That being said, I find Hanania’s description of the historical causes of wokeness more persuasive than other right-wing screeds or even the Atlantic contributor Yascha Mounk’s forthcoming book on the topic. Almost all such books blame identity politics on postmodern philosophy and critical race theory, with some pinch-hitting by Tumblr. Although strong overlaps certainly exist between the ideologies found in American humanities departments and contemporary “wokeness,” critics rarely explain how exactly these complex, jargon-riddled philosophies are supposed to have migrated out of obscure academic journals and into mainstream discourse; they mistake correlation for causation.
Tyler Austin Harper reviewing Richard Hanania's The Origin of Woke
Hanania blames Civil Rights legislation in the sixties for forcing universities to become politically correct in their hiring practices--everything else follows from that. Whatever.
But what strikes me about this quote is the obtuseness of the last sentence --
critics rarely explain how exactly these complex, jargon-riddled philosophies are supposed to have migrated out of obscure academic journals and into mainstream discourse; they mistake correlation for causation.
Really?
Maybe they don't explain it because it's become the air they breathe. So here's an explanation from someone who breathes that air but also has other sources to supplement his respiratory health.
Anybody who has spent any time in a university setting recognizes how the humanities and social sciences have been overtaken by a militant postmodern mood. It's not about even understanding or reading these "complex, jargon-ridden philosophies". Hardly anybody understands what these guys said. It's been dumbed down to a few misunderstood axioms about how everything is a cultural construction that justifies and reinforces power-holding factions and in doing so justifies and reinforces the marginalization of marginalized. This system and all the subtle ways it promotes inequality must be deconstructed in the name of social justice. [See Note 1] As if that's some kind of big insight. It's inherent in the tradition. It's the message that subversives like Socrates and Jesus gave, but they're dead white guys that the mood dictates should no longer be taken seriously and so have nothing relevant to say to us now.
Students who are are acculturated into this mood, and since these students go on to become the faculty of schools K-12 as well as in the universities, and go on to careers in media and the arts, and go on to careers in NGOs and corporate human resources, they shape the culture top down in pretty obvious ways. This is at the heart of what's freaking Red America out even if they don't articulate it this way. They reject this postmodern mood, and their instincts are largely correct even if their solutions will just make things worse.
So, as I've been arguing here, the meaning of something like 'social justice' becomes something that is understood more in Foucauldian or Derridean terms than in terms that are compatible with what Gandhi's or Martin Luther King's idea of it--or has much to do with Socrates and Jesus said about it. It's not the same thing at all, and it's a very big deal that it's not.
Now I don't know anything about Harper except that he teaches Environmental Studies at Bates. This is not a critque of him in particular, but of the postmodern mood that is so hegemonic in universities. I'm sure Harper is a fine fellow, and that we would agree on most things--especially about how scary and dangerous people like Hanania are. But I thinik there's a pretty good chance that his own acculturation into this postmodern mood makes it difficult to recognize or understand why people might object to how schools at all levels are swimminng in it.
It's the mood that shapes the thinking of everyone he knows, and they're all good people, right? What perversity could be at the root of objecting to the good things that these good, data-based, clear-thinking people want? But then they don't understand why a lot of people don't find in it the Good that they long for, and so reject it as just elite fashionable thinking rather than see what is truly good in it. It's completely understandable to me why some people reject the moralistic nihilism that is at the heart of its postmodern articulation as woke social justice. Most of people who articulate it don't think of themselves as nihilists, but that's because they haven't thought it through. In order for people to give up old habits of thinking and feeling, they need to be inspired not scolded. They need an encounter with Socrates.
Update 9/25/23: Harper has an article in yesterday's NYT about social justice education in which he shows that he gets how this mood is particularly powerful among educated white progressives:
Yet I can’t help also feeling that as American culture has become more racially progressive, it’s become more pathological about race. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of social justice parenting. ...
Social justice parenting gurus also tend to espouse strange and at times unsettling beliefs that encourage children of all races to become obsessed with Blackness and to view whiteness as a kind of cultural cancer.
A common theme across many antiracism parenting books is the importance of teaching your child to identify micro-gradations in skin tone and hair texture. In “Raising Antiracist Children,” Ms. Hawthorne recommends that parents acculturate children to recognize and label the many distinct colors of Black and brown skin, offering a typology like “red clay brown” and “pinecone brown.” She calls this phenotype introduction and provides helpful instructions for teaching children racial phenotypes by having them make “skin-tone play dough.”
As an academic with expertise in the history of science, I am struck by just how much overlap there is between social justice parenting’s fixation on phenotypes and that found in 19th- and early-20th-century race science, lending credence to John McWhorter’s observation that antiracism might be better understood as a kind of “neoracism” that peddles new forms of race essentialism under the guise of liberation.
BTW, I have not read Mounk's book yet, But whatever Harper's objections to it might be, Mounk's NYT piece last week pretty much makes the same point Harper does:
Critical race theory is far more than a determination to think critically about race; similarly, the identity synthesis as a whole goes well beyond the recognition that many people will, for good reason, take pride in their identity. It claims that categories like race, gender and sexual orientation are the primary prism through which to understand everything about our society, from major historical events to trivial personal interactions. And it encourages us to see one another — and ourselves — as being defined, above anything else, by the identities into which we are born.
This helps to explain why it’s increasingly common these days to see schools seek to ensure that their students conceive of themselves as “racial beings,” as one advocate puts it. Some of them even split students into racially segregated affinity groups as early as the first grade. These kinds of practices encourage complex people to see themselves as defined by external characteristics whose combinations and permutations, however numerous, will never amount to a satisfactory depiction of their innermost selves; it is also a recipe for zero-sum conflict between different groups. For example, when teachers at a private school in Manhattan tell white middle schoolers to “own” their “European ancestry,” they are more likely to create racists than anti-racists.
There is even growing evidence that the rapid adoption of these progressive norms is strengthening the very extremists who pose the most serious threat to democratic institutions. According to a recent analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump has attracted a new group of supporters who are disproportionately nonwhite and comparatively progressive on cultural issues such as immigration reform and trans acceptance, but also perturbed by the influence that the identity synthesis has in mainstream institutions, like the corporate sector.
As an educator and as the husband of a K8 public school teacher, I have observed over the years how vulnerable schools are to intellectual fads in university schools of education that are distributed into classrooms, i.e., rammed down teacher's throats, by district offices. A decade ago, a good example was how a Constructivist approach became dogma and Direct Instruction heresy. This had enormous consequences for the way that math and reading were taught, very often in ways that made learning for many kids performing under grade level more difficult. I wrote about that in a post over ten years ago when I was more involved in education politics. It's among the posts I've written over the years that get the most pageviews.
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Note 1: One of the consequences of this move is in its making equality an absolute value. This is a mistake that leads to all kinds of problems. Equality is important, but it must be understood to be in a polar tension with freedom. The two have to be kept in a dynamic balance. Freedom without equality leads to the anarchic state of nature where the strong dominate the weak; equality without freedom leads to the leveled, spiritually inert Last Man society that Nietzsche warned about.