All posts tagged: white people

When Does DEI Make a Workplace Hostile?

When Does DEI Make a Workplace Hostile?

Published by skeptic

Zack De Piero taught writing for four years in the English department at Penn State’s Abington campus. Then he resigned and, in 2023, filed a lawsuit alleging that administrators and other faculty members discriminated against him because he is white. In his telling, the school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by creating a hostile work environment. In response, hundreds of academics signed an open letter calling the lawsuit a reactionary attack on “ongoing efforts in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.” The dispute, like so many in higher education, pits a faction that believes that the prevailing campus attitudes toward identity are racist against a faction that believes that they help fight racism. It is hardly unique in raising the question of whether DEI initiatives ever go too far. Still, this case stands out, not only because it resulted in a federal lawsuit, but because earlier this month, a judge denied Penn State’s motion to dismiss De Piero’s hostile-workplace claim. The case can now go to trial. The ruling …

White Families Sucked the Suburbs Dry

White Families Sucked the Suburbs Dry

Published by skeptic

Nearly 25 years ago, I reported on the changing demographics of Cicero, a working-class suburb just west of Chicago. For years, the town, which was made up mostly of Italian and Eastern European American families, worked hard at keeping Black people from settling there. In 1951, when a Black family moved in, a mob entered their apartment, tore it up, and pushed a piano out a window. Police watched and did nothing. The governor had to call out the National Guard. By 2000, the nearby factories, which were the economic foundation of the community, had begun to close. White families moved out and left behind a distressed, struggling town to its new residents—Latinos, who now made up three-quarters of the population. It felt wrong. It felt like the white families got to enjoy the prosperity of the place, and then left it to these newcomers to figure out how to repair aging infrastructure and make up for the lost tax revenues. After reading Benjamin Herold’s Disillusioned, I now realize I was witnessing something much larger: …

Bill Ackman Is a Brilliant Fictional Character

Bill Ackman Is a Brilliant Fictional Character

Published by skeptic

Before last month I knew next to nothing about Bill Ackman. I probably would have recognized his name. I guess I knew he was a hedge-fund billionaire, and his reputation as kind of a jerk. “He has been straddling that line of public recognition for some 20 years now,” a New York writer explained last week, with a “formula for notoriety” based on “making big controversial calls” as an investor “and picking messy, high-profile fights.” My interest was piqued when I learned that he was part of the group publicly attempting to purge Harvard’s first Black president. Ackman attended Harvard roughly a decade after I did, and he has donated roughly $50 million more to the university than I have. Claudine Gay had just started the job last July, but he was angry because he thought she hadn’t condemned (or disciplined) Harvard’s anti-Israel, pro-Palestine, Hamas-apologist protesters quickly enough or strongly enough. That gambit failed to convince Harvard’s governing board, even after Gay’s very inept congressional testimony about free speech and the advocacy of genocide. But …

The Curious Rise of ‘Settler Colonialism’ and ‘Turtle Island’

The Curious Rise of ‘Settler Colonialism’ and ‘Turtle Island’

Published by skeptic

Recently, I stood on a windswept street corner in Brooklyn and watched a river of pro-Palestinian protesters move past, as police officers tracked their path. A number of demonstrators had heads swathed in kaffiyehs, and some wore face-obscuring black masks. They waved Palestinian flags and placards denouncing Israel in many different ways. Defund the settler-colonialist state demanded one. Another stated Land back!, echoing the Native American movement to reclaim lost territory in the United States. Two women held tight to a Decolonization from Turtle Island to Palestine banner as a gust tugged at it. Turtle Island alludes to the creation story of the Lenape tribe of the Northeast, and some academics and Native activists treat it as a de facto Indigenous name for the settler-colonialist U.S. Settler colonialism—academic jargon for the violent process by which colonial empires empower settlers to push out and oppress Indigenous inhabitants and form a dominant new society—is a term much in vogue among activists and academics on the left. To talk of settler states and oppressed Indigenous people, and claim …

