Tag: racism

Welcome To Class

The arrogant self-righteous lies being used to protect Critical Race Theory at student’s expense.

@gacruz_phd

#stitch with @itsadamrich If you have a question just raise your hand. #criticalracetheory #teachersoftiktok #OOTD #PrimeDayShowPJParty #Race #BLM

♬ Equal – Instrumental – Bsidezz

The Rundown

The video starts off with an angry white guy insulting CRT and claiming that it is idiotic to teach in schools. It then is revealed that this was just the intro for the creator to launch into his platform.

The creator introduces himself as Dr. Cruz despite the cringe-worthy use of Dr. to mean he has a Ph.D. He smugly invites the original creator to a “schooling” by saying, “welcome to class” with a big smile on his face. This is the smug self-righteousness of a bully whose platform is based on being able to censor comments and avoid anyone who disagrees with his position.

He tells us he is going to address multiple aspects of his claim that he got considerably wrong:

  1. The “Critical” in Critical Race Theory refers to Critical Theory which was started by Jewish people afraid of the rise in popularity of a particular German party.
    • The Critical Theory founders that started the Frankfurt School would have laughed at anyone suggesting that this is Critical Theory. At best, it is the bastardization of Critical Theory that uses the term “Critical” as a defacto claim to legitimacy. It is not.
    • But furthermore, as Critical Theory was replaced by critical theory (lower case) it began to change forms and the new critical theory had different goals that made it more adaptable to modern times. These changes did not happen 100 years ago as Dr. Cruz suggests, they are relative recent and the critical theory from which Critical Race Theory pretends to adhere to is simply again to sound more legitimate than the truth.
  2. No one who studies this theory has any use for any white person, especially children, to feel guilty about CRT and that White Guilt just gets in the way of learning about CRT.
    • Again this is not accurate. Critical Legal studies had specific goals of finding race-specific laws and neutralizing them. It was not necessarily successful as the practice behind the laws didn’t change, just the wording.
    • With this in mind, as an attorney, Derrick Bell started formulating his courtroom defense of black defendants using a new technique. The technique explained a different perspective of his defendant’s situation. In it, he used language that exonerated his client because it thrust the blame for the precursors to the crime directly on the shoulders of the jurors. In the grand style of a southern preacher, he would point at the jurors and squarely accuse them of forcing this poor otherwise innocent man to commit the crimes he was accused of. Since the jurors were mostly white, he would convince them that the only reason this person committed the crime was because he had no other options because of racism. He put the jurors on trial for the crime and all it takes is one juror to feel guilty for how they treated this poor client to acquit. In short, the foundation of the legal defense which spawns CRT is in fact White Guilt.
    • The only reason that people claim that CRT scholars don’t want to hear about white guilt is because it’s not actionable. Guilt does nothing and because CRT is about advocacy first and foremost, they want action. If the guilt sponsors some sort of reaction like special consideration for black people, then it is the special consideration they are after, not the guilt. This allows them to further chastise people for guilt because guilt does nothing for them when it is considered in isolation.
  3. If you teach young white kids about CRT and labor issues they will grow up to realize that they have more in common with the poor than they do with the rich white people ruining everything.
    • Let’s just quickly note how he slyly included labor issues. This isn’t about labor issues, but it seems to give him another point of defense. It’s not an honest portrayal of the conflict happening in our schools and it is almost shameless that he chose to include this in his claims defending CRT.
    • One of the things about this kind of advocacy is that they employ the same techniques they accuse others of. School, to these people is a means of conditioning young students. It’s not so much about education as it is about conditioning them. They make these claims alongside the claims about the dishonest and incomplete portrayal of slavery in our schools–claiming this is how white people condition our children to be racist. It’s really just a smokescreen to get CRT into schools to start the conditioning them as CRT advocates early for their goals.
    • At the very beginning of CRT, it was clear to the founders and their followers that for CRT to expand its effects it needs a captive audience like the forced education and brainwashing of college students. It was a clear progression that new students in higher ed could easily be recruited to join the advocacy of CRT once they were fed “alternative facts” through mandatory classes in CRT disguised as race-studies combined with loaded and cherry-picked perspectives about black opression. What if they could get the students to be prepared to take action in high school. So that’s what they started to do.
    • Now granted they hid behind the idea that CRT was a matter of legal scholarship for as long as they could. Now, it clearly is laughable that this advocacy group of educators was teaching the legal aspets of CRT that include shifting the blame for the crimes of black defendents onto the shoulders of white jurors. But to keep bringing this into our schools, we needed a new face for CRT.
    • Diversity, Inclusion, And Equity (carefully reordered so as not to refer to the literal death of America as DEI) has the same goals as CRT, makes the same claims as CRT and is sweeping through our schools because the students of the original CRT scholars are now the teachers in K-12. They have left higher education and are now expanding their cult viewpoint to indoctrinate students earlier.

Conclusion

My general response is that Dr. Cruz is simply a willful victim of the CRT cult who uses his platform and his Ph.D. to influence people to support the publically palatable aspects of CRT while denying the more apocalyptic and nihilistic.

