They’ve always known

Ignorance is such a common excuse.

We didn’t know carbon dioxide could affect our climate. We didn’t know pipelines would leak. We didn’t know slaves were people. We didn’t know women could have the same aspirations as men. We didn’t know colonialism was exploitive. We didn’t know those people would be unhappy if we stole their children.

We knew all along. We just didn’t want to do anything about it.

Don’t believe those “if we had only known” people. There were other people who were telling them the truth, and they just chose to ignore them, usually because the lies were more profitable.

How to shame a mob of racists

Nikole Hannah-Jones has one answer: be so damned good at your job that you can humiliate them by walking away. Read her statement on the chaos caused by the racists who tried to undermine her career at UNC.

“Being asked to return to teach at Carolina had felt like a homecoming; it felt like another way to give back to the institution that had given so much to me. And now I was being told that the Board of Trustees would not vote on my tenure and that the only way for me to come teach in the fall would be for me to sign a five-year contract under which I could be considered for tenure at a later, unspecified date. By that time, I had invested months in the process. I had secured an apartment in North Carolina so that I would be ready to teach that January. My editors at The New York Times had already supplied quotes for the press release of the big announcement. I did not want to face the humiliation of letting everyone know that I would be the first Knight Chair at the university to be denied tenure. I did not want to wage a fight with my alma mater or bring to the school and to my future colleagues the political firestorm that has dogged me since The 1619 Project published. So, crushed, I signed the five-year contract in February, and I did not say a word about it publicly.

“But some of those who had lobbied against me were not satisfied to simply ensure I did not receive tenure. When the announcement of my hire as the Knight Chair came out at the end of April, writers from a North Carolina conservative think tank called the James G. Martin Center railed against the university for subverting the board’s tenure denial and hiring me anyway. The think tank had formerly been named after Art Pope, an influential conservative activist who now serves on the UNC Board of Governors, who had helped birth the center. The article questioned how I had been hired without the Board of Trustees approval, and its writer argued that, because the university hired me anyway after the board stymied my tenure, the Board of Governors “should amend system policies to require every faculty hire to be vetted by each school’s board of trustees.” And yet, when that article was published, it had not been made public that I had been hired without the board approving my tenure or my hire. Even faculty at the journalism school were not aware that I had not been considered for tenure and would not learn this until some days later.

“Nine days after the James G. Martin Center published this piece, reporter Joe Killian at N.C. Policy Watch broke the story that, because of political interference and pressure by conservatives, I had been denied consideration for tenure and instead offered a five-year contract. The story about the denial of consideration went viral, and I was dragged into the very thing that I had tried to avoid as the actions of the Board of Trustees became a national scandal.

I did not know that ironic detail. She’d been willing to quietly accept a compromise until the conservatives themselves balked, and they triggered the whole colossal scandal.

“To this day, no one has ever explained to me why my vote did not occur in November or January, and no one has requested the additional information that a member of the Board of Trustees claimed he was seeking when they refused to take up my tenure. The university’s leadership continues to be dishonest about what happened and patently refuses to acknowledge the truth, to offer any explanation, to own what they did and what they tried to do. Once again, when leadership had the opportunity to stand up, it did not.

“At some point when you have proven yourself and fought your way into institutions that were not built for you, when you’ve proven you can compete and excel at the highest level, you have to decide that you are done forcing yourself in.

“I fought this battle because I know that all across this country Black faculty, and faculty from other marginalized groups, are having their opportunities stifled, and that if political appointees could successfully stop my tenure, then they would only be emboldened to do it to others who do not have my platform. I had to stand up. And, I won the battle for tenure.

“But I also get to decide what battles I continue to fight. And I have decided that instead of fighting to prove I belong at an institution that until 1955 prohibited Black Americans from attending, I am instead going to work in the legacy of a university not built by the enslaved but for those who once were. For too long, Black Americans have been taught that success is defined by gaining entry to and succeeding in historically white institutions. I have done that, and now I am honored and grateful to join the long legacy of Black Americans who have defined success by working to build up their own.

