Feeding On Failure
Dr Erec Smith, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania, on educators who would prefer minority students not to be understood, or indeed successful:
[W]hat is perhaps most troublesome about [“anti-racist” educator, Asao] Inoue’s statement is that he is projecting negative emotionality onto students because of something—their desire to learn standard English—that would otherwise suggest a positive and confident self-image. By framing this desire to succeed as hopeless, he is encouraging healthy young people to adopt attitudes that will hinder their development.
Possibly because expectations of failure, and cultivated resentment, are more exploitable by race-hustling educators. People whose paycheque depends on propagating misery.
Implicit in Inoue’s statement is the notion that the only way “students of colour”—particularly black and Latino students—can successfully navigate American society is to be phony and put on an act for white people’s approval. The thought of a black person seeing the pragmatic benefit of standardised English, or of a black person coming to college already proficient in it, are by this standard of black or Latino authenticity either impossible or reprehensible.
Authenticity being defined, it seems, as inarticulate ghetto knucklehead.
For Dr Inoue, a minority student wishing to be articulate, precise, and understood by a wider audience, by being fluent in the language of his academic peers and potential employers, is “selfish” and “immature.” Opting for comprehensibility and success is, we’re told, to surrender to “white supremacy” and “capitalist-inflicted bullshit.” “You can… mouth the words that are white, but… they’re coming from a [black] body,” says Dr Inoue, as if expecting applause.
Dr Smith continues,
Inoue rejects the notion that education should foster the development of individual identity in favour of promoting a social and political agenda… Inoue subordinates his students’ desires to acquire a helpful communicative skill to his own radical conception of what will promote the well-being of everyone… The course in question is called “First-Year Writing,” not “First-Year Communal Consciousness.” This is a clear example of projection of an educator’s politics onto his students—even when many of them voice, in so many words, that they already have a preferred viewpoint that led them to the class in the first place: to learn to communicate effectively using a standardised dialect of English.
But in Dr Inoue’s classroom, a student’s ambition to develop linguistic skills, to be clearly understood, and to succeed in life, must be subordinate to the paranoid, tribal politics conceived, rather feverishly, by Dr Inoue. So, no selfishness there, clearly. As a display of the pernicious and perverse, it’s quite a thing. Achieving proficiency and wishing to be taken seriously as someone capable of thought are framed by Dr Inoue as some kind of internalised oppression. And being able to express yourself precisely, and getting a job you want, is somehow a failure, a betrayal of authentic blackness. And by implication, getting on in life – being able to provide for yourself and your family – is, according to Dr Inoue, “a really shitty choice.”
This, then, is the man to whom hopes should be entrusted.
Dr Inoue has of course been mentioned here before, as when telling us that teachers should “dispense almost completely with judgements of quality when producing course grades,” on grounds that a student’s ability to convey their thoughts in writing – and to formulate thoughts by writing – is merely a manifestation of “white language supremacy,” an allegedly lethal phenomenon. And when boasting that a simple 495-word press release for his own “racial justice” Writing Centre took “over a year” to write. As if this reflected some profundity of thought, and not a more prosaic explanation.
As noted at the time,
Apparently, the way for minority students to flourish as writers is for them to dismiss any criticism of their prose, and any attempt to improve it, as a racially motivated “microaggression” and an “oppressive practice,” and thus proof of “an inherently racist society.” You see, students with brown skin needn’t be articulate, verbally self-possessed, or precise in their thoughts. And that ungrammatical job application, the one enlivened with incomprehensible sentences and lots of inventive spelling, will do just fine. And by the time the real-world consequences of this “social justice” posturing become difficult to avoid, Dr Inoue will have been paid – and be merrily exploiting the next batch of suckers.
And so, it turns out that the way to help brown-skinned students achieve authenticity and empowerment is to ensure that as many of them as possible leave academia, as graduates, sounding uneducated and unable to write in an adult manner, and consequently struggle to find statusful employment, thus leading to plenty of that lovely and exploitable resentment, on which race-hustling careers, much like Dr Inoue’s, can be built.
Rinse and repeat.
