Diversity, Inclusion, Equity | James Lindsay

[Music] so i'm according to the doc it's supposed to talk to you about diversity inclusion and equity and i have to start with a confession that i have a bit of a frustration that i've been living for the last several years which is when i try to explain what seems to be a simple word like diversity or inclusion to an audience on the internet in writing people think i'm crazy so i'm going to start by saying that we're not ready to learn about diversity inclusion and equity and this is what you're going to run into everywhere you go that's the point in this fight where we are to understand diversity inclusion and equity you have to understand where those ideas are coming from i realize there's a bit of chats but involved in this room saying that ideas have consequences but they do that's true and the set of ideas that stands behind diversity inclusion and equity makes those words not mean with maybe the exception of equity what you think they mean and if you don't understand that you're not ready to talk about it i recently gave a talk in front of a group of people conservatives and at the end a lady raised their hand and said i don't want to have to be smarter i don't have to read another book i don't want to have to understand i just want to tell these people they're wrong because i know i'm right and i know they're wrong and i had a picture in my mind of somebody you know the nazis bombing london and somebody's saying i don't want to know what an airplane is i don't want to build an anti-aircraft gun i just want them to stop you've got to understand where these ideas come from and i have dedicated the last ever since the whole fake paper dog humping thing two years of my life or thereabouts that was just over two years ago that came out to helping people understand the ideology in fact the world view in which these ideas have arisen and it's not what your worldview is whether you are christian whether you are secular whether you are muslim whether you are an old school marxist it is not the way you think about the world those people all believe in objective truth this is a very different fight these ideas are concerned with one and one only organizational principle of society which is systemic power if you don't understand these ideas and all of the other ideas that the woke movement uses in terms of systemic power you don't understand the ideas at all and what's going to happen is you're going to get played and you're going to get played again and you're going to get played again and you're going to get played again and you're going to say fun words like you know they can't mean that they must mean this more reasonable thing and i'm going to tell you that part of you getting played is them depending on you to translate their ideas back into liberal ease the way that people that believe in objective truth fairness correspondence to reality would understand those ideas people who do not believe that everything in the world comes down to systemic power in its operations so i have to walk you through a little bit of history to get you ready and we will probably spend a lot less time talking about diversity inclusion and equity than you may have feared we're going to start although the story doesn't start here but we're going to start with karl marx and we're not going to dig deeply into karl marx we're not going to get into das capital we're not going to do the whole thing mark's had a couple of very important ideas one of which was it very important ideas in terms of shaping the world i should say one of which was the idea that we shouldn't study society to understand it we should study it to change it another of these ideas is what is known as conflict theory that is that the world is separated into stratified groups that's a technical term to mean something like classes or castes and that those stratified groups are in a zero-sum conflict for the resources opportunities in power in society there is no cooperation there is no positive sum game positive sum is a fancy way to say all ships rise together there's no mutual cooperation which is a little funny given the goal of the communist utopia the classes of society are in zero some conflict and marx put the locus of conflict theory on economics he believed that if the workers could unite workers of the world unite that's the saying if they could unite and seize the means of economic production they could turn the ship of society toward the communist utopia details to be filled in on the other side of the gulag didn't work wasn't true people noticed in fact people who are very relevant to the story not just liberals noticed and so in the late 19 teens going into the early 1920s a group of people that eventually convened in frankfurt germany formed the school of critical theory the frankfurt school the institute for social research as it was called and they wanted to study why marx was wrong and they said in a sense following the uh italian communist antonio gramsci that it it it's not as it turns out just economics it's more complicated than that culture matters and thus the things that prop up culture matters faith family the institutions of society those matter those have to be subverted that's where consciousness has to be raised to show that there are powerful entities in society who are creating conditions systemic or structural conditions under which other people are oppressed so the oppressed have to be told that they're being fed culture by the elites and that they are accepting that and internalizing their own oppression as natural right or the proper order of things so we now have a shift some people have referred to this as cultural marxism this is a fraught term it's very complicated issue there are multiple things that go by that name very skillfully it was appended the idea of a conspiracy theory uh that's anti-semitic so it's very difficult to talk about cultural marxism without falling into that trap so it's best not to it's best to say they applied conflict theory to culture which is the same thing they applied conflict theory to these various elements of culture into the cultural institutions and you started to have different thinkers arise so you had theodore adorno arise he's looking at media he's looking at propaganda he's looking at how that was used to feed the elite culture into to the the common person and get them to accept their lives you see this emergence of popular culture starting to happen in the uh a little bit in the interwar but especially in the post-war era post-world war two and they're