As a black person, I'll say this new crop of books like White Fragility on one hand aren't great, and in the long run some will probably seen as outright bad, but I'm still glad they exist?
It's kind of an Overton Window thing for me. I'm just very used to the 90's, where you couldn't even come close to saying anything like this out loud in, e.g. an academic setting because you know what you would set off.
I'm glad it's out there to at least be reckoned with as a theory.
(Relatedly, this is why I have zero respect for the suggestion that a new form of "censorship" is taking place when people talk about e.g. "cancel culture" and whatnot. This has always been around, the only thing that's new is that it can now come from e.g. both the left and the right)
It has always been around, but it is fundamentally opposed to any intellectual exchange. And we slowly improved here. Yes, freedom of speech does require freedom from consequences. That is also true for the author of said book. I don't think ridicule is prohibiting speech, it can be, but this is not the case here.
I'm not quite getting at what you're saying here? What is the "it?" I ask because the old-school "cancel culture" that didn't go by that name frequently employed bad intellectual exchange.
Put differently, "White Fragility" is intellectual exchange, so was "The Bell Curve", so was "Phrenology" and a lot of other things?
It's kind of an Overton Window thing for me. I'm just very used to the 90's, where you couldn't even come close to saying anything like this out loud in, e.g. an academic setting because you know what you would set off.
I'm glad it's out there to at least be reckoned with as a theory.
(Relatedly, this is why I have zero respect for the suggestion that a new form of "censorship" is taking place when people talk about e.g. "cancel culture" and whatnot. This has always been around, the only thing that's new is that it can now come from e.g. both the left and the right)