He may be a racist asshole, but he doesn’t play one on TV…
African-American actor Jesse Williams attracted national attention at the BET Awards last month as he accepted the BET Humanitarian Award. Williams launched into the racist black activist version of Authentic Frontier Gibberish, sending out sufficiently loud anti-white dog-whistles that he received a standing ovation from the throng. In response, a petition was placed on Change.org demanding that he be fired from his role on the inexplicably long running ABC medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy”:
“Jesse Williams spewed a racist, hate speech against law enforcement and white people at the BET awards. If this was a white person making the same speech about an African American, they would have been fired and globally chastised, as they should be, but there has been no consequences to Williams’ actions. There’s been no companies making a stand against his racist remarks and no swift action condemning his negative attitude. Why was Burke’s character fired from Grey’s Anatomy after his inappropriate homophobic slur, but nothing for Jesse Williams? Why the one-way street? Why the support for a hater? Why the hypocrisy? #AllLivesMatter All humans bleed the same color. #EqualConsequences4RacistBehavior”
The reference to “Burke’s character” ( Helpful Tip: When you are making a pitch in a petition, take the time to check your facts so people know what the heck you are talking about) was a reference to African-American actor Isaiah Washington, who was fired from his role as Dr. Preston Burke on “Grey’s Anatomy” in 2007 for using homophobic slurs in public, including The Golden Globes telecast, and on the show’s set.
Petitioning to have someone fired for their political opinions is an ethically-dubious enterprise at best, but the allegation of a double standard is apt, because it is a double-standard. The culture nourished by Barack Obama and his political-correctness obsessed regime accepts anti-white rants as legitimate and honorable, but holds the expressing of anti-gay sentiment as grounds for shunning and destruction. Writes professional gossip columnist, celebrity worshiper and silly person Perez Hilton:
“True, Isaiah Washington did ultimately get fired for saying hateful homophobic slurs — but comparing that to Williams’ uplifting speech about equality (that had everything to do with why he was on stage accepting his humanitarian award in the first place) doesn’t make much sense at all.”
Let’s clean that up a bit, shall we? Hilton, who is not only gay but incredibly gay, thinks that homophobic slurs are disgusting and therefore should forfeit the right to make a living, but anti-white diatribes are “uplifting,” so the comparison doesn’t make sense to him.
Here is what Williams said at the BET Awards; let’s see if you find it uplifting. I’ll interject the comments I might have shouted out during the speech had I been there and was willing to be pummeled to death, including notes, probably unnecessary, where Williams descends into Authentic Frontier Gibberish (AFG), social justice warrior dialect class:
Now, this award – this is not for me. This is for the real organizers all over the country – the activists, the civil rights attorneys, the struggling parents, the families, the teachers, the students that are realizing that a system built to divide and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do. [ That system that you claim was built to “impoversh” you has allowed you to make a high six-figure salary and have influence far beyond your actual acumen, experience or accomplishments.]
It’s kind of basic mathematics – the more we learn about who we are and how we got here, the more we will mobilize. [ AFG ]
Now, this is also in particular for the black women in particular who have spent their lifetimes dedicated to nurturing everyone before themselves. We can and will do better for you. [Awwww. This isknown as “sucking up.”]
Now, what we’ve been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow manage to deescalate, disarm and not kill white people everyday. So what’s going to happen is we are going to have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and ours. [They also have to kill more white people than black people, but don’t let facts get in your way, Jesse. You’re rolling.]
Now… I got more y’all – yesterday would have been young Tamir Rice’s 14th birthday so I don’t want to hear anymore about how far we’ve come when paid public servants can pull a drive-by on 12 year old playing alone in the park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then going home to make a sandwich. [ Gee, what a fair and complete description of Rice’s death! I’d say “playing alone in the park with a realistic-looking toy gun without the mandated orange plastic cap on the barrel” would be a bit more accurate. I’d say the fact that the 12-year-old was 5 feet 7 inches, and 195 pounds is also part of the story as well as the fact that the dispatcher didn’t bother to tell the cops that he was a “kid” and that the gun he was brandishing “was probably a toy.” Has there been any evidence at all that Rice’s race had anything to do with his shooting? Oh, right, the cop was a white guy, so this had to be racism. Now, when I hear anyone make a statement like this, I stop listening, because it’s a tell: the speaker doesn’t care about the truth, and believes in presumed racism, which itself a racist attitude.] Tell Rekia Boyd how it’s so much better than it is to live in 2012 than it is to live in 1612 or 1712. [ Rekia Boyd was killed because a reckless off-duty cop fired a gun into a dark alley and killed her by accident. He was charged and tried, and got off due to a technicality, in a strange judicial ruling. The cop was a “man of color, ” but white enough to make this a racist shooting by Williams’ analysis.] Tell that to Eric Garner. [ The police weren’t trying to kill Eric Garner, and there is no evidence that racism was involved.] Tell that to Sandra Bland. [ Sandra Bland committed suicide.] Tell that to Dorian Hunt. [ Dorian Hunt was shot by a police officer last month in an incident now under investigation. Of course, you don’t need an investigation if you believe, like Williams does, that any time any African American is shot by a white police officer, it is per se a racist execution.]
Now the thing is, though, all of us in here getting money – that alone isn’t gonna stop this. Alright, now dedicating our lives, dedicating our lives to getting money just to give it right back for someone’s brand on our body when we spent centuries praying with brands on our bodies, and now we pray to get paid for brands on our bodies. [AFG]
There has been no war that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There has been no job we haven’t done. There is no tax they haven’t leveed against us – and we’ve paid all of them. [ About 50% of African Americans pay no Federal income tax, Jesse.] But freedom is somehow always conditional here. “You’re free,” they keep telling us. But she would have been alive if she hadn’t acted so… free. [ Who is the “she” referenced here? ]
Now, freedom is always coming in the hereafter, but you know what, though, the hereafter is a hustle. We want it now. [AFG]
And let’s get a couple things straight, just a little sidenote – the burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander.That’s not our job, alright – stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression. If you have no interest, if you have no interest in equal rights for black people then do not make suggestions to those who do. Sit down. [AFG. Also garbage. Here’s a suggestion: Stick to the facts. Here’s another: Be responsible. Here’s one more: Keep talking like Karl Marx, and I’ll respect your opinions as much as I respect Karl Marx. A millionaire actor should know that talking about being “oppressed” makes him look like a fool, unless he is too much of a fool to comprehend that.]
We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil – black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit. [ SUPER AFG. Wow.] The thing is though… the thing is that just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real. [Still more AFG. A reference to “the magic negro” cinema trope, presumably (think Morgan Freeman) with no actual coherent thought connected to it at all. Sounds goooood, though. Rarit!]
This is a racially hateful and socially divisive speech. That’s all it is. It is not “uplifting” to anyone but knee-jerk progressives who will cheer any black activist even if he begins speaking in tongues, and it is not responsible speech except to purveyors of double standards. It isn’t even coherent. Williams was spewing canned Black Lives Matter propaganda, as he has before. He has been even more irresponsible and dishonest in other statements, like in 2014, when he said this in reference to the Michael Brown shooting:
“I know plenty of white kids that steal stuff from convenience stores. There is this idea that every time a black person does something they automatically become a thug worthy of their own death. There’s a lot of young black men getting gunned down because people felt they were threatened. Unarmed boys who were supposedly threats because being a black man in this country is sometimes an act of aggression in itself. The rest of us are not treated like human beings. Period. That needs to be discussed. That is the story.”
Right, that’s the story, except that Mike Brown was not shot for stealing from a convenience store, but for aiming his 300+ body at a cop and charging after trying to take his gun. It was not his color that was threatening to the police officer, but his size, aggression, and demonstrated intent.
Okay, so Jesse Williams is a smug, none-too-bright, virulent anti-white bigot. That’s his right. It has nothing to do with how well he does his job of portraying Dr. Jackson Avery, unless cognitive dissonance causes audience members (most of the viewers making Williams rich are the white people he hates so much) to like the show less because it makes them watch an actor they know to be a hateful, loud-mouth asshole. It might. I can enjoy, for example, Alec Baldwin’s performance as Jimmy Doolittle in “Pearl Harbor,” even though I know that Doolittle would probably have punched his lights out, but watching Woody Allen dramedies about middle-aged romantic angst is just impossible for me, knowing that the author and director married one adopted daughter and probably molested another.
