Black Lives Matter: ‘Confessional Church of the Woke’ needs to check facts first, not privilege
Setting buildings alight, looting, and bashing the innocent seems counter-productive to fighting discrimination. Apparently, whiteness constrains my perspective.
This tolerance and equality business sure is complex. Setting fire to buildings, looting shops, and bashing innocent people in the street seems to me a nonsensical and counter-productive way of addressing discrimination, but apparently my whiteness constrains my perspective.
Perhaps I am also wrong to be cynical about the reasons why Australian activists would co-opt the death in custody of an African American man at the hands of Minneapolis police. Maybe I have become distracted with Australian Institute of Criminology statistics which show that indigenous prisoners are less likely than other races to die in custody or in interactions with police, notwithstanding they are disproportionately incarcerated.
Last month in the Sydney Morning Herald a Kaytetye woman, Rona Glynn-McDonald, wrote that COVID-19 presented an opportunity for Australians to learn from indigenous Australians. “As the world looks to … enhance community wellbeing, we can see that First Nations communities already hold many of the answers we are looking for,” she said. As I write this, reports are coming in of a Black Lives Matter protester having tested for coronavirus. Who knew that attending an unlawful mass gathering during a global pandemic puts people at risk?
Mention these facts and it is likely someone will respond with a fallacious platitude telling you to check your privilege.
Confessional Church of the Woke
And there is no shortage of white people eager to declare just that. Think of social media as the confessional in the Church of the Woke. “Henceforth I will undertake to better educate myself about structural racism and inequality”, or “From now on I will listen respectfully and be an ally for repressed minorities blah blah blah.”
It is all about whiteness supposedly. You could read about this abstract concept by race theorist authors, but chances are you will never be that bored.
Suffice to say this interminable waffle holds that whiteness entails cultural appropriation, hegemony and repression.
So numerous and dastardly are the crimes of whiteness that accusations against it are rarely challenged. When indigenous woman Nerita Waight appeared last week on Melbourne radio station KIIS 1011 to talk about racism, she said police officers “haven’t been taught black history in their schooling”. Consequently, she claimed, this affects their ability to “understand their privilege and their bias” in dealing with indigenous people.
Police ‘privilege’
As to what privileges police enjoy, she did not elaborate.
Maybe it is the privilege of being spat on, or bashed, or discovering decomposed bodies, or even dying on the job as four Victorian officers did in a single day this year. As ludicrous as her statement was, it was nothing compared to her reference to “the 1967 referendum where we were finally counted as humans and not plants”.
Waight was referring to the claim that, prior to this constitutional referendum, indigenous people were classified as flora and fauna. This is nonsense. Even ABC’s Fact Check acknowledged it is a “myth”, stating “Aboriginal people in Australia have never been covered by a flora and fauna act, either under federal or state law”.
The referendum was for the purpose of allowing the Commonwealth to include indigenous people in the national census and to make laws regarding them. Waight, a lawyer, should know this. She is also the co-chair of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services as well as chief executive officer for Aboriginal legal services in Victoria and Tasmania. Ironically this week she called for truth-telling regarding the history of indigenous people.
Uncomfortable truths
Sadly, Waight’s howler is not the most risible thing said recently regarding the Black Lives Matter movement. Last week ABC’s AM featured a Deakin University academic, associate professor Clare Corbould, who referred to a Monmouth University poll which found among other things that 54 per cent of those surveyed felt the burning down of a Minneapolis Police precinct was either fully or partially justified.
It is to say the least disquieting, as was Corbould’s reaction. “To have a poll like that this morning is again another sign of hope and quite significant,” she stated. Host Linda Mottram did not so much as demur.
It must have been a delight to race activists this week when the Australian National University released the findings of a study conducted over 10 years involving 11,000 subjects which found three quarters of Australians hold an implicit bias against Aboriginals and Torres Strait peoples. Whilst admitting that implicit bias is not a measure of racism, researcher Siddharth Shirodkar claimed the results were “shocking, but not surprising”.
“The reality is if your unconscious bias remains unconscious and unchallenged and you don’t identify it, if you are not even aware of it, then it is potentially weighing on all of your decisions and how you behave,” he said.
But the methodology of this study hardly resembles the stuff of futurist psychology. Respondents were shown black and white photographs of various peoples, both indigenous and white. They were assessed on how quickly they clicked a button to associate a positive or negative word with that image. According to theory, the slower the reaction time regarding positive words, the more likely the bias.
So how do we know the designers of this test were not compromised by, you know, an implicit bias? Originally developed by Harvard University, they were sold as “a scientific window to the unconscious.” HR departments in government departments, police forces and companies across America enthusiastically mandate them. But Ulrich Schimmack, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto who has researched these tests dismisses them as “basically a roulette wheel that comes up with a random number”.
Their accuracy rates are notably flawed according to what is known in psychology as “test-retest reliability”, which examines consistency of results through repeat tests. To quote science reporter Olivia Goldhill of the publication Quartz “Perfect reliability is scored as a 1, and defined as when a group of people repeatedly take the same test and their scores are always ranked in the exact same order. A psychological test is considered strong if it has a test-retest reliability of at least 0.7, and preferably over 0.8.” The implicit bias tests found the race aspect to have a test-retest reliability score of only 0.44. In short, it is a poor method of ascertaining unconscious bias, but great for gaslighting.
Rowling becomes a pariah
Speaking of gaslighting and undermining, you would have to agree actor and Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe would make a great Judas Iscariot. JK Rowling, author of the books on which the film series is based, upset many in the trans community this week when she lampooned the news headline “Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate”.
“I’m sure there used to be a word for those people,” she tweeted. “Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” Enter Radcliffe. “Transgender women are women,” he posted on an LGBTQ forum. “Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I.”
But it is in line with the advice of scientists who specialise in biology, yet that counts for naught in a world where facts are subordinate to feelings. It says much that Radcliffe, who has a reported net worth of $110 million, would publicly repudiate her. If I were her, I would be writing a revised ending to the book series: “I have no idea what you are talking about, Mr Potter”, said the man in the white coat to a stupefied Harry, “I’m a doctor, not Dumbledore, this is a hospital, not Hogwarts, and your predicament is a case of methamphetamines, not magic.” Cop that you ungrateful little grub.
To think only a few years ago Rowling had impeccable leftist credentials, particularly her revulsion of US President Donald Trump and her demand Europe open its doors to all asylum-seekers from the Middle East. Now she is a pariah.
The quiet one in the mob
That is the nature of these little cultural revolutions. Once you are denounced, no-one wants to be associated with you.
And that is the secret fear that many of these race activists harbour. Sure, many of them love that intoxicating feeling of power when pusillanimous officials, politicians and even police surrender to their demands. But their entire self-worth is dependent upon constantly demonstrating ideological purity, and just one lapse can mean expulsion and vilification. You must regularly scream at your enemies, vent your righteous hatred, publicly deplore your whiteness, and do it louder than your fellow activists. Because few things are as dangerous as being the quiet one in a mob.
Oh, and as for my sitting an implicit bias test, I have a doctor’s certificate which excuses me from attending. Something about my aversion to explicit bullshit, I understand.
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