Book Review: The Origins Of Woke

Speaker 00s - 2589s

Welcome to the Astral Codex 10 podcast for the 1st of May 24. Title, book review, The Origins of Woke WORK_OF_ART. This is an audio version of Astralcotex 10, Scott Alexander's Substack PRODUCT. If you like it, you can subscribe at astralcotex10.com ORG. The origins of civil rights law. The Origins of Woke, by Richard Hanania PERSON, has an ambitious thesis, and it argues for an ambitiousthesis. But the thesis it has isn't the one it argues for. The claimed thesis is, the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there's the title, The Origins of Woke WORK_OF_ART, or the Amazon blurb, the roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacteddecades ago. Or the Bannerad PRODUCT. Here's a picture of the Bannerad. What if just a few laws are responsible for the left conquering American culture? The Origins of Woke by Richard Hanania PERSON, civil rights law Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics. On sale 91923 available for pre-order now. Scott PERSON writes, The other thesis, the one it actually argues for, is,US GPE civil rights law, is bad. On its own, this is a fine thesis. A book called Civil Rights Law is Bad LAW would, okay, I admit that despite being a professional internet writer, I have no idea how the culture works anymore, or whether being outrageous as good or bad for sales these days. We'll never know, because Richard PERSON chose to wrap his argument in a few pages on how maybe this is the origin of woke or something. Still, the book is on why civil rights law is bad.Modern civil rights law is bad, he begins, for reasons baked into its history. The original Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supposed to be an ad hoc response to the outrageous level of anti-black racism going on in the South LOC, which protests and TV news had finally brought to the attention of the white majority. There was broad support for a bill which was basically, Don't be the KKK ORG. Sex discrimination got tacked on half as a joke,half as a poison pill by its enemies, to make the bill unpalatable. Fact check, true, but there's a deeper story. See this Slate article for more details, Lincoln Post ORG. Ideas about affirmative action and disparate impact weren't tacked on at all. The bill's proponents denied that it could be used to justify anything of the sort and even agreed to include language in the bill saying it was against that.Still, after the bill was passed, a series of executive orders, judicial decisions, and bureaucratic power grabs put all those things in place. The key point here is that quotas, in quotes, or any kinds of positive discrimination in quotes, where minorities got favoured over more qualified whites, were anathema to lawmakers and the American NORP people. But civil rights activists, the courts and the bureaucracy really wanted those things. So civil rights law became a giant cludge that effectively created quotas and positive discriminationwhile maintaining plausible deniability. This ended up as the worst of both worlds. Hanania PERSON specifically complains about audio note, there's a footnote here and then a series of subheadings with details under each. The subheadings are affirmative action,disparate impact, harassment law, and more. Here's that footnote. I've included three of Hanania's four civil rights law subtopics. The book covers a fourth, Title IX LAW, mostly focusing on women's sports in college. Although the book provides lots of examples about how the laws here are unfair and outrageous, I can't bring myself to care about college sports enough to give it the same subtopic statusas, say, the hiring process for all the corporations in America GPE. The first subheading? Affirmative Action. Hananias PERSON take on Affirmative Action involves the government sending companies a message like this. One, we notice your workforce has fewer minorities in the applicant pool. Two, if this remains true, we'll sue you for millions of dollars and destroy your company. So by the next time we check, your workforce had better have exactly as many minorities as the applicant pool.Three, but you're not allowed to explicitly favour minority applicants over whites. You certainly can't do anything flagrant like set a quota of minority employees equal to their level in the applicant pool. Four, have fun! This satisfied the not really paying attention white electorate because politicians could tell them that quotas are illegal we're sure not doing anything like thatand it's satisfied civil rights activists because inevitably businesses or departments came up with secret ways to favour minorities until representation reached the level where they wouldn't get sued a recent case illustrates the results of this double bind. The FAA ORG hires air traffic controllers. They used to judge applicants based on a test which measured their skills at air traffic control. This resulted in comparatively few black air traffic controllers.Various civil rights groups put pressure on them and they replaced the test with a, quote, biographical questionnaire. The questionnaire asked weird, unrelated questions about your life, and you got points if you gave the answer that the FAA ORG thought black people might give. For example, if you said your worst subject was science. This still didn't get them enough black employees, so they secretly told black communities exactly what answers to put on the questionnaire to go through. It's easy to blame the FAA here, but, Hanania PERSON says,civil rights law almost forces you to do something like this. People tried simpler things like keeping a test but giving minority applicants extra points. The courts and civil rights bureaucracy struck these down as illegal. The almost explicit policy was that you had to get more minority employees, but you had to hide it carefully enough that the American NORP people, who was still against racial