Daily Archives: November 3, 2021

This essay is adapted from the preface to the forthcoming paperback edition of Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West.

A few months after Return of the Strong Gods was published, the strong gods returned.

Panic struck in March 2020 as a virus originating in China spread around the world. Fear of death and disease rippled through the population, especially among influential, university-educated people, who in the West are especially anxious about their health and safety. Politicians responded by throwing entire countries into lockdown, an unprecedented measure that put society in a state of suspended animation for months.

Nature abhors a vacuumespecially human nature, which is sociable and restless. In June 2020, amid the existential void of the universal lockdown, police in Minneapolis arrested an agitated, unruly black man named George Floyd, who died under restraint. The result was an explosion of protests across the United States that often descended into violence and looting.

We can argue endlessly about what killed George Floyddrugs in his bloodstream, vicious police tactics, a criminal justice system that targets blacks. We can speculate why protests spread so quicklysystemic racism, endemic violence in poor black communities, networks of professional agitators. But one thing is indisputable: In the vacuum of lockdown, blood cried out from the ground. After a long season of turmoil and confinement, the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion seemed ineffectual. It was replaced by strident demands for retribution, reparation, and punishment. No justice, no peace. This is the slogan of a strong god.

We should not judge movements by extreme voices, but anyone who wishes to understand the events inspired by the slogan Black Lives Matter must pay attention to what people say, especially people of influence. In early June 2021, a woman named Aruna Khilanani revealed her fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any White person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Khilanani is not an anger-addled street-corner crank but a psychiatrist, and her words, uttered in a lecture at the Yale School of Medicine, expressed more than political correctness. She was there to worship the strong god of vengeance.

In the ensuing controversy, Khilanani insisted that she had been exaggerating for rhetorical effect, which was no doubt true. But how and when we exaggerate is revealing. Impatient with calm discussion and meticulous analysis, she will no longer deliberate about root causes. Her remarks excluded all softening gestures such as sharing perspectives or hearing new voices. The hot hyperbole rejected the open-society slogans that have dominated for so long, clichs that soften civic life and make things more porous and fluid, formulations that weaken strong claims and blur sharp boundaries.

Khilananis talk of guns and blood points in a very different direction. A powerful consensus in favor of fluid openness was embraced by the left and right in recent decades. I call it the postwar consensus, because I trace its origins to the American-led reconstruction of the West after Auschwitz. In my reading of recent history, that fell name denotes more than a death camp in Poland. It sums up the entire orgy of destruction that began in the trenches of World War I and ended with mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The consensus that took hold after 1945 sought to dissolve the political passions that many deemed to be the underlying cause of those decades of violence. The postwar consensus sought to banish the strong gods.

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the postwar consensus supported a power-sharing arrangement between the Democratic party, favoring go-fast liquefaction of traditional culture and go-slow economic deregulation, and the Republican Party, favoring go-fast economic deregulation with the hope of not-too-fast cultural deregulation. When I wrote Return of the Strong Gods, the establishment consensus in favor of openness was plain to see. And when I was writing, a rejection of open borders, open trade, and other fruits of the postwar consensus by the populist right was also obvious. The events of 2020 indicate that the strong gods are returning on the American left as well.

Return of the Strong Gods offers a succinct history of the past seven decades, most of which I have experienced as a teenager and adult. I distrust the sufficiency of singular explanations, including my own. Technological innovations (the Pill, for example) shaped that history, as did international events and economic developments. There exists no Lord of the Rings in social analysis, no single explanation that rules them all.

But I remain confident in the basic story I tell. After 1945, our ruling class agreed that powerful loves and intense loyalties make us easily manipulated by demagogues. Our passions hurl us into disastrous conflicts and brutal ideological movements. Our only hope, the postwar consensus holds, is to tamp down our loves and loyalties, to weaken them with skepticism, nonjudgmentalism, and a political commitment to an open society.

And I argue that the wheel of history is turning. The gods of weakening are losing their power over public life. Donald Trump horrified the establishment because he derided the open-society consensus. His brash Americanism, his promises to tear up trade deals, and his loud talk of building a wall thrilled voters who wanted reconsolidation not deregulation, protection not limitless openness.

You can find Trump odious or inspiring. You can reject or affirm his political priorities. But a sober observer recognizes that Trump rose to prominence because an angry populace felt betrayed by the postwar consensus. What I did not see while writing the book is that the American left, which opposed Trump bitterly, would pivot to affirm the return of its own strong gods.