very critical of this in 1937 you had a book that was written by max horkheimer that separated thought into two types of theory traditional and critical theories and so this is the formal birth of critical theory it didn't actually begin specifically in 1918 or 1920 when the frankfurt school began by 1937 it was outlined that critical theories were going to come into the world to understand society so that you might change it so we come back to marx's other big idea they wanted to implement it so now we've got marxian conflict theory analysis being applied to avenues of culture you've got the high culture high society dictating what is good in life and how people should aspire and what they should hope to what social mobility would look like and convincing the poor oppressed plebs that they uh have it good when in fact they have it bad even though they like their lives so you have to agitate them to do this critical theory became the tool to do that we had a quote on the marquee a few minutes ago talking about that when you use science the objective is to understand the truth of the thing and when you use alchemy the the objective is operational success in this case science is traditional theory the traditional theories were philosophy they were science they were things that cared about epistemic adequacy they were the attempt to find truth to describe the world as it is and to understand it remember there's this dichotomy are we going to understand the world or are we going to change it right so traditional theory was used to understand the world as it is critical theory was the other side it was to understand how the systems that exist the structures that exist are failing people you have to understand how they're failing people not understand how they work how they fail people traditional theories for understanding how they work they work in tandem you also have to have a normative vision you have to know where you're trying to change society in this case it was not toward marxism but toward communism anyway by other means through changing culture and you had to make a critical theory by definition has to be applicable to social activism so you have to have these three ingredients or you're not dealing with a critical theory so critical theories born in 1937 as a means of bringing social activism to change the world according to our normative vision by picking at the scabs of where the structures and systems of society institutions of society fall short of that normative vision and by norm division again i mean the pathway to the utopia these ideas are very dangerous but used in tandem they still fall within this broad scope of modernism traditional theory still exists the original critical theorists for whatever their flaws and their thinking might have been whatever their flaws and their objective might have been were still bound by objective truth they still thought that traditional theories and critical theories must be used in tandem to understand society and to advance progressively in the 1960s this is the subject of my book that mr o'fallon mentioned um cynical theories in the 1960s we had a new line of thought blossom and the french kind of avant-garde philosophy scene drawing off of art and literature that preceded it by a couple of decades that's post-modernism post-modernism is playful by definition and one of the main things that they want to do is play they want to play with ideas they want to take ideas apart that's your deconstruction eventually the post-modernists were highly influenced by a french school of thought that's been mostly discredited called structuralism that believed that the ways that language is used in society has a lot to do with the structures that evolve in society we the way we talk the way that we believe the way that we inter interact with language and communicate meaning structure society in some meaningful way and the post-modernists grew skeptical of this in a particular way and said that what's really going on is that language is a vehicle of power so with the post-modernists we have two kind of main ideas that were kind of brought to the fore among many it's a sprawling philosophical uh school of thought or if we stretch the word philosophical a bit to do that but it's a sprawling school of thought the two main ideas are that objective truth as a matter of fact is inaccessible as richard rorty the american pragmatist kind of post-modernist put it the world might be out there but the truth isn't out there the more famous most famous maybe post-modern philosopher michel foucault had a particular belief about truth he thought that truth knowledge and power are the same thing knowledge and power are not related to one another they are in fact the same thing that the power applies itself through truth so if you don't understand this about power we can't understand words like diversity inclusion and equity so for foucault the belief was that you have these statements people call them truths somebody got to authenticate them as truth maybe they were scientists maybe they're philosophers maybe they're politicians maybe they were journalists somebody had the privilege of saying these things are true and other things are false and in particular for foucault these other other things are crazy they're mad those are to be completely thrown out and he had a very pessimistic read of science as a result he saw science as a process of applying power through claims on truth people went to school perhaps or they worked with the with an existing scientist and they learned the so-called methods of science they learned how to authenticate truths as a scientist but in fact foucault said this is a political process the process of becoming a trained scientist has more to do with playing the political game in the social meloo in which scientists are considered important and in which they're educated then it has to do with anything else so his underlying belief was we have these claims about the world that are called truths or truth claims and truths or truth claims might be true in reality they might correspond to reality or they might be false but to worry about that is to miss the point that there was a political process that made them be considered so and so he put a really thick wall between reality and our claims about truth truth is now on the other side of a impossible epistemic barrier truth becomes a cultural artifact so the first real principle of post-modern thought is that truth and knowledge are cultural constructions they are the product of a social system and the power contained within