Friend Infected With Right Wing Brain Worms - What to Do?

yeah, this is an idea that doesn't always work in practice.

I will go a step further and say this is an idea that never works in practice, as the most racist people I interact with are the ones who loudly and incessantly claim they "don't see color" when interacting with others, by which they think they mean they treat everyone the same regardless of their ethnic background but in practice actually means they internalized a whole bunch of bullshit stereotypes about the way people are and are very comfortable talking shit about anyone and everyone on every ethnic axis imaginable and never, ever seem to know or associate with more than 1-2 non-white people.

I will also say, Mordy, that what you are grasping for is exactly what all of the literature I posted says parents should talk about. You need to recognize/acknowledge differences so that they can be categorized as "not a big deal" and not a reason for you to default to treating someone poorly. It is the exact opposite of "colorblindness" and it's very weird that you are super-invested in calling it that.

I read this this morning as well and I think the writing of it makes it seem more false than I suspect it is; that is, it's overly written in a creative-non-fiction manner. It's detailed enough in weird ways though that I don't really think the core story of it is untrue. The presentation doesn't do it any favors though.

in next week's episode, I undoubtedly make some offhanded "the restrooms here are terrible, huh?" comment to a trans person who just returned from the toilet

it helps to pay attention to how other people might experience the world, is all I'm saying

btw DJP thanks for compiling those links, really good to have these in one place and i'm encountering some really cool/thought-provoking proposals.

xpost mh, when I was at my last consulting job in nyc I was introduced to some guy who looked maybe hispanic and I said "Hola!" and then I was horrified and overexplained myself that I usually live in a spanish speaking country and just flew in the day before. My coworker who introduced us was dying laughing.

Also DJP OTM as usual

anyway this story did resonate with me. My son is almost 13. He spends too much time online. I did get onto his instagram once and he was following a number of stupid meme accounts which would sprinkle in some pretty insidious shit among the other dumb crap they posted. I kind of read him the riot act on that. But I could never tell what he thought about things. LIke he suddenly would say "Ben Shapiro is the smartest person in the world!" but he was clearly trying to be funny. But there's a line there where you think you're giving someone shit but at the same time you're paying too much attention to them...dunno. One of his friends who is sullen, white, and a dork was posting what I just felt were quite blatnatly racist and sexist memes. I haven't been into his instagram account in some time because he changed his password and now I can't get into it on my phone (he'd logged into it there at some point and forgot to log out, which is why I even had access for six months). He doesn't really discuss politics and seems uninterested. We live in Berkeley and he goes to the middle school that was very widely derided by the alt-right for having a teacher on staff who hit some neo-nazis in SF (something that is actually way more complicated than it seemed to outsiders, because she's actually a completely shit teacher who never comes to work, and seriously does spend her time indoctrinating and trying to attract kids to BAM, which I think doesn't belong in the school and I seriously wish they'd just fire her), and yes, there is a shitload of left-wing talk in Berkeley public schools...the only thing I worry about there is that there's so much of it, and some kids are so inherently reactionary, that having that present might exacerbate contrarian behaviors because kids want to rebel. Anyway. We try to remind him he's 1/4 middle eastern, 1/4 Oglala Sioux and a registered member of the tribe and hope for the best.

(sorry, teacher hit neo-nazis in Sacramento, in case anyone cares)

hola, Yerac!

my take on speaking with people from a variety of backgrounds is if you never feel mortified by something you've said you're either an amazing cultural polyglot or you've probably missed something

btw DJP thanks for compiling those links, really good to have these in one place and i'm encountering some really cool/thought-provoking proposals.

I'd just like to point out that I typed "colorblind study children racism" into Google and posted most of the links on the first page of search results; if you are interested in finding this information, it isn't exactly hidden.