Only yesterday, multicultural managers and HR bureaucrats spoke solemnly of diversity and inclusion, vague notions that serve the gods of weakening. Today, however, the same managers and bureaucrats add equity, a term that signifies a change in direction. Equity operates in the domain of justice, and justice promises not diversity but the right result. Equity encourages strong measurescondemning the unjust, punishing the oppressors, denouncing the unfairly advantaged and the wrongly privileged. Diversity is a feel-good word. Equity topples statues.

I cannot pretend to know the future. I can only take the measure of present trends. The postwar consensus trusted that a better future could be achieved by removing barriers, setting aside traditional mores, empowering individual choice, and letting markets decide. The sudden prominence of the rhetoric of equity suggests that many on the left are losing confidence in the promise of an open society. They now demand racial and sexual quotas, hard numerical measurements that cannot be evaded with avowals of good intentions. As the right demands clear and enforced borders, the left demands clear and enforced results. It wants a just society (as it conceives of it), not an open society. And it is willing to rule with an iron fist to achieve that goal.

I am suspicious of those who turn too quickly to Nazi Germany for analogies that illuminate our present distempers. But if we remain sober and do not allow ourselves to be swept up into moral and political panic, we can detect parallels. In the 1920s, conservatives in Germany distrusted the procedural justice and commercial ethos of the Weimar Republic, believing that a good society would not automatically evolve in accord with liberal principles and market forces. The future, they argued, must be shaped by a decisive act of will. A similar view is emerging on the left. Progressives are impatient. Free speech? Merit? Procedural justice? Laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race? These formal commitments must be set aside, we are told, because they stand in the way of transformative justice.

And so it is not only Trump and the populist right that wants the strong gods to return. Many on the American left look to blood for answers, a vengeful and punitive image that suggests strong gods with grim designs. They champion bloods binding power, its demand for justice, and its powerful symbolism of moral and political urgency. The signs of the times suggest that the historical thesis of the book is correct. The postwar era is ending. The strong gods are returning. Let us work to ensure that they are ennobling, not debasing, that they rebuild and renew rather than tear down and degrade.

Return of the Strong Gods has been criticized from a number of angles. I will not try to respond to all of them, but it is useful to consider some. Some have complained that my talk of strong gods is imprecise and obscure. Yes, but every consequential episode in human history is blurry and opaque, including the past seventy years. My aim is to illuminate, as best I can, our political and cultural struggles, which have become intense. The metaphor of strong gods casts useful light on our situation.

Friends counsel that I should be less enthusiastic about the return of the strong gods. I am fully aware of the dangers they pose, which is why, following the Bible, I urge a politics of noble loves. The Book of Wisdom begins with an extended allegory. Lady Wisdom goes through the city, explaining to men the bad consequences of their liaisons with prostitutes and loose women (a metaphor for idolatry). But the men are smitten, and the arguments of Lady Wisdom have no effect. Returning to her palace, she prepares a great banquet and sends her beautiful young attendants into the public square to draw in the men of the city. They come to feast, and their perverse loves are corrected by the higher love of Lady Wisdom. The opens society tries to buy peace with dispassion and small ambitions, encouraging critique and other techniques of weakening. This approach will not succeed in the long run. The only reliable safeguards against debased political passions are elevated ones.

Though many defend the status quo, I will not raise my voice in defense of the dying postwar consensus. I argue that the West overreacted. Intent on countering the evils of Auschwitz and all it represented, we embarked on a utopian project of living without shared loves and strong loyalties. Human nature was never going to allow that project to succeed. We are made for love not open-ended diversity, limitless inclusion, and relentless critique. The postwar consensus went too far, emptying our souls and desiccating our societies. So yes, the strong gods can be dangerous. But they make transcendence possible. They restore to public life spiritual drama and shared purpose.

Christian allies warn that I am insufficiently alive to the danger that populism will make an idol of the nation. In Platos Symposium, Socrates recounts the teaching of Diotima, his mentor, who observed that we often love finite goods as if they were ultimate. But this is not reason to despair. For once aroused, loves ardor can be directed toward a ladder that rises from lower loves to higher ones. I hold the Platonic view. There is no guarantee that we will climb the ladder of love. Misjudging lesser goods as the highest good (the essence of idolatry) always remains a danger. But the unstated premise behind Return of the Strong Gods is that life without love is a greater evil than life in which finite loves are made absolute. I have argued for this premise in other works (see especially the essays in Fighting the Noonday Devil). Put simply, to love wrongly is dangerous, but however debasing, it is human. By contrast, to fail to love is inhuman. The deepest failure of the postwar consensus, then, is that it trains us to be loveless and therefore to be something less than human.

