Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has become quite a lightning rod since he’s undertaken to fight what he contends is the neo-racism of critical race theory. Some see him as a racial bomb thrower, while others see him as doing the “dirty work” of saying what few would say given the backlash. That’s not to say that he’s not a serious person presenting serious thought. Indeed, he appeared with Mark Lamont Hill as well as Tucker Carlson.
“What do you like about being White?” I asked this question to anti- Critical Race Theory advocate Christopher Rufo. He stated that Whiteness was always only painted as negative, so I asked him to offer something different. Peep his response: pic.twitter.com/H5IkAyv2Co
— Marc Lamont Hill (@marclamonthill) May 26, 2021
This appears to be something of a litmus test clip, where one either sees Hill’s “gotcha” question as revealing Rufo’s inability to answer the question, or refusing to acquiesce to the legitimacy of seeing the world through a racial lens. You decide for yourself.
As one becomes a lightning rod for a cause, people reach out to you and let you know of things happening that may be significant to the issue. That happens a lot to Rufo, and happened again with regard to military contractor, Lockheed Martin.
SCOOP: @LockheedMartin, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sent key executives to a three-day white male reeducation camp in order to deconstruct their “white male culture” and atone for their “white male privilege.”
I've obtained internal documents that will shock you.🧵
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) May 26, 2021
The company running the training session was a consulting firm called “White Men As Full Diversity Partners.” Their name describes their purpose.
When companies engage white males alongside their peers from different backgrounds, marginalized groups are freed from the exhausting work of coaching white men to understand their world. Most white men want to help. They just don’t know how.
And as a part of their training, they included this list of “white male culture characteristics.”
While the message isn’t exactly that each of these, individually, is necessarily bad, but that the “white male culture” as a whole precludes valuing cultures that don’t share these characteristics.
None of the traits described here are automatically negative. But collectively they create a thick web of what’s expected of white males and, by association, everyone else. As a result, all people are measured against a white male standard of organizational worth and contribution.
This raises some troubling questions. First, whether these are “white male” traits at all, or are these traits shared by most effective people without regard to their race or gender. Are women not principled? Are black people incapable of hard work? Are Hispanics disinterested in striving toward success? Do Asians not focus on the future?
The second question is why these are no longer considered virtues, particularly for an enterprise like Lockheed Martin, if not for any individual who aspires to a successful career?
Notably, this isn’t the usual outright condemnation of either white men or traits that most consider virtues, but rather a softer winnowing of how they crowd out those who don’t share these views from the workplace and society. And indeed, they provided a list of “I’m tired of” statements, most of which hit their mark.
Lockheed Martin is a private corporation engaged in a great deal of public contract work. Whether this training reflects a choice by the corporation or a requirement imposed by the government as part of its contractual requirements is unclear, but it is fully entitled to have its staff attend diversity training. Whether that means it can segregate white men from other staff without violating Title VII is another matter.
The more fundamental question is whether this effort to teach white men that these traits, these virtues, are no longer virtues, but the characteristics of a culture of racism and sexism. Do we want people with a “can do” attitude, or people whose primary skill is whining about hard work and blaming others for their failures? Do we want people who are principled or do we want hypocrites schooled in facile gibberish to rationalize their desired outcomes?
What’s curious is that the “I’m tired of” statements would seem to reflect a goal of a colorblind society, where no one questions the abilities of a black man to be effective, perform with excellence and achieve success. And yet, simultaneously, the training argues that these expectations are “white male” culture and should thus be eradicated from the workplace and society as they have a deleterious impact on women and people of color. Maybe white men can’t jump, but black women “can do.” Why deny that? Why is that bad?
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Part of the reason Rufo is a lightning rod is he has disingenuously talked about what CRT is and isn’t. See the tweets in the attached from Charlie Sykes where Rufo talks about his effort to “put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category” and “recodify [CRT] to to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/scenes-from-the-culture-war
I’ve left in your link despite rules because it makes a valuable point about Rufo. I agree with Berny that he has a tendency to go well over the top.
That’s not an unreasonable thing to do, though. From the other side, a lot of things that left-leaning people hate get thrown under the banner of “conservatism”, “capitalism”, “right-wing”, “fundamentalism”, or as Rufo points out in this various expose, “white supremacy” or “white male culture”, because it’s common based upon our psychological biases to see our side, our people, as diverse and with many fine distinctions, and see outsiders and the other side as completely monolithic and all part of the same package. It becomes a problem, though, when phenomena like critical race theory (or various extreme nationalisms, or communism, or fundamentalist religions) exploit this psychological tendency in humans and amplifies it a thousandfold by deeming it virtuous and the height of intellectual awareness.
Yes, we should try to see beyond our ingroup/outgroups biases and be conscious of them, but no one is so perfect and so totally reasonable that they can totally overcome them without depersonalizing themselves such that they have laid their mind in submission and gone around the bend to the other side of the horseshoe, which is what happens with people who try to “eliminate their bias” by embracing, e.g., CRT. Or people who join cults.
“What’s curious is that the “I’m tired of” statements would seem to reflect a goal of a colorblind society”
Precisely–yet we’re told today that that in itself is racist. And if (as a sizeable fraction of those statements indicate in various ways) they’re tired of people questioning their qualifications, they should be campaigning against racial preferences in education and employment just as hard as (certain of) those evil white males are.
