We had a field trip to the baseball stadium today. Parents were asked to chaperone and transport children to the train station in batches. But 100% of parents showed up, so everybody drove their own child.
The excursion was unavoidably woke. Three of the four stories we heard had the words “but because of the color of his skin.”
The most bizarre story was told in front of the photos of the team’s most famous players.
“These are our most famous players,” said the tour guide. “But I won’t talk about them. Instead, I’ll tell you about a player who never played for our team. He played for [some other team name]. He’s important because the color of his skin…”
People keep asking why Americans are so nutty about race but imagine hearing this 4 times a day every day, often completely out of any context. And on and on and on. Anybody would get nutty.
In case you are American and don’t understand what I’m saying, here’s an example. I tell Klara about her great-grandfather a lot. He was a doctor, a pediatrician. He founded several clinics in Kharkiv. It was impossible to walk down the street with him without somebody stopping us to say, “Doctor, you saved my son”, “Doctor, my child can walk because of you”. He created the first clinic in the region where women could give birth in the water. He instituted a doula experience in his clinic which, in the USSR, was next to impossible to do. (The horrors of Soviet childbirth are the main reason for the collapse of fertility in the 1990s but that’s another story).
When I talk to Klara about her great-grandfather, do I add “but because he was a Jew” after every sentence? No, I don’t. I don’t want it to be a miserable, guilt-trippy story. Badgering her with the anti-semitism that grandpa very much experienced would generate a mix of guilt and repellence. And more guilt for feeling repelled.
There’s an enormous distance between concealing unpleasant parts of history and obsessing over them maniacally. Americans have left the “obsessing maniacally” territory behind and are hurtling straight towards utter lunacy.
Clarissa's Blog 
It’s all such recent manufacture, that’s what’s so infuriating about it. I’m the tail end of Gen X and my husband and I had conversations 25 years ago (after a couple conversations with much older family members) about how soon the generation who had lived through segregation and race riots would be retired from the workforce and we’d really be the color-blind, no-racism* society that everyone under 60 was already living. Not that those family members were particularly racist (some had been involved in sit-ins in the 60’s), it’s just that they’d lived through a time when race was often front and center and sometimes resulted in violence. But we (naively, as it has turned out) thought that our generation – which had grown up with everyone in a mix, all listening to the Free To Be record together – wouldn’t care anymore because none of Gen X had ever cared. But 8 or 10 years ago, that all changed and now it’s A Thing again.
*Not that we’d be in utopia, just that race wouldn’t be a societal problem much at all.
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The tour guide at the stadium works for the stadium, not the school. But as long as both are located in America, “because of the color of his skin” will be part of every communication including basic exchanges about the weather.
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The second question, though, is the perfect illustration of what I’m saying. Not mentioning grandpa’s experiences with anti-semitism in every other sentence means I concealed his ancestry.
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No, you just said you didn’t repeatedly mention it [“but because…after every sentence”], not that you concealed his ancestry.
Hence I took it to mean the anti-Semitism is irrelevant to Klara understanding these stories you’re telling her of his pediatric practice and his doula practice. “Great grandpa took care of lots of kids and helped bring babies into the world.” That’s pretty neat.
And even if the tour guide isn’t an employee of the school, a field trip is a curated educational experience provided by the school. The ballpark also has a standard menu of things they’d want people to take away from a tour. Very strange not to learn about any of the players who actually played there.
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Oh its not just there. A few years back my family gathered for a winter vacation in Virginia. While we were there I wanted to see Jamestown. There was a tour guide and it was all I could do to keep from getting up and calling the smug leftist tour guide out for a liar and a fraud.
He stated a lot of things that were opinion rather than fact, but he thing that really set me off was that like a lot of the early colonies there was a period of starvation. The tour guide went on spill about how a young woman starved to death because she was being oppressed for being female and that if it came down to cannibalism she would have been chosen because she was a young single female. And on and on and on.
This wasn’t at a college or high-school brainwashing center, this was in a historical landmark away from any cities in the middle of winter. That fellow should have either been pulled to the side or fired when he started expressing his opinion rather than actual facts.
Worse it wasn’t the only place either. We visited President Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello while we were there. Paid for the tour. The building was interesting though I wish I could have seen the gardens in Spring. However the tour guide spent nearly the entire tour talking about the slaves owned by the Jefferson family instead of the President who the tour was supposed to be about.
This sort of nonsense is extremely infuriating.
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This is precisely the kind of ignorance and militant stupidity that I’m talking about. It’s so tiresome, and it’s everywhere.
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@ – W.
Instead of letting this people infuriate you, you should have said something.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
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How often has this worked for you?
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@methylethyl
How often has this worked for you?
Is this intended for me? I’m sorry I did not see it earlier.