Let me issue my own theological warning: Beware iconoclasm. It is a heresy born of the fantasy that we can eliminate the possibility of idolatry by destroying every object of love other than the highest, which is God. Thomas Aquinas taught that grace perfects nature; it does not destroy nature. Family, team, city, countrythese social spheres rightly win our love and command our loyalty. We can be seduced and blinded by our loves. A great deal can go wrong, which is why Jesus warns us that our love of God may require us to hate our father. The same holds for fatherland. But our capacity for perversion does not destroy these natural goods. They remain worthy of our love if we will but love rightly.

Liberal allies worry that I court a dangerous illiberalism. Their concerns are overwrought, but they have a basis in truth. Our liberal traditions aim to limit the role of religious and metaphysical passions in public life. In this regard, liberalism harkens to the gods of weakening. The open-society consensus gained traction after 1945 so easily because it drew upon the liberalism that is an important part of our Anglo-American inheritance. Like my liberal critics, I cherish this inheritance. Let us by all means defend the Bill of Rights and other honorable components of our liberal tradition. But let us also remember that liberalism tempers and moderates; it does not initiate. It weeds the field but does not plant. When liberalism becomes dominant, as it has done in the postwar consensus, civic life withers, for liberalism offers no vigorous language of love.

For everything there is a season. I argue that our historical moment begs for the restoration of shared loves. We must not fail to meet this need. In my estimation, only an uplifting politics of solidarity can counter identity politics, which makes a dark promise of solidarity, one based on blood, chromosomes, and sexual appetites. In this historical moment, full of the confusion and danger that attend the collapse of a governing consensus, we need something more than liberalism. We need strong gods, purified by reason and subordinate to true religion but nevertheless powerful enough to win our hearts.

I have cryptically thanked Philip Rieff in my acknowledgements. I never met him, but as a young theological scholar I read his books. A brilliant sociologist, he despaired of the desacralization promoted by so-called critical reason, which he believed was leading us to an anti-culture, a third world of spiritual impoverishment heretofore unknown to men. And Rieff despaired over his despair. In his agony of unbelief, he pointed me toward a fundamental truth: It is more precious to love than to know.

Of course, the Bible says as much. Love of God is the first commandment, and as the First Letter of John teaches, Love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. As I have already noted, Plato strikes a similar note. I should not have needed Philip Rieff to guide me to such an obvious truth. But I did need him. He reasoned his way to the dark bottom of the postwar consensus, allowing me to see that the opposite of love is not hate but death, the placid cessation of aspiration and desire, the tempting void of nothingness.

The spasms of violence in the twentieth century rose to great heights, casting a long shadow over our moral and political ideals and even over our spiritual imaginations. The postwar consensus was originally modest. I would have supported the efforts of men like James B. Conant, and in fact I did in my younger days. But as it developed and became more and more rigid in its dogmatic openness, that consensus became an enemy of love.

I am more than sixty years old. The only society I have known is the one dominated by the postwar consensus. I am therefore a largely blind guide to whatever comes next. But of this I am sure: It will require a restoration of love. And love is roused by the strong gods, which is why they are returning.

R. R. Reno is editor ofFirst Things.

First Thingsdepends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

Clickhereto make a donation.

Clickhereto subscribe toFirst Things.

Here is the original post:

Shared Loves and Strong Loyalties | R. R. Reno - First Things

When Lawrence Summers tweeted on Sunday that he is "certainly no left wing ideologue," it wasn't a Halloween joke.

Summers is a famous academic who served as Chief Economist of the World Bank and President of Harvard University. Hewas influential in crafting the economic policies for two center-leftDemocratic presidents Bill Clinton (serving in various Treasury Department roles) and Barack Obama (serving as Director of the National Economic Council). Summers' resume is what makes his recent remarksso noteworthy.

"I think something wrong when taxpayers like me, well into the top .1 percent of income distribution, are getting a significant tax cut in a Democrats only tax bill as now looks likely to happen," Summers explained on Twitter. He went on to criticize President Joe Biden's current legislative package for "no rate increases below $10 million, no capital gains increases, no estate tax increases, no major reform of loopholes like carried interest and real estate exchanges but restoration of the state and local deduction explain it."

