Last thread (I think) on this fully intact gem of toxic bad-faith discourse.

Today I'd like to drop in on the aspect I didn't touch, which is the real reason behind the opposition to training in antiracism.

Click through for backstory if interested. https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1275042784358137856?s=20

First, a reminder: I'm contemplating a person who has announced his intention to act in bad faith, and those who would defend his method.

As you might expect from people who have announced themselves as untrustworthy, their justifications for acting in bad faith are laughable.

There's the claim that if bad-faith questioning isn't met with satisfactory answers, it means antiracist theory is exposed as unable to withstand questioning—as if these theories have somehow evaded scrutiny and opposition until now, here, at your corporate training.

Laughable.

There's the claim that these tactics are justified because they are identical to those used by victims of totalitarian regimes—as if it's antiracial theorists that represent entrenched political power, and those who feel convicted by it that are powerless victims.

Laughable.

There's the similar claim that the trainings are totalitarian in their refusal to allow questions to even be asked—as if a training doesn't seek to teach, as if they hadn't already announced their intention to not learn, but rather to disrupt learning.

Laughable.

Finally, there's simple negation—the claim these tactics are justifiable because the mission is invalid: an exercise designed not to teach, but only to harm and accuse, with no opportunity to redeem oneself or even answer the accusation.

I'd like to unpack that one.

First, to disclose: though I have some awareness of the concepts of critical race theory, I haven't (yet) read White Fragility or How To Be An Antiracist, which the texts most centrally attacked.

However I'm very familiar with how people sound when they don't want to see racism.

Thus I'm not speaking as an expert antiracist—at all. Rather I've an extensive familiarity with sorts of aggrieved complaints Lindsay and his followers (remember, self-confessed as untrustworthy) bring against discussions of racism, and what I perceive their real objection is.

In short, I people who bring smart criticism of racism try to move people past a frame of seeing racism as a matter of merely personal individual intention, and into a frame of seeing it as structural—systemic, pervasive, societal.

They do this because it's true.

We don't first and foremost have racism because an individual thinks: "I will do racism, out of hate."

We have it because we have a society that is optimized for empowered harm and abuse and theft, along the lines of racial injustice.

And many people benefit from this system.

The real objection to antiracism, I'd argue, is a desire among many benefitting from a system optimized for abuse to not know about harm, in order to maintain personal individual blamelessness.

The core of a racist mission is to preserve ignorance about things already known.

This is why corporate trainings in particular are so threatening to people of ill intent and bad faith, like James Lindsay.

Corporation represent power. If power starts to confess reality, ignorance can't be maintained.

Unacceptable to the racist mission.

If others don’t learn they won’t know, and if they don’t know, you won’t have to know either.

And if you don’t know, then you don’t have to take responsibility.

But if they do learn, you might have to learn, too.

I'll create some scenarios, to illustrate.

Scenario 1: Imagine a virus. https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1276124029708046336?s=20