This: "I am quite certain that almost anyone would rather be the empowered villain than the powerless, blameless nobody." I've thought about this a lot in the context of where Latino and other immigrant voter preferences seem to be heading. If you move to a new country, and upon arrival you are told, "Look, there are two groups here, the oppressors and the victims, the winners and the losers—and this will never change," and then you are given the *choice* of which group to join, I think it's pretty clear (justly or not) what many people would choose...
Lol right? "Do you wanna be on the winning side that gets all the awesome stuff or the losing side that doesn't? Oh wow you chose the losing side what a monster."
I think it's a higher-social status, but it doesn't seem like it's generally a winner. Outside of maybe some DEI jobs and university bureaucrats, victim mentality seems like a big loser. I don't know anyone with a victims mentality that's actually successful.
Do not forget marriage. I have known many women who changed identification when they married. My mother was from New Mexico with a clearly Hispanic surname; she married my father who was Irish with an Irish surname-- so her children's identities (incl.
mine) were Irish. It was only when I was in my teens that I learned about my Hispanic heritage. I think this is the case for many women in the U.S. Not so much today--people are proud of their heritages but past generations more the case to use marriage the make a change of identity.
I think the Irish side was more oppressed by England than the Hispanic side who'd been in NM for hundreds of years. Since I went to university before affirmative action, it was just me, my GPA and my SATs and I waitressed my way through. I think a lot abt what it might have meant if DEI was a factor then. Since I went to mainly public universities I missed knowing about the elite schools. I've only learned since what a difference they make to some people. I'm glad I didn't know. Class does have an effect. My father was IBEW and my mom worked at a 5&10. I've only worked at public universities.
This is a good point. Young people are encouraged to make these issues their core identity at university - but they are toxic attributes in most real world environments.
"Successful" has as many definitions as there are people walking this planet. There are certainly quite a few fools who think it means "having money and stuff," but the fact that there are lots of them doesn't make them any less wrong.
I would dispute that there is actually, functionally, higher status for those on whom the victim label is bestowed. I think it serves to signal high social status for those bestowing the label. It is high status to be very visible in recognizing others as victims. The people described as victims are mostly props.
Some people do clearly use the victim label as a weapon against others, as in the case Smith College case, or as a way to seek higher status. I suspect these cases are high-profile exceptions, and that, in most cases, people prefer to be treated as capable agents. This seems to be true for the children and families of color I work with.
This of course is not to say that people are not victimized or that they should be solely held responsible for their condition. Most people recognize nuance here.
When women were given the choice between Madonna and Whore, Betty or Veronica, I think both sides were appealing for different reasons. Both are a trap.
Within the current social-identity-power paradigm, it’s almost a win-win if you know how to play your politics in the right circles.
Conservative Hispanic “villain” -> threatening tokenized exception to hegemonic liberal ideology, or strong and radical realist who rejects the true socialist horror from back home for a better life?
Progressive Hispanic “victim” -> infantilized minority who garnishes long-overdue social reparations cred for institutionalized colonialism and white supremacy, or greatest threat to your labor opportunities this country has ever seen?
At what point does this ontological orientation ever concede it’s simultaneous entanglement of baseless moralistic derision and empowerment of identity-culture? I wonder where in the world we’ve seen this before…
Mhmm. I don’t think that’s what’s going on politically in the States, per se, but it serves the same regressive functionality promoted by ethnocentrism and ethnonationalism
I loathe this crap - and rather ironic given the "centering" they talk about: only white people get "centered" by this nonsense.
Also - can we come up with a better word than "liberals" for this particular political group? It seems hopelessly ill suited by this point. This particular political culture is not liberal in any meaningful sense.
Hah! The Corporate Social Justice Chimera? Probably needs to be a bit snappier than that... It's almost like its actually very hard to come up with a name for a group whose internal value system is just a cluster of socioeconomic forces at this point.
Yes, everyone should be centering my emotional responses! :)
But seriously, the terminology issue is real. How about "identitarians"?
It seems to me that this group, whatever we call them, draws both from traditional liberals (who are OK with capitalism if it's sufficiently regulated) and the tradional left (who are not OK with capitalism). This group's defining feature is putting body-intrinsic identity over class.
I don't know, the Woke also seem invested in the idea of being transhuman. To put it another way, I think they struggle with ideas about being embodied.
You might not have to. I have not read it, but Lev Gumilev’s Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere may have some insight on the ontological/epistemological matter that seems to be prevalent in this line of thought.
The influence of postmodernist thought, the combination of standpoint epistemology and racial/ethnic groupthink, and the excessively irrational moralization over identity/culture (which contains proto-fascistic ideological tendencies, but is not to say that they are in themselves fascist) all point towards an old-school conceptualization of race-nationalism thought and cultural determinacy.
They’re ethnocentrists, if not ethnonationalists. Identitarians could be sufficient, but I see that more as an extension/expression of being ethnocentric.
yeah, "an expression of radical liberalism" or "radical racial liberalism" and actually really just pulling back from labeling people like this in general, I think is preferable, but you'r right, lol
Neither of those addresses the root terminology problem, in my opinion. Both of those terms strongly suggest that this cohort are somehow more liberal, when the opposite is generally true.
May I suggest Progressive instead of Liberal? Try Leonard's excellent book, Illiberal Reformers, for a discussion of the history and principles of the Progressive movement in the US. Not a pretty picture. In reality Liberal is just a name they stole because it sounds good. (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169590/illiberal-reformers)
Try discussing this outside of the US, where 'liberals' is not understood in the same way. I'm desperate for a name to call the leftish (group-signalling, morally-focused centrists).
Doesn't "progressive" describe the group that holds both weak and strong versions of these claims? Moreover, that term is consistent with their self-id, so it avoids needlessly alienating snark (apart from the self-identification of those that embrace the radical chic of more extreme labels).
I agree that "liberal" is nowhere near accurate. The fact that we sometimes use it to describe them is a bizarre artifact of the Michael Kinsley / Pat Buchanan Crossfire era.
I read this stuff a bit differently. I think that race is the only acceptable lens through which to discuss class. You hear something like "whiteness caused this non-white person to kill this other non-white person." Now, replace "whiteness" with "poverty" or something similar, and a lot of these ideas start to make some sense. We can't discuss the round hole of class, so we try to fit the square peg of race into it
If the general public is tied up with arguing amongst itself about identity, then it is unable to make any type of unified effort against global inequality or militarism. It's why defense contractors, large banks, and the like can put a simple icon on their social media apps and still rake in $$$ pushing policies and changes that negatively affects the rest of the country/planet.
