RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/racial-hysteria-is-consuming-juilliard?wallit_nosession=1

Turn on CNN or open the New York Times, and you may encounter someone explaining how exhausting it is to be a black person. The idea that systemic racism is leaving blacks scarred and spent has been embraced across mainstream America, articulated by corporate CEOs and university presidents. The latest performative assertion of black oppression is playing out at the Juilliard School in New York City. The controversy has significance beyond the school.

In September 2020, the Juilliard School’s Drama Division announced a series of “community meetings” to address “Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (EDIB) issues.” The school’s growing cadre of diversity bureaucrats would discuss Juilliard’s’ “anti-racism work.” The head of the Center for Racial Healing would give a presentation. Workshops would address such topics as “race in rehearsal” and “voice and speech and race.” NYU theater professor Michael McElroy, one of the school’s two external diversity consultants, would offer a three-day seminar in black musical culture.

These Drama Division meetings were part of Juilliard’s broader effort to bring race into all its activities, including music and dance. Damian Woetzel, former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, became Juilliard’s president in July 2018 and proceeded to put increasing bureaucratic clout behind the concept that Juilliard has a racism problem. The school added diversity curricula and audition requirements. It beefed up its system for reporting bias incidents. It mandated diversity workshops for faculty and students.

Those efforts picked up steam after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Within a week, Woetzel and the EDIB taskforce had sent out three schoolwide emails on the “work” Juilliard still needed to do to become an “anti-racist community.” The school sponsored a blacks-only “healing” space. It recommended that students and faculty read the books of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Michelle Alexander to understand systemic racism. On June 11, 2020, Juilliard’s provost, Ara Guzelimian, circulated a student petition. Lending an administration email account to a student communiqué violated school protocol, but the Juilliard Student Congress’s “Call to Action” was important enough to justify the exception, wrote Guzelimian in his cover letter.

The Call to Action charged Juilliard with “systemic injustice.” It demanded an end to the school’s “almost completely Eurocentric” faculty, curriculum, and performances and a “complete in-person season featuring the works of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] artists.” It called on Juilliard to create #BreonnaTaylor and #GeorgeFloyd scholarships in music, drama, and dance.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/woke_culture_comes_for_shakespeare.html

William Shakespeare wrote his plays at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries. Over the years, people have tried to make Shakespeare more palatable for then-current audiences, either by putting the plays in new settings or getting rid of “objectionable” issues. Nothing, though, has ever equaled what Britain’s modern Globe Theater plans to do: It’s going to “decolonise” Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s plays have lasted 500 years. Even in 21st century America, we still routinely used words and phrases that Shakespeare first wrote: “admirable,” “barefaced,” “hostile,” “sanctimonious,” “all that glitters isn’t gold,” “break the ice,” “clothes make the man,” “a laughing stock,” “It’s Greek to me,” “too much of a good thing,” and many more.

It’s true that much of Shakespeare’s language is hard to understand for modern people — although, oddly, Americans may find Shakespeare’s English easier to understand when spoken as he would have spoken it, rather than as actors speak it today – but it’s still exquisitely beautiful. And while his plays’ values can be strange or even offensive, Shakespeare nevertheless had such a deep understanding of unchanging human nature that he always has currency. Whether it’s those stupid teenagers in Romeo and Juliet, the witty Beatrice and Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing, or even Shylock’s ageless plea that others recognize his common humanity, he still can resonate with modern audiences.

At various times, people have tried to bring Shakespeare in line with their times.  In 1807, Thomas Bowdler created a cleaned-up Shakespeare, shorn of suicides, blasphemy, prostitution, etc., so that families could read it together without shame. His effort became so famous we still use his name as a verb for someone creating a mangled abridged version of an original work of written art. At around the same time, siblings Charles and Mary Lamb prepared a clean and simple version for children.

In our modern era, we’ve seen The Taming of the Shrew reworked as Kiss Me Kate, a brilliant Cole Porter musical; Richard III reimagined in a fictional 1930s fascist England; Much Ado About Nothing moved to small-town America at the end of the Spanish American war; and Macbeth transformed into a feudal Japanese tale in Throne of Blood. Shakespeare is almost infinitely malleable because, under the British renaissance trappings lies someone who understands people – how they behave in different circumstances and what motivates them, whether we look at people’s best or worst instincts.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/21/a-woke-lexicon/

At this point few will deny that there is a massive failure to communicate between the minions of the woke Left and those who have managed to maintain their equilibrium in a world gone off the rails. At least some substantial portion of that failure stems from the fact that too many of us hear woke Left terminology and take it literally, ascribing to it traditional definitions of the sort that might still be found in dusty dictionaries or that are tacitly shared by all involved in dinner-table conversations in ordinary American households. 

