If the elites like it, it’s a scam and a distraction

This interview is from September 28th, a little over a week before Norman Finkelstein burst onto the scene for his commentary on October 7th and the aftermath. The interview is on a completely different topic. It is excellent.

Is Ibram X Kendi's 'Anti-Racism' a SCAM? (w/ Norm Finkelstein) by Bad Faith (YouTube)

I’ve included a partial transcript with the parts I found particularly interesting below.

At 00:02:00, he discusses the drift in capability of students over the last few decades.

“Norm: If you go back as far as I do, the fact of the matter is, that what they teach now in college is what used to be taught in high school. […] There are many students who enter college who’ve never read a book. I mean that literally. I teach in those schools. I don’t fault them. I ask, ‘what did you do in English class?’ They say, ‘the teacher read us books.’ You can laugh, but that is literally the case. You will have many first-year college students who never wrote a paper. They don’t know what it means to write a paper.”

At 00:03:30, after having very eloquently and long-windedly come to a recognition that she should definitely stop fighting on the Internet with people arguing not only in bad faith (no pun intended), but also from an intellectually diminished standpoint, Briahna says,

“Briahna: I have limited emotional energy left to not just call people stupid to their face. I feel like I’ve been spending the last five or six years of my life going out of my way—in part, because of who I am—to decline from saying ‘you are a fucking moron.’ … like 30 times a day.

“Norm: Briahna, I think ‘fucking moron’ is a perfect segue to the topic today, Ibram X. Kendi. [both laughing uproariously]”

At 44:30, a snippet with Cornel West includes,

“Cornel West: No, I am not first and foremost an anti-racist. I am first and foremost a lover of my mama—and it leads to anti-racist practice. That’s the second step. I love, whatever, I love the Asians, I love the Jewish folks, I’m gonna be against any kind of mistreatment of them. So, anti-racism is part of a larger, humanistic project that’s predicated on an affirmation of the humanity of people.

“Because if you’re anti-racist, you’re really nothing but a parasite on the host. You’re still looking at yourself through the lens of the racist—and you’re just “anti” them. And, one of the distinctive features of the racist gays is that they’ve lost contact with the humanity of the people they’re objectifying. They’ve lost contact with the humanity of the people they’re putting down. Why would you also want to do that? You don’t begin with them [racists]. You begin with the humanity of the people that you’re talking about.”

This is a brilliant mind. Future president of the United States, people. This is man who has assimilated a tremendous amount of knowledge and human experience and distilled it into something new, something that cannot be so easily swayed by superficially convincing argument. We need experts like this who can not only contribute new thought, but can also help us eliminate unproductive thoughts that we’ve beaten back before, but keep cropping back up because they appeal to the inexpert.

In the comments to this video, it was interesting to see that other people noticed that Norman and Briahna were often talking past one another. One person said that it was HER podcast and that she’d been the “epitome of patience.” I responded with the following,

Really? That just goes to show how subjective conversations like this are. My impression was that he had to reformulate his points several times simply because she wasn’t understanding what he, for m, at least, quite obviously meant to convey in his first formulation. I think it’s useful to take the time to play through this because she’s probably not the only one who didn’t get his point the first time.

As to it being HER podcast … this is an interview show and I’m watching because it says “Norm Finkelstein” not because it says Briahna. She’s fine, but she often has the less flexible mind of the two participants in her interviews. That’s an admirable place to be, though, considering the general quality of her guests (e.g., I recently watched a good interview with Corey Robin where she played the “do we really need to know how to write?” side of the debate).

At 58:45, they discuss respect for knowledge.

“Norm: You must be able to distinguish between what you called a moment ago, a concept and a brand.

“Briahna: That’s fine. If it’s just a brand, we can cut this off short. Even if it’s just a branding exercise, he succeeded in that. That’s all I need to attribute to him. I honestly … we don’t need to be on this for another ten minutes, Norm. But, that’s my point. He did a successful branding exercise. Why’s that so hard to just acknowledge and move past?

“Norm: OK. There’s a simple answer to that. It’s called—and maybe this is going to sound very prissy and old-fashioned—it’s called respect for knowledge. It’s one thing to coin a brand. It’s quite another if you respect a field of intellectual inquiry and you respect the vast labors that were invested in creating that field of inquiry. To then call a brand a “concept”, to heap awards, tens of millions of dollars, a center for anti-racism, on somebody who just created a brand or a word. It’s so disrespectful of that struggle, the hard, honest labor, effectively beginning with W.E.B. Dubois.”