I did get onto his instagram once and he was following a number of stupid meme accounts which would sprinkle in some pretty insidious shit among the other dumb crap they posted. I kind of read him the riot act on that. But I could never tell what he thought about things. LIke he suddenly would say "Ben Shapiro is the smartest person in the world!" but he was clearly trying to be funny. But there's a line there where you think you're giving someone shit but at the same time you're paying too much attention to them...dunno. One of his friends who is sullen, white, and a dork was posting what I just felt were quite blatnatly racist and sexist memes

this is pretty frightening to me -- the fact that there is a meme culture that's accessible to kids that is trying to indoctrinate them into a racist and sexist ideology. how prevalent actually is this?

@ DJP - fair! just saying, you took that step and i am benefiting from it. whereas without it i would not have learned as much and prob would have just clicked into another thread, since i agreed with your global point.

and treesh uhm... yeah, that's the internet these days. at the very least since gamergate, in terms of kid-friendly indoctrinating memes and youtube channels and all that.

yeah so like, in this environment... that's what post upthread was about. what's the way to teach kids an egalitarian perspective that allows them to resist this. if they're clumsily getting messaging that they're somehow already on the "other side" because of their race-- as DJI said his kid got, when he said that he might "deserve" getting bullied for being white -- that seems like it makes them more vulnerable to this

i think this is to do with teachers being clumsy messengers of a very complicated topic. and kids being black and white thinkers, sometimes. also i don't think i have the answer

using black and white metaphorically

poor choice of words, maybe.

idk, i'd be interested to hear from educators about what efforts if any schools are making to resist this.

i think maybe child safety locks on all computers and smartphones

thats your answer to burnt soup and everything above it

I think the articles DJP posted are great, but not really relevant when a white kid is the minority in their school and is getting teased for it. akm otm:

there is a shitload of left-wing talk in Berkeley public schools...the only thing I worry about there is that there's so much of it, and some kids are so inherently reactionary, that having that present might exacerbate contrarian behaviors because kids want to rebel.]

I think that is basically what happened to the kid in the article I posted. That doesn't mean we should stop teaching kids about race and privilege, but it does mean that maybe we should knock it off with some of the more toxic forms of callout culture, especially when it comes to kids.

And don't let your kids have instagram! Especially not until they are 13, at least (even Instagram agrees with this)

yes otm

Idk what kinds of conversations you've already had with your son, DJI, to unpack the complicated stuff that is being packed into "I guess I deserve it," but maybe it's time to have another convo about it or probe a little more?

some kids are so inherently reactionary, that having that present might exacerbate contrarian behaviors

now this really is a force we will never get rid of no matter how we arrange our society. i was pro-iraq-war in 2003 just because i knew no one else who was. the cure turned out to be to collect information, not to accept the necessity of deference to a moral authority.

they need to have access to the right information sources though. the 2k19 internet has plenty of "information" that will lead them to become more entrenched in reactionary ideas

sure, and i read plenty of christopher hitchens columns.

idk, i'd be interested to hear from educators about what efforts if any schools are making to resist this.

― Trϵϵship, Tuesday, May 7, 2019 8:40 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In my school, we're majority immigrant, starting with Chinese, with Latinx as the second largest category, and then Russian, Georgian, various Arabic-speaking people, and a bunch more. Only about 10% of our students are African-American, which is not what ppl expect from an "urban" school.

Tbh I wish we did MUCH more explicit instruction in anti-racism but a) not everyone agrees that it's necessary, and b) this area is the most right-wing part of NYC and full of "Blue Lives Matter" stickers and NRA and Trump bumper stickers on cars, so evidence suggests that any white privilege language would have to be delivered extremely carefully from a trusted source. We do a lot of "equity" instruction and have LGBTQ supports and mental health supports and we have a very diverse staff with lots of POC, but we don't have the demographics to commit to more open racial privilege work.

Which is a shame because afaict everyone in the NYPD is from here so if we did a better job maybe someone would accidentally learn something.

Have you seem evidence of extremism among your students?

