As y'all might know, I'm a YouTube junkie. I've got it playing from when I feed the dog breakfast, before sunup, until sundown, off and on.
And as YouTubers know, to tug on a video is to yank on a long chain of recommendations. "If you liked that one, what about this one?" And so on. I don't resent said algorithms; I use them as mirrors. I'm able to see how my interests change over time.
Anyway, a lot of my peeps have started reviewing that Matt Walsh movie, which broadcasts from the right on the political spectrum, which in snapshot, in today's lingo, means it's prone to pick on a lot of the more juvenile elements within the professoriate (e.g. the ones who haven't gone back, in later life, for those high school refresher courses per my School of Tomorrow).
The meme of "race" (not genetically based really, and yes, we all have a skin color, what's your rgb?) still besets American discourse, whereas most of the time what they really want to talk about is "ethnicity" but that word is hardly made available to them, given the weakness of the anthropology department.
Teasing apart "race" from "ethnicity" is more where my training would go. There's not color blindness, but there might be some acknowledgment that "race" is more important in apartheid cultures than others.
I prefer the word "apartheid" to "systemic racism" and think it's useful, even essential, to speak freely about the US apartheid system that we succeeded in stamping out for the most part, starting with the anti-slavery movement and leading through a civil war to the civil rights movement. People are still working hard on their phobias. Islamophobia and Russophobia are still prevalent as mental illnesses.
Those human rights gains were all hard won and we should thank our lucky stars we're not in the pit of hell like Israel is, for choosing apartheid as its moral compass (nothing to do with Judaism in my view, which is here to stay, by continuing to morph, as they all do, these world religions). Too bad women never got an Equal Rights Amendment though. Patriarchy triumphed, at least in the lagging political sphere.
Anthropology, the discipline, always had a hard time escaping ethnocentrism, but it least it had a name for it, and could therefore set up a program whereby individual students of anthropology could start to deprogram, to whatever extent they wished or could.
Deprogramming means discovering one's own birth culture to be sufficiently alien as to no longer come across as the one obvious choice, even for oneself or one's family, going forward. Roll your own, from the wealth of great lineages made available.
You have to work on transcending your own ethnicity to have empathy and understanding of the others, and that work eventually becomes more about solo psycho-philosophy or "soulmaking" in the James Hillman tradition. You don't necessarily die with the ethnicity you're born with. That's partly what makes it less attractive to bureaucrats, who want to check a box that never changes.
The racists, on the other hand, that dwindling number who actually still believe the pseudo-science, find it convenient to corner a market they call "whites" (scoff scoff), who have no choice but to need endless deprogramming, given how deeply programmed (so-called "privileged") these buggy bots have become.
"Ethnic whites" (invented for the purposes of this blog post) delude themselves into thinking it's all about them and their racist identity (ethnicity), and then they're supposed to suffer guilt about that, followed by transformative rebirth. As an ethnic Asian (self identified), I consider such "whiteness" rather callow and I'm glad to not be an ethnic white in that sense, although I won't deny my skin has a pale rgb value.
DEI trainers are or were a type of deprogrammer.
Matt goes undercover, in the manner of a Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) to infiltrate the DEI trainer universe, and mock it thoroughly.
He concludes with his own over-the-top version of a training, which likely DiAngelo would call "weird", just as was her own lucrative interaction with the guy pretty "weird" (the $30 race reparations incident).
I'm on board with mockumentaries as a genre, however if I wanted to mock racism (and I do), I'd take a different tack. I'd bring up all those websites about Noah and his spreading family after the flood, and how encoded the racial talk becomes in Bible studies.
These different races really became more pronounced after the Tower of Babel incident though (we're still in Genesis here), when a lack of mutual understanding proved a godsend: peeps were no longer working lockstep on a fruitless, morally bankrupt project to "reach god" through the vertical dimension (the so-called 3rd dimension, i.e. depth).
Humans have continued confusing themselves with the word "dimension" ever since.
God loves His little morons though, and wanted them to survive, and so confused their tongues this time (vs sending a flood). That started a clumping process whereby humans distilled into the five races we have today: black, white, red, yellow and brown. Everyone else is a mixture of these five.
That's in the sapien branch of the hominid family. The Neanderthal and Denisovans were presumably racialized in different ways (we don't have all the data yet -- I'm looking forward to the AI art).
Perhaps I just don't sound mocking enough?
The literal Genesis story has been a dead horse for centuries, such that its skeleton was long ago back to sand. Only the symbolic meanings, as hinted at above, have any ongoing ethical or aesthetic value.
If we want literal history regarding a Great Flood, we should study Ballard et al and steer clear of theologically-minded spin doctors such as myself.
I'm interested in the dharmas, but when I want science, the Bible is not the first book I think of.
