The next battleground-'Cancel Culture & Identity Politics' - Page 24 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15168205
wat0n wrote:@QatzelOk's point is implicit in my response. You could perhaps respond to the question below:


some jurisdictions use public funds to train their white workers to get rid of their "whiteness"


Though this demand for an answer wasn't aimed at me, let me say that I don't understand what "get rid of their whiteness" could possibly mean.

It looks to a layman like myself that you are demeaning any attempts to sensitize people to the plights of other groups of humans.

Demeaning this kind of thing is bad behavior, unless you have some very specific things to criticize about a particular program.

To brush them all off as "losing your whiteness" is suggesting that racism is part of that whiteness that you don't want to part with. Meanwhile, it should be the only thing that these programs ask you to part with, as well as your ignorance of the experiences of people from different walks of life as yourself.
#15168213
QatzelOk wrote:Though this demand for an answer wasn't aimed at me, let me say that I don't understand what "get rid of their whiteness" could possibly mean.

It looks to a layman like myself that you are demeaning any attempts to sensitize people to the plights of other groups of humans.

Demeaning this kind of thing is bad behavior, unless you have some very specific things to criticize about a particular program.

To brush them all off as "losing your whiteness" is suggesting that racism is part of that whiteness that you don't want to part with. Meanwhile, it should be the only thing that these programs ask you to part with, as well as your ignorance of the experiences of people from different walks of life as yourself.


Actually, it's a good question. What do these guys mean by whiteness anyway?

It's vague, as it happens with all things postmodern, but I think the Smithsonian has a fair bit of material about what these people mean by it. Quite frankly, I don't think the traits they label as "whiteness" are exclusive to white people at all, but whatever.
#15168223
Godstud wrote:The thing is, only the people like you(poor victims of white racism who can't even point to actual harm done), are the ones saying this is happening. No one else is. You are the ones pretending to be victims, while having all the benefits that the real victims of racism are trying to get.

White racism isn't a thing. The system and culture isn't there to support it.

Nice try.

Can you cry, "I am the real victim!", a few hundred times? Maybe it'll help convince thinking people that you're right.





I doubt it. :lol:


Many POC think white CIS men are the root of all world problems. There is nothing in that statement that implies victimhood.
#15168281
noemon wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WGlcGkVjq4



It doesn't make the hedge funders richer in the pocket they think. It is not about money only. It has to go. That is their stance.

It is incredible but the USA in particular, unless it is an elite college or a specifically liberal arts college? Will never include a classics major.

Community colleges that I have either seen their catalogs of classes very very rarely ever even offered what I remember taking like Western Civilization I, II, Humanities I, II, foundational histories of the world, etc etc. It is not happening in many places. It is increasingly how good one is in computer programming, software development and innovation in marketing or something related to high finance. It is worrying.
#15168284
Godstud wrote:You constantly saying that white people are the victims of racism doesn't imply victimhood, it asserts it, @Julian658.

Your assumption is just silly Freudian slip. You project your victimhood into others.
#15168336
Tainari88 wrote:It doesn't make the hedge funders richer in the pocket they think. It is not about money only. It has to go. That is their stance.

It is incredible but the USA in particular, unless it is an elite college or a specifically liberal arts college? Will never include a classics major.

Community colleges that I have either seen their catalogs of classes very very rarely ever even offered what I remember taking like Western Civilization I, II, Humanities I, II, foundational histories of the world, etc etc. It is not happening in many places. It is increasingly how good one is in computer programming, software development and innovation in marketing or something related to high finance. It is worrying.


There is an anti-Greek, "anti-white" movement behind this as we saw in the thread. Dan-El Padilla Peralta of Princeton wants the Classics to be cancelled for cultural reasons and he is joined by various others in the cause.

It is quite abhorrent what is happening.
#15168337
I think all of you are making solid points.

However, another layer of the issues with universities, is that more and more, universities are being viewed as training programs for jobs. As opposed to places for young people to become more enlightened, wise, thoughtful. This is why you see so much emphasis on STEM. STEM is great, but it should not come at the expense of everything else.

