To be fair, he does say the above, which is close enough. The problem with asking "what if they're right" is that there's no single formulation of beliefs shared universally by such large and diverse group, so you can't consider whether they are right or not, only whether each individual expression is.
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be…
The whole idea of woke (in the non pejorative sense) is that you’ve done the work to perceive the actual problem.
That statement shows that he hasn’t, which I think undermines the good parts of the essay.
When people were asked whether male-dominated or female-dominated industries were sexist, they vastly overestimated the degree of gender discrimination as compared to the experimentally observed rates (and in the case of male-dominated industries, they got the direction of discrimination backwards): https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S07495978230005... from https://id.elsevier.com/as/authorization.oauth2?platSite=SD%...
The whole pattern of people saying what amounts to "the fact that you disagree with me means you haven't bothered to examine the problem" is a very unfortunate trend. Did it occur to you that perhaps he did do the work on studying the problem, and came to a different conclusion?
But I wouldn't be surprised if this is also discarded as biased. The issue is that the allegation of bias is often justified by the outcomes of the research, thus statements like "the research showing people overestimate racism is biased" becomes tautological.
Also, do you have specific critiques of the study? Or is your dismissal solely based on the authorship of the study?
Has anyone ever referred to him with a racial epithet? Has he been stopped and frisked? Racially profiled? When was he last treated as if his ideas aren't as good because of his gender? Or passed up for a promotion for any of these reasons? Was he ever treated as if he is unworthy of marriage because he loves the wrong person? Has he worried about whether or not his name sounds a little too ethnic on his resume? Has he ever been called a dirty ____?
Among other things, including being called racial epithets, and worry about whether or not my name sounds a little too ethnic, I've had to listen to contemporary American politicians talk about how my ethnic group controls lasers from space.
But no, racism is not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be? It's easy to say that when you never experienced it.
The comments have quite clearly laid out how to uninformed this perspective is because it lacks knowledge. It’s not because he’s white ir male it’s because he’s talking over people who have experienced this to tell them they are overreacting.
Gender and race are explanatory of why this is dumb but not fundamental to why it is - that is simply him being misinformed.
In your comment.
"Well of course by 'the woke' I only meant the ones I'm talking about, and since I'm choosing what that means let's just say part of the definition includes that they think racism is an even bigger problem than it is—whatever amount you think it's a problem, they think it's a bigger one, so even you think they are wrong! So as you can see I wrote precisely and correctly and you're an idiot who can't read."
But in fact it's all nonsense. This whole essay is a bunch of mealy-mouthed gibbering, because it relies so heavily on that kind of thing. It's either saying something boring that 99% of people already agree with, or it's expressing the more controversial (and dumber) thing that's getting everyone here worked up, but accusations of the latter can be deflected by claiming it's only doing the former (in which case, why bother writing it in the first place...?)
Essays like this are one of the few things LLMs are already entirely capable of replacing us for. Bad ones that mostly lack actual content, and don't even really need to be right because they're constructed such that they can't be wrong.
From what you say, anyone who disagrees about the nature or severity of the problem hasn't done the work and is flat out wrong.
If so, then the whole idea of wokeness collapses into the state of infallible enlightenment where everything one says is correct.
And the polarized ends of woke and anti-woke shouting aren’t going to achieve that.
So it’s important to engage with the (non-shouty) people in our lives who we can have those discussions with.
Issues aren't in a que where the most important get done first, and there is rarely a master calculation weighing them against eachother. When there is, it is called a budget, and that come into play after people have agreed upon what they would like to do.
We dont have to fix global racical justice before a pothole in the street just because the former is more important. If you want to talk about racial justice, policy proposals are concrete. Should we have job and education quotas, should we have race based criminal sentencing, how about diversion programs? Now these are topics with some meat on the bones.
I'd be curious how he "sizes" the import of these problems (priggishness, prejudice) and whether it's just drawn directly from personal frustrations of a wealthy white billionaire in the most progressive state in the world.
Rich, coming from a rich white male. Hey, we're not lynching people anymore!
The whole point of "wokeness" is being legitimately aware of these issues and not just sweeping them under the rug with an "it's a problem, but not as bad as they say".
You're sounding like someone in the 60s saying "yeah, equal rights is a problem but not as bad as they say". The majority of white Americans at that time didn't think there was a problem with equal rights. In 1963, 60% of Americans had an unfavorable view of MLK's march on Washington. In 1964 a survey showed that a majority of New Yorkers felt that the "Negro civil rights movement had gone too far". etc. etc.
If you're not aware that there's a problem, __that's__ the problem.