preferences, wouldn't catch on.Disparate Impact Not only can you not explicitly discriminate, you can't use hiring criteria that accidentally, in quotes, discriminate by favoring one race over another. To give a stupid example, if someone refused to hire anyone from Detroit GPE, this would have disparate impact, since Detroit GPE is a majority black city. If you allowed stuff like this, racists could covertly discriminate by using these sorts of rules. But Hananiachallenges us to think of any criterion that isn't potentially racially biased. For example, we know universities discriminate against Asians NORP, so only hiring people with college degrees is a disparate impact. We know that more men than women have experience as minors, so a mining company only hiring employees with experience is a disparate impact. Since whites typically do better on IQ tests than blacks, and all cognitive skills are correlated with IQ, the Supreme Court decided in Duke versus Griggs ORG that all tests of any ability were potentially disparate impact, and you opened yourself to lawsuits if you used any of them.In theory, companies are allowed to use tests and similar criteria if they prove them non-discriminatory. The standards for this, they have to prove it for each race and each job side individually, are so high that in practice few companies take this route. Since this technically banned all possible criteria, companies couldn't follow the letter of the law. Instead, they hired fancy lawyers to tell them which way the winds were blowing. The lawyers told them that college degreeswere okay, resumes with biographies and experience were maybe okay, and interviews were okay, tests were out, anything more creative was out. A disparate impact case made the news recently. The Biden-EEOC sued convenience store-change sheets for running criminal background checks on their employees. They didn't allege any intentional discrimination. They just said that more minorities fail criminal background checks than whites,therefore it's disparate impact, therefore sheets has to drop the criminal background check. The article links to disparate impact, therefore Sheets ORG has to drop the criminal background check. The article links to another case where the Obama EEOC ORG sued a corporate events planner, demanding they give monetary compensation to an employee who they had refused to hire simply because he had committed attempted murder and lied about it on their job application. Is Sheets ORG the only company that does criminal background checks on its employees? Do they dothe criminal background checks differently than any other company? My understanding is that the technical answer is that to do background checks without being sued, you have to prove in some very formal way that the specific crimes you're looking for would be bad for your specific industry, and maybe Sheets ORG didn't prove that a general history of violence was bad for convenience stores. But if this sounds kind of fake to you,and you're wondering whether the real rule is, the government has wide discretion to prosecute whoever it feels like, Hanania PERSON's answer is definitely yes. His position is that all of these rules are so broad that every company is always violating them in some sense. No company has exactly the same distribution of minorities as the applicant pool, whatever that is. No company has exactly the same distribution of minorities as the applicant pool, whatever that is. No company has some magical hiring rule that has literally zero correlation with race, especially since black people are, on average, poorer, less educated, and less likely to have any given achievement.So any attempt to choose better employees over worse will necessarily disadvantage them. In real life, the bureaucracy's rules are something like, don't do anything different from other companies in your industry, and especially don't be caught seeming less woke. Hanania PERSON argues this creates an arms race or a ratchet. Every company wants to be at least 50th percentile wokeness or above, but not every company can be above average, so everybody gets more and more woke with no end in sight.Continuing with sheets, according to the article on the lawsuit, in 2020 they, quote, introduced the idea initiative, end quote, that is inclusion, diversity, equality and accessibility. Their website has a big picture of a black woman saying, we're building a great place to work for all, and boasts that they've created a special forum for black employees.They've made 60% of managers women, started a women's leadership program, offered generous maternity leave, and written letters to the Chamber of Commerce on how the George Floyd PERSON murder make them realize, quote, we quickly needed to learn, listen, be vulnerable, and humbly approach culture-shifting work. End quote. Companies hope that if they do enough of this stuff, the EEOC ORG will agree they're an ally in the civil rights project and not sue them under their work. End quote. Companies hope that if they do enough of this stuff, the EEOC will agreethey're an ally in the civil rights project and not sue them under their wide discretion to sue basically anyone. Too bad they're getting sued anyway. Some other convenience store must have done more of this stuff. Surely some executive is wishing they had just tried having one more mandatory diversity training. Harassment Law Harassment Law might win the award for most complicated chain of reasoning from real legislation to enforcement.Legislation says you can't discriminate against minorities. If you bully minorities out of your company, that would be a way to discriminate against them. So you can't have an environment that's so hostile to minorities that they inevitably leave. In some sense,anything that offends a minority is part of this environment. Any joke, political comment, flirtation, etc. could potentially offend a minority. Therefore, every