Oh, and should readers assume that Dr Inoue must be some one-off aberration, feel free to think again.
telling us that teachers should “dispense almost completely with judgements of quality when producing course grades,” on grounds that a student’s ability to convey their thoughts in writing – and to formulate thoughts by writing – is merely a manifestation of “white language supremacy,” an allegedly lethal phenomenon.
Who the hell is hiring these mentalists?
Anyone who uses that nauseating term “black bodies” should be pushed head first into a slow grinding woodchipper with dull blades. Right in line behind those pseudo-intellectual dullards are the ones who repeatedly use “unpack”, “reimagine”, and “at the intersection of.”
Authenticity being defined, it seems, as inarticulate ghetto knucklehead.
Remind me again who the racists are…
Remind me again who the racists are…
Well, quite. But apparently, an “authentic” black student is one who struggles to be understood beyond his immediate peer group, and to whom punctuation and basic grammar are alien concepts, something to resent, along with so much else.
As noted previously,
But hey, this is wokeness.
The “academics” who push these twisted notions of “authenticity” always seem to abide by these rules and standards in their professional lives.
The woke white teachers at the costly private school where I once taught always took offense when it was suggested they quit their jobs, give their jobs to teachers “of color” and go work in the large urban public school system in the same city.
Anyone who uses that nauseating term “black bodies” should be pushed head first into a slow grinding woodchipper with dull blades.
Physicists and astronomers excluded, of course.
Who the hell is hiring these mentalists?
Other mentalists. If you look at his CV one sees that since graduating from college he has never had a real job, only academic gigs* where at present, aside from his grueling class load of two courses, he is also “Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Equity and Inclusion in the College of Integrative Science and Arts” whatever the hell a “College of Integrative Science and Arts” is.
IOW, like so many others, racism is his rice bowl so he has to perpetuate it even though according to this only 3% of adult blacks call racism a big issue. The other 97% are, of course, suffering from internalized yteness.
*(Not counting the time he was apparently a test proctor, excuse me “Testing Supervisor”, and the four months he was a technical writer for HP which might explain why the manual for my printer is incomprehensible)
It seems to me that the mindless expectation that everyone must go to college and burden themselves with needless debt wasting four, five, six, ten of the best years of a person’s life is itself a surrender to “white supremacy” and “capitalist-inflicted bullshit.”
look at his CV
44 pages of it, too. Some curious gaps between gigs early on.
I recall Thomas Sowell noting that what is called ‘Black English’ or ‘Ebonics’ is nothing more than rural English dialects brought to North America by early settlers.
I recall Thomas Sowell noting
“Black Rednecks”. He convincingly argues that ghetto black culture is just white southern redneck culture.
I once did some mentoring for a college-level engineering program (for Americans: Canadian colleges are roughly the equivalent of your trade schools or junior colleges – they’re vocation focused rather than academic) and one young black woman got quite upset with me and began flinging racism accusations when I suggested, diplomatically, that the engineering technologist program probably wasn’t for her and that given her approach to first year she was unlikely to complete the program.
When I was asked to defend my comments to the Dean I pointed out that by her own admission she had cozened her lab partner into doing all of the assignments and labs for the first year engineering math course, struggled with finding the slope of a line after he dropped out of school, and didn’t consider any of this a problem because “this was the last math course in her program” – math being the sort of thing that’s never likely to come up in, say, the third year truss design course.
Oh, and she was there on a Black Woman scholarship.
Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
When I was asked to defend my comments to the Dean I pointed out that by her own admission she had cozened her lab partner into doing all of the assignments and labs for the first year engineering math course, struggled with finding the slope of a line after he dropped out of school, and didn’t consider any of this a problem
It seems as if utterly unprincipled and even morally depraved Deans are a dime a dozen.
…Oh, and she was there on a Black Woman scholarship.
Figures.
math being the sort of thing that’s never likely to come up in, say, the third year truss design course.
Don’t worry, everyone. Smooth roads and indoor plumbing will always exist, no matter who is put in charge of designing, engineering, and maintaining them.
math being the sort of thing that’s never likely to come up in, say, the third year truss design course
We have point and click computers for that math stuff now!
“If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow enobled and no-one dares criticize it.”
