FAIR Weekly Roundup
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For our Substack, FAIR Advisor Erec Smith wrote about a growing belief in the field of rhetoric that author “authenticity” rather than effective communication should be paramount. According to Smith, this belief has become so entrenched that many now claim that expecting foreign students to learn Standard English, as well as their self-expressed desire to learn it, is oppressive and rooted in white supremacy.
In this piece, Smith describes a question raised by a professor during a seminar directed at another professor asking for advice on how to deal with his students who were expressing a strong desire to speak and write in Standard English over their home dialect. The answer was both patronizing and, according to Smith, racist.
For our Substack, CEO of the Jazz Leadership Project and Senior Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Evolution Greg Thomas wrote about “why race-based framings of social issues hurt us all.” This article is partially in response to a piece by Carrie Sheffield published last month on this Substack.
Among other things, Thomas takes issue with what he calls “deficit-framing,” which is the practice of defining people or groups solely by their problems. Thomas says:
Race-based framing of problems in a segment of the American population results in narratives of pathology. Unfortunately, this is the default position of many academics, activists, and reporters who discuss Americans who self-identify as “black.” By instead framing issues in terms of the tangible assets and skills that people have, however, we can jump off the vicious wheel of racialization that keeps us in this mess.
For Areo, FAIR Advisor John Wood Jr. wrote about the recent failed conversation about race between comedian Jon Stewart and author (and FAIR Advisor) Andrew Sullivan after a segment on Stewarts show called “The Problem with White People.” According to Wood, this segment “provided a large viewing audience with a masterclass on how not to talk about race.” He added:
This panel discussion did indeed reveal a problem with white people—the difficulties they have in conversing with each other about race. There is a lack of mutual understanding here that must be remedied before this conversation can be of much good to anyone.
Ultimately, says Wood, if there is any “problem with white people” in discussions about race, it is “that they fail to listen to all black people” and “fail to listen to each other.” He believes that the moment “well-meaning white people…figure out how to do that, maybe they could help us undo the legacy of racism once and for all.”
For The New York Times, FAIR Advisor John McWhorter wrote about his view that the political Right’s recent call for book bans is an over-correction in response to the Left’s own penchant for censoriousness. He states:
These cancellations are part of a larger project, seeking to muzzle opinions antithetical to the woke quest to eternally contest power differentials and endlessly expand the definition of white supremacy. People on the right are duly appalled by this mind-set. But they miss that their book bans are just as tinny, just as local to petty concerns of our moment and just as, well, unjust.
McWhorter worries that the Right’s book bans are nothing more than “a combination of virtue signaling, panning for gratifying retweets and ginning up wedge issues to help win elections.” If this is the case, he warns that it is “distracting focus from the way the left continues to shred our cultural fabric.”
For CNBC’s Make It, educational psychologist Michele Borba discussed seven skills known to help kids succeed and how parents can teach them effectively. Her work has led her to the conclusion that “thrivers are made, not born,” and that children need a balance of structure and autonomy in order to flourish.
Borba then covers each of the seven skills she found to be “most highly correlated to optimizing kids’ thriving abilities.” The skills are self-confidence, empathy, self-control, integrity, curiosity, perseverance, and optimism. When taught correctly, she claims these skills increase “mental toughness, social competence, self-awareness and moral strength.”
For The New York Times, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris wrote about the book Bad and Boujee: Toward a Trap Feminist Theology by Jennifer M. Buck that was recently pulled by its publisher in response to social media backlash claiming that the book was “academically flawed,” contained passages that were “deeply problematic,” and that it was guilty of “cultural appropriation.”
One critic, theologian Candice Marie Benbow, was apparently “livid” that a book touching on aspects of black culture was written by a white woman. Another critic claimed that Buck had “no business writing about this” because of her white skin, even though Buck had acknowledged her lack of “lived experience” in the book’s introduction.
The authors are worried about “how far such restrictions might go,” and say that “great books could be lost if authors are discouraged from writing outside their own experience.”
For The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum wrote about Hannah Arendt’s 1950 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, and asks whether we have reason to be worried about the threat of totalitarianism arising in within Western societies today. While the events and trends Arendt wrote about in her book are undoubtedly different from what’s is happening today, Applebaum believes there are enough similarities to be cause for concern.
By destroying civic institutions, whether sports clubs or small businesses, totalitarian regimes kept people away from one another and prevented them from sharing creative or productive projects. By blanketing the public sphere with propaganda, they made people afraid to speak with one another. And when each person felt himself isolated from the rest, resistance became impossible.
Applebaum explains that The Origins of Totalitarianism contains little about how to go about fixing things. Rather, “it offers proposals, experiments, different ways to think about the lure of autocracy and the seductive appeal of its proponents as we grapple with them in our own time.”
For Reason, Katrina Gulliver reviewed the book Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media by FAIR Advisor Jacob Mchangama. The book traces the concept of free speech through the ages, revealing its central importance for debate, challenging power, and achieving liberation.
While many take free speech for granted, both Gulliver and Mchangama believe it is ultimately fragile and always in need of protecting from our worst human tendencies and instincts.
Meanwhile, the secular world has its own forms of blasphemy. As our politicians and tech gods talk about cracking down on "disinformation," I get the sneaking suspicion that they don't just mean Sandy Hook truthers—they mean political ideas they don't like, the stuff they called "sedition" in 1798. Once the government is allowed to silence speech, the net of justification always broadens.
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I'd love to read John McWhorter's article, but I wont be subscribing to the NYT. Quit that a long time ago.