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.