Dr. Cruz has appropriated the struggle of supposed inner-city black citizens, a trope that wil never die thanks to CRT, to use victim mentality to make his claims that he is oppressed like all black people are oppressed. To someone not so fortunate as to have the advantages he has had by virtue of his skin color, his claims seem specious and his arguments seem intentionally misleading.

He has provided us with three explicit untruths about Critical Race Theory (listed above). He suggests that we read the works of a number of CRT Scholars and triggers his band of mouth-frothing followers to spew their venomous support for his views all over the comments. He does this with impunity because not only does Tik Tok allow creators with dishonest motives to eliminate all but the most glowing support comments, it also limits comments to 150 characters. He is free to provide multiple alternative facts that simply cannot be corrected or sourced in such a short format. This is the dangerous side of Tik Tok and Dr. Cruz has it down.

If you find that you are unconvinced about the risk associated with bringing CRT into our schools under such optimistic names as D.E.I. (actually DIE, but you get the point), simply consider this. Critical Theory is designed to express an alternate point of view as part of a wider curriculum of thought. It is supposed to take it’s place at the discussion table as one potential way to view a subject. That is not the case with CRT.

CRT offers their point of view as the only point of view. This extreme perspective coming from a small fraction of the small fraction of our country (less than 14%) is being told not as an alternative consideration, but rather as the only fact available. This is not relying on students to explore options and decide for themselves, this is brainwashing students and children as young as they can possible be. Though not officially CRT, Kendi’s work on Anti-Racism provides us with the same dichotomy: Either you are a racist or you support his radical extremist view of what racism is and how it affects a small portion of our country. Kendi even suggests that we introduce our children before school to the struggle between the races. How is this effective at coming together as a country–it’s not. That’s not the goal of Kendi, of anti-racism, or of CRT. Their priority is to bring about the literal deconstruction of our racist country from the roadways to the skyscrapers–all models of oppressive white supremacy. Read Derrick Bell’s last book to see that this is the real goal of antiracism and CRT. Quit listening to the pretty parts of CRT and look at what it is really saying.

Revisionist History is Intrinsically Biased- A response to Dr. C.

@gacruz_phd

#stitch with @momllennial_ Academia, Credibility, and Identity Politics #academia #teachersoftiktok #popculture #phd #history #MacysGiftTok #ootd

♬ Elevator Music – Bohoman

“Our identities are tied to our lived experiences,
and lived experiences will inform and influence
how a person goes about
interpreting information.”

Your use of semantic ambiguity with phrases like “tied to” and “inform and influence” make this statement nearly impossible to discuss. Changing verb tenses from the future conditional to the present in “will inform” and “goes” also makes this a semantic landmine. Even the change of subject and object references from the implied [our lived experiences] to [a person] makes it so ambiguous semantically that any statement I make about your intent or implication can be countered with an alternative that better suits your argument in context.

I am going to have faith that you will not employ tactics like this in what I hope is an honest conversation.

Identity Renders Your Analysis Equally Biased and in Need of More Sifting

It appears that you mean to say that our identities are built on our experiences and that these experiences, therefore, determine how we analyze information. In short, any analysis made by any person is based on their identity and therefore their lived experiences. You seem to believe that either the entire compendium of historical human knowledge must be re-analyzed using modern views of identity as it pertains to historical figures and their associated works or just the juicy parts that support your agenda in dismantling power structures.

If we, for the sake of discussion, believe that you honestly believe that the “good” parts of the research done by “problematic” historical academics must be sifted from the “bad” parts and that it is only through this lens of identity or what the person “brings to the table” that you can do this virtuous work, you end up creating an eternal self-referencing loop.

If you don’t hear how opportunistic and selective this is, you should reconsider whether you are any different from the original men who sought to condition society based on public media/propaganda.

I mean, I have no doubt they sifted through the news they received and chose the good parts, discarded the bad parts, and promoted their new version as the truth much like you are doing. The difference is that they knew their intent and they were explicit about their goals. Can you say the same or do you honestly think you are coming from a place of academic virtue and innocence?

And using your own logic, any analysis that you offer has to be filtered through the lens of your identity which you wear on your sleeve. Your characterization of the straw man in your example shows implicit bias on numerous fronts. It would, by your own logic, be in every academic’s best interest to take your bias and identity into consideration when listening to anything you present. As well I have.

And if not me, have no doubt that the next generation will invalidate your content by nitpicking the “good parts” and discarding the problematic sentiment just like you do. The next generation, following your virtuous lead, will be just as stuck trying to invalidate the past as you are.

And where do we end this stroll backward through history picking the parts we agree with based on how racist we think the authors were? Back to Lincoln, Washington, Plato, Socrates, dare we even apply this logic to the sacred word of God himself, because I assure you that the inspired word of God in the Christian faith is the most virtuous a Christian can get. It might be valuable to pick out the good parts only….oh wait. We’ve already done that, I forget.

Complexity of Analysis

Let’s skip the obvious efforts to propagandize a literal rewriting of history while signaling virtue, what about the complexity of identity in a historical context? How do we reconcile the fact that Thomas Jefferson, a founding father, tried several times to prevent slavery in our constitution and failed every time? Should we sift through his good intentions and only keep the bad ones because they fit the modern narrative characterizing our founding fathers as racist white supremacists whose only goals were to subjugate black people?