business owner needs to monitor their employees for jokes, political comments, flirtatiousness, and take action against any offences. Henania has several complaints here. First and most legibly it, say it with me, gets taken too far. Quote, Volok ORG lists a large number of examples of things that have been found to be evidence of a hostile work environment, signs with the phrase men working, draftsmen and foremen as job titles, pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and Burning American Flag WORK_OF_ART in a cubicle,titles, pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and Burning American Flag in a cubicle, an ad campaign using samurai, kabuki and sumo wrestling to refer to a Japanese NORP competition, jokes of a sexual nature not targeting any particular person, misogynistic rap music, even terms like Great View and Walk Up have been cited as potentially trying to exclude blind people and those in wheelchairs, end quote. And, quote, in 2015 and 2016, a black father and son named Owen Diaz and Demetric Diaz PERSON with a hyphen,sick, worked at a Tesla ORG plant. Footnote. The book offers no explanation of why a father with the last name Diaz PERSON would have a son with the last name Diaz PERSON, but it includes the sick that makes me think it's on purpose.Other news articles covering the story are split about 50-50 about whether they use the hyphen in the sun's name. None of them explain what's going on here. Back to the text. They sued the company for racial discrimination,with the father's claims alone making it to trial. Racial slurs were used in the presence of Diaz and he saw racist graffiti on a bathroom wall. It appears that the work is allegedly responsible were mostly, or all, minorities themselves, and each time an allegation could be verified, the employee was punished. Tesla claimed that they had taken enough steps to address the concerns of Diaz PERSON.A jury disagreed, and awarded the plaintiff $137 million, an amount that the judge reduced to $15 million. In response to the verdict, Tesla ORG released a statement pointing out that witnesses confirmed that the slurs were used in a friendly manner, usually by African-American NORP employees, and without hostile intent. End quote.Scott PERSON writes, fact check. This article, Lincoln Post ORG, says the racism also included demands to, quote, go back to Africa LOC, people leaving drawings of caricatured black cavemen at the employee's desk, threats, and claims that black employees were, quote, given the most menial and physically demanding work. And that these claims were backed up by testimony from two dozen former workers and a cell phone video showing people telling a black employee that they were going to, quote, cut you up,n-hyphen, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen, R, end quote. This seems like a sufficiently different story that I'd like to know whether Hanania PERSON still stands by his version. Other parts of harassment law lead to more unfair double binds. For example, you can't be seen to retaliate, in quotes, against someone who accuses another worker of harassment. So suppose that a minority employee is bullying a white employee, the white employee resists, and the minority accuses them as harassment. Maybe there's even a full trial.Everyone agrees this is what happened, and the white employee is found totally innocent. Still, you can't fire the bully, because that would be retaliation for a harassment complaint. And since you probably don't want the bully and their victim in the same department, you need to move one of them. And you can't move the bully because that would be viewed as retaliation for the harassment complaint and they could sue you for millions of dollars, so you have to punish the victim.But Hanania PERSON doesn't just say that this kind of thing goes too far. He has some broader point that I have trouble interpreting. Basically that corporations used to be cozy, chummy places full of banter and flirtation that everyone enjoyed, and now this has been universally replaced with the bland, soul-draining bureaucratic corporate aestheticsatirized in works like office space. Is this true? People talk about madmen, I've never seen it, as reflecting some kind of corporate golden age, where at least high-ranking men enjoyed their jobs. If so, did it change because of harassmentlaw, or because neoliberalism replaced the work for 30 years and get a golden watch, corporation, with the work for three years and then seek a better job elsewhere, corporation. Still, Hanania PERSON really hammers in this point that we should apparently all be angry about the loss of corporate flirtation. He calls the current regime, quote, a sexless, androgynous and sanitised workplace, end quote, which is, quote, contrary to human nature and miserable, end quote, without civil rights law, we could have, quote, organizations that combined the aspects of a church,a social club, a matchmaking service and a traditional business, end quote. In such a world, quote, some corporations start encouraging dating and forming close personal bonds among their employees. This can take many forms, from Christian NORP matchmaking to promoting a party-like atmosphere. These pro-relationship corporations will come in conservative or liberal forms. Other firms explicitly market themselves as providing a more, quote, professional or classic work experience.We will see a period of wild experimentation with some forms of corporate organization drawing a great deal of media coverage. People will criticize many of these experiments, and they'll become the subject of public outrage. After civil rights law has been defanged, however, government no longer has the ability to easily shut such efforts down. Eventually, public anger subsides, and the idea of the media attacking a firm because it dislikes its internal culture, will seem as intolerant as attacking a religious community for