RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/ripping-off-the-veil-on-diversity-regimes?wallit_nosession=1

Racial preferences have been almost impossible to dislodge because their human costs are usually hidden. College admissions officers don’t inform rejected student applicants that they were turned down to make room for diversity admits. An HR office does not tell job seekers or the company’s own employees that they were not hired or promoted because they would add nothing to the company’s diversity metrics. The rejected applicants may suspect that they didn’t get a desired position because of a racial preference, but they can rarely be 100 percent sure.

The offstage nature of these tradeoffs allows preference proponents to deny that diversity decisions entail a zero-sum calculus. In 2019, a U.S. district court judge upheld Harvard’s racial-admissions preferences after a lengthy trial. In her opinion, Judge Allison Burroughs insisted that race is only a positive factor, and never a negative factor, in Harvard’s admissions process. Such a claim is specious. The only reason that institutions implement racial preferences in the first place is that there are not enough qualified applicants among non-Asian minorities to achieve a racially proportionate student body or workforce under a meritocratic selection system. Hiring a diversity candidate under a preference regime almost always means not hiring a more qualified non-diverse candidate. The former’s gain is inevitably the latter’s loss.

Now a British classical music organization has inadvertently ripped the veil off the diversity arithmetic, and the consequences may be far-reaching. Earlier this month, the English Touring Opera told nearly half its orchestral musicians that it would not be renewing their contracts for the 2022 season because it has “prioritised increased diversity in the orchestra.” In other words, as a bunch of white guys you must be cleared out so that we can boost the collective melanin levels among our musicians. Your talent does not matter; your skin color does.

Here, at last, were concrete, publicly identified victims of a preference regime. The reaction was swift. Since the Sunday Times broke the story, the English Touring Opera has been thrown on the defensive. Arts Council England, a government arts funder and the opera company’s main patron, is backpedaling on its aggressive promotion of diversity after the company claimed that it was only following the Council’s mandates in terminating the white musicians. It turns out that the public has little stomach for watching the diversity sausage be made.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/20/the-lefts-war-on-comedy-is-no-joking-matter/

A curious characteristic of totalitarian communist regimes is the dearth, if not the total absence, of comedy. No comedy films were ever made in the Soviet Union or in any of the other Communist countries. In fact, cinemas in communist countries were almost always empty, the films being so mind-numbingly abysmal. (One time in Havana, the government allowed American films to be shown in a theater and the lines stretched around the block, whereupon the government arrested the attendees inside the theater.)

In the Soviet Union, circuses were a major source of popular entertainment, devoid of the usual crude propaganda. The favorite aspect of Soviet circuses were the clowns, when the otherwise unsmiling Russians could let loose with belly laughs.

Yoani Sánchez stated that one of the things that first helped her to break through the indoctrination received at school of the cult of personality of Fidel Castro was her observation that Castro never joked, highly unusual for a Cuban.

We are in the midst of a Marxist upheaval going full throttle towards turning America into a Communist utopia. The symptoms are all there: self-censorship, censorship (aka “cancel culture”), political indoctrination of the military, indoctrination in the schools, network news deliberately becoming propaganda outlets, Balkanizing the population, etc.

Another symptom is the slow strangulation of comics and comedy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/opinion/woke-politically-correct.html

If you’re subscribing to my newsletter, you likely already know that I am a linguist who writes books and articles about the joys and mysteries of language. Others likely know that I write about race in America. Some of you know that I switch hit between both and sometimes combine the two. In my newsletter I’ll also be pitching in about music and other things that occupy me from week to week.

But for this first edition, I have chosen a subject that brings together the two things I get to write about most: language and race. Namely, just what has happened to “woke” lately?

It seems it was 10 minutes ago that it was the hot new badge of enlightenment, shared warmly as a kind of lexical bonding ritual, usually in the expression “stay woke.” To be woke was to be in on a leftist take on how American society operates, especially in reference to the condition of Black America and the role of systemic racism within it.

In 2012, people were using “stay woke” on Twitter with unalloyed pride. As late as 2016, you could find rosy-cheeked teens and 20-somethings all but chirping “woke,” such as in this earnest little guide to the latest slang.

No more. These days, “woke” is said with a sneer. It’s a prisoner in scare quotes as often as not (“Why ‘wokeness’ is the biggest threat to Democrats in the 2022 election”) and typically uttered with a note of condescension somewhere between the way comedians used to talk about hippies and the way anybody talks about, well, rather than a word beginning with “a” you’ll find discussed, among other places, here, I will sub in “jerks.”