“I will be taking a position as the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at Howard University, founded in 1867 to serve the formerly enslaved and their descendants. There, I will be creating a new initiative aimed at training aspiring journalists to cover the crisis of our democracy and bolstering journalism programs at historically Black colleges and universities across the country. I have already helped secure $15 million for this effort, called the Center for Journalism and Democracy, with the generous grants from the Ford, Knight, and MacArthur foundations, and have set a goal of raising $25 million. In the storied tradition of the Black press, the Center for Journalism and Democracy will help produce journalists capable of accurately and urgently covering the perilous challenges of our democracy with a clarity, skepticism, rigor, and historical dexterity that is too often missing from today’s journalism.

I suppose it’s too much to hope that another outcome will be that UNC will repudiated the influence of wealthy bigots like Walter Hussman, everyone at the James G. Martin Center, and certain old rich racists on the UNC Board of Governors. North Carolina has resisted supporting black students and faculty and made life difficult for Hannah-Jones in every step of her career, and she still loves the place despite the actions of the rich and powerful, who have managed to do great harm to the reputation of their school.

Nikole Hannah-Jones gets the last laugh

First, her tenure was denied by UNC, thanks to a meddling rich donor; then UNC worked past that and belatedly offered her tenure; now Hannah-Jones has turned them down and taken a tenured position at Howard University. Sweet.

UNC gets its comeuppance and Howard wins out. This is what happens when institutional racism conspires to deny talent.

Big bonus: Ta-Nehisi Coates is going to be teaching creative writing at Howard! Man, all the great students are going to be applying to Howard this coming year, and UNC is never going to live this screw-up down.

Blogs are dead! Long live the blogs!

I’m beginning to wonder if I’m doing PR wrong (no, I know am). This article by Aaron Rabinowitz on the scourge of anti-“Woke” activism had me wondering if I’ve really missed an angle.

Our story begins on January 24th of 2021, with the formal launch of the UK based Counterweight website, billed as “the home of scholarship and advice on Critical Social Justice ideology”, and committed to “individualism, universalism, viewpoint diversity and the free exchange of ideas”. Counterweight is one of many anti-woke activist organisations that has popped up in the past year to provide resources for organising against wokeness. Despite providing scant evidence that there was a substantive problem their organisation would address, Counterweight’s debut was uncritically covered by several news outlets, including The Daily Mail, Russia Today, The Daily Telegraph, and The Times – the latter two of whom felt Counterweight’s launch warranted front-page coverage. Counterweight’s founder, Helen Pluckrose, was invited to give numerous interviews in the mainstream media.

So I took a look at this Counterweight bullshit, looking at it for content and structure. Content: it has a small stable of contributors who write essays on an irregular schedule. It looks like they get a new post every few days. It’s basically nothing but a multi-author blog — it’s not even as active as Freethoughtblogs, and is kind of the inverse of our goals. Structure: here’s a big difference, with the front end loaded with all kinds of explicit material defending their anti-“Woke” agenda — basically, their ideology is made primary and loud. The Freethoughtblogs entry page is just a table of our authors and their most recent articles. One other content difference is that they must have some minimal essay length, while we don’t, so often here you’ll get a short blurb, while there you can reliably get a solid couple of paragraphs of hatred and ignorance.

And yet, somehow, Helen Pluckrose starting a gussied-up blog site gets write-ups from various well-known, if conservative, newspapers? We didn’t do good PR, I guess, because here you’ll find more and better essays written by genuinely individualistic people who are not hog-tied by the status quo. We also don’t have to struggle to hide our hideous opinions.

That’s what Aaron’s article is mostly about: the Counterweight started up with James Lindsay on board, and then Lindsay tweeted out a bunch of grossly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, like this.

Oops! Quick! Get his name off the masthead! But let’s keep all the links to his New Discourses website, and continue to encourage people to read Lindsay, just with a little implausible denial. They don’t mind a little anti-Semitism and racism at the Counterweight, they just want it slightly less prominently labeled. While Freethoughtblogs would explode with anger if someone here favored anti-Semitism, and they wouldn’t be quietly tucked away, we’d do a lot of brutal self-examination, and carry out a public execution, so I guess that’s another difference.

OK, if we had a lot of money (we don’t, we dribble on month to month), I guess I’d do a major makeover, call this place Freethought Magazine or some such (“The Journal of Social Justice Studies”?), and turn the main page into a menu-driven summary of freethought and social justice, but keep all the same writers and list their contributions even more prominently, and catch the eye of the NY and LA Times, maybe a few other major liberal publications. It’s kind of obvious that calling it a blog network made it more easily dismissable.

