... [W]e assert that only Kendi and his guild of "racism experts" can save us from the "existential threat" posed by racism:
[In my doctoral studies] I was readying myself to join a guild of intellectuals with expertise on the structures of racism. This guild studies, diagnoses, and strives to eliminate racism. The [people who believe in a post-racial society] call us “race hustlers,” but they would never call oncologists “cancer hustlers.” They’ll do anything to delegitimize our training and expertise, which veils their absence of training and expertise, which legitimizes their postracial fairy tales.
What Kendi doesn't seem to understand is that, when Oncologists and the extended medical establishment put their collective minds to defeating cancer, they get results. Proactive screening, more accurate diagnosis tools, and advancement in multiple treatment methods mean that people are much less likely to die of cancer than they were a few decades ago
In the United States there has been an increase in the 5-year relative survival rate between people diagnosed with cancer in 1975-1977 (48.9%) and people diagnosed with cancer in 2007-2013 (69.2%); these figures coincide with a 20% decrease in cancer mortality from 1950 to 2014
People trust in Oncologists and Scientists because science WORKs. The treatment recommendations from scientists work to make cancer patients live longer, happier and more healthy lives, according to objective measurements.
Imagine, an alternative universe where the recommendations of Oncologists didn't work. Where we gave Oncologists a shitload of money to try a whole bunch of different stuff, give them decades of opportunities to try every combination of drugs/diet/radiation/whatever treatment that they can... and none of what they tried worked to improve survival rates of people with cancer. A reasonable societal response to this failure would be to say "you know what, Oncologists, maybe you don't know what the fuck you're doing" and stop giving them money to solve problems that they've demonstrated they don't know how to solve. (This is what happened to the field of Alchemy; its repeated failures for decades to produce anything of value means that we collectively decided to tell the alchemists to screw off with their fake science)
THEN, continuing the example, imagine in response to this failure the Oncologists say "wait a minute, it isn't our results that didn't work, it's the CANCER DIAGNOSIS TESTS that are broken! Because the cancer diagnosis equipment tends to discriminate against people who live in polluted environments, people who don't exercise, people who sit in the sun too much, and the obese". Instead of jumping to the sensible conclusion that the tests discriminate in this way because those demographics are actually more likely to get cancer, there is an unfathomable display of mental gymnastics involved to convince yourself that these tests are invalid because they give different results to different groups.
This is exactly what Kendi and his grifter friends are doing. They claim to possess a magical set of policies that will actually correct for bad black outcomes.... but we've tried a LOT in the past 50+ years to correct for black-white disparities already, to no real effect. Why should we continue to invest in these policies when they have shown repeatedly to not correct for this measurable difference in test scores, or differences in educational/career outcomes?
Kendi's reply: it is because the predictors/indicators of societal success (standardized test scores, GPA, placement in good jobs, income) and metrics of societal failure (violent crime arrests, prison population, homelessness) are all racist! The standardized tests are racist! The employers are racist! Cops are racist! Therefore we should stop measuring the intellectual ability of our students. We should stop having a police force at all!
Alchemy was trying to solve real problems: People age, Steel/Lead is less pretty, less expensive and less beautiful than gold. It would be great if Alchelmy succeeded in in stopping aging, or converting lead to gold. But it didn't. So we cut our losses and moved on. I think that society will be much better off when we realize that these racial disparities are not going away anytime soon, and we need to give the Critical Race Theorists and Grievance Studies the same treatment that we gave Alchemists