If “Grey’s Anatomy” is hurt by having Williams on the show because he’s an outspoken racist jerk, then that’s the reason to fire him, not because he spoke what he amusingly calls “his mind,” and not because of another Change.org petition.
I would like to get the names of everyone in the BET crowd that gave Williams’ hate-speech a standing O, though.
Ethics Alarms 
Reading your analysis…sigh. Keep in mind this speech was from an African-American person, to a primarily African-American audience. He did not fel the need to translate what he was saying to a white audience. You either got it, or you didn’t. You don’t have a frame of reference to even begin to decode and translate the speech, and quite frankly, with the Alton Sterling thing, I’m not feeling it today. But google “strange fruit”, #blackgirlmagic, “cultural appropriation”, and you might get a small inkling of what he was talking about
Boy, you are sometimes completely shameless. And blacks feel that anti-black jokes and slurs are acceptable in white-only venues, do they? The BET Awards were on TV. TV. Not that it matters. Words matter. Incoherent, race-dog whistles, fake facts and lies. Your rebuttal: “you just don’t understand.” Ugh.
I’ll see your sign and raise you an ack-gag-choke-retch.
Alton Sterling has nothing to do with this.
How can it be both incoherent, and a dog whistle. Suggesting gently that you simply don’t have the context to even begin to decode this speech, as you aptly just demonstrated, isn’t smear, or an insult, it’s just the simple truth.
Rap videos and telenovas are also on tv, and I would not expect you to be able to decode much of what they are saying either. Not everything is for everyone. *shrugs*
Decode? You mean English?
Seriously though, these “You aren’t part of the group so you just don’t get it” arguments get lamer by the minute.
What you are really arguing is “He was speaking make believe to a group of people who are already convinced that make believe is the absolute truth”
You’re shilling for dishonesty, but then again, that’s really your modus operandi.
Decode? You mean English?
No, as in analyze. Like we do with speeches, poetry, songs, and other pieces of literature. When we doth that, we take into account cultural contexts, explicit meaning, implicit meaning, intended audience, and the like. Jack (and probably you) simply does not have the complete set of tools to begin to analyze his speech. Jack’s analysis = “I didn’t understand what he said, but he sounded really intense, he’s black, and he mentioned some people and causes that I don’t like, so it’s obviously anti-white, even though I have already admitted that I have absolutely no clue over half of what he’s talking about, and those things I think I know what he’s talking about, I’m wrong. But anyway, RACIST!!!”
“we take into account cultural contexts”,
That is a whole sub-set of the culture pre-programmed to seek victimhood.
“explicit meaning, implicit meaning,”
AKA “you just don’t get it” argument again…sigh.
“intended audience,”
If it’s true, it’s true regardless of audience. If it is necessarily audience specific, my make-believe-grievance detector is going wild.
“Jack (and probably you) simply does not have the complete set of tools to begin to analyze his speech.”
Erm. We have objectivity and haven’t been pre-programmed to see ourselves as victims whenever possible…I’d say we’re imminently more prepared to analyze his speech than most.
Sigh. Keep being wrong…your “You just don’t get it argument” doesn’t hold water.
When we analyze Shakespeare, do we not take into account who is intended audience is? We understand that some lines are meant for the gentry, and others for the peanut gallery, and we analyze them accordingly. We understand that in that context that he wasn’t writing everything for everybody, and some things can be understood in the context of the audience, and the language that he uses to speak to them.
I would say in this case, it is a black thing, and unless you have some familiarity with AAVE, several inside black cultural tropes, and the language and memes of Black Twitter, a large portion of what he was saying was just going to pass over your head. And it’s ok.
I enjoy watching some British politics. I like the questions to the Prime Minister. They are speaking English, but a lot of the context of what they are saying is unfamiliar to me, simply because I lack the cultural context to decipher it. I don’t assume because it was not tailored for me that somehow it is anti-American, that they are speaking in dog whistles, or speaking in gibberish, simply because I don’t have the equipment to understand it. If I were really that interested, I probably could apply myself, and understand it more. But I have other things to do, so I don’t complain and expect others to translate it for me.
Until you can accurately demonstrate precisely each line that Jack misinterprets and why and what the appropriate interpretation is, I’m going to go ahead and ignore anything else you have to say as just another empty “you just don’t get it” rant.
“Unless you do the work of translating it for me, (because I’m too lazy to do so myself, which won’t stop me from being angry about that which I don’t understand), I am just going to ignore you.”
Cool by me.
Well, given that you’ve already indicated, dumb whites like us won’t understand it, we need gnostic liberals like you, in possession of the greater truth, to translate it for us.
Go ahead swami, do it.
Otherwise shut the hell up with your “you just don’t get it” arguments.
Do the work.
I didn’t think you could.
Case closed.
Jack’s analysis is spot on.
Just as I thought as well.
Like I said, cool by me.
That’s a half-a-percent more substantive than “you just don’t get it”.
Congrats, you’re getting better. But still failing miserably.
Again. Do the work Tex. At least Humble made an attempt.
I don’t think you grok your failure here.
Jack did the work, I agree with, you refuse (likely because you can’t) to the work demonstrating what he said that’s wrong, why he’s wrong, and what the deery-approved ‘correct decoding’ is.
Ball’s in your court in this one.
We’re still waiting.
“Humble made an attempt”
Sure did. But your response to me didn’t really contradict anything in my interpretation, if I take that as a “close enough” from you, it seems… damning, no?
Regarding deery’s avoidance of the topic at hand
Sure did. But your response to me didn’t really contradict anything in my interpretation, if I take that as a “close enough” from you, it seems… damning, no?
Actually, no. It seemed obvious, but I wanted to make sure whether it was the case, that you had not read at least the two works I had mentioned. Without at least that, as a bare minimum, it’s almost useless to start the conversation, as you would have no clue what I’m even attempting to explain. It’s exhausting. But suffice to say, Williams is not talking about white people as such in the passage, but questioning whiteness as a legal and social concept. You did catch the “strange fruit” reference, which seems to have stymied Jack completely, and some of the critique of “blackness” as a performance, but I think you missed the point altogether.
I’m sorry deery, but I think you’d have just as hard a time as Chris in making a material argument to the difference between “whiteness” and “white people” that doesn’t make hatred of “whiteness” hatred of “white people” per se.
My understanding of “Whiteness” is that it is a state of being marked by certain privileges commonly associated with white people, and while at times certain groups of white people did not exhibit “whiteness” privilege (people tend to mention the Irish here, Jews are also an example, but lefties tend to hate giving Jews victim cred.), the fact of the matter is that is that in this day and age, and especially in the West, there really aren’t any distinguishing features separating every white man woman and child from people experiencing “whiteness”. Maybe a certain subset of Asians have started accumulating “whiteness”, but to be quite frank, I think it’s a distinction that the vast majority of people saying “whiteness” aren’t aware of. I think that they’re using it as a placeholder for white people, if for no other reason than people like you have encouraged it.
Unless I’ve missed the point, what someone is doing when raging against whiteness is in essence saying: “I hate this group of people, not necessarily all white people, but it just so happens that all white people belong to this group.”
Unless I missed something, and I’d love for you to explain to me what that is.
Maybe you could explain to me the kind of white person that doesn’t have whiteness?
“The black thing” is that African American are being encouraged to reject trust, facts, fairness, logic and responsibility in favor of a deadly and crippling rejection of accountability that projects racism onto any negative outcome, giving blacks an excuse to be paranoid, racist, and perpetual victims. You are arguing for an echo chamber, and a particularly dangerous one. Lies do not become facts because of the audience. Williams intentionally misrepresented Rice’s death, Garners’s death and Bland’s death (as well as other facts)—who he misrepresented them too doesn’t alter a thing.
You just don’t get it Jack.
Maybe you could explain to me the kind of white person that doesn’t have whiteness?