In my grumpier moments, I think there's also an element of rich white lefties subconsciously just wanting enough cosmetic racial equality that they can feel comfortable not caring about poor black people as much as they don't care about poor white people.
I don't need a grumpy moment. With corporations, this is probably the most generous explanation you can come up with. They play the game to distract from the fact that they have impoverished millions in this country, including minorities, while using our tax dollars, our military, and our infrastructure to bolster their presence globally. "Rich white lefties" run many of these companies and profit from them, and they themselves use the technique to deflect from the fact that they really don't care about anybody that won't further their own agendas, so not just the poor but the working class and the middle class, whom they see as interchangeable players that have no speaking parts and really have no names and no faces (literally sometimes as the pictures would prove).
"They play the game to distract from the fact that they have impoverished millions in this country, including minorities, while using our tax dollars, our military, and our infrastructure to bolster their presence globally." Bingo!
I think to understand the state of the world (the "world system" we have going), you gotta know about European colonialism and the way race has been intertwined with class oppression, and a lot of people do experience class oppression through race (and gender etc).
But there's also the history of oppression of poor white people (There's a book called "White Trash" that's all about that.)
And the example I give to put things into perspective is India. Most of what I know about modern Indian history comes from reading Salman Rushdie's novels, and there's the very good book "Maximum City" about modern Bombay, and the racism/caste issue is huge and complex. Lots of irrational hatred going on, but if you put all of those people in the US, they would all fall underneath south Asian "race".
People hate each other all over the world, and if you magically solved the European vs African "race" issue, people would find other reasons.
(This is why class should be the first analysis, but that's another discussion.)
I think there’s something to this. The way some liberals talk about diversifying spaces or whatever makes it sound like they’re leveling the playing field of opportunity, when in practice it is often replacing a rich white person with a rich Black person
This morning I was listening to the LA Times daily podcast and it was about the death penalty in California. They talked about a prison warden, who in the mid century advocated for abolishment of the death penalty, and they shared a quote: “I’ve never seen a rich man executed in California”. Then the guest commentator said “he didn’t use the word racism but that’s clearly what he was talking about.” I was a bit confused. I am 100% sure there was a ton of racism involved in deciding who was executed in California throughout our entire history but I do not see any evidence that that’s what this person meant, nor do I think we need to apologize for every mention of class as a factor with a disclaimer that what we really mean is race. Your comment “race is the only acceptable lens through which to discuss class” really rings true to me today.
I'd bet my life you are right: the prison warden was talking about economic class. He probably would have noticed that many prisoners were poor AND non-white, but he would not be so ridiculous as to assume that poverty was not a factor. The truth is, rich people of EVERY race in the U.S. live better than poor people.
When you look at any broad, societal issue here in the USA, whether it's education or policing or housing or economic inequality whatever, it's easy to make the case that the core problem is racism or white supremacy. Structural racism and its effects are broad and deep, so when there is a bad thing happening, black people get the worst of it. So all you have to do is have a cursory look at the data and go, "See, that's racism".
But most of these issues aren't specifically about race and insisting they are elides the actual problem and impedes discussion of plausible solutions.
For example, I've seen people argue that the only issue with police misconduct in this country is race because cops are always friendly and deferential to whites. To which I have so say, "Have you ever had a run in with the police? The only color they really care about is blue."
I've had a few run-ins. They also care about race and class, if my experience driving cross country with a black man is any indicator (horrific), when compared with no-black-man-in-car (much nicer) when compared with being a member of the state bar (let off with a warning every time). YMMV of course, but I think only to the extent that their profiling aptitude is reliable.
Let me rephrase and say, "The color they care about MOST is blue". Obviously there's still a lot of racial profiling going on. It's just that being white is far from a guarantee of good and fair treatment.
Great point. I bet you could do this swap with much of the current racial discourse these days. Because at the end of the day it really IS about class isn’t it?
“Black” people don’t need more “representation” or chalkboards patting them on head. They need fucking money. I’d like to see that on a hipster cafe’s chalkboard. “We’re giving all our profits to black people!” Or just to the poor (which would help lots of black people, but we can’t do that if it helps poor white people too)!
So, saying that white supremacy moves POC to kill other POC does remove agency from POC. Which is ridiculous.
At the same time, it often seems the case that aggrieved groups will target the weakest members of the out group. For example, it is probably easier, for racist and misogynistic reasons, to target Asian women, rather than white men, for a racially motivated murder.
We currently see this with transactivists and anti-racists, who disproportionally target women over men for their activities.
I never understood this either as I've always felt like if you've blaming white people for everything bad that ever happens to black people, then by logic white people are also responsible for everything good that happens to black people.
Logic doesn't come into it. Nobody's looking for consistency or trying to avoid hypocrisy. You're not going to own them with facts and logic. The only way to win is not to play. Reject all race-baiting.
It's a weird way of putting people of color in a box. So Kamala Harris will never be seen as someone who was the Veep choice because she was the strongest candidate. If the white people are the ones deciding who succeeds based on skin color, aka equity, then it's still the same game. Meet the new white supremacy, same as the old white supremacy. I think about young girls from Afghanistan thrust into American schools having to learn that nonsense. They will no doubt conclude Americans are ridiculous. How could they not.
"Kamala Harris will never be seen as someone who was the Veep choice because she was the strongest candidate"
That's always true. You never choose a running mate who can take your job if things go bad in your first term. You choose some clueless dunce who makes you look good. You leave your opposition with The Poison Pill so they won't impeach you. President Biden would be out today if Harris wasn't the poison pill.
This is a woman who proudly slept her way up the ladder of success (with California Assembly leader Willy Brown, basically the Nancy Pelosi of the California Legislature).
When she was California Attorney General, proposed holding state prisoners past their release dates because the state needed them to fight forest fires.
Umm ... this is the definition of slavery, forcefully holding people against their will, forcing them to work.
Per the above, the problem with Whitey-as-agency isn't that it's wrong. It isn't that it's dictionary-definition blood libel, to blame one group in society for every sin, regardless of whether it's true or who actually did it. No, it's wrong because 1) Whites aren't protagonists and 2) Whites might get an ego trip out of it.
