The Week That Was

Because so many things have happened this week - and because I can't decide which topic I should address - this post is going to be composed of many parts. Use the links below to navigate to the section that interests you. (Note: If you're on the main page for the blog, click the title of this post first.)

A Brief Statement on Christchurch
Don't Listen to SJW's: There's No Excuse for Poor Writing
What to Do About the Dysfunctional College Admissions Process
Historical Cross-Dressers Are Not Necessarily Trans

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A Brief Statement on Christchurch

I condemn, without equivocation, violence against innocent Muslims. If you have reservations about Islam or unchecked immigration, the proper manner to address those concerns is through discourse, not mass murder.

I also condemn, without equivocation, all attempts to make political hay over this massacre before the bodies are cold. The correct time to discuss how the psychopathic shooter was radicalized - and what we should do about it - is after the time of mourning has passed. And the correct time to blame our political opponents? Well, that would be never. The shooter was trying to foment civil war; don't give him what he wanted.

The end.

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Don't Listen to SJW's: There's No Excuse for Poor Writing

This week, a certain maleducated writer dreamed up a most remarkable rationalization for her complete lack of subtlety on racial issues. According to said author, the fact that, in her view, our society - and geekdom in particular - is still shot through with -ist and -ism proves that tackling racism through analogy "doesn't work" and that she's therefore justified in calling out bigotry directly in her books.

I feel a little sorry for this author, truth be told. A while back, I read an early novel of hers and found her to be an okay talent. If she had been guided by mentors who actually cared for her professional development, she might have overcome the damage of her post-secondary education (remind me to explain one day why I'd rather cover myself in paper cuts and jump in a vat of lemon juice than get my M.Ed.) and become a fantastic storyteller. Unfortunately, she was discovered by our Red Guards instead -- those toxic "diversifiers" I covered last week who encourage creatives from "marginalized" groups to sell their victimhood in lieu of developing their skill. Now, having been feted endlessly by these white flagellants, she's essentially stuck.

My sympathy for this individual, however, doesn't change the fact that she is wrong in almost every way.

There are racists in the US. There are also disparities that cut across racial lines. It does not follow from either of these realities that our society is therefore irredeemably racist and must be dismantled root and branch. Indeed, the US ranks among the world's LEAST racist countries. Since the 1960's, the white majority's support for integration and interracial marriage has climbed to commanding, near-universal majorities, and the share of African American families that live below the poverty line has declined from more than half at the start of the civil rights era to less than a quarter today. Once again, I'm not claiming that we have completely overcome the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, but tremendous progress towards that goal HAS been made and will likely continue to be made so long as we cleave to our fundamental liberal values.

And whatever can be said about the US as a whole can also be said about geekdom. We have our bigoted cranks, sure, but they certainly can't be found "everywhere." On the contrary, geeks are probably among the most accepting of difference. If this were not the case, the author under discussion - and other SJW's of her stripe - would not have become so powerful and so celebrated. (It's quite despicable, actually, to leverage the geek's natural politeness, desperation to be liked, and sympathy for the downtrodden to berate a community that has showered you with accolades for its supposed depravity on matters of race. But this is generally how SJW's fight; they attack and then colonize soft targets.)

So the baseline premise of this writer's argument is pure delusion: we are not living in a racial hellscape, and we don't need a revolution. What this means, then, is that the sub rosa anti-racist storytelling of the past several decades likely did work -- that it did change minds over time. It wasn't the only factor driving the shift in white America's racial attitudes, to be sure, but it wasn't utterly inefficacious.

What this ideologically-possessed author is proposing we do instead of analogical storytelling, however, will categorically fail. Apparently, she was sleeping the day her psychology professors discussed the boomerang effect. To put it simply, people can't be insulted into agreement; upon encountering a hostile opponent, people in fact become more wedded to their original worldview. So if we scrap subtlety and subterfuge and start openly scolding readers for their prejudices, we will close minds, not open them.

How do we fight racism successfully? Non-threatening exposure helps -- which is why I'm not against healthy, non-toxic representation. Relationships of trust are also key; musician Daryl Davis, for example, has successfully persuaded people to renounce the KKK by befriending them and gently challenging their beliefs. And lastly, we must understand and grapple with racism's evolutionary roots in disgust and fears of contamination; indeed, ensuring bodily security and economic prosperity through liberal democratic capitalism may be our most powerful weapon of all.

