FAIR Weekly Roundup
For Quillette, editor Scott Newman addressed the large gap in America between the discourse surrounding issues of race, class, and fairness, and the truth.
Though the narratives and conversations surrounding these topics are often “vague, grandiose, and informed by generalities, abstractions, and righteous indignation,” Newman contends that the values held by both progressives and conservatives are actually quite similar. Using concrete data, Newman split the political divide to reveal a path forward that most Americans should be able to agree on.
One by one, Newman applied his data-first approach to highly contentious topics such as poverty, police brutality, Affirmative Action, and free speech. His analysis is even-handed and reveals that there is plenty of blame to go around on all sides contributing to our warped perceptions.
Both progressives and conservatives are bound to get it wrong sometimes, no matter how worthy their intentions. Inflexible ideological assumptions and value judgements are not always well-suited to addressing the problems of a complex world filled with conflicting interests and the perverse and contradictory impulses of human nature.
For his detailed analysis, read the full article here.
In the National Post, Michael Higgins wrote about Dr. Patanjali Kambhampati, an award-winning chemistry professor at Montreal’s McGill University, who claims to have been denied federal funding for his grants due to his refusal to take a person’s race into consideration for hiring purposes.
For many of Canada’s research granting agencies, Kambhampati’s insistence of a “colorblind” approach to “hire on merit any research assistant who was qualified, regardless of their identity” is not compatible with their diversity and inclusion requirements.
“I’ve had two people say that was the kiss of death,” said Kambhampati. “I thought I was trying to be nice saying that if you were interested and able I’d hire you and that’s all that mattered. I don’t care about the colour of your skin. I’m interested in hiring someone who wants to work on the project and is good at it.”
Kambhampati’s laboratory studies high-powered lasers that have applications in the telecom industry as well as medicine. While Kambhampati believes that Canada is well-situated to become a world leader in this field, his grant applications have not yet been evaluated by any qualified scientists because they are routinely struck down by DEI administrators before peer review.
Read the full article here.
For Heterodox, David Diener and Angel Parham aimed to show how the fraught history behind some of our holidays can actually be used as a source of unity. When these holidays begin to polarize, the authors believe we need to remind ourselves about fundamental purpose behind teaching and celebrating history.
We shouldn’t study history—or observe historical events—to open old wounds or unearth the sins of our fathers. Rather, we should view these holidays—and history more generally—with open minds as a series of lessons on human nature and as a guidebook for cultivating virtue and wisdom. If we learn to approach our history from this perspective, we might find it can be a catalyst for unity rather than an ongoing source of division.
By cultivating an environment of open debate and free inquiry, the authors believe we can use history to draw out personal lessons about the moral blindspots of the past to help direct our attention to new blindpots that undoubtedly exist today that will seem obvious to future generations in hindsight.
History uncovers what is common in every human experience—the realities of love and hate, justice and injustice, fidelity and betrayal. It is through the recognition of, and learning from, these commonalities that the study of our history is fundamentally a uniting enterprise—that is, if we choose to learn its lessons.
Read the full article here.
For Tablet, Ari Blaff wrote a powerful essay on the tendency of Americans to “graft their domestic culture wars onto foreign conflicts.” Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, for instance, compared the conflict between Israel and Palestine to race relations in the United States, saying that “what they are doing to the Palestinian people is what they continue to do to our Black brothers and sisters here.”
Blaff highlights the worrying portrayal of Israel as “the embodiment of global whiteness” that is rapidly becoming “synonymous with racial supremacy.” As a result of these portrayals, the social landscape for Jews in the United States has also begun to shift as they are being transformed (in the eyes of some) from a highly oppressed minority into symbols of white privilege and oppression.
[T]he whitening of both domestic and foreign Jews is not an isolated phenomenon. It is also a foreboding sign for other American minorities caught in the cultural riptides. The attempt to whiten Jews in order to demonize or discredit their history in America has many parallels with similar attempts to racially recategorize Asian Americans.
Read the full article here.
For City Journal, Daniel Buck and James Furey exposed a highly ideological English Language Arts curriculum called Units of Study that is currently being used in thousands of classrooms across the United States.
The K-12 cirriculum is rooted in “critical theory,” and covers “the politics of race, class, and gender.” The programs are heavy on ideological jargon, with some asking students to analyze text through “identity lenses” and break down their “hegemonic masculinity” by applying both “critical race theory” and “gender theory” to develop “critical literacy” and help “investigate power.”
This unit underscores a problem far larger than a few lesson plans. It exposes a radical approach to education that pervades our schools and upends all of our former notions of what education should be, replacing the goal of fostering inquisitive, capable minds with ideologically trained readers, who already know what a text has to say.
The authors highlight research by the education nonprofit EdReports.org claiming that Units of Study did not “meet the expectations for text quality and complexity and alignment to the expectations of standards” and that its materials are “devoid of a consistent, systematic, and explicit plan for instruction in and practice of grade-level foundational skills.”
Read the full article here.
For The Telegraph, FAIR Advisor Inaya Folarin Iman described what she views as a “new moral order” which dictates that “you should be honoured not for what you’ve achieved nor what you’ve sacrificed, but instead for the ‘correct’ opinions you express and the identity category you belong to.”
Iman’s essay was inspired by recent events surrounding the late English Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Harry Potter author JK Rowling, where activists attempted to erase their achievements because of their “problematic” views. According to Iman:
Young people are being taught that goodness isn’t found in forgiveness, fortitude and courage, but in uncritically reciting the fashionable cultural mantras of the present. Everything must be made subordinate to the compulsion to show that we have the “right” views. It is a moral catastrophe.
Iman believes that we need to “rediscover the importance of goodness, truth, beauty and shared meanings,” otherwise these virtues will “be lost to an aggressive, philistine and corrosive ideology.”
Read the full article here.
For Discourse, FAIR Advisor Erec Smith describes what to do when you’re preceived as being the “wrong kind of black person,” an accusation Smith is well accustomed to for his criticisms of “critical race theory” and other identity-based teachings.
Those of us considered “the wrong kinds of Black people” are treated worse than problematic whites; our refusal to toe the woke line is seen as betrayal. At best, we are accused of “multicultural whiteness,” i.e., being racially Black but politically white. At worst, we are seen as traitors, kissing up to our oppressors. Either way, we are seen as holistically “wrong” and, therefore, detrimental to the advancement of social justice.
Smith points out that, while there is considerable viewpoint diversity among the “wrong” kinds of black people, one thing they all share is a “common shunning” from ideologically righteous activists. To help those who find themselves the target of such shunnings, Smith outlines six things that so-called “wrong blacks” should know and expect, and how to respond. These include:
Expect Classical Liberal values to make you suspect
Expect that what you call “accomplishment,” they call “privilege”
Expect people to put words in your mouth
Expect some white people will police your Blackness
Realize that there is power in numbers
Remember to laugh and love
For Erec’s advice on how to respond, read the full article here.
On her Substack, Common Sense, FAIR Advisor Bari Weiss takes a step back to evaluate how so much of the media narrative surrounding the Kyle Rittenhouse trial became distorted on almost every relevant fact which resulted in a picture that bared little resemblance to reality. Weiss claimed:
This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.
Weiss then breaks down each mainstream claim—that Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist” with no connection to Kenosha, that he drove across state lines with a gun to oppose BLM protests, that it was illegal for him to have the gun at all, and that he was “looking for a fight”—and carefully presents the bare facts that either refutes or calls these claims into serious question.
Read the full article here.
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