Harper’s “A letter on justice and open debate” is criticized by some of the narrow-minded ideologues targeted

The Objective criticizes Harper’s “letter”:

1. Harper’s is “a prominent magazine that’s infamous.” “The signatories [include those who are] white, wealthy, and endowed with massive platforms … even as they speak from one of the most prestigious magazines in the country.”

2. “Nowhere in it do the signatories mention how marginalized voices have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing.”

3. “The content of the letter also does not deal with the problem of power: who has it and who does not.”

4. The authors avoid “The ongoing debate about who gets to have a platform.”

5. “‘Professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class.’”  “Laurie Sheck, who said the N-word when referencing a James Baldwin piece in class.” The Objective implies she wasn’t punished, therefore this is a bogus issue. In fact, it was made an issue;(1) and though she wasn’t fired, many others have been fired on the same grounds.

6. “The heads of organizations are ousted for what are just clumsy mistakes?” John McWhorter cites many such instances in Woke Racism, for example, the person who strongly supports Black Lives Matter, but made the mistake of noting the universal liberal principle that all lives matter as well, in passing.

What’s wrong with this stuff? First, it’s an example of the people being rightly criticized objecting to their critics for not writing about their issues. It’s like criticizing an article objecting to high taxes for not writing about how the government needs to spend more. Wokeness is a current ideology - a set of dogmas which seeks to dictate what everyone else should believe and say and do. That’s not compatible with “open debate,” so they fault a critique for 1. having massive “platforms”; 2. not addressing marginalization; 3. not addressing “the problem of power”; 4. not addressing “who gets to have a platform”.

5. and 6. They dismiss the problem of Woke taboos’ hampering open debate.

I call ideology “the restriction of thought, language, and truth in the service of power.” Usually the power of a self-aggrandizing group or faction. As such, ideology is a mere belief system (“thank you for speaking ‘our’ truth”), and a much better option is an information system, such as liberalism throughout the ages.

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(1)“The Idea That Whites Can’t Refer to the N-Word”

Linguist John McWhorter rightly names this: It’s a taboo. I cite his article because of Orwell’s warning about the deadly effects of taboos, below. “Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind.”

McWhorter: “Laurie Sheck is a professor of creative writing at the New School in New York, a decades-long veteran of the classroom, a widely published novelist and essayist, and a Pulitzer nominee. She’s also spent the summer in trouble with her bosses for possibly being a racist.”

“Early last spring semester, Sheck, who is white, was teaching a graduate seminar on [James] Baldwin, and one of the questions she posed for discussion was why the documentary title had substituted “Negro” for [the n-word.]”

“A white student in the class objected to Sheck’s having uttered the word. And administrators were apparently dissatisfied with Sheck’s attempt to defend herself, because the school put her under investigation, while directing her to reacquaint herself with the school’s rules about discrimination. This month the school determined that Sheck had committed no offense. But the fact that smart, busy people felt it necessary to investigate Sheck for mouthing the word when referring to it—not using it independently, much less directing it at someone—suggests a preoccupation less with matters of morality than with matters of taboo.”

“How thoroughly campus cultural Marxism has come to be tolerated in mainstream society”

[From a July 2019 Facebook post] - I was once a fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates. He is a writer with phenomenal natural talents. Then he took a part-time teaching position at MIT, and he began saying things like, “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house.” (As Doris Lessing wrote, “There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence.”)

Ta-Nehisi adopted a social-justice warrior stance which made him the idol of a surprisingly large number of progressive journalists, despite positions which were often rather strange, as you will see in the following instances.

Carlos Lozada, at the end of this post (“Radical Chic”), describes an adulation which made me realize how thoroughly campus cultural Marxism has come to be tolerated in mainstream society:

For instance, Ta-Nehisi said that the deaths of those who tried to save people on 911 left him “cold”:

“He writes of the police and firefighters who died running into the burning buildings [the twin towers on 911] in a forlorn effort to save all the people whose bodies were about to be obliterated into dust, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.””

Ta-Nehisi would apparently let _all_ criminals out of prison:

“[Jeffrey] Goldberg asked what [Ta-Nehisi Coates] would do if he were in [Mitch] Landrieu’s position — surely there was something, “I don’t know what I’d do if I were mayor, but I could tell you what I’d do if I was king.” [Ta-Nehisi Coates would] let criminals out of prison, he said. “And, by the way, I include violent criminals in that.” Goldberg asked what he meant by “violent.” “Gun crime, too,” Coates said.”

He is unconcerned with the civil rights of any group but his own:

“Everywhere he goes, Coates hears versions of the same plea: What about my group? What about Native Americans? What about Latino immigrants? What about me?

“You get here and people say, ‘Why can’t you do that for our community?’ ” Coates says one morning at a Capitol Hill coffee shop. He calls the reaction “disrespectful” ... Disrespectful because he believes the experience of blacks in America deserves its own, focused examination.”

Ta-Nehisi said that reparations would end “white guilt.”

-*—

In The Radical Chic of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Carlos Lozada writes:

“In an America consumed by debates over racism, police violence and domestic terror, it is Coates to whom so many of us turn to affirm, challenge or, more often, to mold our views from the clay. Among public intellectuals in the U.S., writes media critic Jay Rosen, he’s the man now. When the Confederate battle flag on the statehouse grounds in Columbia, S.C., seemed the only thing the news media could discuss, my Washington Post colleague Ishaan Tharoor put it simply: Just shut up and read @tanehisicoates. These days, you hear many variations on that advice.

Coates is more than the writer whose thinking and focus best match the moment. With his 2014 Atlantic cover essay on The Case for Reparations, which explores the brutal U.S. history of redlining and housing discrimination, and now with the critical rapture surrounding his new book, Between the World and Me, he has become liberal America’s conscience on race. Did you read the latest Ta-Nehisi Coates piece? is shorthand for Have you absorbed and shared the latest and best and correct thinking on racism, white privilege, institutional violence and structural inequality? If you don’t have the time or inclination or experience to figure it out yourself, you outsource it to Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/07/16/the-radical-chic-of-ta-nehisi-coates/]