Black People Are Far More Powerful Than Critical Race Theory Preaches | Opinion Chloe Valdary
, founder of Theory of Enchantment On 5/10/21 at 8:00 AM EDT
The nation is currently engulfed in a debate about critical race theory, a social science that emerged in the mid-1970s that analyzes how racism has been used as a system to disempower people of color. The view has been popularized by people like Ibrahim X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, whose books
How to Be an Antiracist and
White Fragility mainstreamed the idea that racism is systemic and must be combatted constantly and vigorously, at every level of society. More recently, there s been some pushback, too: Republicans across the nation have been making attempts to ban this theory from public schools, pointing out that its practical application has led to the demonization of white students.
The fall of the intellectual Where have all the great thinkers gone? In the month before it was pulled by its publisher because of its author’s alleged sexual predations, Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth produced an outpouring of terrifically entertaining reviews in the literary pages of East Coast periodicals – the New Republic,
Harper’s and the
New Yorker. The essays were a lot of fun; they were also implicitly nostalgic for the novelistic world that Roth so egomaniacally bestrode. At Toni Morrison’s death in 2019 I suggested in the
New York Times that she might be the last “Great American Novelist”, meaning not the last good novelist (good novels are still regularly published) but the last writer who “made novels seem essential to an educated person’s understanding of her country”. That might be premature – Cormac McCarthy is still living, after all – but in the sheer energy and delight of the Roth reviews you can feel a cultural pul
Sun, 25 Apr 2021 00:00 UTC
Fauci in the Machine.On the Monday before Easter 2021, Gallup published a poll indicating that membership of a church, synagogue, or mosque had dropped below fifty percent of U.S. adults for the first time in eight decades.
For six of those decades, the number hovered around 70 percent. It has since dropped to just 47 percent, with the sheerest decline occurring in the past two decades.
Religion In America Is Hollowing Out.
The study noted: The decline in church membership. appears largely tied to population change, with those in older generations who were likely to be church members being replaced in the U.S. adult population with people in younger generations who are less likely to belong. The change has become increasingly apparent in recent decades because
The Politics of Identity Politics: Learning from a German Discussion
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Criticism of identity politics is hardly new. The insistence on or “celebration” of fractional community identities rather than a common good was presented as an explanation for Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election. No coalition of separate groups will ever be able to muster the political magnetism of an inclusive rhetoric of national solidarity. That is the first problem: how identity politics divides, rather than unites.
However in addition to the problems of fragmentation and exclusion, the very focus on “identity,” a cultural and psychological concept, has always distracted from material issues of political economy, redirecting debate toward symbols and selfhood. Christopher Lasch labeled this a