A lot of Europeans do not have whiteness, as a concept. Or to flip it, many people from African and Caribbean nations immigrate here and describe the sensation of gradually realizing that they are black. In nations where the racial breakdowns are not delineated the same way they are in America, and there are different “in groups” and “out groups”, the concept of blackness and whiteness are very different. Or look at Brazil and their definition of “whiteness”, and the horror of many “white” Brazilians who move here, and realize that they are not white at all, but black.
You may also look at some memoirs from black soldiers and the black intelligentsia who moved to Europe in the 40s (especially France). They describe the rather unique sensation of gradually unlearning that they are black, and thus racial pariahs, and the freedom that goes along with it.
So you, deery, are not going to take a stab at a nice definable list of traits? Just going to toss off to some other vague considerations?
Tex and Humble, what you want us to do is to simplify a very complex concept, which you haven’t done any research into yourself, and which you express overt hostility to. Sorry if I don’t have the patience for that. You want to know what “whiteness” is, the Internet is a big place.
So you’re not going to try either?
That is an unfair characterization of Jack’s points. You are simply restating the “it’s a black thing – you wouldn’t understand” line. It is by definition exclusionary, condescending, and insulting. That kind of thinking shuts off any kind of debate. Simply because I grew up in a Cleveland, OH suburb I can’t understand the plight of other communities? That is nonsense. How about this? I am bilingual -fluent in English and Spanish. My wife is from Mexico. Does that give me any street credibility to understand Latinos? Or is learning a second language simply appropriating another country’s language, culture, and heritage?
jvb
“RACIST!!!”
I have to laugh. Have to. This is perhaps the best example of hypocrisy I’ve ever seen. From someone who has consistently answered the clarion call of “RACIST” in every single case of race-mongering for the last four years to come out and use the epithet with derision when the label no longer suits their political needs… I actually can’t think of a better example. Bravo, Bravo!
But regardless
The word I use is parse, usually. But what are you parsing to? Whitey? Whatever. Let’s use this as the example:
“We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo”
America owes us a debt, and has for centuries.
“and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us,”
We’re done watching from the sidelines while white people use and abuse us.
“burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil – black gold”
Black culture is valuable, but white people steal it and don’t give proper credit.
“ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them,”
White people culturally appropriate.
“gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.”
And after white people appropriate from us, they discard the source of that culture, by methods similar to lynching.
You know… generally, people on the left tend to think of the group. They see black people doing poorly and generally ignore the individuals doing well within the group and they see white people as doing well, and pointedly ignore the destitute within the group. People on the right tend to focus on the individual, and often fail to see the forest for the trees. But progressives are special. It’s because they’re unscrupulous. They see black people as a group and white people individually, when you say anything negative about a black person, or a woman, or a gay person, the knee-jerk is to assume that you hate the entire group and to saddle you with a label. But when you have an individual actually smearing an entire demographic “we obviously just don’t understand, he doesn’t ACTUALLY hate ALL white people.”
Look, the definition of racism requires two tests: 1) That a person separates people into groups based on shared physical characteristics or ancestry (that they separate people into race) and 2) That they “believe that inherent differences among those racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.”
This is textbook, obvious racism. This goes back to points I made on earlier topics, and it’s perhaps the most important question facing your side of the debate right now:
Understanding that in this day and age, while overt racism towards minorities isn’t entirely stamped out, the majority of racism is subliminal and inadvertent. While it would absolutely be beneficial for people to take a step back in their lives and introspectively analyse their relative privilege to others, and make steps to actively try to address their innate biases, do you really think it’s reasonable to expect them to so in the the face of overt, hostile racism from the minorities expecting them to do so?
You just don’t get it, Humble. But that’s because you are white.
I commend you for making an attempt Humble.
Have you read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White to start with the reference? They both talk about “the invention of whiteness” and how some groups become absorbed into the legal fiction of whiteness, while other populations do not and become in opposition to “whiteness” as outsider groups.
The rest of that paragraph flows from that background knowledge. It is difficult to parse completely without having at least those two works as background knowledge.
Understanding that in this day and age, while overt racism towards minorities isn’t entirely stamped out, the majority of racism is subliminal and inadvertent. While it would absolutely be beneficial for people to take a step back in their lives and introspectively analyse their relative privilege to others, and make steps to actively try to address their innate biases, do you really think it’s reasonable to expect them to so in the the face of overt, hostile racism from the minorities expecting them to do so?
It’s like blaming the victim, no? Is it reasonable to expect a person who you have just beaten up, and now is recovering in the hospital, to be calm and happy to see you if you deign to pay a visit? Especially if you bring a knife and are still making shallow cuts all the while? I’m sure the gesture is appreciated, but it’s a more than a bit of “tone policing”, eh? “I’ll stop hurting you if you would just calm down and be nice about it!” lol
“It’s like blaming the victim, no? Is it reasonable to expect a person who you have just beaten up, and now is recovering in the hospital, to be calm and happy to see you if you deign to pay a visit? Especially if you bring a knife and are still making shallow cuts all the while? I’m sure the gesture is appreciated, but it’s a more than a bit of “tone policing”, eh? “I’ll stop hurting you if you would just calm down and be nice about it!” lol”
Anyone want to play the “Count how many ways this is an awful analogy game?”
1) The ‘black’ sub-set of the greater culture is not an individual who has just been beaten up by the ‘white’ sub-set of the greater culture (as it isn’t an individual either). Arguments oft-pushed by deery’s ilk require us to view the world as amorphous groups sharing one collective experience equally. FALSE.
2) A bit of a hyperbole to then claim that the modern ‘individual’ that deery likens to ‘black culture’ is being sliced by dozens of tiny knife wounds by the modern ‘individual’ that deery likes to ‘white culture’. Especially as deery makes it out to be intentional, all the while often indicating that ‘microaggressions’ are mostly unintentional. FALSE.
Ultimately just another one of those “you just don’t get it” arguments.
Can anyone else point out other ways deery is sunk?
Also, points removed for the “lol”.
I have more to say on this, but I think it’s really important that we deal with my question and your response:
“Understanding that in this day and age, while overt racism towards minorities isn’t entirely stamped out, the majority of racism is subliminal and inadvertent. While it would absolutely be beneficial for people to take a step back in their lives and introspectively analyse their relative privilege to others, and make steps to actively try to address their innate biases, do you really think it’s reasonable to expect them to so in the the face of overt, hostile racism from the minorities expecting them to do so?”
“It’s like blaming the victim, no? Is it reasonable to expect a person who you have just beaten up, and now is recovering in the hospital, to be calm and happy to see you if you deign to pay a visit? Especially if you bring a knife and are still making shallow cuts all the while? I’m sure the gesture is appreciated, but it’s a more than a bit of “tone policing”, eh? “I’ll stop hurting you if you would just calm down and be nice about it!””
It’s EXACTLY like blaming the victim, we just disagree with who that is. This could very easily become a chicken and the egg scenario if we let it, but I think the difference between overt and subliminal racism is important to understand and address. White people, generally, started addressing their overt racism generations ago. Black people never really did. And while the proceeds of white racism was obviously more damaging than that of black racism, the question remains at which point must the black community take a good long look at itself in a mirror, and start to police themselves on a cultural level similar to the transformation white people have undergone.
This is the progressive blinders I was talking about; you can take examples of individual black people physically assaulting individual white people and ignore it, still comfortable calling the black person a ‘victim’ because she belongs to a group that generally isn’t doing too well. I’d like you to take a step back and reconcile that with the textbook definition of racism. In that case you would be assuming this person is a victim based on nothing but the colour of her skin.
Meanwhile, people like me look at this and say: Jesus… What are we doing all this soul-searching for when these people are literally making excuses for people who are overtly racist and hostile? You’ve lost a fundamental credibility, broken the basic trust that people should have in the belief that people are generally honest, and have an uphill battle on the trail to legitimacy. Digging in with vagaries like “you just don’t understand, you’re white” Is both racist and will never amount to a single changed mind.
I do think it is a chicken and egg thing Humble, to a very, very, limited extent.
Understanding that in this day and age, while overt racism towards minorities isn’t entirely stamped out, the majority of racism is subliminal and inadvertent.
I think, as long as whites control the vast majority of the levers of power, it doesn’t matter to the victims of racism. “Did I lose the job because he hates black people, or because he hates “ghetto” names, which are associated with black people? Either way, I’m still unemployed!”