He added, "We don't need radical new ideas, just determination to implement old good ones." Summers then included a link to a paper he co-authored last year with University of Pennsylvania professor of law Natasha Sarin and research assistant Joe Kupferberg. It calls for stronger measures to make it harder for people to legally avoid taxes and to crack down on illegal tax evasion, which could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Biden's bill is currently being criticized by progressivesbecause in order to win support from moderate senators likeJoe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, as well as many moderate House Democrats the president has agreed to remove a number of tax increases that would have compelled the wealthy to pay a fairer share. They protected President Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts, kept in a loophole that helps wealthy heirs avoid taxes on their inheritances andjettisoned a proposed tax increase on income accrued from wealth that would have taxed it like ordinary income. They also refused to raise taxes on corporations or eliminate a tax break that mainly helps private equity firm managers and hedge fund managers.

This is not the first time that Summer has openly disagreed with Biden and the Democratic Party, even though he continues to characterize himself as a supporter. What makes this public dissent notable, though, is that Summers is approaching his criticism from the left this time rather than from the right.

When it was revealed last year that Summers was advising Biden's campaign, progressive groups protested until he promised that he would not work for a future Biden administration.In June, The New York Times reported that Summers' political clout remains so significant that the Biden administration felt compelled to address Summers' claim that the president's March stimulus bill would overheat the economy and cause a spike in inflation. At the time Summers described it as "the least responsible macroeconomic policy we've had in the last 40 years," blaming both the Democratic Party's left wing and the entire Republican Party.

The concern about rising inflation coming from excess spending would seem to put Summers more in the Manchin/Sinema wing of the Democratic Party than the more progressive one. This makes his recent policy statement all the more striking, as it potentially signifies that moderates as well as progressives are unhappy with some of the changes to the original proposed legislation.

Summers has also attracted headlines for reasons unrelated to economic policy and not always in flattering ways. He stepped down as President of Harvard University in 2006 partially because of comments he made about women in STEM fields that were criticized as sexist. He has been broadly critical of political correctness, referring to it as a "creeping totalitarianism."

View post:

Larry Summers slams Democrats for failing to tax the wealthy - Salon

Modern conservative use of the word woke taps into a larger societal backlash againstsocial justice movements and efforts to confront racism. Its a word that means something very different now than it did just a few years ago in the Blackcommunity.

Woke initially came out of the Black community It meant that, if you were saying stay woke or be woke there was a kind of seriousness and playfulness, that you need to be aware of the social conditions of America to surviveit. Joshua Adams,journalist

Broader attitudes toward wokeness invoke similarly co-opted and weaponized concepts such as cancel culture and political correctness. But when we dig deeper into the meaning of the word and how it is used by conservatives and most white Americans, it becomes clear that the wordhas lost all of its original meanings in order to create a new slur to be leveled against progressives and AfricanAmericans.

Joshua Adams is ajournalist whowrote a piece for Colorlines in May titled How Woke Became a Slur.

He says that language is incredibly important in the Black community.African American vernacular English comes out of the slave experience, he says. Black people couldnt learn the language formally We had to learn it through the ear. He also notes the necessity for slaves to be able to communicate in ways that slave owners couldntunderstand.

Woke initially came out of the Black community, says Adams. It meant that, if you were saying stay woke or be woke there was a kind of seriousness and playfulness, that you need to be aware of the social conditions of America to surviveit.

Damon Youngis co-founder of Very Smart Brothas, author of the memoir What Doesnt Kill You Makes You Blacker.He wrote a piece in The New York Times in 2019 titled, In Defense ofWoke.

Hesays, although the meaning of the word has changed for people who arent Black, the meaning hasnt changed as much for AfricanAmericans.

For Black people, woke still has the same connotation as someone who has consciousness, but maybe takes that consciousness too far, Youngexplains, someone who maybe believes conspiracy theories, who maybe shows a more performativeBlackness.

Young says conservatives like toco-optand weaponizeterms that begin in the Blackcommunity.

They are very effective at distilling these complex ideas around a single word and galvanizing support around the use of that single word, he says.Its easier to rail against something than to createsomething.

WDET strives to make our journalism accessible to everyone. As a public media institution, we maintain our journalistic integrity through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.

