James Lindsay: Exploring Intersectionality

welcome ladies and gentlemen to thinking out loud it's a new title of this podcast today I'm speaking with James Lindsay and my friend Bruce we go over a contemporary intersectionality theory the state of academia and more be sure to follow him on Twitter and support and he's doing amazing work he's at conceptual James it was an honor and a privilege to have him on the podcast he's genuinely one of the most articulate and intelligent people I've had the honor of speaking anyways hope you enjoy the podcast [Music] welcome ladies and gentlemen to thinking out loud I'm joined here with Bruce Bruce thanks for coming on the podcast thank you for having us and I'm here with a very special guest I'm sure many of you have heard his name out there in the Twitterverse James Lindsay James Lindsay has degrees in physics and mathematics with a PhD in the latter oh so we should really be referring to as dr. James Lindsay Lindsay then huh I guess I mean pretty much nobody does but you can all right so there are so many directions that we can take this conversation into you've been at the epicenter of many topics ranging from the book that you published alongside your co-author Peter pegasion to the your involvement in the grievance studies hoax I'm hoping we can discuss all of that but one of the first things that I want to discuss is the fact that you consider yourself if I remember correctly when you were on the Joe Rogan podcast you considered yourself an economic you're no longer in academia which is different from peer pegasion who's still a professor of philosophy again if I remember correctly my memories waning it is right that's right okay yeah so why is it that you've been out of academia was it because of the whole shift in the cultural zeitgeist no that's why I didn't go back but that's not why I left I just left for kind of boring family reasons um nothing too exciting I wish there was a cooler story but the in 2010 the I mean the university was kind of tipping that way with the biggest drama that would have pushed me away from it then was not it's I mean in mathematics which is the department I was working in you know it wasn't exactly going like social justice crazy or anything and I was more or less insulated from the rest of the school or the university what was really the issue at the time that kind of kept me from from sticking around in academia then was actually contracting state budgets for education which was mostly a conservative endeavor at the time it's kind of funny how things go and then for a variety of reasons they mostly had to do with family I left the university always missed teaching enjoyed Reece thought about going back after you know a year or two after things changed and then by the time that kind of opened that door was kind of open again I just kind of looked at what people who were teaching were doing that politics around university teaching and the demands and I thought it just it's not worth it mostly at that point economically it didn't really get totally nuts like whoa the culture there's messed up until 2015 16 but the over the overwhelming pressure to hire underpaid lecturers and underpaid adjunct lecturers instead of faculty positions was a real mess at the time and it's kind of a thing that I like to say that between all this social justice stuff in between the economics that they've done and then the the fact that they've switched to heavy student services budgets that have skyrocketed tuitions and built a giant administrative class that have done it more the university it's you know physically speaking it's hard to paint yourself into one corner but it's like really hard to paint yourself into more than one corner at a time and somehow the universities painted themselves into like five and how do you think that we got here in regards to the whole change in the cultural zeitgeist because you know the academic field has always leaned too liberal and there's studies that show that's the more educated a person tends to be the more liberal they tend to they tend to be so that on its face isn't too surprising but we're at a point right now where 30% of professors consider themselves marxist and swear you know you know the academic fields that are getting the most leeway in regards to rigor and regards to their proofs in regards to research are the grievant studies fields and this was wildly different from how it used to be you know I remember you said something on Twitter or yeah I think it was on Twitter that I think perfectly encapsulated much of the grievant Studies fields where a lot of it is just armchair philosophy instead of actually garnering data at a point when to understand you know predictions and models about future states of how social circles should work based on what we currently understand it really is just sort of trying to come up with your own theories in you know based on how you expect it to work right and much of that is just getting so much leeway there's you know whatever you would publish as we'll get to of course in the field for like let's say Gender Studies the amount of research and the amount of hard work and hours grueling hours that you would put into that paper is laughable compared to the amount of hours that would he be expected in the amount of rigor and research and data then you would expect in a physics paper or really any other proper academic field so how do you think we back here at this point this is a question with deep roots and it depends on how detailed do you want the answer to be so a variety of factors so the university has a I don't know if it's always tipped liberal I strongly suspect a tipped conservative before mid-century in the 20th century I mean certainly when the schools were primarily seminaries which is how they almost all began they probably tipped conservative rather than liberal but a variety of different things occurred especially during the kind of radical 60s and there's this so-called new left activism so one of the drives that came out of the critical theory based activism Herbert Markku so would be the philosopher that pushed a lot of that was actually to get involved in research Social Research and to really kind of flush that out and he stemmed also a lot of radical activism that really defined the 19 late 50s and almost all of 1960s culminating in a lot of violence in 68 in particular and so that time period becomes really relevant to how we got to where we are with this so at that point the universities really took a undertook a push to become more progressive facing the University of Sidney for example or maybe it's Sydney University in Australia it was the first one to create a Women's Studies department for example and so you started having these very progressive Cultural Studies departments coming into existence in the mid and late nineteen six he's largely to increase representation both of you know women ethnic minorities and so on but also of topics and cultural studies that are particularly interesting to them and so the university's kind of gave them you know while we need these departments they look good and so we're not going to be too critical and we'll make sure they stay funded and keep them going so you started to have ethnic studies and women's studies and eventually gender studies and then all of the you know whatever it happens to be they get awfully specific now studies departments coming into existence meanwhile and I think this has been the most and this is a guess I don't know this yet for sure but more and more I'm becoming convinced that the most liberalizing event left pushing event it's not even liberal it's leftist bending event in the history of the Academy meaning the academic Academy would be the Vietnam War era where you had a lot of Vietnam War protesters who didn't want to go to war and one of the ways to avoid the draft was to continue higher ed and you had a lot of sympathetic far-left professors who were like well let's expand our departments and to give them a place to be and so there was actually during that point a massive swelling in terms of the number of graduate students being accepted especially in cultural studies and and other as you pointed out we'll just say not that hard fields and a lot of activists that were flooding in to fill them in particular anti left-wing anti-war activists who were coming in to