Straha wrote: ↑2018-02-02 02:18amSimon_Jester wrote: ↑2018-02-01 03:31pm
So, just to be clear, you want there
NOT to be a limit on how hard powerful people and privileged groups can "punch down" to inflict harm upon weak people and unprivileged groups?
Because that appears to be what you're saying.
No, that's a misread of what I'm saying.
I'm saying that any system that creates and protects power groups in comparison to weak groups is a bad system and not one worth protecting. I'm saying designing a system that includes that is part and parcel of being one of those groups that punches down, and that the act of punching down at all is never okay. To say there should be a "limit" is to accept it should happen, and I think that's bullshit.
...You do realize that "zero" is a value to which a limit can be set, yes? I mean, the number "zero" has been around for a long time.
Also, seriously pause to consider how your words sound to other humans. If I ask "should there be a reciprocal limit on how hard people can punch down," and you say "no," that
sure as hell sounds like the answer is "no, I think there should be no limit." And "no limit" sounds to most people like "punch as hard as you want."
The way you are communicating is (perhaps accidentally) adding a lot of obscurantism to this conversation, and you're trying to present "but this unrelated philosophical idea not cited coherently in the article means the article is part of an honorable philosophical tradition!" as a defense of an article.
Please pay some attention to making the conversation legible to others. Communication is pointless when both parties aren't putting effort into being legible.
[That's an adjective, I needed a noun. Furthermore, "anti-black" implies opposition to the people, not the culture, which tends to be a much more accurate description of the frothing demented racist monstrosities I'm talking about.
No, it's a noun. It's used as a noun to describe the ideologies and systems that create these structures, thousands of writers and scholars use it as a noun. You may be talking about the extreme few who are explicitly racist monsters, but that's a distraction from the point which is how the vast majority of American (and western) culture is designed to both create and then destroy Blackness as it is embodied in both people and culture.
In the context of my original statement, no it was not a distraction. I was specifically talking about the extreme few, a subset which exists and whose existence has consequences, in the context of the larger many who may or may not be unwitting or vaguely affiliated with a larger cultural trend.
I would also take an interest in which definition of the word 'designed' you are using. I have a (possibly incorrect) sense that this is one of those postmodernist things where a word gets creatively redefined, creating a scenario where one can
equivocate to exchange an unambitious true claim for an explosive but false one.
2. The point of the article and the field of thought is that there are no white people who are not structurally anti-black, and the policing of language (and laws) that occurs is one that protects anti-blackness on a fundamental level. The point of this article, and many other books, is less to say "Let's rally!" and more to say "You too are culpable."
The point of the article is so effectively obscured by its tone that it does not achieve the desired goal. As such, it should not be sheltered under the protective aegis of "but this is intended to achieve a goal!"
The fact that my actions are aimed towards a purpose is not an excuse for my actions,
UNLESS [insert list of other conditions], AND my actions are rationally oriented towards the goal.
If I do some random stupid crap, and try to make an excuse that I was just trying to do X, it is entirely reasonable to ignore my excuse on the grounds that my random stupid crap was not a plausible way to achieve X.
I think that that still requires you to win that this is stupid crap. It also requires a real justification for your explicit tone-policing. Both of which are handled below...
Very well, we can address the question of whether it does or does not accomplish the goal elsewhere.
As to justification of tone policing, my point is that certain tones have to be policed out for any meaningful shared environment to exist. And if you find an environment that is tone-policed with the specific intent of enabling a shared environment to remain stable, "protesting" that policing is the equivalent of strutting around screaming at the top of your lungs in avalanche country because 'fuck snowdrifts.' Or playing with matches at a gas station. In other words, it's deeply self-destructive, and other-destructive of anyone else around you who shares your situation.
3. Your argument is almost explicitly a ransom. "Pretend we're good people or else we will not do anything to stop the bad people." I don't think I need to unpack the implications of taht.
No, that is not my argument, that is the strawman version of my argument you're building up to avoid engaging with it.
My argument is that
no conversation can exist without rules of order. It's literally impossible. If there are no tacit or explicit rules of order for a conversation, the conversation will simply cease to exist. Because conversations are a form of voluntary association between rational beings. Rational beings will not voluntarily seek out abuse, and certainly will not seek out unlimited, massive amounts of abuse.
Thus, to preserve the conversation, there have to be rules that protect everyone involved from outright abuse.