That sure is a funny way to celebrate Canada Day

I shouldn’t talk. Here in the US we have our own funny way of celebrating a patriotic holiday: “Hey, let’s set off a lot of explosions and set fires and terrify our pets!” In Canada, though, it’s “Hey, let’s go poke around the church school and find the dead bodies of Indian children!”

You guessed it: another 182 mysterious shallow graves have been discovered on the grounds of a residential school.

A First Nation in B.C.’s South Interior says 182 unmarked grave sites have been discovered near the location of a former residential school.

The community of ʔaq̓am, one of four bands in the Ktunaxa Nation and located near the city of Cranbrook, B.C., used ground-penetrating radar to search a site close to the former St. Eugene’s Mission School, the Lower Kootenay Band announced Wednesday.

In a statement, the ʔaq̓am band said it began searching the area for burial sites after finding an unknown, unmarked grave during remedial work around the ʔaq̓am cemetery last year. The cemetery is adjacent to the former school.

Preliminary results from that investigation found 182 burial sites. The statement said the graves were shallow — about a metre deep — and within the cemetery grounds.

Come on, Canada. You have to learn from your sister nation to the south. We keep our atrocities on the down low, and our legislators work night and day to bury our history. When you murder masses of small children, you have to dig the graves much deeper, and cover them over with a heavy layer of excuses.

Why was Chauvin sentenced to 22 years?

I found an informative thread on Twitter that explains how the judge arrived at that number. It was a reasonable sentence at the high end of the allowed sentencing guidelines. The judge was not generous.

To summarize, there is a precedent of prior court decisions with establish an allowed range of sentencing, and if a judge were to step way outside the bounds of that range, they’d be providing grounds for overturning their decision. So the judge’s hands are tied to a certain degree.

That doesn’t mean the guidelines are free of bias, however. For example, one factor they’re supposed to take into account is your prior convictions — you’re guilty of lots of crimes in the past, so therefore you’re justified in increasing the allowed range of punishments. If you’re a first offender, the judge has to bump the range down.

Derek Chauvin had zero prior convictions.

Where that is unfair and biased is that we’ve had this idiotic “war” on drugs going on for decades which is unfairly applied by the police, which means that if you’re a black person, you’re much more likely to stack up a record of offenses which will then automatically be used to increase the severity of sentencing against you. Being a white cop means you get to start with a clean slate, making it easier to skate when you do commit a serious crime. “Repeat offender” laws seem superficially just, but are also ways to selectively target oppressed minorities.

I’m calling it the Chris Rufo Theory from now on

Chris Rufo is a sad little man, and I almost feel sorry for him. He is the primary person responsible for triggering the nationwide moral panic over Critical Race Theory; he’s the one who handed the far right an egregious misinterpretation of the idea, shaping it into a meaningless punching bag for conservative resentment. Now he’s getting his moment in the sun, and we all get to see how feeble his idea is. He got eviscerated by Joy Reid. From the very first question she asks he is found wanting.

“Are you an expert in race or racial theory, are you a lawyer, a legal scholar, is that part of your background?”

Yeah, I’m a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, I’m running their initiative on Critical Race Theory.

Uh, what? The Manhattan Institute is a conservative think-tank dedicated to promoting capitalism and free market economics. Former members include George Gilder (who also co-founded the Discovery Institute) and Charles Murray. One of its big policy successes was pushing broken-windows policing, that terrible flop of an idea that only succeeded in increasing police power.

Rufo is, or was, a documentary film maker, and a research fellow at the Discovery Institute. There is absolutely nothing in his background that qualifies him in the slightest way to be an expert in race or the law. He should have said “No” in answer to that question.

But that’s OK, because Reid then exposes his ignorance repeatedly. She is amusingly vicious with a smile as she points out that nothing he claims is part of Critical Race Theory actually is, and wickedly uses his own words against him. His version of CRT is just a propaganda tool, a grab bag of lies and nonsense that he claims are all part of the theory; as he himself says, The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ I like that she also does not let him use this interview to vomit up nonstop lies without pushback, something I’ve missed from too many journalists in the last few decades. A good interviewer is not a stenographer who is providing a platform for the interviewee.

Watch the whole thing.