— Pierre Marie Gallois
There is a certain logic here. People like this prof believe that white people are just handed plum jobs like candy, with no regard for ability or performance. Looking around his department, this would probably not be contradicted. One of the huge problems with communism has always been the handing out of jobs based on favoritism, which leads to dismal performance in everything. The only thing, by this logic, preventing brown people from getting handed a nice job is racism. The fact that they don’t show up to work, don’t dress appropriately, get in fights with customers, steal from the office, and can’t write, couldn’t have anything to do with it. So it is all only oppression.
“Don’t worry, everyone. Smooth roads and indoor plumbing will always exist, no matter who is put in charge of designing, engineering, and maintaining them.” that is exactly the disconnect. We should be constantly amazed that things work, but we easily get used to it. Stuff just appears like magic and does amazing things. Just appears. That sloppiness could cause planes to fall out of the air…
One of the huge problems with communism has always been the handing out of jobs based on favoritism…
Likewise fascism: One of the reasons that fascist Italy did so badly in WWII was that so many generals and officials were hacks appointed for loyalty to the Party.
Looking around his department, this would probably not be contradicted. One of the huge problems with communism has always been the handing out of jobs based on favoritism, which leads to dismal performance in everything.
Top down authoritarian systems really. Privilege has always been envious and suspicious of talent and ability. Contrary to popular opinion, it’s how the corporate world functions for the most part. The amazing thing is more stuff doesn’t fall from the skies, so to speak.
One of the reasons for the proliferation of administrators in academia and health care is the making of lucrative employment for people of little or no ability.
This problem of deadweight is also one of the flaws in unions. Make-work. Rules so the truck driver is not allowed to touch a broom or empty a truck. In NYC unions double the cost of doing many construction jobs and make the subways expensive.
Had to go to the social security office and the people I talked to were unable to help me. Simply not competent. All the talk against capitalism leads to this: giving jobs to everyone whether they can do it or not. Mail truck drivers who dump the mail.
Had to go to the social security office and the people I talked to were unable to help me. Simply not competent.
During the pandemic I had a very frustrating series of written communications with Social Security. None of the responses I received directly and clearly responded to my questions. None.
This problem of deadweight is also one of the flaws in unions. Make-work. Rules so the truck driver is not allowed to touch a broom or empty a truck.
I started to learn about this from my father when I was a pre-teen: Example: An urgently needed order was ready for shipping but there were no idle hands to wheel the boxes to the loading dock. Dad would get a hand truck and move them himself. Then the union would file a grievance. The union felt that the company should employ another menial laborer full time, just so he would be available on those few days when something like this happened–they had zero interest in the long-term viability of the company, even as new competitors in Japan and Europe took market share. Eventually Dad’s employer moved the entire operation down south where the unions had little power. Damned union pukes.
The amazing thing is more stuff doesn’t fall from the skies, so to speak.
But plenty of it does. Three years ago, a glimpse into our gloriously diverse future:
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/legacy-of-a-lie-the-crash-of-atlas-air-flight-3591-519a3a7bd6ec
But plenty of it does. Three years ago, a glimpse into our gloriously diverse future
Yes indeed.
One of the huge problems with communism has always been the handing out of jobs based on favoritism…
Likewise fascism
Isn’t that true of any system where politicians get involved?
Isn’t that true of any system where politicians get involved?
Well yes, but it’s worst in totalitarian systems.
Rules so the truck driver is not allowed to touch a broom or empty a truck.
Learned this lesson as a teen. I worked for an independently owned tire shop. The boss trusted me to drive more than some of his DUI employees. I would be sent to the Firestone warehouse to pick up an order. It was an hour and a bit drive and I would inevitably arrive during a break or during lunch. The warehouse was very organized from an order perspective. Mine would always be ready at one of the loading doors, but I couldn’t just pick it up and throw it on the truck. I would have to wait for whatever union sacred moment was going on to end. Really, the only thing missing was the prayer mats.
Contrary to popular opinion, it’s how the corporate world functions for the most part4
This is one of the reasons I wish people would stop using the “if women only make 79 cents on the dollar, why doesn’t some company hire all women and out-compete everyone on salary” argument, because it presumes that people are hired and promoted entirely on merit and not because they’re related to the boss or went to college with the VP or or are sleeping with someone in a corner office. Like, have these people ever had a job?
