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Trying to engage with any of this in any meaningful way is worthless because without being able to articulate class conflict the whole structure of these arguments are predicated on absolutely goofy poo poo that might as well be that whites were created by evil scientist yakub to have the racism gene and that's why we can't have universal healthcare. It's a huge mess without the fundamental understandings of class and power that historical materialism gives you, and so you get a bunch of different voices: academics, political agents, outright grifters, etc. etc. striking out in the dark with various goals in mind and because there's no chance at resolution or even definition of any of this it's just an impossible malestrom. The only way you interact with any of it is to try to use as a bludgeon against your political enemies, or -- more likely -- your direct economic competitors so you can outsell their book or pull in more twitter followers than them. The goal of the 1619 Project itself was (and is) ultimately to drive liberal engagement with the NYT. If you'll recall when it was being launched it was the big "excuse me sir Mr. President Trump sir prepare to get owned you son a bitch, sir!!!" thing in social media for a while.
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Jun 25, 2021 19:47
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It's for people who believe in race but don't consider themselves racist (openly mean about it)
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Jun 25, 2021 19:50
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the best way ive conceptualized privilege for myself and others is not as "here's our benefits package the white male cabal sends us" but rather "there is a whole spectrum of unfair bullshit you and i both never have to deal with, and nobody can ever force you to even acknowledge as existing". like no matter how low you get on the social totem pole you're own personal hell is going to lack a lot of the poo poo a less advantaged person will have. even if you're a tramp on the street you can still maintain the myth that your own two hands can drag you out of that hole as you are a Real American; youll get poo poo for being a bum, but that's something you can conceivably slough off. if you get poo poo for just being a women or minority, there is no escape, no way to maintain social dignity in that state. its difficult to get an understanding of things that you're never exposed to; nothing can force you to understand this advantage you have, and there's quite a few pressures that will threaten your self worth for doing so (fragile masculinity and the like, but it goes a bit more past that into the unconscious idea that you control your own destiny, rather than being affected by social forces you have no power over; it can be hard to surrender an idea that justifies you). there was a kind of stereotypical southern boy i worked with that i talked a bit about, and i remember when he blamed rap music/"culture" for how bad black kids were, i just twisted it around to point out, hey, you or i never had to deal with that, then, right? you never even had to struggle with that poo poo. that's privilege, ain't it? it was a cop out on my part but it worked to shut him up for a bit, lol. had a similar conversation with a manager when I was young, when they asked me where on my resume i marked off my privilege, i said basically, where i got to mark off where i graduated high school and how i never had to struggle for that, or struggle for respect every day; i never got a criminal record not because i was a smart, good kid, but because every social element in my life said i was innately above such concerns. it was never a challenge, it was just the default. e: that zizek clip gives another way to look at it: i can say that my race and gender don't matter at all to myself. that's how free i am of bullshit; i can just cut it out of my self evaluation and pretend my life is just the Default setting for human existence. its absolutely maniacal. Tiler Kiwi has issued a correction as of 20:09 on Jun 25, 2021 |
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Jun 25, 2021 19:56
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mind you, i also don't think you can, or even should, divorce all this stuff from class privilege. they're intertwined in this country, and not accidentally so.