If I can't or won't follow those rules? Well, I can't participate in a conversation. Not because other people are holding hostages, but because a conversation is a form of voluntary association between rational beings. And rational beings won't voluntarily associate with an obnoxious and foolish jackass.
You ever play games in grade school with the kid who couldn't stand to lose? The kid who changed the rules time and again without warning so that he would always win and you wouldn't? The one who would flip the chessboard when he knew he was going to lose?
I think this is the fundamental divide that's going on here: I'm not saying
rules bad. It's asinine to says that rules ought not exist, just like it's painfully obvious to say rules ought exist. That's not the question.
The question is: Are the rules
as they exist good? The rules of American discourse and society are fundamentally anti-black, anti-native, and anti-latinx. They are violently so. They justify mass acts of violence against non-white bodies and they prevent the discussion of that violence from non-white perspectives. So, to loop back, why the fuck should they play the game they know they're always going to lose? And why should they appeal to the kid who will never let them win to try and make the game fair? If you can't prove that the rules as they exist are fair towards them and allow for the discussion and airing of their concerns (which I think you explicitly concede with the whole "people from below punching up" framing of their complaints) then calls for them to play by the rules are calls for them to give up and to accept their position as inferior.
The very reason "the kids who can't stand to lose" are relatively rare is that most people aren't willing to play with them. They become ostracized by the majority that finds their behavior more and more transparently stupid, obnoxious, and unfair. And the more their popularity is undermined, the less likely they are to be able to find games to sabotage with their narcissism.
If you respond to narcissistic fuckwits who actively sabotage games they're losing by
pre-emptively sabotaging
all games, if you respond to Johnny flipping the checkerboard you were playing at by walking up to other people in other places and flipping their boards and pissing on them... You have become another breed of narcissistic fuckwit.
A person who is so determined to see literally everyone as a mortal enemy who will never hear them out and never honor rules that protect them... Well, such a person will doom themselves,
regardless of whether they are objectively doomed or not. It's like, oppression made so circular that people will oppress
themselves in a recursive loop of self-destructive stupidity, regardless of whether or not anyone from outside actually wants to inflict oppression, by forcing even neutral mechanisms that would
actively punish outside efforts to oppress to strike down the victims of self-oppression.
If you oppose being oppressed or think it undesirable,
don't make it that easy. Don't deliberately go out of your way to oppress yourself.
I'm saying that if a level of violence would be unacceptable when aimed at whites, it should be unacceptable when aimed at blacks. The prescriptive state I desire for society is one in which the conditions we now call 'white privilege' are the same privileges enjoyed by everyone. Where nobody gets locked out and nobody gets victimized and everyone enjoys the presumption of innocence and so on.
Yeah. That's the point. White privilege is predicated on systems of violence and exclusion. Saying that everyone should benefit from it is saying everyone should benefit from a system that is based
fundamentally on oppression. Best read of your statement is that it is non-sensical. The worst of your statement is one that normalizes every day acts of violence around us. That's wrong, and that culture should be ended.
That's the explicit, black and white, point of the article. It says so. It may not spend pages discussing this at length backing up its point but it's a three hundred word op-ed in a newspaper, it shouldn't be expected to have to do that for everything it says.
You cannot advocate for the creation of a system while spitting on both the rules of the system you
want to create and the majority of the people who will be living in that system. Or rather, you can, but you lose all credibility and it serves you right if you get kicked out of the garden into the wasteland by the very people who are already trying to create the system you 'want.'
Blacks deserve protection from hate speech, the violence should be prevented and prohibited and punished. But for that to happen, there need to be rules against hurting people. And rules, to be enforceable, have to be at least broadly uniform.
Yeah, there can't be a blanket prohibition against hurting people's feelings to get to your prescriptive end state. That process is going to have to involve telling a whole lot of people who cling very dearly to, for instance, the confederate flag that they are endorsing a symbol of hate and oppression. They are going to find that profoundly, and personally, hurtful as many have already. The only way to progress is through some painful self-reflection and discussion. This article is part of that process.
No, this article is part of sabotaging that process, by actively undermining the "painful self-reflection and discussion," by creating a situation where people with predictably and understandably react to criticism as an attack rather than part of a 'discussion.' Because in this case it IS an attack, not an attempt to discuss.
If you tell people "greenness is a plague upon the world and green people should die," you will not get a lot of them walking away going "wow, we greens must have done something terrible to deserve such anger." You will get a lot of them walking away saying "wow, blue people are assholes."
