Rod Dreher endorses the notion that 'code switching' is lying

Rod Dreher* has a lot of anonymous correspondents. But I think this is one super-misguided part of his recent blog post.

My correspondent — let’s call him Henry — argued with the CRT person over power and identity within corporations. Henry has decades of experience with corporate life. His view is that men and women who have reached the top in most corporations have been thoroughly assimilated into corporate culture — and that defines who they are and what they believe. His interlocutor disagreed, and said blacks in corporations retain their black identity and just engage in lots of “code switching.” They tell white people what the white people want to hear. They tell the truth to their black friends.

Henry said that this woman’s view, when understood through communications theory, means that her actual argument is this: that black people lie to white people all the time. Conclusion: the white racists have been right all along. Black people cannot be trusted when they talk to whites.

Understand that we're getting this account of what the corporate trainer said third-hand, so I have some questions about the accuracy of how it's characterized. Nonetheless, Henry's understanding of code switching seems to me to be misinformed.

Code switching, as I understand it -- and hey, I'm not Black, so I've never had to do it -- isn't lying, but rather attempting to communicate in the vernacular of whatever setting you're in. White people don't generally have to code switch because their vernacular tends to be the dominant one. And yes, I suppose it means that the person doing the code switching obscures some part of their "authentic" self to do so, but that doesn't strike me as lying.

Put it this way: If Black people didn't code switch in corporate settings, Dreher would be writing a post complaining about ebonics.

Anyway, here is a good post from last year, "Code-Switching Is Not Trying to Fit in to White Culture, It’s Surviving It."

For African Americans, it is a performative expression that has not only helped some of us thrive in mainstream culture—it has helped many of us simply survive.

Dr. Dione Mahaffey, an Atlanta-based business psychologist and coach, says the very notion of code-switching is draining, but asserts that the practice has been most beneficial as she progressed in her career.

“It’s exhausting, but I wouldn’t go as far to call it inauthentic, because it’s an authentic part of the Black American experience,” Mahaffey says. “Code-switching does not employ an inauthentic version of self, rather, it calls upon certain aspects of our identity in place of others, depending on the space or circumstance. It’s exhausting because we can actually feel the difference.”

Anyway: It's frustrating to see Dreher take a common practice and interpret in the worst possible way for the Black people who practice it. (Typical, though.) For all his smarts, Dreher shows little evidence of considering what the world must look like through the eyes of Black people, or even having read much. He's incurious, which makes him stupid. He could do better. He chooses not to.

* The man gets my goat for some reason. I'll try not to make this a Rod Dreher shitposting blog.

3,000 words

 It took me four days of hard writing, but I just completed a 3,000 word draft of a reported piece.

I know the work isn't over. It never is at this point of the magazine article writing process! But it feels good to have hit this milestone.

Trump is a racist. And....

Here is my column from this morning about how Donald Trump is criticizing Critical Race Theory and "The 1619 Project":

It is unlikely Trump has read or personally tried to understand much about CRT or "The 1619 Project," or possesses the capacity to engage with either meaningfully. But he probably understands one important thing. What both those efforts have in common is an effort to understand and address the experience of being Black in America — where slavery and Jim Crow have been the law of the land for all but a few decades — and to do so from a Black perspective.

That is what Trump is against.

After nearly four years of this guy's presidency, it feels insufficient to say "Trump is a racist" over and over again. I mean: It is one of his defining characteristics. But the people who are going to listen to you say it already agree with you. Also, it's easy. But it also seems worth pointing out how that actually works from time to time.

I'm not sure I have the best handle on how to do it. Here is what I wrote this morning:

Black Americans are definite underdogs in the telling of this country's story. So theories and histories that center their perspective get crosswise with the old axiom that "History is written by the winners." Trump, we know, has a rather narrow idea of who constitutes America's winners — and contempt for everybody else as "suckers" and "losers." So it is to be expected that he defines such Black-centric ideas as "un-American," and attempts to put them outside the bounds of debate.

And here is a more straightforward way of saying what I was getting at.

“To say antiracism is anti-American is to say racism is American, which is to say Trump wants white Americans to be racist,” said Ibram X. Kendi, the author of “How to Be an Anti-Racist” and director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. 

How to address the problems of this era in a true and meaningful way -- rather than just heaping more kindling on the fire -- remains a challenge for me. I'm trying to get there.