We’ve had two shootings this year—christchurch and san diego—that were linked to 4chan and the alt right. I wonder if and how this is on the radar of teachers

and like, what even would be done about it

However I did see a student declamation/performance at a school in a majority-Black part of BK that was a condemnation of police violence and a protest for racial justice and it was really motivating to see that that school is able to make an explicit commitment to, and celebration of, Black excellence.

xp I see evidence that kids are jerks and don't understand the issues they're conflating which is why I wish we could do more. But "extremism" -- not necessarily but since most of our white kids probably go home to racist environments we ought to be doing more about it, because they've probably already learned the other stuff.

sure, and i read plenty of christopher hitchens columns.

― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, May 7, 2019 4:57 PM

isn't this how we connected

him and madonna

i say 2003 but full disclosure not that anyone cares: the last time i argued in favor of anything about the iraq war (the "well it was v badly handled but" position) was the evening of the u.s. midterm elections in 2010. by then i was arguing w educated people who could talk to me about history both iraqi and american and i could feel myself losing ground. later that night i vomited on a robert conquest book.

something that is actually way more complicated than it seemed to outsiders, because she's actually a completely shit teacher who never comes to work, and seriously does spend her time indoctrinating and trying to attract kids to BAM, which I think doesn't belong in the school and I seriously wish they'd just fire her

i feel dumb asking but what is BAM?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAMN

haha thanks -- did some googling and was wondering why it would be bad for a teacher to tell kids about the center for disease control's BAM! body and mind program

oops sorry I forgot to hit "N"

him and madonna

― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, May 7, 2019 5:21 PM

not Pet Shop Boys videos on the beach?

1) DJP OTM, as often

2) i think this is to do with teachers being clumsy messengers of a very complicated topic. and kids being black and white thinkers, sometimes. also i don't think i have the answer

― Trϵϵship, Tuesday, May 7, 2019 4:38 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark

see, i think you're totally incorrect on two accounts. first of all, teachers (especially in diverse school districts) directly and openly confront explicit, implicit, and structural racism single day! it's a huge part of the job. f'rinstance, when i request special education testing/evaluation for a struggling student, i've found it efficacious to follow one of three distinct paths –– dictated by the student's family background. when i make groupings to discuss many texts in my language arts classes, i have to account for race, native language, gender, disability, family dynamic, etc., etc. to optimize group dynamics. i'm aware of which groups of parents (broadly, reductively defined by ethnic identity) prefer to receive positive or negative news via email, which prefer phone calls, and which groups prefer in-person conferences. teachers aren't clumsy about a complicated topic. the job requires some deftness. the topic itself is clumsy, and teachers must often confront it despite others' awkwardness.

it's also incorrect that students are binary 'black and white thinkers.' kids - past a certain age - have deeply-nuanced, multifaceted understanding of the racial/cultural constructions du jour, and they're often thinking (and speaking) far more fluently about these things than their parents. they may lack historical grounding and academic language, but they make up for formal disfluencies by engagement in a wideass array of banter (digital and in-person) to openly expresses tensions that their adults are unable, unaware of, or unwilling to confront. kid-language is rich with aggression, microaggression, and toeing-the-line language in a million subtle ways that adults barely parse. a fortnite chat might use 'Sped,' 'sped kid,' 'tard and 'retard' to comedic, self-effacing, microaggressive, and outwardly hostile effect – but in such a way that it's all deniable to clumsy ol' dad. just 'rude language' besides, it's all just memes, and not the really racist stuff. memes/meme culture/4 chan/ben shapiro-lite shit is an onramp of the transgressive humor >> socially conservative >> right wing >> white supremacist highway.

which is to say: kids are complex, and some of them, from a very young age, are intrigued/titillated by 'transgressive' right-wing/racially coded language in a way that is deniable/downplayable to naive adults. the teachers who work directly with them are very aware of this, and confront it head-on, but aren't always backed up by parents/administrators who often thing the whole subject 'could be handled better.'

my uncle sent me this. it's "for dummies" but pretty good as a synopsis of where we're at i think?