avoid the draft and so this actually swelled the academic ranks and academic graduates the number of PhDs produced during the Vietnam War era is is like a jacket it's almost like the baby boomer thing if you look at the population graph it just shoots up well it's like the PhD graph just shoots up straight out of the Vietnam War era and so I suspect that that strongly concentrated academic leftism in American universities in particular although that was going on in other parts of the world also simultaneously you had the whole new life Europe and that gave birth to a lot of different movements including you know that were the post structural it's got a hold of it youth is all postmodern thing blowing up these were you know Marxists who are disillusioned or communist I should say they weren't really Marxist they'd given up on Marxism grew disillusioned and then they had this whole culture specially especially in France of like kind of being like the smartest smartypants possible and showing off how intellectually cool you were and so they created all this incomprehensible prose and that made them academic rock stars of a kind that was like cultural thing in France at the time so they really blew up and so academic leftism started getting a lot of huge legs under it through the 50s and 60s coming out of again the collapse of colonialism being very relevant the aftershock of the two world wars the rise of fascism how did this happen so that time to set the context to really twist everything to the left and then these theories that they started putting forth became more and more insular they stopped listening to outside criticism and then they eventually started calling all outside criticism part of kind of a conspiracy to keep them down and for whatever set of reasons that aren't totally clear to me a blind eye was was turned to that and these these departments flourished although they didn't grow they got their next big surge the UN I think politics have so much to do with what's going on and I'm finding out the next big surge was when Reagan took the presidency so all of a sudden the country lurches neoconservative to the right and tons and tons of people decide it's time to study the sociology of how that could have happened they're kind of like you're seeing people starting to sociology of how Trump could have been elected now and so there's this huge leftward surge in the Academy again following Reagan's election and so while the neo-cons kind of took over culturally and economically and politically you had a whole bunch of people like Judith Butler who's in just swelling up in the Academy trying to give their high-minded explanations for it and eventually this stuff got by the Mayweather late 90s or mid-90s even this stuff got so effective it basically just calling everybody a racist you disagreed with it the nobody will touch it I can't tell you the number of people who have reached out to me in various academic fields or related you know intellectual production fields like like literature in particular literature talking about how it's been virtually impossible to publish anything that goes against this kind of social justice theory in the last maybe 25 years especially if you have a white or male or white male identity it's just become almost impossible nobody will the gatekeepers at this point that are all of it the publishing houses are all sympathetic to the theory and won't publish a problematic book because they know they'll get protested into the ground if they do plus they already believe it so they'll say well this book is problematic we can't publish it so a whole bunch of stuff like that had a lot to do with it and I think that there's frankly been a bit of a moral panic going on in the past five or six years that have launched it into like utter absurdity there's another element to it again it's like super complicated I hate it this isn't a simple story where it's like oh well this happened then boom we were social justice University but there was a huge surge of interest in this kind of critical as they call it line of thought within education research it's called pedagogy coming out of roughly the early 1980s mid 1970s it started you had this guy Paulo ferrary he was in in Brazil he was teaching people how to read he was criticizing critical methods to try to awake a critical consciousness that the people that were being oppressed because they work and his programs were pretty successful and then left-wing academics in in education theory in the u.s. caught hold of this guy in particular this guy Michael Apple and another guy Henry Giroux and they just went nuts with his stuff they infused it with postmodern theory and identity politics and they started taking over the colleges of education so that by the mid to late 1980s a college of that colleges of education were all under the sway of what's called critical pedagogy now so they were teaching our teachers to think this way and not to approve of any other way of thinking so you can kind of see how lots of things started to come together maybe if you want to point at something a lot of people do in terms of why did this happen then in the 1980s in mid 1970s you have for example the Marxist or communist again post Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci who came up with the idea of hegemony that there's this controlling force the society creates its own controlling force it keeps it kind of locked into its dominant paradigm and everybody's kind of subject to it and his ideas really had a little bit of influence on the critical theory schools in Europe but mostly Fela or just fell fell to the wayside as far as the rest of the world went and then they were translated in English in 1970 for the first time and Henry Giroux and Michael Apple had definitely ready graham chic and and very few people in the US or Canada before that had done so so you have a lot of forces it's sort of to kind of come together all at once that you could point to as to how this happened but there it's a lot of features all at one one time kind of building up to it and then of course there's the simple explanation that once you create a particular kind of ecosystem ideological ecosystem it tends to self concentrate until something breaks it so once the university started tipping left's they had a Vietnam they would just keep concentrating to the left via either selection bias of who's going into it or the the way that they decide who can be promoted whose papers can be published what papers can be published so on and so forth you can actually concentrate that drift and and cause it to happen and even accelerate so I guess I mean that's sort of a really like holy crap how did we get here how did we get here culturally is really it took off on blog probably around 2010 and I think that's how it jumped from academia to the mainstream is basically people who had take a couple of these classes started getting in arguments online all the time and writing blog posts all the time and people got familiar with the concepts and ten years later it's all anybody's talking about yeah Jonathan Hyde also the psychologists at NYU documents this in his book the coddling of the American mind you mentioned the 1980s and then I believe it was 1984 also when a helicopter parenting started coming into fruition when you had those two children that were abducted and murdered and one of them unfortunately you found his severed head I think about 100 miles north of where he was originally abducted and this started the whole phenomenon of putting children's faces on milk cartons all that jazz and now we're at a point where and Jonathan Hyde talks about how in the thing was around 2010 if I remember correctly where you started seeing this increase in social codling and people wanting to bar themselves from offensive ideas prioritizing the emotions and the sensitivities with their own classmates over reason over truth over genuine progress this coincided perfectly with the 1984 incidents of helicopter beginning of helicopter parenting do you think that that's a do you think there's a strong correlation there or do you think yeah most of it is yeah lecture that you came you gave us no I mean so I was talking mostly about the academic side how did the university get that way but things don't like you can't just bend things that way right you got to have kind of an up you