Thus, for example, when we hear the accusation of “racism” cast about recklessly every which way, we might feel bewildered or even exasperated if we approach the matter from the standpoint of the word’s customary meaning. To clear this and other similar misunderstandings up, I have endeavored to offer below a necessarily partial compilation of woke terms and what they really mean when voiced by those on the other side of our growing political divide. 

Please understand: as this is a work of cultural anthropology presenting a snapshot of the inner workings of an anti-culture that routinely purges its own most cherished creeds and their adherents, all definitions adduced here are necessarily provisional and may change drastically, even by the time you are done reading these words.

Please note, also, that in order to steer clear of even the appearance of Western imperialist hegemony, I have studiously avoided alphabetical order and presented the terms below in a sequence informed solely by the opaque workings of pure intuition and indiscriminate whim.

racism: 

      [archaic and rarely used in this sense today] the harboring, exhibition or embodiment in practices of ungrounded views or beliefs that some racial groups are inferior or superior to others in various ways
      a generalized term of derision commonly used in a manner similar to how terms such as “jerk” or “scoundrel” might have been employed in earlier epochs
      a label deployed in order to ostracize or as a prelude to a ritualized ostracism, roughly analogous to “witch” during the Salem witch trials
      a rallying cry used to muster support for Democratic Party candidates or policies, especially for candidates or policies that stand against the interests of poor and working class Americans; also, the central tenet of contemporary Democratic Party politics that is most often deployed ironically, that is, to refer to anything and everything as “racism” or “racist” in order to institute “corrective” practices or policies that are, in reality, far closer to the traditional notion of “racism” than the practices or policies that they seek to correct; see also anti-racism
      a fail-safe retort that may be strategically deployed to stifle disagreement or shut down debate, especially when it is a debate one is losing
      a label for the emotion of BIPOC individuals when their feelings are hurt
      a word news media companies with a shrinking audience, such as CNN or the New York Times, can and should throw around frequently and indiscriminately to drum up controversy and create fleeting spikes in viewership and/or readership to stave off their inevitable sell-offs and bankruptcies
      a false charge to be publicly leveled at in-laws (ideally, during softball interviews with Oprah) by wealthy, privileged, status-seeking, profiteering, half-BIPOC C-list actresses who marry into the British royal family but find themselves, due to their thoroughgoing narcissism, unable to get along with others, whether their own family or their new in-laws, especially when said actresses become upset and disenchanted with the whole “royal” thing upon discovering that her husband likely will never become King.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/race-crazed-disney-backs-down-matthew-vadum/

A humiliated Walt Disney Corporation scrubbed its bizarre critical race theory-based employee indoctrination materials from the Internet after a think tank scholar exposed them.

Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow and director of an initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute, celebrated Disney’s conspicuous retreat from the Left’s rarefied anti-white anti-Americanism, the New York Post reported May 13. Rufo defines critical race theory as “racialized Marxism.”

Disney “has removed its entire antiracism program from the company’s internal portal,” he said, “effectively scrubbing it out of existence.”

“This is a major victory in the war against ‘woke capital,’” he said, noting a “significant backlash from the public” after his initial report.

“Disney was peddling the most toxic elements of critical race theory — and my reporting led to immediate changes within the company,” Rufo said.

The environment at Disney has become increasingly politicized in recent months, Rufo reported employees telling him. The account appeared in a City Journal article he penned, titled, “The Wokest Place on Earth.”

There are “almost daily memos, suggested readings, panels, and seminars that [are] all centered around antiracism,” one said. Disney is “completely ideologically one-sided” and discourages conservative and Christian employees from expressing their views.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/you-may-not-speak-if-you-use-an-aggressive-tone/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third

America’s descent into an Orwellian nightmare continues apace. Now government officials see fit to keep you from speaking out on policy matters if they don’t like your tone.