The White blame for anti-Asian hate will continue, then, until morale decreases.
This is perfect. Denying agency to the majority of the world’s population is condescending: “The insistence that white people are ultimately responsible for everything bad in the world is immensely insulting to people of color. It casts them as the victims of history, consigned to a role of powerlessness and anonymity, in contrast with the white people who rule the world and make history go. Like so much of our ostensibly progressive racial discourse this frame ultimately portrays people who aren’t white as children, blameless and weak.”
That backlash will only make them push back harder in the areas that they still fully control like the media and the academy (and potentially the elite business world as well, though outside of a few tech companies they seem more faux-woke than truly dedicated to the cause). If you think the current ideological litmus tests in academia and one-sided reporting are bad now, I regret to inform you that it will get worse.
Yep. Personnel is policy. The personnel are in place and not leaving anytime soon. The Left should be thrilled that conservative politicians are so incompetent that they have no idea how to manage education systems effectively.
The irony of course is that what they'll implement will be similar to the current overbroad laws being passed by GOP state legs. Except instead of bans of CRT, they'll mandate it by policy and hire DEI auditors for syllabi, classes, organizations, committee meetings, etc. to enforce it.
White people feeling shame about their whiteness and the historical behavior of some people in that group is the same as white people feeling like they are the anointed ones who rule the world; it is incredibly narcissistic. Some people of color do get an upsurge of feeling powerful by being able to legitimately shame white people; some even write books that make them a lot of money. Most of us who have been there done that (in whatever form we did) understand that feelings of self worth created by oppositional denigrating of others rarely is a decent foundation for a life. Sooner or later the whole things comes apart and those old feelings of worthlessness emerge again.
I have thought a lot about this, as you have Freddie, and it seems to me from my own experience in life that most people in this world are in one way or another oppressed by others. Some more than others to be sure. I am a polytheistic animist and like all people of other faiths I have had to deal most of my life with denigrating put downs by christians, have had to encounter their book being cited as an authoritative source even in scientific journals that should know better. Unlike many other faiths, i have had to experience christians calling for my death and using their book as the authority for doing so.
I have found however that this opposition (from christians as well as reductive scientists who are anti-animist to their core) has, instead of reducing me to a victim, engendered the emergence of a strength, an acuity of intellect, and a creativity that i doubt i would have developed any other way. By their, admittedly, simple epistemology being forced upon me for most of my life, i have had to think my way through the flaws in that system of thought. it has forced me to understand in far deeper ways than i otherwise could have done.
I wish that we lived in a culture which had more of the cultural support as some European countries do for their citizens. we are a barbarous culture in far too many ways. Despite this and my work toward such a way of being for most of my life, i still believe in the promise of the constitution, in the work of people like Martin Luther King, jr, and James Baldwin and vaclav Havel and so many others. they have helped me find my own deeper humanity over the years of my contemplation of their words.
I believe it incumbent upon us to oppose the identification of people by the color of their skin as firmly as we can. And to oppose the forces that set us against one another for their own purposes.
And as i see more people standing up and refusing to accede to the woke brigade by articulating the kind of responses you have made here, it does feel to me, that as slow as it is, the tide is beginning to turn.
It's very strange, this idea that everything bad that happens must be in some way related to race and ultimately a product of white supremacy. It is pretty tiresome.
LT John R. Fox won a posthumous Medal of Honor for his actions in WW2.
His unit took a town from the fascists in Italy, and was about to get bumrushed by the Wehrmacht who were hell bent on taking it back. The Americans didn’t have the assets on hand to repel them and reinforcements weren’t gonna show up in time.
Fox told his guys to bounce while he stayed behind alone. He got up in a tall building with a pair of binos and radio and starting calling in artillery strikes onto the attacking forces.
As the enemy closed in to within a few feet of his position and preparing to assault and clear his building, he called in artillery on his own grid. His commanding officer protested that it was definitely going to kill him, but Fox said “Don’t care, do it.”
When the Americans counter-counterattacked, they easily retook the town and found a pile of fascist corpses in a ring around Fox’s bombed out position.
Anyone who says that Fox, due to the color of his skin, lacked moral agency in his decision to sacrifice his life to land hammer blows onto the fascist war machine is anti-American.
Or that Black people have so few accomplishments that we can easily name them all.
Thank you for this. The ego of the white liberal is quite amazing, and the inferiority complex of minorities that buy into it. But it is quite useful for not addressing real problems, generally those surrounding caste and class.
"which, like all liberal narratives, is primarily espoused by white people"
Not so sure about this. I have seen left-leaning Black people all-but-explicitly say that no Black person is ever responsible for their own bad choices, up to and including murder; that the whole concept of personal responsibility is racist if applied to Black people. That certainly seems to be an underlying thread in Kendi-ism, which holds that any difference in outcomes can only be the product of racism, not of culture or personal choices. I agree that the whole thing seems terribly racist and condescending in itself, but some folks are apparently fine with that as long as they can leverage it for political or social power.
YES! I think this point needs to be made again and again. When someone claims that white people are the ones promoting the narrative that white people are responsible for all bad things I can't help but think that the claim is illustrating what is being claimed. (i.e., Why do we espouse the harmful idea that white people are guilty of everything? Because white people are guilty of promoting that harmful idea!) Where I work (at a university) lots of people who would not call themselves white pin all bad things on white people. They also pin all good things on non-white people, which is also a problem. But I think people don't consider the underlying assumptions of these claims. They just like how it makes them feel to make the claims. Bottom line: belonging to an historically oppressed group does not automatically make one virtuous. Likewise, belonging to an historically oppressive group does not automatically make one oppressive. *sigh* I can't wait for this moment to pass.
Interesting. I'm also in a university town and a fair amount of the "everything is someone else's fault" rhetoric is definitely coming from the faculty lounge, although it's filtered down to some of the general population too. It's particularly odd to hear such claims coming from POC professors and administrators who must have worked hard to get where they are. Clearly they understood the value of good choices and self-discipline when it came to their own lives and careers.
Oh lardy yes, and maybe I'm stretching it, but today I read a review of the movie Parasite which claimed it was "punching down" because it portrayed members of the underclass as not being completely virtuous, which Plays Into Stereotypes, which must be avoided at all costs, including getting to be portrayed as human.
