You can add: when the Spaniards arrived in what is today Latin America, they found two huge empires - no other word will do - the Inca and the Aztec. And before these, we have 1,000 years of archeological evidence of one empire/nation subjugating another in an endless cycle. Europeans did not need to invent any of this. Also, yes, the idea that Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Indians, and others are incapable of hating, fighting, and oppressing one another without European "inspiration" is just insanely condescending. Have none of these people ever heard of Genghis Kahn or the Mughal Empire?
The historical ignorance here is appalling--it's one of those "Spain is the capital of Mexico", "what are they teaching in schools these days" gut check moments.
It's incorrect to suggest SWPL whites don't feel racialized, or that indictments of "white people" resonate, to them, as merely encompassing other, bad white people. Any white lib in publishing feels racialized -- how could she not? "Wokeness" is the ocean in which she swims. She knows she is not merely a Swarthmore grad, but a *white* Swarthmore grad, not merely a mom, but a *white* mom; one of her greatest daily efforts is to avoid behaving like the *white* feminist she's always been.
She's comfortable with indictments of white people because she knows they encompass her and she enjoys this form of abasement. Much like the Puritans who named their kids Festering-Rotten-Sinner Smith, she enjoys being reminded of her place in the world. I think it's a combination of masochistic pathology and the confidence that by debasing herself, she gets to debase other white people, too.
WWII-era Japan was definitely an imperial power, but for some reason I'm a lot more bothered by the fire bombing of Japanese cities in 1945 than I am by the destruction of Dresden, Germany (and I feel that has little to do with the disparaties in deaths of those two events).
Anyone else feel similarly? And if so, do you know why that is?
Re: the Smith college episode, I wonder if you might employ a bit more imagination to see if there's any version of the student's experience you might sympathize with.
First, we shouldn't assume the student intended to break the rules -- it's not like she picked a lock, she just went and sat in a place that was totally common to sit and eat, that's explicitly for students like her, which presumably had some sort of sign saying that the building was temporarily not in service. Signs are often unobtrusive, wordy, out of date, etc.
Second, I'm guessing that a lot depends on the manner in which a security guard approaches someone to get them to move. My heart has definitely beat fast, with my body in fight or flight mode, when a cop or security guard has made me move -- sometimes there is a distinct element of threat of violence in how they talk to me. I'm White, and I have seen firsthand the added element of threat that is sometimes present when cops or guards are talking to Black people, regardless of the race of the cop/guard.
All of this is to say that maybe the student is a whiny, entitled distraction from what really matters. Or, maybe if you were a fly on the wall, you would have been horrified at what you witnessed, and want it to be an issue that the university sees as a real problem with students' sense of safety and inclusion on campus.
"One of the biggest problems with this condescending insistence that people of color are permanent victims is that insisting that they have no ability to make change in the world hinders our ability to make intelligent determinations about choices of relevance to them moving forward." I generally agree with everything in the essay but sentences like the above bump me. Who the heck is "our" and why are their choices important? Doesn't the second part of the sentence do what the first part calls a problem?
I can't be the only one who's noticed that much of liberal-progressive ideology is just taking the most demeaning and degrading stereotypes about marginalized people and saying "this is good actually, and if you disagree you're a fascist". It's almost deliberately designed to reinforce traditional bigotries through indirect means.
Example: BIPOC are dumb and have Other ways Of Knowing and so need the bar lowered for them to succeed, but this is good actually.
Women are hysterical and emotional and vulnerable and need men to be chiv... I mean be Better Allies, but this good actually.
Gays are annoying promiscuous degenerates, but this is good actually. Trans people have irrational and unstable self concepts and will rope without endless validation from society, but this is good actually.
Since all functional, well adjusted people are aware that weakness, incontinence, irrationality, and stupidity are bad things, and no amount of liberal scolding is going to make this self-evidently true fact less self-evidently true, all this has the inevitable effect of increasing bigotry towards marginalized groups, regardless of the progressives insisting that "This Is Good Actually".