That’s the upshot of a recent encounter between Center for Equal Opportunity president Devon Westhill and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. As we read here, Westhill had been invited to speak before the commission, but was then disinvited when Commissioner Janet Dhillon turned thumbs down because she didn’t like his remarks.

Federal officials don’t care much for freedom of speech. They prefer controlled speech that supports their efforts. And they’re getting more aggressive themselves in deciding what may or may not be said.

I’m afraid that this will only get worse.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-man-they-couldnt-cancel-11619806528?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The term “cancel culture,” like “political correctness” before it, is a comical expression for an ugly cultural pathology. To be canceled—an older, closely related term is “blacklisted”—is to have your public persona or influence assailed, typically by a sizable mob, for some real or perceived offense against progressive orthodoxy, whatever that orthodoxy may hold at the moment. For that to happen, you must possess some form of authority in the first place: an academic post, a political office, a role in the entertainment industry, employment with a “mainstream” media organization, a voice as an intellectual or imaginative writer.

But the targets of cancellation, having derived their legitimacy from consensus left-liberal culture, are typically not very good at defending themselves, or even understanding what happened to them. Often they apologize, despite having said or done nothing wrong, which only emboldens the cancelers. Or they fall back on pieties about free speech and the marketplace of ideas, as if their tormentors still believed in those principles.

One target of cancellation who is able to speak intelligently about it is Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto clinical psychologist, YouTube lecturer, and author of “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” (2018) and “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life,” published in March.

If you’re an ordinary curious person, Mr. Peterson won’t strike you as a likely target for moral outrage. He brings together a dizzying array of texts and traditions—Jungian psychoanalysis, the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, Frederick Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard and much else—to formulate basic lessons, or “rules,” about how humans might overcome their natural tendency to lassitude and savagery. His books, podcasts and lectures are impressively argued, frequently insightful and occasionally abrasive presentations of various principles of wise living.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/07/wealthy-and-woke/

Ed Bastian makes $17 million a year as chief executive officer of Delta Airlines, Georgia’s largest employer. 

Bastian just blasted Georgia’s new voting law. He thinks it is racist to require the same sort of ID to vote that Delta requires for its passengers to check-in.  

Yet most Americans believe voting is a more sacred act than flying Delta and, moreover, may have noticed that Delta has all sorts of partnerships with a systemically racist China. So polls show Americans approve of voter IDs.  

Bastian fears the woke mob more than the majority of Georgia residents who support the law. Apparently, his theory is that the greater numbers of average folks won’t threaten his multimillion-dollar perch as much as fewer but more powerful left-wing elites. 

The most privileged CEOs of corporate America—those who sell us everything from soft drinks and sneakers, to professional sports and social media—now jabber to America about its racism, sexism, and assorted sins. 

The rules of cynical CEO censure are transparent. 

First, the corporation never harangues unless it feels it has more to lose—whether by boycotts, protests, or bad publicity—than it stands to gain in staying neutral and silent. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/hollywood_choked_by_wokeness.html

At the 78th Golden Globe Awards ceremony in 2020, host Ricky Gervais savagely roasted Hollywood’s woke hypocrisy.  The British actor-comedian said this was the last time he would be hosting the show, so he would fire away with some nothing-to-lose sarcasm.  He joked about Felicity Huffman — who got a 14-day jail term plus a fine and community service for bribing an SAT proctor to boost her daughter’s scores — designing the license plate of the limo that ferried him to the gala; about sex offenders Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein; and about Hollywood’s protracted, politicized acceptance speeches.  The reactions of many in the audience — including actor Tom Hanks’s priceless display of restrained apoplexy and discomfiture — were later meme-ified across the internet.

But what was really important was that Gervais drove home points about Hollywood’s sham wokeness, a sickening obsession that threatens to deep-six entertainment.  Apple, Amazon, Disney — he spared none: “Apple roared into the TV game with The Morning Show, a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China.  Well, you say you’re woke but the companies you work for in China — unbelievable.  Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you?”  And he punctured many an inflated ego, saying, “So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use your platform to make a political speech.  You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything.  You know nothing about the real world.”

Indeed.  Ruled by the messages of leftists and social justice warriors, whose beliefs have long informed the culture of political correctness, Hollywood — like the community of political insiders designated “the swamp” — is out of touch with the American public and with reality.