“American Fiction” Is More Than a Racial Satire

“American Fiction” Is More Than a Racial Satire

Published by skeptic

Who decides what qualifies as a “masterpiece of African American literature”? The question is central to an audacious scheme that unfolds in Erasure, a 2001 novel by Percival Everett about a Black professor of English named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, whose high-concept retellings of Greek classics haven’t endeared him to a wide readership. Monk is beguiled by rave reviews of a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, which earns praise for its “haunting verisimilitude” in depicting the ghetto “in all its exotic wonder.” The author resolves to conduct an experiment: He writes a stereotype-driven manuscript meant to reflect the racist appetite of the white publishing industry, then instructs his agent to submit it to book editors for consideration. And so begins the saga of My Pafology, a ribald anti-bildungsroman about a violent, fatherless 19-year-old whose own mother calls him “human slough,” which Monk publishes under the pseudonym “Stagg R. Leigh.” Monk’s satirical exercise thrusts Stagg into the literary limelight as the industry lavishes praise on the book’s gritty rendering of an ostensibly authentic Black experience. …

The Big Questions About AI in 2024

The Big Questions About AI in 2024

Published by skeptic

Let us be thankful for the AI industry. Its leaders may be nudging humans closer to extinction, but this year, they provided us with a gloriously messy spectacle of progress. When I say “year,” I mean the long year that began late last November, when OpenAI released ChatGPT and, in doing so, launched generative AI into the cultural mainstream. In the months that followed, politicians, teachers, Hollywood screenwriters, and just about everyone else tried to understand what this means for their future. Cash fire-hosed into AI companies, and their executives, now glowed up into international celebrities, fell into Succession-style infighting. The year to come could be just as tumultuous, as the technology continues to evolve and its implications become clearer. Here are five of the most important questions about AI that might be answered in 2024. Is the corporate drama over? OpenAI’s Greg Brockman is the president of the world’s most celebrated AI company and the golden-retriever boyfriend of tech executives. Since last month, when Sam Altman was fired from his position as CEO and …

Netanyahu’s Odd Embrace of Elon Musk

Netanyahu’s Odd Embrace of Elon Musk

Published by skeptic

The Israeli prime minister is playing a seedily transactional game. Government Press Office of Israel / Anadolu / Getty November 30, 2023, 11:59 AM ET Less than a month after the billionaire Elon Musk enthusiastically endorsed the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that motivated the deadliest massacre of Jews in American history, this week, he received a warm welcome to Israel from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Since Musk took over Twitter, which he has renamed X, the sort of hateful content that drives both negative and positive engagement has flourished on the site. But he has also directly promoted some of the most toxic claims on the platform. He endorsed as “the actual truth” the idea that Jews were deliberately supporting the immigration of nonwhite people in an act of “hatred against whites.” The post’s implication was that not restricting immigration to Western countries on the basis of race and religion is racist against white people, who have a racially defined right to political, cultural, and demographic hegemony in those nations. As my colleague Yair Rosenberg notes, …

Our Lonely Indoor Lives – The Atlantic

Our Lonely Indoor Lives – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

My Brooklyn apartment is designed for sterility. The windows have screens to keep out bugs; I chose my indoor plants specifically because they don’t attract pests. While commuting to other, similarly aseptic indoor spaces—co-working offices, movie theaters, friends’ apartments—I’ll skirt around pigeons, avert my eyes from a gnarly rat, shudder at the odd scuttling cockroach. But once I’m back inside, the only living beings present (I hope, and at least as far as I know) are the ones I’ve chosen to interact with: namely, my partner and the low-maintenance snake plant on the windowsill. My aversion to pigeons, rats, and cockroaches is somewhat justifiable, given their cultural associations with dirtiness and disease. But such disgust is part of a larger estrangement between humanity and the natural world. As nature grows unfamiliar, separate, and strange to us, we are more easily repelled by it. These feelings can lead people to avoid nature further, in what some experts have called “the vicious cycle of biophobia.” The feedback loop bears telling resemblance to another vicious cycle of modern …

How Reconstruction Created American Public Education

How Reconstruction Created American Public Education

Published by skeptic

Before the Civil War, America had few institutions like Antioch College. Founded in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1850, Antioch was coed and unaffiliated with any religious sect; it was also the first college in the nation to hire a woman to serve on its faculty as an equal with her male colleagues. It was unquestionably progressive, and would not have been that way without its first president: Horace Mann. Mann, the politician and education reformer from Massachusetts, sought to mold a certain kind of student: conscientious, zealous, inquisitive. For years, Mann had opposed slavery; he hoped his students would as well. He charged those he taught at Antioch to dedicate themselves to eradicating injustice with sedulous care. “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity,” Mann told the graduating class of 1859. Explore the December 2023 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More Mary D. Brice was one of Mann’s students at Antioch, and she was a true believer in Mann’s vision. …