The Woke Generation - Fighting Back

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There's nothing overtly white supremacist about it although it always gave me a similar vibe.

I see. Whereas the book it was plagiarized from is 100% one of the most white supremacist texts ever written. Hmm, perhaps the plagiarized version from the late 1960's is in fact a full offering of the philosophy without the white is right part. Maybe I'll get around to reading it someday. Maybe.

Not sure if the author was European born.. maybe. It (Might is Right) was written by an anonymous Chicago area Doctor, under the pen name "Ragnar Redbeard," and he was very clearly an incredibly well read man.. for the historical references throughout the book are plentiful. It was nice reading a version that had a lot of footnote explanations of things. The Might is Right/Survival of the Fittest philosophy stuff is fantastic.. but the white supremacy stuff is dangerous mind pollution - it's very cleverly crafted to alter your thinking & programming, truly. I read it for the philosophy not realizing the extent of the white supremacy throughout it in advance.. and then I can attest that it most certainly did influence my thinking about race things & took some time and effort to deprogram that crap. It's Very well written, and when you're reading something by someone who was Obviously very well read, it's easy to begin believing their personal opinions about things - it's like conspiracy theories where they sandwich some facts around garbage and the facts give validity to the garbage.

No regrets reading it. May even get another copy and read it again someday.. maybe - for the philosophy; it's very empowering. The biggest reason I wouldn't re-read it is to avoid whatever influence the race stuff could have that I'd then have to consciously undo. However, being older and more mature with a much better overall view on racism, maybe it wouldn't be able to influence my thinking about that stuff much.

This is the version I read based on reviews stating the footnote explanations were the best:



It truly is one of the best books I've ever read. There's a reason that politicians and military generals read it. It's Very empowering. But it's Also one of the worst books I've ever read and ever written.. because of the white is right component to it - it's some serious poison, and probably a big part of the reason it's banned in some countries. However, it may be banned more so because it preaches fierce independence (from government) & personal responsibility.. probably not types of thinking that collective societies want to encourage when group think & obedience are prized as methods to manipulate and control populations.

Yeah, that sounds like the rest of the book.. but I do wonder if it's just flat out plagiarized enough to have the same "wow!" factor of Ragnar Redbeard's writing. Whoever that dude was.. was truly a well read & educated man with a talent for writing. It's just too bad so much of his knowledge & energy was directed towards white supremacy, as it's 100% without a doubt helped perpetuate that mentality for the last 130 years. Maybe even more than any other text ever written - I dunno.

Middle school is terrible for everyone, but you’re going to have to trust me that it was rougher on me than many. I was short, funny-looking, and a practicing Muslim in a town called Kennesaw, Georgia, where I almost never met anyone who looked like me or who worshipped like me. I was relentlessly picked on and beat up on a regular basis.

Ninth grade was my opportunity for a new identity. In attending a magnet school that was outside of my normal district, I had the chance, at last, to make new friends. But I often found myself being misinterpreted or misunderstood.

There was a student in one of my classes with whom I got into arguments over trivial things.

We were all asked to keep diaries to describe our experiences in class. I mentioned in that diary that I thought I didn’t get along with this other student because he was Jewish. A teacher read the diary and asked me to speak to a school administrator.

That administrator was a calm, soft-spoken man who used the conversation to learn more about me. He quickly realized that I had anxiety issues and was struggling to fit in. He pointed to the comments I had written about my classmate and suggested to me that they were antisemitic. I was judging him on the basis of stereotypes I had about Jewish people, not based on who he was.

Here is a good moment to reflect on the fact that I am a Pakistani-American Muslim. Our community is warm and generous, hardworking and inventive. My parents came to this country in the 1970s because they knew it was welcoming to people like us. Unlike life on the Indian subcontinent, here you aren’t instantly judged by your ethnic group, sect or caste. In America, we were free to be whoever we wanted to be.

But every community has its problems. Antisemitism was ours. The data bears this out: one ADL poll found that more than half the Muslim populations of some Western European countries hold antisemitic attitudes.

In political conversations and at social gatherings, it was all too common to hear ordinary Jewish people get conflated with extreme actors, like far-right Israeli politicians, or to hear about complicated conspiracies involving Jews that, if nothing else, are far too elaborate to ever reflect reality.