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Jun 25, 2021 20:01
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comedyblissoption posted:and then i hear on npr about essentially male chauvinism that results in lower women pay. and the conclusion of the segment is essentially men are sexist, so women are paid less in executive and non-executive positions. and no examination of the socioeconomic relationships that determines pay. and then i hear npr talk about fdr to prop up the biden administration, and they frame explicitly the benefits of the new deal as won by wise politicians and the business community. and npr and the new york times and so on are very comfortable with this type of language because it seems very unthreatening to the status quo. It always seems kind of pointless when people talk about material impacts of privilege tied to identity, because it's just completely unnecessary. If someone is poor, obviously the net sum of all their privilege and disadvantages is negative, and if they're rich it's positive. A rich black person is likely less well-off than a white person would be in the same circumstances, but I don't see how that's relevant since both the rich black person and rich white person clearly ended up with more "net" material privilege than anyone who isn't rich. There's no need to calculate exactly how much worse or better off someone is based off of gender/race, since you can simply look at their overall material circumstances. If they're worse than what is livable and reasonable in an equitable society, clearly there's not enough privilege involved to outweigh their disadvantages (and if they're significantly better off, obviously other sources of privilege/luck off-set their disdvantages). Attempting to eliminate material discrepancies based off of race/gender is certainly better than nothing (since at least you'd be helping a subset of people), but it would unquestionably be better (and a lot easier) to just eliminate significant material discrepancies among all people. The way this stuff is usually discussed also carries a strong implication that, as long as you remove identity from the equation, our economy/society is fair (and people are to blame for their own material circumstances if they don't fall into one of the disadvantaged identity groups). There's obviously non-material impacts of privilege, but those don't really have much political relevance, since government can't reasonably address that issue (and this stuff is usually brought up in a political context). There's not really a clear political answer to stuff like "people saying racist stuff to other people" (or at least one that isn't really bad). Even a lot of material inequality isn't reasonably dealt with along identity lines - you can remove all discrimination from laws, but you can't really directly deal with the material end result of something like race-based discrimination without resorting to race science.
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Jun 25, 2021 20:19
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So I had not previously actually read the 1619 Project. I am now reading Nikole Hannah-Jones's essay from the first post, and there are some things that really stand out to me. I will post my thoughts here. My thoughts start with this passage. I have bolded the most relevant parts. quote:Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire. Through backbreaking labor, they cleared the land across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow rice. They grew and picked the cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation’s most valuable commodity, accounting for half of all American exports and 66 percent of the world’s supply. They built the plantations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, sprawling properties that today attract thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated by the history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the White House and the Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the railroads that crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton they picked to the Northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial Revolution. They built vast fortunes for white people North and South — at one time, the second-richest man in the nation was a Rhode Island “slave trader.” Profits from black people’s stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts and financed some of our most prestigious universities. It was the relentless buying, selling, insuring and financing of their bodies and the products of their labor that made Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading sector and New York City the financial capital of the world. This is fairly early in the essay, but it already speaks to a fundamental assumption underlying Hannah-Jones's writing. That assumption is, to use her own words, that the United States of America is "the world's greatest democracy." Further down, we see the supplementary contention that black people are the ones who improved ("perfected"?) that democracy. But the underlying assumption is the same belief in American exceptionalism that exists in much liberal discourse: America (more precisely, the United States) is the greatest country in the world. You can examine its flaws and analyze where it fails to live up to its promises, but you have to begin your analysis with the assumption that you are talking about the greatest country and no matter how much you criticize it, that is still the belief you will hold at the end. By what measure is the United States "the world's greatest democracy"? By this point in the essay, still fairly early on, Hannah-Jones has already made clear that until the second half of the 20th century much of the population was disenfranchised, abused, and kept in a state of subjugation comparable to slavery, even though emancipation had theoretically removed the actual burden of slavery. By what measure does that make it a great democracy? How does she define democracy, and how does she measure the "greatness" of American democracy compared to the democracy of every other country and society on Earth? These are foundational