got to kind of have a grassroots thing happening too so part of what was going on of course you did have these you talk about you know those abductions there was also they cite an excuse in the 80s you had a variety of different things that led to the creation of a lot of very popular media that looked like news but wasn't on the kind of paradigm example would have been Dateline NBC if I remember correctly the name of it I mean they basically fear monger to you for an hour once a week in the evening during primetime and parents got really scared so certainly this kind of like hell copter or coddling Parenthood took off in the 80s it was very very big of a deal so you're free-range children thing kind of fell apart you also had the the rise of the self-esteem movement particularly with an education that make it really about kids self-esteem you started to see the rise of participation trophies a few years later and so on you hear people talking about that a lot and so you have those two elements creating an entire generation who would have grown up by the early 2000s and start to become the people who make the decisions so it's not surprising at all if you mark 1984 or so from 1984 to 2010 those people are 26 they've graduated college they've got a couple of years experience now they're making some level of decision making at their jobs it's no surprise at all that they would institute an even stronger and they're also writing blogs all the freaking times which was a thing back then and people were reading blogs it was a huge blog explosion back then but ISKCON it was like nobody had a camera good enough very few people did to be able to do YouTube YouTube existed I think maybe around 2010 but you couldn't it was a real pain in the butt to get video on the internet 10 years ago and so blogs were kind of where it was that certainly podcasting hadn't taken off yet or anything so you had this huge dissemination of that mind of people who had grown up totally taken into that mindset if you're I don't I guess you guys probably aren't parents or maybe one of you is I don't know but you'll find if you ever are a parent that one of the things that you run into all the time is that everybody who doesn't have kids has lots of opinions about how to raise kids and they're bad they're just terrible they have no no idea of the reality of raising children and so you have these people who are you know largely deferring their childbearing and in raising years they're being professional or whatever and they have been raised in this kind of self esteem coddling environment that they think is just you know exactly right for everything and now they're the ones cooking up the theory meanwhile they've been getting methods through critical pedagogy and their teacher education programs and administrator programs pumped into them I mean it's it's again it's like you're seeing kind of this perfect storm that the because critical methods are basically about complaining about things that don't feel good to you that you don't have to understand why the system doesn't work you just have to complain about it that's really the whole point of critical theories and so you have this group of people who have you know extremely thin skins they're all interested in their their self-esteem they've been coddled they don't have that kind of resilience that you normally would get if you kind of harken back to what height says and then you know you cram them full of a theory that's like if something doesn't make you feel good complain about it and here's how its kind of you know almost obvious that that's going to just take over especially because I mean you really gotta consider this so much of what this stuff has propagated by his hot takes and that's like hot take Central right yeah and so it's like everything I remember there was this whole like force own around like everything you ever knew was not right you know everything you ever learned was wrong whatever they taught you at school was a lie it was like such a huge thing when the internet first started opening up and people were sharing you know a lot more information a lot more widely and so what you learned at school was barely like scratching the surface of what there was to know that you were aware of and so this whole thing like the hot take culture really started to blossom in that time so again it's you know and it's but certainly that cop mindset and the self-esteem movement mindset had to have played a huge role I mean I think they were the progenitors of the culture in which this would really take off edgington's yeah I could around because you know my interactions with what we could consider I think what Majin awaaz would call a regressive leftist my interactions would then have largely been around that kind of personality type of describing I have some concerns as to where this is all going but I think there are some concepts that I'm not clear on how they necessarily together as now one way I could illustrate that is is which you can I wanna have a question is to whether you would distinguish if there's a difference between intersectionality and what who would call wellness looking at kimberlé crenshaw as introduction of the idea 1989 and when she was investigating why certain women were getting past them for jobs General Motors because was it because they were women of color or the boy was it because there was biases against women or was it a combination of both factors that just these people got hit with it for the dog pile of past penchant prejudices man there seems to be a basis for this seems to be a rational basis there however when I I recently finished reading Barry Weiss's blog and she was comparing how intersectionality could lead into a caste system based on power that's flowing to ethnicity and led to if I'm not mistaken a a very very dangerous form of anti-semitism on the left that deals with Jews for a white well if they're white they're part of that they're part of a higher power structure therefore racism doesn't apply to them anti-semitism does not apply to them in that fashion so with intersectionality what it lead to a state of woke fanaticism if the intersections tie from one class that's previously a pressed into a into a into a into a cast that supposedly has some kind of structural power in society so they negates their grievances which would you say that draws that's a distinction between the two okay so let me see if I can can nail that down as quickly as I can so intersectionality is a tool that allows you to make sense of the way as you're talking about the different forms of minoritized as they call it identity or marginalized or oppressed or other words that they can apply identities usually by demographic fact intersect with one another so the example Crenshaw used as you as you detailed pretty well there is that you had black women who may have been being discriminated against and because they're black women intersectionality would say well they did they have a hard time knowing where they discriminated against because there are black women against because they're women were they discriminated against specifically because of stereotypes about black women that don't apply universally to blacks or universally to women and then the law at the time is determination law actually had a loophole in it that would have allowed such discrimination specifically of black women to take place while not allowing discrimination against black or discrimination against women for instance if you had a lot of white women and you had a lot of black men you could still discriminate against black women specifically because you have enough women to say you're not discriminating there and enough black people to say you're not discriminating they're there for black women could be systemic ly discriminated against since she had a point with that so intersectionality is a tool where you can see how different identity statuses kind of pile up the problems that people would face with with relationship to being those more than one at a time in particular that's the idea behind intersectionality kind of it's actually like a steal man of what the thing is doing more specifically intersectionality is supposed to get you to understand that that's always going on that the different group memberships are relevant that the way that they intersect is relevant so that if you