I agree that whites have started grappling with their racism just a few decades back, and are still quite unsure what, if anything, to do with the damage their centuries of racism has caused. Should we make up for it? Should we just pretend it never happened? Apologize? Blame them for causing us to be racist? What, exactly, to do?
Individual people have their prejudices, for sure. I think black people are still grappling with the damage done to them from centuries of racism, still grappling with unlearning so many American tropes that we have learned to accept unquestioningly as children, and still learning about how such racism is still embedded in the current laws, housing patterns, and schools in this country. There is anger there, and an uncertainty on where and how to channel that anger.
In the age of social media, there just aren’t as many gatekeepers. People can get together, without being physically together, and celebrate their community and culture (a la Black Twitter). People’s experiences aren’t filtered through the mainstream media, and that has huge reverberations for everyone(see the rise of Trump). In the case of Williams, he was speaking, without bothering to translate, directly to his community, using the idioms, shorthand, and tropes of that community. The people he was speaking to got it. Others, outside of that community, just got confused frightened, and angry. It’s always useful to see when someone admits that they have no idea what someone is saying, but still want to condemn the speech anyway. It’s useful to see privilege in action.
“I think, as long as whites control the vast majority of the levers of power, it doesn’t matter to the victims of racism. “Did I lose the job because he hates black people, or because he hates “ghetto” names, which are associated with black people? Either way, I’m still unemployed!””
I think it’s telling that your hypothetical person didn’t even consider the possibility that they might have deserved to be fired because they were a bad employee, even though I find your assessment accurate. We have trained a generation of young black people to assume that everything bad that happens in their lives is the result of ‘whiteness’ and racism, which has nurtured a very hostile racial attitude originating from them to white people. And you don’t seem to think it’s a problem, or maybe to be fair at least not a problem worth consideration.
I’m… confused as to what your end game looks like: Do we continue to blame white people for everything until they’re perfect and only then focus on the toxic attitudes we’ve spent generations fostering? If not perfection, then what?
“Blame them for causing us to be racist? What, exactly, to do?”
Previously you used the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ to identify yourself as white, but when I read that I momentarily thought you were identifying as black. No, people in colonial times had some very harsh ideas about race, it might have been a factor of racial segregation or cultural segregation, or religious segregation, but over time as we’ve become more homogenised and literate, we’ve made great steps towards egalitarianism. I think people in general were racist with very little stimulus necessary. But I do think that black people currently are using white people as a foil to excuse their shortcomings, and that the attitude basically boils down to “their whiteness makes me hate them.”
As to what to do? We had this discussion on Jack’s reparations-that-weren’t-reparations post. While the black poverty rate is higher than the white poverty rate, it is also true that once in poverty, black people tend to have more upward mobility… Probably due to programs and affirmative action. I think merely our awareness of the problem HAS made a change, if a slow one. The problem is that there won’t be a QUICK solution. And that might stifle the poverty stricken of this generation, but it’s too late for them. Sorry. What might speed the process up is to foster the idea of family again, to make parents want their children to do better than they did, and to empower them to do it. A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
Deery wrote: “I agree that whites have started grappling with their racism just a few decades back, and are still quite unsure what, if anything, to do with the damage their centuries of racism has caused. Should we make up for it? Should we just pretend it never happened? Apologize? Blame them for causing us to be racist? What, exactly, to do?
“Individual people have their prejudices, for sure. I think black people are still grappling with the damage done to them from centuries of racism, still grappling with unlearning so many American tropes that we have learned to accept unquestioningly as children, and still learning about how such racism is still embedded in the current laws, housing patterns, and schools in this country. There is anger there, and an uncertainty on where and how to channel that anger.”
___________________________
This is so interesting to me. The topic is on one level ‘anthropological’. It has to do with how people define themselves (or perhaps that they do not). The European attitude vis-a-vis the primitive world is not so much a trope as it is, or was, a simple fact. There are many many different angles to this conversation and many things that could be said.
I find it interesting to recognize, to internalize, that Africans did not come to the US to seek freedom or opportunity or anything at all. They came as victims of white intention and to be put to work ‘in the empire of the white man’s will’. As anthropology, as interpretation, that worked at that time. The whole idea was to bring enlightened possibilities to the benighted masses. Now, we react against the entire presumption. It is ridiculed and it is made to seem absurd. Yet it still functions. It is still operative. Europe in this sense, and in these senses, is still transforming the world and it is still, therefor, a project of the white man’s will (that is not my phrase but one common in the 18th century). It is a power-relationship and a power-dynamic.
What I find interesting are two (or perhaps three or four) specific elements. One is that African Americans did not come here voluntarily. They did not come as the Puritans did, to construct a world. They were to quote Angela Davis ‘stolen from the shores of Africa’. Nor did they liberate themselves. They were liberated. This is a really large issue, in my retrograde view of things. They had, and in some senses they have, no very good reason to ‘participate’ in these processes which were thoroughly foreign to their will and desire. I mean, being here. At some basic level then their project is one of resistance. It had been resistance, and even when freed it remained at least in some senses one of continued resistance. The will to resist and also ressentiment (resentment in the Nietzschen sense) is a very peculiar, but a very powerful, sentiment. I can think of nothing more natural and even ‘good’ but that a people work out their own definitions of themselves, and become themselves. Obviously, if I make any part of this clear, I note what I interpret as ‘lack of desire to cooperate’ in what are, in fact, ‘white man’s projects’. Why? For many reasons then one must look at, and expose to view, ‘subversion’. Subversion, resentment, rebellion and non-cooperation. These are factors that, in my view, function very strongly in our present. They are in this sense ‘social spirits’ and they have wills and they move in their own ways. I question their relationship to the underpinning or the basic ideational values of this country and also Western civilization.
Additionally, I think it could be just as readily said, and just as truthfully, that the ‘victims’ you speak of — though I do recognize conquest and the manipulation of peoples that is part and parcel of civilization in their negative aspect — you could as easily speak of extreme benefits offered. You could invert the trope as it were, you could transvalue the value, and continue to see ‘the white man’s project’ as 1) real and actual, and 2) valid, necessary and important. I only suggest this as a perceptual exercise. True, it tends to invert and to stub many narratives in operation now, but it is a useful excersise.
I would rather not apologize for anything anymore. I would rather exist non-beholden to any level of guilt. I would rather shake it off. I would rather shake off all hangers-on. All dead weight. I would rather become exclusive — even to a certain extreme — and to reverse inclusion and the perverse ideology that supports it. I would rather be concerned for my culture, my country, my values (provided they are high and noble ones) and would rather see silenced those who, for wahtever reason (and they are agonizingly complex) do not wish to cooperate in the world that I desire to create. You see where this goes, right? It leads away from decentering and disestablishment of the arbiter-self and back to a core position of self-empowerment and self-actualization.
The prejudice that exists now between any and every people that are somatically dissimilar is a fact and an element of huamn culture on this planet. Japanese do not desire to blend or be blended with Zulu. Nor the Hottentots with the Finns. Nor White America with Black America. The ideological project that insists, against the current of the real world, that this must happen, needs to be disassembled. THAT in itself, that attitude, that false idea, is where the problem lies. That idea must be revamped.
In any case, I am a minor prophetess and therefor I predict that these concerns and issues and conversations will come up more and more in the coming years. Here and in other places (America and other places). It has to do as I wrote somewhere else with the reversal of a group and a system or narratives that have been ‘installed’. It does not have to be social war either. Just clear thinking.
And deery still fails to actually address what and why he thinks Jack is wrong and how to correct it.
I’m beginning to suspect that deery has nothing in that regard.
I used to think that progressives were just… immature thinkers. That their positions were the result of thoughts have formed and left once a palatable conclusion had been found. But more and more I’ve been driven towards the conclusion that a healthy portion of them know they’re factually wrong, they just don’t care. That they see both sides of the argument, but choose to focus on one side, and don’t want the annoyance of doubt to tarnish the righteousness of their cause, so they pretend that the truth isn’t.