This post is extremely truthy. The notion that there's this whole broad wing of SJ-aligned liberals and leftists who want to deny that Japan was imperialist certainly sounds true, and it's an appealing idea for the logical leftist who wants everyone to be treated with respect.
But is it true? For all I know, maybe, but this post has utterly failed to convince me that this demographic exists beyond a few teenagers on Twitter, and therefore it fails as a post. You need more evidence than "people I've talked to". Again, the notion is an appealing one, but it could easily be exaggerated or outright fabricated.
Beinart denies it in his post, but as my comment states, I feel there is a direct line between “Israel is a colonial settler project” and “Israel is a satellite of American anti-Blackness”
But I’m truly curious of your thoughts on Beinart’s framing? I think the connection to anti-Blackness is more wrong than right (point of fact is Likud gained political strength as a reaction to Ashkenazi (and therefore “white”) sense of superiority over Mizrahi, so it’s to some extent backwards), but the framing seems very effective, likely because of what you describe in your post.
Great post. Reminds me of a passage from George W. S. Trow's Within the Context of No Context:
"During the 1960s, a young black man in a university class described the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century as 'belonging' to the white students in the room, and not to him. This idea was seized on by white members of the class. They acknowledged that they were at one with Rembrandt. They acknowledged their dominance. They offered to discuss, at any length, their inherited power to oppress. It was thought at the time that reactions of this type had to do with 'white guilt' or 'white masochism.' No. No. It was white euphoria. Many, many white children of that day felt the power of their inheritance for the first time in the act of rejecting it, and they insisted on rejecting it and rejecting it and rejecting it, so that they might continue to feel the power of that connection. Had the young black man asked, 'Who is this man to you?' the pleasure they felt would have vanished in embarrassment and resentment."
Thinking more about this whole thing, it seems to me that the self-centered condescension starts and goes even deeper. Bear with me for a sec. When you say the word "summer" in Europe or the U.S., the average person thinks "July/August." But when you say the same word in Argentina or Australia, people (of course) think "January/February."
Now, all of us know this to a certain degree, but if we live in the North, there is still an element of "weirdness" about it; we almost can't help feeling that "our" summer is the right one, the correct one, and theirs is a bit weird. And the fascinating thing about this is that only after you live in Argentina or Chile for a while do you realize that for them it is *equally* weird that summer here is in July. It's like, *of course* summer is in January! We end school in December and then break for two months. That makes sense! Summer in July is weird!
All this to say, that the very word "history" is just as loaded. To an educated person in Europe or the U.S., it immediately evokes a line of "Caves-Mesopotamia-Greece-Rome-Middle Ages-Rennaisance-Revolutions-Napoleon... etc..." And it takes a huge mental effort to realize and accept that for a kid growing up in China that whole line may be as alien and "irrelevant" as the line of Chinese dynasties are to the a kid growing up in France.
(I remember a friend who years ago moved from Germany to Israel to study music at the university there. After a few months, she was shocked to discover that none of her Israeli classmates had ever heard of Martin Luther. "How can you understand Bach without Luther?! This is nuts!" Well, yes, but Israel is primarily a Jewish and Muslim country, and so most kids may never hear about the Reformation. In fact, many have never even heard of the New Testament.)
And so when people take this approach you mentioned, they are - ironically - "centering whiteness" to an extreme degree, while it is in fact entirely possible to be an educated person in another culture without "European Imperialism," or almost any part of European history, playing a central role in your consciousness.
I would like to suggest that the new fashion of capitalizing "black" and not "white" is a linguistic example of denying agency to blacks: they have a special need to be capitalized.
burkina* faso
You can add: when the Spaniards arrived in what is today Latin America, they found two huge empires - no other word will do - the Inca and the Aztec. And before these, we have 1,000 years of archeological evidence of one empire/nation subjugating another in an endless cycle. Europeans did not need to invent any of this. Also, yes, the idea that Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Indians, and others are incapable of hating, fighting, and oppressing one another without European "inspiration" is just insanely condescending. Have none of these people ever heard of Genghis Kahn or the Mughal Empire?