that social system and its operations so now truth is power everything is power we can't look to the world to find out if something is true or not because power determined the method by which we will say yes this is true and no that is false and that is right out that's crazy that's a application of power and nothing more and that's where the fruitful analysis lies he softened just to be completely fair to foucault he softened later near the end of his life he gave a series of lectures on on his concept of biopower and he was much more accepting of this he still asserted that it was a method of applying power but he was much more uh accepting of it than other you know more tyrannical applications of power but the most important thing was that he had introduced and loosed into the world a set of ideas where power no longer works the way that the critical theorists and the the marxists before them and then many other people aside from that believe power is no longer this weight as he said pressing down from above it works through all of us like a grid in the way that it works is through discourses the ways things are spoken about not necessarily the words we use but yes the words we use but the ways that we consider it acceptable to talk about a thing so a medical discourse for example would be kind of dr speak doctors talk about things in certain ways those are medical discourses they write about things in certain ways those are medical discourses and so the ways that it's considered acceptable to talk about certain topics became the locus of power the dominant discourses were the conveyors of power and it works through everybody everybody's a participant and so now we have this idea that society is ordered by a conspiracy theory where everybody is an unwitting conspirator and if you don't understand that this is how they think that you don't understand that this is what systemic power means you can't understand the shift from racism to systemic racism that we're facing today okay so everybody's participating in this all the time by the ways that we think by the way that we structure our language by the ways that we interact by the ways that we consider interactions to be legitimate and illegitimate foucault was very concerned with the central idea of expanding the potentialities of being i love that phrase expanding the potentialities of being and when you do have a genuinely repressive system you do want to expand the potentialities of being when you have an oppressive church you do want to open that up for example when you have an oppressive church saying no we're not going to do science we're going to accept this dogma in place and you're going to put galileo in in house arrest we're going to set ginardo bruno on fire for discovering that the stars are positing that the stars and the sun are the same kind of thing and refusing to recant you definitely want to expand some of your potentialities of being a little bit right however there's a limit which is called reality reality also reality has a very important definition which is it is the thing you run into when your beliefs are false okay so if you expand your potentialities of being beyond the ranges of reality whether those are the realities of physics or whether those are the realities of human interaction and the principles that lead to true true human flourishing you start running reliably into problems and this is whether he were whether his analysis falls on the positive or negative valence of history is what michelle foucault unleashed under the world that we need to expand beyond the correspondence theory of truth because truth doesn't sorry i shouldn't say truth doesn't exist truth is inaccessible that's the postmodern belief nobody can claim truth nobody is objective we're all subject to our biases and our biases are located in the cultures in which we find ourselves everything is a cultural artifact post-modernism and critical theory both kind of wore themselves out through the 60s they they rose through the 70s they rose and then through the 80s they declined post-modernism is a bit silly it's a bit difficult to buy into at the end of the day reality is still out there it's still the thing you run into and your beliefs are false we're not going to expand our potentialities of being that far deconstruction has its limits at least in terms of fruitful activism critical theory became just kind of annoying in the post-war period following herbert marcusa herbert marcus wrote one dimensional man in 1964 and in one dimensional man he explained that they need a a coalition built out of the liberal intelligentsia together with the racial minorities and the societal outsiders that's who was going to push critical theory forward and so you ended up with this vein of very radical activists who brought riots to our streets much like we're seeing now 1964 is when this comes out repressive tolerance that we should not tolerate ideas that uh are against that normative vision of critical theory that's 1965 1967 detroit's on fire 1968 more riots by the 70s people are getting tired of this critical theory started to burn itself out even the academic stuff people just kind of rolled their eyes and got sick of it by the time we got to the 1980s going into the early 1990s but a handful of activists many of whom learned directly from not marcusa himself but one of his students angela davis who's very active with black lives matter today many of these people realized that there was a fruitful site of renewing the critical theory school of activism by picking up post-modern theory so you can see it one way or you can see it the other way that critical theory picked up post-modern tools or that post-modernism morphed into a more critical theory mindset but either way the observation that brought the two concepts together into a completely new form that we in cynical theories call applied post-modernism but it is actually the birthplace of woki-ism was that you have to have an awful lot of privilege to deconstruct a site of systemic oppression somebody who experiences who has the lived experience the lived reality of systemic oppression cannot deconstruct that you must be privileged to deconstruct that you can't deconstruct racism because you don't live it and so now we have a shift with post-modernism we've already slipped from the truth to your truth versus my truth and now we've located that within ideas of systemic oppression that are rooted in race gender sexuality ethnicity religion disability status fat status you could just go on and on even they the people who promote