Abandoning craft in favor of didacticism, on the other hand, is a profoundly unsound strategy that will lead to resentment and further division. Americans are some of the most tolerant people in the world; they don't need to be lectured by authors seeking short cuts to critical prestige.

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What to Do About the Dysfunctional College Admissions Process

As regular readers no doubt know already, a big part of my day job involves shepherding students through the college admissions process. So when the Varsity Blues cheating scandal hit the news, it also hit me where I live. Here I am trying to get my predominantly minority and/or foreign-born clientele into college through the honest method of developing their academic chops -- and at the same time, some richie-riches are bribing coaches to get their mediocre kids in through the back door? I was spitting nails!

Of course, as other writers have correctly noted, criminal fraud isn't the only way to cheat the system. If you're an athlete, a legacy, an approved political activist, a child of a major donor, or a member of a sought-after minority group, you often get admitted under lower standards than the rest of the student population. This isn't fair to the students who were denied admission despite excellent credentials -- but it also isn't fair to those admitted under those preferences, who will likely find themselves at the bottom of their classes and struggling to keep up.

The focus needs to return to academic accomplishment alone. Each school needs to determine what sort of educational preparation is required for real success in their various programs and then mandate that preparation for all prospective students regardless of their extra-curricular resume, family connections, "personal qualities," or demographic identity. If a university is concerned about recruiting "whole men," then fair enough: that university should make its prerequisite curriculum wide-ranging. But we need to get out of the subjective business of assessing each student's ability to "contribute to the campus community" and get back to the objective business of assessing a student's ability to handle college-level coursework.

Obviously, this is the sort of change that would have to be phased in gradually. I doubt anyone would agree to the evisceration of certain popular college athletics programs -- and we'd have to establish an infrastructure to help needier students develop their intellectual bona fides so they can compete with their more affluent peers. But I think, in the long run, making college admissions standards purely academic will have positive knock-on effects. Imagine how much better off our young athletes would be if they were told they had to buckle down in school to play for their top-choice college. And I bet we'd finally kill off - or at least critically wound - the damaging anti-intellectualism I sometimes encounter when dealing with students who know they're being held to lower standards and therefore don't feel the need to do their very best.

What's eminently clear is that our current college admissions system is not a meritocracy -- nor is it sustainable.

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Historical Cross-Dressers Are Not Necessarily Trans

Last on the docket this week is another bit of news from the literary world:

Shakespeare was never a 16th-century Moorish general in ­Vienna, but he had the temerity to write about one in “Othello.” George Eliot was never a crabbed and megalomaniacal mythologist, but she dared to create the gloriously appalling Mr. Casaubon in “Middlemarch.” And Leo Tolstoy wasn’t an adulterous woman — ­indeed, he was a man — yet he gave the world one of the most compelling and memorable portraits of female adultery in “Anna Karenina.”

Are such feats of imaginative creation and habitation now to be scrutinized by the gender police and social justice warriors?

The case of the American novelist E.J. Levy, celebrated author of “Love, In Theory” and “Tasting Life Twice,” an anthology of lesbian fiction, makes me wonder.

Levy has also written a forthcoming historical novel titled “The Cape Doctor.” At least, I hope it’s forthcoming. The book is about a real-life character, James Barry, née Margaret Ann Bulkley, a 19th-century, Irish-born army surgeon who practiced in Cape Town and lived as a man.

It’s that last fact, of course, that gives Barry’s story its dash of hot sauce.

What do you suppose the problem is here? I'll give you one guess.

Yep: The author referred to her title character as a "she" and attracted the ire of the crazy trans-activist set.

A simple headdesk won't suffice for this nonsense. Do these people not realize that in the 19th century, women were pretty limited in their career choices? That in order to circumvent these strictures, ambitious women had to either fight or use subterfuge? How do we know that Barry was indeed transgender and not just a woman who put on men's clothing so she could pursue an occupation that would otherwise have been closed to her? Are we going to argue now that Disney's Mulan is a transgender princess because she impersonated a man to save her ailing father?

Please stop transgendering every historical figure who ever bucked gender norms. What those of us who don't quite fit the feminine mold really need is reassurance that our Oddness can still fit under the umbrella of "female." By booting people like us out of the "female" category, you're only reinforcing regressive stereotypes.

There are many ways to be a woman. There are many ways to be a man. Maybe, in certain edge cases, someone's internal sense of self really doesn't fit the outer equipment. But not everyone who's ever chafed at a social expectation for his or her sex is trans. Insisting otherwise is confusing our kids.