Side note: I quite enjoyed the philosophy courses I took even though I was studying engineering.
#15168344
noemon wrote:There is an anti-Greek, "anti-white" movement behind this as we saw in the thread. Dan-El Padilla Peralta of Princeton wants the Classics to be cancelled for cultural reasons and he is joined by various others in the cause.

It is quite abhorrent what is happening.


@noemon most of the early memories I have of my mother reading to me where all Greek fables, stories, literature and classical mythology. I loved it as a child, and she enjoyed reading it to me or storytelling it in Spanish to me for me to understand it.

I always thought that truth is found in many cultures and stories and it was not about race. Or colorism. It is about humanity. Learning the best of human experiences. There are fine writers in all cultural traditions. I always believed in the value of a broad based education.

It is important.

I never lost that love for Greek cultural traditions, stories, histories, myth and all the rest.

Who would not? It has all of what human beings aspire to achieve in this world. To be free and thrive and live with balance and harmony.
#15168368
Godstud wrote:You constantly saying that white people are the victims of racism doesn't imply victimhood, it asserts it, @Julian658.

It is not about victimhood. This is about woke people like you that are anti-west 24/7.
#15168376
Washington Post wrote:
Opinion: Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe

Cornel West is a professor of the practice of public philosophy at Harvard University and serves on the board of academic advisers of the Classic Learning Test. Jeremy Tate is the founder and chief executive officer of the Classic Learning Test.

Upon learning to read while enslaved, Frederick Douglass began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind. Defying unjust laws, he read in secret, empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man. Douglass risked mockery, abuse, beating and even death to study the likes of Socrates, Cato and Cicero.

Long after Douglass’s encounters with these ancient thinkers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized by his reading in the classics as a young seminarian — he mentions Socrates three times in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”


Yet today, one of America’s greatest Black institutions, Howard University, is diminishing the light of wisdom and truth that inspired Douglass, King and countless other freedom fighters. Amid a move for educational “prioritization,” Howard University is dissolving its classics department. Tenured faculty will be dispersed to other departments, where their courses can still be taught. But the university has sent a disturbing message by abolishing the department.

Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.

Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.


The Western canon is, more than anything, a conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices and the excellence of voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else in the world. We should never cancel voices in this conversation, whether that voice is Homer or students at Howard University. For this is no ordinary discussion.

The Western canon is an extended dialogue among the crème de la crème of our civilization about the most fundamental questions. It is about asking “What kind of creatures are we?” no matter what context we find ourselves in. It is about living more intensely, more critically, more compassionately. It is about learning to attend to the things that matter and turning our attention away from what is superficial.

Howard University is not removing its classics department in isolation. This is the result of a massive failure across the nation in “schooling,” which is now nothing more than the acquisition of skills, the acquisition of labels and the acquisition of jargon. Schooling is not education. Education draws out the uniqueness of people to be all that they can be in the light of their irreducible singularity. It is the maturation and cultivation of spiritually intact and morally equipped human beings.


The removal of the classics is a sign that we, as a culture, have embraced from the youngest age utilitarian schooling at the expense of soul-forming education. To end this spiritual catastrophe, we must restore true education, mobilizing all of the intellectual and moral resources we can to create human beings of courage, vision and civic virtue.

Students must be challenged: Can they face texts from the greatest thinkers that force them to radically call into question their presuppositions? Can they come to terms with the antecedent conditions and circumstances they live in but didn’t create? Can they confront the fact that human existence is not easily divided into good and evil, but filled with complexity, nuance and ambiguity?

This classical approach is united to the Black experience. It recognizes that the end and aim of education is really the anthem of Black people, which is to lift every voice. That means to find your voice, not an echo or an imitation of others. But you can’t find your voice without being grounded in tradition, grounded in legacies, grounded in heritages.


As German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer emphasized in the past century, traditions are inescapable and unavoidable. It is a question not of whether you are going to work in a tradition, but which one. Even the choice of no tradition leaves people ignorantly beholden within a language they didn’t create and frameworks they don’t understand.

Engaging with the classics and with our civilizational heritage is the means to finding our true voice. It is how we become our full selves, spiritually free and morally great.
#15168387
wat0n wrote:It's vague, as it happens with all things postmodern...

Here, you are smearing post-modernism because, for you, it's "too vague."

