Welcome to Litsy!

1. Several books at once.
2. My favorite this year was "Woke Racism" by John McWhorter. I bailed on a few books this year, but the most annoying one was Ben Burgis's "Cancelling Comedians While the World Burns."

#wondrouswednesday

Counterpoint

A Columbia Professors take on the Woke movement. A movement that began as a simple creed to remain conscious of racial inequities but has involved into a movement that is considered beyond critique. He goes on to argue that the zealots approach may actually harm those it is designed to help.

I can't possibly think of a more important book for the times that we are living in than this one. I particularly like how he ends it by telling the stories of those who fought back against the "Woke" mob and won.

He goes on to write:

How about doing work motivated by something other than working out feelings of guilt and feeling superior to other people while enjoying a sense of belonging?

(Continued)...religion.

I got the book at the #bnbookhaul but listening on audio right now. Love his voice!

(Continued)...was right. You are Galileo being told not to make sense because the Bible doesn't like it.

A lot of today's victimhood claims on race are fake. Ibram Kendi intones that being an antiracist means that we should engage solely with the how the "victim" feels rather than with the "perpetrator's" explanations. But sometimes the explanations are valid, because the claim of victimhood is unwarranted.

(Continued)...antiracism. Their sense of priorities is fundamentally and immovably different from those of someone unconverted to their worldview.

(Continued)...racism in most black lives--including that police brutality, while appalling, is just one of thousands of types of experience one goes through from cradle to grave, if at all.

He's referring here to the ridiculous book that Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote, in which she claimed that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery. This has been dismissed by pretty much EVERY historian, but she won the Pulitzer Prize for it anyway.

McWhorter goes on to write: "Garrel's firing "functioned," as it were, to make his inquisitors feel noble, and LOOK noble, to one another. They were doing their duty as parishioners displaying their faith, not forging societal change."

One's commitment is driven more by how it feels to be someone with the message, than the message alone.

This was an anonymous person's reaction on Facebook, when a friend of the author wrote on Facebook that they agree with the Black Lives Matter movement. This just proves that when you're "woke," you don't even want agreement. You just want self-righteousness.

(Continued)...sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming coworkers merely by existing in the same virtual space.

Seriously?

Don't dismiss this just because it's from Fox News. This piece of shit really did say these things. I only chose the Fox News article because it had the clearest headline regarding this in a Google search.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/ta-nehisi-coates-who-called-9-11-responders-menaces-o...

(Continued)...political commitments, leading an observer to say of one professor, "He is a wonderful man universally loved by students. It makes me sad to see that he is forced to say otherwise."

Whites flock and even pay to hear Robin DiAngelo teach them the counterintuitive lesson that they are racist cogs in a racist machine, with societal change only possible only when they admit this and shed their racism (which will make poor black people less poor how and when exactly?).

By "the Elect," McWhorter is referring to the "woke" mob.

(Continued)...you of a sense of purpose.

A key part of their tool kit is that they call those who disagree with them racists, or the more potent term of art of our moment, "white surpremacists." That kind of charge has a way of sticking. To deny it is to confirm it, we are taught; once the charge is hurled, it's like you're caught in a giant squid's tentacles.

To the Third Wave Antiracist, the sense our society must make above all other kinds is tarring whites as racist and showing that you know they are racist. Any cognitive dissonance this occasions is "not what we need to be talking about," because antiracism is everything--regardless of logic.