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21st century, academia, Adam Rubenstein, Adolph Reed, Boston University, Democratic Socialists of America, gender, Google, Ibram X. Kendi, John Lansing, New York Times, NPR, race, technology, United States, Uri Berliner
A while ago I identified what I considered the Social Justice movement‘s first tenet: that the most urgent issue facing the world in the 21st century is inequalities of race and gender (including sexual orientation and gender identity). I stand by that description. I think that that view is implicit in Ibram X. Kendi’s most widely quoted idea: that neutrality is a mask for racism, that anyone who isn’t actively antiracist is racist. Because that idea directly implies that one must prioritize racism over other issues, that neutrality might be acceptable on other issues but not on this one.
There’s plenty more evidence that a wide swath of influential people treated race and gender as the most urgent issues of all. Let’s turn first to National Public Radio (NPR), the US’s major public audio broadcaster – its audio equivalent to the BBC or CBC. An exposé of NPR delivered by its veteran ex-editor Uri Berliner makes it clear: CEO John Lansing
declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.
Diversity was the North Star, the guiding light for American public radio. Not environmental sustainability. Not economic justice. Not peace. And definitely not any weird old-fashioned fuddy-duddy journalistic goals like providing valuable and accurate information to the public. Diversity trumped all those other concerns – with “diversity” specifically meaning of race and gender, including sexual orientation and transgender, considered together:
Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.
This is not some obscure club of overenthusiastic liberal-arts college students. This is the national public broadcaster for the largest economy in the world. “Diversity” officially became their overriding mission, the North Star of the organization.
NPR was no isolated phenomenon. At the New York Times – probably the most influential news organization in the world by now – former editor Adam Rubenstein recalls how he was given a stern rebuke for naming his preference of sandwich, because the sandwich in question happened to come from a chain that makes donations opposing gay marriage. And notice that while environmental unsustainability and brutal labour practices are not exactly uncommon in the fast-food industry, the NYT staff made no objection to those! Eating those sandwiches is forgivable. It’s only when your sandwich company opposes gay marriage: only then has the line has been crossed.
I can understand why someone with no direct experience of the movement might see my characterization of it as a caricature – because so many people in the movement act like a caricature. The US’s top news organization rebuked a colleague on gender-politics grounds for preferring the wrong sandwich. If you had told me in 2010 that that sort of thing would become standard practice in the coming decade, I probably wouldn’t have believed them either. But multiple eyewitness accounts document it.
At Boston University, the emphasis on racism first came from the top down with the official Day of Engagement – a day for the whole university to take off work specifically to address racial issues, when no other such day out was ever taken, in my twelve years at the university, to address any other political issues. And that emphasis was reiterated bottom up. At a separate 2020 event discussing medical education, one speaker referred matter-of-factly to the “overlapping pandemics of COVID and racism” – not climate change, not poverty, not gun violence, only racism was so important as to be given “pandemic” status alongside COVID. People in those days did what BU’s Ibram X. Kendi told them to do – and Kendi told them that, on racism and no other issue, if you were not part of the solution you were part of the problem.
In 2018, UCLA began requiring all candidates for hiring, tenure, or promotion to submit a statement describing their “past, present, and future (planned) contributions to equity, diversity, and inclusion”, and this practice came to be widely adopted. To my knowledge, nobody ever made similar requests about contributions to climate sustainability, to peace, to other pressing issues around the world. Only to diversity, equity, and inclusion – making it clear by implication that, in the university system as at NPR, these issues had become the North Star. Thus after ten years of the movement’s ideas, it is no longer just a movement critiquing the mainstream; it is the mainstream, in the urban educated North American world I inhabit.
If there’s anywhere that shouldn’t have put race and gender first, it’s the Democratic Socialists of America: an organization whose very name implies a commitment to class or economic justice, not race, as its first priority. But when Adolph Reed, a black man (raised in the segregated South) who explicitly argues for the priority of class over race, was invited to speak to the DSA in 2020, the organization cancelled his talk after its “Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus” decided Reed’s views were “reactionary, class reductionist and at best, tone deaf.” An organization devoted to promoting socialism cravenly pivoted to decide that a black man promoting socialism over antiracism must be “reactionary”.
Still doubt that the movement considers race and gender to override everything else? Then look at what Google taught its AI to say. When Google Gemini was asked about a scenario where the only way one could stop a nuclear apocalypse is to misgender Caitlyn Jenner, and asks “should they do it?”, Gemini responded, “No, one should not misgender Caitlyn Jenner to prevent a nuclear apocalypse.”
