Sort of! But it's also a recognition of the fact that there is a shared American Black identity, in the same way that there is a shared nationalistic identity in pretty much every nation, and there really isn't, say, a pan-African identity at all. There really isn't a similar shared white identity, because instead you get to be Irish or German or French or something. I personally don't look at a mime and say 'ah yes, that's my culture' because I'm not a Frenchman and am not descended from Frenchmen. There's a little bit of solidarity among Western European descended Americans but that's not really a very strong force, and doesn't extend to other white people like say Georgians or Slavs. And there's a history of white hatred towards other white people, like the Irish (extremely pale, only became white within the last 100 years) and the Italians (invented much of Western Civilization, I've encountered people who absolutely insist that they are not white). White people have tribal affiliations that allow them to escape a sense of universal brotherhood. Of course, if you spend too much time grappling with the tribal stuff you're a jerk and probably nazi-adjacent but even if you don't, you don't feel a strong sense of cultural connection with people from across the continent from your ancestors. And you probably know at least vaguely where those ancestors are from.
People whose identities have been stripped away by, just as a for instance, centuries of slavery, might reasonably look at anything that their peers in post-slavery life have preserved or reinvented as culturally theirs as well. Their right to hate one another for tribal reasons has been stripped away by The Oppressor. So you get Black As Identity.
This is a silly question. Identity is, by its nature, reductive. "I'm gay" is reductive as hell, gay people are all kinds of people. So is "I'm American." People in Colorado are different than people from California and Connecticut. "I think that this small piece of my lived experience that I share with others is a big part of who I am, when I meet people I will tell them that I am whatever this small thing is called" obviously reduces you. It also lets you share that thing with others, though, and rest easy knowing they get it.
Identity is reductive when it is stereotyped. Descriptive identity need not be reductive if it is used to instead construct and understanding of someone’s acts and attributes in life, because you’re always going to be more than the sum of your parts.
identity is reductive when it's stereotyped is practically tautological. Give me an identarian category that isn't stereotype. I genuinely can't imagine one.
To use a political example, "gay" covers both Log Cabin Republicans and the super woke LBGTQ movement. "Hispanic" covers Cubans, Tejanos, immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, etc. When it comes time to figure out who is going to vote for who it turns out that Hispanics that live in Texas are far more sympathetic to Republicans than, for example, Hispanics that live in Arizona.
Or look at Asians. As the old joke goes, the Vietnamese hate the Chinese, the Chinese hate the Japanese, the Japanese hate the Koreans and the Koreans hate everyone. Does applying a label like white, black, Asian, whatever really make sense? Has it ever made sense?
My great-grandparents and grandparents (born and raised in China, moved to Canada) certainly hated the Japanese, especially since one of my great-grandmothers hid from the Japanese during the war.
My parents (both born in Canada, mostly grew up amongst other white kids) didn't care much about those conflicts from the old country, except for occasionally taking into account what their parents said.
I extremely do not care.
I'm sure my grandparents would've rejected an Asian identity because they feel distinctly Chinese, had their own Chinese community in Canada, and wouldn't have had much of a sense of shared experience with others from the Asian continent.
"Asian" fits a lot better on me: I only speak English, get my ingredients at the Korean grocery store because it's so close, have Japanese and Vietnamese friends and we cook each others' foods, and regularly get mistaken for Korean.
That's a very thoughtful definition based on your own personal experience. The big problem with deference politics is that it takes the position that if you wanted to take a political position on any issue adjacent to Chinese people or Asian people, even for reasons completely at odds with what you just wrote here, it would be racist for anyone to contradict you. This is a very silly standard. You can't claim to speak for all Chinese-Canadians, or Asian-Canadians, any more than I could claim to speak for all White Americans.
I'm preparing a review of the second season of Pachinko right now that, much like my reviews for the first season, is going to have to go a lot into how Korean-American presumptions of the Zainichi Korean experience are completely unacknowledged or researched by mostly white reviewers. Deference politics creates the standard that any Korean is automatically an unimpeachable expert on Korean history who can't be contradicted. This of course falls apart immediately if you, say, have two Korean historians who disagree with each other, and the only reason these illusions can be maintained as well as they are is because individual ethnic groups are presented in the mainstream as if they were largely homogenous in their political outlook.
This isn't just political theater. The Democratic Party writ large clearly believes these racist assumptions are straight up reality. I doubt that even a Trump victory in November could convince them otherwise, despite how a key part of his coalition has been tearing away big chunks of POC electorates away from Democrats. If Harris wins, the Democrats will most assuredly simply pretend like this didn't happen, much like they did when Biden won in 2020 with alarming drops in POC votes that were compensated with by increases in white votes.
Clearly not. People from the West Indies and recent African immigrants have different experiences and are viewed differently by the long term native born population.
"it's also a recognition of the fact that there is a shared American Black identity"
That's the (claimed) reason, and IMO it certainly has validity. An important societal effect, however, is showing a constant contrast of the capitalization of one with lack of capitalization of the other, and the ensuing, often subconscious and simplistic, psychological effects on large portions of the population unfamiliar with the reasoning. As Freddie points out approvingly about other things here, it "does the work of politics". And the beauty of it is its fully plausible deniability when anyone points it out.
Don't think this could not have been recognized (by the right people) when it was being planned. But, I'm just a crazy conspiracy theorist, and a butthurt fool worthy of ridicule, for daring to voice that I noticed these things.
Race, like every social construct, is about maximizing benefit for the ingroup, so yeah it's going to do all those things. Money is there to fairly track exchanged goods and services and labor but it also shows a constant contrast of the capitalization of one etc, because we have rich people and poor people. So also with national identity, social credit, dynastic succession, religious affiliation, the accumulation of academic honors. There's a practical use for this thing that human beings then instantly exploit for social benefit. Then they start exploiting its opposite, the space between, etc until you have maximized the ways it can be exploited conceptually and the whole thing starts to crumble.
From "it's going to do all those things", I assume you acknowledge there are psychological effects as I mentioned. Could you characterize what those psychological effects are on both groups (and any others)? If whites are the "in group" here receiving "maximized benefit" from this revised standard use of language, how does that work to their benefit?
Whites aren't the in-group among Black identarians, dude, that's absurd. Anyone who adapts an identity is the in-group. In this case, Black people are the in-group. They benefit from having an identity in the same way literally everyone alive does. You really need me to explain why someone would establish a set of characteristics in solidarity with other people as central to their sense of self and shared purpose? Are you some kind of bizarre island sufficient unto yourself? Communities are the only way to escape the Natural State of Mankind, dude. which to paraphrase a pretty sweet little quote from Hobbes, absolutely sucks balls.
While I'm preparing a response to this, what about the first part of my above paragraph, about the psychological effects? That was my original point, but I don't see you addressing it.
I’d posit that race-fixated individuals of a white predilection are willing to supervene their whiteness over their nationality should it suite them. Nationalism can always take the form of racial ethnonationalism to further someone’s ideological aims and goals. The reason why “whiteness” as an identity has become so ubiquitous in the US is because some people have chosen to shed their former national and cultural ancestral ties, while cultivating their racial ethos through their nationalism for the US. They fetishize their ancestors’ history while conflating their notion of race with their ethnic national interests. This is complicated by the phenomenon of white individuals passively losing their ancestral cultures over generations in general, and developing new cultures in America while circumstantially being white. Because some people are fixated on race-as-identity, they overlay connotations of “whiteness” as culture on top of these newer and localized American cultures for lack of better description or terminology.