Who gets to determine the identity that Jefferson brings to the table in founding our nation? Because if you let the current narrative speak, you can discount just about everything he wrote in much the same way that modern activists discount the constitution.

The bias associated with trying to evaluate perspective from 400 years ago is more telling about modern victimhood than it is about identity at the time. That is to say that you have no way of isolating the identity of historic academics individually.

This is further compounded by the shared beliefs of other countries at the time. To take into account the entirety of social contexts and personal ideas, and then use that to cherry-pick historical texts for “good” and “bad” parts is indistinguishable from blatant propaganda.

You then cite an example of a research paper written by an”old rich white guy from a previous generation that had really bigoted thoughts about people of color.” You are quick to indicate that this alone does not invalidate his work, just that you have to consider his perspective when reviewing his findings.

And why is that? It must be because people are unable or unwilling to record factual data that conflicts with their identity, right? We should ask Roland Fryer or Glenn Loury about that.


Identity vs. Integrity

Next, you claim that “problematic people” often produce “good work” that you can use, you just have to re-analyze it, sift the good from the bad, and make some use out of it.

There is no doubt that our identities are tied to our lived experiences. However, to claim that our identities are created entirely based on our lived experiences is not defensible. In every bit as much as our identities are influenced (not defined) by our lived experience, our lived experience is also influenced by our identity.

For your premise to be reasonable, I would not be capable of acting in conflict with who I identified as. My identity as a gay male does not prohibit me from having sex with a woman, for example. In fact, having had a significant amount of sex with women in my youth, distilling my analysis of the sexual appeal of a naked woman to my identity as a gay male would be startlingly inaccurate.

Your belief that we have to consider a person’s identity when reviewing their work is dishonest and inaccurate. Often, people in academia publish their analyses that conflict with their identity.

Dr. Roland Fryer grew up in a household where several members of his family dealt drugs. When the recent media focus changed to present stories of black men being killed by police, Fryer set out to express his identity as a proud black man who came from an underprivileged life and succeeded as an award-winning economist to analyze the data on police killings using his skills of analysis. When his findings showed, without a doubt, that the media was exaggerating the killings of black men by police and under-exaggerating other forms of injustice and abuse, he was distressed. He published his findings in direct conflict with his identity and his preconceived notions about the situation.

But let’s see how other academics went about similar analysis. When self-proclaimed racial justice advocates analyzed the data without taking into consideration the details of the situation, they chose an intentionally dishonest base of comparison. They created a false narrative based on per capita analysis because it was appealing, not because it was accurate.

That is to say that if you were to analyze the mortality rate of women during childbirth to the US population, it would be a useless comparison but it might sound good. Even if you refined the comparison to just women, it would still be a useless comparison. Why? Because not all women can get pregnant, for one. But even the further refinement to just women capable of getting pregnant is nonsense because not every woman capable of getting pregnant had the possibility of dying during childbirth. The only responsible analysis would be to compare the part/whole. The number of pregnant women who died during childbirth to the total number of women who entered into childbirth. THIS paints a much different picture than the one where men were included in the comparison.

The same is true for killings by cops in the line of duty. Using the entire population when a lot of people never even interact with a cop or have never seen a cop paints the same false picture as the one in which men are included in the mortality during birth analysis.

So if we then look at just the people who have the opportunity to get killed by a cop, that is they have to have been stopped, walked past a cop, interacted with a cop in some way, suddenly the analysis is much different. WHY? Because cops have historically focused a majority of their policing efforts where the majority of crime is being committed. Cops have historically interacted with more black people every year than white people. This is true regardless of whether you take into consideration police bias or not. If more black people interact with cops every year, more black people are at risk of being killed. In its most simple form, if 51% of cop interactions (where someone could possibly get killed) are black and only 24% of all people killed by cops are black…there’s a much different comparison that is significant digits more accurate.

But like with women and pregnancy, we can be more accurate in our comparison:

What if we just compared stops by police where the person being stopped had a history of criminal activity or violent criminal activity. When we do this, suddenly it becomes entirely clear that cops are not killing black people more than white people. They aren’t killing them with racial animosity. They are routinely subjected to significantly more cases of black subjects that are violent and confrontational and refuse to cooperate. This is the analysis that Fryer did that makes his study more accurate. But it conflicts with the social justice warrior identity.

To Filter or Not to Filter?

So I ask you, based on the fact that one man’s identity would have preferred to present research that supported the public narrative of extrajudicial cop killings and yet, despite his lived experience, despite his desire, he found data that empirically conflicted with his view of the world and he published it.

But then you have others who half-assed their analysis and focused a cloudy lens on the subject just long enough to create more conflict in our society because it felt good and jived with their lived experience or at least matched their promoted narrative.

As a critical analyst, how do you reconcile these completely different cases where identity and history fail to account for the analysis.

But before you answer that, let me give you a similar straw man like the one you gave us about the old racist white dude (an obvious construction from your own identity.)