It reminds me of Rand and Robyn Miller’s “Myst Reader”, in the book of D’ni, interdementional travellers stumble across a portal to another dimension. Upon arriving in the new world, a local asks the travellers, “Do I see you?”
In this world, there are three peoples: The Lords live an extravagant lifestyle from any point of view, and the Stewards who serve the lords still live lavishly. Food is plentiful and the entertainment rich. But where does the food come from, and why do none of the books mention a smattering of history?
But what of the third group? Yes, what of them? For a good chunk of time, the visitor doesn’t know that they exist, and neither do the Lords or the Visitors, for the same reason but in fundamentally different ways: Neither the Lords nor the Visitors can see the slaves. The Visitors can’t see the slaves because the slaves leave no trace and stay out of view. The Lords can’t see the slaves because they are trained from birth not to, and it results is that the Lords truly do not see their slaves, it’s not pretention, it’s psychological. The stewards act as slavemaster, and as far as the Lords are concerned, things like food appear because they always have. When the Local asked “Do I see you?” with clouded eyes, it was literal.
The conflict comes when the Visitors realise what has gone on, realise in horror that the extravagance they experienced for the previous few days literally cost lives, and in their rage they reveal that one of their number does not belong to the same race as the Lords or the Visitors.
Things happen, it’s a good read, I recommend, but at the end of the book, when they return home, the Visitors find records of the world they were in, the portal was deliberately sealed with the warning: Beyond is True Evil, Those Who Cannot See.
AFG
“Cultural appropriation”? Does that mean that only black people can appreciate black music, art, or film? Does that mean that only Jesse Williams should appreciate Morgan Freeman? How about Jimi Hendrix? Robert Johnson? Sammy Davis, Jr.? If so, that seems pretty narrow minded and exclusive to me.
jvb
“Cultural appropriation”? Does that mean that only black people can appreciate black music, art, or film? Does that mean that only Jesse Williams should appreciate Morgan Freeman? How about Jimi Hendrix? Robert Johnson? Sammy Davis, Jr.? If so, that seems pretty narrow minded and exclusive to me.
Nope. More like “columbusing”.
Taking credit for other people’s inventions, art, and music, as if you came up with it yourself, without acknowledging/giving credit to the person/people who actually came up with it. See the latest Jack Daniels controversy as a recent example.
“Taking credit for other people’s inventions, art, and music, as if you came up with it yourself”
The Hell are you talking about?
Elvis?
What do you mean by “Elvis”. Are we considering Elvis from a purely cultural point of view? Have you taken into account how his mother felt about him in a sort of Johannine “agape” mindset? She may have no qualms about his fusion style. From a less immediate point of view, perhaps the more platonic relationships developed by members of his platoon in the military? Their point of view is valid in that it represents a kind of pre-appropriation Elvis that few may realize. Until we can really get to the metaphysical level of what Elvis really means, I don’t think any of us can give an accurate answer.
From a purely Aristotelian angle, I just want to make sure we’re asking all the right questions and never actually get around to answering any of them.
Well, what DOES he mean at the metaphysical level?
I don’t know, but I’m reading half a dozen volumes from my brother-in-law’s library on the topic.
But Tex that is not quite high-tones sarcasm but mere snark. I think you can do better.
I was thinking too that might now be the time to get set up on farmersonly.com? A little too long staring at the unfortunate end of a steer does things to a man’s mind. Would you like someone to help you write your blurb?
On a more serious note, what are you reading these days Tex? Don’t be selfish. I am genuinely interested. And what’s your background anyway?
You’ll need a photo from the 21st century and this might be the time to pull out the ones taken at that Varmit Jamboree. You probably never thought it’d be an asset but then who’d have guessed? Times change eh?
Cultural appropriation is by far one of the stupidest accusations the left has produced to date.
Before their insanity, we used to have things like interaction and fusion and development of new genres and styles where previous cultural values has been separated before. But in the interest of maintaining separation, we now can accuse people of cultural appropriation.
But on the bright side, only half of Jesse Williams is guilty of cultural appropriation.
“Cultural Appropriation” is code for dog in the manger syndrome.
White European culture built the West, it designed democracy, oversaw the enlightenment and is responsible for probably every good thing in every American’s life. White people don’t complain when minorities wear their clothes, eat their foods, watch their TV or appreciate the fruits of their ancestors labour. And do you know why?
Because culture isn’t set in stone, and it doesn’t belong to anyone.
Yep.
This is a false-statement and a false-affirmation. It is a skewing of truth. And it is done because of doctrinal pressure.
Culture and civilization are creations of and outcomes of the people who formed them. It cannot be said that they ‘own’ them, but what dummy would say that? They created them out of their own selves. And without those ‘selves’ there to do that, with the will to do that, it will not simply self-exist and carry on.
You cannot ‘transfer’ culture and civilization to any other, nor virtue nor libertas, as if you are passing one of your cans of sodapop. Yet you actually see it in similar terms. Thus, your thinking has gone off the rails.
“It cannot be said that they ‘own’ them, but what dummy would say that?”
The people saying that white people wearing dredlocks are appropriating black culture, and should stop, because only black people can have dredlocks, even if they personally don’t, for instance. I think that you’re looking at the term too esoterically, and not practically. The common usage is authoritarians attempting to police cultural behaviour, it isn’t healthy. If you want to say “Your history is your own” Well that’s true, I couldn’t say I’m Asian by any stretch of the imagination, but if I decide to binge watch Anime on Netflix, I’m going to, and no asshat with a chip on his shoulder is going to scold me for appropriating Japanese culture.
“You cannot ‘transfer’ culture and civilization to any other”
Sure you can.
“Wow, you just get together every Tuesday to play board games?” “Yup, it’s just something our family does, it’s nice to have time together.” “Well gee, I think I’ll do that too.”
“Hey! You’re hair looks lice, how do you make it X*?” “You just Y and Z” “Gee, I think I’ll Y and Z.”
“Hey! Those colours look great on you!” “Thanks, my aunt from Animestan sent them to me.” “Gee, I wonder if I could make something like that.”
Culture is not set in stone, culture is fluid, and will osmose to places people damn well want it to. Culture isn’t a series of flag plantings, where someone does something first and everyone else on the planet is permanently precluded from doing it.
*My experience with hair amouns to a comb and on special occasions a little gel. Use your imagination.
We are not speaking of the same things. You are speaking about cultural detritus, the junk of culture, tinsel, stuff. I am speaking to those qualities in people out of which the culture we have and value has been created and also what qualities and what will sustains it.
Perhaps you will call it ‘esoteric’ but I’d rather think of it as foundational to self and civilization.
Your second to last paragraph indicates, to me (I don’t mean this to be at all offensive) that you have sunk into a form of modern nescience. You have in my view no idea at all what you are speaking about. And because you don’t, you have no idea what to defend and why.
“We are not speaking of the same things.”
Do fuck right off. We’ve had this conversation before, your habitation of thick textbooks and ignorance of current events, common usage and frankly, reality, is wearisome and I have run out of patience for it. If you want to have conversations about current events, political or otherwise, it is ignorant to approach the conversation with as little raw knowledge as you do and scold someone for not using the language in the way you’d prefer them to. Speak my language or get bent.
That you run out of patience of run out of anything else is not very much my concern. It is not ‘textbooks’ that I am speaking about but the ideas and the will that went into establishing our culture(s) and the institutions of culture. I am speaking to that. And THAT has to do with the creation of persons who are capable of being free (libertas), and who function from a level of virtue and integrity. Those are cultural creations. And they are ‘ours’ though, as may be the case, they are not yours. If you cannot even conceive of them, how could you ever be expected to value and protect them? The answer is that you could not.
My ‘knowledge of current events’ arises from watching and feeling my former country, my republic, be given over to brutes. I suffered the consequences and I paid the price, and the price was high indeed. What do you know about these things may I ask?
When one does the hard philosophical work to understand what has made us us and what has brought all this to be, one’s perspective changes. This is not an issue of ‘language’ or nomenclature, it is an issue with ideas and values.
You have in this last post shifted to ad hominem and away from arguing ideas. That’s to be avoided.
I want you to know, as a courtesy, that I will never reply to anything you write on here ever again. If you reply to me, I will assume it to be the addled rambling of an insane person speaking to herself, and ignore you.