What saved me from the same fate — of holding ignorant beliefs about an entire people — was that extraordinary administrator. The most important thing he impressed on me, calmly and without shaming me, was that my classmate, like me, was an individual. He wasn’t an avatar of some kind of monolithic group. And neither was I.

The primacy of the individual — that we judge people not by their lineage but by their deeds — is at the very foundation of a free society and of the American experiment. Here, unlike so many other places, including Pakistan, the law and our common culture insists that we see people as individuals who are the product of their character, not their tribe, family, race, or status.

This wisdom has come under sustained assault by an ideology that insists that we are, in fact, avatars of various demographic markers — race, gender, sexuality — rather than complex human beings.

Critical Race Theory sees people not as individuals, but more like the Borg from Star Trek. It insists that white people are inevitably oppressors and that African-Americans are inherently oppressed. And everyone else, like Schrödinger’s cat, exist in a kind of liminal position, playing the role of victims or victimizers depending on the situation. That is how, in the context of the admissions process at Stuyvesant, Asians are seen as “white-adjacent” and privileged, but in the context of street crime, they are cast as victims. Attributes of specific races are assumed.

Even after yesterday’s tragic shooting in a Boulder grocery store, this racist illogic reared its head. “It’s always an angry white man. always,” tweeted a “race and inclusion editor” at USA Today. A senior editor at Deadspin tweeted: “Extremely tired of people's lives depending on whether a white man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not.” Kamala Harris’s niece, Meena, offered: “violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.”

Perhaps the most disturbing, sustained example of the way this ideology distorts the truth is the coverage of ongoing violence against Asian-Americans, most recently last week’s Atlanta-area murders, in which six of the eight victims were Asian.

If you thumb through news articles from the past few days or read over statements from leading politicians, you’d imagine that the Ku Klux Klan is responsible for the spree of robberies, assaults and murders of Asian-Americans across the nation. The phrase “white supremacy” is used repeatedly. The Root’s Damon Young, for instance, took the occasion of the shooting to declare that “whiteness is a pandemic.” While it’s true that the shooter in Atlanta was a young white man, there is no evidence that he was a “white supremacist,” as Young writes. The facts we know so far suggest that he was motivated by perverse sexual beliefs, not racial hatred.

This narrative is pervasive, but it bears no relationship to the evidence before us. Not only are none of the high-profile attackers over the past few months white supremacists, many of them aren’t even white.

One recent study looked at hate crimes carried out between 1992 and 2014. It concluded that around 25% of those that carried out anti-Asian hate crimes during this period were nonwhite.

Last year, the NYPD arrested 20 people accused of anti-Asian hate crimes. Two of them were white.

Those are just hate crimes — crimes in which the suspect explicitly declares a racial motivation. If you look at all violent crimes, you’ll see a picture that diverges even more sharply from the white supremacy narrative.

This is relevant because much of the violence that has occurred over the past year doesn’t neatly fit into the hate crime category.

So why are so many self-described liberals embracing an ideology that seems to insist that white racism is the only kind of racism? That bigotry only counts when the perpetrator comes from a “powerful” group? That denies that the same person can be both a victim and a victimizer?

I suspect that many white liberals — ridden with guilt over American history and biases that still exist among the white majority — believe they are doing minorities like me a favor by denying us the responsibility of addressing our own prejudices. Critical race theorists often argue that the true definition of racism should be prejudice plus power, implying that only whites can be racist But hidden within that construction is the assumption that minorities can never be powerful.

My high school administrator disagreed. He looked at me and saw a young man full of potential.

You cannot have power without responsibility. Denying minorities responsibility for their own actions, both good and bad, will only deny us the power we rightly deserve.

This year, all generations sitting around the table would be well-advised to take a deeper dive into the Haggadah—the narrative retelling the epic Exodus of the Hebrew slaves from ancient Egypt. It turns out that the Haggadah has plenty to say about a woke/cancel culture.

There is nothing woke about the seder. In fact, here are some points to keep in mind.

Jews are all about memory.

Far from erasing the past, the Haggadah insists we re-enact it.

The past, warts and all, is key to understanding who we are.