Similarly, pan-Africanism was a huge movement in the Civil Rights-era US, but this was uniquely a consequence of the diasporic affect of African descendants forging and/or “reclaiming” an identity and culture that was lost over time. Pan-Africanists like Marcus Garvey proclaimed himself to be king of Africa, while other revanchists took it upon themselves to emigrate back and settle Liberia. Black tribalism is a reflection of white tribalism or any other racial tribalism, but in the case of US Americans who are black, there’s far more of a positive association with the development of Black (capitalized in this case to denote the US phenomenon of cultural development around racial identity) culture than any sort of White culture due to the historical context of local and global racial capitalism/enslavement/oppression.
This also doesn’t eliminate inter-ethnic or intra-ethnic conflict either, as there are many notable examples of frustration surrounding discussions of (for example) Black cultural hegemony/monoliths, and oppressive acts exhibited between minority demographics despite any ostensible hegemonic racial oppressor.
"Pan Africanism was a huge movement in the Civil Rights-era US" is the point; only people who can't get any more specific than "Africa" in their identity are gonna want to be Pan African. Certainly you won't find such a movement in Ghana.
>Certainly you won't find such a movement in Ghana.
I'm not sure what would make you think that. Just a quick wikipedia skim turns up a huge number of African intellectuals, activists, political leaders, and actual organized movements that were substantially influenced by Pan-African thought/strategies and who advocated for and implemented material policies that moved toward Pan-African goals.
It wasn't just about rediscovering cultural identity; it was about material solidarity and pursuit of collective interest.
NOTE: I was prompted to this dissection of Liam's post (now liked by Freddie) mainly about white people, which IMO is a bit of a mess, following a repeated accusation of ignorance by Liam, in a thread that also, repeatedly, studiously ignored my sole original point (about the juxtaposition "white and Black").
Also, there is Freddie's "Do the work of politics, which is to say, evaluate what your moral values tell you is the right thing to do or say and then do or say them."
Otherwise, I wouldn't have bothered... (now edited several times for clarity)
-Thank you
------
As a slow white person, could you allow me to initiate a Socratic check here? So many questions I have! I hope you will help me...
"[white and Black] is also a recognition of the fact that there is a shared American Black identity, in the same way that there is a shared nationalistic identity in pretty much every nation, and there really isn't, say, a pan-African identity at all."
Fair enough, with caveats. As I pointed out in my first response, and explain and concur below, and in my first post. It needs breaking down...
"There really isn't a similar shared white identity, because instead you get to be Irish or German or French or something."
Could you tell me where all the white mongrels go? You might be shocked to know the level of white source-country-crossbreeding that has occurred in a couple hundred years. I'm sure you're not fooled by a [B|b]lack with a Washington surname; neither should you be by a white McCoy.
"I personally don't look at a mime and say 'ah yes, that's my culture' because I'm not a Frenchman and am not descended from Frenchmen."
I'm French-derived, and neither do I. Why don't you tell us why? You seem quite confident you know our minds.
"And there's a history of white hatred towards other white people, like the Irish (extremely pale, only became white within the last 100 years) and the Italians (invented much of Western Civilization, I've encountered people who absolutely insist that they are not white)."
Yeah, whites are strange that way. We tend to do a fair amount of hating (it's what you might want to call an "evolutionary construct", after all), even hating being *accused* of hating (cue the Antiracism cure). Weirdly, though, I am told this is apparently unlike most other peoples from rest of the world. At least, so the MSM tells me. Because I need to rely on them, you see, instead of on something as stupid as decades of my "lived experience". (Ignore the Middle East, African civil wars, China-vs-Taiwan, etc. etc. etc. Nothing to see here, folks, move along now.) I'm just not smart enough to wrap my head around all the layers of hypocrisy, elegantly designed to completely befuddle those of us outside a campus. It must be my need for a foolish consistency in political discourse. I need help.
"White people have tribal affiliations that allow them to escape a sense of universal brotherhood."
Please see above re white crossbreeding.
"Of course, if you spend too much time grappling with the tribal stuff you're a jerk"
So, you can't ever be (cultural?) jerk if you're POC and do this?
"and probably nazi-adjacent"
Then, if you're a member of a local working-class Irish or Italian club, you're most likely close enough to a Nazi to be smeared with the accusation?
"but even if you don't, you don't feel a strong sense of cultural connection with people from across the continent from your ancestors."
So, which is prevalent here -- the tribal affiliations or not? And, if you're white and you're not tribal, then who/what do you properly affiliate with? That is, to avoid infection with Nazism and all the other nastiness that appear to flow merely from whites associating (nay, just breeding!) with each other.
"And you probably know at least vaguely where those ancestors are from."
I'd say vaguely or less is far more often operative than not.
"People whose identities have been stripped away by, just as a for instance, centuries of slavery, might reasonably look at anything that their peers in post-slavery life have preserved or reinvented as culturally theirs as well."
Agreed.
"Their right to hate one another for tribal reasons has been stripped away by The Oppressor."
Well, since we now know "hate is bad" (even though hate is an evolutionary construct), it seems at least that's a rare silver lining in the otherwise horrific experience of slavery. Just think what a mess we'd have in America with the additional tribal conflicts between all the African cultures. Er, which probably don't exist (conflict, that is), please excuse the unwarranted supposition!
"So you get Black As Identity."
So... back to my original point: What can we do to prevent the psychological issues resulting from (the literal text) "white and Black"? Should we use "White and Black"? "white and poc"? I'm open to suggestions.
Hmm. Why is it that identity seems to be used to describe where your genes came from geographically, or your particular sexual orientation, as opposed to simply who you are as a person?
I mean, if someone asked me who or what I identify with, my first instinct is to simply say 'homo sapien'. After all, we are human beings first, and everything else second. At least that's how I see it.
If pressed to choose something other than the extremely general 'human' identity, I suppose my first few thoughts would be about my individual personality. Although the word 'dude' is probably within those first thoughts too. But I certainly wouldn't get to something like "Irish Catholic" until well into the relationship or conversation. And even then, only if it happens to come up.
I guess I'm just wondering why 'identity' always seems to be defined in terms of race, gender, geography, etc., and not by the person's intrinsic personality characteristics.
Do you ACTUALLY identify as 'homo sapien?' because if so I'd say part of your identity is pedantically misunderstanding questions, which puts you in a pretty specific category. An overbroad identity is no identity; the whole point is exclusion and identification.
If you're saying that you keep that shit to yourself, then yeah of course you do, you're irish catholic. you don't need to establish identity on that level, it's already there for you to inhabit and no one is trying to put you in alternative identity boxes like 'wife beating drunk' or 'shiftless layabout with too many kids he doesn't take care of.' If you found yourself in 1920s America of Britain it'd come up a hell of a lot faster.
I'd say the point is primarily descriptive, and not necessarily exclusionary. If it happens to be broad or narrow is up to the individual, no one else can tell you what or how you choose to identify yourself.
And yes, I do see myself as primarily a human being. Being white or male or American or even my father's son is all secondary to that. At any rate, I'm not sure why it elicited such an emotional response from you. Was that even necessary?
"I'm not sure why it elicited such an emotional response from you."
My guess, sadly, from early-trauma-based brain miswiring, but apparently exacerbated by the type of educational environments which exist today. The former I speak from experience, but now older and (hopefully) wiser, but I lapse not infrequently.
"Was that even necessary?"
Possibly yes, due to the above. Absolutely not, by rational civility.
