The Hypodescentism of Woke Intellectuals
Lowering standards and the "one-drop" segregation of children by phenotype is a recipe for cultural and economic disaster.
Rational Americans should find the propensity of people to believe unresolved contradictions are natural conditions very disturbing. The only three groups of people who can sustain such delusions are the mentally ill, the media and politicians – but perhaps I repeat myself.
Several years ago, I told a group of people that society will begin to fall when quantitative reasoning began to give way to qualitative reasoning.
Quantitative reasoning is simple – most times it can be proven with fingers and toes – as in 2+2+4. No matter what it is called, when you add 2 toes to two other toes, there are 4 toes there. Also works with dominoes, rocks, birds, and people. It is because it is, something either is or is not and “A” is “A”.
On the other hand, qualitative reasoning is somewhat more complex as it seeks to determine the validity of the number four by assigning other “social” attributes to it and to the process by which such a result was obtained. For example, contemporary thought in certain circles has determined the process of math to be based in white supremacy, therefore whatever the result is, it is invalid because it is racist. Who are we to say that a black child that comes up with the answer 543 is wrong if that is a product of his cultural knowledge?
As it turns out, it does not matter that the numeric symbols we use to represent the concept of numbers are Arabic and the first recorded treatises of mathematics come from Mesopotamia and Egypt (as far as I know, none of those people were pasty, white northern Europeans), the very idea of a correct quantitative answer is still a construct of white people and therefore racist.
You see, while quantitative reasoning tends to focus on discrete conclusions, qualitative reasoning is exposed to subjective concepts that may or may not be based in reality. For example, hard data can be interpreted though a lens constructed from the milieu of theoretical viewpoints of the social “sciences” and as a result, the conclusions can be informed by those viewpoints or result in ridiculous endpoints that render conclusion little more than uninformed opinions.
Critical Race Theory is a hot topic right now due to its coercive insertion into school curriculum, but it should be a hot topic for another reason as well.
It is one of the academic “theories” resulting from qualitative reasoning, and one extremely biased by “social” science in its conclusions.
Derrick Bell, the academic progenitor of what we now call CRT, began researching the reasons that black Americans have not progressed as well and as fast as their white counterparts. Focusing on Supreme Court decisions that were intended to, and from a legal perspective, did, guarantee racial equality under the law, he determined that the expected equality, as he defined it, did not result. Given that the decisions stopped at equality and did not provide any special restorative treatments, Bell and his cadre of like minds determined the only possible cause for this was the racism inherent in the legal system.
In examination of Bell’s logic, and the logic of every Critical Race theorist since, there seems to be a flaw, one that ignores all other factors and exculpatory evidence that does not support the conclusion that America’s legal, cultural, and social systems are inherently and systemically racist.
Which brings me to the flaw in their qualitative reasoning.
It is a flaw very similar to something called the “one-drop rule”.
The “one-drop rule” was a method of racial qualification and social classification dating back to a 1662 Virginia law on the treatment of mixed-race individuals. It asserted that if a white person had “one drop” of African blood, that person was to be classified as an African.
Of course, there were many gradations of classification – mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, mustee – but all universally recognized as a racist construct. The “one-drop” concept is also known as hypodescent, that rule is easily recognized as racist and to that point Critical Race theorist Cheryl Harris, one of Bell’s contemporaries, said that “following slavery whiteness became the basis of racialized privilege – a type of status in which racial categories provided the foundation for the allocation societal benefits.”
Hypodescent applied to Critical Race Theory consists of three propositions: 1) “one-drop” is not about blood, rather it refers to Western culture and if you have “one-drop” of Western Culture, you are white or “white adjacent” regardless of your genotype (DNA), 2) if your genotype is “white” or “white adjacent” (i.e. Asian or Indian), you are racist and 3) if there is one drop of racism out of the one-hundred drops of explanations for why black Americans have not progressed since equality was legally established, the cause MUST be that America is systemically racist.
It is this kind of flawed, bigoted, superficial thinking that leads both black Americans and their “woke” white “allies” to segregate children by phenotype (appearance and physical characteristics), to eliminate performance standards in schools, and to perpetuate lowered performance and expectations for both white and black children, thereby guaranteeing an alleged “equitable” outcome at a lower academic level, a catastrophe for all Americans, regardless of race, creed, or color.
The contradictions are obvious. To ignore them is insanity.