its doctrines, or homosexuals for what they do together as consenting adults. End quote.Scott PERSON writes, I appreciate my anti-civil rights books doubling as interesting settings for pornographic stories, but I'm otherwise unable to fathom the level of Hanania PERSON's enthusiasm here. And more. Richard Henania PERSON hates all this stuff. Partly he hates it because he thinks it's unfair and anti-business and anti-merit, but also Vaclav Havel talks about the indignity of life under communism. You weren't allowed to just do your job and pay your taxes and follow the laws of the communist state. You had to be actively complicit. You had to actenthusiastic about the communism, force it upon others, inform on your colleagues and punish deviation, at least if anybody was going to check later. This kind of communism didn't just hurt your pocketbook. It damaged your soul. It molded you into a worse and uglier type of person who would eventually abandon their better impulses in order to justify their actions to themselves. This is how Hanania thinks of civil rights law. Business owners can't just give blacks 10 extra points on the screening test and call it a day. They have to favor blacks while insisting toeveryone that they don't do this and it's perfectly fair and they love civil rights law. They have to twist their employment criteria into some kind of illegible monstrosity, so nobody can notice all the favouritism they're doing, then tell everybody that they believe the monstrosity is fairer. They have to hire a bunch of diversity coordinators. Not because they're required to hire diversity coordinators, it's not a requirement, but because they love equality so, so much. And if they don't do this, they'll get sued for seeminglyunrelated reasons. Everyone faces a constant threat of lawsuits which can only be warded against by seeming maximally woke and maximally enthusiastic and maximally happy about all the idiotic fake laws you're being forced to comply with. Like, in communism, you have to become your own mini-police state. You have to make employees snitch on each other if they tell the wrong joke. You have to turn your company into a tyranny of HR ladies. If you do any of this even a little less than other companies, you'll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons, with penalties running potentially into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Because there's nolegible law except be the same as everyone else so you don't stand out as suable, every corporation homogenizes into the same bland HRocracy. Everyone agrees on the same hiring process, which is to prioritize college degree, resume, and interview, and definitely not any test or measure of ability. This leads inevitably to our current society, where everyone has to waste their childhood doing meaningless extracurriculars so that they can get into the best college, so that they can take the best internships, so that they can get the best jobs, unless they do something stupid like to let themselves get the dreaded, quote, resume gap.But also, during the early 1800s, government positions were given out by the spoils system, in quotes. Basically, does the party in power like you personally? In the 1880s, after President Garfield PERSON was assassinated by a guy who didn't get a good enough position, they switched to a formal civil service based on test performance and merit. The US GPE civil service became the envy of the world, attracted some of the smartest people in the country, and obviously worked better than the old system, wherever it was possible to compare. Still, this gradually andsomewhat deniably ended in the 1970s, because the merit-based hiring system seemed like disparate impact. Hanania calls the current era the racial spoils system, in quotes, where positions in the bureaucracy are based on the same kind of illegible morass as everything else. For example, the FAA ORG's biographical questionnaire. He says every branch of government has become lesseffective as a result. Hanania PERSON doesn't mention this, but I've heard an additional argument elsewhere. It's legally dangerous for companies to hire based on anything like merit. Still, if you have great lawyers and are willing to pay a lot to settle lawsuits, you can get away with legally dangerous things. This is only worth it if you really, really want high merit employees, that is if the best employee is much more financially valuable to you than the second best. This is mostly true in Wall Street, where you want your trader to outsmart the other guy'strader by half a millisecond or whatever, and Silicon Valley, where 10 employees can write a program used by millions of people. So the government, the civil service, the schools, etc., all abandoned merit-based hiring, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley LOC lawyered up. So the government, the civil service, the schools, etc., all abandoned merit-based hiring, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley LOC lawyered up. But that means that if you're a smart non-minority college graduate, you know that joining the civil service will be a mess. You'll have a tough time even getting in, and you'll always be passed over for promotions for less qualified minorities.Meantime, Wall Street and Silicon Valley LOC would love to have you. So all the smart people got concentrated in a few industries that might not have been their most economically productive use and the old American NORP tradition where elite families would send some of their kids into the public service died out. What to do? Henania stresses that most Americans NORP hate affirmative action,and probably by extension most other civil rights law, though they've probably never heard of disparate impact. Affirmative action has been on the ballot nine times and failed eight of those. Most recently it failed in California, a deep blue 66% minority state where the pro-A-A side outspent