Larry Correia does some schooling on the shape of racism in the getting-paid part of the publishing biz.
Correia made a few good points in particular that I want to focus on for a minute.
For one thing, the publishing industry is heavily blue. Most publishers' headquarters are in Manhattan, and they fit the stereotype.
So if there's racism going on, whose fault is it? After being in the business for in some case literally centuries, there's really no one else to blame.
That's the loophole for them, though.
Like everywhere else in America, law prohibits discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, with a few exceptions for hiring practices. So any racism literally can't be baked into the system as we are asked to believe. The Constitution discusses slavery as a fact of life, but it was on its way out, and the fact that 1776 happened before we crossed that watershed is not germane.
So the only way that racism can persist is in the attitudes of the people who want to propagate it.
There are some back doors, of course. Laws that affect certain demographics but seem colorblind until you note that there are well-known correlations. But this isn't always racism. Certain investment laws prohibit people using certain tools or strategies if they don't have enough liquid assets to back them aren't just to be mean to minorities or generally lower and middle class people, they exist to prevent amateurs from causing damage to the market with their ignorance. But even where it might be, like with certain kinds of inner city zoning laws, if you've got people who know what's wrong getting elected...why are they still unable to set it right? If you're a bleeding heart mayor who wants to help your city and you've been in office for thirty years, at some point the governor and state legislature stop being valid excuses.
But swap everyone in the system out for people who are equally competent but not indoctrinated, and there's no reason to expect the same things to keep happening. Selective misanthropic unwritten policies should evaporate overnight, and bad laws that take advantage of artifacts of history will take a little longer for these unbiased replacements to weed out once they stop enforcing them.
And when a crisis like we're having these days happens, someone can always find some statistics that might be damning, or might not but can be dressed up to look that way, and so all these progress-leading Manhattanites can clutch their pearls and signal-apologize for nothing more specific than being part of the problem, and then after a few days of putting color-coded banners on their web sites and tweaking the language of their boilerplate, it's back to business as usual.
It's like they're springing the Kafkatrap of the retail clerk on themselves just so they can get out of it. It's pretty clever, I'll give them that, but the problem with reminding yourself too much that you're clever is it gets very easy to forget that anyone else has any sense.
Like the black people you just signaled to. Which is probably why you keep doing it and thinking that it's going to keep working.
Here's what I mean by the retail clerk Kafkatrap. I borrowed this from somewhere but don't remember exactly where; I'll give credit or change the example if I find it or a kind reader points me in the right direction:
You're working in a store. A black customer and a white one walk in at the same time. Whom do you approach first to serve? The white one because you're more comfortable? Or the black one because you think on some level they're not to be trusted and need to be watched more closely? Or the white one because you don't want to show that you might think that of the black person? Or the black person to subtly contribute to elevating their social status? The point isn't to reach an answer; the point is to think about it so In The Future You Can Do Better.
But what does "do better" in a case like this mean? Eventually you have to stop the analysis paralysis and do your job.
But that's the Kafka trick. When you're setting up the scenario as if to trap yourself instead of someone else, you don't have to answer. Just framing it is the solution. Let hoi polloi worry about what the actual right answer is; you've shown yourself to be woke enough to be above such things, and can choose to do whichever you want. Since you're woke, it's always the right choice.
Well, not forever. What amuses me about the explosion of obsequious fangirling is how everyone is suddenly an expert in this stuff. In truth, they're not. Many of 'em took good notes in their critical theory studies gen eds, but in most parts of the country there's not a lot of use, so their skills will whither; meanwhile, progress keeps moving in whatever direction is declared forward. The wannabes are going to get left behind or consult the wrong focus group or use an obsolete phrase because even the MSM can't keep up, and eventually their virtue signal will be heard as an obsolescence signal. And they will turn on their own.
Correia made a few good points in particular that I want to focus on for a minute.
For one thing, the publishing industry is heavily blue. Most publishers' headquarters are in Manhattan, and they fit the stereotype.
So if there's racism going on, whose fault is it? After being in the business for in some case literally centuries, there's really no one else to blame.
That's the loophole for them, though.
Like everywhere else in America, law prohibits discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, with a few exceptions for hiring practices. So any racism literally can't be baked into the system as we are asked to believe. The Constitution discusses slavery as a fact of life, but it was on its way out, and the fact that 1776 happened before we crossed that watershed is not germane.
So the only way that racism can persist is in the attitudes of the people who want to propagate it.
There are some back doors, of course. Laws that affect certain demographics but seem colorblind until you note that there are well-known correlations. But this isn't always racism. Certain investment laws prohibit people using certain tools or strategies if they don't have enough liquid assets to back them aren't just to be mean to minorities or generally lower and middle class people, they exist to prevent amateurs from causing damage to the market with their ignorance. But even where it might be, like with certain kinds of inner city zoning laws, if you've got people who know what's wrong getting elected...why are they still unable to set it right? If you're a bleeding heart mayor who wants to help your city and you've been in office for thirty years, at some point the governor and state legislature stop being valid excuses.
But swap everyone in the system out for people who are equally competent but not indoctrinated, and there's no reason to expect the same things to keep happening. Selective misanthropic unwritten policies should evaporate overnight, and bad laws that take advantage of artifacts of history will take a little longer for these unbiased replacements to weed out once they stop enforcing them.
And when a crisis like we're having these days happens, someone can always find some statistics that might be damning, or might not but can be dressed up to look that way, and so all these progress-leading Manhattanites can clutch their pearls and signal-apologize for nothing more specific than being part of the problem, and then after a few days of putting color-coded banners on their web sites and tweaking the language of their boilerplate, it's back to business as usual.
It's like they're springing the Kafkatrap of the retail clerk on themselves just so they can get out of it. It's pretty clever, I'll give them that, but the problem with reminding yourself too much that you're clever is it gets very easy to forget that anyone else has any sense.
Like the black people you just signaled to. Which is probably why you keep doing it and thinking that it's going to keep working.
Here's what I mean by the retail clerk Kafkatrap. I borrowed this from somewhere but don't remember exactly where; I'll give credit or change the example if I find it or a kind reader points me in the right direction:
You're working in a store. A black customer and a white one walk in at the same time. Whom do you approach first to serve? The white one because you're more comfortable? Or the black one because you think on some level they're not to be trusted and need to be watched more closely? Or the white one because you don't want to show that you might think that of the black person? Or the black person to subtly contribute to elevating their social status? The point isn't to reach an answer; the point is to think about it so In The Future You Can Do Better.
But what does "do better" in a case like this mean? Eventually you have to stop the analysis paralysis and do your job.
But that's the Kafka trick. When you're setting up the scenario as if to trap yourself instead of someone else, you don't have to answer. Just framing it is the solution. Let hoi polloi worry about what the actual right answer is; you've shown yourself to be woke enough to be above such things, and can choose to do whichever you want. Since you're woke, it's always the right choice.
Well, not forever. What amuses me about the explosion of obsequious fangirling is how everyone is suddenly an expert in this stuff. In truth, they're not. Many of 'em took good notes in their critical theory studies gen eds, but in most parts of the country there's not a lot of use, so their skills will whither; meanwhile, progress keeps moving in whatever direction is declared forward. The wannabes are going to get left behind or consult the wrong focus group or use an obsolete phrase because even the MSM can't keep up, and eventually their virtue signal will be heard as an obsolescence signal. And they will turn on their own.
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