E-Pluribus | April 23, 2024
Diversity, [racism,] Equity, [racism,] and Inclusion; Salman Rushdie writes again; and child transgender medicine meets its nemesis.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Erec Smith: There’s a kind of racism embedded in DEI
Erec Smith, an associate professor York College of Pennsylvania, writes in the Boston Globe that while he experienced traditional racism as a black man growing up in America, the “prescriptive racism” of the present is no solution. People of all races should be treated as individuals, not simply a member of some group (race or otherwise) to whose mold they must conform.
I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood in southern New Jersey. My neighborhood was so white I could have been used as a landmark when giving directions.
Sadly, as one of the few Black kids in the neighborhood and one of the even fewer who spent any time with white peers, I was a daily target of racist bullying. In fact, one could say it was a pastime of sorts.
[. . .]
My only reprieve came when I did something considered “Black”: like praise a rap song, dance, or do well in a basketball game. All my other attributes were ignored.
So I was excited about graduating from the eighth grade and going to a regional high school with a large Black population. I could finally leave my misfit status behind and enter a diverse environment where I would feel included. It’s not that my white peers had succeeded in making me feel inferior, but not having to deal with their attempts would be a breath of fresh air. The energy I spent upholding mental and emotional armor against their attacks could be spent on more fulfilling things.
However, these hopes were quickly dashed. The Black peers I encountered the most did not accept me either. To them, having grown up in a predominantly white neighborhood had made me white — too white for their tastes. Politeness on my part was considered weakness. My general disposition was not “real” enough in their minds. In this school, too, I was usually left alone if I was behaving in ways coded Black, but there was more to me than that.
The most disheartening aspect was that both my previous white tormentors and my new Black ones were implying the same thing: You’re not fulfilling our ideas of what a Black person is, and for that you must pay.
[. . .]
Unlike traditional racism — the belief that particular races are, in some way, inherently inferior to others — prescriptive racism dictates how a person should behave. That is, an identity type is prescribed to a group of people, and any individual who skirts that prescription is deemed inauthentic or even defective. President Biden displayed prescriptive racism when he said “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t Black,” a statement that implicitly prescribes how Black voters should think.
“Prescriptive racism” is probably a new term for most readers, but it’s not exactly a novel concept. It has a historical analogue: the concept of the “uppity Negro,” a Black person who dared to act like an equal to whites. One of this term’s most famous usages is attributed to Lyndon B. Johnson, who apparently said: “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness.” Clearly, “uppity” was meant to describe people of color who exercised “agentic” power — that is, they were competent and did not need a white person’s heroism. These “uppity” Black people were forgetting their scripted lines, as it were.
However, prescriptive racism casts a broader net, disadvantaging people for not abiding by a long list of things a Black person shouldn’t do. A prescriptive racist may not mind that a Black person has a master’s degree, but he may scoff at the sight of a Black man watching the Masters — especially if Tiger isn’t playing.
[. . .]
For me, DEI done right is DEI based on traditional liberal values. These values make for social justice if we can live up to them fairly and universally.
Read the whole thing.
Jesse Singal: The Cass Review Won’t Fade Away
Writing for The Dispatch, Jesse Singal, who has written extensively about healthcare malpractice when it comes to the treatment of young people on gender issues, says those who are counting on quick news cycles and short attention spans to bury the recently released Cass Review are going to be disappointed.
Anyone who reads the Cass Review, and who then reads most recent mainstream American media coverage of youth gender medicine, will be gobsmacked.
The review, spearheaded by the respected British pediatrician Hilary Cass (and ably summed up in The Morning Dispatch last week), explains that youth gender medicine “is an area of remarkably weak evidence, and yet results of studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint. The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”
Cass and her colleagues arrived at this conclusion after an ambitious yearslong effort to interview clinicians, parents, and patients about their experiences with the National Health Service’s youth gender medicine system. She also commissioned a sizable bundle of independent systematic reviews evaluating both the evidence for puberty blockers and hormones, as well as the quality of recommendations published by influential groups like the World Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare. Overall, dozens of studies were collected and evaluated by the team at the University of York, and this culminated in Cass delivering a damning verdict on the present state of youth gender medicine and the professional guidelines surrounding it.
In her report, Cass clarifies that her goal is not to question whether some young people are “really” transgender. She acknowledges that some young people are in tremendous distress about their gender, and she doesn’t deny the fact that some may benefit from blockers and/or hormones. Her argument, which in any other context would not be controversial, is simply that powerful medical treatments should be underpinned by quality evidence—and that that clearly isn’t the case here. Cass also focuses on the need to ensure youth referred to gender clinics receive the proper screening and assessment before medical interventions are undertaken, especially for the growing subset of these youth who are autistic or who have mental-health comorbidities that, some experts believe, can significantly complicate the diagnostic process in these settings.