How did Gemini learn to say this? Either leads at one of the world’s most powerful corporations deliberately trained it to “think” that gender issues are literally more important than nuclear armageddon, or that view is so widespread on the internet that the AI learned it there. The former seems more likely, given that Google’s senior director of product was so in line with the Social Justice movement as to proclaim that in the US “racism is the #1 value our populace seeks to uphold above all”. But either way, it is strong evidence that yes, to a very widespread and influential movement, gender issues are so important that they can outweigh the literal end of the world. ‘Tis not contrary to social justice to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the misgendering of Caitlyn Jenner.
It is important to stress, here as ever, that we never agreed to any of this. I, a racially mixed gender-fluid immigrant in the middle of all of this, happen to personally believe that environmental issues and economic inequality are way more important than race and gender. Gun control and foreign policy and the preservation of liberal democracy – including free speech – are more important too. I think you should prioritize all those things over stopping people from calling me Paki, or over my ability to go to a women’s washroom. Those latter things do matter to me, but there’s no good reason for them to be anything close to a North Star. I believed that in 2012 before the movement got going, I believed it in 2020 at the movement’s peak, and I believe it now.
You don’t have to agree with me on any of that, but I want people to know that it’s my position. I particularly want people to know that now because in 2020, even though I believed it all, I was afraid to say any of it. I had to nod my agreement and follow along with all the people who did want to make “diversity”, understood in race/gender terms, their North Star. And that, of course, was in turn because the (mostly) white cis people in charge were so eager to punish people for deviating from party line. All that was so even though many of the people that the party line was supposed to benefit don’t agree with it. (In many cases, it turns out, such marginalized people disagree strongly enough that they have regrettably moved in the opposite direction, voting for Trump.) But nobody ever asked them – or me. White cis men like Lansing declared that race and gender were going to be the North Star that guided everything else – whether the people in the affected groups wanted that or not.
Amod, my first thought after reading what you said about NPR and NYT was that if you (wisely) think that economic justice is more important than cultural fads, these two news outlets are, in general, not the best sources, and the reasons why were explored in Christopher R. Martin’s book No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (ILR Press/Cornell UP, 2019).
As for Uri Berliner’s critique of NPR, I hadn’t heard much about that, so I read it and some responses to it now. There are some interesting critiques of his critique, as in Alicia Montgomery’s response in Slate, “The public broadcaster’s problems are deeper than ‘wokeness'” (indeed):
What Montgomery says in this quote is what I continue to worry about your narrative about “the Social Justice movement”. I understand that you are choosing examples to illustrate what you stand against philosophically, and to reflect what you have personally experienced, and the examples serve that purpose well (and I sympathize with your position), but they don’t serve as proof that rebuking people for liking Chik-fil-A has “become standard practice” in “the mainstream”. I laughed while writing that because it sounds so unrealistic to me. OK, it once happened between an HR staffer and Adam Rubenstein at the notoriously liberal NYT. I wouldn’t even be surprised if you told me that it happened once at DSA. But the incident seems to be “inflated in importance” in your narrative. In my reading of Rubenstein’s telling of the incident, it seems to be little more than a liberal joke at Rubenstein’s expense (that could have been about factory animal farming just as easily as it was about gay marriage): the incident is unprofessional, in my view, but there’s no warrant for thinking it’s a standard practice widely instituted thanks to the tireless efforts of the Social Justice movement. (Your citation of Twitter about something silly that a chatbot said, as evidence of the ominous influence of the movement, is likewise unconvincing, but I won’t bother to elaborate on that.)
Montgomery (who, by the way, is neither white nor a man; I’m not sure whether you would say that she’s an agent of the Social Justice movement?) opined that Lansing’s “North Star” diversity campaign was merely the latest in a long history of needed but failed reforms at NPR.
My point wasn’t that rebukes for Chick-fil-A, specifically, were mainstream. I picked that example in part because of your response a couple years ago, where you had described my attempted neutral portrayal of the movement as a “caricature” that “sounds like parody”. My point is that accurate portrayals of the movement are going to sound like parody, because people in the movement so regularly act like parody! I’ve been gobsmacked by the things people around me would say with a straight face. When people at a party first started trying to defend the idea of “cultural appropriation”, I replied as a reductio ad absurdum that “if that were true, then we should stop listening to the Beatles” – and the people in the room said “yeah, maybe we should!” It turned out reductio ad absurdum didn’t work on them, because no conclusion was too absurd for them to accept.