HT couteously writes: “I want you to know, as a courtesy, that I will never reply to anything you write on here ever again. If you reply to me, I will assume it to be the addled rambling of an insane person speaking to herself, and ignore you.”
______________________
Now you have taken this to the level of a child. It is interesting to me that such a possibility is the backdrop of discourse between adult persons.
Have it your way.
Knock it off, Humble is giving small scope examples but they still lie on the same continuum as the grand scope cultural values like “religious tolerance” or “work ethic” or “encourage innovation” or “value education” etc etc.
Humble just as easily could have made his example one of a hard-core sunni cleric migrating with his family from Iraq, having left just recently calling his fellow sunnis to keep on hating non-muslims, then living in America after awhile decides “gee, everyone seems a whole lot happier when they just live and let live, I now agree and espouse religious toleration as a cultural value”.
Say it doesn’t happen and you’ll sound like a fool. When it happens on a macro-scale, as it does in a process called assimilation, we get precisely what Humble asserts.
That is a nice try, Tex, but I sincerely believe that your argument is not a good one. It is a form of idealism and it is propped up by ideology. The structures of Occidental culture, in jurisprudence, in ‘classic liberalism’, in the rights of man, all depend not on an imposition from beyond but are the result of inner qualities. And this is even more apparent in the case of the establishment of America. ‘America’ is in many different senses an idea, but to understand and to appreciate how that idea came to be one has no other choice but to examine the people — the actual persons, their milieu, their antecedents, the structure of ideas that molded them — to understand that they alone came up with it. It is the result of long and laborius processes. A man capable of enjoying ‘libertas’ is the only man that can maintain it. You cannot give it to someone, you cannot go over to someone’s culture and ‘install’ it like installing a ball field. It arises, organically, in a people. As America is being, in our present history, repopulated and were this to increase the will to 1) appreciate and understand freedom and all the responsibilities and sacrificed on which it depends, and 2) see it and understand it conceptually, and 3) defend it and protect it, will diminish bit by bit.
It is obvious that with your example of an immigrant who consciously chooses to adopt the intellectual culture of America (as an example) and consciously and willingly submits himself to it by simultaneously turning against other, former structures, and vast understructures of people, or ‘bilogical and cultural material’ if you wish, who have not any intention or desire or good reason to do so. You fail to take into consideration what must be the opposite side or aspect of your assertion: just as someone could assimilate to a higher value, if he had in him higher material and the aspiration, so the opposite can happen, and does happen. I have the sense that it is the latter that may be more common and more probable.
One of the questions that always seems to float here, I mean in the overall ethics conversation, is ‘Why has things gotten so bad?’ And ‘What is going wrong in the Republic?’ This questions interests me a great deal, and I have my very good reasons why this is so.
In my view, assimilation as you speak of it is possible and it is real. In my view the better candidate for such assimilation is a similar stock as that which founded the country. I am not so certain that the logic of assimilation functions when the immigration patterns shift, as indeed they have shifted. But I do too understand that it is a requirement of a form of liberal and modern thinking (or perhaps one of the tenets of America’s civil religion?) that this view be seen and understood as true, even if much evidence works against it.
All my declarations and any statement I make are conjectures. I do not have exact and precise information. I do not have absolute certainty. But I try to say what I see and I try to eliminate the censor that rises up and interposes itself to keep me from coordinating what I see and understand with what I say. Subtly, and also openly, I get mockery and contempt from you and numerous others. I merely note it. It has nothing to do with me though. That’s *your* problem. But my thinking processes and my projects are above-board and honest.
‘Say it doesn’t happen and you’ll sound like a fool’ is bad argumentation. It is similar to the implication that you are mentally sick if you think in contrary ways. I say what I say and I will be proven or disproven by time and reality. Or maybe I won’t be disproven at all? You and some others certainly seem to think I am a fool. I laugh along with you. Why not? But I do think I would slaughter you in any debate that required up-front and strict argumentation. You have a habit of resorting continually to the fallacy of ad hominem (among other fallacies) and to trite and empty ‘humor’ when it suits you.
‘Knock it off’ as I recently heard.
😉
“It is obvious that with your example of an immigrant who consciously chooses to adopt the intellectual culture of America (as an example) and consciously and willingly submits himself to it by simultaneously turning against other, former structures, and vast understructures of people, or ‘bilogical and cultural material’ if you wish, who have not any intention or desire or good reason to do so. You fail to take into consideration what must be the opposite side or aspect of your assertion: just as someone could assimilate to a higher value, if he had in him higher material and the aspiration, so the opposite can happen, and does happen. I have the sense that it is the latter that may be more common and more probable.”
You do realize that that whole bit can be summarized as “Yes, Humble and Tex, I agree that people can shift the culture to which they subscribe.”
Thanks!
deery,
Almost every word you’ve written in four comments pegs you as an absolutely shameless apologist for racist black people. If you’re actually a black man or woman, you’re quite likely a racists yourself.
While those thoughts are bouncing around inside your thick skull, you make sure to have a nice day.
deery,
I’d like to think that Jesse Williams was falling down drunk or high on cocaine when he delivered his racist speech, but there’s no evidence to support it; therefore, I can only conclude from his racist rant that he, Jesse Williams, is in fact a black racist regardless if he’s half white or any other combination of human mutts like the rest of us he has shown his true bigoted color, he’s a race-baiter, and an unethical political hack.
Jesse Williams is a racist; fire him, he’s a detriment to the “Grey’s Anatomy” franchise.
Oh, and Jesse Williams is half-white. His mother, the white parent, who he acknowledged, was in the audience that night, and seemed to be quite proud and beaming.
Oh. Well, then, since we know that mothers are the ultimate objective judges, I stand corrected.
One white person gets it Jack. Can’t you get on board?
No? Well duh, it’s because you are white, you racist…
Just think Jack…he’s only half-white….
He’d be twice as wealthy if he was all white.
Wait hold on, if White people just don’t get it because they aren’t part of the group, how on Earth can you trust his white mother’s opinion on the matter?
She must be delusional or something…
Who is Jesse Williams and why did BET give him a humanitarian award?
Do you have stats for that? I’ve been unable to find the number of people killed by police, much less a breakdown by ethnicity.
It’s one of BLM’s legitimate points, statistics are notoriously hard to come by because police departments aren’t required to report to a central intelligence compiling body.
There are examples done at the state level that have shown that while black people are arrested at a per capita rate higher than white people, white people are shot more often than black people as a percentage of their demographic’s confrontation number. That is: You’re more likely to be arrested while black, but if you’re in a confrontation with police you’re more likely to be killed if white.
I’m loathe to use these statistics definitively because the gathering of them is so fickle… But there aren’t better numbers yet. And what that means is that while I’m loathe to use what I think are shady statistics, people making definitive statements about police related shootings are revelling in them and don’t actually have good numbers to back them up.
As Humble Talent pointed out, stats are generally unavailable. The Washington post attempted to put together some numbers, but they are not definitive.
Could be helpful: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
This is an issue that, even to think about it, even to *see* it, requires a huge project of back-tracking even to get to the point where one could really describe what is going on here. This is a labyrinthian endeavor.
I am always inclined to do it, and yet every time I feel that inclination I just as much recoil away from it. (I mean my basic project is one of ‘Identity’ and ‘Identification’ but when I am tempted to speak in clear terms about what I see, I recoil away).
To accept the philosophical and also the historical position that this man has internalized — and it is not a false-narrative exactly, but a tendentious one, and a politicized one, and one with a very specific intent — requires a sort of philosophical indoctrination. Well, substitute philosophical for emotional/somatic and then add ‘idea-of-sorts’. It comes from the body, is how I see it. ‘Somatic’.
I guess you’d have to say that it is quintessentially ‘racist’ insofar that it has everything to do with a biological body that seeks to impose itself, to gain power, to overpower, to gain control of the field, to come into a position of being able to determine.
There is usually a ‘surface’ to a given event or narrative, and then there is the ‘depth’ and what lies under the surface. His speech has to do with power. With naming it and making it public. With getting it to ring and resound in others, those that feel as he feels. With building as it were a team spirit. It is not rational and it does not have to do with ideas. It has to do with the body and to asserting that body horizontally and also vertically. It functions as resistance narratives function. The words do not really matter, though AFG (that is, a form of poetry, a skill in oration) is best if it seems cogent.