One lasting contribution is that I’ll never again think of the right-wing spin on CRT as Critical Race Theory. It’s all really Chris Rufo Theory.

I’m not on the side of Boghossian and Lindsay, OK?

Critical Race Theory is simultaneously a profound readjustment of how we see American history, and a trivial, obvious fact. Yes, the United States was founded by genocidal European colonizers who built their country on the backs of African slaves. Yes, the Founding Fathers were philosophical hypocrites who wrote elegantly and beautifully about liberty and freedom and human rights and then went home to rape black women. Yes, that lovely classical architecture and those white pillars were erected on an Indian burial ground by black slaves. Get used to reality and accept it and do something about it.

The only people who reflexively object to Critical Race Theory are the worst and whitest buffoons in the country. So who do we see eagerly marching up to the microphones and cameras to express their dissent from reality? Two representative white atheists with arrogance to spare and a history of whining about “grievance studies,” Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay.

Jesus fuck, it’s embarrassing to be an atheist anymore.

Their ignorance got exposed and ridiculed on air, and now Michael Harriot completes the disembowelment. This is a truly ugly execution. Jimmy and Petey really need to stay at home, hiding under their bed, from now on.

Lindsay and Boghossian are college professors who have turned whitesplaining into an academic field called Grievance Studies. Basically, they propose that social justice is just a bunch of whining from people who don’t want to be held accountable for their lack of agency, unlike our white brethren who are coasting off a quarter of a millennium of privilege and convulse into conniptions at the very mention of this country’s racist past.

That’s just the prelude. Marc Lamont Hill, the man in the middle, let the two insipid fuckwits dig their own graves for 10 minutes. I about died when Lindsay, thinking he was so clever, tried to go on the counterattack and tell Hill that he was made uncomfortable by the word “folk” because Germans used the word “Volk” in Nazi propaganda. What a maroon…but here, enjoy the idiocy for yourself:

Or just savor Harriot’s summary:

So when Lindsay and Boghossian began whitemanning using polysyllabic words to explain why all the negroes are wrong, they had no idea that Hill was a practitioner of the ancient African tradition of knowing what the fuck he’s talking about. The pair filibustered through two segments while Hill patiently allowed them to say the things they made up. When they were done, Hill surprised Pinky and No-Brain with why they would not be able to take over the world with their pseudo-intellectual tripe.

“Of course, we’re running out of time but I’m going to respond just so people don’t think I don’t have a response,” Hill said, before launching into an explanation that Critical Race Theory is only related to Critical Theory in the way that bullshitting is related to having someone slap the shit out of you; it’s not the same shit. They may have known that Hill was the author of six books and holds a Ph.D. in the subject on which they speculated, but they were unaware that Hill also holds the position that can only be described by the things he is not.

He is not one of their lil’ friends. He is not Boo Boo the fool. And, most importantly, if they thought they were going to overwhelm someone with their white-centric Critical Racist Theory, they should have known:

Marc Lamont Hill is not the one.

Bewildered, Lindsay could only respond by saying: “You actually know a lot about this.”

And then, with a smile, Hill invites them to come back on sometime to continue the discussion. He sure knows when he’s got some tasty fish on the line.

This is not a fundraiser — it’s Juneteenth!

You may notice a Juneteenth logo on the left side of the window, where we usually put a link to a fundraising page. This is a bit awkward, because we want to honor and celebrate Juneteenth, but not appropriate it, so we’re taking a low key approach. Various bloggers around Freethought blogs have written or will be writing about civil rights, liberation, justice, all those sorts of things associated with Juneteenth, and I’ll be linking to them on our fundraising page, which is not about fundraising, this time. Look for that to appear tomorrow.

It’s also awkward for us because, well, Freethoughtblogs has no African American bloggers. We used to, but you may have noticed that we have a fair amount of turnover here, with new blogs joining and old blogs departing, possibly because we’re a good place to get started with public engagement, but since we don’t pay our bloggers and we had the recent episode with a jerk trying to silence us with a lawsuit, there’s always the appeal of greener pastures. Also, we’re maybe a little too low key in advertising blogging opportunities — we do have an application process, but it’s subtly buried in the “About FtB” link in the top bar. I should probably do something about that.

Freethoughtblogs is committed to supporting a diverse network of bloggers here. If you’d like to join a socially conscious, diversity affirmative network, let us know!