opponents 17 to 1. Also, Republicans NORP have controlled all the branches of government many times in thepast 50 years, and now they control the Supreme Court. Most civil rights law is based on executive orders and judicial decisions, so you wouldn't even need a congressional vote to overturn it, just an executive order from any president who felt like it. Reagan could have overturned half of this with a stroke of a pen if he'd want it. So how has it survived this long? His answer? Because until about 2010, Republicans NORP were too scared of getting called racist. Reagan wanted to overturn affirmative action, but other Republicans, like Bob Dole PERSON,begged him not to, because racism, and eventually he caved. But since 2010, everybody has already been calling Republicans NORP racist all the time, to the point where probably this threat has lost its power. And the sort of moderate Republicans who reigned in Reagan PERSON are gone. So why haven't Republicans, for example, Trump PERSON acted? Hanania PERSON thinks everyone is so obsessed with woke, in quotes, culture war stuff,that the low-hanging fruit of actual woke laws that presidents can change has slipped under the radar. And so, this book. I would have summarized the case as, Hey, Republicans NORP, do you hate wokeness? Well, too bad. It's a vast cultural movement with bastions in a bunch of places where we have no power. But some of this civil rights law stuff seems pretty related to wokeness, and we do potentially have power there. So instead of fighting the unwinnable cultural battle, how about we fight the very winnable policy one? But maybe this didn't seem optimistic enoughfor Hanania PERSON, so he framed it as, the legal wokeness is the source of the cultural wokeness instead. More on this later. The origins of inequality. A progressive, reading this book, might counter, sure, civil rights law, like all law, is poorly written and clodgy in parts. Like all law, it sometimes gets abused or taken too far. Those are the costs. But the benefits are that it fights discrimination and inequality.That's very important. Don't you think those benefits are worth the cost? Unless I missed it, Hanania PERSON doesn't touch this obvious counter-argument. He briefly says that in a free market, companies couldn't consistently maintain discrimination because they would be leaving money on the ground. Cool theoretical results, objects the hypothetical opponent,but white households earn an average of $80,000 and black households an average of $50,000, and so on with other minority groups. So it sure seems like something inequality-related is going on. My tongue-in-cheek reframing of Hanania PERSON's summary of civil rights law went, one, we notice your workforce is less black than the applicant pool. Two, if this remains true, we'll sue you for millions of dollars and destroy your company. So by the next timewe check your workforce, it'd better be exactly as black as the general population. Three, but you're not allowed to explicitly favor black applicants over whites. You certainly can't do anything flagrant, like set a quota of black employees equal to their level in the applicant pool. 4. Have fun. Our hypothetical opponent could argue there's nothing necessarily contradictory or Orwellian about this. If your company is whiter than its applicant pool, for example the general population, then you must be discriminating. If you stop discriminating, you can get racial balancewithout any of that nasty quota stuff. So what's the problem? Everyone is so circumspect when talking about race that I can never figure out what anyone actually knows or believes. Still, I think most people would at least be aware of the following counter-argument. Suppose you're the math department at a college. You might like to have the same percent black as the general population, 13%. But far fewer than 13%, let's say 2% of good math PhDs are black. So it's impossible for every math department to hire 13% black math professorsunless they lower their standards or take some other drastic measure. Okay, says our hypothetical opponent, but that means math grad programs are discriminating against blacks. Fine, they're the ones we should be investigating for civil rights violation. No, say the math grad programs, fewer than 13% of our applicants are black too. Fine, then the undergrad programs are the racists.Or if they can prove they're not, then the high schools are racist and we should do busing. The point is, somebody, somewhere along the line, has to be racist, right? I know of four common non-exclusive answers to this question. One, yes, the high schools or whatever are racist. And if you can present a study proving that high schools aren't racist, then it's the elementary schools. And if you have a study there too, it's the obstetricians giving black mothers worse pregnancy care. And if you have a studydisproving that too, why are you collecting all these studies? Hey, maybe you're the racist. Two, maybe institutions aren't too racist today, but there's a lot of legacy of past racism, and that means black people are poor, and poor people have fewer opportunities and do worse in school. If you have a study showing that black people do worse even when controlled for income, then maybe it's some other kind of capital like educational capital or social capital. If you have studies about those two, see above.3. Black people have a bad culture. Something something shoes and rap music. Trying hard at school gets condemned as acting white. They should hold out for a better culture. I hear nobody's using ancient Sumerian culture these days. Maybe they can use that one.4. White people have average IQ 100. Black people have average IQ 85. This IQ difference accurately predicts the different proportions of whites and blacks in most areas. Most IQ differences within race are genetic, maybe across race ones are genetic too. I love Hitler and want to marry