these theories get tired of listing all of the different identity statuses judith butler a very famous queer theorist the kind of fairy godmother of queer theory um in fact calls it that exasperated etc when you have to list all of the different identity categories so all of a sudden now you have your truth as a white person black person man woman gay straight and my truth as a something else and one of those ideas that they borrowed from foucault was that those exist in different cultures therefore they exist in different truth regimes they have different ways of knowing they have different ways of understanding and they can't understand one another they cannot find some objective external standard by which they can settle the difference when your truth and my truth don't agree they are cultural products and cultural products only and the critical theory idea stepped into this and said but there is a way to judge because systemic oppression is surely wrong if we want to be charitable if we want to be uncharitable we remember that they also said the critical theorists that a marxist revolution can't have just one axis of fighting or one axis of conflict say proletariat versus bourgeoisie as of a constellation of axes say race and gender and sexuality and ability status and fat status and ethnicity in religion you need multiple dimensions upon which you can fight the conflict theory fight and so critical theory and postmodernism fused into a new view of power power works through everybody it is systemic it works at the level of discourses to create systemic oppression those oppressions are based in identity categories primarily because identity politics had become the ascendant thing following marcusa into davis into the critical race theorists first especially kimberly crenshaw and bell hooks who were black feminists that is not to say that there are black women who are feminists which is also true it is actually a school of thought i have to clarify that every time people think i'm saying a thing i'm not saying there are black feminists who were very concerned about the idea that there are multiple systems of oppression in play when you were a black woman and they wanted to expound upon this by borrowing ideas that were growing at a queer theory that saw the intersections of oppression across the three things that queer theory is most interested in which are sex gender and sexuality and so they borrowed these ideas and built this thing that kimberly crenshaw laid out and defined as a practice called intersectionality she defined it first in 1989 and by 1991 she wrote a very famous paper called mapping the margins you want to understand where the margins are you want to understand what she's talking about the mard the margins of mapping the margins are she lists at the beginning of the paper one radical feminism which she decried as white feminism that was disinterested in black women and to black liberationism which she said was black male oriented and the identity politics around those two things left out black women that's the point of intersectionality version 1.0 she then proceeds to give a scathing critique in the style of critical race theory of liberalism and liberal values saying that they are just a way that oppression has been maintained and hidden more successfully necessitating a critical theory that can make them visible that can convince people who think that their lives are fair and equal and good that their lives actually suck and that they are under the thumb of systemic oppression under the form of white supremacy and patriarchy even if they don't realize it even if they never experienced these things themselves even if they think that this is mostly a relic of the past with maybe some inertial issues in some occasional uh ignorant jerks here and there that's not how we're going to think about it anymore she critiques liberalism she also critiques post-modernism and she says that what post-modernism gets wrong is that it's going to deconstruct even those places of systemic oppression so i'm not making any of this up i'm not just riffing she actually says this she then goes on to assert unapologetically that her mission is um to give identity politics first and foremost she has a very famous paragraph which she borrowed from bell hooks that says there's something much more important and powerful about the statement i am black then i am a person who happens to be black because the second puts universal humanity in front of the identity that's what she says that's where this comes from that's what intersectionality is about put the identity first it's called identity first politics and then at the end of the paper and a paragraph near the end that puts everything i'm saying into clarity of context she says that for her intersectionality is a provisional concept linking contemporary politics and post-modern theory contemporary politics of course are those radical feminism radical liberationism that she talked about positively throughout the paper while criticizing liberal approaches like the civil rights movement as not doing the job as actually succeeding following her mentor derek bell at hiding racism rather than taking a step toward ending racism this is the birth of woke the word wasn't being used then it was a slang term that appeared here and there before roughly 2008 to 2011-12 but this is the birthplace of woke this is the place where something got stuck into deconstructionism that could not be deconstructed and it is the experience of systemic oppression by identity so this is the place where we have to start if we want to understand words like diversity inclusion equity racism everything everything you have to understand that this world view about power is where they come from you can't appeal to the facts you can't appeal to reason you can't appeal to a reasonable person standard or what a fair-minded person might think you can't appeal to faith because those are all applications of power by a means that people don't recognize as an application of power and have fooled themselves into believing are methodologically rigorous or objective or for some other reason legitimate these are people who have fooled themselves into believing that the power they gave themselves to be authenticators of truth are natural it is fooling yourself to believe that they are rigorous it is fooling yourself to believe that they are anything other than a base application of identity politics by other means in particular white western often straight male ways of knowing and so now we have this cultural relativism that