The historical ignorance here is appalling--it's one of those "Spain is the capital of Mexico", "what are they teaching in schools these days" gut check moments.
It's incorrect to suggest SWPL whites don't feel racialized, or that indictments of "white people" resonate, to them, as merely encompassing other, bad white people. Any white lib in publishing feels racialized -- how could she not? "Wokeness" is the ocean in which she swims. She knows she is not merely a Swarthmore grad, but a *white* Swarthmore grad, not merely a mom, but a *white* mom; one of her greatest daily efforts is to avoid behaving like the *white* feminist she's always been.
She's comfortable with indictments of white people because she knows they encompass her and she enjoys this form of abasement. Much like the Puritans who named their kids Festering-Rotten-Sinner Smith, she enjoys being reminded of her place in the world. I think it's a combination of masochistic pathology and the confidence that by debasing herself, she gets to debase other white people, too.
WWII-era Japan was definitely an imperial power, but for some reason I'm a lot more bothered by the fire bombing of Japanese cities in 1945 than I am by the destruction of Dresden, Germany (and I feel that has little to do with the disparaties in deaths of those two events).
Anyone else feel similarly? And if so, do you know why that is?
Re: the Smith college episode, I wonder if you might employ a bit more imagination to see if there's any version of the student's experience you might sympathize with.
First, we shouldn't assume the student intended to break the rules -- it's not like she picked a lock, she just went and sat in a place that was totally common to sit and eat, that's explicitly for students like her, which presumably had some sort of sign saying that the building was temporarily not in service. Signs are often unobtrusive, wordy, out of date, etc.
Second, I'm guessing that a lot depends on the manner in which a security guard approaches someone to get them to move. My heart has definitely beat fast, with my body in fight or flight mode, when a cop or security guard has made me move -- sometimes there is a distinct element of threat of violence in how they talk to me. I'm White, and I have seen firsthand the added element of threat that is sometimes present when cops or guards are talking to Black people, regardless of the race of the cop/guard.
All of this is to say that maybe the student is a whiny, entitled distraction from what really matters. Or, maybe if you were a fly on the wall, you would have been horrified at what you witnessed, and want it to be an issue that the university sees as a real problem with students' sense of safety and inclusion on campus.
Don't be too smug!
Just a sidebar, I’m a historian, and I have to say I’ve never met anyone who thought imperial Japan wasn’t a racist or fascist state.
(I also am not an Asian Historian, so I’ll admit i’m not familiar with the historiography either. Maybe I don’t want to be!)
"One of the biggest problems with this condescending insistence that people of color are permanent victims is that insisting that they have no ability to make change in the world hinders our ability to make intelligent determinations about choices of relevance to them moving forward." I generally agree with everything in the essay but sentences like the above bump me. Who the heck is "our" and why are their choices important? Doesn't the second part of the sentence do what the first part calls a problem?
I can't be the only one who's noticed that much of liberal-progressive ideology is just taking the most demeaning and degrading stereotypes about marginalized people and saying "this is good actually, and if you disagree you're a fascist". It's almost deliberately designed to reinforce traditional bigotries through indirect means.
Example: BIPOC are dumb and have Other ways Of Knowing and so need the bar lowered for them to succeed, but this is good actually.
Women are hysterical and emotional and vulnerable and need men to be chiv... I mean be Better Allies, but this good actually.
Gays are annoying promiscuous degenerates, but this is good actually. Trans people have irrational and unstable self concepts and will rope without endless validation from society, but this is good actually.
Since all functional, well adjusted people are aware that weakness, incontinence, irrationality, and stupidity are bad things, and no amount of liberal scolding is going to make this self-evidently true fact less self-evidently true, all this has the inevitable effect of increasing bigotry towards marginalized groups, regardless of the progressives insisting that "This Is Good Actually".