questions to ask if you are going to base your essay about the USA's historical sins on the liberal assumption that the USA nonetheless remains the greatest democracy in the world, but so far they have gone unexamined. quote:Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all. This comes back to the same problem. By what measure is the United States currently a democracy? Hannah-Jones assumes that it is, the same way the readers of the New York Times assume that it is. She is clearly poking at the definition of democracy, when she says it could look different than it currently does. She clearly accepts that there can be more than one form of democracy, but she continues to not examine what exactly she means by democracy, and how she measures what makes one society more democratic than another. quote:In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” For the last 243 years, this fierce assertion of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom and self-governance has defined our global reputation as a land of liberty. Here we see another side to the democracy assumption: that the rest of the world sees the United States as "a land of liberty." This is another fundamental part of the liberal assumption about American democracy. It isn't enough that the United States is the world's greatest democracy, the rest of the world has to understand that it is so. Hannah-Jones here shows that she believes that too. She thinks the United States enjoys "a global reputation as a land of liberty" thanks to the writing of people like Thomas Jefferson. This is a flawed premise. The Economist, hardly a bastion of left-wing thought, rates the United States as the 25th-freest democracy in the world and calls it a "flawed democracy" rather than a "full democracy" like its #1 through #23 places, Norway to South Korea. Globally, only 17% of respondents to a poll of people in US allied states think the US is a good model of democracy that others should follow. A poll of people in 53 countries showed that 44% of respondents thought the US threatened democracy in their own countries. Hannah-Jones's contention that the US is not only "the world's greatest democracy" but also enjoys a "global reputation as a land of liberty" says more about her own assumptions that the United States, for all its flaws, is world-renowned a force for good, than it does about the actual state of American democracy or its reputation. Hannah-Jones doesn't write these things sarcastically or ironically. She does not put air quotes around American "democracy" or its reputation as a "land of liberty." As far as I can tell, these passages reflect her own beliefs. Most importantly, they appear in passing and are not interrogated. They aren't foundational parts of her essay to be deconstructed and interrogated, they are momentary reflections of the underlying assumptions that made her want to write the essay in the first place. quote:The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. Here we might get a hint of where these assumptions come from. As Ardennes put it upthread, "At its core is a hard to accept message: that the United States, despite its long history of slavery and discrimination, is worthy of moral authority because of its power." For Hannah-Jones, the core of black people's contributions to American "democracy" by 1776 was the production of wealth and power. Is wealth and power what makes America "the world's greatest democracy"? Does the US enjoy a reputation around the world simply because of its wealth and power? Hannah-Jones goes on to explore the flawed premises underlying American democracy. In her discussion of Dred Scott and of Lincoln, she says that nineteenth-century Americans on both sides of the slavery debate believed that the United States was "a democracy intended only for white people." She then discusses Reconstruction: quote:For this fleeting moment known as Reconstruction, the majority in Congress seemed to embrace the idea that out of the ashes of the Civil War, we could create the multiracial democracy that black Americans envisioned even if our founding fathers did not. Reconstruction, as we all know, didn't last, and Hannah-Jones explains that with reference to the US's racist "DNA," which not only inspired white southerners to overthrow multiracial democracy but also inspired white northerners to leave them alone and let them do it. The end of Reconstruction is the end of democracy, which "would not return to the South for nearly a century." But again, we don't really understand Hannah-Jones's definition of democracy. Does democracy literally just mean enfranchisement and freedom to participate in institutions of representative government? Or does she not take a more expansive definition to say that "black life" in general constituted democracy? This seems to be implied by the next paragraph: quote:White Southerners of all economic classes, on the other hand, thanks in significant part to the progressive policies and laws black people had championed, experienced substantial improvement in their lives even as they forced black people back into a quasi slavery. As Waters McIntosh, who had been enslaved in South Carolina, lamented, “It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the Negroes.” Advancements like free public education, which Hannah-Jones earlier described as "that most democratic of American institutions," benefited white southerners. The war "freed" them, but not enslaved people. Here she seems to offer up a more expansive view of democracy. It isn't enough to vote and to run for office, you need additional democratic institutions like education. She makes this clear when describing segregation, detailing a long list of exclusions inflicted on black Americans: being banned from public libraries, using separate entrances at work, housing discrimination, all the way down to being required to use honorifics when addressing white people. This expansive notion of democracy extends to the norms of everyday life and social interaction. This is also the only place in the entire essay where she mentions economic class, to say that poor white southerners benefited from the democratic innovations of black