The first thing that happened to “woke” was that it was borrowed from Black slang. It first appeared in neither a BuzzFeed article nor a rap but a jolly piece on Black vernacular expressions in 1962 in this newspaper called “If You’re Woke, You Dig It.” Many will be surprised that “salty,” as in “irritable,” another Black expression that white people have taken on of late, also occurs in this piece.

By the time something hits the page, we can be sure it had been around long before, and it’s a good guess that Black people had been using “woke” for at least a couple of decades before this. Lead Belly gives us a look at its likely origins when he urges people to “stay woke” in an afterpiece remark on a 1938 recording. He is referring to Black people being alert to actual physical danger; it would have been a natural evolution to start using “stay woke” to refer to more, as we say, systemic matters.

It was after 2010 that “woke” jumped the fence into mainstream parlance. Erykah Badu’s “Master Teacher” seems to have at least planted a seed, and then those “stay woke” salutes on Twitter in 2012 were in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing, upon which the expression was truly set in stone.

There are those who will see the story of “woke,” therefore, as one of cultural appropriation. But that’s a narrow take. To refer to its uptake by whites as a kind of theft is one way to see it. But another way is to marvel at how bizarre it would have been as recently as the 1980s for white progressives to warmly embrace a term from the Black street as a sign of empathy with Black America’s problems — and as for the theft, Black English is mighty enough that legions of its slang words and expressions stay quite unappropriated, thank you very much. Clearly we can spare one or two now and then? In the meantime, while racism’s persistence is clear, people who like and at least halfway understand one another will talk like one another.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/09/rocks-are-racist-now-university-of-wisconsin-moves-derogatory-boulder-for-50k/

The University of Wisconsin at Madison is spending $50,000 to move a giant rock that leftist students insist is a symbol of racism—all because a century ago some publication used a racial epithet to refer to the rock.

Chamberlin Rock, which was positioned in the same spot on campus since 1925, is a boulder named after Thomas Crowder Chamberlin, a former university president and geologist. But according to students who testified at a Campus Planning Committee meeting last November, the rock is racist because it was referred to with a racial slur in a 1925 newspaper headline.

“The derogatory nickname was commonly used at the time to refer to any large, dark rock,” relayed a university press release. “The Wisconsin Black Student Union, in partnership with the Native American student organization Wunk Sheek, led an effort to remove the rock from campus. UW–Madison’s main campus is on ancestral Ho-Chunk land.”

The rock is deemed by experts to be more than 2 billion years old, and it will be used for educational purposes at its new location. Nearly 12,000 years ago, it came from northern Canada to Observatory Hill—the Wisconsin area—after being carried by glaciers.

The students, however, have evidently yet to unearth evidence that the professor the rock is named after is a racist. Instead, the boulder was characterized as oppressive because a writer 100 years ago referred to it with an outdated term, “nig-erhead,” which was used by people at the time to describe darker rocks, as noted by the university. The 42-ton boulder will be moved off-campus thanks to private donations.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/under-fire-from-social-justice-warriors-classical-music-organizations-grovel/

If you don’t really have any talent, the surefire way of getting attention these days is to claim that some institution is racist. For several years now, the malcontents have been griping about classical music, claiming that it is “too white” and “not inclusive.”

Naturally, the leaders of orchestras and opera companies and other groups have abased themselves before the critics and are hastily trying to make amends by hiring “diversity” administrators and putting more works by “underrepresented minority” composers on programs.

For a thoroughly depressing read about this, Heather Mac Donald has written an essay for City Journal that lays out the ugly facts.

Sadly, nobody in the classical-music world seems to have the nerve to tell the SJWs that there is no racism in it and hasn’t been for many decades.

Mac Donald’s concluding paragraph explains the truth:

Without home transmission, the best hope for creating more black classical musicians is to restore widespread music education. The antiracism advocates have said little about that imperative, however. It’s easier to extract racial quotas from compliant organizations than it is to engineer a change as profound as exposing students to a vanishing musical aesthetic. Packing off every opera and orchestra administrator to implicit bias training will not produce a single competitively qualified black musician. Nor will potential students be inclined to pick up the violin after learning that its repertoire belongs to a white supremacist tradition. But more power is to be gained by pushing the racism line than by pursuing the unlikely rebirth of public school music training. So the search has been on to find racial scapegoats.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/clevelands-baseball-team-dishonors-indian-it-was-robert-spencer/

Many, many years ago, long before any of you who are reading this were born, and long, long before Major League Baseball went woke, pulled the All-Star Game out of Atlanta for not toeing the Left’s line, and made race-baiting Communist agitprop a permanent feature of its website, I learned about a man named Louis Sockalexis. Sockalexis, a great baseball name if there ever was one (later announcers would have loved to report about how he “socked” one into the stands), is largely forgotten today, although he has made a few headlines in the last few days because the Cleveland Indians, a team that bore that name in his honor, has now dishonored him by changing its nickname, so as not to insult Indians. Yes, friends, it’s a topsy-turvy world, and it isn’t getting any saner.