The thing is that this Narrative has got most white folk peeing in their pantaloons. They simply melt in front of it. Grown men, grown women, their children, their institutions, are bending so far over backwards that they might break at any moment. They run and hide. They simply do not know how to counter these charges. They have no defense. No articulatable counter-narrative. Why?
Because the articulation of a counter-narrative can only function through a somatic counter-resistance. That is one element. It is a very large element. The post-war has been one where ‘the white man’ has voluntarily given up an incredible amount of ground and space. I mean Europeans, Americans and all white class-elites. You know, the European zones and then the Colonial zones. They simply ceded this ground. After the primary rebellions it has all done through idea and sentiment. The opposite of ‘body’ in the sense that I mean. They did it for ‘moral’ reasons. But they have given up ground in a way that is, as far as I am aware, unprecedented in any history that I am aware of. ‘Liberal’ in my book is general aquiesence to this historical project. ‘Conservative’ tends to resist the Liberal narrative. Strange, isn’t it? (I am not unaware of the problematic elements here, and that is why I veer toward ‘separatism’. In the next years this term will come up all the time, I predict).
There is no way for any White person to fight back against this except through legalistic speech and elaborate emotional negotiations, appeals. That is, to call it ‘racist’ and to point out that ‘We have done a great deal’ and ‘We are doing the best we can’. And ‘Things are much better now, aren’t they?’
And then you will cede more ground. Are you hoping for a balance-point?
It is clear, and should be clear, that I have a very different outlook on issues that pertain to culture and to race/culture. I am not your best American in this sense. I also do not believe it is in the best interests of anyone to establish ‘blend republics’, like in Brasil. (Or in my former republic, Venezuela). It is a very hard position to take insofar as it runs against so many currents that feel monolithic. I am obviouly of the school that understands that whites need now to reclaim their own power in the most direct terms. Yep. That is what I think. Yet this process starts in ‘idea’ and THEN moves to a somatic level. Thus it is necessary to establish ‘counter-narratives’.
No apologies. No excuses.
My brain hurts.
jvb
lol. Basically she’s saying, “Make America Great Again!”
No, that is what Trump is saying.
I am much more interested in as well as a product of the European Alt/Right school of thinking. Alain de Benoit, Jonathan Bowden and others There is a nify little viddy that I think encapsulates a group of ideas (which also link to sentiments) that inspire me and people like me. It is only 13 minutes long. You might appreciate it if only to be able to have a stronger focus on what you don’t like.
In my view the *work* that has to be done is primarily internal and ideational. It is an inner organization. In my understanding it touches everything but is also, I mean basically, religious. Europe (and by extension America, a bedroom communiy of Europe, also a laboratory) has collapsed away from a much needed philosophical and existential understanding. We exist in the shadow of a collapsed medievalism. We have no unified and unifying ‘reigious’ structure.
To be ‘great’ does not mean to expand endlessly, or to dominate, or to conquer. It means to really become what you are. There is so much to the question and yet there are so few hearers to hear.
I am convinced you just have to start with small and very basic things.
That was a fascinating video. Thanks.
Let’s see. Michael Richards goes on one racist rant in a comedy club where he was heckled and his career is totally ruined. Williams deserves the same treatment although nobody heckled him at the BET Award show. Hopefully the producers of Grey Anatomy will show that they have some balls and fire him. Maybe Ice Cube or somebody else could replace him.
Michael Richards used the N word. What slur did Williams use?
While I can see the argument that Williams was wrong, I don’t understand how his speech can be characterized as “anti-white.”
WHAT??????? You must be kidding. To take just one example, I know this…
We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil – black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.
Is semi-coherent, activist-speak blather, but it’s obviously anti-white blather. How can you deny it?
I see a critique against “this invention called whiteness,” not against white people.
Can you describe the difference?
Probably not very well, but many others have done the work of identifying the concept of “whiteness.” Basically, it is a social construct that marks people as “white,” and has excluded and included different people at different times, but always seems to come with a certain legitimacy and privileges in Western culture.
White people are simply people who benefit from this construct; condemning the social construct of “whiteness” isn’t the same as criticizing white people, because this is a construct that predates any of our existences and which most of us are simply passive beneficiaries of.
So what is “whiteness”, then?
That is to say, could you list some of the cultural traits that might get someone labelled as “engaging in whiteness”?
Can I or any other white person opt out? And if not, is there a material enough difference between “whiteness” and “white people” to not make hatred of “whiteness” not hatred of “White people” per se?
I’m interested to see where the answers go to my question immediately above (I have my suspicions which direction they will go). And I have a sneaky suspicion the answers will be very revealing to your question.
I understand their frustration, they’ve built part of their political identity around this vague theory that allows them to feel morally superior about being a bigot by deeming their bigotry “different” than the bigotry they don’t like… The problem is that despite the very real belief that their beliefs are different, they can’t describe how the belief is different or why the belief is different. I can’t think of something more frightening, frustrating and gut wrenching that having the rug pulled out from under me with a single question. The gut check is always how someone responds.
I have a sneaky suspicion that most answers regarding “identifying with the concept of whiteness” will boil down to “being a white person” or “crap, I’m gonna have to list general American values and somehow tap dance around the fact that they are general American values that at the end of the day most people even non-whiteness people aspire to”
It would help of course, Dear Humble, if you were a bit more ‘intellectually capable’. I note a problem with both you and Tex and it is that you lack subtle intellect. Tex especially. You work, and with all your might, binary angles, and you pick fights with folks who do not have a grasp of their own material (Chris and deery). They feel something, they have some limited ideas they are exploring, they certainly have a base in ‘the grammar of European self-intolerance’, but they cannot articulate a cogent program. They are easily thwarted and confused. And these are the people you love to hunt-out and carry out (enact) what looks from my perspective to be a ‘performance’. It has NO INTELLECTUAL VALUE and you have NO INTEREST in learning or expanding perspectives. You only seem to want to flatten other perspectives, to trounce your ‘enemies’. It is boring and rudely infantile.
Typical of you, you write things like: “I have a sneaky suspicion that most answers regarding “identifying with the concept of whiteness” will boil down to “being a white person” or “crap, I’m gonna have to list general American values and somehow tap dance around the fact that they are general American values that at the end of the day most people even non-whiteness people aspire to”.
That’s how it is done by steer in Texas. OK I get that. But I do not wish to be trained up by a steer, Tex. I demand more.
‘American values’ is a labyrintian and extremely complex set. Your fathers and grandfathers in the 20s and 30s were card carrying members of Klan organizations on the basis of their ‘American values’. American values is a shifting territory of valuation.
If you are going to speak specifically about African culture in the US you have to backtrack over a tremendous amount of material, to have read it, to have thought about it with some non-steer mental commitment. You do not have any of this background. For this reason you are not so very useful in plumbing these depths and making interpretations. You remind me of a barnacle.
Actually, I think you are part of a class of ‘lying men’. It is not exactly intentional lying though. You do not even know how to tell the truth. You function out of partial truths, select truths, one’s that serve you, but you seem to have trouble seeing a larger picure. You are reductionist thinkers and this is a bane to the intellectual project.
You project seems founded in a peculiarly modernistic project of annihilation of identity. To be the ‘American’ you are, or have been made to be, you have to have destroyed certain identity. Then, in the melting pot, you can all blend gleefully together and suddenly no one is really anything specific. You are a ‘general American’. You think the same, talk the same, buy the same stuff, see the world through the same lens.
I suggest that THIS is part of the problem, and it is one that has to be transcended. You and Humble and Chris and Deery can haggle over petty terms and miniscule definitions but no one of you seems to be getting to the core. You really do not succeed in doing much intellectual work.
Victims of tropes is how I’d put it.
https://www.google.ca/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiQ3JeU9OHNAhVGJiYKHU0OAGoQjRwIBw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsimpsonstappedout.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FFile%3ATap_Ball_Player_Crazy_Cat_Lady.png&psig=AFQjCNHBg-ZJREu1-ZBoxzdbycSfTh7QAg&ust=1467999956191003
“We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil – black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.”