has come out of post-modern thinking that one culture does not have the necessary epistemic or ethical tools to judge another culture and we add in the critical theory dichotomy of oppressor versus oppressed that drives back to marx and there is now an answer all the cultural methods of producing knowledge of producing truth of speaking of organizing society all of them are equal except the one produced by straight white men in europe under the enlightenment that one's bad that one's wrong and so this is the world that we live in now so we have this view of power that works this way that it's always that it's everywhere it's imminent when there's an act of racism the only reason there was an act of racism is because we live in a society that has produced a system that would allow an act of racism to occur it wouldn't be possible to be racist for a racist action or act or belief or word if we lived in a society where it wasn't permissible so this is totalitarian even if we were to then scrub all of the racist acts and actions beliefs words deeds out of society though the system itself being built with racist biases as they say would remain racist and racism would still be occurring without a single racist person act belief word deed anything this is the view that they have the system itself is racist because it was formed under the conditions of racist racism by people who didn't know that they were racist and falsely believe that they are objective where objectivity in the words of the now famous author robin d'angelo is something that we should consider neither possible nor desirable instead we should have subjectivism the subjective experience of the lived reality of systemic oppression is the only and highest truth and it carries with an ethical imperative to make it visible and to tear it apart so i'll give you an example within critical race theory critical race he's very famous i know some of you will have heard this example i've given it a number of times too lazy to think of another one um i mean it works right you just keep doing the same thing uh so this is how critical race theory since it's so popular you need to understand this is how it analyzes the situation so i want you to envision for a moment that you run a shop or store something like a tailor shop something where you have to come out and work one-on-one for a number of minutes with each customer as they come in and through whatever set of circumstances you're working alone that day you're behind the counter the bell rings the door opens and in very short order two people enter before you can react but not in a way where you have the impression that they're together they just happen to arrive roughly at the same time and one of these people is white and one of these people is black you're the only one there so you have to make a zero sum decision of who you help first the white person or the black person now the fundamental assumption of critical race theory is that these systems of power are imminent they are everywhere they are always they are permanent and they bear on every social interaction every phenomenon they are present in everything that is the fundamental operating assumption of critical race theory so the question as our friend robin deangelo put it is not did racism take place it is how did racism manifest in that situation that's a quote she's given this quote multiple times both in writing and in speech the question is not did racism take place but how did racism manifest in that situation racism is to be assumed so you now have your choice anybody in here want to go to the white person first what a shock not a single one bunch of racists so you're racist you're all racists you're all racist do you know why you're racist because you think black people can't be trusted to be left alone in that store for a few minutes while you help another customer you think they might steal something or maybe you actually wanted to help the white person you really did but you didn't want to be seen helping a white person first so you had to perform you had to pretend that you're anti-racist your decision was riddled with racism the question was not did racism take place it was how did it manifest in that situation it's that you don't trust black people and you wanted to get them out you racist anybody want to pick the white person now still no amazing look at things pause pause pause think about what that means nobody wants to pick the white person first that's the very definition of bias by the way every single one of you somehow intuit that in this new world a colorblind choice was wrong none of you want to help the white person first well that's good because that would be racist too by the way of course because racism of course must be present it's not did it take place but how did it manifest in a situation and it's obviously because you saw white people as first-class citizens black people second-class citizens who have to wait or maybe you just prefer working with members of your own race first if you're white or maybe it's that you uh any number of things this is the way that these woke critical theories analyze the world why because one the systemic idea of power must be present in all things the job of the critical theorist is to make it visible and to agitate for social activism around it like burning your store down later after they put on social media what a racist you were and three because truth doesn't matter there is no truth objective truth doesn't matter even if we were to ask well what was your motivation why did you choose as you chose doesn't matter even if it could be shown by some test that you are absolutely true doesn't matter there's probably some implicit bias at work truth doesn't matter impact not intent the impact was racist because somebody was able to write racism into the story and that's all it takes this is the woke ideology everything must be analyzed through power in this way in other words everything must be reduced to a simple understanding a cartoonish understanding of systemic power that thinks that everything that happens intentionally must have racism in it and everything that happens that produces desperate outcomes even if we can find no evidence of racism must be the result of racism that tuck that is tucked somewhere in all the cracks and corners and it's a weird room to say this in but it's the racism of the gaps i know that many of you probably heard that god of the gaps thing here or there um it's the racism of the gaps we don't know why the different the outcomes are different must be racism that's