Decline of Western civilization, Chicago edition.
Nothing will be done until a disaster kills people. Any “infrastructure” bill will be spent on political cronies, commissars, and other useless things.
I would have to wait for whatever union sacred moment was going on to end.
I believe loading docks are controlled by the Teamsters union. So, especially corrupt and vile.
OT – good news for a change, The Babylon Bee is giving Libs of Tik Toc a job.
Decline of Western civilization, Chicago edition.
I have some working familiarity with that sort of condition. There is an amazing amount of it out there.
This is one of the reasons I wish people would stop using the “if women only make 79 cents on the dollar, why doesn’t some company hire all women and out-compete everyone on salary” argument,
Not seeing why both cannot apply. Nepotism exists independently of women not being underpaid.
I have some working familiarity with that sort of condition. There is an amazing amount of it out there.
I have read that the Romans required that the designer/builder of a bridge had to stand underneath it when the construction scaffolding/supports were removed, so that he would be crushed to death if it collapsed. It’s kind of a pity we can’t do that today with politicians and deteriorating bridges and other infrastructure. [ Laughs while twirling mustache ]
Like, have these people ever had a job?
I worked for most of my career at a company that was large enough to be part of the Toronto Stock Index. It had a .b share class structure that allowed the founding family to control the stock since they owned 80% of the voting shares and their buddies owned the other 20%. This class structure allowed them to keep their idiot, untalented children in the senior executive positions until just a few years ago. This is where I learned to drive a car from the backseat.
Arab “refugee” gets a small part of what he deserves.
Disgusted and horrified? Thank a liberal.
Well, most of the people spewing the line that “it’s horrible that women (on average) get only 79% of the pay that men get (on average)” think that corporations are run by absolutely greedy bastards that would sell their grandmothers to become cat food if the price was remotely right. Oh, except the “(on average)” bit is left out from the whine; weird.
And I guess you haven’t seen the outsourcing of various jobs to India from North America (not to mention moving manufacturing jobs to China) since the mid-to-late 1990s. I guess the initial profit margin was greater than the ~21% implied by the initial 79% number given by the folks pushing the “79 cents on the dollar” meme.
I’ve been in the workforce since July 1976, so, yeah, I’ve had a job or two. Nortel paid me almost as long as the US Army did (14 years versus 16 years, respectively), but you could very well argue that the US Army wasn’t really impacted by market forces, so my experience there isn’t applicable.
I like the company I work for now, but if they could replace my ass with equal talent at 20% less, I have no bloody doubt that I’d be looking for another job. One might search on how Disney IT workers were treated to get an idea.
This class structure allowed them to keep their idiot, untalented children in the senior executive positions until just a few years ago.
Not that this surprises me, especially not for a large corporation, but was there limited competition with this company or had it morphed into a conglomerate of businesses of businesses?
But plenty of it does.
This is the sort of thing that infuriates me. We’ve discussed similar here before but in this case life and death were obviously on the line. Several people spoke up about this guy being dangerous. Many others appeared to notice but said nothing. Surely the few flights he had with this company before the fatal one, possibly/probably even with this same captain, no one put their foot down? We’re talking about dozens of people who should have noticed that this guy was incompetent to fly a plane. Why were they more afraid to speak up than they were afraid he would kill people someday? Innocent lives on the ground would/should also have been a concern.
I didn’t catch that the first time I read it. Very well done.
This is the sort of thing that infuriates me. We’ve discussed similar here before but in this case life and death were obviously on the line.
That reminds me of an exchange from a year or two after 9/11: A junior manager type told me that if someone told him that a Muslim coworker was saying anti-Christian things to him, that manager would fire both of them. Most Muslim bigots never kill anyone, but it did get me wondering about that manager’s judgement and about what life in most corporations is like.
but was there limited competition with this company or had it morphed into a conglomerate of businesses of businesses?