him. None of these are great options, and I think most people work off some vague cloud of all of these and squirm if you try tomake them get too specific. I don't exactly blame Hanania PERSON for not taking a strong stand here. It's just strange to assume civil rights law is bad and unnecessary without having any opinion on whether any of this is true, whether civil rights law is supposed to counterbalance it, and whether it counterbalances it a fair amount. A cynic might notice that in February of this year,Hanania PERSON wrote, Shut up about race and IQ. He says that the people who talk about option four are, quote, wrong about fundamental questions regarding things like how people form their political opinions, what makes for successful movements, and even their own motivations. A careful reader might notice what he doesn't describe them as being wrong about.The rest of the piece almost but not quite explicitly clarifies his position. I read him as saying that race realism is most likely true, but you shouldn't talk about it because it scares people. I'm generally against calling people out for believing in race realism. I think people should be allowed to hide beliefs that they get punished for not hiding. I sympathize with some of these positions and place medium probability on some weak forms of them.I think Hanania PERSON is open enough about where he's coming from that this review doesn't count as a call-out. His foil here is race realist Nathan Koffness PERSON, who says you have to discuss these things. Otherwise, progressives can win every argument by using the line of reasoning above. Just look how much inequality there still is. This shows there's still lots of racism, or at least the lingering effects of past racism. Obviously, our job isn't done yet, and we need lots more civil rights law to combat it.Hanania's answer to Kovna's is that this isn't a debate club. Ah, but Glorkin PERSON, your claim that affirmative action is unnecessary must imply the corollary that there must be no inequality, thus proving a contradiction. Loll PERSON, no. Realistically, this will get fought on the level of, you oppose affirmative action, which makes you a gross Nazi NORP, versus you support affirmative action, which makes you an annoying, woke scold. Just say the woke scold thing louder than your enemies, say the Nazi NORP thing, and you win. Talking about racial differences scares people off and doesn't help. I find it hard not to feel contempt for this level of contempt for reason,but Hanania PERSON is no doubt right about the strategic considerations. And in his book, he follows his own principle. There's no discussion of why civil rights law might be necessary or why it might be impossible for companies to hire enough minorities without reverse discrimination. As he predicts on his blog, it's not fatal. You wouldn't notice unless you were looking for it. I'm not really sure what to do here.How do you review a book that has a glaring omission, but also its author has written an essay called, Here's why I like glaring omissions and think everyone should have them. Is it dishonest? Some sort of special super meta-honesty? How many stars do you take off?Nothing in my previous history of book reviewing has prepared me for this question. The origins of racial categories. Hanania PERSON presents a few scattered arguments that civil rights law is the origin of woke, of which the section on racial categories was the most interesting. Having instituted affirmative action, the government had to decide what categories it was going to inspect businesses for. Like the rest of civil rights law, the resulting system was a bunch of political clodges.There is no true, in quotes, set of races that, quote, falls out naturally, from genetic or cultural data, but the US GPE government system was especially fake and embarrassing. They created the concept of Asian-American by combining the old category Oriental, together with Indians, Pakistanis, ties, etc. Then, under pressure from the Hawaiian NORP delegation, they added Pacific Islanders NORP to create an even more heterogeneous and meaningless category of AAPI, Asian American or Pacific Islander NORP.Then under more pressure from Hawaii later, they separated out native Hawaiian NORP again. The result is that Pakistanis, Koreans and Tongans are the quote same race, but Hawaiians NORP and Samoans are quote different races. They combined Mexican Americans but Hawaiians and Samoans NORP are, quote, different races. They combined Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans NORP, previously three different groups that have been viewed as white light, in quotes, along the same lines as Italians, into the new race Hispanic NORP,adding in all of South and Central America LOC for good measure. Then, under pressure from black activists who were worried that some blacks would reclassify as Hispanics NORP and they'd lose constituents, they declared Hispanics to be an ethnicity, in quotes, that you could have along with a different race. So a white Spaniard NORP from Spain and a white Spaniard NORP from Mexico got treated as different ethnicities, but a white Spaniard from Mexico and a Mayan from Mexico got the same ethnicity. Even though Arabs and Muslims NORP are one of the most discriminated against groups in the country,especially after 9-11 EVENT, they didn't have good lobbyists, so they got classified as white. According to Hanania PERSON, the government's dividing line for white versus person of color is at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and nobody knows what to do about, for example, Uzbeks NORP. Hanania himself is Palestinian-American NORP and seems salty about this. All of this means that, for example, a company that had 10 Pakistanis and 10 Afghans might get classified as two white, in quotes, and get sued for failing to hire enoughAsian-Americans NORP. But a company that had 20 Pakistanis, or 10 