I'm not sure why you take this as a strongly emotional response. I think I dealt with your points pretty clinically; there are only two ways to read your comment. Either you were being pedantic in order to pretend to avoid the conflict (I'm homo sapien, I identify with all people and am above it all), which you can do because you don't need to defend your identity at all, and in the second reading you also don't need to defend your identity at all and see that as inherently virtuous (Why can't we all just get along/be citizens of the world???) because you haven't had to establish identity for yourself in those terms. We're discussing the active construction of identity here, where people build a way to identify in order to gain specific positive outcomes and escape negative outcomes.
The reason I simply do not believe that you identify as primarily a human being is that such an identity makes no sense. It's like identifying as a collection of atoms. Identity exists to differentiate; you are different than me in clear ways that you obviously understand. You identify as someone who is not mad on the internet, and attempt to establish me as mad on the internet for example. your identity here is 'the cool and collected one.' I simply do not believe that someone who goes immediately to that kind of construction has no sense of categorical self.
Well no, that's not exactly what I said. I said I identify as a) a human being, and b) and individual with all sorts of particular personality traits. One is generic, and one is specific.
Your issue seems to be that a) the generic reason is flat-out bogus, and b) the specific reasons I identify myself with have little to do with race, gender, ethnicity, etc., and you find that automatically disingenuous for some reason. Umm...why?
The point of my first question to you had nothing to do with being virtuous or the 'cool kid' or whatever, and everything to do with being unendingly exasperated with this modern trend to make every single difference between everyone boil down to a handful of traits that someone somewhere decided was the only way we can talk about it. And by the way those traits are not only socially and politically charged out the wazoo, but also, for the most part, lead to never-ending discussions that solve nothing and just manages to make everyone pissed off all the time. How people can live with that level of constant anxiety every day is beyond me, but no one is under the gun to do so...even though it may seem that way.
I really don't know why you think I'm being purposely pedantic or whatever, but the fact remains I really don't give a shit about whatever you think is the 'right way' to go about deciding one's identity. This isn't a classroom, and you're not the teacher. If you don't like the way someone prefers to 'identify' themself...fine. But don't presume to be the arbiter of what is or isn't the the correct way to do so. For fuck's sake dude, get a grip.
This seems to be answering the question as "well, yes . . . but if we fling enough words around, maybe we can rationalize it--or at least obfuscate it."
There also isn't a shared white identity because identities split among class as well as ethnicity/race. (I mean "social" class here not just incomes.) The hillbillies of Vance's elegy and the typical white Yale graduate, or even the middle class New Yorker, do not share some deep connecting identity.
"When I talk about deference politics, I’m referring to the tendency of left-leaning people to substitute interpersonal obsequiousness towards “marginalized groups” for the actual material change those groups demand."
Forgive me for repeating myself, but all of this performativity is for the benefit and moral preening of the performer. We see this, because none of this performativity does anything concrete for the ostensible beneficiaries, much less anything to change the way the economic pie is sliced.
Freddie- a suggestion/request to share a post about the definition of "identity politics." The term is used all the time as a stand in for all sorts of ideas.
“the point is not that the good intentions of the people who practice them are worthless but that the people who practice deference politics never seem to recognize that all of the deferring never makes positive action more likely.”
I agree w this, esp at the interpersonal level. But an expression of this at the policy level that is effective/necessary is centering/actively including marginalized communities/voices in the shaping of program or policy. I find that principles of practice at one scale of society (ie policy level) get conflated w what should be done at group or one-on-one level, with each setting and scenario being unique and in need of customized approach
I agree. The performative aspect of this so-called "deference politics" can certainly operate to ward off positive action. But a posture of real political receptivity––what lots of people will see as cringey deference––that is really prepared to absorb the knowledge political operators don't already have, is absolutely necessary for positive action.
You actually have to make a positive effort to listen to people, and to grasp the categories and values they use to make political claims, before you evaluate those claims. This is hard to do, for everyone. But it's especially hard for people who have always had their habits of analysis and areas of concerned deemed "serious" and rational.
Just reading some of these comments, it is obvious to me that taking the claims of certain people seriously ("left-leaning women, progressive black activists, LGBT advocates," to quote one poster) is going to make one a priori obsequious and dishonorable.
I agree. Being receptive to various perspectives is a big part of building an effective coalition. However, I question the utility of generalizations like this one: "But it's especially hard for people who have always had their habits of analysis and areas of concerned deemed "serious" and rational." That kind of broad brush has been very popular over the last several years in lefty circles, and I think it obscures more than it reveals, to the detriment of political progress.
It's a good question. If you grant as true the idea that conversations have unspoken meta-rules (what counts as rational, which values are assumed as germane) that aren't themselves rational but instead contingent, that truth could still be abused. But that doesn't tell us that the best path to political progress is to ignore it, i.e. what you call the utility of it.
I think that idea (meta-rules) is pretty easily provable, both theoretically and historically. I don't doubt it has been misused, and that people have tried to use this truth about discursive communication to just play a card that trumps everything (and thus make a move that ends communication in the guise of communicating). But on the hand, the idea might be popular because it's both true and has a real utility for thinking through the ethics of political discourse.
In a great deal of political discussion there is going to be an overt level of a claim and counter-claim, as well as a more submerged level that is a struggle over what should get to count as a valid claim. That struggle on the lower frequency is probably more consequential than the overt one. No one knows that better than someone like Chris Rufo.
I think we agree that a person who assumes they lay exclusive claim to what is rational or serious is a challenge for a diverse group hoping to create a material impact. Where it gets messy is anticipating who will fall into that category (which I thought you might be doing in your initial post) and how to create an effective group structure to deal with that reality. For all the reasons stated in the original post, deference politics is not the path forward.
As for the meta rules, I agree very much that they exist and I think there is a tricky balance between acknowledging those cultural norms and getting stuck in language/process spin mode to the detriment of progress.
I think the only way to avoid those problems is to focus on the specific material problems and their specific material ameliorations (or solutions, if you get really, really lucky).
Taking people's ideas seriously, including close listening, thoughtful analysis, and respectful disagreement, is never obsequious or dishonorable. Suppressing those behaviors in favor of unquestioning endorsement of poorly reasoned positions due to the dictates of "standpoint theory" is the behavior that Freddie is calling out.
I think "deference" lies somewhere beyond good faith inclusion and very close to "centering." I think the former is a necessary part of any effective political effort but the latter can easily become another layer of performative distraction.
"You can express a confident opinion, even in the commission of disagreeing with someone, while still being respectful and kind." I think this undersells just how aggressively so many nominally oppressed groups—left-leaning women, progressive black activists, LGBT advocates—have over the past decade or so equated "disagreement" with "disrespect." Asserting a contrary opinion in these contexts is, to many people, essentially tantamount to saying, "Fuck you, go jump off a bridge and die." You can't really have a respectfully dissenting conversation in this environment. I would argue deference politics is in no small way a reaction to this paradigm, which is to say you're not going to be able to fix the problem of cringey, simpering lefty show-politics without fixing the political incentives that are driving them.
My thoughts exactly. Disagreement is described as hate speech by plenty of people in these spaces and it has bled over into normal, everyday interactions. I recently saw an instagram video where a white child takes a toy from a black child and the poster is asking what to do about the situation and insinuating there is a racial dynamic at play, both children appeared to be under 2.
This description of "the environment" rules out seems premised on the notion that members of these groups haven't adequately perceived reality––they can't identify respectful disagreement and instead mistake it for disrespect. Which also seems to assume that those people don't actually encounter disrespect in "this environment"––that *they* don't ever make their political claims only to be answered by their interlocutors with what amounts to "Fuck you, go jump off a bridge and die."
