The cultural revolutionaries see the world through colored glasses — and they want you to also. This reality again comes to mind after a video surfaced of a teacher berating a high-school student because the young man was not sufficiently race-obsessed. In fact, the incident tells us much about leftists and their agenda, and about how conservatives must avoid combating them with poor arguments.
The video shows part of a lecture at a Loudoun County government school in Ashburn, Virginia, and begins with the teacher showing a slide of two young women standing side by side with an accompanying caption reading “What is race?” The exchange between the student and teacher went as follows:
Teacher: “Tell me what this seems to be a picture of?”
Student: “That’s just two people chillin.”
Teacher: “Right, just two people; there’s nothing more to this picture?”
Student: “Nah, not really, just two people chilling.”
Teacher: “I don’t believe that you believe that. I don’t believe that you look at this as just two people; I don’t think you can look at this as just two people.”
Student: “It truly is just two people, is it not?”
Teacher: “I think you’re being, I think you’re being, um, I think you’re being intentionally coy about what this is a picture of.”
Student: “What am I being coy about? It’s two people standing back to back in a picture.”
Teacher: “Yeah, and that’s all you see, is two people.”
Student: “I’m confused as to what you would like me to speak on in that sense.”
Teacher: “I don’t think you are. I don’t know why you do this, um. I’m not trying to call you out, but you could, you raised, you come out off of mute to talk about what this is a picture of and act as if, ya’ know, there’s nothing noticeable about this apart from the fact that it’s two people.”
Student: “Well, I’m confused, are you trying to get me to say that there are two different races in this picture?”
Teacher: “Yes! I am asking you to say that.”
Student: “Well, at the end of the day, wouldn’t that just be feeding into the problem of just looking at race instead of just acknowledging them as two normal people?”
Teacher: “No it’s not, because you can’t not look at, you can’t ack — you can’t look at the people and not acknowledge that there are racial differences, right?”
Student: “But if we’re going for, let’s say we’re looking for equality within all of this, then why would we need to point out things such as that?”
Teacher: “Because those differences are real things”
Making this even more preposterous is that it occurred during a college-level English course, according to The Daily Wire.
Of course, the student was being intentionally obtuse — and perhaps rightfully so since the teacher was being unintentionally obtuse. Yet more can be said about the obtuseness. So let’s finally have one of those “brave discussions about race” the Left always claims to cherish.
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If racial “differences are real things,” and they are, and if we’re going to discuss them, we should do it intelligently and with precision. As to this, golf great Tiger Woods once described his “race” as “Cablinasian” in recognition his Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian background. He has more sense than the “educators” who’d call him “African-American.”
I mention this because while I’ve even seen conservatives say that there was one white and one black girl in the Loudon teacher’s picture, is that really true or what’s most notable about them physically? They are similarly complected, after all.
(As it turns out, some are reporting that the girls “are twins born of a white parent and a black parent,” writes the Independent Sentinel.)
If you’d asked me about them, for example, I could note that they’re both sentient bipeds, both female, and both young. If questioned about how their group status might influence their treatment in society (which was the teacher’s focus, apparently), I might mention that as young women they’d both benefit from affirmative action and other beneficial double standards. There’s also the possibility that the redheaded girl might experience “anti-ginger” prejudice (yes, that is a thing).
As for race, how is it that we describe a light-skinned girl as “black”? It’s ironic that all these “progressives” embrace the old racist “one-drop rule.”
That there are differences among groups, as the teacher states, is obvious. Were there not, we couldn’t even describe groups as “groups” because there’d be no way to differentiate among them. Moreover, many differences are more than just skin deep.
For example, relative to other men, black men have higher free testosterone levels, which would account for their often impressive muscularity. Black people also have narrower pelvises, which helps explain why they dominate in sprinting.
North Asians have the highest IQ of any racial group, while Ashkenazi Jews have the highest IQ (115) of any identified group. This may help explain why Jews have won 22 percent of the world’s Nobel Prizes despite being only two percent of its population. There are many, many other group differences as well.
One can argue whether these differences are due to nature, nurture, or both. But we shouldn’t make either of two mistakes, both of which the Left has made at different times (and sometimes at the same time). They are painting either all groups or all people with the same brush.
The rules are simple, too:
- Since there’s variation among groups, we must judge every individual group as an individual group.
2. But since there’s also variation within groups, we must judge every individual as an individual.
When the Left claimed to care about “equality,” it recoiled at the first proposition. Now that it has dropped the mask and advocates discrimination branded as “equity,” it resists the second. Conservatives shouldn’t join leftists in either error.
For the record, the Left has always been driven by prejudice of various types. In fact, leftists were major proponents of eugenics — the science of improving man via selective breeding — until the Nazis embraced it and were defeated in WWII and discredited. Then the Left had to pretend otherwise (and that the National Socialists were “right-wingers”).
By the way, acknowledging group differences doesn’t have to lead to hatred or unjust discrimination — if people are God-centered. I don’t need to believe that a developmentally handicapped boy next door with a 64 IQ is my “equal” (in a worldly ability sense) to value him. I only need to know that he’s a divinely created being and is thus sacred, that he’s a child of God.
The Left’s problem is that it isn’t God-centered but self-centered — and deifying one’s own will, “woke” or otherwise, always leads to destruction.