Pakistanis plus 10 Koreans NORP, would be fine. Hanania PERSON argues that this has gone beyond corporations and seeped into the culture, helping create modern wokeness. For example, after some Chinese people got beaten up a few years ago, there was a campaign to hashtag stop AAPI hate, as if AAPI were a natural category, or there were some raciststargeting AAPIs in particular. Does this mean government-mandated racial categories are invading our deepest thoughts? That one campaign was kind of silly, but aside from that example, I don't usually hear people talk about AAPIs outside a purely legal context. All my Asian NORP, for example, Chinese, Japanese, etc., friends self-identify as Asian. When everything everywhere all at once came out,people said it was a movie about the Asian NORP experience, in quotes. The top Ivy League colleges have an Asian Student Association, Harvard, an Asian American Students Alliance, Yale ORG, or an Asian American Students Association, Princeton, with Pacific Islanders NORP nowhere to be seen. With all due respect, Hanania PERSON really doesn't have much here beyond the hashtag stop AAPI NORP hate thing, which seemed like a weird astroturf campaign in other waysand probably shouldn't be taken as actual grassroots racial categorization. The point about Hispanics NORP, in quotes, is better taken, and you can read more about the case here, Lincoln Post ORG. But since 1964, when Mexican Americans NORP, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans were the three equally sized and equally interesting groups, the Hispanic community has become dominated by Mexican and Central American NORP immigrants,who do form a pretty natural grouping. People are just as happy to talk about Latinos, and Latinx, as Hispanics NORP. I'm not sure we can attribute this one to the government either. As for Arabs NORP, they seem to have plenty of organization and activism, for example, C-A-I-R. If this is less prominent than, for example, Asians or Latinos, it's probably because Arabs are about 0.5% of the US population, compared to Asians 5% and Latinos 20%. Hanania PERSON's strongest point here, more suggested than asserted, is that maybe civilrights law prevented Hispanics from assimilating into white, in the same way that Italians NORP and Irish did before them. Hanania claims that Mexican-American NORP activists originally demanded to be classified as white, then turned 180 degrees after affirmative action proponents promised them better jobs for being non-white. This seems like one of the bigger what-ifs of American NORP racial history, although people say that maybe Hispanics NORP are assimilating somewhat anyway. The much-remarked upon rise in Hispanic NORP white supremacistsseems like a weird yet promising sign here. The origins of woke. Aside from this, Hanania PERSON doesn't have much to support his claimed thesis, that civil rights laws are upstream of the cultural package of wokeness. He mostly goes with vague, zoomed-out arguments. Civil rights law sets people against one another.It accustoms them to lying. It forces them to focus on people's race instead of being colourblind. It denies merit. It saps people's hope for the future, and their ability to trust the political system. The few exceptions where he gave more specific stories were helpful.For example, quote, civil rights acts as a sort of force multiplier for disgruntled employees, allowing them to change institutions from the inside. The same company that might not think twice about disciplining workers for making unfounded or exaggerating claims about other aspects of its business can have its hands tied if the allegations being made contain even a hint of a charge of racism or sexism. As mentioned before,civil rights law bans retaliation, in quotes, against an employee even if the underlying complaint is ultimately without merit. When Senator Tom Cotton PERSON wrote an article in the New York Times in the summer of 2020 calling for the military to be sent to deal with rioters in major American cities, the opinion editor of the paper eventually resigned, after employees waged a campaign against him that included sending out identical tweets saying that the peace put black staff in danger. Had they claimed a grievance based on some other non-protectedidentity, there would not have been the specter of legal liability for the article, nor would the controversy have invoked the grievance procedures and norms already established to deal with racial issues. If a major newspaper being influenced in its staffing and editorial choices by civil rights law seems too absurd to contemplate, consider that Felicia Sonmez, a reporter for the Washington Post ORG, sued her employer on the grounds that it was discriminatory to take her off Me Too ORG stories after she talked about her own alleged sexual assault. Although her suit was dismissed in 2022, newspapers are no different than other employersin responding to incentives. Sonmez was eventually fired by the Washington Post in 2022 for weeks of publicly attacking co-workers on Twitter ORG. It is reasonable to wonder whether the employer's hesitancy to part ways with her was based on the incentives created by civil rights law and their downstream cultural effects. End quote. Scott PERSON writes, so maybe the causal pathway is civil rights law to worker workforce at newspapers slash universities, etc., to cultural whokeness? But there's not a lot herebeyond this New York Times ORG example. When I think of workness, I think of the great cultural turn around 2010 to 2015. When everybody started talking about privilege and white supremacy, Black Lives Matter ORG burst onto the cultural scene, all your friends suddenly had rainbow and trans flags in their social media profiles, and people coined terms like SJW and woke to describe this phenomenon.There's an image here. It shows New York Times word usage frequency from 1970 to 2018. It shows