There is no magical machine to measure intangible things like good faith and respect in public discourse. But it just doesn't seem plausible to me that we have had "decades" where there were attempts at respectful conversations, grounded in good faith attempts to hear the arguments of progressive women, LGBT advocates, and black thinkers, only to have those efforts spoiled because those folks hallucinated disrespect and couldn't engage dissenters with the same equanimity as their opponents.
I think they understand the difference but it’s a power dynamic at play and they want to win, which is understandable. I want my policy preferences too!
"You can't really have a respectfully dissenting conversation in this environment." Have you hung out with the MAGA crowd much over the last decade? There are big chunks of the left and right electorate who are primarily interested in the performative signalling of group beliefs. The MAGA hats and the "In this house we believe" yard signs are two sides of the same coin.
Where I get confused is how exactly "marginalized groups" are defined. How is it that an Ivy League educated, upper middle class professional academic/activist or lawyer qualify as marginalized simply by the fact that their skin is a shade of tan or are gay? And yes I understand the history of black oppression in the U.S.
For my money, socioeconomic class is where the rubber meets the road in defining who is marginalized in our culture.
It isn't hard to identify which groups have been unjustly marginalized over a period of a hundred years or three hundred years (though they will have been marginalized for different reasons).
Those groups have also always had more educated "organic intellectuals" who articulate claims on their behalf, even if not always completely accurately. Priests who speak for illiterate peasants. Freemen who speak for enslaved people.
I don't think socioeconomic class tells us everything we need to know about how political claims and arguments match the political interests of groups.
Socioeconomics can’t tell us everything about the antecedent issues of group politics, but they are at least quite revealing of the consequences. Racial capitalism operates in the abstract ideologically but it gets implemented materially. So if and when there are moral or cultural or otherwise social political arguments that are worth hashing out through debate and dialectics, the socioeconomics will at least be revealing of what is to be done about it.
Another problem with this approach is that it clouds your ability to rationally analyze novel issues that don’t have anything to do with race/gender/etc. I’m thinking of “If only Republicans would cooperate, we could rid the world of Covid.”
Freddie, you yourself wrote a time, back in the early pandemic days, when you pointed out some logical contradictions in an online discussion group ("If you defund the police, who is going to enforce all the draconian lockdown measures you are proposing?") and you came to the conclusion that voicing a rational dissenting opinion was the wrong thing to do, because the folks who came there were not interested in having a rational conversation -- they just wanted to do some tribal emotional reinforcement with each other. It's kind of like trying to stage a Lincoln-Douglas debate around the Thanksgiving table -- nothing wrong with LD debates, but context matters and you gotta read the room. And in the vast majority of public "conversations", the context is NOT one of actually trying to solve problems, but rather performative rhetoric. It is perfect rational to opt out of such discussions. If no one's mind is going to be changed, and nothing of substance will be decided at the end of the conversation, then I have better things to do with my time and social capital.
“Aggregate these pieces together” as opposed to “aggregate these pieces apart?” In my opinion, you are one among the three or four truly excellent writers whom I subscribe to on Substack. I therefore would love for you to speculate on the prevalence in English writing of redundancies like “revert back” and “reiterate again.” Is it a consequence perhaps of the Norman invasion, importing Latinisms that now uneasily co-exist with Anglo Saxon usage?
Something I heard on a tech podcast (ATP) of all places, during the beginning of the #MeToo conversation, is one of the first times I grappled with the idea of not being overly fearful or anxious with regards to deference politics, though it wasn't phrased like that. One of the hosts of the 3-male cohosts, said something along the lines of "well, I shouldn't even be saying anything on this topic", and the other co-host responded somewhat sharply along the lines of, "if we, with good intentions, don't talk about this topic, despite some clumsiness, then we hold back both our opportunities to learn and grow, and we leave the conversation to a small segment of the population. We should support what's going on by talking about it and continuing to normalize, etc."
It was a helpful frame. And along the lines of what you are saying about the strengths and weakness of deference politics. Obviously, the reminder and emphasis on listening carefully to those directly affected is important and often overlooked, but we are all better when we are listening & engaging, which directly means speaking.
This reminds me of Malcolm X's Foxes vs. Wolves speech. The Wolves want to eat the sheep and they are open about it. The Foxes want to eat the sheep, too, but they are smart. They play at being the sheep's friends and its a better strategy. Republicans are the wolves, Democrats are the sheep.
I'm not much of a bible thumper, haven't even read the whole thing and find the religions of the Far East far more appealing than their Western counterparts. That said, I think there's incredible wisdom in Matthew 6. Don't practice your righteousness in public like the hypocrites do, [they'll get their meaningless rewards].
I prefer people more than principles and people with no principles better than anything else in the world! -Oscar Wilde
I think this is where it's important to remember the actual power of real, in-person, one-on-one intersubjectivity, and having honest dialogues with people you know and have actual investment with. Both people theoretically have interpersonal investment in that environment, and so lobbing rhetorical firebombs is discouraged, and you usually are incentivized to be charitable with each other. The second other parties enter the mix, is when the specter of performativity and masking for reasons of social capital starts to increase dramatically, and by multiples the more people are involved.
Have real, honest, good-faith conversations with people you know and respect.
Some of this risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, there are ridiculous excesses, telling people to shut up and listen is counterproductive and rude, and the idea that any demographic group has an inherent monopoly on truth is incorrect. But the good faith version of "nothing about us without us" is, like, if you set up a task force to address a particular black/white disparity, you should have some black people on it. If we accept that there are inequalities that persist as a legacy of slavery and discrimination, which I know you do, then part of understanding what to do about that means understanding what it's like to live in society as a black person, which I can read about but can't fully know. That alone doesn't dictate public policy, and it doesn't mean I can't use my rational thinking skills to gauge what's believable/desirable, but there's something there, and I don't think "criminal sentencing isn't done by criminals" makes sense as a comparison. If we want to reduce recidivism, it absolutely makes sense to hear from former criminals about what worked and didn't for them.
A while back you described woke politics as something like "a social tendency masquerading as a political tendency," which I think is a great and underdiscussed point. I think at least some of the roots of deference theory are less in radical leftism than in very deeply ingrained norms, more etiquette than politics - "walk a mile in someone's shoes before you judge them," "I can criticize my own family but you can't," etc. Of course some of that has been weaponized in bad faith, but there's also some truth underlying it - again, I'm confident that I have a right to make up my own mind about what policy measures should be used to address racial inequality, but there are things relevant to it that are outside my experience and that it makes sense to hear from those directly affected.
I look at all those old people kneeling and imagine what it looked like after the photo shoot. Lot's of groaning and struggling to stand back up. How many needed assistance getting back up?
OK...sounds like agism. Sure a few old people can kneel like that and get back easily, but a hell of a lot of us can't. All for a bit of show.
Is this a symptom/result of deference politics: "white and Black people"?