intersect it's not like so a black woman doesn't just suffer discrimination that a black person suffers and discrimination that a woman suffers she also suffers a discrimination that a specifically black woman suffers on top of that and so you can find lots of examples in the literature where they they give you stereotypes of black women specifically that don't apply to other women and that doesn't don't apply to black people in general so there's extra stereotyping so it's like you have the stairs termination for being black plus the discrimination for being a woman plus this extra discrimination of being a black woman that's specific to that plus the fact that you don't know which one of those is actually operating at any given time if you're being discriminated against so that intersectionality says that that's kind of how intersecting identities create discrimination that multiplies that's that's a pretty good explanation of what it does so what you're supposed to be doing with intersectionality is constantly engaging those facts and your own relationship to them so it's interested in seeing them in terms of systemic power structures so if you're white you're in the dominant side of a systemic racial power structure and then people of color there's a hierarchy depending on how colored you are depending up your skin's lighter or darker depending on which racial minority or on how that students Society bla bla bla and you are supposed to engage with your position relative to all of the power structures that are relevant to you at all times and be aware of them and how they manifest in social situations that's called engaging your positionality it's not considered optional under intersectional framework in fact Robyn D'Angelo the critical race educator who wrote the book white fragility has blatantly stated over and over and over again as a matter of fact not like she slipped one time and said it they positionality must be constantly engaged that's the point of intersectionality intersectionality is a tool to allow you to constantly engage your position with respect to the various aspects of social power that play out in different various demographic ways and how they pile up with one another Lok Ness refers to that awareness woke miss is actually a very specific term a very specific type I should say of a broader term that shows up and all of this literature that comes out of what's called critical theory and that the more broad thing is called critical consciousness which is to learn to think about the world in terms of these power structures and such so being woke means that you understand that the intersectional power structure exists that hierarchy that it defines which has actually been explicitly named say by Patricia Hill Collins as the matrix of domination so the thing has a name woke miss is being aware of the realities if you will of those systemic power dynamics and thus understanding that you must engage your positionality and be aware of those power dynamics and defer correctly to whether you are on the dominant side in which case you need to check your privilege or the oppress side in which case you're given special sight under what's called standpoint epistemology you understand oppression so you have the lived experience therefore a different way of knowing and you have extra knowledge is therefore you have something to contribute that nobody outside of that identity group can understand because you have to live the experience of oppression to understand it according to the theory you can't imagine it you can't have it explained to you you have to live it to understand it properly so woke misses being aware that all that is operating intersectionality is the heuristic tool that's designed or as kimberlé crenshaw calls it now the practice of understanding how that works in engaging your positionality at all times so for you for example you would say all as a person of color then I get to have whatever blah blah blah you know and then but as a man I have to understand that I don't understand the experiences of women I'm not gonna guess your sexuality but then you could do it with that and I'm not gonna guess your ability status but you could do it with that and maybe if you're fat or something you have to do it with that I mean it's like really with all of these different things you have to say you know where you fall and what that's actually telling people is I'm an authority based on my identity status according to the intersectional heuristic that theorizes these things and you have to listen to me anywhere I have an oppressed status and I have to shut up and listen to you anywhere that you have a oppress status relational to me if I'm dominant over you then I can't understand does that clarify the difference so intersectionality is the tool locus is the state of being that you realize the need for the tool and I recognize in your description right there that that's where where the whole postmodernist ideas come into play given that like they don't believe that there's a subjective reality can can be clearly discerned it's because comes into this world with their own set of dealer biases and perspectives which had to be taken game play and therefore had equal consideration across across the board and so it becomes very very easy to dismiss sane discussion of objective fact and comes to social strata and how a society actually works that opposed to intersectional Theory right right yeah the postmodern link there you more or less have it right the idea with that the way the postmodern theory works in is that it is ultimately structuralist an orientation and critical in methodology so the way that that works is that it understands so everybody's born actually a blank slate nothing is written thereupon but everybody is born into and I did a set of identity groups and a social position with relationship to power so social power dynamics the various hegemonic forces of society are the key object and then what basically happens is that you learn to be who you are by virtue of which identity groups you're in so society casts you into a role whether you learn that explicitly people teach you this is how you're supposed to be to be you know a good man or whatever or whether it's society constantly scripts for you that you know maybe black people aren't on TV as much so black people aren't supposed to be on TV and it's a subtle message or something like that and so you're socialized into your social your positionality with respect to power and that happens mostly through representation and language and other modes of symbolism that all can be kind of summarized under the word discourse or discourse analysis and so that's actually if you that that's kind of Derrida he's one of the post-motor of philosophers views about how language does that and then you have on the other hand Foucault Michel Foucault was it the other big time relevant was modern philosopher and his view was that the dominant people the dominant groups I should say in society whoever holds that social dominance creates the hegemonic force that defines what is acceptable to know and in particular that which is unacceptable to know is crazy and must be dismissed and so in other words he create said that the dominant groups or social power creates the ability to say what is true and false truth and falsity have all to do with just who has social power and what they believe is true and false and those things fill out what's called an epistemic eCall it and so an epistemic an epoch of time and geographical and historical space place in place and time both being relevant a culture that says that this is the way that knowledge works and so he actually fused you've heard knowledge is power he actually fused the ideas of knowledge and power together knowledge is power actually came from Thomas Hobbes not the the friendliest philosopher but he fused those ideas together into one called power knowledge and said that power and knowledge er actually is is like an equal sign there they are two pieces of the same thing there are two manifestations of the same thing and he was in particular worried about how scientific knowledge is misused he called that by open think it might have lost you there James are you there sure being socialized into you and the way that you experienced the world is is what you know and if that's dominance then you