Book completed

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, by Yascha Mounk. Well. I feel pretty ambivalent about this book, and rather frustrated. Mounk is making the case that wokeness, or what we used to call political correctness, has become its own ideology, which is interfering with the values that we place on doing well by all of our people and treating everyone fairly. I firmly agree in the alternative he proposes (the type of political liberalism that's common across most of the political spectrum - our standard beliefs in free speech, individual rights, and an ideal of equality, as something we would like for everyone despite their ancestry, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, etc.). And I also firmly agree that there's something wrong with the examples he gives of different types of wokeness, or what he calls the "identity synthesis" - for example, if a few white children are invited by their Nigerian teacher to wear traditional Nigerian clothing to school for a special event, they obviously should not be disciplined by the school for doing what their teacher asks.

However, his arguments aren't sufficiently nuanced - he doesn't ever express concern that microaggression is a real thing, for example. He also argues against the supposed "identity synthesis" position that white people can never experience empathy fully for people of color, when I would say, duh, none of us can ever experience empathy fully for anyone else, even though there are many cases when we should try, and I would also say that of course there's a value for white people to realize that they get to take many things for granted that many people of color do not. He never really addresses how we should acknowledge the continuing challenges faced by people who are Black, gay, trans, etc. other than that we should work to make things fair for everyone.

Overall, it often felt like he was setting up straw man positions to argue against, and he was able to find examples to illustrate them because it's a big and complicated world, and examples are out there if you look for them. Maybe I'm just being naive, but I don't see this "identity synthesis" ideology as being as fully developed and entrenched as he claims.

Thanksgiving cupcakes

When we do our Tuesday shopping, I always like to chat with D's longtime coworker A, the cake decorator. Yesterday she showed me a whole bunch of Thanksgiving-themed desserts she'd been told to make by a visitor from "corporate" over her objections that such things don't sell, and indeed, they did not sell. She was moving them to the half-price racks and soon what remains of them will go into a big bin in the back.

Fortunately, I realized that the wrongness of this coincided with our need to get rid of four large bags of bottles and cans, which I donate to the tiny house "village" that's set up in the parking lot of the neighborhood Episcopal church. So now the guys there have not only four large bags of bottles and cans to return for the deposit refunds, but also a tray of cupcakes decorated to look like Thanksgiving turkeys.