And while it's true that Modernity had all the answers, it failed to provide a sustainable quality of life for everyone. Modernity had the assurance of an atomic bomb, or a reversed river flow. "We can do whatever we want."

Post-modernity *recognizes* the fragility of life and the vagueness of human knowledge.

Identity politics is not as post-modern as you make it sound. Many people use a medieval definition of "race" or "ethnicity" to define the world around them. Medieval is NOT post-modern.

...

noemon wrote:There is an anti-Greek, "anti-white" movement behind this as we saw in the thread. Dan-El Padilla Peralta of Princeton wants the Classics to be cancelled for cultural reasons and he is joined by various others in the cause.

It is quite abhorrent what is happening.

I agree with you that this "movement" is fairly bruitish and reactionary.

But I disagree that it involves a rejection of all things Greek. Only those that contribute to the cannon of Western Civilization seem to be targeted.

I think the question that every academic has to ask is "What will replace these works?"
Last edited by QatzelOk on 21 Apr 2021 19:19, edited 1 time in total.
#15168389
QatzelOk wrote:Here, you are smearing post-modernism because, for you, it's "too vague."

And while it's true that Modernity had all the answers, it failed to provide a sustainable quality of life for everyone. Modernity had the assurance of an atomic bomb, or a reversed river flow. "We can do whatever we want."

Post-modernity *recognizes* the fragility of life and the vagueness of human knowledge.

Identity politics is not as post-modern as you make it sound. Many people use a medieval definition of "race" or "ethnicity" to define the world around them. Medieval is NOT post-modern.


No, identity politics is older (a lot older) than both modernity and postmodernism. However, postmodern identity politics is a fairly recent phenomenon.

The idea of applying deconstruction whenever it suits your identity politics, and only in that case, is a fairly new development.
#15168390
wat0n wrote:No, identity politics is older (a lot older) than both modernity and postmodernism. However, postmodern identity politics is a fairly recent phenomenon.

Yes, it is "post-modern" in the sense that Modern Media and Modern Politics is using Medieval concepts to prevent any kind of return to equality or sustainability on the part of the (well-divided by ID politics) masses.

This is terrible, of course. But Moderns have been doing this for centuries, so even the tactic isn't really post-modern. It's more "the end of Modern manipulation of the commons" - at least, I hope it is.
#15168392
QatzelOk wrote:Yes, it is "post-modern" in the sense that Modern Media and Modern Politics is using Medieval concepts to prevent any kind of return to equality or sustainability on the part of the (well-divided by ID politics) masses.

This is terrible, of course. But Moderns have been doing this for centuries, so even the tactic isn't really post-modern. It's more "the end of Modern manipulation of the commons" - at least, I hope it is.


On the other hand, don't you think that this idea of deconstructing identity categories (or even identity classes) is in fact a fairly recent innovation? Maybe I'm wrong here, but I don't think the core idea of, say, deconstructing gender was ever thought about before.

That's what is actually new: There is a doublethink going on here because, while these guys may say stuff like the above, they also go on and don't hesitate to apply those medieval concepts too. Again, when it suits them.
#15168395
wat0n wrote:Maybe I'm wrong here, but I don't think the core idea of, say, deconstructing gender was ever thought about before.

Anthropology suggest you are wrong, that this kind of gender-reinvention has been going on ever since the first technologies were invented.

How do you think we got from *women working outside bare-breasted with children of many men* to the Modern period of *women's clothing, men's cars, women's perfume scents, men's products are blue, women's are pink, etc.* ?

Manipulative elites have been redefining gender and nationality (etc) for as long as they have been in charge.
#15168397
QatzelOk wrote:Anthropology suggest you are wrong, that this kind of gender-reinvention has been going on ever since the first technologies were invented.

How do you think we got from *women working outside bare-breasted with children of many men* to the Modern period of *women's clothing, men's cars, women's perfume scents, men's products are blue, women's are pink, etc.* ?

Manipulative elites have been redefining gender and nationality (etc) for as long as they have been in charge.


But is that change in gender roles, which also happened in modernity, really comparable to introducing non-binary or fluid gender identities? That idea that gender has no essential meaning and is wholly socially constructed is way more radical than simply changing social norms around gender roles.
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