Sort of! But it's also a recognition of the fact that there is a shared American Black identity, in the same way that there is a shared nationalistic identity in pretty much every nation, and there really isn't, say, a pan-African identity at all. There really isn't a similar shared white identity, because instead you get to be Irish or German or French or something. I personally don't look at a mime and say 'ah yes, that's my culture' because I'm not a Frenchman and am not descended from Frenchmen. There's a little bit of solidarity among Western European descended Americans but that's not really a very strong force, and doesn't extend to other white people like say Georgians or Slavs. And there's a history of white hatred towards other white people, like the Irish (extremely pale, only became white within the last 100 years) and the Italians (invented much of Western Civilization, I've encountered people who absolutely insist that they are not white). White people have tribal affiliations that allow them to escape a sense of universal brotherhood. Of course, if you spend too much time grappling with the tribal stuff you're a jerk and probably nazi-adjacent but even if you don't, you don't feel a strong sense of cultural connection with people from across the continent from your ancestors. And you probably know at least vaguely where those ancestors are from.
People whose identities have been stripped away by, just as a for instance, centuries of slavery, might reasonably look at anything that their peers in post-slavery life have preserved or reinvented as culturally theirs as well. Their right to hate one another for tribal reasons has been stripped away by The Oppressor. So you get Black As Identity.
Is there really a single Black identity? That seems pretty reductive.
This is a silly question. Identity is, by its nature, reductive. "I'm gay" is reductive as hell, gay people are all kinds of people. So is "I'm American." People in Colorado are different than people from California and Connecticut. "I think that this small piece of my lived experience that I share with others is a big part of who I am, when I meet people I will tell them that I am whatever this small thing is called" obviously reduces you. It also lets you share that thing with others, though, and rest easy knowing they get it.
agree...well said.
Identity is reductive when it is stereotyped. Descriptive identity need not be reductive if it is used to instead construct and understanding of someone’s acts and attributes in life, because you’re always going to be more than the sum of your parts.
identity is reductive when it's stereotyped is practically tautological. Give me an identarian category that isn't stereotype. I genuinely can't imagine one.
To use a political example, "gay" covers both Log Cabin Republicans and the super woke LBGTQ movement. "Hispanic" covers Cubans, Tejanos, immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, etc. When it comes time to figure out who is going to vote for who it turns out that Hispanics that live in Texas are far more sympathetic to Republicans than, for example, Hispanics that live in Arizona.
Or look at Asians. As the old joke goes, the Vietnamese hate the Chinese, the Chinese hate the Japanese, the Japanese hate the Koreans and the Koreans hate everyone. Does applying a label like white, black, Asian, whatever really make sense? Has it ever made sense?
My great-grandparents and grandparents (born and raised in China, moved to Canada) certainly hated the Japanese, especially since one of my great-grandmothers hid from the Japanese during the war.
My parents (both born in Canada, mostly grew up amongst other white kids) didn't care much about those conflicts from the old country, except for occasionally taking into account what their parents said.
I extremely do not care.
I'm sure my grandparents would've rejected an Asian identity because they feel distinctly Chinese, had their own Chinese community in Canada, and wouldn't have had much of a sense of shared experience with others from the Asian continent.
"Asian" fits a lot better on me: I only speak English, get my ingredients at the Korean grocery store because it's so close, have Japanese and Vietnamese friends and we cook each others' foods, and regularly get mistaken for Korean.
That's a very thoughtful definition based on your own personal experience. The big problem with deference politics is that it takes the position that if you wanted to take a political position on any issue adjacent to Chinese people or Asian people, even for reasons completely at odds with what you just wrote here, it would be racist for anyone to contradict you. This is a very silly standard. You can't claim to speak for all Chinese-Canadians, or Asian-Canadians, any more than I could claim to speak for all White Americans.
I'm preparing a review of the second season of Pachinko right now that, much like my reviews for the first season, is going to have to go a lot into how Korean-American presumptions of the Zainichi Korean experience are completely unacknowledged or researched by mostly white reviewers. Deference politics creates the standard that any Korean is automatically an unimpeachable expert on Korean history who can't be contradicted. This of course falls apart immediately if you, say, have two Korean historians who disagree with each other, and the only reason these illusions can be maintained as well as they are is because individual ethnic groups are presented in the mainstream as if they were largely homogenous in their political outlook.
This isn't just political theater. The Democratic Party writ large clearly believes these racist assumptions are straight up reality. I doubt that even a Trump victory in November could convince them otherwise, despite how a key part of his coalition has been tearing away big chunks of POC electorates away from Democrats. If Harris wins, the Democrats will most assuredly simply pretend like this didn't happen, much like they did when Biden won in 2020 with alarming drops in POC votes that were compensated with by increases in white votes.
Korea is the Poland of Asia, so it has reason to hate the Chinese and Japanese lol
Well, especially the AAPI moniker, which is really meaningless!
Clearly not. People from the West Indies and recent African immigrants have different experiences and are viewed differently by the long term native born population.
"it's also a recognition of the fact that there is a shared American Black identity"
That's the (claimed) reason, and IMO it certainly has validity. An important societal effect, however, is showing a constant contrast of the capitalization of one with lack of capitalization of the other, and the ensuing, often subconscious and simplistic, psychological effects on large portions of the population unfamiliar with the reasoning. As Freddie points out approvingly about other things here, it "does the work of politics". And the beauty of it is its fully plausible deniability when anyone points it out.
Don't think this could not have been recognized (by the right people) when it was being planned. But, I'm just a crazy conspiracy theorist, and a butthurt fool worthy of ridicule, for daring to voice that I noticed these things.
Race, like every social construct, is about maximizing benefit for the ingroup, so yeah it's going to do all those things. Money is there to fairly track exchanged goods and services and labor but it also shows a constant contrast of the capitalization of one etc, because we have rich people and poor people. So also with national identity, social credit, dynastic succession, religious affiliation, the accumulation of academic honors. There's a practical use for this thing that human beings then instantly exploit for social benefit. Then they start exploiting its opposite, the space between, etc until you have maximized the ways it can be exploited conceptually and the whole thing starts to crumble.
From "it's going to do all those things", I assume you acknowledge there are psychological effects as I mentioned. Could you characterize what those psychological effects are on both groups (and any others)? If whites are the "in group" here receiving "maximized benefit" from this revised standard use of language, how does that work to their benefit?
Whites aren't the in-group among Black identarians, dude, that's absurd. Anyone who adapts an identity is the in-group. In this case, Black people are the in-group. They benefit from having an identity in the same way literally everyone alive does. You really need me to explain why someone would establish a set of characteristics in solidarity with other people as central to their sense of self and shared purpose? Are you some kind of bizarre island sufficient unto yourself? Communities are the only way to escape the Natural State of Mankind, dude. which to paraphrase a pretty sweet little quote from Hobbes, absolutely sucks balls.
While I'm preparing a response to this, what about the first part of my above paragraph, about the psychological effects? That was my original point, but I don't see you addressing it.
Please see my detailed response to your original post; I think it deals with these questions.
I’d posit that race-fixated individuals of a white predilection are willing to supervene their whiteness over their nationality should it suite them. Nationalism can always take the form of racial ethnonationalism to further someone’s ideological aims and goals. The reason why “whiteness” as an identity has become so ubiquitous in the US is because some people have chosen to shed their former national and cultural ancestral ties, while cultivating their racial ethos through their nationalism for the US. They fetishize their ancestors’ history while conflating their notion of race with their ethnic national interests. This is complicated by the phenomenon of white individuals passively losing their ancestral cultures over generations in general, and developing new cultures in America while circumstantially being white. Because some people are fixated on race-as-identity, they overlay connotations of “whiteness” as culture on top of these newer and localized American cultures for lack of better description or terminology.
