Not sure if this is news to anyone or not, but it was a stark example of something that is worth a look. If you can’t get to the article, you’re not missing much.
It starts with a story of Goldman Sachs and a claim that they reformed themselves, resulting in increased profits. There is a brief history of days when they “filtered” people out based on the shoes they wore, of their pronounciation. Never mind the much easier statement that everyone was a white male. So it starts off with coded language and leaves out any hint of the struggles people went through to get the culture and laws to change. They even have the audicity to parenthetically say that unequal hiring practices were illegal at that time, as if that was stopping them.
After patting the rich guy on the back for being a leader of civil rights, it jumps right to the new code words, like “woke”, and “pronoun rules”. But Gerard Baker doesn’t just put these groups down, he says they are the new oppressors. I keep asking people exactly when did racism end? This guy at least is brave enough to say it was gone, but this new elite from the Left started in the last decade. After the usual litany of all that is wrong with America today, he ends with,
“If we are losing, it is because we are losing our soul, our sense of purpose as a society, our identity as a civilization. We in the West are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood, embraces societal self-loathing and enforces it all in a web of exclusionary and authoritarian rules, large and small.”
It’s hard for me to look at that and believe he thinks all of that about progressive liberals and none of it about conservatives. But that’s his theme here. If you erase a lot of this article, you can find him saying democracy is great, equality is part of it, and meritocracy is the way. But then he takes the word “freedom” and uses it as a club for anything he doesn’t want to hear. You’re free to be equal, but not to discuss a situation that looks like inequality. You are now judged on your merits, so don’t use the bad neighborhood you grew up in as a excuse.
When I see how people who use the term “woke” are not able to say what it means, I see how it has become the latest version of “those people”. Direct racial language has been relegated to the garbage bin so a new label was needed. This label has no color or country of origin, so it’s applied as easily to the privileged white ally of the minority group as it is to the individual feeling the effects of systemic racism.