systemic racism that's how you must analyze the world and i've focused on racism but we could do the same thing with sex with gender with sexuality with ability status with fat status with that exasperated etc intersectionally intersectionally as a whatever you have to whatever your whatever you know as a black man i have to acknowledge that i'm black and therefore i have a certain understanding of systemic oppression but as a man i have to defer to to my female colleagues you know we've heard these things before that's called engaging positionality the rule in intersectionality as a practice is that intersectionality must be intentionally engaged that's how they make that's how you must think about the world if you grok this then we can talk about diversity equity and inclusion until you grow until this you don't get it so when i tell you that diversity doesn't mean what we think it means like let's bring in people with different perspectives they think that the only different perspectives that could possibly matter are ones rooted in identity but that's not even good enough that's not even good enough we have racial minorities we have women we have whatever in this room and i guarantee you you're the wrong kind of diversity you are the wrong kind of diversity because you don't have authentic diversity authentic diversity is that which is in line with that agrees with that has the sophisticated understanding of the critical theory of identity that's in play you have to be a critical theorist of identity or you have false consciousness there's another idea that sort of traces back to marx mark said it once didn't really buy it but the critical theory school really loved it engels used it a couple of times wasn't their thing false consciousness became big under the frankfurt school not under marx but it did originate there so you have false consciousness you have internalized the racist system you've internalized the patriarchal system you've internalized the heteronormative and homophobic system you've internalized cysts normativity and transphobia you've internalized these myriad words you've internalized them and so if you disagree with the critical theory of the identity as it applies you are the wrong kind of diversity so diversity means hiring critical theorists that's what diversity means and if you don't understand that they think in terms of power you think i'm crazy when i tell you that not crazy that's what they mean diversity means uniformity of critical theory thought with different colored faces they need somebody who can give the authentic lived experience of being black an authentic lived experience of being a black woman an authentic lived experience of being latino an authentically loved experience of being a gay latino they need the authentic lived experience where authentic means agrees with critical theory that's what it means and you can't possibly believe me until you understand that they think only in terms of systemic power and we we could go into a great deal of detail about how there is much value to identity if we had time and we're interested uh sorry not any diversity there's much value to diversity you have this expertise i have that expertise you came from the farm i came from the city we have different real different perspectives that bear on something we can even understand how that can apply sometimes in terms of the experience of being a certain identity group in certain contexts but those contexts are contextual and fluid and complicated and move through time that's not how critical theory sees it it's very straightforward it's very cut and dry it's very cartoonish and if you don't agree you're the wrong kind of diversity inclusion inclusion sounds great let's all be included let's we don't want to make anybody uncomfortable we don't want to make anybody want to leave we don't want anybody to feel unwelcome that's inclusion let's include people let's not exclude people what does that look like through a lens that understands the world only in terms of systemic power as related by critical theory where truth doesn't matter anything that could be construed as offensive or uncomfortable to any member of a minoritized group as they use the language to say is not inclusive that has to be stricken so inclusion means speech codes it means restricted speech it means not racial sensitivity or sex sensitivity or any of these other kinds of sensitivity it means a very extreme form in which anybody who could link the thing that was said or done to a system of power upholding a system of power has grounds to tell you that what you said or did was inappropriate and your intentions didn't matter so it means severely restricted speech it means a totalitarian environment in which the views that are considered right and authentic are the only acceptable ones unless you're asking questions to learn more so says one of their theorists barbara applebaum and her 2010 book being white being good and maybe said that wrong it's maybe it's being good being white i do it every time so i don't want to misquote that it's one or the other flip a coin she argues that the only legitimate way to disagree is to ask questions to understand better what's another example though of something that might make somebody uncomfortable well according to the critical theory that says that we live in a white supremacist head hegemony the presence of whiteness is everywhere and this is a this exact a constant toll on the people of color who have to experience living as a person of color in an oppressive white supremacist society so you have to set up all black spaces where that presence of whiteness isn't there we call that segregation they call it desegregation georgia orwell would be proud desegregation is segregation or segregation is desegregation however you want to have it so you have to have segregated spaces to help people escape the the uh permanence of the white male gaze they sometimes phrase it that way you have to give them uh safe spaces is the sort of friendly way to put you know identity uh single identity or mono identity spaces in which they don't have to have the oppression of being around people who their very presence reinforces the the experience of hegemonic power so the point of the point of these critical theories then is to over sensitize people to language so that i might hear somebody say something and i think an african-american might not like that and then that person's out that person can't speak that person has to be silenced it doesn't matter if a single person ever was offended by it a good example