Month: December 2022

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Student Posts

Blog 11/30 Class

Overall, I have learned a lot from this course. Coming into this course, I was not sure what to expect. However, I think that my main takeaway is that discovering the Truth can be difficult, although it is important. This can be applied to my everyday life by not being afraid to question positions that people have if I am confused or disagree. Providing evidence either through lived experiences or information sources is important to back the Truth that you are promoting. I think that this concept was very much in practice during this course. There were debates, however engaging critically is something that this university veers away from. This is interesting as higher education is supposed to cultivate an education that promotes critical thinking and debate. This was one of the only courses that I have taken at Bucknell that encouraged looking at both sides of an argument to discover which one was writing about a particular agenda and which one was attempting to push the truth.

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Class Minutes

Class notes

The articles from this week’s discussion came from Bucknell’s Antiracism page and showcases how our own university deals with wokeism. There are two main aspects to woeksim that we tackled this week which include racism and the power of language. 

In the article “10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms”  it addresses the prejudices that minority students face when they read and write in the classroom. This article is effective at tying together both racism and the power of language in through a wokeist perspective. We went on to talk about how our goal should be to listen to as many different voices and perspectives as possible. Yet this is very challenging to implement realistically in a society with multicultural beliefs. It is virtually impossible to get everyone to agree upon one thing and having so many competing viewpoints can lead to chaos and hinder our baility to successfully communicate with one another. 

Language can be used to unite society, but at the same time it can deepen divisions between social groups and even lead to violence. This made us think about: How can langugae have pyscholgical effects/harm on people? Should we limit our free speech to spare the feelings of others? This relates to our discussion with Gad Saad and seeking the truth. He argues that we should find the truth through the scientific method and incorporate evidence and facts into our language to support our arguments. There are wokesits that make factual claims which makes it more difficult to critique their arguments sucecsffuly. This directly contradicts spiritual relgions such as Christiianity which base their beliefs on faith vocabulary. They accept moral truths with no empirical evidence or science whatsoever. This leaves spiral religions more open to criticism that quasi-relgiions because they do not have data to base their claims on. 

The interpretation of language from Christians and Wokeists also relates to our discussions of truth relativism. According to Christians there is a mystical fact that informs them of what happened in the universse and what comes after that. They accept moral truths that comes from language in the Old Testament rather than the language of fact. Their viewpoints come from a faith program rather than an experiment. Wokeists on the other hand have their own language for looking at social justice issues.

The main social justice issue that we covered was the American social problem with police violence aagainst young black men. Kendi’s “Who Gets to Be Afriad in America?” covers the case of an unarmed black man, Arbery, who was fatally shot by two white men. The white men claim in their defense that they thought he was guilty of robbing the neighborhood and tried to detain him but he grabbed their gun. Yet it was a controversial case and the verdict found the white men guilty of murder and a hate crime. Kendi argues that  white supremacists are  inherent to american society and the result of such hate crimes is because of structural racism. We discussed the issues of making such a claim such as: how do you know the structure is the only thing producing the injustice? What is the social structure and how is it perpetuating this social injustice? We concluded that there needs to be support with scientific evidence to suppor tthi claim, but it is challenging to do with other confounding variables that cause hate crimes. If the only cause is structural racism then that would warrant that nothing else conceiveably could be going on to perpeturate these issues. Currently our social sciences are not developed enough because our tools are not sophisticated enough to fully understand or assign solutions to certain social justice issues like racism and hate crimes. Some issues are so complicated in human nature that we will never be able to sort out how much of each cause is producing each effect.

Additionally another common theme that came up during our conversation was police brutality against young black men. There are cases in whcih the driver is resistant or not compliant to the police’s orders which escalation points. Yet we must ask ourselves: are these police using self defense or unecessary violence? Somebl people would argue that black men are disproriotnately targeted by police officers which is an example of instiutionalized racism within the police system. This relates to Kendi’s claim that America is fundamentally a white supremacist nation. He claims that racism is still very much widespread today. Even though we do not have Jim Crow laws, racism in today’s society has become more insidious. He goes as far as to claim that the election of the first black president was evidence of how insidious racism has gotten because we have become so used to internalized racism. The fact that we had a black president to him was not a milestone in combating racism in America. Overall, a lot of the calims that Kendi make seem to falsifiable and open to critique due to his lack of evidencei n support of his argument. 

Overall our discussion of the power of language and racism can help us understand how wokeists approach such issues. They advocate for change and express frustration with the current and past administrations in America. Yet, the only way to make such arguments non-falsiafiable is to know the scientific facts and utilize empirical evidence in order to claim validity to the arguments that you are making. 

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Student Posts

Blog 12

After our last discussion of white culture and white supremacy culture, I found that there is much to unfold here. For example, as we brought up in class, many of the primary pieces that are available on the Bucknell Anti-racism page never define the terms “culture” or “white supremacy” and what that means in the context in which they are speaking. Nor do these writers attempt to define these terms or provide any evidence for their argument. They provided many characteristics of all cultures and of defining entities of culture itself, such as deciding what is normal, deciding what is proper behavior and what is not. As this was discussed in class, it became clear to me that the idea of preconceived notions plays a role here. Some gathered that it would be beneficial to switch out certain words to fit the narrative in which they thought the author was attempting to portray. Yet switching the words would not change the general argument that the writer was making. Instead of “white culture” change the phraseology to “white American culture” or “white American society”. I think this could run us down a slippery slope in marginalizing a group of people that simply exist in society. Those who claim that white Americans marginalize and discriminate against minority groups are doing that very thing to whites. This in itself is racist against white people. Allow me to define the term racism here for reference. According to Merriam Webster dictionary, the term racism is defined as “a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race”. The same criticism of white Americans could be turned onto any other racial group who believes that ALL white Americans are responsible for the marginalization and discrimination of a particular race. As we stated in class, it is extremely complex and obviously there are exceptions but generalizations are what lead us to the era of wokeist agendas being propagated.

Another important point I found interesting is that it is mostly white people bringing up this idea of white privilege and supremacy. I found this especially virtuous and almost martyrdom like in the podcast “Betray White Fathers” where they give actions that need to be taken of white people ASAP. They write “If things get confrontational with the police, you are there to de-arrest people and put your body between Black people and the police.” Why is it a white person’s responsibility to put his or herself in harm’s way to protect black people that may very well be committing a crime? Almost as though it’s a martyrdom for their “faith” or as reparations for those black people.

To finish this blog post I’d like to say what I took away from this course. After taking this class, it is clear that the quasi-religion aspect of the wokeist agenda is the basis for why much of this rhetoric is spread so successfully. These ideas are highly geared toward young impressionable students who are looking for something to believe in and act for. As a young student, one of the most important things I took away was to ask questions about things and to not be afraid to ask questions. Do not simply allow others to tell you what the truth is but go out and seek it for yourself.