Donate today

Visit link:

How the Word 'Woke' Was Co-Opted And Weaponized - WDET

The Trumps were also captured joining in the Braves' signature "tomahawk chop" before the game, which didn't go unnoticed in the press. The cheer, which originated in 1991, has come under fire from Native communities who say it promotes racist stereotypes (viaKCRA). However, it's not likely that Donald Trump was too worried about the implications of the war cry; he once stated, "[T]his political correctness is just absolutely killing us as a country. You can't say anything. Anything you say, they'll find a reason why it's not good" (via CNN).

The gesture was greeted with roaring approval by Trump fans who saw it as a slap in the face to "woke liberals." Others felt differently. Keith Olbermann commented on Twitter, "Well, it IS a cousin of the Nazi salute so."

What really got people's attention, though, was Melania Trump's face. In a clip now circulating on social media (and seen here on MSN), the former first lady smiled broadly for the cameras as she faced her husband. A second later, turning away from him, her smile faded into an expression that looked positively disgusted.

Naturally, Twitter exploded with comments and jokes. Writer and pastor John Pavlovitz quipped, "Melania despises him as much as decent people do" (via Twitter). Humorist Paul Rudnickadded on Twitter, "Melania can maintain a smile for three seconds and then even rubbing the krugerrand she keeps in her pocket can't control the nausea."

More here:

The Head-Turning Gesture Donald And Melania Trump Made At The World Series - The List

The temperature in the Outer Sunset is around 5 degrees lower than the rest of San Francisco, but it always feels much colder. There, the sun struggles to penetrate overcast skies and the wind seeps through row after row of single-family town houses, unhindered by skyscrapers or housing complexes. It is a place where people live, an uncharming expanse of mid-century architecture built on what was once miles of sand, the suburbs, the Outside Lands and where most of my Chinese American friends grew up. And at its edge lies the oldest school west of the Mississippi, my alma mater, Lowell High School.

Founded in 1856 as a boys-only grammar school, Lowell migrated from downtown to the Panhandle in 1913 and then to its current location in 1962. The campus is a short descending staircase from Eucalyptus Drive and from there it sprawls out and downward, until it nudges Lake Merced and the Stonestown Galleria. For four years, Id ride the M or K Muni line from my home in the Mission and walk through the schools front doors; the Sunset kids would hop off the 29 and face an uphill trek to Lowells backside.

Chinese Americans comprise about 21% of San Franciscos population and are the citys largest ethnic minority group. Some families have deep roots the children of railroad workers, the laundromat owners and shopkeepers who built Chinatown but most immigrated here after the Hart-Celler Act was passed in 1965, which opened the U.S. to more immigration from Asia. Chinese immigrants came to San Francisco from Hong Kong or Guangdong Province and worked tough blue-collar jobs, even though many were well educated. They sent their kids to college and bought houses in the Sunset, replacing the Irish and Italian Americans who fled to the suburbs in the 1970s.

At the risk of courting Asian Americas oldest albatross the idea that were all the same its the Sunset that sees Lowell High School as its to lose.

For those who grew up in the San Francisco Unified School District system, Lowell is synonymous with achievement. The school has produced three Nobel Prize winners, one U.S. Supreme Court Justice and a handful of minor celebrities. While Lowell athletics range from unbeatable (track and field) to abysmal (football), its equipment and facilities are top of the line, thanks to a loyal alumni network and generous endowment the Lowell Alumni Association holds over $6 million in assets and that grew by $865,000 in 2020 alone. Lowell is the largest feeder school to the University of California system and offers the most Advanced Placement classes in the San Francisco school district.

Until recently, Lowell was one of only two city public high schools the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts being the other that used a merit-based admissions policy rather than a semi-random lottery. Ambitious students tested into Lowell and were rewarded with well-funded programs, academic rigor and sleepless nights, leaving their lower performing peers in the dust.

Because Lowell grounds itself in elitism, its culture is one of exclusion and tends to recapitulate existing inequities. Like the Sunset, Lowells demographics have shifted from predominantly white to mostly Asian American over the past few decades, but the school has also become notorious for admitting fewer and fewer students from other ethnic and racial minority groups. Last year, it counted just 52 Black students out of around 2,900; Asian Americans, who make up over 50% of the student body, outnumbered them nearly 32 to 1. For comparison, district-wide enrollment is about 8% Black and 33% Asian American.

