"To be professionally smart is to concede always to rational science, to polls and confidence intervals. These colleagues, the professionally smart, seemed dismayed that the black woman they’d been brave enough to think smart could believe a President Trump was possible.
They were dismayed but not surprised. Women and black people always have a potential blind spot where race and gender are concerned. It is why we’re so emotional and irrational. We just cannot see past our unscientific claims of racism and sexism to be truly professionally smart. Our models, in the parlance of the professionally smart, are always just a bit skewed.
It’s a shame, too. Because the professionally smart really want evidence that their faith in affirmative action for smart minorities is well-placed. It is a shame with a black woman has as much potential as me and still can’t see past that racial blind spot.
My blind spot was, of course, perfect clarity about how whiteness and racism work.
It is a difficult thing to measure in polls. That’s why there is still great value in systematic collection and analysis of how people experience the world and not just how they tell you they experience the world...
Philosophically, of course, there is a debate about whether there is any such thing as “truth” but politically there is no doubt that there is an agreed upon idea of what constitutes a fact. A social fact, even, as sociologists often call it. How ironic for the great narrative emerging from this election to be so fastidiously addicted to “fake news” that may or may not have swayed the election given how racecraft has shaped the political fabric of this nation, eating truth whenever convenient to make sure that fabric only ever secured white freedoms...
professionally smart people require all members to the club have irrational, exuberant hope. But, the black members have to have the most irrational and exuberant and performative hope. We cannot just scream “yes we can!” We have to scream it even when it is clear that we cannot and no, we will not and no, we are not. We have to pay this tax to the professionally smart because our blind spot is so discomfiting. We come with the baggage of lived experience of racism."
One of those essays you just want to pull everything from, every other line.
One of those essays that manages to pull together all these amorphous thoughts you have been having and make them solid and then teaches you what they mean and where they come from
Read it all, learn about "racecraft", stare into space for a little while.
FB: "Professionally smart people who claim to know our collective heart really like straight lines. First, there was the enlightenment and then some unfortunate business about colonialism and black ocean bottoms. Then there was freedom and the Great Society and smartphones and the browning of America.
The straight line requires a lot of erasers...
partisanship literally means just voting like lots of other people vote out of loyalty. Racism, in contrast, is a cohesive analytical framework that accounts for the complex ways that identities and ideologies shift over time. One of those concepts is as complex as the phenomenon in question but only one is dismissed outright as foolish. When racecraft is the prevailing responsibility of professional smart people and erasers and line drawers, these kind of inconsistencies don’t matter."
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