Nation Of Victims Identity Politics The Death Of Merit And The Path Back To Excellence Vivek Ramaswamy by Vivek Ramaswamy 9781546002963, 1546002960 instant download after payment.

When I looked at the reading lists of the schools Karthik will attend in Columbus, Ohio, I didn’t see anything like that children’s book about the Nacirema. Instead, I saw Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby and Anastasia Higginbotham’s Not My Idea, which portrays white supremacy as a constant devil whispering from one’s shoulder. I worry Karthik will be assigned children’s versions of Robin DiAngelo’s work instead of Horace Miner’s. Miner tried to teach his readers how to think, but I’m afraid the DiAngelo adaptations will only teach my son what to think.

I wonder if Karthik will be taught calculus in high school, if he’ll be placed in advanced classes in the subjects he’s passionate about.2 I wonder what he’ll be good at, and if his talents will be nurtured in the strange land I find myself in today. I wonder whether my son’s teachers will prioritize him or some abstract social good, whether they’ll view it as their duty to mold him into an instrument to make a better world. I guess I would like them to mold him into an instrument to make the world better according to his own notions, not theirs. But the culture he’s been born into may not allow that.  The Americans. A strange people with strange ways. Their customs are riddled with contradictions, their people consumed by odd obsessions. They seem preoccupied with the notion that they are inherently unclean, and their lives revolve around elaborate purification rituals where they attempt to cleanse themselves and each other.

Many American rituals stem from their belief that the mouth is the root of all sin because the words it speaks have a supernatural power to cause harm. Many insist this verbally inflicted harm is an actual form of violence, perhaps even more damaging than the physical kind.4 Americans believe in a pre-scientific metaphysical system by which the very words one speaks are the primary forces that change self and world; one’s actions are considered secondary, the mere effect of words. And so