Anecdotal Analysis

Enter Darrell, he is a young black student who was raised by his grandparents who were alive during the failed Civil Rights Movement. His father was put in jail when he was five and Darrell got to watch his mother struggle with three jobs at a time when violence was really bad in their community. Still, he studied hard and went on to college to become an attorney where he was introduced to an idea that provided a novel defense for black defendants. It was highly effective and wasn’t exactly lying. Being a lawyer, he understood that you only have to present one side of the argument and it could be hypothetical–that didn’t make it dishonest.

So Darrell learns this effective way to get a majority white jury to view his client as the real victim in a case. He was compelled to this life of crime because the system made him that way. Darrell would raise his voice with the fury of a Baptist preacher as he reached the peak of his closing swinging towards the jury to make the claim that “You all compelled this man to commit these crimes… you should be the ones on trial, not him.” The gavel rings out and the DA yells objection, but the seed was planted and all it took was one white person to accept the story that their whiteness and complicity in systems of injustice were more to blame than the defendant and the man gets acquitted.

When Darrell realizes how effective this measure is, he hooks up with a group of legal students who suddenly realize that this same idea could be applied to more than just the courtroom. Why not expand this idea to promote the notion that black people, in general, are incapable of being successful because white people hold them back as an expression of white supremacy. But rather than go full speed ahead, they keep their ideas centered in higher education so that the next generation can take up the charge. In fact, if they can push this concept into high school by modifying the context slightly, they will get younger, more vibrant activists already informed of this plan when they get to college.

Before long, all of the works of every scholar past must be re-analyzed to support this idea. Surely anything that conflicts with this idea will be labeled as “problematic” and during this great sifting process from history, only those sufficiently subordinate white folks like Peggy McIntosh and Robyn D’Angelo will be exempt from this application of identity politics to their writing because they were “good” or useful to the cause.

Never mind that Peggy McIntosh was from one of the richest white families in Brooklyn and had never spent a moment in the ghetto when God inspired her to list out her privileges that black people didn’t have. Things like having her hair did by anyone in her neighborhood, being sure they would understand how to cut her hair. Had she come to my neighborhood in Atlanta, she would have quickly scrapped that nonsense lest she walk out bald. My point is that had anyone applied the critical analysis of identity like you claim that you do to the foundational work of white privilege, they would have clearly seen that the privileges of which she was confessing were not shared by all white people as she claimed, but rather by the rich white aristocracy from which she alone came.

Never mind that Robin D’Angelo’s book on white fragility chronicles cases of white people getting angry when feeling pressured to be polite to black people who felt no such pressure. Her entirely self-referential fragility could be easily discounted when you consider her position and her identity. She owns 4 mansions in San Francisco where she charges outrageous amounts of money to peddle white guilt and self-deprecation as a testimony to white supremacy. No self-respecting academic could read her work without laughing and yet here we are.

My point in relaying this story is, of course, to use Derek Bell’s preferred method of supporting his arguments–the anecdote. Hopefully, you can see how someone could easily be indoctrinated into a cult-like mentality that has but one goal: to bring about the destruction of our democracy because they believe, as Derek Bell does, that no society built on racism is redeemable and that the only way forward is to tear it all down and start from scratch.

And you want us to take Darrell’s analysis of past research based on his own biased identity as though it has more academic goodness than the original article? Surely you see that it is equally as biased and that the future analysts will then be responsible for going back to correct for your political identity in your analysis of bias in previous papers….it’s ridiculous and it’s exactly what you are proselytizing.

Summary

In summary, let me say that I have written and rewritten this about 20 times since I saw your post (included). I do not believe that you have any conscious malice or that you are aware of how your identity leaves you with only the past to draw comfort when you discard the parts you don’t like.

I hope you can see that you have no mystical insight into the minds of the past by which your analysis can be any less biased or expressive of current social norms.

I hope you can see that even if you did have God-given skills at analyzing the identity of historical writers, you would still have to account for the social identity of the region where the paper was written. You would have to know the social moires of the time and you would have to be able to suspend your own personal beliefs based on modern logic when sifting through history.

And if nothing else, I hope you can see that cherry-picking the good and bad parts from history based on writers that you see as problematic is nothing more than propaganda.

Please reconsider that you have no particular insight into history that isn’t formed from your own Identity and therefore you are claiming that your point of view is more accurate, more virtuous than others and history has shown that it is not. We are all subject to interpretation and we are all fodder for propaganda.

PS. Please know that I mean no disrespect and that my writing style is more an expression of my passion and my affinity for the spectrum. When obviously good-hearted and well-meaning people like yourself are rewriting history while ignoring the real-time results of this sentiment, we are rapidly approaching the most violent time in our history (certainly the last 25 years) and the more we fight amongst ourselves, the more we become easy targets. Surely you have seen other representative democracies go down this path as liberals create racial or sociopolitical unrest and a weary, broken democracy welcomes an authoritarian that can deliver peace. Surely as a student of power structures, you see the potential we are headed for.

In Response to @emmanuelacho

@emmanuelacho

Reply to @alt.waifu.cosplay This is our safe space. Welcome to #uncomfortableconversations

♬ original sound – Emmanuel Acho

Dear Emmanuel Acho,
I want to first thank you for your Tik Tok video. I look forward to watching the full video soon.