Competitive market but rapidly expanding. Efficiencies didn’t exist and didn’t need to at the time. Money was raining from the sky and he who had the biggest bushel basket to catch it won while everyone else still did well. I left just as the industry was looking to efficiencies and consolidating. I brought them two buyout deals that would have maximized the .b shareholder’s value. They wanted to hang on. The company today is worth 20% of the deals I brought them 15 years ago and all the big buyouts have happened so there is no extra value in the company.
I don’t want to hear one more word about how smart and wise and noble librarians are: Marxist elected president of American Library Association.
Contrary to popular opinion, it’s how the corporate world functions for the most part. The amazing thing is more stuff doesn’t fall from the skies, so to speak
I think it depends strongly on where you are. I don’t see much of that in the software engineering domain. Every time I get interviewed it’s multiple rounds of interviews, with code writing tests at every step, some of them live (so real bad if stage fright is your thing). Frank incompetence is weeded out real fast, though I’m sure extroversion and good looks are a huge leg up. In today’s legal and political environment being female is too.
I’m surprised they still do it, because testing has been forbidden by judicial fiat in most employment realms. Seems only a matter of time before somebody starts suing software engineering departments for racism in their hiring practices. I know there are black software engineers, but I’ve never personally met one. The only blacks in our engineering department work for IT, not one of the coding teams.
I know there are black software engineers, but I’ve never personally met one.
I’ve worked with a few. One was on the cover of Black Engineering magazine (or some such title) back in the 90’s. At one point I was given two younger engineers to train, a white kid and a black guy. Going into it, I knew the black guy fairly well, or so I thought. He was a guy from the mail room/secretarial group who would tag along on Friday lunches and also used to play after-work basketball with us. Had white man’s disease in that he could not jump for nothing. Bit of a short guy as well. He could shoot ok. I knew he was a bit of a stoner and was kinda surprised they picked him before another Jamaican guy. They were obviously trying to cut labor costs (people were leaving in droves for higher pay once Oracle came to town) and get diversity credits. This was early/mid 1990’s. Again I wasn’t expecting much. But to my surprise, when I would teach him a thing or two and turn him loose on a task, he figured things out better than the white kid. TO BE CLEAR I say ‘surprise’ based on my previous knowledge of his personality, not his race. But unfortunately, due to his personality and hangups and poor work habits, and that he was certain of the prejudice against him (in which he did have some justification but not such as to justify giving up) he eventually quit and AIUI failed elsewhere. This according to his Jamaican friend who still does some software work while running his own barber shop.
corruption: The reason the levies failed in New Orleans hurricane was because the money sent to upgrade the levies was diverted by local gov to do other things. And yes, people died.
Via Ace:
Professor at University of Jerusalem asks a question that probably sounded better in the original German.
The Roman Republic also had senior officials pay for public works out of their own pockets… certainly incentivised cost efficiency.
I’ve worked with 2. One was a junior engineer at Nortel Networks. The other was an engineer at my current company.
The first was OK as a junior engineer; neither horrible nor spectacular. Like, well, most junior employees. I didn’t keep track of where he ended up.
The second was senior to me in terms of years in the company. I absolutely hate UI work and I detest javascript with the heat of a thousand suns. He was my go to guy for javascript/UI questions; he’d ask me stuff about what the hell the backend services were doing. He was (and probably still is) an interesting guy. He had learned both Japanese and Chinese; unfortunately for him, he had married a Taiwanese Chinese woman who divorced not that long after she had the anchor baby. She, of course, took the kid and high tailed it back to Taiwan. He’s too nice of a guy to abandon his kid, so the last I knew, he’s been trying to do the right thing for his child at a rather severe cost to his personal future. All hail him.
For that matter, I’ve dealt with more than one African-Americans while in the US Army. Since I was in that organization while there was an existential threat to the US, I didn’t closely work with those who were obviously incapable at their assignments. One might rephrase that as “not more incapable than I”, which might be a fair cop.
Yeah, the stuff above around the 2nd guy isn’t exactly correct.
However, he was the first person hired at our location and he was able to communicate in multiple human languages (Japanese and Chinese) as well as multiple computer languages.
(If you think that Chinese and Japanese are similar, you are pretty much wrong on almost any axis of contemplation.)