My mother's birthday

 She would have been 69 today. She was 61 when she passed. I still miss and love her.

Alan Jacobs on Frederick Douglass

I've been thinking about this piece all day.

Decades ago, I read an essay by a feminist literary critic named Patrocinio Schweickart about how feminists should read misogynistic texts from the past. She counseled them to face the misogyny but also to look for what she called the “utopian moment” in such texts, an “authentic kernel” of human experience that can be shared and celebrated. I think that’s what Douglass does. He has every reason, given what their sins and follies cost him and his Black sisters and brothers, to dismiss the Founders wholly, but he does not. “They were great in their day and generation.”

It would be utterly unfair to demand of anyone wounded as Douglass was wounded the charity he exhibits here. I would not ever dare to ask it. That he speaks as warmly of the Founders as he does strikes me as little less than a miracle.

Please read the whole thing.

And now the earthquakes

 

If I were possessed of a certain theological bent -- or if I was a huckster televangelist trying to scare people -- I would be out in the streets suggesting that wildfires, plagues, earthquakes and all the rest are God's judgment on humanity.

I feel sad about Rod Dreher

 I used to enjoy reading Rod Dreher.

Dreher blogs these days at The American Conservative, but I first started paying attention to him back when he wrote regularly at Beliefnet. His social conservatism was never going to be my own, but I admired what appeared to be an independent cast of mind: He was a conservative who opposed the Iraq War, who questioned capitalism's corrosive effects on our souls, who sought out community, who righteously bore witness to sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and left that church because of it. There were alarming moments in his writing -- a seeming hatred of Muslims, a disregard for immigrants that seemed un-Christian. But for the most part, he seemed thoughtful and generous of spirit. He modeled a kind of conservative thinking that these days I find best representative in writers like Alan Jacobs and David French. I don't always agree with their viewpoints either, but I sometimes learn from them.

Over the last few years, Dreher's writing has curdled into something mean and hard. I don't want to play armchair psychologist, but the shift seems to date from his book, "The Little Way of Ruthie Lemming," and a realization of how completely his small-town family hated and rejected him for his cosmopolitcan ways. I hate that he experienced that -- the end of "Lemming" was shattering to me, frankly.

But where Dreher once seemed curious and generous-spirited, he transformed into one of the most-shrill writers around. A lot of this was focused on sex -- his disdain and hatred for gay and transgender people defines most of his writing these days. Even when it seemingly makes no sense: He went out of his way this week to point out that the author of "In Defense of Looting" is transgender. (In the comments, he said he thought the author's "disordered" mind explained the defense of looting.) 

Dreher roots much of his writing in a Christian morality. But he applies his standards -- and his compassion -- differently to different kinds of people. This is what he wrote* about Kyle Rittenhouse, who stands accused of killing two people in Kenosha:

I’ve said it here before, and I’ll say it again: I don’t see Kyle Rittenhouse as a hero or a villain. I see him as a tragic figure, a kid who inserted himself into a situation where he didn’t belong, and that was way, way over his head. He meant well, but he shouldn’t have been there.

He also wrote about Breonna Taylor, who was killed in her bed by police, but who "had been involved romantically with Jamarcus Glover, a drug-dealing thug."

What happened to George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and Breonna Taylor would not have surprised a man like my father. Floyd was a career criminal and a drughead. Blake was a violent man too. Taylor’s extended romantic relationship with a career criminal brought her to ruin. All of these cases, regardless of how they are adjudicated in a court of law, would have been seen by my father as examples of what happens to people who refuse to live by the Tao (I mean this in the C.S. Lewis sense of “natural law”), or who entangle themselves with those who refuse to live by the Tao. 

So. Dreher is sympathetic of Rittenhouse, a young man who armed himself with a gun, went looking for trouble and found it. But he stands in judgment of Taylor, who found herself caught in a crossfire because of police mistakes.

We all have our rooting interests, I suppose. But Dreher applies a harsher moral standard to a woman who has been killed than the young man who killed. His morality -- the thing that defines him -- makes excuses for some and blame for others. It is ugly. I used to enjoy reading Dreher, and admired his independence of mind. Now, he just looks like a cautionary tale to me.

*I don't feel like linking him. His articles are easy enough to find if you want.