Here, we get her impatience with what is actually the core argument, the more interesting argument about someone like Ibram X. Kendi —namely, why did he become so famous? What damage did that do? I can’t tell if she’s wicked smart and pretending to be a dumb foil, but I suppose it doesn’t matter because, at any rate, she teed up a good question for Norm. I don’t know that she actually heard his answer, though.

Her contention is “none” because she doesn’t seem to be intelligent enough to acknowledge that pushing his kind of ideas to the forefront necessarily takes time away from other, more useful, ideas. Or she doesn’t care, because all ideas are equally bullshit—and all “brands” are bullshit.

It’s interesting that she continues to value her own opinions about Kendi over Norm’s, even after it’s become blindingly obvious that he’s actually read Kendi’s books and work—and that she has not. She’s just followed tweet-storms about him.

In case you think I’m being unfair, after his statement, she continued to berate him that “obviously, there’s an appeal to Kendi’s ideas”, which, while true, is irrelevant in a debate between two people who purport to not be representing the opinions of “fucking morons” (as she noted at the top of the podcast). What is the point of acknowledging that an idea is appealing to the easily lulled? Everything is appealing to them. You don’t have to worry about what morons think, because they don’t think, by definition.

The point is that Kendi’s work has been used as a cultural weapon that works against what might be a cohort that would agitate against the political elite. That relatively well-educated cohort is going to spend time thinking, even if only because they think they should be doing that because it increases their cachet in society.

Their thoughts have to be channeled and focused so that they don’t think the wrong ones. Instead of thinking about how everything is a problem of class—and that there is a class war being waged by elites—those elites promote brands like Kendi to intellectually cow people into thinking that everything is about race instead.

Even if we were to magically solve some problems of race in the U.S., the underlying class war would still be raging, with wealth and power still flowing ever upward. That is the point that even Norm Finkelstein was not making very well.

The corporate and elite appropriation of something like Kendi’s anti-racism—or BLM and rainbow flags before it—is a bellwether. It is the way that the elites prevent dangerous ideas from coming to the forefront. It is deliberate. It is unsurprising that it’s a scam. It also happens to hurt a lot of people whose careers are ruined by accusations of anti-racism—conveniently enough, many people who would otherwise be promoting dangerous thought, like class being the root of the problem rather than race. In this, the elites wield Kendi as a weapon to cow their opponents, or, if they refuse to be cowed, to eliminate them entirely from public discourse.

Briahna eventually expresses her point better (covering a few of the points that I make above), but it takes her a long time get there—and she does so in an incredibly exasperated voice that indicates that she thought she’d already expressed these ideas in her muddled half-sentences before. But, maybe I just understand Norm in shorthand better than Briahna.

I felt a few times like she was forced into making a more lengthy characterization of her argument that ended up being much more articulate, nuanced, and useful than her initially terse and oversimplified formulation, then tacked onto the end that that was the same thing as she’d said in the first place, which was patently untrue. I wonder if it’s just her avoiding ever having been wrong, which doesn’t really matter, but tends to get in the way.

I think that they both blur the distinction between racism and discrimination. Everyone discriminates. Not everyone is a racist. Do you think fat people are kind of gross? What about ugly people? People with bad teeth? Terrible hair? Bad fashion sense? Too many tattoos? Dumb people? Which distinctions are you allowed to draw?

If you discriminate against someone because they’re dumb, is that wrong? If you don’t let them operate a steam-shovel because they’re black, you’re a racist. If you don’t let them do it because they’ve never done it before, is that wrong, too? Aren’t you limiting their range of experience based on distinctions you’ve made based on them lacking characteristics that they lack through no fault of their own? It’s not their fault that they were never given an opportunity to learn how to operate a steam shovel because of a racist world, so you not letting them do it now just promulgates that racism. That way lies madness.

It’s why Archer’s plea “I wanna fly the plane!” is so funny.

What if you had a news anchor who could only speak Spanish, but wanted to work on an English-language broadcast? Is it discriminatory not to hire them because of that? What if they’re latino? Is it fair to claim that they weren’t hired because they’re latino when they’re obviously woefully unqualified?

