Great interview. I am a fan of Olúfẹmi Táíwò's mind.
“Broadly speaking, I think all of that is true. But those are more effects than causes; the real thing that's happening is the actual institutions where we develop habits, where we refine our ideas, are more and more owned by and responsive to a very small group of people. That, in and of itself, is the problem.”
“As I understand it, your argument is that, since 2020, we’ve done a lot of diversity training, we’ve fretted about whether people of different identity groups can understand each other (which is part and parcel of standpoint epistemology) and we made sure that the boardrooms were more diverse. But the fundamental structures of society remain in place. Is that a problem?”
Can you not see the connection here? The social justice projects that are now the woke projects are designed and implemented by the same elites that have captured the institutions. If you buy into it you are either a member of the elite cohort and committed to projects that help you secure and hold your elite status, or you are just swept up in their well-funded PR campaign of useless virtue signaling.
“I'm trying to see what the current framework does achieve. What's the output of diversity training, in terms of political outcomes or social interactions? I think what I'm getting at is not just different modes of attacking the problem, but a different understanding of what the problem is in the first place.”
Exactly. It does nothing to solve the root causes of the problems that can be measured by group socioeconomic outcomes.
“we keep thinking exclusively, primarily about race and identity, when we really should be thinking about economics and social class?”
Bingo. Ding Ding Ding Ding. Absolutely. This is everything. Most of our nation’s core problems are this and it has been caused by our elites exporting American working class economic opportunity to other countries while they imported other country’s poverty.
From a political perspective, most Trump supporters have it figured out but the raging left is just campus-brainwashed by the elites to chase false fantoms of victim group preference instead.
The black community is a mess primarily because at the very time in the post civil rights 70s – 90s, when many more blacks should have advanced from the low income to middle class, the elites (academic, political and business) sold out our industrial economy. Then they did the same to our tech economy. And while doing this we opened the doors for cheap foreign labor… driving up the competition for a dwindling supply of good paying jobs… depressing wages to the floor in all the service business and trades. The elites also went on a regulatory excess spree. Without any concern about their lower-level needs being met outside of their Wall Street holdings, elites would focus entirely on their higher-level self-actualization needs. And not finding enough real challenges like to start and grow a business that hires, they instead funded non-profits and pushed for all these social and environmental justice changes… most that added to the roadblocks and barriers for non-elite individuals and families to advance their socioeconomic circumstances. Black families fell apart and gangs and drug trafficking became a necessary choice for survival. Crime exploded and of course so did black incarceration.
The elites now claim this is all because of racist cops and that we should defund the police. How is that working out?
Until and unless the left truly wakes up that they are programmed clones sleepwalking to their own destruction, and joins the right in demanding that the American middle class takes back control of our institutions, and that we exercise our anti-trust / anti-monopoly laws to give back economic opportunity to our middle class workers and small business economy, the elites will continue their consolidation of power and money at the expense of everyone else.
The first step in getting this done should be term limits for our national politicians.
Great interview. I am a fan of Olúfẹmi Táíwò's mind.
“Broadly speaking, I think all of that is true. But those are more effects than causes; the real thing that's happening is the actual institutions where we develop habits, where we refine our ideas, are more and more owned by and responsive to a very small group of people. That, in and of itself, is the problem.”
“As I understand it, your argument is that, since 2020, we’ve done a lot of diversity training, we’ve fretted about whether people of different identity groups can understand each other (which is part and parcel of standpoint epistemology) and we made sure that the boardrooms were more diverse. But the fundamental structures of society remain in place. Is that a problem?”
Can you not see the connection here? The social justice projects that are now the woke projects are designed and implemented by the same elites that have captured the institutions. If you buy into it you are either a member of the elite cohort and committed to projects that help you secure and hold your elite status, or you are just swept up in their well-funded PR campaign of useless virtue signaling.
“I'm trying to see what the current framework does achieve. What's the output of diversity training, in terms of political outcomes or social interactions? I think what I'm getting at is not just different modes of attacking the problem, but a different understanding of what the problem is in the first place.”
Exactly. It does nothing to solve the root causes of the problems that can be measured by group socioeconomic outcomes.
“we keep thinking exclusively, primarily about race and identity, when we really should be thinking about economics and social class?”
Bingo. Ding Ding Ding Ding. Absolutely. This is everything. Most of our nation’s core problems are this and it has been caused by our elites exporting American working class economic opportunity to other countries while they imported other country’s poverty.
From a political perspective, most Trump supporters have it figured out but the raging left is just campus-brainwashed by the elites to chase false fantoms of victim group preference instead.
The black community is a mess primarily because at the very time in the post civil rights 70s – 90s, when many more blacks should have advanced from the low income to middle class, the elites (academic, political and business) sold out our industrial economy. Then they did the same to our tech economy. And while doing this we opened the doors for cheap foreign labor… driving up the competition for a dwindling supply of good paying jobs… depressing wages to the floor in all the service business and trades. The elites also went on a regulatory excess spree. Without any concern about their lower-level needs being met outside of their Wall Street holdings, elites would focus entirely on their higher-level self-actualization needs. And not finding enough real challenges like to start and grow a business that hires, they instead funded non-profits and pushed for all these social and environmental justice changes… most that added to the roadblocks and barriers for non-elite individuals and families to advance their socioeconomic circumstances. Black families fell apart and gangs and drug trafficking became a necessary choice for survival. Crime exploded and of course so did black incarceration.
The elites now claim this is all because of racist cops and that we should defund the police. How is that working out?
Until and unless the left truly wakes up that they are programmed clones sleepwalking to their own destruction, and joins the right in demanding that the American middle class takes back control of our institutions, and that we exercise our anti-trust / anti-monopoly laws to give back economic opportunity to our middle class workers and small business economy, the elites will continue their consolidation of power and money at the expense of everyone else.
The first step in getting this done should be term limits for our national politicians.