southerners. quote:No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had it. And to this day, black Americans, more than any other group, embrace the democratic ideals of a common good. We are the most likely to support programs like universal health care and a higher minimum wage, and to oppose programs that harm the most vulnerable. For instance, black Americans suffer the most from violent crime, yet we are the most opposed to capital punishment. Our unemployment rate is nearly twice that of white Americans, yet we are still the most likely of all groups to say this nation should take in refugees. Here Hannah-Jones acknowledges the flaws in American democracy by noting that it is not fully democratic. "[A]s much democracy as this nation has today" clearly implies that the United States is not fully democratic. Her invocation of "democratic ideals of a common good" imply that there is more to democracy than the right to vote or equality before the law. Like her invocation of public education or public libraries, here she takes an expansive, positive view of democracy: not just individual equality, but interventions for the common good like universal healthcare, a minimum wage, refugee resettlement, and abolishing capital punishment. This returns to the issue of class: here she essentially says that it's black people who fight for economic democracy, i.e., a more expansive vision of democracy than just the right to vote. But if these are the hallmarks of a true democracy, like the one she says black people fight for and drag white people towards despite their resistance, then by what measure is the United States "the world's greatest democracy"? If these things, which other countries have already accomplished but which the United States may never have, are required for full democracy, then why does the United States have a "global reputation as a land of liberty"? Her own arguments reveal the inaccuracies of her underlying assumptions about American greatness. This may seem like a small thing to nitpick. Why do I keep harping on these two throwaway lines early in the essay? Partly it's because I wasn't born American, and the assumed nationalism of the United States always grates on those of us who were not indoctrinated to believe we lived in the greatest country in the world from birth. But partly it's also because I think this points to something important to understand about this essay, exemplified by its closing line: quote:We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all. What does it mean to be "American" in this formulation? What does it mean to be "the most American of all," in the context of an essay that posits that black Americans have been the driving force behind liberty, justice, and democratization for all Americans? It means that to be "American" is to be democratic and free. Black Americans are the most American because they believe most faithfully in the ideals of justice, democracy, and freedom, in which all Americans are supposed to believe and which are supposed to be the defining values and principles of the United States. This is what Hannah-Jones is talking about when she says the United States is "the world's greatest democracy" and talks up its reputation abroad. This is based on a fundamentally nationalist premise that believes that the United States might have flaws but it is still a force for good in the world, and so the people who have made it that way deserve credit. In Hillary Clinton's words, "America is great because America is good." We're in CSPAM, you don't need me to tell you how flawed this premise is. But it's essentially a premise that's shared with Hannah-Jones's fiercest critics on the right: that America is great and good, they just disagree on who made it that way. The entire essay is dedicated to pointing out where the United States does not live up to these ideals, how racism is baked into its "DNA," and yet Hannah-Jones still frames the entire project according to those underlying assumptions. Why? Why not admit that, in fact, the United States is not a democratic country, it is not the greatest country in the world, and the rest of the world does not and should not look at it as a model to follow? Wouldn't that make for an even more compelling argument about the centrality of race and racism to the American story? But when it comes down to it, the United States is rich and it is powerful, and the ideology underpinning its wealth and power insists that wealth, power, and virtue are the same thing. Maybe I've been putting the emphasis on the wrong part of her initial assumption. Maybe the US is not the greatest democracy, maybe it is the greatest democracy, i.e., the most powerful and overbearing of countries that calls itself democratic. She hints at this as well, when she talks about black people building "the richest and most powerful nation in the world," not just building its democratic institutions. By a great many standards, including those Hannah-Jones uses in her own essay, you cannot consider the United States a properly democratic country. But it would be foolish not to consider it rich and powerful, and as long as that version of its "greatness" continues to serve those at the top and the assumptions built into American nationalism--that it is the greatest democracy and the shining city on the hill to which the rest of the world looks for moral authority and leadership--continue to hold sway even among its supposed critics like Hannah-Jones, nothing will change that. Her essay still supports the American exceptionalism at the core of the American liberal project, it just asks us to give the credit for the shining city on the hill to a different group of people. And that's why I fundamentally can't see it as a real critique of American power relations and social structures, because it doesn't critique them or ask us to deconstruct them. It upholds the assumption that the United States is great and good and deserves to be the leader of the world as a result, it just proposes a different path by which it became that way. vyelkin has issued a correction as of 21:09 on Jun 25, 2021 |
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Jun 25, 2021 21:05