In 2016, the Lowell Black Student Union staged a walkout after a student had put up a racist poster parodying Black History Month in the school library. The Black students called the incident typical of their Lowell experience, marked by daily microaggressions, snide references to affirmative action and lack of social support. While systemic racism is a truism, the water we swim in, a snake eating its own tail, here at Lowell you see its clear emergence not by design but from design, in a cold place where peers and parents revere success, where its taken for granted that half of the student body looks the same.

Last October, in the midst of Black Lives Matter protests and shrinking student enrollment, the San Francisco Board of Education suspended Lowells selective admissions process for the coming school year, citing the difficulty of collecting grades and standardized test scores during a global pandemic. Though positioned as an interim solution to logistical issues, the change quickly garnered controversy. Parents of Lowell students decried the move as anti-Asian racism; right-wing publications latched onto the story as political correctness gone wild; someone photoshopped swastikas on pictures of board members Alison Collins and Gabriela Lopez and posted them on social media; the head of the Lowell Black Student Union received death threats. A few months later, after yet another incident an anonymous troll posted pornography and spammed anti-Black slurs to an online anti-racism class the board voted 5-2 to make the admissions change permanent.

There are legitimate grievances to be had with the current Board of Education. Their failed proposal to push racial equity by renaming 44 public schools was reactionary, poorly researched and expensive; the Lowell decision also felt hasty and ill-timed. But if not now, then when? The board has the impossible task of making diversity a priority, and the Sunset is impossible to please and quick to retaliate.

In April, the newly formed Friends of Lowell Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to reversing the change, filed a lawsuit against the district. The suit claims that procedural issues void the admissions decision, which was made without the input of the Lowell community. However, considering that Lowell has failed to prioritize racial diversity for decades, its hard not to see this legalistic, middle of the road argument as another bid to keep out the rabble. Even though the school years already begun, the foundation is still trying to revert to the old system: In September, it filed another injunction against the change.

A second legal threat comes from Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney, top Republican National Committee official, Trump legal adviser and regular Fox News guest. She claims that the lottery is rigged because it prioritizes students from the underperforming and majority Black and Hispanic Willie Brown Middle School, and that the change will encourage racist acts against Asian American students.

My social media feeds feature a stream of otherwise apolitical friends reposting videos depicting violence against Asian Americans, Chinatown elders shoved to the ground, stabbed in the face and so on, an endless scroll of viral, harrowing content mainlined into the lizard brain. Its often impossible to disentangle racial animus from systemic poverty. But when the assailants in these viral videos happen to be other people of color, Dhillon and her ilk push a narrative that resonates with the latent racism in the Asian American community. Its the easy explanation, the big grift: the implication that race in America has always been a zero-sum game and this time the Asians are losing.

And then theres the controversy around Collins, the Board of Educations only Black female member. Earlier this year, Diane Yap, the Friends of Lowell Foundation vice president, unearthed a 2016 tweet thread from Collins. After recounting a racist incident that her daughter faced at Ruth Asawa High School, she wrote, Many Asian Am. believe they benefit from the model minority BS ... They use white supremacy to assimilate and get ahead. She continued, Where are the vocal Asians speaking up about Trump?

During her tenure on the board, Collins has done solid work with groups like the Chinese Progressive Association in 2019, she co-sponsored its Our Healing in Our Hands Resolution, which led to increased mental health resources for students of color in the citys public schools. Yap, meanwhile, has been caught dog whistling for white supremacy: On Facebook, shes rallied against critical race theory, asserted that systemic racism does not have a consistent or causal effect on academic performance and joked that a Black person would beat you up if you called them a colored person.

Nevertheless, Collins tweets, which were posted years before she took office, ignore the work of Asian American activists and address us as a monolith. Even worse, she hasnt taken her cancellation on the chin. After being stripped of her titles and committee seats, Collins, who is married to a wealthy real estate developer, attempted to sue the struggling school district for a whopping $87 million before withdrawing the suit last month.

The same adage applies to Collins and her detractors alike: Dont hate the player, hate the game. Collins lawsuit is frivolous and self-aggrandizing; her tweets were borderline racist, generalizing and hurtful. But shes essentially correct, at least about the Sunset.

