marxian critique (“ruthless criticism of everything that exists”) in the pursuit of dialectical materialism, which in turn was derived, with a particular purpose attached to it, from the anti-Enlightenment project of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason) centuries earlier