I wanted to also tell you that I appreciate what you are trying to do and I can see the virtue in your intentions. The unfortunate thing about this Tik Tok is that it introduces a subject and immedately sends people in the wrong direction. In your attempt to make white people comfortable, you have made some tacit assumptions that serve more to undermine your goal than I think you are aware.

When you grant your viewers the notion that there is a lack of success in black people, you are painting black people with the same miopic brush that your viewers use. There are 10 black billionaires in the United States and hundreds of millionaires. This is hardly expressive of an inability to succeed. Yet you go with it. Why would you concede that black people are unable to succeed? Black people are not monolithic. In 150 short years, despite all odds, black people have progressed through society in ways that we have not seen from a formerly enslaved group of people in all of history. To that end, there can be no doubt that Black Americans are the richest, most successful black people on the planet by any measure. To be a modern Black American is to be successful already in so many ways. Statistically, the black middle class in America has exploded and is growing at a faster rate than the subculture of poverty that so many people want to characterize as “black.” You tacitly approve of this in your video.

You then continue by admitting that you “thought about it” rather than researched it. You proceed to tell us what seems like logic, at least from your perspective. But you fail to account for the time period after slavery was abolished when black families were strong and stayed together despite all odds. You see the way that black families were decimated systematically by slave holders didn’t destroy a belief in family. If anything, it gave cause for black freed citizens to cherish family more than anything. Slavery absolutely was terrible and it destroyed a great number of black families, but it instilled in freed black communities the importance of family. Look back only 3 generations and it you will find black couples still married having raised dozens of children and grandchildren. It cannot be Slavery that destroyed the black family or those families would have been even more heavily influenced than black citizens are today.

And we see this despite Jim Crowe, despite widespread acceptance of racial bias against blacks. Literally despite all odds, black families persisted. What changed?

If you would please listen to this speech by Glenn Loury at the National Conservatism Conference where he addresses this exact topic in much more eloquent detail than I ever could. He’s an award winning economist and his concern is for Black Americans as he is a Black American himself. Please consider what he says.

In Response to cglenharris on Tik-Tok

I have written this lengthy response no less than half a dozen times. Why would I care to do that over a simple Tik Tok post that only 1200 people are subscribed to?

Simple.

I think you are likely a good person and I appreciate some of your content. I don’t feel like you are prone to lying, but I do think that you should reconsider the message you are sending out there.

I am hoping to appeal to your sense of duty and intellectual honesty and hope that you are willing to see my point of view on this topic. While I hate Shapiro’s delivery and I think he makes some stupid mistakes by assuming that people understand what he is saying, when you listen to the entire video and you hear what he is saying, you can see that it’s nothing like what you suggested he was saying or implying. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite.

So please, put on your objectivity cap for a moment and consider this long-winded post that I respectfully submit in the hopes that you will engage me in a conversation about the issue in good faith rather than 150 characters of nastiness back and forth.

The Myth of a single Black Culture in the United States

Although it is completely unreasonable to assume that a culture exists in which all black people exist, that seems to be your argument here. When you asked me “If not, what do you define culture as” which seems to indicate that you missed the point of why he was asking the questions about the statistics he cited.  

Let’s break down what Culture means and you tell me if you can name a specific trait or traits that all black people share that would qualify them as a culture.

Borrowing heavily from the Merriam Webster’s online dictionary, I define culture as:

A Culture is the set of ideas, beliefs, and values shared by a group of people and reinforced through anecdote, appearance, tradition, ritual, and routines. By providing a descriptive name for the culture, you can use the name to also represent those who participate in its ideals.

For example:

  • John only eats vegetables but doesn’t participate in the vegetarian culture. (this describes a set of values, ideas etc. that make up the vegetarian culture that eating only vegetables does not necessarily make you part of).
  • Vegetarians don’t like John. (vegetarians refers to the people in the vegetarian culture).

Question:

I answered your question about what culture means, can you please show me how all black people are part of a single culture and not part of multiple cultures? If in fact, the only similarity you can name is related to the pigment in their skin, I want to point out that that’s what race is. Not culture.

Back to the Clip

Now let’s consider this clip by taking for granted the common-sense notion that when you say something about black people in general,  it refers to their race and not some culture within the race.

For example:

When I ask why black people like Chitlins, I am suggesting that this is a race issue that all black people necessarily like Chitlins. We both know that not all black people like Chittlins so therefore this is not a valid argument about race.

This is the logic that Shapiro is clearly using

Addressing the False Presumption that Race is the Defining Factor in Statistics.

If the wage gap is about race and not about a culture within the race, how about these issues? These are statistics that you would argue are also about race? And he lists them out and it sounds horrible. It’s positively offensive to believe the statistics he cites are indicative of a race of people. He agrees.

When he says, in response to the dismay about his claim, “Well then you explain to me why…” That’s obviously the same as saying, “If it is race then why…” Which would be immediately offensive intentionally. Nobody thinks that all black people fail to graduate high school, but if the issue is RACE, that that would have to be true for all or at least most black people. It’s not and he knows it because he’s discussing this issue two two college graduates who prove that it’s not about race.

In fact, that’s his point. It’s not about race. It’s about a culture that exists partly within a race—not the entire race.