Historically, Chinese Americans have been among the biggest opponents of the school districts desegregation efforts. In the 1970s and 1980s, they advocated for plans that let them opt out of busing, putting the onus on students in Black neighborhoods like the Bayview to commute across the city if they wanted to attend better schools. In the 1990s, the Asian American Legal Foundation and the Chinese American Democratic Club sued the school district to end the use of racial caps, which dictated that no racial group could exceed 45% of any schools student body, and won.

Since then, the districts diet-diversity initiatives the diversity index, a composite of socioeconomic factors as a stand-in for race; and from 2011 on, a system that prioritizes school choice have led to resegregation. More than a quarter of the citys public schools enroll greater than 60% of a single racial group, and Black and Latino families, who generally submit their paperwork later than white or Asian American ones, end up with lower priority for contested schools.

Many of my friends in the Sunset remain loyal to a gilded ideal of American meritocracy. They oppose affirmative action, diversity initiatives or anything that would threaten their edge in the game of capital. Unlike many of their immigrant parents, theyre not anti-Black on principle, but generally advocate for conservative policies to the same effect. By design, the Sunset is disconnected from the rest of San Francisco. Its restrictive single-family zoning laws were conceived as a vehicle for segregation, and its residents consistently block new housing developments, choosing clean streets and homogeneity over the needs of the city. About 20% of voters in the Sunset went for Trump in the 2016 election, a significantly higher percentage than most city neighborhoods.

Its ironic that the de facto moniker for people of Asian descent, Asian American, was radical before it was descriptive. In the late 1960s, student activists at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley intended to create a pan-Asian coalition, a political group critical of white supremacy and standing in solidarity with Black, Latino and indigenous power. But here we are, half a century later, more fractured than ever, the label stretched to its breaking point. Asian America was always too broad and too unwieldy to comfortably house all of us.

In the stony sleep of leftist solidarity the death of organized labor, the birth of the neoliberal beast the Chinese immigrants who came to San Francisco in the 1970s and onward found shelter in higher education. Insulated by wealth and the Sunsets de facto racist housing policy, they traded an Asian America founded on collective resistance for one based on identity politics. We have representation Crazy Rich Asians and a Marvel superhero and a flourishing literary scene even as the old dream of self-determination recedes into the past.

The incoming freshman class at Lowell is roughly 5% Black and 22% Latino, double the proportion of the previous class. In turn, the proportion of Asian American freshmen has decreased from 42% to 38%, a mere 4% for the chance to iterate on, or even revolutionize, Lowells values.

I remember my tenure at Lowell as a bleary-eyed dash to the finish line. My competitive, college-bound peers constantly compared grades and accolades and wore sleep deprivation as a badge of pride. I had good teachers and bad ones, who coasted on the assumption that most Lowellites would teach themselves while the rest would fail. I opted for classes that gave easy As and gravitated toward friends who let me copy their homework. By Lowell standards, I thrived; I graduated with a high grade point average and matriculated to the UC system. And yet my high school experience failed to uplift me. It mostly reinforced what I already knew: I had tested into Lowell because my parents had taught me how to chase success. I would keep succeeding because of that gift and those without it would continue to struggle without help.

Curiosity, kindness and grace I would learn only later and elsewhere.

I have visited Lowell only once since I graduated my high school friends prefer to come to me, since the Mission has better weather and more expensive bars in 2017, when the Obama years had already curdled into a quaint and distant disappointment. The buildings facade had been repainted, from red and white (our school colors) to a vaguely Soviet shade of green. From a distance, I had trouble distinguishing its silhouette from the relentless gray engulfing it. As I entered, I got lost in once familiar hallways, said hello to the teachers who still remembered me, and left, realizing that time had made me a stranger to the place.

Lowell High School stands for many things academic achievement, racial inequities, Asian America but it also stands for itself, the physical space it occupies. With its generational wealth and storied history, Lowell is responsible for transforming that tract of the Sunset into a place of public good, one that prioritizes the needs of its people above all else. Set Asian America, the grifters and Alison Collins aside for a moment, and picture a revelation peeking through the fog, way out west where the country meets the sea. Imagine a community of students in Lowells cradle gathered from all across San Francisco, dedicated to each other and the city they share, seeing themselves reflected in that oft-forgotten corner of the Sunset, their hour come round at last.

Justin Lai is a San Francisco native and freelance writer. You can find him at http://www.torwards.com. A version of this piece was originally published in the Potrero View.

The rest is here:

Lowell High, Alison Collins and the Sunset's rage against diversity - San Francisco Chronicle