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Ytlaya posted:It always seems kind of pointless when people talk about material impacts of privilege tied to identity, because it's just completely unnecessary. If someone is poor, obviously the net sum of all their privilege and disadvantages is negative, and if they're rich it's positive. A rich black person is likely less well-off than a white person would be in the same circumstances, but I don't see how that's relevant since both the rich black person and rich white person clearly ended up with more "net" material privilege than anyone who isn't rich. There's no need to calculate exactly how much worse or better off someone is based off of gender/race, since you can simply look at their overall material circumstances. If they're worse than what is livable and reasonable in an equitable society, clearly there's not enough privilege involved to outweigh their disadvantages (and if they're significantly better off, obviously other sources of privilege/luck off-set their disdvantages). Tiler Kiwi posted:mind you, i also don't think you can, or even should, divorce all this stuff from class privilege. they're intertwined in this country, and not accidentally so. bruenig's written some articles about how whites are the plurality or majority in every single wealth decile. wealth inequalities are deeply dominated by extreme concentration of wealth at the top, and you can produce misleading but commonly understood mainstream statements about wealth and race ignoring this. avoiding this topic is i think an intentional rhetorical misdirection with the way wealth and race interacts, since class would obviously factor much more heavily in such an analysis  https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/03/05/wealth-inequality-across-class-and-race-in-5-graphs/ https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/06/29/the-racial-wealth-gap-is-about-the-upper-classes/
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Jun 25, 2021 21:06
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didnt know the 1619 project seems conceived as nationalist exceptionalism lol and a contrarian thought popped into my head that's probably already happened, but what if you asked people to think about doing the hamilton musical but with white actors for the white slave owners. i expect a fierce backlash but maybe that would make some people go what the gently caress at the idea of hamilton is there other media where the race of the oppressor is intentionally swapped with the oppresed in a celebration of the oppressor lol
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Jun 25, 2021 21:30
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nationalism is a helluva drug
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Jun 25, 2021 21:32
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comedyblissoption posted:and a contrarian thought popped into my head that's probably already happened, but what if you asked people to think about doing the hamilton musical but with white actors for the white slave owners. You'd probably get something along the lines of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which is a bit more honest about how little America has ever given a poo poo about minorities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tknTTDajpdI
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Jun 25, 2021 21:37
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i had a thought pop up in my head that's kind of a hot take: i was thinking of the whole issue of essentialism in the writing, talking about the "dna" of the nation, established on the tabula rasa of 1619 america, and how all hitherto existing american history is about this 'dna', and i thought like, do people talk that way about england? france? germany? i guess they kind of do, but they usually talk about the specific founding of say, that current republic or government and maybe the 'character' of that nation's people rather than dig up four hundred year old events as key to understanding everything about the modern times without really bothering to analyze the dialectical evolution of said nation. but then i thought like, do they do that to china? the middle east? yeah, they did; old school orientalism was about ignoring all the material conditions or historical processes in favor of picking out some essential Nature of the peoples that constitute said region; like to talk about shah Iran, you'd coach it in talking about how the mohammedans were, by characteristics of their religion and overanalyzed definitions of their language (jihad means struggle), Subverviant or Uncreative or Decedent and you'd explain everything about their modern nation using that methodology alone. You were able to understand them more than by doing silly things like 'reading actual recent events and developments or any writings from them past a specific cut off date or outside a narrow context. so hence my new hot take, that the 1619 project is basically just the same style of "histography" as old school orientalism Tiler Kiwi has issued a correction as of 22:57 on Jun 25, 2021 |
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Jun 25, 2021 22:51
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It surprised me that 1619, for all its talk about Evil Racism DNA, doesn't conclude that America is lovely (because I guess that would imply something needs to change), but instead that Black People saved America from lovely White People. So it's like Black Panther where neoliberal technocratic empires are good if black people are in charge of them.
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Jun 25, 2021 23:24
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OP, where does retro gaming fit in to all this?
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Jun 25, 2021 23:41
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Cool Ghost posted:I'm not the OP, but they might be talking about this interview with the wsws; I was reading this article of Reed's recently, where he gives a good take on neoliberal forms of anti-racism. Thanks for these, and thanks to the OP for making a thread about this.