The struggle to define and maintain one’s identity is not new. The Hebrews came to Egypt as 12 fledgling families. They left a nation. How did that happen? While the progeny of the 12 sons of Jacob successfully assimilated into Egyptian society, they retained their identity. Despite the power of the dominant culture, despite escalating discrimination culminating in abject slavery, the Hebrews kept their language, their original names and their distinct garb.

Symbols of slavery can be transformed into symbols of freedom. Matzah is called “poor man’s bread.” We are told that slaves would break off a piece and keep it hidden, never sure that the next meal was coming. Yet matzah quickly emerged as a symbol of victory over slavery. And so, a powerful symbol of suffering and hopelessness can remind us and teach our children about hope, perseverance and triumph.

Don’t hide past tragedies. At a pivotal moment of the seder, we eat the bitter herbs to momentarily taste the bitterness of slavery. But we are told to dip it into a sweet concoction called charoset. Takeaway: What doesn’t break you can make you stronger. We were slaves, look how far we have come.

Let your past tragedies guide your actions. Throughout the biblical narrative, Jews are admonished scores of times. You were once a slave, you were once the stranger in a strange land, you were once the odd man out in an alien culture: Remember how that felt and remember to treat every stranger you meet with dignity and respect.

We are not commanded to hate (read cancel) the Egyptian people. Our sages remind us that before they enslaved the Hebrews, Egypt had welcomed them and initially allowed them to thrive. It’s a powerful, nuanced lesson—one that would be lost on any culture too committed to erase the past rather than be able to learn from it.

Community is the foundation of identity. On this night, you had to celebrate with a group of friends or family of your choosing. Called a chabura, the word comes from the root means “binding.”

Actions of our fathers instruct their children.” This dictum has been embedded in the DNA of the children of Abraham and Sarah for 3,500 years.

As the Hebrew slaves rushed to leave Egypt, Moses rushed back to retrieve the bones of Joseph. By doing so, Moses created a teaching moment for the ages. None of us can predict the future, but we will all be better equipped to deal with the unknown by carrying the legacy of our past with us.

These teachings first spoke to us Jews, but they can also guide our beloved America and other democratic societies that seem to have lost their grounding and traction. The Jewish experience has taught that without a past, there is no future. Shared values and a sense of community are the only guarantors for a future anchored in freedom.

So, on this Passover, let’s counsel before we cancel.

Wtf are you suggesting with that post? That black Americans celebrate slavery and gays celebrate homophobia and bigotry?

Comes across as "Old man grasping at straws trying to justify holding onto racist & bigoted ways because somehow these reminders are supposed to be good for the oppressed."

lol, No. Evolve.

I acknowledge that - but what other message was ASPartOfMe intending to convey with that post if not my interpretation? Hence my post consisting of two questions of him for clarification and an explanation of what it comes across as To Me.

IMO, their tradition of acknowledging surviving slavery and exile is a bit like remembering the holocaust. No one is celebrating either. It's just that as I read it, it came across as a bit of a snarky old man suggesting that reminders of oppression are good for the oppressed. And I say No to that - especially if it's oppressors, or descendants of oppressors that want to carry on oppressive culture.

Different story when Black Americans want to sing freedom songs & celebrate their increased success over generations, or if LGBT people want to have a massive party to celebrate Pride -> gays aren't joyously celebrating bigotry against them; they're celebrating equal human rights and basic dignity.

A bit like oppressed cultures can say certain words that oppressors cannot - Black American musicians using the "N word," or gays using the "F word." Those people and cultures can use those words, reclaim them, own them, redefine them.. but an oppressive bigot using them in any form and then considering it a justified reminder of history that the oppressed should have some sort of respect & appreciation for? Naaaaah! Doesn't work like that.



*and if that is not what ASPartOfMe intended at all, my bad. But based on his posting history, I don't think I'm too far off base with my responses here & feel justified in my explanation of the social "double standards," that exist about who gets to remind who about history & why.

The problem is the anti-woke backlash is hiding those who use it as a smokescreen to attack advocates for social justice. I can't comfortably get into bed with people who are prejudiced against minorities as I share nothing in common with such people other than feeling some pity if its the way they have been conditioned from birth to hate those who are weak and vulnerable (the classic rugged individualist).

I agree it is a problem, possibly a fatal one.

All I can do is try and find and use non-bigoted sourcing.