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Cerebral Bore posted:i only skimmed that poo poo, but it sounds like they're making a shittier version of losurdo's argument in liberalism: a counter history, except instead of deriving the impetus for slavery from the material necessities of liberal capitalism they just throw their hands up and say that racism just happened because it happened
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Jun 25, 2021 15:39
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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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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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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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Lucky Greedo posted: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 there's not really an issue with "white privilege" in the sense that you can use it to describe a phenomenon that is objectively and obviously real, but its used to decontextualize race from class. Atrocious Joe put it really well, IMO: Atrocious Joe posted:"white privilege" is embraced because "Black oppression" is too radical. describing eg. your coworkers in terms of privilege is sort of describing a picture only in terms of negative space. Yes, it's objectively true that you could, like your coworker did, get a black coworker fired on false pretenses for no other reason than you, a white person, and your claims, feelings and livelihood, will supersede those of your black coworkers. This is very obviously and incontrovertibly racism, but the issue lies with describing it. "privilege discourse" and CRT generally, casts racism as a phenomenon that just sort of bubbles up in the white brain (if you're dumb and/or looking to get clicks), or if you're an academic (or playing one on TV) is that there is some sort of base inclination to racism within all humans due to some sort of kin-selection mechanism or something and people are Just Racist, and if you're on top like white people are now, you're going to be racist and create a racist society. the problems with this are, one, it's totally unfounded evo-psych garbage that people regurgitate because it sounds like it might kind of be true but has zero basis in anything. People aren't born racist, the kin selection mechanisms that might describe a kind of biological racism in humans are incredibly weak, and easily disproven by societies that didn't exhibit color-based racism or the many, many times in history where whiteness was shown to be totally fluid and subjective. the second problem is that this view not only doesn't suggest anything to do about racism, it explicitly lays out that nothing can be done about it except for try to set up society in such a way that the worst excesses of racism are sort of reined in. you can even see how the dilettantes of CRT suggest "education" is the way racism is curtailed or even defeated, but the real heads are smart enough to point to the fact that some of the best-educated people in the world are also massive racists to show how it ultimately cannot be resolved. so to find what works, let's go back to your example and look at it through a class-analytical viewpoint. it should be pretty clear that not just your work environment, but the entire structure of a racist and race-conscious society behooves your boss. Your black coworkers know that you could, at any time and for any reason, get them fired. Their livelihoods, maybe their actual lives, are contingent on not pissing you off or even making you feel bad. You can't -- can not -- find any sort of solidarity in a power dynamic this incredibly hosed up (unless you both recognize this and align along class status, which CRT specifically and neoliberalism in general phohibits). You, on the other hand, almost undoubtedly feel some sort of safety in this, even if only subconsciously. You're a white woman, you've been blasted 24/7 with the racist propaganda that black people, black men especially, are dangerous and specifically dangerous to you. Even if you don't believe this on a conscious level, it's going to make going to your boss a lot easier in the event you do start to feel uncomfortable about something. If you are a bigot, if you've uncritically internalized the clear racism that permeates society, this is way easier because you don't like your black coworkers anyway! Your black coworkers are primed not to trust you. You're primed not to trust them. All of this serves your boss, where these racial dynamics make all of you easier to exploit and, more importantly, less apt to come together with thoughts of eg. unions. People who want to talk about race without the class component often call those who do "class reductionists", but its like trying to talk about the smell in the house without being able to talk about your roommate who keeps allowing his cats to piss on everything. The smell is a real thing that exists, this is true just as much as that racism is a thing that exists in the real world and will not be eradicated totally by "more unions" or "m4a". The problem is pretending that race exists in a vacuum, and trying to claim that it's a distinct unique thing that exists independently in and of itself, and it's not epiphenomenal to our economic structure. Racism obviously exists independently of capital, but today, in the real world, it predominantly arises from capital vis a vis class conflict. You can't solve bigotry by resolving class conflict, sure, but you can't do anything about racism without aligning on class exploitation. so anyway this is a lot of words to say that the problem with privilege discourse isn't that "privilege" doesn't exist, it's that talking about it in those terms obfuscates the class structures that generate and propagate racial "privilege" and prevents you from actually doing anything about it, which are all things your boss really likes.
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Jun 27, 2021 19:24
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