of that would be master bedrooms master bedrooms we can't have master bedrooms anymore we have realty businesses dropping the term master bedroom from their their websites from their their listings why because somebody decided that this term which was invented in a sears catalog in the 1920s obviously must refer to slavery which it didn't therefore it makes me uncomfortable so we have to get rid of that so we have to strike even language that whether it corresponds to reality or not we have to strike out language that somebody could find offensive even in theory as long as you have a critical theorist who's able to figure out that the racism which must be present somewhere can be found once it's found it's out so we have to do that to keep a space inclusive these arbitrary moving rules create a system in which everybody's afraid to speak all the time because they never know what the wrong thing is that's going to get them in trouble or fired or pilloried on social media and that's called totalitarianism and we have to segregate our spaces because social justice obviously that's inclusion and if you don't understand this word in terms of the insane idea that everything boils down to these cartoonish power dynamics they had lots more truth in the past but not even the degree of truth that they're speaking about now and almost no truth now if you don't accept that you can't understand this you hear inclusion and you translate it into something more reasonable you hear diversity and you think well it is good to have different kinds of people around it is good to have that different perspective here's this example of something bad that happened when we didn't so diversity and inclusion install a totalitarian system of thought in which we have to hire the party to micromanage every single thing for us it is a world in which adult human beings to say nothing of children cannot be possibly trusted to talk about identity related issues or even be in the vicinity of one another across identities and have to be micromanaged by administrative busy bodies who love to go to bureaucratic meetings when you don't and they can install the policy there so that's diversity and inclusion now we can turn to equity equity is not as big of a lie as these other two equity kind of tells you what it is it sounds like a nice word but if you actually just look up social equity theory which they've dropped the social so you can't look too easily it means whereas equality this is pretty close to a quote whereas equality means that citizens a and b have equal shares equity means adjusting the shares so that citizens a and b are made equal it's equality of outcome enforced a quality of outcome so in practice it's going to uh involve racial quotas other identity quotas we see this in practice in california which has had a law for a little while saying we have to have a female ceo in every company of a certain size now that you have to have a racial minority on every c suite sorry i said ceo it's on the c uh the c suite of every big company not to have a woman and at least one racial or sexual minority uh and this will expand quotas are the thing this is racial quotas and sex quotas and other quotas it is to enforce equal outcomes those equal outcomes are going to be assessed though because they have to make up for the the cruelties and oppressions of history the unfairness of history they will be enforced rather generously in certain directions and rather tightly in others so in other words it will be something like affirmative action combined with reparations without ever having to use either word so they can keep using those words for other things at the same time equity doesn't mean equality equity means forcing equal outcomes artificially we've tried this experiment as a society again and again and again and again and it doesn't work it never works it undermines trust in our institutions at the very least it places people who would be better qualified in other in certain sectors and in the wrong sectors because they have to meet certain quotas so rather than helping people flourish to the best of their ability where they would flourish to the best of their ability you have to stick them like puzzle pieces into places where sometimes it works out great and sometimes they don't belong and meanwhile making everything fit this preconceived notion and so you look at this very very uh even still in a probably very friendly way you say oh well i don't think that's a great idea but it doesn't matter under an an understanding of systemic racism by the way systemic racism means inequity is there racial inequity exists if there are inequities there must be systemic racism they're identical concepts the the opposite pieces of one another and so you think well maybe that's fine well if you look at it under a systemic understanding any cause must be racism so even if it's a statistical fluctuation even if the entire applicant pool was pulled through and you couldn't find and that you hired every even minimally qualified person to fill your different boxes whatever those happen to be that's still racism so you see this a lot in organizations i know it happens in some churches where where the the most dangerous place to be is close to woke because they're bending over backwards to make this happen and they're the ones who get hit the hardest saying you're not trying hard enough because they're the ones who are showing that they're going to make that effort equity is not equality equity probably will not work in any case whatsoever but when you have this systemic understanding of equity even random fluctuations would be considered racist just that many applicants this year and it was a totally random stochastic error sorry i'm a mathematician it happens doesn't matter just natural variance in the numbers would be enough so you have to understand then the equity the point is to undo by artificial means systemic inequality systemic racism systemic power it is the tool to unmake the effects of systemic power believing that if we just have them unmade that everything's okay diversity and inclusion are the tools that are believed by magic kind of like with the seizing the means of economic production here we seize the means of i guess bureaucratic production but also cultural production we just get everybody believing diversity and inclusion then equity will follow probably and if it doesn't we'll adjust the numbers with quotas and things and everything will come out just fine this is why you see the proposition 16 in california right now on the ballot to remove the