Labeling

Labeling

I just had one of my increasingly infrequent text sessions with my two deeply red Republican motorcycle buddies. It started as a circulation of a film clip about a young woman who complained about having to share a locker room with a 6’4” swimmer with full male genitalia who chose to identify as a woman and wasw therefore on her swim team. My reaction to it was “big deal”, which was to say that with all the serious problems in the world, I’m not so sure that worrying about looking at male genitalia in the locker room is all that much of a problem. If it was, at least half of the male population has grown up having to deal with penis envy and should be making its own video to register the insult and garner sympathy. I am clearly in the “live and let live” camp that thinks that while I don’t understand what makes for all the gender confusion that seems to be going on among our youth, but I am OK adding that to the very long list of things that I don’t understand but can still accept and live with. My Republican counterparts thought I was being insensitive or something and they told me that my reaction was a typical “woke” response.

“Woke” is a favorite label of the right these days and while I have looked it up before, I looked it up again in Merriam-Webster and found that it means: aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice). The right like Ron DeSantis like to sling the term around as an insult. In fact, my Republican friends seem to like to combine it as an adjective with the word idiot. I am referred to by them as a “woke idiot”. They joke that they have tried hard to be “woke” but just can’t do it. My response is that it actually isn’t that hard since all it really requires is to be a bit tolerant and that maybe if they stopped using labels it would all be a lot easier. Their response is that they aren’t labeling anything and furthermore, who am I as a member of the label-loving left to accuse them of labeling. That string ranks right up there with “neiner, neiner, neiner, I’m rubber and you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks on you.” That is not an unusual ending place for us in these sorts of dialogues, unfortunately.

But they must have been at loose ends this morning because things then shifted to a general denigration of DEI, saying that it is over and that it is now exposed for what it really is, which it re-education. Wow, these guys need to go to a class on hurling insults because I’m not so sure they are stinging me with what they are currently hurling. Why exactly is re-education a bad thing? DEI, as well know, stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, so I asked the simple question of what of that did they disagree with? The answer shot back was equity. They felt that equity was not the same as equality and used the President of Harvard, Claudine Gay as an example of equity versus equality. So, I thought I had better pull our Merriam-Webster again.

What I found was that equity means; justice according to natural law or right … something that is equitable. Equality, according to Merriam-Webster is: the quality or state of being equal (of the same measure, quantity, amount, or number as another or capable of meeting the requirements of a situation or a task). I’m not sure that I am etymologist enough to delineate the difference between equity and equality. The first comment that was shot back at me was to question where I was getting these definitions. I’m sure they thought I was using some leftist propaganda urban slang dictionary, but when I told them it was Merriam-Webster, they quietly moved on. This allowed them to just revert to an attack on Claudine Gay, saying outright that she was only in the position because of the color of her skin…and that was obvious to them.

So, I pulled up her biography and shared it with them showing them how her accomplishments at both Harvard and Stanford, the two schools thought of as the standalone pillars of the American higher education system had been the cause of her ascendancy to the presidency of Harvard. They grumbled this and that and had to add that clearly her being black was a factor. I doubt seriously that it was not a factor and that her gender was also a factor, but none of that diminishes her stature as an academic administrator, so I’m not sure where any of that was going. I then made the mistake of saying that she was appointed by the Harvard Trustees, so a bunch of old white rich guys must have liked her. As it turns out, when I pulled up the Harvard governance information I learned that Harvard has a Board of Fellows of the Corporation who run the corporation and are the financial fiduciaries and a Board of Overseers who guide the academic agenda.

The Board of the Corporation has 12 members, seven of whom are women, four of whom represent minorities and at least two that are openly LGBTQ+. There are actually only three white guys on the board and I am estimating that of the 12 members, only half of the members are what we would call very wealthy. I laid all that bare for my friends to help them out. They took the obvious bait and went on to tell me that the whole bunch of them were “rich woke idiots”. They also went on to tell me that was why Harvard was in decline and that the University of Texas is in the ascendancy. Both of those thoughts may be true, but I am not sure that anyone who got admitted to both Harvard and the University of Texas would choose the later over the former, but then again, who knows.

That’s when things went a bit off the rails with the ending comment by them that it is hard to become a first generation “rich woke idiot” unless you’re very good at playing a sport. And so we went full-circle back into the locker room, dragging everything but the kitchen sink along. That finishing comment has immigration commentary (first generation), liberal elite (rich), DEI social consciousness (woke), racial (good at playing a sport) and LGBTQ+ (the prior locker room reference) all imbedded in it. I feel like they need to work just a bit harder to throw in something like “its hard to give birth to a first generation rich woke idiot unless you’re very good at playing a sport like sissy soccer”. That way they can include the abortion issue and round out their negativity by labeling every form of degrease behavior that just drives them crazy and renders them unable to function while it is present in their community, nay, their world, double nay, their universe. I think we need to set up a Harvard department specifically to study the Republican brain to better understand just how it functions and is able to chew gum and walk at the same time while finding its next labeling opportunity.