Not only that, but, as Norm points out at 01:19:15,

“It had never occurred to me before that, when they say black IQ scores are lower than white IQ scores—who’s defining who’s black? […] my point is, that these are very complicated concepts and, for me, I recoil, […] at attaching the label “concept” to something which is just a brand like Adidas. I can’t accept that, not because I’m some important scholar, but because I respect the intellectual labor of those who wrestled with these concepts and produced serious scholarship.”

As noted above, it’s also just a waste of time and energy, deliberately aimed at frivolous topics that don’t endanger elites.

The scholarship is deep and stretches back many decades, if not a century, and has included the thoughts of many intellectuals who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. The shortcuts that we make—”black” or “white”—is actually a spectrum. One that used to include “quadroon” and “octaroon”, which seems like utter madness today. The only way out of this morass is to just stop considering race a distinction at all.

It’s similar to the abortion debate. It’s very easy to be lulled into thinking that you’re either “for” or “against” abortion—or, more precisely, “a woman’s right to choose”. But, when you are forced to think about the mechanics of it, which kinds of abortions do you support? State-ordained ones? After 10 weeks? After 20 weeks? 30? What if the child is viable? Unviable? The mother’s life is endangered?

The problem really is that there are some debates in which everyone feels qualified to take part, but for which we are woefully unequipped. People burbling along at a superficial level feel slighted when others who’ve already plumbed the depths dismiss their arguments. On the other hand, it’s not so hard for those who’ve been involved in a subject for a long time to have overcomplicated it, often beyond recognition, and, sometimes, because it’s become personally lucrative to keep things complicated. Still, the danger that dilettantes drive policy is real.

At 01:26:00, Norm says,

“That woke culture is completely, totally bankrupt. That’s the problem. It’s not only bankrupt, but it does huge damage. I went out […] every day for those George Floyd demonstrations. For six weeks, I went out every day. And then, when I saw what it turned into? $90M for BLM? And it all just disappeared? Wild horses couldn’t get me to come out for another demonstration. And I’m pretty committed. Wild horses.

“And now, the money’s going to dry up for African American Study Centers because they’re gonna say, ‘you know those people. Lurking behind every black person is an Al Sharpton.’ That’s exactly right. That’s what everyone’s gonna think. And now, you’re gonna say, ‘that’s because they were racist to begin with,‘ and I’ll grant that. But guess what? Why help it out? Why facilitate it. No integrity whatsoever. You have this charlatan and hustler. […] doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.”

“This culture is not just bankrupt. It’s retrograde. It does real damage. […Ibram X. Kendi] is an exemplar of the damage. Reduced the field to idiotic brands. Discredited the giving of money and donations and nurturing of the field.”

Briahna wraps up by defending that it wasn’t the left that built Kendi, but that’s just defending yourself. There is a large machine that calls itself left that built him. Kendi’s just a scam artist. But what’s the point of bringing in the “no true Scotsman” argument? She distinguishes between leftists and liberals, but very few people see the distinction.

She defends the left by saying that they were more involved in the UAW strike rather than caring about wokeness and Kendi. But, Norm says that this is evasion—because Kendi is everywhere, and his ideas fill the bookstores that influence a lot more minds than the left could ever dream of doing.

You don’t have to pay attention to every little stupid thing, but you should be more aware of how well the rest of the populace is being distracted by things that aren’t your agenda. It speaks to the emptiness of the left’s political ability in the States that it thinks it can ignore such large changes in intellectual movements.

I like that Norm managed to provoke her into blowing up at the end of her own podcast, complaining that she “doesn’t understand why everyone wants to talk to her about Marianne Williamson”—as a podcast host. She seems to get mad a lot (and I’ve observed this in other episodes) when people try to change the topic from what she’d like to talk about. Luckily—or unfortunately—she has excellent guests who are often quite interesting.

A comment on the video summarizes it well,

“Very disappointing behaviour from Briahana at the end. Norman was trying to explain, politely, how dangerous and empty it can be to elevate certain people with no substance, no track record, only with nice slogans/brands. Briahana dismisses Ibram X but fails to see the potential same issue with Marianne W. who apparently she admires.”

I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who thinks that Norm towers over Briahna intellectually, a fact which, despite her best efforts, seems to rub her very much the wrong way. A perfectly reasonable response from her would have been that she’s voting for Marianne as a spite vote, even though she knows it doesn’t matter. Instead, she doubled down, imbuing her choice with more support for the candidate’s policies than she seems to actually have.