you understand very little because you have the privilege of being dominant but if you're oppressed you have to experience being dominated as well and you know that experience so that ultimately all does come down from that post modern conception of knowledge and power and cultural relativism and really that is where it comes from yes your you've got that right the best insidious nature that it's a few years ago like read through Stephen pick it was blank slate that when in which he pretty much delineate how there is no such thing as a blank there are certain biological factors that distinguish between men and women there's a certain way that how we're supposed to hormones we're inside a look at the womb that determine if someone is likely to be transgender or likely because if it behaves that are more akin to a male female or somesuch and the postmodern theory they can just keep it aside and bring this idea of oppression in the play where there could be wouldn't it there may well be none or at the most it's exaggerated in in society right yeah yeah and what's in the the problems with view and reality within this lens I think are as clear as day because what's interesting about when you view reality with these power structures in mind these social structures are made these types of social dynamics is that from what I've seen most of the time they amplify the problems that they're trying so hard to try to solve so instead of just right instead of trying to get passed to this pointed society where we don't have to be concerned about what type of color your skin or any other immutable characteristic that you contain they are now Paramount's in the way that you have to live your life there parama right in just about every interaction that you're going to have this to me is not getting past racism it's not getting past oppression but rather amplifying it's looking at it and saying that this is the way that we're gonna choose to live our lives and instead of trying to get past this we're gonna try to live with it and that's right is horrifying and it would be one thing if these ideas are insulated within the university system but as Bruce was telling me there pestilential e spreading themselves into high schools into a lower level of education I know for a fact in my in my high school there was a whole week dedicated to black lives matter which they which will about the movement I think there's a lot of validity there for sure but much of it has just been trained into this sort of woke anti anti cop anti white narrative and as Bruce I'm sure can elaborate on this even his high school will blend under something like this right yeah before we started this podcast James you know then I yeah I've been in a few podcast before my name isn't actually Bruce I have to go in under a pseudonym and we talked briefly about why I had to do this um to give you some some background I I live in Southern California now and I but my original home is in the Bay Area in Silicon Valley so that's something I've nicknamed regressive central walking around mild high school almost twenty years removed from from my graduation so going back up there it is completely different experience for me now because of the the the changing demographics that Union attitude well not us one of the lessons and these reasons I decided to stay down here rather than move back up I was very very well aware that the intersectionality and the idea of what culture has most definitely taken a hold in our universities but what I was completely appalled to see was visiting my old high school at times and there's a flyer I actually wanted to show you that I took when I was up there they're actually teaching this stuff to kids as young as four between the ages of 14 18 years old that's a very very young age rate you're very easily don't worry it's in it's considered to be an integral part of P through 20 now which means pre-k kindergarten one through twelve and university it's fear investors they're kidding I'm not kidding meso they're not kidding oh my god vogue baby I mean I mean these are books critical I mean I just retweeted one a couple of days ago which was a complaint that a pre-k per had however many you know books that they have in their little pre-k library which I don't know what in the world four-year-olds are reading but hopefully it's good and they were complaining that it's like out of a hundred and sixty two books or something like that only like nine or 11 or something or by not white authors or yeah by non-white authors we need to decolonize pre-k we need to push diversity equity anti racism as early as we can why it's appropriate blah blah blah and I've seen these calls for for P through 20 not just K through 12 reform and by reform I mean making it woke for months and months now I people reach out to me from from within the educational sphere all the time panicking like this is in my here's my third graders assignment what is this this is what they're needed it's so little kid but it's almost like okay I mean it's not warble but but it's like to be talking to little kids about I mean like literally three four or five year old kids you know like making identity race racism sexuality maybe you know trans issues whatever it happens to be you know prominent if central within some of their educational programs or if not more than some of their educational programs is really the push right now so that yeah I mean this certainly is very deeply embedded within high schools at this point as you're pointing out but this is throughout the education system bottom to top as you at this point it yeah there's no other word for it Jesus and it's not just you know like every left-leaning media outlet in the universe or our presidential candidates pandering to those people or did Elizabeth Warren say just the other day that one of her secretaries wouldn't be appointed until she consulted with a young trans person for their opinion about it what are you talking about okay it's not just that I mean this is literally in every level of education it's pushing to just about every professional sphere the HR departments for diversity officers and inclusion and implicit bias trainings if they have like pretty much everywhere I just saw yesterday I don't know if this numbers right I saw an eight billion dollar industry was the number quoted yesterday that might have just been speaking about education though because I read a few years ago that this was already a ten billion dollar industry in the u.s. I don't know what that real figure on that is but we're definitely somewhere between you know eight plus billion dollars a year being spent on diversity training the diversity training industry in the US you have it state governments like to say to Washington right now is created in creating an equity task force the revamping an ethnic studies program that's designed to be K through 12 that even targets things like mathematics talks about how mathematics is to individual needs more room for stories needs to be made about collectivism needed to get past the idea that there's one right answer in math bring perspectives to bear on it and you know talk about other forms of mathematics and all this crazy stuff so this is I mean that's you know that's happening in state legislatures too so I mean this stuff is everywhere I get reached out to you by people from every walk of life now is a fiction other kind you know romance fiction regular fiction you know whatever you whatever it is it's the classics that kind of fiction fantasy fiction young adult fiction so across the board and literature across the board and academic disciplines communications classics anglo-saxon studies it's literally a field that's calling for its own demise because it's inherently racist by focusing on anglo-saxon history which is white British people so they're like with this field that we are in shouldn't even exist because we're inherently racist lawyers which is another one it's really pushed heavily into law it's good to remember that critical race theory was a fusion of black feminism and critical critical views are but trying to think of the right word race activism as it was in the 70s and 80s kind of the black power black nationalist stuff fusing into critical legal studies so it started out in law and it's very heavy in law this office in everything right now and it's really pushing I even