This post is extremely truthy. The notion that there's this whole broad wing of SJ-aligned liberals and leftists who want to deny that Japan was imperialist certainly sounds true, and it's an appealing idea for the logical leftist who wants everyone to be treated with respect.
But is it true? For all I know, maybe, but this post has utterly failed to convince me that this demographic exists beyond a few teenagers on Twitter, and therefore it fails as a post. You need more evidence than "people I've talked to". Again, the notion is an appealing one, but it could easily be exaggerated or outright fabricated.
People who don't think Japan was imperialist should watch "Red Sorghum". Actually you should watch "Red Sorghum" anyway, it's an amazing movie.
It so happens that this also dropped in my inbox today, and it seems like the sort of “everything devolves to whiteness” thing that you state here:
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/progressives-are-comparing-palestinians/comments
Beinart denies it in his post, but as my comment states, I feel there is a direct line between “Israel is a colonial settler project” and “Israel is a satellite of American anti-Blackness”
But I’m truly curious of your thoughts on Beinart’s framing? I think the connection to anti-Blackness is more wrong than right (point of fact is Likud gained political strength as a reaction to Ashkenazi (and therefore “white”) sense of superiority over Mizrahi, so it’s to some extent backwards), but the framing seems very effective, likely because of what you describe in your post.
Great post. Reminds me of a passage from George W. S. Trow's Within the Context of No Context:
"During the 1960s, a young black man in a university class described the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century as 'belonging' to the white students in the room, and not to him. This idea was seized on by white members of the class. They acknowledged that they were at one with Rembrandt. They acknowledged their dominance. They offered to discuss, at any length, their inherited power to oppress. It was thought at the time that reactions of this type had to do with 'white guilt' or 'white masochism.' No. No. It was white euphoria. Many, many white children of that day felt the power of their inheritance for the first time in the act of rejecting it, and they insisted on rejecting it and rejecting it and rejecting it, so that they might continue to feel the power of that connection. Had the young black man asked, 'Who is this man to you?' the pleasure they felt would have vanished in embarrassment and resentment."
Thinking more about this whole thing, it seems to me that the self-centered condescension starts and goes even deeper. Bear with me for a sec. When you say the word "summer" in Europe or the U.S., the average person thinks "July/August." But when you say the same word in Argentina or Australia, people (of course) think "January/February."
Now, all of us know this to a certain degree, but if we live in the North, there is still an element of "weirdness" about it; we almost can't help feeling that "our" summer is the right one, the correct one, and theirs is a bit weird. And the fascinating thing about this is that only after you live in Argentina or Chile for a while do you realize that for them it is *equally* weird that summer here is in July. It's like, *of course* summer is in January! We end school in December and then break for two months. That makes sense! Summer in July is weird!
All this to say, that the very word "history" is just as loaded. To an educated person in Europe or the U.S., it immediately evokes a line of "Caves-Mesopotamia-Greece-Rome-Middle Ages-Rennaisance-Revolutions-Napoleon... etc..." And it takes a huge mental effort to realize and accept that for a kid growing up in China that whole line may be as alien and "irrelevant" as the line of Chinese dynasties are to the a kid growing up in France.
(I remember a friend who years ago moved from Germany to Israel to study music at the university there. After a few months, she was shocked to discover that none of her Israeli classmates had ever heard of Martin Luther. "How can you understand Bach without Luther?! This is nuts!" Well, yes, but Israel is primarily a Jewish and Muslim country, and so most kids may never hear about the Reformation. In fact, many have never even heard of the New Testament.)
And so when people take this approach you mentioned, they are - ironically - "centering whiteness" to an extreme degree, while it is in fact entirely possible to be an educated person in another culture without "European Imperialism," or almost any part of European history, playing a central role in your consciousness.
I hope that made some sense :)
I would like to suggest that the new fashion of capitalizing "black" and not "white" is a linguistic example of denying agency to blacks: they have a special need to be capitalized.