I have had enough contact with Americans to notice that they do not appreciate a confrontational style, which is what has given a leg up to progressive radicals, who are instead not at all afraid of being in-your-face confrontational and oftentimes even worse than that.
However, my background IS progressive radical, so I’ve kept that style, more or less, maybe a tad more subdued now that I have moved to the conservative camp. Has it worked for me? If you mean, have I been able to persuade others of the goodness of my ideas, I would say generally no. But then this morning, one of my most radical progressive students said in front of the whole class during a presentation that she has changed her mind about her ideas. She then proceeded with such a wide-ranging and in-depth critique of Marxism and Woke sloganeering that I was taken aback and almost moved to tears. The other students were in silent awe. You could have heard a pin drop.
How direct was my influence in causing this change of heart through my explicit, in-your-face, constant efforts highlighting the pitfalls of neoliberal Wokistry while reading texts for our literature lessons, considering that not one of the other teachers ever dares to explicitly criticise any remotely progressive ideas, when they are not actively promoting them? I honestly do not know.
It is true though, that quite a number of former students do come back to visit me after a few years at university or write to me to let me know that my ideas helped them change their minds on such topics as abortion, homosexuality and feminism, so I would say that I do have a certain impact.
Of course, this might not be appropriate in other social situations or cultural contexts, where I would simply lose my job if I did not keep my counsel on such heated issues. I acknowledge that, but sometimes I feel that conservatives tend to stay too much out of the fray: they are positively afraid of the consequences of saying what they really think out loud.
But I am an in-your-face, former radical abortion activist who also happens to be an openly gay man who has renounced homosexuality, converted to Christianity and openly criticises abortion: people generally tend to shut up when I engage with them on these issues.
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Might depend on your personality, and your rhetorical style generally. I find that the only times I have any persuasiveness at all, is when talking to the small handful of people with whom I have a relationship of intense mutual trust and affection. So basically: family members.
Pretty futile to start confrontations over anything with people I have no pre-existing relationship with. Partly this is because I don’t love them, and this fact communicates itself. Partly it is because my verbal processing is painfully slow in conversation contexts: I’m not a person who can muster a clear, logical, snappy reply out of thin air. I have to think about it and choose words carefully (this works great in writing: not so in realtime).
I have doubts about whether it works even if you are handy with a quick reply. Mostly it engages people’s ego-defense-systems and they shut down whatever part of them is listening and start hurling insults. If you evoke that ugly beast, you may convince some onlookers to rethink, but not usually the original speaker.
YMMV.
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It’s true!
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I’m ineffective at talking to Americans about this. I never see a friend of 15 years who suddenly joined the cult of “there are too many white people everywhere.” If I don’t join her in these chants, she doesn’t want to hang out. It’s like she joined a religious sect. Her eyes glaze over and she’s unreachable.
I don’t know how to speak to people about this to achieve anything.
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Maybe your friend would be happier moving out of the US. May I recommend Asia or Africa?
A student I have from Africa told me that before moving to US he never realized he is black. But after arriving here, white students started to ask him a lot of questions about “how it is to live in America as a black person”. The African student got quite upset about it, and rightly so.
This American race obsession is completely crazy. When my child was 2 or 3-years old they came back from an American daycare telling me they are white. Once I walked into their classroom and listened to a teacher explaining to a group of 3-years olds a concept of slavery. It is unclear to me what kind of harmony between races is being achieved by telling children since they barely learn how to talk that they are white or black and put so much focus on what shade their skin is. My child is in an international school now with teachers who are not American and who are fortunately not obsessed with race.
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It’s an obsession, for sure. A national pastime of sorts. But I remember very clearly that this wasn’t so even just 15 years ago. This is recent. I’m hoping it’s a fad that will go away because it’s getting very annoying.
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It picked up during the second Obama presidency, around 2013-2015. That’s when it left the halls of academia and moved into mainstream society, aided and abetted by the mainstream media complex. And it was not by accident.
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“…hoping it’s a fad that will go away…”
Hoping isn’t enough; money talks, we have to remove all public funding of professinal hatred including the sexual and racial “studies” ;-D
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I’ll respond in a separate post because this is important.
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I had a similar experience only yesterday, I was a substitute aide working with two boys who had learning disabilities. The head teacher had them read from a book about growing up under Jim Crow when they could barely pronounce the words, that disturbed me. These were third graders who could barely read and instead of having them read age-appropriate fiction, she had them read agitprop when they could barely read
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“…unpleasant parts of history…are hurtling straight towards utter lunacy.”
Not just America, Canadian Liberals have been subsidizing the same woke nonsense. I may be losing one of my closest buddies because he has recently completely bought into modern Metis historical revisionism.
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