https://points.datasociety.net/agnotology-and-epistemological-fragmentation-56aa3c509c6b

agnotology and epistemological fragmentation for dummmies

seriously, though, i guess i'm a dummy, because i thought this was great! i love the library science community, i wanted to be a librarian but tech has been doing a lot of work to deprecate that profession

i feel like a lot of the success of the right has been their implicit understanding that human beings aren't fundamentally rational and their according extremely savvy exploitation of human irrationality. what i love about folks like boyd and proctor and boal is that one of the opportunities for us is that the right don't necessarily have a schematic understanding of what they're doing, and merely the codification of the concept of agnotology is a powerful tool. naive enlightement rationalism is exploitable by weaponized ignorance. boyd, as i read it, doesn't respond to that, like some on the left have, by saying "fuck it, we're in the 'post-truth' era" or, worse, loudly complaining about how "stupid" people are, but by seeking to understand and express how weaponized ignorance works, and i feel this is wonderful.

(as a side note i do think there's a sense in which tech's usurpation of the profession of library science has unavoidable gender implications)

Tech has not usurped librarianship, it just has better advertising.

Librarianship, seen as "women's work" and unwilling to throw ethics away for short-term profit, could never see the influx of money the tech sector has. The tech industry took a deep foundation of information theory from library science and removed all scruples while throwing crazy money at it. So now we have chintzy big budget tools like Google that are optimized around advertising to you and helping you find things to buy. If you want to find deeper information than that, you often have to dive into databases that the general public can not access.

Librarians do still develop useful tools and technology but that's only a small part of the profession anyway. The reason librarianship will never be automated away is this: Librarians are educators FIRST. Public librarians are highly educated information specialists embedded in all kinds of communities in some of the only public spaces left in our late capitalist hellscape. No matter how much money you have, you can go to the library and access books, computers, and the internet. You can ask a librarian to help you figure out how to apply for a job in a language you're still learning, or access social services. You can borrow a meeting room for your book club or communist organizing group. You can take your baby to storytime programs to meet other young parents and expose your child to literacy at an early age.

Library science graduates do a hundred other kinds of vital jobs too. Academic librarians, UX researchers, archivists, law librarians, data librarians, taxonomists, digital repository developers, news librarians, the list goes on.

Anyway, total derail, but I had to defend my profession that gets constantly shat on by people who are eager to put us in the dustbin because their privilege keeps them from seeing why we matter. (that's not directed at you rushomancy, it's just something I've seen often out there!)

OTM.

This is somewhat counter to what’s happening with education reform and “data.” Techbros and their MBAs cherry-pick weaknesses of traditional education that are easily solved (in the short term) by the application of money and time, and head into underperforming districts. They trumpet promising early successes. These wins in hand, they promote “disruptive” techniques in place of conventional tools and wisdom to promote long-term solutions to thornier problems in exchange for more time and money. All of which come from the coffers of preexisting programs. However, techbros aren’t good af fixing systemic problems, and end up disenfranchising career teachers and administrators. To avoid shouldering the blame, they suggest that teachers/administrators haven’t implemented their solutions with fidelity. The solution is more data and more oversight, which they provide. More management, fewer teachers and traditional administrators . And new metrics — which confirm the biases and preferences of the techbros — always show the interventions working, in spite of the ineptitude of the teachers/allied admin.

OTM

I will add that I believe that the "disruption" of education with the above-described tech "solutions" fuels brain worms by reinforcing patterns of thinking that are not conducive to actually helping the educational endeavor succeed.

onesecondbefore and rb both otm, thank you for speaking up. i think there's a pattern in tech of taking "women's work", giving it to less competent and less qualified men with no ethics, and paying them exponentially more money. i believe this is a bad thing.

i’d like to give the immediately preceding posts in this thread a standing ovation. thank you. librarians do important, great work.

I have several friends who have degrees in library science, a couple of whom are acting librarians, and I extend my thanks in their behalf

The legitimacy and ethics of data is a sidebar to library science and it’s exactly what much of the tech world refuses to value because the very idea of legitimacy, ethical implications, and the privacy of data are things real librarians have tackled over time and they have an actual code!