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Jun 25, 2021 23:42
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comedyblissoption posted:so i was thinking about the specific word "privilege". the author of that essay advises not to get hung up on this word, but i disagree. so this is the specific definition: i mean, it's not hard to see why "white advantage" didn't catch on. it doesn't quite send the right message if you're trying to fight racism by saying "white people are advantaged over black people," "white people are born with advantages," "white people need to wake up and realize they have advantages over other races," etc. it makes it sound like white people are naturally smarter or whatever coming up with pithy two-word political soundbites isn't easy, i suppose
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Jun 25, 2021 23:47
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"white privilege" is embraced because "Black oppression" is too radical. Oppressors can and must be confronted and defeated. While those who grant privileges only need to be educated and enlightened.
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Jun 25, 2021 23:58
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porfiria posted:It surprised me that 1619, for all its talk about Evil Racism DNA, doesn't conclude that America is lovely (because I guess that would imply something needs to change), but instead that Black People saved America from lovely White People. and backed by the CIA, yes.
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Jun 26, 2021 01:08
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WampaLord posted:OP, where does retro gaming fit in to all this? critical race theory is commonly abbreviated as crt which is also shorthand for a cathode ray television a device that frequently appears in the context of retro video gaming discussion because these were the machines the video game systems of our childhood were designed to be played on many who have seen the crt abbreviation used without context are confused by this alternative usage in part because discussions of critical race theory dont make it clear what critical race theory actually is i was also kiiind of getting ahead of myself by mentioning that at all because critical race theory as we understand it right now shows up in the discourse quite some time after the 1619 project does even though critical race theory claims the 1619 project as an important intellectual underpinning and we are not by the way done with the 1619 project its like ten different essays most of them from people who arent nikole hannah jones i want to try to snipe the third page with the next one if possible
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Jun 26, 2021 02:01
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Atrocious Joe posted:"white privilege" is embraced because "Black oppression" is too radical. yeah this is a great point and cannot be stressed enough. privilege discourse specifically and CRT generally is first and foremost a neoliberal framework and regardless of who writes about it or subscribes to it is ultimately in the service of white supremacist capitalism. It takes the actual and significant phenomena of racism and exclusively and specifically focuses it around the internality of white people. Without having a class component, without being able to align people on an axis of exploitation, even if they're at different positions on the axis of oppression, it does nothing except deepen the chasm between white identity and everything else. If you're a white person who subscribes to this stuff and reads the NYT and nods along with all of these PoC writers who tell you that the historical experience of racism is unfathomable to you (which is correct) but give you nothing like shared class-based exploitation on which to build solidarity you're going to do what all Good liberal white people do which is feel guilty, which will further separate you from your non-white peers because the guilt you have and the resentment you feel (for making you feel guilty) and the guilt you feel about that results in a totally loving bizarre relationship to nonwhite but especially black people that is one of the hallmarks of modern liberalism. divorced from cultural ideas of being what a good woke liberal ally means, the sort of behavior expressed by white liberals towards black people is loving unhinged. future generations (if we get that far) are going to see this era's racial dynamics as little better than minstrel shows but with an additional fetishization of a sort of political and spiritual purity, mostly expressed about black women by white women who do not have any meaningful interaction with black people. like if you didn't know anything about contemporary American race relations and you saw nancy pelosi running around in kente cloth for a cheap photo op or every hashtag resist wine mom using gifs of black women in the exact -- exact -- same way they use gifs of the minions you'd say "oh these people are insanely racist" and you'd be right. It does the exact same thing that the bad and unwoke version of racism does, which is operate in service of capital to help prevent worker solidarity.
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Jun 26, 2021 03:33
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it also seems to serve, as karp alludes to, the non-white middle and upper class who are now in the upper echelons of media and political power who can employ this stuff to frustrate class-based mass politics that might threaten their own standing. the liberal promise of each individual being fully actualized and well-off through hard work is possible; just look at me!