(See also how hurt people are in this thread when it's suggested that they occupy stolen land and benefit from ethnic cleansing. True facts, yet still profoundly unsettling to most people.)
I can actually take that one, but I have practical arguments regarding it.
I am willing to participate in that discussion.
But I'm not willing to participate in a discussion that takes the form of someone telling me it doesn't matter what I say and I should die, because the only response to that is "no, fuck
you." Conversely, I do not
communicate to others that it doesn't matter what they say and they should die, nor do I
willingly participate in the sending of that message to others.
The alternative to peace is war. I want peace. If you don't want peace, or don't want to follow the rules associated with a state of peace, by default you're inviting a state of war. I would argue that this is an undesirable outcome and should not be sought.
This, again, requires winning that a state of war doesn't exist in the status quo. See: police violence targeted, and exonerated, against black folk. Or economic and social violence (Flint Michigan.) Or political violence (the rhetoric of the Trump campaign, supported by a majority of white folk.)
I want to be clear here: None of what your saying is wrong, but it's not remotely descriptive of the world as we live in it. Saying that it is
is the problem.
I'm not saying it's descriptive of the world, I'm saying it's descriptive of the Texas State university newspaper.
In that case, participating in shared spaces is useless and the only option is the resort to armed violence, in which case you should be arguing for that, not trying to publish newspaper articles.
Ain't never been a war that didn't have a good propaganda campaign and at least some discussion of why people were fighting. Writing and publishing agitprop seems conducive to those long-term efforts.
Do not expect multiracial venues to voluntarily become a battleground in a race war. Many people of all races do not desire a race war, and if you
do desire a race war you can damn well get your own newspapers to fight to pursue your agitprop campaign in. If as a practical matter you complain that such a newspaper would have low subscription rates, consider what that implies for the level of popular support a race war enjoys, and the likelihood of said race war leading to a good outcome.
The
actual article being discussed here isn't a 'response' to anything specific or concrete, it is quite simply a matter of Rudy Martinez thinking white people are uniformly terrible and foul.
it If Texas State's university newspaper won't or shouldn't publish random crap from Stormfront, I don't see why we should expect it to publish the photonegative version of same, with black replacing white and white replacing black. Or white replacing Latino and vice versa.
See, the campus newspaper in a typical university is NOT, by design, a hostile space for nonwhites. It is in fact intended by the (usually) well-intentioned heads of (most) modern universities as a safe shared space. Insofar as this intention is not fulfilled, it is because of unwitting or unintended failures on the parts of the people who control the newspapers.
Universities are not safe spaces for non-white folk. There is so much ample literature on this that it really doesn't bear repeating here.
And, this is exactly the bait-and-switch of the rules that I critiqued above. The newspaper is designed to be friendly to non-whites and offer them a space to share their views, so a non-white person shares what amounts to a very tame critique of whiteness and is then literally fired and pilloried for their article. The space, it turns out, was never one where they could share on an equal playing field.
"Your DNA is an abomination... I see [your] people as an aberration... I hate you because you shouldn't exist" is
not a tame critique.
If I said comparable things about Latinos and posted them on this website I would expect to be banned from this website. If I published them in
any newspaper
anywhere in America I would expect to get in grave trouble. I
hope I would lose my job.
But unless you want me to be free to
literally say those terrible words, not just to 'structurally oppress' Latinos by existing but to
literally say that they are abominations and aberrations who shouldn't exist...
You cannot in consistency say that it is 'mild,' 'moderate,' 'reasonable,' or otherwise even
tolerable for others to say that about me in a venue that is seriously intended to be open to everyone.
Ask yourself, what would a walled garden safe for everyone look like? It would protect opinions like "therefore black people should receive financial reparations for slavery, paid for by the US government taxing the disproportionate wealth of white people." It would not, however, protect "all white people are terrible and I hope they all go die in a sewer because it would make the world a better place." Because the former opinion does not make the garden unsafe for civilized conversation. The latter one does.
Yeah, that line you're drawing
is the problem. For many non-white folk (and white folk, for that matter), shocker of shockers, the US Government is a fucking abomination. It is based explicitly on taking land that never belonged to it, it built its wealth on uncompensated forced labor, it was built to be explicitly white until the 1950s and even after that it's still implicit in most of the acts and rhetoric of the government. Women have had the participate for less than a hundred years, and many many many women are targeted for violence both physical and structural by the government because... it just does.
Telling the people who have been the victims of this that they have to recognize the legitimacy of the US Government and not oppose it is like telling the Kulaks that they need to recognize Stalin as their fucking leader before they can get their troubles addressed. Screw that.