Yep. There is an entire movement of black supremacy that positions white people as literally Satan: a malign, alien monster that black people must overcome. It's not just white people, and I think it's probable that the idea didn't even come from white people originally. People are just parroting.
unfortunately, I've seen this to be true as well, of ultra liberal black friends and acquaintances, particularly in my many years living in the Bay Area. This is markedly different from years in Brazil where black Brazilians hold each other accountable/responsible in a different way, I think the concept of personal responsibility has its limits, but shouldn't be dismissed outright
Definitely agree that the concept has its limits. I think the "it's never our fault" viewpoint arose in part from a perception (probably an accurate perception) that "personal responsibility" talk was being used to avoid acknowledging systemic racism, but the pendulum has swung too far the other way now.
right, I mean, I get wanting to push back on "personal responsibility" when especially poor people of color are really dealing with crushing inequality and the after effects for many of Jim Crow, deindustrialization etc and also, its oddly disempowered/disempowering to take onself completely out of the picture
By a 40-point margin, voters in San Francisco have just decided to recalll three members of the city's school board. Press accounts attribute the outcome in part to a heavy turnout by Asian-Americans supporters of the recall. One of those supporters, a Chinese-American mother of two public school children, attributed the high turnout by Chinese-Americans in particular to the value that the Chinese place on education: "“That’s been ingrained in Chinese culture for thousands and thousands of years." Does that long-standing Chinese value, if expressed in a school board election in the US, constitute an affirmation of white supremacy? Bear in mind, none of the three of the recalled members is white.
Matt Taibbi reported a similar dynamic among Asian-American parents in Loudon County, VA. They moved there for the schools, where their kids excelled, and then were accused of being white supremacists for opposing the cancellation of gifted & talented programs. (I'm not a huge fan of gifted&talented programs but to accuse Asian-American parents of being white supremacists for valuing these programs is, as they say...problematic).
I'm interested in your objections to gifted and talented programs. Have you seen Abbott Elementary? Its a great show, funny and realistic. They had an episode on the topic.
Haven't seen that show. I worry that these programs uphold the cult of smart and possibly take resources away from programs that serve students who need help just hitting grade level achievement. (It shouldn't be a zero-sum game but it kind of is). On the other hand, I think it's important that all students be challenged and not have to sit through classes that are too easy for them. I'd probably have less objection if they were called something other than "gifted and talented" which idk, maybe some are now, that's what they were called back in my day.
"Gifted and talented" is terrible framing and should be dropped. Just call them classes in this or that, and have prerequisite requirements (eg you need a B or better in algebra to take calculus). And as wide a range of classes as possible should be offered. I'd like to take a class in "advanced caregiving"!
Or to put it another way, when there are "gifted & talented" programs for kids who are great carpenters, caregivers and mechanics, I'll have less of a problem with gifted & talented academic achievement programs.
I hear you (responding to both your comments). I can't see how that'll happen without a major sea change in what school is; what you're describing are trades, which aren't a major part of curriculums anymore. (FWIW I agree with you about recognizing multiple intelligences.)
I don't see these objections around music programs, which like any non STEM or reading program tends to be chronically underfunded. Yet there are honors bands/orchestra, District bands/orchestra, etc. Maybe the objections are out there but I haven't heard any.
I think the lack of vocational classes is part of the problem and a symptom of how trades are devalued and academics are over-valued.
Good question about honors music which I'd never thought about before. I remember being disappointed when I didn't make the prestigious chamber singing group and instead sang in the regular choir but then it turned out I loved it anyway so I didn't really care. I think even in high school I was aware that being in the elite singing group wasn't going to impact the course of my life in the same being in AP classes would.
I would love to see gifted vocational programs! I think we waste a great deal of talent and potential in this country by not focusing more on vocational training.
This: "I am quite certain that almost anyone would rather be the empowered villain than the powerless, blameless nobody." I've thought about this a lot in the context of where Latino and other immigrant voter preferences seem to be heading. If you move to a new country, and upon arrival you are told, "Look, there are two groups here, the oppressors and the victims, the winners and the losers—and this will never change," and then you are given the *choice* of which group to join, I think it's pretty clear (justly or not) what many people would choose...
Lol right? "Do you wanna be on the winning side that gets all the awesome stuff or the losing side that doesn't? Oh wow you chose the losing side what a monster."
Right, but in this scenario victimhood is a higher-status and in many cases higher-reward position than oppressor.
I think it's a higher-social status, but it doesn't seem like it's generally a winner. Outside of maybe some DEI jobs and university bureaucrats, victim mentality seems like a big loser. I don't know anyone with a victims mentality that's actually successful.
Do not forget marriage. I have known many women who changed identification when they married. My mother was from New Mexico with a clearly Hispanic surname; she married my father who was Irish with an Irish surname-- so her children's identities (incl.
mine) were Irish. It was only when I was in my teens that I learned about my Hispanic heritage. I think this is the case for many women in the U.S. Not so much today--people are proud of their heritages but past generations more the case to use marriage the make a change of identity.
How does it feel to be half oppressor and half oppressed?
I think the Irish side was more oppressed by England than the Hispanic side who'd been in NM for hundreds of years. Since I went to university before affirmative action, it was just me, my GPA and my SATs and I waitressed my way through. I think a lot abt what it might have meant if DEI was a factor then. Since I went to mainly public universities I missed knowing about the elite schools. I've only learned since what a difference they make to some people. I'm glad I didn't know. Class does have an effect. My father was IBEW and my mom worked at a 5&10. I've only worked at public universities.
Ah. You're one-a the "salt-of-the-earth" race. I'd HEARD-a them. ;)
My grandmother referred to herself as "Italian By Marriage", spoke Italian, and had a great love of Italian culture (she was actually German).
This is a good point. Young people are encouraged to make these issues their core identity at university - but they are toxic attributes in most real world environments.
"Successful" has as many definitions as there are people walking this planet. There are certainly quite a few fools who think it means "having money and stuff," but the fact that there are lots of them doesn't make them any less wrong.
Having money and stuff is wrong?
Perhaps you meant something a little more nuanced?
No, it's not wrong. It doesn't inherently make you successful tho. Some of the biggest losers in the world are billionaires.
Donald Trump is successful and has a victims mentality.