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Jun 26, 2021 03:41
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oh for sure we're living through what I think is contemporary neoliberal synthesis of racism as a capitalist structure with the educated values of the petit bourgeois. Old, bad racism doesn't conform to the neoliberal model (or, can't in the way it can be leveraged by capital), so new, woke racism is arising to take its place in the system. non-white wealth, and especially the perception of non-white wealth is absolutely a component of that. We've been seeing the absolute numbers of rich and very rich black americans skyrocket while the total share of wealth by black americans as a population totally craters. the system is working!
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Jun 26, 2021 03:49
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nthing that karp essay is real good isn't there a bunch of other stuff in the project? I already knew NHJ was a loving moron but the smarter defenders of the project have argued that it's more broad than just one particular argument
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Jun 26, 2021 03:51
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im eagerly awaiting the next 1619 article promised on page 3 to see what i can get baffled by next
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Jun 26, 2021 05:40
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Tiler Kiwi posted:i had a thought pop up in my head that's kind of a hot take: i was thinking of the whole issue of essentialism in the writing, talking about the "dna" of the nation, established on the tabula rasa of 1619 america, and how all hitherto existing american history is about this 'dna', and i thought like, do people talk that way about england? france? germany? nah its waaaaay worse, there's a loving lot of yankee-flavored exceptionalism I can't help but use that sort-of framework to compare to Latin American slavery and especially the Brazilian case, which was way more intensive than the American experience. If the historical determinant of a country works by some sort of abstract moral character of the oppressed, established in relation to what are the cultural values of that place... It means that the oppressed are responsible for the whole loving deal. Am I getting this right? So to give an example of how much bullshit this is: Brazilians in general believe that our "particular cultural values" are very bad, that it encourages selfishness and mediocrity, etc (compare to the "greatness of the American ideals" for maximum effect). So, going by this author's argument, the Brazilian colored people, descendants from natives and from transported and enslaved Africans, would be the ones who perfected these values and thus can be considered direct collaborators in the many social ills that affect them too. what in the gently caress. jfc
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Jun 26, 2021 06:18
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yeah thats a really great point, its a completely hosed methodology
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Jun 26, 2021 06:25
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dead gay comedy forums posted:I can't help but use that sort-of framework to compare to Latin American slavery and especially the Brazilian case, then youre already doing it wrong a big problem with the 1619 projects framing is that it considers all forms of slavery basically equal which is absurd on its face the living conditions indentured african servants who arrived in jamestown in 1619 had about as much common with chattel slaves during the revolution as modern day black people do with their counterparts during the reconstruction era lets all take a moment to appreciate that this sort of oversimplification is usually a right wing talking point which they use to claim that slavery wasnt that bad actually since african people also did it and sold their slaves to the europeans
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Jun 26, 2021 11:57
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dead gay comedy forums posted:nah its waaaaay worse, there's a loving lot of yankee-flavored exceptionalism This is an excellent example of the American exceptionalism that I discussed in my long post. It's pretty clear, imo, that Hannah-Jones at least doesn't bother to compare the American experience to anywhere else, the same way she doesn't bother to really compare the African-American experience with the experiences of other oppressed minorities in the United States (does it change her argument, for example, if you as the reader know that indigenous populations were enslaved by European colonists long before Africans first arrived in the New World?). Hannah-Jones isn't interested in understanding the experience of Atlantic slavery more broadly, she's interested in creating a teleological narrative to explain the present-day United States, and she does not care if that narrative has unpleasant implications for other societies because they don't matter.
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Jun 26, 2021 14:18
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Tiler Kiwi posted:im eagerly awaiting the next 1619 article promised on page 3 to see what i can get baffled by next praying that this quote isn’t a snipe
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Jun 26, 2021 17:27
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Some Guy TT posted:lets all take a moment to appreciate that this sort of oversimplification is usually a right wing talking point which they use to claim that slavery wasnt that bad actually since african people also did it and sold their slaves to the europeans vyelkin posted:This is an excellent example of the American exceptionalism that I discussed in my long post totes agreed also I can't be the only one who got some reactionary vibes from that, right? this whole 1619 feels a lot like mythologization
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Jun 26, 2021 18:32
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dead gay comedy forums posted:totes agreed Yeah pretty much, if we treat reactionary as fighting for the status quo against any kind of change. In mythologizing the past it means that the present is fixed. And there's an implication that if racism was ever seriously tackled and overcome in America, it would cease to be America. Which I'm sure sounds fine to a lot of people here, but if you're cloaking yourself in this weird liberal nationalism, it's a horrific thought.