And if they don’t want me, as a white male, disparaging “their campaigns,” perhaps they should take some care that “their campaigns” actually have something to do with their interests, rather than being a thinly-veiled attempt at the destruction of western society (yeah, that sounds like tinfoil hat material–but one of their core values was explicitly stated as undermining the nuclear family; if that wouldn’t lead to the destruction of society, nothing will).
It’s almost as if this CRT enterprise is intentionally unserious and crafted to fail.
Or that it’s as serious as a heart attack, but dishonest about its true goals. Which, coincidentally enough, describes BLM perfectly.
The problem is that “colorblindness” is often used as a way to pretend that racism doesn’t exist. Any incident, say a police stop, can be called coincidence and when statistics show that black drivers are stopped nine times as often, “colorblindness” is used as an excuse to not address the issue.
The point isn’t that we’ve achieved colorblindness, which we haven’t, but that colorblindness is the end goal of this exercise.
A number of the “I’m tired of” statements involve assuming what someone else is thinking.
I’ve lived in a couple of majority minority cities (Corpus Christi and San Antonio). Nobody thinks a lot of those things listed. A Hispanic guy working in his yard is assumed to be the lawn guy? Really? Not if he doesn’t have a trailer with all his equipment parked at the curb. People assume that black guys with high incomes are athletes? No, they don’t.
Perhaps the problem is inside the tired person rather than the people around them. Or more likely it’s a list of grievances drawn up by a white diversity expert.
It’s both insulting and false to suggest that most black and brown people aren’t smart enough, strong enough and good enough to succeed. Encouraging failure is very much the soft racism of low expectations.
The subtitles really make the vid.
Lili von Shtupp.
“I’m tired
Tired of playing the game
Ain’t it a crying shame
I’m so tired
God dammit I’m exhausted
Tired, tired of playing the game
Ain’t it a crying shame
I’m so tired.”
Not something to take lying down.
If “a tendency to rugged individualism”, “a can-do attitude”, “operating from principles and conscience”, etc., are things that CRT wants to challenge, then why not directly do that? Surely it doesn’t matter where they come from. Or are they only to be challenged because of where they come from (“White Male Culture”)? In that case, it seems like CRT is simply wasting people’s time.
That’s an excellent point, but the nature of CRT is race, not traits per se, so if adherents dissociate the trait from race, does it not become irrelevant?
A lot of CRT unfortunately, especially in the hands of laypersons and activists, turns race into the starting point of all intellectual exploration, the prime essence of all being, and then works outward from there, so traits (and everything else, from furniture to how you walk) are racialized and boiled down into a racial character that can not be disentangled from the foundational starting point, race.
There have been other race theorists and race scientists of the past that thought this way.
People who are So Very Tired of not living in a color blind world object to treating color blindness as an ideal and demonize those who do.
Meanwhile people who claim to want to be treated as individuals and not as members of a racial category are offended at the idea of abolishing their racial category…which would actually reinforce their non-racialized “privilege.”
Tribalists want to win by losing.
Seems like there’s room for some interesting dialogue, and even cooperation, between people of good faith. But most likely people will prioritize tribalism and disagreement and righteousness, and any progress will happen over time in the aggregate with generation renewal and evolving vocabularies.
The irony of the “we need to have a discussion” view is that the dialogue consists of STFU and do as you’re told. This is not a tenable way to find common ground and create a consensus.
Some folks just like to bitch and whine. Being white is bad, but when white folks accordingly decide to be black, that’s bad too, because then those white folks are “race-fakers” or “cultural appropriators.” Nothing and nobody will ever make the bitchy crybabies happy. Not Boss Hogg, not Nkechi Amare Diallo, not anyone. It’s the classical “solve my problem that can’t be solved” shtick. It’s a waste of time to even try to engage these infantile fools, and society needs to acknowledge that and move on.
“First, whether these are “white male” traits at all, or are these traits shared by most effective people without regard to their race or gender.”
The assumption here is that these traits are purely positive and that the alternative is indolence or anarchy. “Rugged individualism” is pretty useless when dealing with larger societal problems, like pandemics and climate change. The “focus on status and rank” and concept of “silent strength” are antithetical to effective problem solving. The focus on “hard work” often detracts from efforts to work efficiently. And blindly adhering to principles, like these, makes it difficult to question or refine the principles.
So your argument is that they’re simplistic blithering idiots? Fair enough.
Reminds me of when people assert you said something, and when you point out you said nothing of the sort, they reply, “Well, you implied it.” You can superimpose whatever nonsense you want by projecting “assumptions” onto otherwise benign statements, or going strawman or red herring whenever it serves to create an issue out of nothing, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s bullshit.
“What do I like about being white?”
I am not sure any answer to that cannot be considered racist. I know I am white but that does not make think of all other whites as part of my group. My wife has some German ancestry while I have some Jewish ancestry. Am I supposed to hate her because of the holocaust or identify with her because we are both white? (Of course, my Jewish father not was really white when he grew up.)
Historically, wars have been between neighboring tribes/countries or have been civil wars within the tribe/countries e.g. within the same race. French do not identify with Germans. Koreans do not identify with Japanese. Pakistanis do not identify with Indians. Hate thy neighbor is the general rule.
I can tell you what I like about the French or the Germans, or even the Americans. I can tell you what I like about Jews (as well as what I don’t). I can tell you what I like and don’t about lawyers. But about being white? It’s never been the lens through which I consider the question.
Tummy rub for that. It says it all.
I gave it some thought. I did have to give it some thought though! Here’s what I like about being “white”: it’s a color that looks good on me. I am sure I would feel the same if I was born “black” and had grown up looking at myself in the mirror with nice dark chocolate skin.