you know a lot of people have realized to their horror that I've been reached out to you by a lot of religious organizations so even like very conservative and not very conservative religions are reaching out to me Presbyterians have a big problem with it in some of their major branches Lutheran's Catholics Orthodox and non-orthodox Jews we talked about the Jew team where the Jewish thing where they classify Jews as white that's a huge issue besides there for the rest of this stuff trying to make Judaism more woke Buddhism the Southern Baptist Convention says as conservative you know as conservative as you can get in there pushing that a resolution to integrate into the Southern Baptist Convention as a political entity to adopt critical race Theory intersectionality as a analytical tool subordinate to scripture but nevertheless integrated is as an analytical tool into the Southern Baptist Convention's methodologies and they teach it at all of the major Southern Baptist seminaries so I mean you talk about it's an educator it's even in religious education in like conservative religion like I'm not talking like small like religious seminaries I mean like a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville Kentucky has all al woke instructors teaching woke interpretations of the New Testament for example so I mean it's I don't bring them up because I have some special interest in religion I'm an atheist I actually I mean I care in the sense that I care about what's going on but it and people want to believe what everyone believed I don't care I bring it up because if it's infiltrating conservative institutional structures and it's infiltrating state governments and it's at every level of education and it's good thing and it's in law it's in everything in the arts it's the media it's everywhere it I don't mean to sound like I'm freaking out but it really is it's really working its way into pretty much everything right and I see this incident as a version of McCarthyism that that mid twentieth century it just is just incredibly insidious and just different we have dangerous concept to be introducing how you know I write I'm the whole reason I'm speaking to you under under a pseudonym is because the yeah I work in tech and they'd be toast yeah and there is a diverse quote unquote diversity inclusion department which is anything but which I suspect to be anything but and the the the thing is all of us here we want that diversity and inclusion that's not done that way right of course um but my concern now is where do we go from here and um there's there's seems to have been some talk going back and forth in some of the circles that we inhabit that wellness will eventually burn itself out I'm partially inclined to believe this and that now we have our comedians really pushing back on a Dave Chappelle and Bill bird in a comedy routine which was absolutely hilarious just exploring the whole concept and and even recently like with Bernie Sanders creating a clip of Joe Rogan's endorsement of them and the blowback and be outright dishonesty and lying from CNN came out on Twitter and there's a huge push back again against that and mm-hmm so there does seem to be a little bit of room for optimism but going back down hometown which I'm absolutely horrified to see they're teaching it to youngsters mm-hmm teaching youngsters this new racism I I personally don't see it going anywhere anytime soon oh I hope I'm wrong but I'm a personal belief that it is going to be around for a while and I will actually go so far as to say that I as a result of this I as much as I hate to admit it I think Trump's victory and in a few months in 2020 election is all those shirred because of this where do you what do you see this going so what I see going on right now to kind of hit on the moment before I try to make guesses that where it'll go which are harder where I see it right now is that it's losing grassroots support massive lately it's trying to educate a new generation but every time I talk to people I keep hearing people say the kids just aren't buying it I don't know what happens when you started doing like PK or P P through K kids you start getting like three to five and seven year olds Sirkin those kids I don't know you might warp their heads but older by it and it has like his whole thing but man once anything gets institutionalized it's not cool anymore so the grassroots though are turning on this fast really fast like you even just said you know you hate to say it Donald Trump's victory and it's almost like you weren't horrified by that idea I'm not a huge fan of the man as a matter of fact but I know where you're coming from and that's what I'm talking about is that the grassroots are like wait a minute roses faster I have to interrupt you there because I'm most definitely not a fan of him yeah yeah in a few months I'll be absolutely thrilled I'm just hoping we have someone decent come in who is it was definitely not Trump but will help push back against this focus I mean the Obamas about speaking out against it now and there exactly yeah I'm no fan of Trump like not even close so don't don't get me won't get me wrong here a lot of people are trying to brand me as conservative or trumpet or something it's not like that or not alright not even outright adjacent or any of these other things so the thing is though is I think they've lost the grassroots but they are absolutely not only have they deeply institutionalized whether they one of two things is going on either they they think they have more power and success than they do and they're rapidly capitalizing upon that or they realize the writing's on the wall and they're trying to institutionalize as fast as they can but either way that pushes into institutions right now is really intense so I think that it's going to be an ugly picture to programmatic ate off of that that a lot of institutions are gonna go whole hog on this and the public's gonna turn on it which means it's they're going to end up discrediting those institutions all heart and reform will be demanded and it'll be a really ugly both vital and not that important institutions as a result of this that's kind of what I see happening and what I am guessing is gonna go forward it's certainly out because I think that there's a huge element or it's both a fad and a moral panic those things always burn out another thing is that it hates everything including itself so it doesn't really recruit people very well it kind of alienates everybody so and it's problematizing itself like you can't have you can't even have like people of color now you got to have black and indigenous people of color who are mad at the light-skinned privilege and the not black or indigenous people of color and then the indigenous are complaining about settlers of color which are black people who are gone they're subtle who aren't indigenous man it's like this whole their infighting is next level we also saw that you know das a meeting words like point of personal privilege and we can't get anything done and if you saw the Washington State Legislature thing the guys like white supremacy is showing up and to your meeting on time and having an agenda and trying to get things done and making checklists and getting that's white supremacy and we need to get away from that does not it's like how much can they accomplish I do think it's not going to be terribly effective I do think we're gonna lose a lot of institutions I do also fear that we will get Donald Trump again for another four years as a result and in fact I think that the way that the impeachment thing is going in the Senate is a sign of that because if they thought he was going to get walloped in November I don't think that they would be quite so ready to cozy up to him and support him right now sort of a cutthroat environment up there so it's really concerning that you know woke miss has become this influential now as for the first question you ask what should we do this is the fun part secret societies and I'm not kidding I don't mean like go join the Freemasons I mean like I mean like these kinds of podcasts where people and then like extrapolate out from this right so people are gonna watch your podcast but people could also have meetups meetup is a thing there used to be a website for that maybe it still exists people could actually organize meetup so they could get together