Unclear what you mean by "see" here. Are you calling me weird, or calling Trump weird?
A victim mentality is a key component to the psychology of any thriving narcissist.
lol at "thriving".
I don't think new immigrants perceive it that way.
Depends entirely on the immigrant and to a lesser extent their identity. This immigrant knows which way the wind is blowing.
You talking about legal or illegal immigrants?
I'm talking about their identity in the context of the article. Legality isn't a huge factor.
I would dispute that there is actually, functionally, higher status for those on whom the victim label is bestowed. I think it serves to signal high social status for those bestowing the label. It is high status to be very visible in recognizing others as victims. The people described as victims are mostly props.
Some people do clearly use the victim label as a weapon against others, as in the case Smith College case, or as a way to seek higher status. I suspect these cases are high-profile exceptions, and that, in most cases, people prefer to be treated as capable agents. This seems to be true for the children and families of color I work with.
This of course is not to say that people are not victimized or that they should be solely held responsible for their condition. Most people recognize nuance here.
When women were given the choice between Madonna and Whore, Betty or Veronica, I think both sides were appealing for different reasons. Both are a trap.
Ha! The law of unintended consequences at work.
Within the current social-identity-power paradigm, it’s almost a win-win if you know how to play your politics in the right circles.
Conservative Hispanic “villain” -> threatening tokenized exception to hegemonic liberal ideology, or strong and radical realist who rejects the true socialist horror from back home for a better life?
Progressive Hispanic “victim” -> infantilized minority who garnishes long-overdue social reparations cred for institutionalized colonialism and white supremacy, or greatest threat to your labor opportunities this country has ever seen?
At what point does this ontological orientation ever concede it’s simultaneous entanglement of baseless moralistic derision and empowerment of identity-culture? I wonder where in the world we’ve seen this before…
Nice!
Germany 1933?
Mhmm. I don’t think that’s what’s going on politically in the States, per se, but it serves the same regressive functionality promoted by ethnocentrism and ethnonationalism
I loathe this crap - and rather ironic given the "centering" they talk about: only white people get "centered" by this nonsense.
Also - can we come up with a better word than "liberals" for this particular political group? It seems hopelessly ill suited by this point. This particular political culture is not liberal in any meaningful sense.
same latin root are corpolite? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprolite
I'm just trying to annoy MarkS!
Just kidding, but you're right, I should think of something else
Hah! The Corporate Social Justice Chimera? Probably needs to be a bit snappier than that... It's almost like its actually very hard to come up with a name for a group whose internal value system is just a cluster of socioeconomic forces at this point.
I'd prefer to call it the DEI movement.
As we know, the Founding Fathers, too, were DEIsts.
I call it DIE. It's obvious.
what is DEI?
Diversity, equity and inclusion.
thx!
Chimera is pretty good.
Yeah, it IS. :)
Successor ideology: inchoate, evolving and a departure from liberalism.
John McWhorter called them the Elect. I think that works as well as anything.
You mean loud, proud and faith-based?
Sounds familiar.
Self-Elect, and also self-nominated.
Yes, everyone should be centering my emotional responses! :)
But seriously, the terminology issue is real. How about "identitarians"?
It seems to me that this group, whatever we call them, draws both from traditional liberals (who are OK with capitalism if it's sufficiently regulated) and the tradional left (who are not OK with capitalism). This group's defining feature is putting body-intrinsic identity over class.
I don't know, the Woke also seem invested in the idea of being transhuman. To put it another way, I think they struggle with ideas about being embodied.
You might not have to. I have not read it, but Lev Gumilev’s Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere may have some insight on the ontological/epistemological matter that seems to be prevalent in this line of thought.
The influence of postmodernist thought, the combination of standpoint epistemology and racial/ethnic groupthink, and the excessively irrational moralization over identity/culture (which contains proto-fascistic ideological tendencies, but is not to say that they are in themselves fascist) all point towards an old-school conceptualization of race-nationalism thought and cultural determinacy.
They’re ethnocentrists, if not ethnonationalists. Identitarians could be sufficient, but I see that more as an extension/expression of being ethnocentric.
'Ethnocentrists' is useful - thanks
Cedric Johnson has been using the term “radlib” which I think works.
yes, though I don't very much love the idea of all these conservatives and liberatarians on the thread picking it up. sigh
radlibs makes them sound like a bunch of cool enlightened bmx bikers
they may be radical (and sanctimonious, pompous, and insufferable), but they’re not rad
yeah, "an expression of radical liberalism" or "radical racial liberalism" and actually really just pulling back from labeling people like this in general, I think is preferable, but you'r right, lol
They're also, as noted, not liberal in any meaningful sense.
The IDW “anti-woke” crowd uses “leftists”. But I fear that this, like all labels, starts to become pejorative & the term gets abused by reactionaries.
I just say “current social justice orthodoxy”. It’s a mouthful but that keeps it out of hashtag country.
Sam Killermann calls the narrative Social Justice Dogma. So, how about SJ Dogs? ;-)
Agreed, except for the fact that we don't have a name for this movement: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what?r=lbykm
I think "ultraliberal" or "radical liberal" works just fine, that's what Marxists have been calling it...and I say Marxist with love and affection...
I like "RadLibs" myself. Short and definitely to the point.
Neither of those addresses the root terminology problem, in my opinion. Both of those terms strongly suggest that this cohort are somehow more liberal, when the opposite is generally true.
May I suggest Progressive instead of Liberal? Try Leonard's excellent book, Illiberal Reformers, for a discussion of the history and principles of the Progressive movement in the US. Not a pretty picture. In reality Liberal is just a name they stole because it sounds good. (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169590/illiberal-reformers)
Try discussing this outside of the US, where 'liberals' is not understood in the same way. I'm desperate for a name to call the leftish (group-signalling, morally-focused centrists).
Doesn't "progressive" describe the group that holds both weak and strong versions of these claims? Moreover, that term is consistent with their self-id, so it avoids needlessly alienating snark (apart from the self-identification of those that embrace the radical chic of more extreme labels).
I agree that "liberal" is nowhere near accurate. The fact that we sometimes use it to describe them is a bizarre artifact of the Michael Kinsley / Pat Buchanan Crossfire era.
