What is FAIR?

Because I follow the Twitter feed of the erstwhile NYT columnist Bari Weiss, I noticed that there's a new group that calls itself FAIR — The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. Here's their video:

 

That's on such a high level of abstraction that it hard to understand what's really going on there. The assumption is that you'll recognize at least some of the names/faces and trust their authority. They seem to be banding together as a correction to the excesses of social-justice activists. But what exactly? Are we to trust them as experts, with details to come later?

I found their website, here, and the front page has that video embedded next to the words "What is FAIR?" So I'm stuck in a loop. "What is FAIR?" is the question I had after watching the video. So I watched it again. As far as I can tell, based on the words spoken, it is a forthright demand for the old-fashioned color-blindness approach to racial justice: There is "one race, the human race."

Given the famous names who've joined together — Steven Pinker, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Bari Weiss, etc. — I would expect news coverage of this organization, which seems to have been announced yesterday. But when I did a Google News search, only one thing came up, a NY Post item titled "Booksellers were unprepared for Dr. Seuss ban as sales skyrocket." 

That's not an article about FAIR, just a reference to it at the end of an article about the Seuss crisis:

A Web site has sprung up called BannedSeuss run by the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism that says: “Erasing books is insanity. Stand up for our common humanity.”

Here's the BannedSeuss website.  Ah! It has the full text and pictures of "And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street" (a book, that, I think, is cancelled because of the line "A Chinese man who eats with sticks" and the picture of a man whose eyes are represented by short angled lines when everyone else in the book has eyes represented by dots). 

Back to the NY Post:

The Foundation behind it claims to be a non-partisan organization “dedicated to advancing civil rights and liberties for all Americans, and promoting a common culture based on fairness, understanding and humanity.” It did not return an email from Media Ink seeking comment. None of the banned books could be found at the Barnes & Noble in Manhattan’s Union Square on Thursday even though an associate said he believed the store had “And To Think I Found It on Mulberry Street” in stock as recently as Wednesday. Other Dr. Seuss books were still available for purchase, however.

How quickly the mind erases the past. At the NY Post, the title has already deteriorated from "And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street" to "And To Think I Found It on Mulberry Street." Just imagine how racist this book would become if we lost access to it! 

I celebrate the BannedSeuss website. I'm not a copyright expert, but I encourage the defense of the practice of publishing the entirety of a book that has been banned. It's fair use, no? It's only by seeing the whole thing that we can know how little was even questionable about this 70-year-old book.

Now, back to the FAIR website. I click through to the "About" page. There's some specificity here. I'll select the most usefully specific material: 

We advocate for individuals who are threatened or persecuted for speech, or who are held to a different set of rules for language or conduct based on their skin color, ancestry, or other immutable characteristics....

We believe bad ideas are best confronted with good ideas – and never with dehumanization, deplatforming or blacklisting.

We believe that objective truth exists, that it is discoverable, and that scientific research must be untainted by any political agenda.

We are pro-human, and promote compassionate anti-racism rooted in dignity and our common humanity.

There's a pledge: "I seek to treat everyone equally without regard to skin color or other immutable characteristics. I believe in applying the same rules to everyone, and reject disparagement of individuals based on the circumstances of their birth... I am open-minded. I seek to understand opinions or behavior that I do not necessarily agree with. I am tolerant and consider points of view that are in conflict with my prior convictions.... I recognize that every person has a unique identity, that our shared humanity is precious, and that it is up to all of us to defend and protect the civic culture that unites us."

There seems to be an effort to infuse the work with the kind of religion that Martin Luther King Jr. brought to the civil rights movement. They seek "redemption and reconciliation" and "to defeat evil." And: "Suffering can educate and transform. We will not retaliate when attacked, physically or otherwise. We will meet hate and anger with compassion and kindness. Choose Love, Not Hate. We seek to resist violence of the spirit as well as the body. We believe in the power of love."

"The New York Times announced Sunday that Editorial Page Editor James Bennet is resigning — amid reports of anger inside the company over the publication of an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton..."

"... about the George Floyd unrest last week. Bennet, the brother of 2020 White House candidate Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., had apologized late last week after previously defending the piece, titled, 'Send in the Troops.' Cotton, R-Ark., called for the government to deploy troops as a last resort to help quell riots and looting that emerged amid the anger over Floyd's death in Minneapolis police custody last month. The publication sparked a revolt among Times journalists, with some saying it endangered black employees. Some staff members called out sick Thursday in protest, and the Times later announced that a review found the piece did not meet its standards.... 'Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we've experienced in recent years,' [Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger wrote]. 'James and I agreed that it would take a new team to lead the department through a period of considerable change.'"

Fox News reports.

ADDED: NYT writer Bari Weiss has some very useful commentary at Twitter:

The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes [and] the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same.  The Old Guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption. The New Guard has a different worldview, one articulated best by @JonHaidt and @glukianoff. They call it "safetyism," in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.

It's interesting that people who made safety so overwhelmingly important would accept rioting and vehemently oppose government's protecting citizens from the forces of chaos.