You need only look at the questions he asks and ask yourself, “Is this something that is common to all black people as a race?” and immediately your response should be “No”. Use yourself as an example. Did you fail high school? No. Therefore the underlying issue is not race. Period. In fact, all of the statistics that he brings up relate not to race, but to a culture within the black race.

Clever Ommission Of Key Points

But even more to the point, the parts that you cut out show that he further explains that in white Appalachia, the same culture exists. White people have the same culture in white communities.

And though you thought you were being sly by trying to say that he was insulting people from Appalachia, guess what? The people from Appalachia aren’t delusional about some of the people around them. They are well aware of the culture of criminal actions that go on in their area. They will even tell you how ignorant, destructive, and backward the people he’s talking about are.

It’s not judgment or racism or even nastiness. It’s fact. But like with Black people, like with White People, and even like with people living in Appalachia, it’s not about race, it’s about this one particular culture that sponsors uneducated violent criminal individuals.

This is why it is not about race. It’s about culture.

But this is not what you brought up in your video at all. You didn’t bring up race or culture. You simply leveraged the tired trope of racist thought that all black people “look and act” the same. He never suggested, inferred, or hinted at how black people look or act. In fact, that is exactly his argument, that black people don’t look and act the same. Black people belonging to a specific culture often look and act alike because their culture reinforces this.

For example

Nigerians are almost entirely black with a lot of pigment in their skin. They have traditions and beliefs that they cherish for being Nigerian. They may keep these traditions as they  come to America. That’s a cutlure within the black community where its members may look and act alike by choice.

Gangsta Culture exists in the black community which espouses rising up against the police, breaking laws, selling drugs, doing drugs, drinking, having multiple sex partners, treating women like shit, spending lots of money, having nice cars, expensive clothes, etc. This is a culture that you see a lot of young black people attracted to, but guess what? It’s not entirely a black culture. White people buy more music from this culture than black people do by a lot.

White people in a specific culture do the same. This is not racism and it has nothing to do with what he was saying.

Clearly, he is asking the panel guests how, if it is race that explains the wage gap, how does it make sense that all black people therefore face these issues. They don’t and therefore it can’t be about race.

The answer to every single question he asks, “explain to me how black kids are killing blacks at a rate much higher than white kids are killing whites?” is that a culture of ultra-violent people exists in the black (as well as white) community that is causing these problems. In fact, you could say that a culture of white males exist that feel disenfranchised and take it out on schools and mass shootings. There’s no need to deny that this culture exists, but it is not white culture even though most mass murders end up being white men.

How Extremes Affect Racial Statistics

More importantly than just that each race has this fucked up culture within our race is the fact that this culture plays a much more significant and detrimental role in evaluating statistics based on race. I would even go so far as to say that largely this criminal culture is often isolated completely from the majority of black citizens just like it is in white communities. Out of sight is out of mind for most people. So, when a black (or white) person is called to task about this portion of their community, they deny it exists. It does.

Benefits of Cultural Influences on Racial Statistics

Rather than accept that there are some of the most violent and destructive people in a culture within the back community and seeking to resolve this problem first, instead many black activists, yourself included, want to use this community to leverage the public view of racial inequality.

You would be foolish to eliminate this community through education and community action because then statistics about race would suddenly show a remarkable improvement in the quality of black lives.  With as many as 8000 young black people per year killed by other black people, don’t you think the life expectancy of a black person would jump at least 4 years if that was eliminated?

Without this group of destructive people under the umbrella of the black race, you would have to account for the vast improvement and continued rate of improvement in black lives across the country. Right now, any success is measured by including the biggest failures within the race; lowering the statistical view of the quality of black lives based on a culture within their community that they don’t ever come in contact with.

White Community and Its Cultures

Historical Wealth vs. Time

But lets just look at the white community, which also suffers from this cultural phenomenon. White people, when viewed as a whole have significant advantages given by time that nobody will ever be able to account for. There can be no doubt that racist policies have made some people extremely rich. There can be no doubt that in the past when a community of black citizens started accruing wealth, racist white people would come in and massacre them. That’s a fact.

Trying to fix the past is not going to help. But today, we have laws that prevent this. We have a national conscience that says that is wrong. If that happened today, the whole country would hunt those people down and hold them to justice.

The only way that the effects of historical family wealth will ever be leveled is through time. As more and more successful black families plan for their children’s futures, more and more wealth will be handed down and one day the gap in accumulated wealth will disappear.

The majority of Americans don’t benefit from that kind of wealth. It’s just the top percentages that get an inheritance. So again, we are comparing unlike groups when we compare the entire race. The gap between the rich and the poor affects both races and the vast majority of both don’t get the benefits that some white families do through historical wealth.

Statistical Extremes

So partly because of historical wealth accumulation and other factors, whites have a disproportionate number of super-wealthy people. Given the same exact logic that we used to say that including the poorest segment of black society in the comparison when trying to determine median wealth distorts the picture, the same has to be true for white people.

That is to say that while black people have an extreme on the poor end that is unreflective of the typical black household, white people have that same extreme on the rich end. This raises the median worth of white people and lowers the median worth of black people. This increases the gap considerably while people who are in the middle don’t experience the gap as it is being protrayed.