Similarly, pan-Africanism was a huge movement in the Civil Rights-era US, but this was uniquely a consequence of the diasporic affect of African descendants forging and/or “reclaiming” an identity and culture that was lost over time. Pan-Africanists like Marcus Garvey proclaimed himself to be king of Africa, while other revanchists took it upon themselves to emigrate back and settle Liberia. Black tribalism is a reflection of white tribalism or any other racial tribalism, but in the case of US Americans who are black, there’s far more of a positive association with the development of Black (capitalized in this case to denote the US phenomenon of cultural development around racial identity) culture than any sort of White culture due to the historical context of local and global racial capitalism/enslavement/oppression.
This also doesn’t eliminate inter-ethnic or intra-ethnic conflict either, as there are many notable examples of frustration surrounding discussions of (for example) Black cultural hegemony/monoliths, and oppressive acts exhibited between minority demographics despite any ostensible hegemonic racial oppressor.
"Pan Africanism was a huge movement in the Civil Rights-era US" is the point; only people who can't get any more specific than "Africa" in their identity are gonna want to be Pan African. Certainly you won't find such a movement in Ghana.
>Certainly you won't find such a movement in Ghana.
I'm not sure what would make you think that. Just a quick wikipedia skim turns up a huge number of African intellectuals, activists, political leaders, and actual organized movements that were substantially influenced by Pan-African thought/strategies and who advocated for and implemented material policies that moved toward Pan-African goals.
It wasn't just about rediscovering cultural identity; it was about material solidarity and pursuit of collective interest.
NOTE: I was prompted to this dissection of Liam's post (now liked by Freddie) mainly about white people, which IMO is a bit of a mess, following a repeated accusation of ignorance by Liam, in a thread that also, repeatedly, studiously ignored my sole original point (about the juxtaposition "white and Black").
Also, there is Freddie's "Do the work of politics, which is to say, evaluate what your moral values tell you is the right thing to do or say and then do or say them."
Otherwise, I wouldn't have bothered... (now edited several times for clarity)
-Thank you
------
As a slow white person, could you allow me to initiate a Socratic check here? So many questions I have! I hope you will help me...
"[white and Black] is also a recognition of the fact that there is a shared American Black identity, in the same way that there is a shared nationalistic identity in pretty much every nation, and there really isn't, say, a pan-African identity at all."
Fair enough, with caveats. As I pointed out in my first response, and explain and concur below, and in my first post. It needs breaking down...
"There really isn't a similar shared white identity, because instead you get to be Irish or German or French or something."
Could you tell me where all the white mongrels go? You might be shocked to know the level of white source-country-crossbreeding that has occurred in a couple hundred years. I'm sure you're not fooled by a [B|b]lack with a Washington surname; neither should you be by a white McCoy.
"I personally don't look at a mime and say 'ah yes, that's my culture' because I'm not a Frenchman and am not descended from Frenchmen."
I'm French-derived, and neither do I. Why don't you tell us why? You seem quite confident you know our minds.
"And there's a history of white hatred towards other white people, like the Irish (extremely pale, only became white within the last 100 years) and the Italians (invented much of Western Civilization, I've encountered people who absolutely insist that they are not white)."
Yeah, whites are strange that way. We tend to do a fair amount of hating (it's what you might want to call an "evolutionary construct", after all), even hating being *accused* of hating (cue the Antiracism cure). Weirdly, though, I am told this is apparently unlike most other peoples from rest of the world. At least, so the MSM tells me. Because I need to rely on them, you see, instead of on something as stupid as decades of my "lived experience". (Ignore the Middle East, African civil wars, China-vs-Taiwan, etc. etc. etc. Nothing to see here, folks, move along now.) I'm just not smart enough to wrap my head around all the layers of hypocrisy, elegantly designed to completely befuddle those of us outside a campus. It must be my need for a foolish consistency in political discourse. I need help.
"White people have tribal affiliations that allow them to escape a sense of universal brotherhood."
Please see above re white crossbreeding.
"Of course, if you spend too much time grappling with the tribal stuff you're a jerk"
So, you can't ever be (cultural?) jerk if you're POC and do this?
"and probably nazi-adjacent"
Then, if you're a member of a local working-class Irish or Italian club, you're most likely close enough to a Nazi to be smeared with the accusation?
"but even if you don't, you don't feel a strong sense of cultural connection with people from across the continent from your ancestors."
So, which is prevalent here -- the tribal affiliations or not? And, if you're white and you're not tribal, then who/what do you properly affiliate with? That is, to avoid infection with Nazism and all the other nastiness that appear to flow merely from whites associating (nay, just breeding!) with each other.
"And you probably know at least vaguely where those ancestors are from."
I'd say vaguely or less is far more often operative than not.
"People whose identities have been stripped away by, just as a for instance, centuries of slavery, might reasonably look at anything that their peers in post-slavery life have preserved or reinvented as culturally theirs as well."
Agreed.
"Their right to hate one another for tribal reasons has been stripped away by The Oppressor."
Well, since we now know "hate is bad" (even though hate is an evolutionary construct), it seems at least that's a rare silver lining in the otherwise horrific experience of slavery. Just think what a mess we'd have in America with the additional tribal conflicts between all the African cultures. Er, which probably don't exist (conflict, that is), please excuse the unwarranted supposition!
"So you get Black As Identity."
So... back to my original point: What can we do to prevent the psychological issues resulting from (the literal text) "white and Black"? Should we use "White and Black"? "white and poc"? I'm open to suggestions.
Hmm. Why is it that identity seems to be used to describe where your genes came from geographically, or your particular sexual orientation, as opposed to simply who you are as a person?
I mean, if someone asked me who or what I identify with, my first instinct is to simply say 'homo sapien'. After all, we are human beings first, and everything else second. At least that's how I see it.
If pressed to choose something other than the extremely general 'human' identity, I suppose my first few thoughts would be about my individual personality. Although the word 'dude' is probably within those first thoughts too. But I certainly wouldn't get to something like "Irish Catholic" until well into the relationship or conversation. And even then, only if it happens to come up.
I guess I'm just wondering why 'identity' always seems to be defined in terms of race, gender, geography, etc., and not by the person's intrinsic personality characteristics.
Do you ACTUALLY identify as 'homo sapien?' because if so I'd say part of your identity is pedantically misunderstanding questions, which puts you in a pretty specific category. An overbroad identity is no identity; the whole point is exclusion and identification.
If you're saying that you keep that shit to yourself, then yeah of course you do, you're irish catholic. you don't need to establish identity on that level, it's already there for you to inhabit and no one is trying to put you in alternative identity boxes like 'wife beating drunk' or 'shiftless layabout with too many kids he doesn't take care of.' If you found yourself in 1920s America of Britain it'd come up a hell of a lot faster.
Well that's a strange response.
I'd say the point is primarily descriptive, and not necessarily exclusionary. If it happens to be broad or narrow is up to the individual, no one else can tell you what or how you choose to identify yourself.
And yes, I do see myself as primarily a human being. Being white or male or American or even my father's son is all secondary to that. At any rate, I'm not sure why it elicited such an emotional response from you. Was that even necessary?
"I'm not sure why it elicited such an emotional response from you."
My guess, sadly, from early-trauma-based brain miswiring, but apparently exacerbated by the type of educational environments which exist today. The former I speak from experience, but now older and (hopefully) wiser, but I lapse not infrequently.
"Was that even necessary?"
Possibly yes, due to the above. Absolutely not, by rational civility.