_______________________
Interpretation: ‘To float this country on credit’ is obviously to have been forced to labor and offer a ‘credit’ used in ‘the empire of the white man’s will’. It has been said that the conquest of the Americas, and the resources pulled out of it, as well as the fantastic wealth of the virgin American forests and its wood-products (among various products) jumpstarted Occidental projects including the Industrial Revolution. Much of Civil War revisionism (in the literal sense of the word) and for example Eugene Genovese in his various Marx-tinged (early) works, examines these economies from a Marxian economic perspective. So, the reference fits into scholarship and as well is a cultural trope.
The implication, which is certainly true in certain senses, is that Black forced labor has been used in the Project that is America. This fits in with many levels of analysis from Liberation Theology to traditional and also Marxian economics.
The ‘invention’ of whiteness is a complex trope to disassemble. Even in this conversation, as with Chris, as well as with Humble and Tex, there is confusion and ideological distortion — an inability to see and to name clearly and without getting trapped on fly-paper — the idea of ‘whiteness’. It means ‘European categories’ essentially. It is idea, romanticism, imposition, narrative, and it also means ‘biological self’ with a specific identification. It is anthropological but an anthropology of former centuries. It is also Christian insofar as the ideological platform of conquest and dominion over the world’s colored cultures was, and perversely still is in ‘shadow form’, a Christian project. It extends from the command to ‘Go out and bring the Gospel of liberation to all peoples’. There are all manner of different predicates encapsled in that. (America as post-Christian nation is still very tied up in these narratives yet they are not stated in the same original terms).
You could say ‘burying out of sight and out of mind’ or employ a group of interchangable images, but the key is ‘appropriation’. That this ’empire of the white man’s will’, and the white construct as it were, the white identity, the white project, robbed black labor and identity, and ‘buried it’. In Cuba during the slave days it was illegal to speak an African dialect. Identity as African was certainly destroyed in the American empire, and this was done because there was no means available to appreciate African culture or tribalism. It was dark, demonic, chaotic and seen as functioning completely against the trope of the pure and good Christian soul, who’d achieved salvation in Christ and was working, sincerely, to bring a level of salvation to the dark primitives. This is not exaggeration of embellishment, this is an anthropological fact, a key definition.
But with the liberation of African Blacks in 1865 and their at first marginal semi-inclusion in the dominant culture of the republic, elements of Black culture were certainly ‘expropriated’. There is no doubt of this at all. It does not have to be proven. The minstrel shows, the mining of musical modes, the developing Jazz world, and the African Black as entertainer and comic: all this requires no explanation. ‘Ghettoizing and demeaning’ require no explanation. That is how Blacks in America began their entry into the culture world, or this was the route allowed to them. This is elementary and very basic stuff.
It is a poetic expression, of course, and yet it is entirely cogent: ‘…ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit’. It is easy to break down.
The minstrel show and also black face — so important and prevalent in the development of an entire entertainment industry — is the ghettoization. To see in terms of ‘ghettos’ is how White America was first able to glimpse Black culture. Who should have to explain ‘demeaning’? But this is also anthropolical and perspectival. Christian Europe could only see Africa in terms that we would now recognize as ‘demeaning’. Essentially, European Christianity saw Africa as demon-possessed. If that is not original demeaning I’d have no idea what is! All other demeaning postures and inflictions extend from this one. But this is, after all, the ‘white man’s project’: it is a way of seeing and interpreting the world, history, existence and ‘reality’, and then setting to work on it and with it.
That project is still moving forward. What has been set in motion does not stop its motion. Motion modifies.
Now, the image of the rind of a discared fruit is not at all inaccurate. The higher value of Empire is what serves empire. As a non-participant whose will is not aligned with the ’empire of the white man’s will’ you cannot be said to have much value at all unless you have been transformed to serve the Empire. A primite, demon-worshiping black African has no intrinsic value until he has been transformed, remolded and restructured, to serve at some level within the empire of the white man’s will. This is totally elemental material. It does not really require explication. Just as people and labor are employed and channeled, the bodies as it were that bring that laborial energy can certainly be ‘discared’ when they no longer serve a recognizable function. Outside of function, determined by a dominant culture, what possible function does a slave or an ex-slave have? It requires a Christian metaphysic, to be truthful, to ‘give’ a soul to a Black person. Among various given things. Language is another.
The ‘strange fruit hanging from southern trees’ is a powerful image as well as a devastating trope. It speaks to the capability of terror in this ’empire of the white man’s will’, as well as to the consequences of disobedience. To get insight into the terror that we, as Europeans, have ourselves lived and been moulded by I suggest a reading of Nietzsche’s 2nd chapter in Genealogy of Morals. European culture, medieval culture, and the Christian society that has produced ‘us’, is in certain respects a Mill of Terror. You pay the price with the flesh of your own body (public execultions, torture-fests, inquisitional pain, etc.) This has gone on for at least a thousand years and, according to Nietzsche, it is what makes us us! A man capable of offering his ‘promise’ and ‘keeping his word’.
I come here and I do all this fantastic work and all I get is insult! Harumph!
In order to understand out present one must dive deeply under the surfaces. To *see clearly* is a phenomenally difficult task. I mention again Heidegger’s essay on Plato’s Cave. As if anyone pays attention.
::: snif snif :::
Shonda Rhimes is the producer of Grey’s Anatomy, and basically rules ABC right now. She responded to the petition to Williams fired with, “Um, people? Boo don’t neeed a petition!” So he’s probably not going anywhere. Even if they end up canceling Grey’s Anatomy (it’s pretty long in the tooth as is), she reuses her actors extensively, so he’s probably set for life.
I’m amazed change.org let this petition go anywhere. Doesn’t change.org have some kind of “nothing but lefty stuff allowed here” filter?
This mixed race thing is a big Gordian knot. This guy has made a career out of being incredibly visually striking. Blue eyes, sexy swarthy complexion. But not TOO black. Just right for general consumption. Looks great without a shirt on. Probably does lots of cologne ads. But he’s black. Never mind about his mother and what she brought to the table. Kind of the Halle Berry syndrome. Raised by her single white mother. But she’s black for diversity purposes.
And I know the old “one percent” rule. It’s just been turned on its head to the tremendous advantage of certain people in the celebrity/entertainment industry and it’s pretty cynical. Then of course, we had the first black president, Bill Clinton. I still haven’t figured that one out. And it was okay for Bill Clinton to call himself black but it wasn’t for that woman out in Washington State? AFG indeed.
Did Bill Clinton ever actually call himself black?
No, Toni Morrison did on the New Yorker, but it was relatively well received by the black community (oh how the times have changed) and he never said a word to discourage it.
And where was the outrage about Bill Clinton playing the sax? Is a white guy really entitled to play the sax? A white guy is never privileged as long as he’s a Democrat? Isn’t that appropriating black culture? I still remember Jerry Mulligan’s annoyance at people telling him only black guys could play jazz. And that was back in the ’50s and ’60s.
You are forgetting that Bill’s black. Toni Morrison said so.
““Humble made an attempt”
Sure did. But your response to me didn’t really contradict anything in my interpretation, if I take that as a “close enough” from you, it seems… damning, no?”
To be clear, deery is conveniently ignoring the half-dozen or so discussions from the past where he went to the mat defending racism and racists in which I made arguments similar and identical to yours. So his desire to make it out as though I haven’t tried to engage him is misleading at best. No, the problem deery continues to avoid here is that he won’t defend his assertions that Jack’s analysis is wrong. He won’t identify what is wrong, why it is wrong, and what the correct analysis is. All he parrots is the “you just don’t get it” line.
Still waiting for his counterargument…well at least one more substantive than the trendy bullet line of “of course, seeing as how you are white, you’ll never understand”.
Not having read all the comments here, I would like to link to a video I watched this morning. My question regarding the video is, what’s your take on the message?
Just imagine had it been the other way around… and “Bob White-Person” had stood up there for, what, 7 minutes.. spewing that kind of hate. (I imagine that there are several videos of the speech on youtube, each with different views of the crowd. Only one I remember was Snoop Dogg, and he was LOVING it.)