I'll also make this crystal clear:
The original article never calls for the actual death of white people. It calls for the death of
Whiteness and calls for their ontological death. Here, I think, we share common ground in a criticism. Ontological death is a complicated concept and there are better phrases to use when put into an op-ed. That said, even there it makes clear that the death imagined is not one of white people but one of
white culture because it explicitly discusses the zombies of what used to be white people walking around without culture after this death. Criticize their imagery all you like but the author is not crossing the line you're laying out.
If I said those exact things about blacks or Latinos I would deserve to be fired from any newspaper in the country.
Split hairs all you want, and be damned to you if you don't understand that, or if you don't respect internal consistency enough to care.
If you start releasing rabid dogs in the walled gardens designed by people who support your own cause as protection from your cause's enemies, your cause will quickly run out of allies, and find yourself at the doubtful mercy of its enemies.
I don't think the author would agree that the people who designed the walls support the cause. If anything they would say, as I am, the opposite.
Then he is welcome to leave the garden and go argue his case with the people who
really oppose his cause. Or to question the purpose of the garden, while remaining within the garden and its rules.
He is not welcome to do his best to disruptively burn down the garden by abusing its protections and expecting to be immune from consequences.
Literally burning things down, as opposed to fixing them, provokes a conflict of destruction. In which case the predictable outcome is exactly what you expect in a war of destruction- a real one, not a rhetorical one- between 13% of the population and 87% of the population.
Since this outcome would be fucking disastrous, the logical response is to back the hell up and re-examine one's premises.
So I'm going to do some more work here:
Again, that violence you describe is not potential but rather on-going. Black people suffer structurally and literally through the hands of the police and society writ large that is still based on a system that denied their humanity. To look at this system and say "Black people have it good!" is lunacy.
And then we come to the solutions. Black people have been told time and again that they can fix their problems
inside the system. So they've tried!
- They demanded access to schooling and the US Government declared it would desegregate.
Segregation still exists, and is being structurally protected across many school boards and, if anything, is
getting worse, not better. Even when they are educated
it still doesn't do much good.
- They worked and invested to find economic security, but
black wealth has been obliterated and despite
having the tools to protect it the government did nothing.
- Black people were politically active and motivated. Yet the response to a half-black man being President was that White People elected a man who got his start in politics by declaring that the Black President was a foreigner... because he was only half-white.
All of which is to say the system is violent against them, and doesn't give them any way to help themselves.
So yeah, you're right. Burning it down would probably trigger some epic levels of violence on all sides. Frank Wilderson (who was a commando against the apartheid regime in South Africa), Jared Sexton, Yancy, and other Afro-Pessimists wouldn't dispute that there would be more violence. Their argument is that the difference would be of degree, not kind, and that fighting within this system is not just counter-productive but also accepts a system where their lives are fundamentally forfeit.
Again,
consistency is key here.
If you think there is nothing but unending war,
stop whining and start fighting. Expect to lose, but that's your decision when you decide to go to war.
If you think there is a point in putting op-eds in newspapers, follow the same rules that are- not "ought to be,"
ARE, followed to protect you. If a given tone and tenor would be unacceptable in an "anti-blackness" editorial, and would in fact get the author kicked off the paper staff, then that same tone and tenor
should be unacceptable in an "anti-whiteness" editorial.
But the level of simultaneous cowardice and viciousness required to simultaneously say "we believe there is nothing but literal war and no possibility of negotiation or peace,"
while actively sabotaging negotiations, deserves literally nothing and should be given literally no consideration.
The words you used aren't the words I used. They do not accurately represent the words I used. Therefore, your reply is at best irrelevant and at worst actively disingenuous. In no way does it invalidate my point.
No, they're not your words. But they're pretty damn close to the articles words, and certainly its arguments vis-a-vis the twelve decent white folk the author has met in their life.
"Abomination" and "aberration" are
also words from the article, and move the tone of the article far away from what you allege it to be.
If I called blacks abominations in an op-ed, I would deserve to be fired from any newspaper in the country. Insofar as I would not be, then that is a newspaper to which I will never subscribe, and whose deranged frothings I will ignore.
I feel entitled to ask, not for unlimited privilege, but for
exactly the same protections I empirically advocate and support for disadvantaged minorities.
Insofar as there is war by whites against blacks, the war has many conscientious objectors. Many draft dodgers. Many pacifists. Many active antiwar protestors.
