Chris wedge whenhe was younge how to#

As Crenshaw recently explained, critical race theory found that “the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.” These scholars argued that the white supremacy of the past lived on in the laws and societal rules of the present. Rufo read the footnotes in those books, and found that they pointed to academic scholarship from the nineteen-nineties, by a group of legal scholars who referred to their work as critical race theory, in particular Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell. Reading through these documents, and others, Rufo noticed that they tended to cite a small set of popular anti-racism books, by authors such as Ibram X. Marooned at home, civil servants recorded and photographed their own anti-racism training sessions and sent the evidence to Rufo. The story was a phenomenon and helped to generate more leaks from across the country. Rufo summarized his findings in an article for the Web site of City Journal, the magazine of the center-right Manhattan Institute: “Under the banner of ‘antiracism,’ Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights is now explicitly endorsing principles of segregationism, group-based guilt, and race essentialism-ugly concepts that should have been left behind a century ago.” One bullet point suggested that the attendees would be “working through emotions that often come up for white people like sadness, shame, paralysis, confusion, denial.” Another bullet point emphasized “retraining,” learning new “ways of seeing that are hidden from us in white supremacy.” A different slide listed supposed expressions of internalized white supremacy, including perfectionism, objectivity, and individualism. (“Welcome: Internalized Racial Superiority for White People,” read one introductory slide, over an image of the Seattle skyline.) “What do we do in white people space?” read a second slide. Under the auspices of the city’s Office for Civil Rights, employees across many departments were being divided up by race for implicit-bias training.

Through FOIA requests, Rufo turned up slideshows and curricula for the Seattle anti-racism seminars. These days, “I’m a brawler,” Rufo told me cheerfully.

Chris wedge whenhe was younge how to#

When Rufo received the anti-bias documents from the city of Seattle, he knew how to spot political kindling. His work so outraged Seattle’s homelessness activists that, during his election campaign, someone plastered his photo and home address on utility poles around his neighborhood. Returning home to Seattle, where his wife worked for Microsoft, Rufo got a small grant from a regional, conservative think tank to report on homelessness, and then ran an unsuccessful campaign for city council, in 2018. In 2015, Rufo began work on a film for PBS that traced the experience of poverty in three American cities, and in the course of filming Rufo became convinced that poverty was not something that could be alleviated with a policy lever but was deeply embedded in “social, familial, even psychological” dynamics, and his politics became more explicitly conservative. Raised by Italian immigrants in Sacramento and educated at Georgetown, Rufo had spent his twenties and early thirties working as a documentary filmmaker, largely overseas, making touristic projects such as “Roughing It: Mongolia,” and “Diamond in the Dunes,” about a joint Uyghur-Han baseball team in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. Rufo, thirty-six, was at once an unconventional and a savvy choice for the leaker to select. Rufo, who read it and recognized a political opportunity. But some less obviously tectonic leaks have had a more direct political effect, as was the case in July, 2020, when an employee of the city of Seattle documented an anti-bias training session and sent the evidence to a journalist named Christopher F. Institutions that had previously seemed impenetrable have been pried open: Amazon, the I.R.S., the U.S.

Zoom allowed you to record and take screenshots, and if you were worried that such actions could be traced you could use your cell phone, or your spouse’s cell phone, or your friend’s. Before the pandemic, if you thought that an anti-racism seminar at your workplace had gone awry, you had to be both brave and sneaky to record it. Holding a large meeting on Zoom often required e-mailing supporting notes and materials-more documents to leak. Instructions that once might have been given in conversation now often had to be written down and beamed from one home office to another. Remote work turned out to be advantageous for people looking to leak information to reporters.