they could go out the Atheist community used to do that really well that even in like the deep south there were atheist meetups happening all over the place and so you'd get a bunch of atheists to go out to dinner together and hang out and talk and they can talk more freely because nobody's gonna bust their chops for it and they're not putting their necks on the line and what happens is you generate organized action that way you start educating each other you start sharing resources with each other eventually what's going on is if it's losing the grassroot support and it's institutionalizing the only way that can happen is people aren't showing up to whether they're not invited or they're just not going a lot of times it's just not going to the meetings whether those are school board meetings whether those are these legislative hearings and things like that people aren't showing up because they they don't realize they need to be they wouldn't know what they're talking about if they did and see they don't want to go alone so if you get to where people are kind of forming networks and they're meeting with each other and they're forming like you know you were or whatever and then you know now 30 if you actually read some of the primary literature and you say hey look I understand what can really Crenshaw meant and this is why that's a problem and this is what you're trying to implement and this is why it's a problem and here's here's a better alternative at that point people are gonna start taking you seriously and then what I'll also happen is people will start running for these administrative roles and where they vote when the decisions are made to infocus a out that's what's going to happen well everybody perceives right now is it's impossible because you're like I'm just one guy I have to hide behind a pseudonym because they'll burn me if I don't lose my job I can't go up against the Machine as an individual you have to go up against the Machine as a machine yeah I mean space one of the one of the reasons I'm and I'm very very dead set about arguing against this is because not simply because the social the social and political situations we find ourselves in now it's what happens to afterwards mm-hmm intersectionality and Wolf nests is pretty much taking a show out of genuine social justice issues and my argument is the aftermath is once well we're in a classic situation of the board who cried wolf you cry wolf enough enough times no one is gonna believe you there was Vince you know the story it's there was an incident a few years ago which this this whole circumstance concerned me so much that I decided to give that decided to give a talk about it in front of a small group of people that was a very very rebel revelatory moment for me because I mentioned several the more egregious examples that of locusts that happened over the last couple of years there was the whole red wine stein incident and evergreen there was the SPLC incident we've been watching the laws there were some of the instances about like I'm allowing transgender and they fighters to fight and like you know what what were the parameters of how they should be allowed to compete and I I gave a talk and made it clear that I was talking about other quote liberal and progressive people getting slandered once it was over I was approached by several people in the audience saying thank you for for bringing that up if you raise a lot of great points and this is largely a left-leaning crowd which I was I was sure I was gonna get score eiated mmm-hmm it didn't happen but towards the end of that talk there was this one lady who just went up there and it was as though she didn't hear a single thing I was saying she just looked at me and Laird and just said I'm only with with you and that conservative voices should not be silenced I'm like are you kidding me did you hear anything I just said and that it's that attitude that makes me wonder how much headway is being made and what happens afterwards mm-hmm I always feel like I have to walk I'm sorry good go for it no no no no I didn't have anything really meaningful to say so it's gonna waffle so it's up to you oh I was gonna say that I always feel I've had those experiences I could I can - that for sure and I worry as well so that was my mean gadget sorry I was gonna say that I'm always concerned that I have to walk on eggshells whenever I meet someone new but what I always find is that it's almost always the opposite just about every person that I come in that I come into contact with and that I form meaningful relationships with meaningful friendships with it they all have basically the same viewpoints as I do on the current state of intersectionality theory almost all of them are confused with why people think that there are one asinine amount of genders why people think that they should be inoculated from horrible horrible horrible speech horrible ideas and it's just that they're concerned about also speaking up about it and so it's the sort of domino effect where because one person is scared about it another person is scared about it then it creates this illusion that we should be scared about it when a reality we shouldn't be scared about talking about it and and like it's just that they have so much the other side they have so much institutional power where they've created this environment where that's that's what we expect and so the question is how do we topple this institutional power that they have and I think you pretty much nailed it on the head you formed these secret societies you formed these secret meetings just as the atheist movement back in 2006 back in 2007 they did such a great job at we can do that again because they are losing steam very rarely now will I see someone such as yourself get ratioed I did want to bring up this one tweet that you tweeted out a few days ago that I don't think I've ever seen you get ratio tat but this is as close as a ratio is I've seen the curve from your side and it'd be level I I wrote it down here exactly what it said and I'm sure you already know what it is that I'm going to bring up you said earlier today I passed a black woman in the store we briefly made eye contact that one another before carrying on with our shopping nothing else happened intersectionality insists that we were at racial and gender dynamics that need interrogating here now it's funny because that's really the crux of the tweet was that intersectionality theory looks for dirt in a clean room and advertises what little dirt it can find but you got a backlash a huge a backlash from people saying that you have no idea what intersectionality means that this is a complete misunderstanding a misrepresentation of what it's supposed to be and funnily enough you're probably one of the people I think out there that understands intersectionality theory more than 99.9% of the people that are actually in the field itself but do you think people missed the point of your tweet oh yeah the question is just how motivated they were to miss the point to be honest with you and I don't like to guess people's motivations but the failure to understand it was so shocking so shockingly bad that some of it had to be that and then on the other hand a lot of people are just in this mindset where it's like oh the guy this a white guy in particular said something about race holy crap or they instantly because exactly the second part of the tweet right it's in two little sections the second part of the tweet says the intersectionality says we constantly have to look for those racial dynamics and so when I said this happened that happened nothing happened they were like something happened something must have happened and you thought it was so remarkable that nothing remarkable happened that you had to comment on it because one of the objectives of critical methods and again remember this is what this is it's critical methods is that you're unmasking hidden power dynamics that are assumed to already exist so they assume that there's a power dynamic and that I had a you know obviously I have hidden racism in me and I didn't maybe reveal it by smiling at the woman although some people said I did I were filled by thinking that it was remarkable enough to tweet about later but either way they finally found out how I'm a racist and I think that a lot of people are just like in this whole mode where it's like