I read this stuff a bit differently. I think that race is the only acceptable lens through which to discuss class. You hear something like "whiteness caused this non-white person to kill this other non-white person." Now, replace "whiteness" with "poverty" or something similar, and a lot of these ideas start to make some sense. We can't discuss the round hole of class, so we try to fit the square peg of race into it
Exactly. Discussing class would cost our so-called leaders. Discussing race, not so much.
If the general public is tied up with arguing amongst itself about identity, then it is unable to make any type of unified effort against global inequality or militarism. It's why defense contractors, large banks, and the like can put a simple icon on their social media apps and still rake in $$$ pushing policies and changes that negatively affects the rest of the country/planet.
That's right
In my grumpier moments, I think there's also an element of rich white lefties subconsciously just wanting enough cosmetic racial equality that they can feel comfortable not caring about poor black people as much as they don't care about poor white people.
It's a new version of deserving vs undeserving poor. Poor because of racism? That's unfair! Poor for the normal reasons? That's fine.
I don't need a grumpy moment. With corporations, this is probably the most generous explanation you can come up with. They play the game to distract from the fact that they have impoverished millions in this country, including minorities, while using our tax dollars, our military, and our infrastructure to bolster their presence globally. "Rich white lefties" run many of these companies and profit from them, and they themselves use the technique to deflect from the fact that they really don't care about anybody that won't further their own agendas, so not just the poor but the working class and the middle class, whom they see as interchangeable players that have no speaking parts and really have no names and no faces (literally sometimes as the pictures would prove).
As they'd say on Succession, "not a real person."
"They play the game to distract from the fact that they have impoverished millions in this country, including minorities, while using our tax dollars, our military, and our infrastructure to bolster their presence globally." Bingo!
Yes. Much of this is about optics. Which will feed their sanctimony.
An element? This is very obviously what it's all about, and has been since the late Obama years.
I think to understand the state of the world (the "world system" we have going), you gotta know about European colonialism and the way race has been intertwined with class oppression, and a lot of people do experience class oppression through race (and gender etc).
But there's also the history of oppression of poor white people (There's a book called "White Trash" that's all about that.)
And the example I give to put things into perspective is India. Most of what I know about modern Indian history comes from reading Salman Rushdie's novels, and there's the very good book "Maximum City" about modern Bombay, and the racism/caste issue is huge and complex. Lots of irrational hatred going on, but if you put all of those people in the US, they would all fall underneath south Asian "race".
People hate each other all over the world, and if you magically solved the European vs African "race" issue, people would find other reasons.
(This is why class should be the first analysis, but that's another discussion.)
Edit:I meant to reply one level up.
White Trash by Nancy Isenberg: https://www.amazon.com/White-Trash-400-Year-History-America/dp/0143129678
It's a very good read.
I think there’s something to this. The way some liberals talk about diversifying spaces or whatever makes it sound like they’re leveling the playing field of opportunity, when in practice it is often replacing a rich white person with a rich Black person
This morning I was listening to the LA Times daily podcast and it was about the death penalty in California. They talked about a prison warden, who in the mid century advocated for abolishment of the death penalty, and they shared a quote: “I’ve never seen a rich man executed in California”. Then the guest commentator said “he didn’t use the word racism but that’s clearly what he was talking about.” I was a bit confused. I am 100% sure there was a ton of racism involved in deciding who was executed in California throughout our entire history but I do not see any evidence that that’s what this person meant, nor do I think we need to apologize for every mention of class as a factor with a disclaimer that what we really mean is race. Your comment “race is the only acceptable lens through which to discuss class” really rings true to me today.
I'd bet my life you are right: the prison warden was talking about economic class. He probably would have noticed that many prisoners were poor AND non-white, but he would not be so ridiculous as to assume that poverty was not a factor. The truth is, rich people of EVERY race in the U.S. live better than poor people.
Kinda obvious point.
When you look at any broad, societal issue here in the USA, whether it's education or policing or housing or economic inequality whatever, it's easy to make the case that the core problem is racism or white supremacy. Structural racism and its effects are broad and deep, so when there is a bad thing happening, black people get the worst of it. So all you have to do is have a cursory look at the data and go, "See, that's racism".
But most of these issues aren't specifically about race and insisting they are elides the actual problem and impedes discussion of plausible solutions.
For example, I've seen people argue that the only issue with police misconduct in this country is race because cops are always friendly and deferential to whites. To which I have so say, "Have you ever had a run in with the police? The only color they really care about is blue."
You've explained the pernicious manifestation of structural racism better than I've ever seen before. I'm stealing your thought 👍🏻
I've had a few run-ins. They also care about race and class, if my experience driving cross country with a black man is any indicator (horrific), when compared with no-black-man-in-car (much nicer) when compared with being a member of the state bar (let off with a warning every time). YMMV of course, but I think only to the extent that their profiling aptitude is reliable.
Let me rephrase and say, "The color they care about MOST is blue". Obviously there's still a lot of racial profiling going on. It's just that being white is far from a guarantee of good and fair treatment.
Great point. I bet you could do this swap with much of the current racial discourse these days. Because at the end of the day it really IS about class isn’t it?
“Black” people don’t need more “representation” or chalkboards patting them on head. They need fucking money. I’d like to see that on a hipster cafe’s chalkboard. “We’re giving all our profits to black people!” Or just to the poor (which would help lots of black people, but we can’t do that if it helps poor white people too)!
It is both, though, right?
So, saying that white supremacy moves POC to kill other POC does remove agency from POC. Which is ridiculous.
At the same time, it often seems the case that aggrieved groups will target the weakest members of the out group. For example, it is probably easier, for racist and misogynistic reasons, to target Asian women, rather than white men, for a racially motivated murder.
We currently see this with transactivists and anti-racists, who disproportionally target women over men for their activities.
I never understood this either as I've always felt like if you've blaming white people for everything bad that ever happens to black people, then by logic white people are also responsible for everything good that happens to black people.
Logic doesn't come into it. Nobody's looking for consistency or trying to avoid hypocrisy. You're not going to own them with facts and logic. The only way to win is not to play. Reject all race-baiting.
“In Smithsonian Race Guidelines, Rational Thinking and Hard Work are White Values.”
--Newsweek
It's a weird way of putting people of color in a box. So Kamala Harris will never be seen as someone who was the Veep choice because she was the strongest candidate. If the white people are the ones deciding who succeeds based on skin color, aka equity, then it's still the same game. Meet the new white supremacy, same as the old white supremacy. I think about young girls from Afghanistan thrust into American schools having to learn that nonsense. They will no doubt conclude Americans are ridiculous. How could they not.