Have you heard of Louis Sockalexis? Some of our great-grandfathers marveled at his feats. He was a Penobscot Indian from Maine who became a major league player in 1897, hitting .338 in 66 games for the old National League Cleveland Spiders. He generated a great deal of fan enthusiasm, but indifferent to or unable to overcome stereotypes, he succumbed to alcoholism and had washed out of the major leagues by 1899. The Spiders amassed the eye-watering record of twenty wins and 134 losses that year, and went out of business right after the season’s end, opening up an opportunity in 1901 for the new American League. It was not until 1915, however, that Cleveland’s American League team began calling itself the Indians in honor of Sockalexis. He hadn’t played in the major leagues in a decade and a half, but was newly recalled to fans when he died an untimely death from tuberculosis in 1913. The Society for American Baseball Research notes that in January 1915, Cleveland team owner Charles Somers, “perhaps recalling the all-too-brief period of excitement that Louis Sockalexis had brought to Cleveland in 1897, dubbed his team the Indians.”

And so Indians they were for 106 years, but when the 2022 season starts (if major league baseball hasn’t succumbed entirely to wokeness by then and decided to dispense with actually playing the games and instead award wins and losses on the number of players of color minus the number of Trump supporters), the Cleveland baseball team will be calling itself the “Guardians,” after a couple of statues on a nearby highway bridge. The statues are known as the Guardians of Traffic. If Cleveland’s baseball solons were so determined to rename the team after traffic markers, given their abject capitulation to wokeness, they should have gone with the Cleveland Yield Signs.

In any case, so much for Louis Sockalexis: he goes the way of Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and any and all non-white mascots and trademarks. But it is just another manifestation of our Age of Absurdity that anyone would think that team nicknames were designed to demean and insult, instead of honor, the person or thing from which the name is derived. Does Cleveland’s baseball team hate Cleveland’s Guardians of Traffic that have now replaced Sockalexis? Of course not. And the idea that they do is just as absurd as the claim that the old name degraded Native Americans.

Yet the claim is, of course, commonplace. Crystal Echo Hawk, executive director of a group called IllumiNative, which claims to be dedicated to fighting misrepresentations of Native Americans, hailed the name change: “It is a major step toward righting the wrongs committed against Native peoples and is one step toward justice.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/national-archives-racism-task-force-labels-own-rotunda-example-of-structural-racism/

The National Archives’ task force on racism claimed in a newly unearthed report that the agency’s own rotunda housing the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights is an example of “structural racism.”

The report to the country’s top librarian, which was released in April but resurfaced by Fox News on Sunday, also claimed that the Founding Fathers and other white historical figures are depicted too positively. 

The task force was formed at the direction of National Archivist David Ferriero in response to the murder of George Floyd last year.

The group claims that structural racism “unequivocally impacts” how National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) employees approach each other, customers, and historical records.

The summary of the report detailed examples of “structural racism” including “legacy descriptions that use racial slurs and harmful language to describe BIPOC communities.” The list includes racial slurs and terms such as “elderly,” “handicapped” and “illegal alien.”

It labeled the National Archives’ Rotunda as an example of “structural racism” because it “lauds wealthy White men in the nation’s founding while marginalizing BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and other People of Color], women, and other communities.”

The task force called for “trigger warnings” to be added to historical content to “forewarn audiences of content that may cause intense physiological and psychological symptoms.”

“Providing an advisory notice to users gives us an opportunity to mitigate harm and contextualize the records,” the report says. “It creates a space to share with the public our ultimate goals for reparative description, demonstrate our commitment to the process, and address any barriers that we may face in achieving these goals (i.e., the size and scope of the Catalog and the ever-evolving knowledge we gain regarding what is harmful).”

The report also recommends a change to language on OurDocuments.gov to be less celebratory of historical figures such as former President Thomas Jefferson.