anti-discrimination language from their state constitution it is in line with equity that's the purpose so we're going to discriminate to get equity this is what ibrahim kennedy another best-selling author that's peddling this stuff for tens of thousands of dollars of pop now keeps saying he says that if if anti-discrimination produces inequity then it's racist if discrimination produces equity then it's anti-racist so we need discrimination just like mike said now you know i don't want to drag this out you've got an idea now of a how to analyze these things and b what these words diversity equity inclusion that are supposed to talk about mean and practice the goal i had is for you to be able to understand them and to be able to start doing this analysis for yourself so you stop getting played the words don't mean what you think they mean you have to say how would somebody who obsesses about systemic power all the time mean this word you have to do that or you're going to miss it every single time that said i do want to say that this is like all such movements in a sense i kind of began with marx we saw the attempts to force marxism with that you know on the other side of the gulag joke i made you end up having to start applying force you end up having to start doing things that are distinctly a liberal distinctly anti-liber liberty anti-freedom as i said totalitarian in order to enforce this and we're starting to see very openly this kind of agitation we've seen for example in the past you know to echo what mike had said earlier we can say the very post-modern thing we've seen people say oh we no longer have to worry about true theories and false theories just uh just um what what was the exact wording the we need uh strategic theories we don't have to worry about true theories or false theories just strategic theories and now this has progressed far beyond that to where the strategic theories people are seeing through them and force becomes necessary so you have to force segregate spaces you have to force diversity quotas you have to force equity you have to force people to believe act and do according to the ideology or you cancel them whiteness is property so we can burn down a target whiteness's property is straight out of critical race theory therefore we can seize it we can seize that property for ourselves you want a scary one we think that the constitution protects us in all things we have the fourth amendment against illegal search and seizure we should all acknowledge at the beginning of every meeting that we live on stolen land your land was stolen your property was stolen in the first place it's not a violation of the fourth amendment to seize stolen property this ideology subverts the contract that's there it changes the meanings of the words according to its obsession with systemic power and it plays us over and over again and it is turning violent as that is starting to be seen not to work i actually want to read because i wasn't going to do this it's not quite where i want to want to wrap up but i want to read to you something and i have pardoned me to push some buttons or whatever um michael talked about about being able to take you to places where men stood for what they believed and were burned this is from i forgot what this person's uh i didn't have a chance to look it up on the spot again what this person's role is but this is somebody who has administrator or bureaucratic power in some capacity i assure you and she wrote i'm assuming something in in schools because she wrote educators at the beginning this is a tweet she put out the other day on the oh sorry a few months ago educators what are you burning your white centered curriculum the amy cooper next door if you don't remember who amy cooper is she's the one that was with uh she was in the new york city central park and the she had her dog and the bird watcher and she was accused of racism for saying she was going to call the cops over this altercation they had the amy cooper next door what are you burning that's the question the amy cooper next door your anti-black behavior policies the school's racist policies your racist ass principle the funding for the police in schools versus counselors what are you burning two of the things she listed are people two of the things she listed are people what are you burning this isn't just some random fringe wacko on on twitter we have a situation now where as michael pointed out i didn't tell you the story the two plus two equals five will will spare that where they're denying objective truth explicitly for the purpose of saying that objectivity is neither possible nor desirable to the point where they will deny two plus two equals four and make a fight about it michael mentioned various people that he kind of asked me to nod uh that quoted this the harvard t.h chan school of public health promoted that idea that two plus two can in fact equal five and people who say it equals four are wrong the harvard t h chan school of public health promoted this idea and shared an article to that effect which you can look up that was written in popular mechanics good luck with you those are not going to be very popular mechanics uh i don't think so to kind of wrap up then a year ago this weekend michael also referenced that we gave a talk in london that was a year ago this weekend and i talked about how the point of the woke thing is to enact a social and cultural revolution it is unlike marx who don't wanted to seize the means of economic production it is a goal to seize the means of cultural production and flip over society and they have done this very well they've seized many of our institutions academia education they're deeply encroaching into faith they've got media they've got their hands on the levers of of power and politics we see states like california we see whatever is going on with the with the police doing essentially not being allowed to do anything to deal with the riots in seattle and portland among other places they have a lot of that power now and so a year ago i stood up and said they want a revolution we have to fight and then i said that we're late to this fight that was the last thing i said we're late to this fight that was a year ago we are later i'll stop there thank you you

Channel: Sovereign Nations

Views: 61,791

Rating: 4.9111681 out of 5

Keywords: sovereign nations, james lindsay, critical race theory, diversity, inclusion, equity, postmodernism, marxism, intersectionality, new discourses

Id: 3jLNgLABuTw

Length: 57min 17sec (3437 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020