I'm not sure why you take this as a strongly emotional response. I think I dealt with your points pretty clinically; there are only two ways to read your comment. Either you were being pedantic in order to pretend to avoid the conflict (I'm homo sapien, I identify with all people and am above it all), which you can do because you don't need to defend your identity at all, and in the second reading you also don't need to defend your identity at all and see that as inherently virtuous (Why can't we all just get along/be citizens of the world???) because you haven't had to establish identity for yourself in those terms. We're discussing the active construction of identity here, where people build a way to identify in order to gain specific positive outcomes and escape negative outcomes.
The reason I simply do not believe that you identify as primarily a human being is that such an identity makes no sense. It's like identifying as a collection of atoms. Identity exists to differentiate; you are different than me in clear ways that you obviously understand. You identify as someone who is not mad on the internet, and attempt to establish me as mad on the internet for example. your identity here is 'the cool and collected one.' I simply do not believe that someone who goes immediately to that kind of construction has no sense of categorical self.
Well no, that's not exactly what I said. I said I identify as a) a human being, and b) and individual with all sorts of particular personality traits. One is generic, and one is specific.
Your issue seems to be that a) the generic reason is flat-out bogus, and b) the specific reasons I identify myself with have little to do with race, gender, ethnicity, etc., and you find that automatically disingenuous for some reason. Umm...why?
The point of my first question to you had nothing to do with being virtuous or the 'cool kid' or whatever, and everything to do with being unendingly exasperated with this modern trend to make every single difference between everyone boil down to a handful of traits that someone somewhere decided was the only way we can talk about it. And by the way those traits are not only socially and politically charged out the wazoo, but also, for the most part, lead to never-ending discussions that solve nothing and just manages to make everyone pissed off all the time. How people can live with that level of constant anxiety every day is beyond me, but no one is under the gun to do so...even though it may seem that way.
I really don't know why you think I'm being purposely pedantic or whatever, but the fact remains I really don't give a shit about whatever you think is the 'right way' to go about deciding one's identity. This isn't a classroom, and you're not the teacher. If you don't like the way someone prefers to 'identify' themself...fine. But don't presume to be the arbiter of what is or isn't the the correct way to do so. For fuck's sake dude, get a grip.
This seems to be answering the question as "well, yes . . . but if we fling enough words around, maybe we can rationalize it--or at least obfuscate it."
Is this somehow distinct from “African-American?”
There also isn't a shared white identity because identities split among class as well as ethnicity/race. (I mean "social" class here not just incomes.) The hillbillies of Vance's elegy and the typical white Yale graduate, or even the middle class New Yorker, do not share some deep connecting identity.
once they have you asking questions like that, the debate is just where they want it.
"When I talk about deference politics, I’m referring to the tendency of left-leaning people to substitute interpersonal obsequiousness towards “marginalized groups” for the actual material change those groups demand."
Forgive me for repeating myself, but all of this performativity is for the benefit and moral preening of the performer. We see this, because none of this performativity does anything concrete for the ostensible beneficiaries, much less anything to change the way the economic pie is sliced.
Freddie- a suggestion/request to share a post about the definition of "identity politics." The term is used all the time as a stand in for all sorts of ideas.
“the point is not that the good intentions of the people who practice them are worthless but that the people who practice deference politics never seem to recognize that all of the deferring never makes positive action more likely.”
I agree w this, esp at the interpersonal level. But an expression of this at the policy level that is effective/necessary is centering/actively including marginalized communities/voices in the shaping of program or policy. I find that principles of practice at one scale of society (ie policy level) get conflated w what should be done at group or one-on-one level, with each setting and scenario being unique and in need of customized approach
I agree. The performative aspect of this so-called "deference politics" can certainly operate to ward off positive action. But a posture of real political receptivity––what lots of people will see as cringey deference––that is really prepared to absorb the knowledge political operators don't already have, is absolutely necessary for positive action.
You actually have to make a positive effort to listen to people, and to grasp the categories and values they use to make political claims, before you evaluate those claims. This is hard to do, for everyone. But it's especially hard for people who have always had their habits of analysis and areas of concerned deemed "serious" and rational.
Just reading some of these comments, it is obvious to me that taking the claims of certain people seriously ("left-leaning women, progressive black activists, LGBT advocates," to quote one poster) is going to make one a priori obsequious and dishonorable.
I agree. Being receptive to various perspectives is a big part of building an effective coalition. However, I question the utility of generalizations like this one: "But it's especially hard for people who have always had their habits of analysis and areas of concerned deemed "serious" and rational." That kind of broad brush has been very popular over the last several years in lefty circles, and I think it obscures more than it reveals, to the detriment of political progress.
It's a good question. If you grant as true the idea that conversations have unspoken meta-rules (what counts as rational, which values are assumed as germane) that aren't themselves rational but instead contingent, that truth could still be abused. But that doesn't tell us that the best path to political progress is to ignore it, i.e. what you call the utility of it.
I think that idea (meta-rules) is pretty easily provable, both theoretically and historically. I don't doubt it has been misused, and that people have tried to use this truth about discursive communication to just play a card that trumps everything (and thus make a move that ends communication in the guise of communicating). But on the hand, the idea might be popular because it's both true and has a real utility for thinking through the ethics of political discourse.
In a great deal of political discussion there is going to be an overt level of a claim and counter-claim, as well as a more submerged level that is a struggle over what should get to count as a valid claim. That struggle on the lower frequency is probably more consequential than the overt one. No one knows that better than someone like Chris Rufo.
I think we agree that a person who assumes they lay exclusive claim to what is rational or serious is a challenge for a diverse group hoping to create a material impact. Where it gets messy is anticipating who will fall into that category (which I thought you might be doing in your initial post) and how to create an effective group structure to deal with that reality. For all the reasons stated in the original post, deference politics is not the path forward.
As for the meta rules, I agree very much that they exist and I think there is a tricky balance between acknowledging those cultural norms and getting stuck in language/process spin mode to the detriment of progress.
I think the only way to avoid those problems is to focus on the specific material problems and their specific material ameliorations (or solutions, if you get really, really lucky).
Taking people's ideas seriously, including close listening, thoughtful analysis, and respectful disagreement, is never obsequious or dishonorable. Suppressing those behaviors in favor of unquestioning endorsement of poorly reasoned positions due to the dictates of "standpoint theory" is the behavior that Freddie is calling out.
I think "deference" lies somewhere beyond good faith inclusion and very close to "centering." I think the former is a necessary part of any effective political effort but the latter can easily become another layer of performative distraction.
"You can express a confident opinion, even in the commission of disagreeing with someone, while still being respectful and kind." I think this undersells just how aggressively so many nominally oppressed groups—left-leaning women, progressive black activists, LGBT advocates—have over the past decade or so equated "disagreement" with "disrespect." Asserting a contrary opinion in these contexts is, to many people, essentially tantamount to saying, "Fuck you, go jump off a bridge and die." You can't really have a respectfully dissenting conversation in this environment. I would argue deference politics is in no small way a reaction to this paradigm, which is to say you're not going to be able to fix the problem of cringey, simpering lefty show-politics without fixing the political incentives that are driving them.
My thoughts exactly. Disagreement is described as hate speech by plenty of people in these spaces and it has bled over into normal, everyday interactions. I recently saw an instagram video where a white child takes a toy from a black child and the poster is asking what to do about the situation and insinuating there is a racial dynamic at play, both children appeared to be under 2.
This description of "the environment" rules out seems premised on the notion that members of these groups haven't adequately perceived reality––they can't identify respectful disagreement and instead mistake it for disrespect. Which also seems to assume that those people don't actually encounter disrespect in "this environment"––that *they* don't ever make their political claims only to be answered by their interlocutors with what amounts to "Fuck you, go jump off a bridge and die."
