I ran across two essays just as I was prepping for a rare, in-person live seminar for young lawyers focusing on basic non-legal, life-competence skills essential to the effective and professional practice of law. One of those is understanding the importance and the power of culture. We all have a responsibility to care for the various cultures we swim in: a bad culture will corrupt us; a good culture will ennoble us and make us more successful and virtuous. If you can’t change a culture, you have to get out. The upcoming election is about, about, other things, what kind of culture our nation will have. People who don’t understand culture (or who don’t make the necessary effort to know what their culture is, like Malcolm Gladwell in his recent book) create problems for everyone, especially themselves.
That infuriating video above prompted a racist substacker named Max Remington (maybe) who describes himself as an “America First, isolationist, unilateralist, shameless nationalist, and post-Christian radical right-winger” to post this long essay. It’s lucid, more-or-less well-written, and provocative, but also displays the logical and ethical fallacies typically embraced by racists who are made stupid by their bias. I know them well: my ex-Marine law school room mate was a racist (and anti-Semite) much like this guy. My room mate got himself killed, but I have another racist friend with similar views, and most of my Greek-American relatives on my mother’s side were racists, including Mom.
In response, another substacker who goes by Sensurround Q Catgirl (or maybe that’s her real name) wrote this essay. Its main theme is that Max “provides absolutely ZERO evidence that race is the cause of the behaviors he’s describing.” “He provides statistics,” Catgirl continues. “He describes experiences. He identifies behaviors he finds objectionable, but then he makes an enormous logical leap from observing behavior to attributing that behavior to race.”
She’s right, Max is wrong
Watch the video, and read the essays.
I’ve got to get ready for my seminar…
In recent weeks I have written some comments that may have been interpreted by some as potentially racist. They were not and I am not.
Culture is the issue as pointed to by our host. There are plenty of people, irrespective of their race, who have allied themselves with narcissistic and thug oriented culture.
If you are interested in this distinction, there is a black gentleman with a YouTube channel called Consider Culture. Cultural affiliation is the central theme of his channel and addresses how gangster rap culture swamped the opportunity culture of the mid 1980s and embraced a criminal and anti-white racist mindset.
This same culture, now allied with /oppressed thinking has swamped across racial lines and obliterated any notion of social and economic mobility.
Subscribing to this culture is the death of perceived individualism and a buy in to systemic oppression.