frequencies of words like sexism, misogyny, racists, LGBT, triggering, and a very large number of other words, each with its own little graph. And the overwhelming pattern among these graphs is that they shoot up suddenly towards the end. There are graphs like white privilege and white nationalism that are on the bottom and then they shoot up at the end.Others don't follow exactly this pattern. There are a few others thrown in like radio which show the opposite pattern, but the overall impression is quite strong from looking at this graph. That there was a rapid increase in interest in these kind of concepts. Back to the text, Hanania PERSON has no explanation for this. He talks about civil rights laws that have been in place since 1964. He does say that maybe the new civil rightsbill signed in 1991 inspired that decade's interest in political correctness, in quotes. But the closing of the American NORP mind, generally considered the opening shot in that debate, was published in 1987. Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015? Henania ORG has no answer. Even the book's own history of the civil rights movement seems to undermine its thesis. This history, remember, is that Congress tried to pass reasonable and limited laws and then woke activist judges and bureaucrats keptexpanding them into unreasonable power grabs. And that, he says, was the origin of wokeness. But if a movement has captured the judicial branch and the civil service, it seems like it must have already originated. Grant PERSON says this was an older form of wokeness, more clearly grounded in the anti-segregation struggles of the 1960s. That just brings us back to the question of where the new 2010's version of wokeness came from,which the book also doesn't answer. There's an image here. It's a cartoon that shows a skeptical-looking goose asking a question and then asking the question again more loudly while chasing after somebody. It says, where did all the woke judges come from? Where did all the woke judges come from? How did civil rights law cause the Ferguson riots?The George Floyd PERSON protests. Joe Biden's promise to appoint a black female Supreme Court ORG Justice and his black female vice president. Drag queen story hours, gay pride parades. If it doesn't explain any of those things, what's left of it explaining wokeness, in quotes?How did gay, lesbian and transgender people win their rights, normalise their identity, and win victories in representation, medical care, and even the language? When these groups were still unpopular, civil rights law didn't apply to them.They fought their way up from zero, with little legal help, until they were powerful enough that they could lobby for civil rights protection. Transgender people in particular weren't covered under civil rights law until 2020. They still don't get some of the most sought-after benefits like affirmative action.But there are a central example of wokeness. Isn't this evidence that wokeness can thrive without support from civil rights law? I don't read Hananias PERSON blog religiously. Maybe he has an article somewhere about, Here's why I think it's good to have a glaring omission around this part of my argument. But I can't predict what it would say.The origins of the next Trump PERSON administration's civil rights policy. Like I said with What We O the Future WORK_OF_ART, it's probably unfair to review this book, Quar Book WORK_OF_ART. I appreciated the readable and thoughtful overview of civil rights law and its victory. I was already skeptical of affirmative action. This book further confirms that skepticism. I was less convinced by the attempt to connect it to cultural wokeness, but that's fine.It seems to have caused enough direct damage to corporations, universities, employees, government departments, etc., to judge it negatively on those terms. Although I'm suspending final judgment here based on my spot check of the Tesla ORG story turning up a different enough sequence of events that I'm not sure how much else was presented in a one-sided way. Let me know if you find other parts that seem wrong.But my impression of Hananias PERSON's place in the ecosystem is it is not writing this for you or me. He's writing this for a group of conservative heavyweights who will set policy if Trump PERSON wins in November. He's reminding them for a group of conservative heavyweights who will set policy if Trump wins in November. He's reminding them that civil rights law exists, that it's against conservative principles, and that it's pretty easy for a president to repeal large parts of it. All the rest ofthe book is just a booster stage to help it reach those people. It doesn't matter if Hanania has a coherent theory of discrimination or a coherent theory of how civil rights law causes woke culture. His instincts here are really good. He's written a book that's become popular and talked about, which has attracted exactly the sorts of policy wants he wanted, and that's well designed to make them pay attention to the issue.In this sense, the book is perfect. Complaining that it doesn't satisfy my intellectual curiosity is like complaining that the operating manual for a missile system lacks convincing characterization or plot. Read this book if you want a well-written expose of the past 50 years of civil rights decisions, or read it in order to feel like you were ahead of the curve if Executive Order Number LAW 11,246 getsrepealed on January the 21st, 2025. This is an audio version of Astral Codeotex10, Scott Alexander's PERSON Substap. If you like it, you can subscribe at astralcotex10.com. In addition, if you like my work, creating audio versions of Scott PERSON's posts, you can support that work on Patreon at patreon.com slash SSC podcast. To reference this, please link to the original post.If you want to contact me, you can use Astralcredex podcast at Protormail.com ORG. Thanks for listening, and I'll speak to you next time.