Weekly Roundup
Requiem for the Oscars: The Academy Awards on the Precipice
For FAIR’s Substack, Libertas Conscientiae (a pseudonym) writes about why in order to return to relevance, the Oscars must reject DEI.
Who else is hurt by such standards? Only those dreaded straight, white males? Think again. The “inclusion” standards are designed to encourage the hiring of people based on identity traits, not talent. Their purpose is not to serve the art of cinema or the careers of cinematic artists but rather to spare the Academy the kind of social media criticism with which it was stung during the #OscarsSoWhite moment in 2015. Black, Asian and Hispanic artists will now wonder whether they are being hired for their talent or because they check a box. Artists who prefer to keep their sexuality a private matter will now feel pressure to out themselves just to be able to keep working. Pundits and critics will have a field day speculating on “the real Best Picture winner” and which films were unfairly excluded because they didn’t meet the arbitrary criteria. And, of course, audiences will continue to abandon the telecast because no one wants to be lectured by an awards show.
How our treatments for “racial trauma” only make the problem worse
For FAIR’s Substack, Dr. Tara Gustilo writes about how microaggressions and affirmative action are harming the very people they are supposed to protect.
Moreover, preferential treatment based on immutable characteristics is, by its nature, divisive and harmful for all involved. For those who benefit, it clouds their ability to accurately assess their own skills and talents. It sows seeds of doubt as to whether they have actually earned what they have achieved or if it is simply because the scales have been weighted in their favor. Worse, it can result in individuals obtaining positions for which they are not qualified, leading to unnecessary failure and self-doubt. And there is also the guilt of knowing that their gain comes at an unfair cost to another.
New Details in the Tragic Case of Toronto Educator Richard Bilkszto
For Quillette, FAIR Advisor Jonathan Kay writes about how a Freedom-of-Information request shed light on the Toronto District School Board’s ‘abusive, egregious and vexatious’ anti-racism trainer.
And so what we are left with isn’t just the tragic story of a tolerant and liberal-minded educator viciously bullied (at taxpayer expense) in the name of social justice, but also a tale of institutional failure, in which the checks and balances normally applied to hold our public education system accountable proved no match for the talismanic power of social-justice rhetoric. It’s something to remember the next time someone in any organization seeks to justify a program of ideological programming on an “urgent” basis.
Bridge over troubled water
For Deseret News, FAIR Advisor John Wood Jr. writes about how to clear the shadow hanging over America.
Many of us in that movement believe if we can understand the humanity underlying our differences we can remember how to love each other. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. taught that agape love (God’s love) was a spiritual power that could affect social transformation. It was this spirit that powered the mainstream of the civil rights movement.
But love is an axiomatic commitment. If America is to move to the next chapter of her story, we must think of America as a family — a family that through love and goodwill can hold together.
We are divided by politics, race, class, generation and many things that cast a dark shadow upon the future of the American experiment. Each is its own part of the riddle. But the answer to this deep societal cancer of polarization must begin with a certain remembrance — that we as Americans are like a family. We didn’t choose each other. But we can choose to love each other. For no family can stand if it does not remember to love.
It’s not just Harvard: Woke healthcare leaders are unfit to lead, too
For the Washington Examiner’s Restoring America, FAIR in Medicine Fellow Dr. Richard Bosshardt writes about why elite universities aren’t the only institutions that need to fire or force out their woke leaders.
Regardless, the accusation of systemic racism has been used to lower standards for admission — a threat to patient care — and led to calls for racially preferential care, which is outright racial discrimination.
The ACS has even paid racist opportunist Ibram X. Kendi, whose appearance fee ranges from $20,000-$30,000, to talk about racism and medicine and the need for so-called “antiracist” discrimination, which is just reverse discrimination. And it recently published a DEI “toolkit” to help surgeons such as me get over our “whiteness” and get on with implementing and spreading radical antiracist ideology. The toolkit shows that the ACS is more interested in indoctrinating surgeons than improving surgical care. In such an environment, surgery will inevitably decline as radical politics becomes more important than real patients.
Social Justice Activists Are Dismantling Theater: I Watched From the Inside
For The Black Sheep, FAIR in the Arts Fellow Kevin Ray writes about how theaters are bleeding attendance after overdosing on ideology and trying to exile heretics like him.
Artists have choices: they can use identity to blame, shame and divide, or they can use identity to bring people together, helping us see what we have in common, despite our differences. Most new theater I've seen that wades into identity expresses a contradiction that linguistics professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter identifies in Woke Racism: “You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people,” while simultaneously insisting, “You can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.” McWhorter discusses only race, but the contradiction he pinpoints has been applied to various “oppressed” identities in several plays. This fashion is wearing itself out, but I fear it will leave behind a long-lasting stain of resentment, assuming an audience remains in its aftermath.
Virtuous Lies and Black Despair
For Quillette, Julian Adorney and Jake Mackey write about the demoralizing message of many leftists who claim that black Americans are crushed beneath a vast, racist social machinery.
Obviously, racism does exist in the United States, at both personal and institutional levels. Commentator David French notes that his black daughter is the target of harassment and of assumptions that she doesn't belong far more often than his white children are. Criminologist Radley Balko has presented a persuasive, exhaustively researched case that there is a racist element to the US criminal justice system. All Americans, whatever their skin color, should be committed to stamping out prejudice and institutionalized double standards like these wherever they encounter them.
But telling virtuous lies about the scope and impact of the racism that currently exists in the United States will not help us do that. Instead, it is likely to simply increase depression and anxiety among black people by encouraging a distorted, overly negative picture of the world.
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