McWhorter reminds us that, of the many professional “defenestrations” that occurred in 2020, most were carried out over Slack or Zoom, where empathy-producing mirror neurons (activated when being physically present with someone) were unavailable. Technological mediums have a way of rewiring our psyches to meet their demands: books give us bookish minds, just as television encourages us to see things televisually. It’s not surprising then, that activism inside the hive-mind of social media, which incentivizes performance and attention (virality), will invariably lead to mob justice.
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“One of the pillars of third wave anti-racism is consequentialism—the idea that, because impact supersedes intent, it doesn’t matter what was meant by a statement or action, what matters is how it is received. This is common to both DiAngelo’s self-policing prescriptions and Kendi’s definition of racism, which shifts its focus from perpetrator to victim. At first, this seems like a useful re-definition that relieves us of the need to interrogate one another’s souls. But the consequentialist model is slippery. Rather than deriving claims from available evidence, modern anti-racism affirms a priori conclusions (that people are inherently racist, and that all unequal outcomes have racist origins) and then demands that the evidence be made to support them.”
Source: ‘Woke Racism’—A Review