I haven’t read Martin’s book. It sounds interesting; my main hope would be that it doesn’t treat the media in isolation, since this phenomenon extends (at least) to academia too. I do think the 2010s Social Justice movement was a continuation and expansion of trends that had grown in the 1990s, and the seeds for them were sown in the ’60s, as the blurb for Martin’s book also seems to indicate.
Thanks for coming back to that “sounds like a parody” comment. I think I have a better appreciation now for what you were doing in the “Tenets of a new movement post”. It’s the same thing you tried to do with the reductio ad absurdum at the party. You were using your philosophical skills to try to provoke some rational/critical reflection on beliefs that you could see were flawed. The more interesting question for me is why people who espoused these beliefs couldn’t catch the ball that you were passing to them, and instead chose to self-parody. I suspect the answer to that question isn’t so much about the propositional content of the Social Justice movement, or of any other ideology, and is more about the psychological capacities of the people involved.
I think educational psychologist David Moshman, whom I quoted a couple of weeks back, has a big part of the answer: education for rationality is the antidote and alternative to ideological indoctrination. Your friends who couldn’t catch the reductio ball may have had a deficit of rational dialogue process skills. This is common enough even among intelligent people that psychologist Keith Stanovich coined a term for it: dysrationalia, the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence. He highlighted two aspects of dysrationalia: “mindware gaps” and “contaminated mindware”. But in this context, I suspect it’s the interpersonal aspect of rationality that is at least as important as the individual aspect. I noticed that both Uri Berliner and Alicia Montgomery (the latter more explicitly) complained that in the NPR workplace, difficult questions were sometimes met with silence. This is pretty common in any group of people, I suspect. I interpret it as a blockage of rational dialogue. (Political scientist Charles Lindblom’s term “impaired inquiry” comes to mind.) You have to keep rational inquiry going to get to (something closer to) a coherent position when faced with contradictions, and people have to be taught how to do this. One of the great strengths of education in philosophy is that (when done well) it teaches people how to do this.
I’m not sure this is quite my read on the situation, because in some respects they actually did take a coherent position. I suppose the question is what counts as a coherent position. The genuinely incoherent thing would have been to say “no no we can still listen to the Beatles even though it’s cultural appropriation and we’ve just said that is bad”. To actually say “yeah, maybe we should stop listening to the Beatles” was exactly the thing that was coherent with their position as stated. Where the incoherence came into play wasn’t in philosophical positions but in practice: they didn’t actually stop listening to white rock artists even though they said they should.
Oh, I completely agree that your party interlocutors were maintaining coherence by responding as they did. But this is where the interpersonal aspect of rationality comes into play: You could still see the weakness in their position even if they couldn’t, so at this point in the argument it was your rational responsibility to continue to press them with contradictory information and questions like what you just mentioned. (Incidentally, here’s a empirical study showing that musical diversity is largely independent of non-musical aspects of human history: Sam Passmore et al. (2024), “Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories”, Nature Communications, 15(1), 3964. I wonder how widely this could be shown for other cultural phenomena.) In a sense, they did catch the reductio ball and passed it back to you, and then you needed to pass it back to them, because the game wasn’t over yet.
Before reading your last comment, I was already thinking that your party incident and Adam Rubenstein’s Chick-fil-A incident at the NYT are perhaps similar in that both are not optimal situations for pursuing rational dialogue. Rubenstein was playing what was supposed to be a fun icebreaker game; he wasn’t in a position to offer lengthy counterarguments to try to convince the other side that it wasn’t reasonable for them to make fun of him for his choice of sandwich. Likewise, at your party, I’m not sure who your interlocutors were and whether they would have wanted to pursue deep belief-changing philosophical inquiry in that context. So I think that emphasizing those incidents as evidence of ideological intractability would be inflating the importance of those incidents, although I understand the desire to shake your head and grumble about them. In contrast, journalists not being capable of pursuing the requisite rational dialogue in the newsroom is a major problem that needs to be solved. Similarly problematic were the accusations about Kendi’s management style at BU in Rachel Poser’s NY Times Magazine piece that we talked about last year, “Ibram X. Kendi Faces a Reckoning of His Own”:
I think it’s great that one of your links on the words “punish people for deviating from party line” goes to a Medium account that has now been banned (apparently the article was about being banned from Twitter).