So to be a good “progressive,” you should place “social justice” indoctrination over actual education, and maybe send your kid to a school with increased crime and violence. I could understand, if you grew up poor, if you got knocked around a lot, if you felt like an outsider, it might be natural to resent the upper-middle-class kids, to think they’re too privileged and need to be knocked down a peg. It’s not exactly a healthy way to go through life, but I could understand it. What I can’t understand is thinking that way as a parent about your own kids.
But there, at the end of the quote, we find the real agenda: you must subordinate your own interests to “the collective.” Who, aside from unreconstructed Marxists, still uses the phrase “the collective”? Maybe Star Trek fans, because Hagerman seems to be offering advice on how to assimilate into the Borg. Resistance is futile.
This goes to the real heart of the issue, and it also indicates that this isn’t really about race. After all, which of these arguments has anything specifically to do with kids being white or black, versus being rich or poor? The difference between phrasing this as an issue of race versus an issue of economics is not logical or substantive. It’s merely a matter of intellectual fashion. It’s harder to get people to listen to you if you publish an old-fashioned lefty screed about “class,” but racial politics is all the rage right now and will get you a book deal and coverage in The Atlantic.
That’s why that phrase “the collective” is such a giveaway. This is just the old-fashioned Marxist class-warfare agenda repackaged in the language of racial politics. That is what is lingering behind most of our discussions of race these days.
Take, for example, the arguments that came up recently in the Sarah Jeong case about how non-white people cannot be racist—even when they are definitely, flagrantly racist—because racism is really about the “dominant power structure.” The “dominant power structure” ends up meaning pretty much the entire capitalist system, including the fact that you are able to make money, own property, and buy things—such as buying a house in a good neighborhood in a town with a good school system, or sending your kids to private school. These are the actual examples used in that interview about people perpetuating racism by providing as well as they can for their kids.
None of that is really about race. It’s about using race as a stalking horse for Marxist anti-capitalism, because by this logic, racism can only be eliminated “come the revolution.”
If there’s one thing we should have learned from history, it’s that “the revolution” will only make things worse, because nothing more fundamentally runs against the grain of human nature than asking people not to care about their own kids. Yet that is literally the solution Hagerman offers: “This idea that your own child is the most important thing—that’s something we could try to rethink.”
http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/12/progressives-wont-happy-hate-kids/
But there, at the end of the quote, we find the real agenda: you must subordinate your own interests to “the collective.” Who, aside from unreconstructed Marxists, still uses the phrase “the collective”? Maybe Star Trek fans, because Hagerman seems to be offering advice on how to assimilate into the Borg. Resistance is futile.
This goes to the real heart of the issue, and it also indicates that this isn’t really about race. After all, which of these arguments has anything specifically to do with kids being white or black, versus being rich or poor? The difference between phrasing this as an issue of race versus an issue of economics is not logical or substantive. It’s merely a matter of intellectual fashion. It’s harder to get people to listen to you if you publish an old-fashioned lefty screed about “class,” but racial politics is all the rage right now and will get you a book deal and coverage in The Atlantic.
That’s why that phrase “the collective” is such a giveaway. This is just the old-fashioned Marxist class-warfare agenda repackaged in the language of racial politics. That is what is lingering behind most of our discussions of race these days.
Take, for example, the arguments that came up recently in the Sarah Jeong case about how non-white people cannot be racist—even when they are definitely, flagrantly racist—because racism is really about the “dominant power structure.” The “dominant power structure” ends up meaning pretty much the entire capitalist system, including the fact that you are able to make money, own property, and buy things—such as buying a house in a good neighborhood in a town with a good school system, or sending your kids to private school. These are the actual examples used in that interview about people perpetuating racism by providing as well as they can for their kids.
None of that is really about race. It’s about using race as a stalking horse for Marxist anti-capitalism, because by this logic, racism can only be eliminated “come the revolution.”
If there’s one thing we should have learned from history, it’s that “the revolution” will only make things worse, because nothing more fundamentally runs against the grain of human nature than asking people not to care about their own kids. Yet that is literally the solution Hagerman offers: “This idea that your own child is the most important thing—that’s something we could try to rethink.”
http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/12/progressives-wont-happy-hate-kids/