The “typical” black family is not affected by either extreme and the “typical” white family is not either. If you were to leave off the extremes for both groups and just evaluate like with like, there could still be a gap between household values.

At that point, and only at that point, would it be reasonable to explore the idea that current and not historical racial bias is the cause of the gap. Until then, you have to understand that the negative culture affecting both whites and blacks disproportionately affects blacks in the negative while whites are disproportionately affected in the positive by the small culture of the super-wealthy.

Yes, blacks have super-wealthy and whites have super poor people, but they are not distributed the same. In fact they are distributed inversely, doubling the appearance of the wealth gap. When the real gap in wealth for a household in the black community is likely to be more in line with the wages for a similar family in the white community.

And that has probably been your experience as well. You may see some difference that I don’t see, but for the most part, you aren’t seeing white people making 68x what you are making in the same jobs with the same experience and education. If you are, you should be seeking legal remedies which exist, not making false claims on Tik-Tok for popularity.

But What About the Social Influence on the Wage Gap?

Let’s look at what happens here though. You and other successful black citizens see this report and feel that it is evidence of racism despite that it doesn’t really play out that way in your life or experience. You tell your kids that the world is an unfair place and racism is everywhere.

How do you expect your kids, when constantly being bombarded by biased statistics and the claim that they are oppressed, how do you expect them to succeed? While you benefitted from growing up during a time where racism was considered so bad that people chose not to see it, it wasn’t until later that children get the message from every corner of the media telling them they are oppressed.

How can they have hope that they won’t just be killed by a cop (even though the chances of this happening are 1:.00000056 which is less likely than being hit by lightning) or end up in prison? How do you expect, if the menacing presence of insurmountable racism is omnipresent in their lives, where is the motivation to study hard in school with goals of growing up to be a scientist?

And before you answer, it’s important that you hear me when I say this. It is under this unfortunate burden, whether valid or not, that the vast majority of Black Americans have endured and overcome racism to make success happen in their lives. This is the message that I believe is important and one that is being left out of the current narrative by blaming racist white people for any failure by any black person.

The message that black people and white people can work together to make the country better; that while racism exists, most white people don’t feel or express it, that all people have a duty to find individual examples of racism and find legal ways of remedying those instance. There are so many white people who know, in their hearts, that the richness of our country is based not on the blandness of uniformity, but rather on the spice of our differences. That’s such a different message than what is being put out there today.

But let me ask you honestly this second question:

Do you think that growing up with the current narrative in the media that racism is systemic and that black people have no hope of ever being as successful as white people…can you predict any effect that this narrative would have on wage earnings or family wealth for black families? And if you want to use your family as an example, did your family mirror this same sentiment: that white people are always going to hold you back? Or did they tell you that while it exists, you are stronger than that. Don’t focus on it, just do your best! How were you able to overcome this insurmountable oppression that so many people today want to believe in?

If you knew that everything was constantly stacked against you and that every attempt to remedy the problem by white folks just created more problems, wouldn’t you be more likely to live your life to the fullest and fuck the man?

Wouldn’t it make more sense not to get married and settle down? Wouldn’t it be easy to justify a huge line of credit for a sports car you wreck while racing around the streets of Atlanta. If the pervasive belief is that you are going to be killed by a cop or arrested unfairly? What motivation is there to follow the law and do the hard work that YOU personally have done to succeed?

I can’t imagine it. I had a hard enough time growing up poor as a gay white male on the spectrum, I cannot begin to fathom growing up black and facing not just the actual racism, but the constant rhetoric that I am going to be a failure because of my skin color. This is the narrative being fed to young inner-city black kids. This is the narrative that perpetuates the cycle that holds the black race back when viewed as a whole.

And if you doubt what I say, simply read Derrick Bell’s novel Faces at the Bottom of the Well and then listen to interviews where he says point-blank that he struggles with the idea that after black people read his book they will lose hope. It’s because he believes that the United States will always be racist and will only allow black people to succeed when it pleases them. It’s a fundamental aspect of CRT that nobody wants to talk about while they usher it into public schools.

This is also the narrative that white people have absolutely no control over. No matter what white people do, we can’t stop this narrative. You can and yet you choose to propagate it by making false claims on Tik Tok.

And despite the fact that Shapiro is an arrogant and self-righteous asshole, that’s his message as well. It just doesn’t come across right at all because he’s on the spectrum. He’s a tantrum-throwing nerd with a head full of statistics. He doesn’t have the human interface to understand how people feel and couldn’t care less when it comes down to it.

But he does know the jeopardy that we all face when we are raised with a spectre of insurmountable force trying to hold us back. If you blame everything on racism, whether true or not, then there is no hope or room for success as a black person. You will always suffer from being less than if you believe that racism is insurmountable and omnipresent. We have had this narrative since 1986 in this country and perhaps from earlier than that.

Regardless of how long black activists have been trying to blame racism for every problem in their lives, there can be no doubt whatsoever that if black communities, especially the violent culture of black citizens killing each other, stopped focusing on racism and started focusing on their own success. Changing this narrative would have profound effects on the cultures in black communities that have given up and chosen not to participate in education, employment, etc.