No. No it doesn't. That is
explicitly the point of the article. How there are twelve decent white folks they've met in their life. Most white people think they're pacifists or conscientious objectors while, in reality, they are happy little foot soldiers in an occupying army. Both literally and figuratively. When the structures are violent and people are going about their daily lives doing everything they can not to upset those structures and, if anything, uphold them (see also: many parts of this thread) then they are anti-black.
Then
literally fight the war you say is
literally going on and stop being a whining coward about it.
Talk, or fight. Don't talk about how there's a fight going on while actively sabotaging the space in which you talk and insulting everyone who's willing to stand still long enough to listen.
Finally, you posit this as a favored outcome:
Okay. So the presence of non-Native Americans in North America is a consequence of ethnic cleansing, and the presence of non-black, non-Native Americans is a consequence of slavery. These are people who do not have a jus soli-derived "right to be here" stretching back to pre-recorded history. Gotcha.
Do you plan to respond to that by talking to these squatters about making the future fair?
I have a question to answer yours, and then a longer bit of navel-gazing that might offer a different answer.
The question is: Can you have a fair future with squatters who benefitted from ethnic cleansing? Is there anyway to make that fair? Is there anyway you can have a fair end point without making them give up the ability to be squatters?
If the answer to that question is "no," then the only correct and plausible course is unending rabid warfare over past wrongs. The past is inherently privileged over the future, our grandparents are more important to us than our grandchildren, and we will fight their battles over and over until one side is
dead.
But this course of action ends with the annihilation of the minority group, not the metaphorical annihilation of cultural disruption and depression and discrimination but the
literal annihilation as in "everybody's dead, Dave." An eye for an eye leaves blind the people who had fewer eyes when we started the eye-gouging competition.
I don't desire this outcome. I'm surprised the Afro-Pessimists do. But clearly they do, or they would not be talking about endless war in the way that they do, while denying and apparently advocating the sabotage of any attempt to negotiate peace or mitigate the alleged war.
I will continue to avoid doing anything that I see as likely to lead to this outcome of unending war that will go on until the less numerous side is dead, and it frustrates me to no end to see people
on the less numerous side trying to bring about this outcome.
The navel-gazing:
Frank Wilderson's book, Red White and Black, is pretty good on this subject. His argument is, simplified down, that there is a three-part structure to how settler-colonialism works. The Settler Colonist comes and takes the land that isn't theirs from the Native, who is either killed or expelled, and then works it via forced servitude from the slave. He says that the problem with fixing the system is that there's no way to deal with the structural position of the slave and their descendants. The notion of sovereignty can resolve the fundamental structural harm to the Native nation: Their land can be returned to them, wealth given to them, and they can be 'restored'. The Settler Colonist can take some of their accrued wealth and simply leave, access to notions of whiteness give them privileged access to other lands, many of which they have cultural ties to. But what do you do with the Slave? They cannot be 'returned' to their land, they were ripped from it and their descendants have no connection to it, to return them to their land would be another act of settler-colonial violence. But you can't leave them on the native lands, to do that would be to leave in place the structure of settler violence committed against the Native Nations.
So, I don't know. I want a solution. I don't think there is one, but that doesn't mean that we let the status quo have a pass. It also doesn't mean that we look at this being an immensely complicated task as being a reason not to have the conversation (if anything, it's a reason why the conversation is so vitally necessary.)
This, by the by, doesn't even begin to approach my criticisms and disagreements with the Afro-Pessimist project which are... many.
Well, the fundamental and obvious problem with the entire approach is that it privileges the past over the future. "Rectifying" a harm done in the past is viewed as more important than anything that can happen in the present or future.
Taken to its logical extreme, this results in us expelling the whites in South Africa to clear space for the blacks... but then it also results in us shoving out he Bantu blacks to make room for the Khoi-San or other such remnant peoples. It results in us having to sort through archeological records to find the oldest known people to occupy a site, and even
they have at best a tenuous claim because we can't prove they didn't conquer it from someone else.
At some point we have to try to fix the present, not break the present in a vain attempt to restore the self-identified honor and "face" of a handful of academics and authors and extremists.
War is not the answer, because when a question is decided by war, the answer is "the side with the most big guns, wins," and in this case that would result in racial minorities the world over going the way of the Tasmanians- or the Moriori.
Only a madman or an idiot would say that more war is the answer to the problem of a small group being oppressed by a large one. The answer is
less war, not more.