wait a minute somebody said something about race and let's flip out let's absolutely flip out and that's what we actually have to get past because it's exactly the backwards thing it's like as you said you know you feel like you have to walk on eggshells and all of a sudden you realize it was all bs well the feeling to have to walk on eggshells actually comes from exactly this like did we interrogate our power dynamics I mean I could be wrong I don't want to speak for the lady of course and as if many people seem to have missed that point but it really didn't seem like there are any weird power dynamics it just looked like neither on of us really was very happy about being at the grocery store and we got each other they kind of like yeah you're here to smile and we moved on with our day I the the response though I'm actually really happy with how that went a lot of people are like reaching out to me like are you okay you take some time off you know get away from all this I'm gonna car you kidding this is the best thing possible it's so hard to convince people that people really think this way and then it's like I tweet that and then thousands of them say it for me it's like okay I'm just gonna retweet pretty much every one of them that I happen to say have time to see and all right case closed you know people really do think that way and that's actually the thing that I'm most worried about is that people learning to think that way to see problems to see like well what was the racial dynamic they're like Robyn D'Angelo teaches the question isn't this is she's not technically I don't know if she's technically intersect her you can't not be intersectional and work in these these fields so she's got intersectional in her she's technically a critical whiteness educator which is I don't like that most horrifying thing I've ever heard of and consultant but but Robyn D'Angelo statement is and this is straight out of critical race theory the question is not did racism take ace but a loaded racism manifest in that situation so people saw that racism manifested by me and a black woman smiling and she was smiling because she was afraid of me which is I think unlikely to have been in the case there people saw the racism manifesting on the fact that I felt the need to tweet about it or that I dared is a white man to speak about intersectionality clearly an ignorant as it turns out I guess ignorant by definition because I can't understand oppression therefore I can't understand the real point of intersectionality which is supposed supposed to speak to oppression so you know I'm really actually happy about how that went it was a kind of tumultuous couple of days but I couldn't have had a better result out of that thank you to all of you people who didn't understand if you have to be watching this you have done me a huge favor please please do it again Nev like significant blue cheque name people coming after me and so it's great thank you thank you all right well our my point out of respect for I know Bruce has an engagement at 6:30 and we're coming up I think we passed 10 minutes over the hour any closing thoughts Bruce no I'm well I just want to thank James for I'm coming on in and joining us in this conversation it's it's what something I consider to be one of the defining issues of our generation and it's conversations like this interactions that will ultimately get us past is the past this and hopefully get us back on track so thank you James for putting on man thanks for having me I have to agree with it you just said they're completely thank you for saying that right it's almost like these were I'm just so happy I'm not white because they can say these things without being concerned about getting called a racist I get called what is it called the talking Tom but well not a racist at the very least and well you know what um you're racists adjacency alright so somebody actually asked me if I'm afraid of being called a racist a it called racist like 500 2,000 times a week now if I get called a racist the first thing I have to wonder is who's calling me that and you know which racism do they mean oh I'm a systemic racist mmm-hmm who isn't okay so what did I actually you know engage in something racist if that's the case I actually do want to know about it and like whoops let's check that so I don't be afraid to be called a racist until you know what the person saying it means I think that's a there's a closing thought for you actually I like to jump in with spammable here found this and I sometimes frequent other circles and someone we both know brought up the idea of victimhood privilege we see we see everything every conversation we have nowadays that even ten gentle touches upon minorities race or any kind of subject matter and one of the quickest and easiest way for someone to shut someone else down in have invalid in my not so humble opinion a very cowardly fashion is to tell them to check their privilege you know check your full sugar white privilege that your male privilege like whatever privilege you have depending on where you are on the intersectional scale on the caste system my response to that is well if we're gonna talk about privilege we're gonna argue from respectable privilege why don't you check your victim of privilege if you're from if your demand right it's the duration then you're saying I need to listen to you because you're a victim and you shouldn't listen to me because I'm a man well if we're serious about genuine social justice and if we're honest about having a conversation like two rational adult individuals let's put the privilege arguments aside and focus on going back to objective truth because that's the only way genuine social justice will move forward and that's the only way we'll achieve what everyone inevitably wants and more just a society and we won't get there by this whole privilege nonsense its victimhood privilege or the hierarchal a privilege for it's a discussion of state objective truth and I encouraging everyone to listen to this podcast that the third way is the way to go yep absolutely they call it an ideology that's used to maintain impression objective truth individualism human universality those are all ideologies we used to maintain oppression but you are right they're the way to go they are not G's used to maintain oppression as it turns out you are right yeah I wish we had another hour because there's so many things that we can talk about we can also talk about your book for instance that you wrote alongside Peter Berg a.cian which could be a good remedy to have conversations with people on the opposite side yeah how did I have impossible conversations it's a wonderful book by the way I recommend everyone listening to hurry up pick it up read it it's fantastic it's on my favorites on Goodreads calm yes wonderful book you guys will have to check out the one that Helen and I have come Helen pluckers and I have coming out in May cynical theories cynical theories is to explain we're witness came from at least see academic stuff of it and how it works and how they think and so you'll definitely want to check that one out it comes out in May I'm actually running around like a frantic fool trying to catch up with all of the last minute you know requests from the the publisher and some editors and they're like change this change that is this right check that no books already done then today this is a publishing there we go it is in the like yeah it's it's it's done but you know we can still change a word here or there we can't really do anything sniffing and then it comes out you know they got a print it and all that comes out in May May 5th I think okay sounds great well James thanks for coming on the podcast I really appreciate it you know guys it was a good one thank you thanks for listening to this episode of thinking out loud feel free to follow me on Twitter at Lee and physicist be sure to follow James at conceptual James thanks again and I hope to see you in the next video you you

Channel: The Babylon Project

Views: 7,854

Keywords: james lindsay, math, physics, thinking, thoughts, intersectionality, woke, regressive left, peter boghassian, philosophy, science, how to have impossible conversations, grievance studies hoax, podcast, discussion, debate

Id: KHQut5THeiU

Length: 71min 5sec (4265 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 02 2020