And don’t even try to pull the standard social justice warrior bullshit about how since I am a cis-gendered white male, I will never understand. I never said I did understand and I never claimed that it would be easy. Somehow it worked for you and the more than 10 billionaires, the hundreds of successful black politicians, and the millions of black business owners, managers, etc. Somehow, these people were able to suffer through worse racism than we have today and still make it. Shouldn’t that be more important than racism itself?

I grew up in the midwest as a gay kid and I have been beaten up repeatedly growing up. I have had my nose broken and nearly took someone’s head off in a fight I was so fed up. I don’t know what it’s like to be black, but I do know that gay people have focused on the blessings that being gay and having a community of gay people brings. We have had in-your-face protests and violent protests and through it all, we have learned that the most effective way to live our lives is proud.

We focus on the positives despite having hundreds of thousands of our gay friends and families decimated by AIDS, drug addiction, and depression. Black people do not own a monopoly on suffering. But from where I stand, it sure looks like there is a push to make black people into victims. My black friends and family are not victims.

When you blame everything that goes wrong in your life on someone else or some specter of oppression, how can you ever hope to succeed? And how do you explain all of the black people who faced this same influence or worse and yet persevered and are successful today? Like yourself?

Even groups like Black Lives Matter come with the pregnant implication that “because you don’t seem to know, Black Lives Matter.” You seriously think it is in the children’s best interest to believe that most people don’t think that black people matter?

And then when you look at how many black people are killed every day (roughly 6 a day) in this country by other black people and compare it to the number of white people who kill black people, there’s no real comparison. White people are not the problem facing black people here. Racism is not the problem facing black people or you wouldn’t be as successful as you are. But there can be no discussion about it because to bring that up or suggest that the best focus is on the cultural values within your community is considered racist.

If you are like me, however, you know the strength and perseverance that your successful black friends use to get through all of the bullshit and live successful lives. I don’t have to post a sign full of overloaded aphorisms and trite tautologies to demonstrate my commitment to equality. I just wish that you could be supportive of the narrative that despite any obstacles, black people will prosper so long as they have hope. I’m just afraid that this current set of stories in the media is creating an atmosphere of hopelessness. One that you, inadvertently or not, are contributing to.

If you look at my neighborhood in Southwest Atlanta, it is terrifying. While the national rate of black people getting killed by other black people is 26+ per day, at least one if not more of those comes from my neighborhood. The crime is out of control and cops are 40,000 understaffed because of our corrupt Mayor and her public pandering that destroyed our police force.

When idiots are marching to support defunding the police (don’t get me started on the double-speak issue), these aren’t people from my neighborhood which is almost all black. These are people from higher income brackets appropriating what they think is affecting black poor communities. Meanwhile, people in my neighborhood, some as old as 75 years old wish these out of touch idiots would shut the fuck up. They know the harmful effects of less police involvement in their communities. They know that less police = MORE DEATH AND CRIME.

It doesn’t stop the self-righteous justice warriors. And the results are in. In Atlanta, people are shot every day within 5 miles of my house. Atlanta is a perfect example of what happens when you have fewer police. It’s not looking good for our future and I already hear the same sentiments expressed in the 1990s where black leaders are begging for more cops, stricter laws, more enforcement, more physical presence while white cops are being prohibited from entering a crime scene by mobs of angry black youth who have bought into the lies and distortions claiming that cops are trying to kill them. Why would they when they could just pull back and let them kill themselves like what’s happening in Atlanta. THIS is the actual real-time effect of your sentiment. Because you look black, according to a successful black person who doesn’t live anywhere near you, you can’t get a job. That’s bullshit and that’s what’s holding black people back. The racism is yours and you are promoting it.

And hoping that we have a history for this country, it will be the kind of sentiment that you are pushing that explains how the American experiment failed. Self-righteous successful black people appropriating the cause of poor black people (who didn’t ask for help in the first place) have created an environment that is quickly destroying the fabric of our democracy.

Quit appropriating the struggle that you don’t have to experience because you sit in your nice house afforded to you by your college education. Come live in my neighborhood for a month and see if your perspective changes. Come listen to the families of black children gun downed by other black children for no reason and tell me that racism is the problem. Come listen to the real-time list of crimes in my neighborhood and tell me how racism empirically is the cause of all of this. Come tell me why it is that you managed to overcome these influences and become successful when so many can’t. Tell me how you are part of the black culture that I live in every day, you aren’t.

Either that or you can admit once and for all that there exist different cultures within the black community. Some of them are violent, criminal, and bring everyone down. Solve that problem then we will have a much clearer view of the effects of racism and we can much more effectively address whatever needs to be addressed. Until then, all you are doing is appropriating another black culture’s struggle, wallowing in appropriated self pity, and blaming white people for all of your appropriated problems. Work with other black cultures to minimize the effects of perceived racism and you would be much more effective at reducing any real racism that still lingers. If this small culture of black people would stop committing more than half the violent crime in the country, racism would take a serious blow.

When you can quit judging all white people by the worst of our cultures, we can work together. But just because you see all white people as representative of the worst culture in the white community doesn’t mean that white people still believe that every black person is representative of the most vile cultures in your community. We don’t.  We don’t see it as something that pertains to race like you do. We see it as pertaining to the culture of individuals.