Scrambled eggs from cage-free plants

On March 18 at McKinney Roughs Nature Park in Bastrop County I photographed some scrambled eggs, which is what people have taken to calling some species in the genus Corydalis based on their flowers’ appearance. The stiff breeze that afternoon led me to use flash, which accounts for the unnaturally dark sky.

 

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I recently read Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, by John McWhorter, who’s a linguistics professor at my no longer alma-ing mater,* Columbia University. His preferred term for the people that others most often call “woke” is “the Elect.” (I assume the publisher insisted on Woke in the title so potential readers would recognize what the book is about.) Here’s one passage:

 

… We must ask whether the Elect approach actually shows signs of making any difference in the lives of black people, other than by making educated white people infantilize them. While purportedly “dismantling racist structures,” the Elect religion is actually harming the people living in those structures. It is a terrifyingly damaging business. Here is how Elect ideology does not genuinely care about the welfare of black people.

You are to turn a blind eye to black kids getting jumped by other ones in school.

You are to turn a blind eye to black undergraduates cast into schools where they are in over their heads, and into law schools incapable of adjusting to their level of preparation in a way that will allow them to pass the bar exam.

You are to turn a blind eye to the willful dimness of condemning dead people for moral lapses normal in their time, as if they were still alive.

You are to turn a blind eye to the folly in the idea of black “identity” as all about what whites think rather than about what black people themselves think.

You are to turn a blind eye to lapses in black intellectuals’ work, because black people lack white privilege.

You are to turn a blind eye to the fact that social history is complex, and instead pretend that those who tell you that all racial discrepancies are a result of racism are evidencing brilliance.

You are to turn a blind eye to innocent children taught to think in these ways practically before they can hold a pencil.

 

Check out Woke Racism, either literally from a library or by buying it.

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* Latin alma means ‘nourishing, nurturing.’ Latin mater means the same as mother, which is its native English cognate [see definition 2].

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman