OnlySubs Episode 70: The Woke Dividing Line is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
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Why is conversation with the Woke so difficult? There are many reasons, but one reason is that the Woke have, by definition, adopted a completely different view of the world, one they believe they have awakened (woke up) to and that no one else can see. At the heart of this worldview is the matter of structural determinism, which roughly means that your membership in an identity group and that identity group’s relationship to “power dynamics” the Woke believe shape society also shape your character. In other words, there can be no equal ground upon which we could possibly stand to judge people by the content of their character that doesn’t also take into account the impact society has had on them in terms of the color of their skin. Conveniently, of course, the Woke get to define for themselves and everyone else what that essential experience of being in a particular identity group happens to be and so what it’s “unique voice” sounds like. In this episode of my subscribers-only podcast, James Lindsay OnlySubs, I walk through the idea of structural determinism and outline how its acceptance or rejection (in favor, say, of individualism that also recognizes a common humanity shared by all) is a deep, fundamental reason why conversations across the “woke dividing line” go so badly. In short, those conversations seem to be about various details, ideas, policies, outcomes, doctrines, and all the rest, but those are all meta-conversations above the question of whether or not we accept or reject structural determinism. Join me to explore this idea and hopefully gain a little more clarity in to the difficulty of talking across this divide.
Previous episodes of OnlySubs can be found here.
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‘Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America’ by John McWhorter
“McWhorter earns his subtitle, and he is not being rhetorical. He does not argue that third wave anti-racism is “like” a religion—it is a religion in all but name. It is religious in the infinite elasticity of its arguments and in its claim to be an all-solving theory, which banishes irony and contradiction and treats all opposition as blasphemy. We see also the prayer sessions and genuflections, the insistence on sin, the creation of saints (see the George Floyd murals), and the same extraordinary moral arrogance masquerading as humility and meekness. Church leaders, in sympathy with white protestors at a rally in Cary North Carolina, actually washed black protestors’ feet. This is not a distortion of religious thinking, as critics like Andrew Sullivan (a Catholic) have claimed. It is religious thinking to a T. It is Christianity in drag.”
from https://quillette.com/2021/10/26/woke-racism-a-review/
Barbara Applebaum now has a new book!
https://books.google.ca/books/about/White_Educators_Negotiating_Complicity.html?id=K6RMEAAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y