[tptacek]

This is a surpassingly stupid story in which literally everyone involved looks like a crank: an existing DEI practice at a community college that was unironically still using Tema Okun's "White Supremacy Culture" slides, the ones that ascribe literacy and punctuality to whiteness, and an incoming DEI dean who decided to operate as an anti-woke crusader, up to and including repping FAIR, a conservative anti-CRT activist organization with a prominent side hustle in making sure that middle schools don't allow any students to prefer pronouns.

[tzs]

Okun says people are using that work wrong. Here’s a recent interview about that: https://theintercept.com/2023/02/03/deconstructed-tema-okun-...

[tptacek]

Right, and for whatever it's worth, most sane DEI-type people have disavowed the interpretation used by slides like the one in this story. Everybody involved in this story looks bad. There's a sort of fascinating sociological phenomenon here where stories like this have so much valence for so many ideologies, confirm so many different priors, that people glom onto them without realizing the side they're taking in it is also terrible.

[mckern]

Not sure how the author looks like a crank here. If treating people with patience and encouraging discourse in the face of a barrage of sabotage and false accusations is anti-woke, well, you might as well call sanity “insane”.

As for FAIR, I’m not sure what evidence you have that it’s conservative. The board members consists of liberals like Jonathan Haidt, John McWhorter, and Steven Pinker. I don’t see anything wrong with operating from a premise that doesn’t rely on CRT either, since it’s really pure rhetoric and scant on evidence, and clearly the cause of the illiberalism and nasty behaviour that the author is calling out in her essay. Consequently, I doubt you’re presenting their “prominent side hustle” in good faith as well.

Your summary is so disingenuous, it’s a great pity that it’s the top most comment. You miss the crux of the essay, which is sounding the alarm that the people who you described as “unironically still using Tema Okun’s…”, are the ones running the show in academic institutions. For anyone reading this comment, I’d urge you to read the source directly, the quality of HN comments for such topic isn’t that great.

[tptacek]

That's a conclusion you might come to if the only digging on FAIR that you've done is to glance at the Wikipedia page (and look past the involvement of Rufo and Weiss listed on that page!). Do some Google searches and look what FAIR is up to. It began as an anti-CRT organization, and is now an anti-trans organization as well.

You can take a side here. Lots of people do. But this whole incident is just a culture war episode. The sides are at opposite, equally off-putting poles.

[mckern]

I'm aware of Weiss' involvement, but I'm not sure why her involvement would discount anything. As far as I know, her views "doesn't fully match" what a left-leaning person should supposedly hold. I'm not sure how that's a problem, or what scandal she has been involved in that's so bad that it warrants dismissing anything associated with her.

As for Rufo, I've heard of him in passing, but never engaged with his content. Regardless, I think it shouldn't be a problem since FAIR is supposed to be non-partisan. Given the membership of the other liberals I've mentioned, Rufo's presence shouldn't be a problem, since everyone mentioned has a stake in the organization.

As for the "anti-trans" aspect, I just googled and can't see how FAIR is "anti-trans". The current mainstream trans activists are rather dogmatic, asserting that gender-affirming care is medically credible and well-established, and any discussion otherwise is "harmful" and transphobic. As far as I best know, the evidence base for gender-affirming care is incredibly dubious, and UK and other European countries have responded accordingly by pausing such treatments. It does make sense then for FAIR to have an interest in this, since said activists have exhibited intolerance, silencing their opponents under the guise of social justice in spite of the fact that the facts aren't in their favour. This is as best as I know about accusations of "transphobia" that are levied against FAIR, and honestly calling them "anti-trans" on that basis strikes me as nonsensical.

I can't comment on FAIR's supposed origin as an "anti-CRT" organization, since I don't precisely understand what that means (e.g. are they against CRT because of some unsubstantiated moral panic, or are they simply against CRT-centric approaches towards activism for equality, or something else). As you can see, some interpretations for "anti-CRT" ain't great, some interpretations of it sounds reasonable. It would be great if you can provide some sources for me to follow up on and better understand this.

For the record, I'm not asserting that FAIR is a fantastic and faultless organization as I do not follow or keep up with them. Hence, my views are not an endorsement of their work. I'm simply disputing the claims you've made about FAIR (supposedly conservative, anti-trans, anti-CRT), which doesn't seem justified by the information and news I can find about them online.

[tptacek]

I'm not interested in recapitulating the dumbest academic culture war battle of 2023 on Hacker News.

[tptacek]

Nobody's reading this at this point, but I feel like it's a fair cop to acknowledge that I was flippant in that last post. My most succinct response to all of this is:

If you're an incoming DEI dean at a community college where leadership at the school has told you there's a problem with overwrought wokeism and performative displays displacing actual inclusion, then it's absolutely part of your job to undo all that woke stuff. But your role as the "DEI dean" is, principally, to persuade faculty and registered student organizations to adopt a more productive "DEI" frame. You can't be persuasive introducing propaganda from FAIR, because: regardless of what De Anza's status is in the ranking of US higher learning institutions, everybody there can Google and find out what FAIR is about, and the moment you cite them you've nailed yourself to a pole in the culture war.

This isn't the only disqualifying action Tabia Lee took at De Anza (I sheepishly admit: I burned an hour or two looking random stuff up here, for no valid reason I can retrospectively discern), but it's the easiest illustration to give of how not to productively push back on wokeism. Don't do things that are trivially caricatured, and especially don't do those things when there's real substance to the accusation.

A hard-won lesson: being right is worth nothing if you can't persuade people. Congratulations, you can tell people you told them so, and they'll just be even more irritated with you.

Looking forward to seeing where Lee ends up on the conservative speaking circuit. Nobody's going to make the mistake of hiring her in an institutional role again.