Meet the new boss same as the old boss: Babe O Reilly , The Who.
autocorrect got you there I think ... and anyway right band wrong song, that line is from Won't Get Fooled Again.
Great song. I always imagine it being sung right after the marxist revolution.
Damn!
"Kamala Harris will never be seen as someone who was the Veep choice because she was the strongest candidate"
That's always true. You never choose a running mate who can take your job if things go bad in your first term. You choose some clueless dunce who makes you look good. You leave your opposition with The Poison Pill so they won't impeach you. President Biden would be out today if Harris wasn't the poison pill.
"clueless dunce"? Harris?
This is a woman who proudly slept her way up the ladder of success (with California Assembly leader Willy Brown, basically the Nancy Pelosi of the California Legislature).
When she was California Attorney General, proposed holding state prisoners past their release dates because the state needed them to fight forest fires.
Umm ... this is the definition of slavery, forcefully holding people against their will, forcing them to work.
Per the above, the problem with Whitey-as-agency isn't that it's wrong. It isn't that it's dictionary-definition blood libel, to blame one group in society for every sin, regardless of whether it's true or who actually did it. No, it's wrong because 1) Whites aren't protagonists and 2) Whites might get an ego trip out of it.
The White blame for anti-Asian hate will continue, then, until morale decreases.
This is perfect. Denying agency to the majority of the world’s population is condescending: “The insistence that white people are ultimately responsible for everything bad in the world is immensely insulting to people of color. It casts them as the victims of history, consigned to a role of powerlessness and anonymity, in contrast with the white people who rule the world and make history go. Like so much of our ostensibly progressive racial discourse this frame ultimately portrays people who aren’t white as children, blameless and weak.”
I feel like the backlash to this condescension is going to be very, very, very bad for the Left.
I think we already started seeing it in 2016, followed by Youngkin's victory in VA last year.
That backlash will only make them push back harder in the areas that they still fully control like the media and the academy (and potentially the elite business world as well, though outside of a few tech companies they seem more faux-woke than truly dedicated to the cause). If you think the current ideological litmus tests in academia and one-sided reporting are bad now, I regret to inform you that it will get worse.
That is is pretty much the argument made in this Substack post by N.S. Lyons:
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over?r=u7d1z
Yep. Personnel is policy. The personnel are in place and not leaving anytime soon. The Left should be thrilled that conservative politicians are so incompetent that they have no idea how to manage education systems effectively.
The irony of course is that what they'll implement will be similar to the current overbroad laws being passed by GOP state legs. Except instead of bans of CRT, they'll mandate it by policy and hire DEI auditors for syllabi, classes, organizations, committee meetings, etc. to enforce it.
Whenever I read this sort of thing I always come to the same conclusion: our grandparents would be ashamed of us.
Recently read: "white people have been harming us for hundreds of thousands of years." I blame white Neanderthals.
Not too far from the truth. Sub-Saharan African populations don't have Neanderthal genomes while Europeans generally have a small amount.
Except Neanderthals are the extinct ones #habiluswillnotreplaceus
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-25885519
White people feeling shame about their whiteness and the historical behavior of some people in that group is the same as white people feeling like they are the anointed ones who rule the world; it is incredibly narcissistic. Some people of color do get an upsurge of feeling powerful by being able to legitimately shame white people; some even write books that make them a lot of money. Most of us who have been there done that (in whatever form we did) understand that feelings of self worth created by oppositional denigrating of others rarely is a decent foundation for a life. Sooner or later the whole things comes apart and those old feelings of worthlessness emerge again.
I have thought a lot about this, as you have Freddie, and it seems to me from my own experience in life that most people in this world are in one way or another oppressed by others. Some more than others to be sure. I am a polytheistic animist and like all people of other faiths I have had to deal most of my life with denigrating put downs by christians, have had to encounter their book being cited as an authoritative source even in scientific journals that should know better. Unlike many other faiths, i have had to experience christians calling for my death and using their book as the authority for doing so.
I have found however that this opposition (from christians as well as reductive scientists who are anti-animist to their core) has, instead of reducing me to a victim, engendered the emergence of a strength, an acuity of intellect, and a creativity that i doubt i would have developed any other way. By their, admittedly, simple epistemology being forced upon me for most of my life, i have had to think my way through the flaws in that system of thought. it has forced me to understand in far deeper ways than i otherwise could have done.
I wish that we lived in a culture which had more of the cultural support as some European countries do for their citizens. we are a barbarous culture in far too many ways. Despite this and my work toward such a way of being for most of my life, i still believe in the promise of the constitution, in the work of people like Martin Luther King, jr, and James Baldwin and vaclav Havel and so many others. they have helped me find my own deeper humanity over the years of my contemplation of their words.
I believe it incumbent upon us to oppose the identification of people by the color of their skin as firmly as we can. And to oppose the forces that set us against one another for their own purposes.
And as i see more people standing up and refusing to accede to the woke brigade by articulating the kind of responses you have made here, it does feel to me, that as slow as it is, the tide is beginning to turn.
Stephen, in case you don't already know of it, I think you would like https://rhyd.substack.com
It's very strange, this idea that everything bad that happens must be in some way related to race and ultimately a product of white supremacy. It is pretty tiresome.
LT John R. Fox won a posthumous Medal of Honor for his actions in WW2.
His unit took a town from the fascists in Italy, and was about to get bumrushed by the Wehrmacht who were hell bent on taking it back. The Americans didn’t have the assets on hand to repel them and reinforcements weren’t gonna show up in time.
Fox told his guys to bounce while he stayed behind alone. He got up in a tall building with a pair of binos and radio and starting calling in artillery strikes onto the attacking forces.
As the enemy closed in to within a few feet of his position and preparing to assault and clear his building, he called in artillery on his own grid. His commanding officer protested that it was definitely going to kill him, but Fox said “Don’t care, do it.”
When the Americans counter-counterattacked, they easily retook the town and found a pile of fascist corpses in a ring around Fox’s bombed out position.
Anyone who says that Fox, due to the color of his skin, lacked moral agency in his decision to sacrifice his life to land hammer blows onto the fascist war machine is anti-American.