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Jun 26, 2021 19:50
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One thing that always frazzled my brain was the Liberia-movement, where African Americans ended up the ruling class in Liberia and had presidents accused of using slave labor well into the 20th century.
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Jun 26, 2021 21:01
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yeah its weird how jones brings that up just to say that lincoln was racist and just completely ignores that the back to africa movement was a huge thing that had quite a bit of support among the black population the assumption in her piece that theres been exactly one kind of black activism in this country and it was totally proamerica and morally pure really rankles me
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Jun 27, 2021 01:03
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https://twitter.com/WonderKing82/status/1408771382264176646?s=20 I see tweets like this and think, absent all the other wrong stuff, why should the US be saved? And why place that burden on Black people, one of the primary victims of the US system? and then I just realized this is how Nikole Hannah-Jones views the role of Black people in US history
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Jun 27, 2021 01:55
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I hate to keep going back to the Karp essay, but as he points out, a lot of transformational African American figures aren't even in the 1619 Project. It's a triumphalist narrative without any aspirational figures or movements.
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Jun 27, 2021 03:25
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the ones that do get mentioned get it done in that boring high school history textbook kind of way, where its just a random trivia thing you peer out your car window down as you drive down History Road. its not connected at all, there's no context, its just In 1842 This Happened.
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Jun 27, 2021 03:53
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People who call themselves leftists but who hate Abe Lincoln are really revealing their true selves.
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Jun 27, 2021 07:19
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the project is definitely mythologizing bullshit and kind of hard to read like the author is hurting herself by trying to tell herself these things almost but i dont get why we're being so obtuse about white privilege, like... im a lower class white lesbian and if i were a sack of poo poo and decided to complain seriously about one of my black coworkers, lie about how i felt threatened or some poo poo, they would probably get fired. if someone complained about me it would either get ignored or i would have a short conversation with my boss. this has happened at my workplace. with a lovely queer white woman i know. she yelled at a black coworker because he made some minor mistake and he wasn't taking it so he bit back and got fired and thats just one example... like, it's just really obvious to me from everything that i've experienced in my life that black people have to work five times as hard and be five times as polite as me in order to not get hosed over and then they usually do anyway and that's something we need words for as tempting as it is to believe that not saying "white privilege" ever again would allow the lower classes to awaken to class consciousness to unite against capitalist evil, you take those words away and it's still there and lower class white people still hate and persecute black people of every class and this poo poo still happens every day. is there some other way i'm supposed to conceptualize it? maybe i'll reread these posts tonight im not an academic just a dumb trailer trash commie, thats my experience
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Jun 27, 2021 11:32
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afaik no ones denied in this thread that the system is deeply racist and features an ethnic caste-like system the contention for critics is problems with the phrasing X privilege and discussions about oppression under a liberal framing like you might hear on npr or the nyt
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Jun 27, 2021 12:36
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no one is dumb here friend not even trailer trash commies we are at worst ignorant and just trying to learn i think the main problem with trying to derive white privilege from a historical context which is what critical race theory tries to do is that the comparison inherently makes modern day trifling just because its not as bad as it was even a generation ago jones is using reactionary framing here in a lot of ways but has disguised it as feel good rhetoric despite her basically being a hotep but for america like i think if you tell your story about how easy it is to gently caress over black people at a job over petty bullshit most people will agree with you even the chuds they take offense at the framing of privilege because of its implication that theyre being rewarded for being white when on a personal level they see it more as being not as easily hosed over for arbitrary bullshit which is a fairly significant distinction
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Jun 27, 2021 12:38
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stealing this spot to insure i snipe the next page
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Jun 27, 2021 12:43
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