There is no magical machine to measure intangible things like good faith and respect in public discourse. But it just doesn't seem plausible to me that we have had "decades" where there were attempts at respectful conversations, grounded in good faith attempts to hear the arguments of progressive women, LGBT advocates, and black thinkers, only to have those efforts spoiled because those folks hallucinated disrespect and couldn't engage dissenters with the same equanimity as their opponents.
Generations are not identical and it could easily be that new generations are more easily offended or less prone to engage in rational discourse.
If that's true, the planet's fooked.
Except that the pendulum swings one way, and then the other, and then back again.
I think they understand the difference but it’s a power dynamic at play and they want to win, which is understandable. I want my policy preferences too!
"You can't really have a respectfully dissenting conversation in this environment." Have you hung out with the MAGA crowd much over the last decade? There are big chunks of the left and right electorate who are primarily interested in the performative signalling of group beliefs. The MAGA hats and the "In this house we believe" yard signs are two sides of the same coin.
ok I'll try to do my best: I'll listen than speak my conscience. Hopefully a good/positive outome will prevail
Where I get confused is how exactly "marginalized groups" are defined. How is it that an Ivy League educated, upper middle class professional academic/activist or lawyer qualify as marginalized simply by the fact that their skin is a shade of tan or are gay? And yes I understand the history of black oppression in the U.S.
For my money, socioeconomic class is where the rubber meets the road in defining who is marginalized in our culture.
It isn't hard to identify which groups have been unjustly marginalized over a period of a hundred years or three hundred years (though they will have been marginalized for different reasons).
Those groups have also always had more educated "organic intellectuals" who articulate claims on their behalf, even if not always completely accurately. Priests who speak for illiterate peasants. Freemen who speak for enslaved people.
I don't think socioeconomic class tells us everything we need to know about how political claims and arguments match the political interests of groups.
Socioeconomics can’t tell us everything about the antecedent issues of group politics, but they are at least quite revealing of the consequences. Racial capitalism operates in the abstract ideologically but it gets implemented materially. So if and when there are moral or cultural or otherwise social political arguments that are worth hashing out through debate and dialectics, the socioeconomics will at least be revealing of what is to be done about it.
> look them in the eye and say “That does not work on me.” Be brave
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/913758-you-have-no-power-here
Another problem with this approach is that it clouds your ability to rationally analyze novel issues that don’t have anything to do with race/gender/etc. I’m thinking of “If only Republicans would cooperate, we could rid the world of Covid.”
covid = plague
Republicans = plague
Republicans = covid
Freddie, you yourself wrote a time, back in the early pandemic days, when you pointed out some logical contradictions in an online discussion group ("If you defund the police, who is going to enforce all the draconian lockdown measures you are proposing?") and you came to the conclusion that voicing a rational dissenting opinion was the wrong thing to do, because the folks who came there were not interested in having a rational conversation -- they just wanted to do some tribal emotional reinforcement with each other. It's kind of like trying to stage a Lincoln-Douglas debate around the Thanksgiving table -- nothing wrong with LD debates, but context matters and you gotta read the room. And in the vast majority of public "conversations", the context is NOT one of actually trying to solve problems, but rather performative rhetoric. It is perfect rational to opt out of such discussions. If no one's mind is going to be changed, and nothing of substance will be decided at the end of the conversation, then I have better things to do with my time and social capital.
“Aggregate these pieces together” as opposed to “aggregate these pieces apart?” In my opinion, you are one among the three or four truly excellent writers whom I subscribe to on Substack. I therefore would love for you to speculate on the prevalence in English writing of redundancies like “revert back” and “reiterate again.” Is it a consequence perhaps of the Norman invasion, importing Latinisms that now uneasily co-exist with Anglo Saxon usage?
Something I heard on a tech podcast (ATP) of all places, during the beginning of the #MeToo conversation, is one of the first times I grappled with the idea of not being overly fearful or anxious with regards to deference politics, though it wasn't phrased like that. One of the hosts of the 3-male cohosts, said something along the lines of "well, I shouldn't even be saying anything on this topic", and the other co-host responded somewhat sharply along the lines of, "if we, with good intentions, don't talk about this topic, despite some clumsiness, then we hold back both our opportunities to learn and grow, and we leave the conversation to a small segment of the population. We should support what's going on by talking about it and continuing to normalize, etc."
It was a helpful frame. And along the lines of what you are saying about the strengths and weakness of deference politics. Obviously, the reminder and emphasis on listening carefully to those directly affected is important and often overlooked, but we are all better when we are listening & engaging, which directly means speaking.
I love this concept; hope to see posts like this one.
This reminds me of Malcolm X's Foxes vs. Wolves speech. The Wolves want to eat the sheep and they are open about it. The Foxes want to eat the sheep, too, but they are smart. They play at being the sheep's friends and its a better strategy. Republicans are the wolves, Democrats are the sheep.
I'm not much of a bible thumper, haven't even read the whole thing and find the religions of the Far East far more appealing than their Western counterparts. That said, I think there's incredible wisdom in Matthew 6. Don't practice your righteousness in public like the hypocrites do, [they'll get their meaningless rewards].
I prefer people more than principles and people with no principles better than anything else in the world! -Oscar Wilde
I think this is where it's important to remember the actual power of real, in-person, one-on-one intersubjectivity, and having honest dialogues with people you know and have actual investment with. Both people theoretically have interpersonal investment in that environment, and so lobbing rhetorical firebombs is discouraged, and you usually are incentivized to be charitable with each other. The second other parties enter the mix, is when the specter of performativity and masking for reasons of social capital starts to increase dramatically, and by multiples the more people are involved.
Have real, honest, good-faith conversations with people you know and respect.
Some of this risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, there are ridiculous excesses, telling people to shut up and listen is counterproductive and rude, and the idea that any demographic group has an inherent monopoly on truth is incorrect. But the good faith version of "nothing about us without us" is, like, if you set up a task force to address a particular black/white disparity, you should have some black people on it. If we accept that there are inequalities that persist as a legacy of slavery and discrimination, which I know you do, then part of understanding what to do about that means understanding what it's like to live in society as a black person, which I can read about but can't fully know. That alone doesn't dictate public policy, and it doesn't mean I can't use my rational thinking skills to gauge what's believable/desirable, but there's something there, and I don't think "criminal sentencing isn't done by criminals" makes sense as a comparison. If we want to reduce recidivism, it absolutely makes sense to hear from former criminals about what worked and didn't for them.
A while back you described woke politics as something like "a social tendency masquerading as a political tendency," which I think is a great and underdiscussed point. I think at least some of the roots of deference theory are less in radical leftism than in very deeply ingrained norms, more etiquette than politics - "walk a mile in someone's shoes before you judge them," "I can criticize my own family but you can't," etc. Of course some of that has been weaponized in bad faith, but there's also some truth underlying it - again, I'm confident that I have a right to make up my own mind about what policy measures should be used to address racial inequality, but there are things relevant to it that are outside my experience and that it makes sense to hear from those directly affected.
"criminal sentencing isn't done by criminals"
TBF, the example wasn't that criminals would be on the jury, but that victims of those same kinds of crimes would.
I look at all those old people kneeling and imagine what it looked like after the photo shoot. Lot's of groaning and struggling to stand back up. How many needed assistance getting back up?
OK...sounds like agism. Sure a few old people can kneel like that and get back easily, but a hell of a lot of us can't. All for a bit of show.