Or that Black people have so few accomplishments that we can easily name them all.
Thank you for this. The ego of the white liberal is quite amazing, and the inferiority complex of minorities that buy into it. But it is quite useful for not addressing real problems, generally those surrounding caste and class.
"which, like all liberal narratives, is primarily espoused by white people"
Not so sure about this. I have seen left-leaning Black people all-but-explicitly say that no Black person is ever responsible for their own bad choices, up to and including murder; that the whole concept of personal responsibility is racist if applied to Black people. That certainly seems to be an underlying thread in Kendi-ism, which holds that any difference in outcomes can only be the product of racism, not of culture or personal choices. I agree that the whole thing seems terribly racist and condescending in itself, but some folks are apparently fine with that as long as they can leverage it for political or social power.
YES! I think this point needs to be made again and again. When someone claims that white people are the ones promoting the narrative that white people are responsible for all bad things I can't help but think that the claim is illustrating what is being claimed. (i.e., Why do we espouse the harmful idea that white people are guilty of everything? Because white people are guilty of promoting that harmful idea!) Where I work (at a university) lots of people who would not call themselves white pin all bad things on white people. They also pin all good things on non-white people, which is also a problem. But I think people don't consider the underlying assumptions of these claims. They just like how it makes them feel to make the claims. Bottom line: belonging to an historically oppressed group does not automatically make one virtuous. Likewise, belonging to an historically oppressive group does not automatically make one oppressive. *sigh* I can't wait for this moment to pass.
Interesting. I'm also in a university town and a fair amount of the "everything is someone else's fault" rhetoric is definitely coming from the faculty lounge, although it's filtered down to some of the general population too. It's particularly odd to hear such claims coming from POC professors and administrators who must have worked hard to get where they are. Clearly they understood the value of good choices and self-discipline when it came to their own lives and careers.
I like blaming capitalism -- or better, hierarchy -- for everything. It's fun and easy! Can't we do that instead?
I can't wait, either. Hang in there.
Oh lardy yes, and maybe I'm stretching it, but today I read a review of the movie Parasite which claimed it was "punching down" because it portrayed members of the underclass as not being completely virtuous, which Plays Into Stereotypes, which must be avoided at all costs, including getting to be portrayed as human.
Yep. There is an entire movement of black supremacy that positions white people as literally Satan: a malign, alien monster that black people must overcome. It's not just white people, and I think it's probable that the idea didn't even come from white people originally. People are just parroting.
I agree. That's why I say the vast majority of black supremists are caucasian.
unfortunately, I've seen this to be true as well, of ultra liberal black friends and acquaintances, particularly in my many years living in the Bay Area. This is markedly different from years in Brazil where black Brazilians hold each other accountable/responsible in a different way, I think the concept of personal responsibility has its limits, but shouldn't be dismissed outright
Definitely agree that the concept has its limits. I think the "it's never our fault" viewpoint arose in part from a perception (probably an accurate perception) that "personal responsibility" talk was being used to avoid acknowledging systemic racism, but the pendulum has swung too far the other way now.
right, I mean, I get wanting to push back on "personal responsibility" when especially poor people of color are really dealing with crushing inequality and the after effects for many of Jim Crow, deindustrialization etc and also, its oddly disempowered/disempowering to take onself completely out of the picture
Is this what's happening at Tesla Fremont with the accusations of racism?
Idk the details but I don't think we should assume there is NOT racism necessarily
Structural or personal racism?
How to prove it?
Moral panic?
By a 40-point margin, voters in San Francisco have just decided to recalll three members of the city's school board. Press accounts attribute the outcome in part to a heavy turnout by Asian-Americans supporters of the recall. One of those supporters, a Chinese-American mother of two public school children, attributed the high turnout by Chinese-Americans in particular to the value that the Chinese place on education: "“That’s been ingrained in Chinese culture for thousands and thousands of years." Does that long-standing Chinese value, if expressed in a school board election in the US, constitute an affirmation of white supremacy? Bear in mind, none of the three of the recalled members is white.
Matt Taibbi reported a similar dynamic among Asian-American parents in Loudon County, VA. They moved there for the schools, where their kids excelled, and then were accused of being white supremacists for opposing the cancellation of gifted & talented programs. (I'm not a huge fan of gifted&talented programs but to accuse Asian-American parents of being white supremacists for valuing these programs is, as they say...problematic).
I'm interested in your objections to gifted and talented programs. Have you seen Abbott Elementary? Its a great show, funny and realistic. They had an episode on the topic.
Haven't seen that show. I worry that these programs uphold the cult of smart and possibly take resources away from programs that serve students who need help just hitting grade level achievement. (It shouldn't be a zero-sum game but it kind of is). On the other hand, I think it's important that all students be challenged and not have to sit through classes that are too easy for them. I'd probably have less objection if they were called something other than "gifted and talented" which idk, maybe some are now, that's what they were called back in my day.
"Gifted and talented" is terrible framing and should be dropped. Just call them classes in this or that, and have prerequisite requirements (eg you need a B or better in algebra to take calculus). And as wide a range of classes as possible should be offered. I'd like to take a class in "advanced caregiving"!
Or to put it another way, when there are "gifted & talented" programs for kids who are great carpenters, caregivers and mechanics, I'll have less of a problem with gifted & talented academic achievement programs.
I hear you (responding to both your comments). I can't see how that'll happen without a major sea change in what school is; what you're describing are trades, which aren't a major part of curriculums anymore. (FWIW I agree with you about recognizing multiple intelligences.)
I don't see these objections around music programs, which like any non STEM or reading program tends to be chronically underfunded. Yet there are honors bands/orchestra, District bands/orchestra, etc. Maybe the objections are out there but I haven't heard any.
I think the lack of vocational classes is part of the problem and a symptom of how trades are devalued and academics are over-valued.
Good question about honors music which I'd never thought about before. I remember being disappointed when I didn't make the prestigious chamber singing group and instead sang in the regular choir but then it turned out I loved it anyway so I didn't really care. I think even in high school I was aware that being in the elite singing group wasn't going to impact the course of my life in the same being in AP classes would.
I would love to see gifted vocational programs! I think we waste a great deal of talent and potential in this country by not focusing more on vocational training.
Shop classes, typing and honors/AP calculus was my path. Couldn't get into home economics.
Funny, they look white.
...sigh...