Cass’ findings led to significant new restrictions on puberty blockers and hormones for youth in the U.K. The changes follow similar decisions based on comparable (albeit less ambitious) reviews in countries like Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Other European nations seem poised to follow suit.
On the other hand, the vast majority of American media coverage has for years touted the safety and efficacy of these treatments. In some cases, writers and reporters denounced the foolishness (if not transphobia) of those who exhibit undue skepticism toward them. These articles are often festooned with quotes from psychologists, psychiatrists, and endocrinologists with extremely impressive credentials—the sorts of people we are told to trust—reinforcing the view that if these treatments have any risks or unknowns, they are small, easily swamped by their salutary effects. A certain message has been delivered with the repetition of a drumbeat: An informed, compassionate person should support access to youth gender medicine.
[. . .]
The toxic and deeply anti-intellectual dynamics that incentivized weak journalism on youth gender medicine were already firmly established by the time Republican states started attempting to ban or severely restrict youth gender medicine. But whatever slim remaining chance we had at a productive national conversation about this subject flew out the windows when those bills caught on. The question was no longer what youth gender medicine would look like, what regulations it would be subjected to, and so on, but whether it would exist at all.
Read it all.
Corbin K. Barthold: A Byword for Resistance
Living under the shadow of a death sentence by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, Salman Rushdie has been a free speech icon for decades. While not overly impressed with Rushdie’s latest work (which tells the story of the attack on Rushdie 2 years ago,) Corbin Barthold at City Journal says it’s a stark reminder of the potential price to be paid for speaking one’s mind.
On August 12, 2022, a young Muslim man rushed a stage in Chautauqua, New York, and spent a harrowing 27 seconds with [Salman] Rushdie, gashing and goring him, before being subdued. One swing destroyed Rushdie’s right eye. Others cut across his neck and face, through his hand, and into his chest, his gut, and his leg.
[. . .]
“So, it’s you,” Rushdie thought, as fanaticism’s emissary arrived at last, more than 30 years after the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the novelist’s death for having written The Satanic Verses, which questions Muhammad’s infallibility in receiving the verses of the Quran. The book sparked demonstrations in London at which Rushdie was burned in effigy. Several people were killed during protests in Pakistan and India. The book’s Japanese translator was murdered. Rushdie spent a decade in hiding.
[. . .]
Rushdie resents being known primarily for the Ayatollah’s fatwa; he’d rather be known for his novels. These are lengthy, prismatic, often absurd stories furnished with great plumes of characters. Knife is not that. For those who prefer it when writers, however brilliant, get to the point, Rushdie has finally delivered. This new book is short, clear, and intimate. At its center is an account of the attack and a diary of the author’s recovery. When it stays this course, it is excellent. The (at first literal) blow-by-blow of the dark day in Chautauqua is vivid and gripping. The recounting of Rushdie’s slow and arduous rehabilitation is frank, engaging, and quietly inspirational. At its best, this is a tale of survival and endurance. “Live. Live,” is the book’s oft-stated axiom.
[. . .]
It’s a relief that Rushdie seldom drifts from poring over his ordeal, because nothing else in the book really works. His musings on art, love, death, and human nature are spotty: he serves up clanging clichés and fortune-cookie wisdom (“we would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays”).
[. . .]
Rushdie’s knee-jerk leftism is a distraction. He reflects that his “own anger faded” when he contemplated climate change—“it felt trivial when set beside the anger of the planet.” Nor should anyone feel altogether content, Rushdie believes, in a world filled with refugees, hunger, thirst, and—worst of all—conservatives. That America is “torn in two” is entirely their fault. They “lie,” “abuse,” and “denigrate.” Their “agenda” is “authoritarianism.” Because of them, “America is sliding back toward the Middle Ages.” Rushdie’s life has been repeatedly upended by Islamic extremism, but you get the sense that, despite (or because of) that experience, he feels safer (so to say) kicking Brexit voters, Trump yard-sign owners, and the Christian Right.
The subtitle of this memoir is correct: it is a meditation. It is not a manifesto, a polemic, or a cri de coeur. Rushdie flinches at the prospect of being seen as a “liberty-loving barbie doll, Free-Expression Rushdie.” If it’s this book he thinks will create that problem, he needn’t worry. It has its moments, primarily when Rushdie declares that “the first lesson of free expression” is that “you must take it for granted.” (“If you are afraid of the consequences of what you say,” he explains, “you are not free.”) But Rushdie no longer cares to defend himself, and his book by extension has little to say about free speech more broadly.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter (X)
Pluribus has covered the case of Texan Priscilla Villarreal in the past, but the Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression is now committing to bring Villarreal’s case to the highest court in the land. Excerpts of longer thread follow:
Here’s Nicholas Christakis (along with a Jonathan Chait quote) about universities and antisemitism:
And finally, everyone is waiting with bated breath for the transphobia! accusations to fly at AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) for her hate speech suggesting that “having a uterus and being a woman” are somehow related: