I've probably said too much already...
I may have to stop dating interracially. This is a harsh prospect for me because I have been dating black women since grade school and have two adorable biracial children. The level of racial polarization has reached a fever pitch. A generation of young black women has been radicalized by police brutality and the other overt racism in the criminal justice system. I've met girls on an interracial dating site who purport to be specifically looking to date white men but spending their free time at BLM movement events. BLM is a rational response to the circumstances of the day, but not all BLM assertions and activities are proportionate to the needs of the moment.
Shouting down Bernie Sanders, a Jew who, like many Jews of his generation may or may not have been violently victimized by overt racism but who would’ve been thoroughly unwelcome at the country club for some of life, has been a civil rights activist from time immemorial. It must be frustrating to be a Jew who, once a member of an ostracized and oppressed minority, is now considered white enough to bear the burden and taint of the stain of white crimes against ostracized and oppressed minorities. This is a burning Mark of Cain that is ironically being branded on the smoldering flesh of members of the Tribe. It's rather absurd. I digress...
There is no soul on God's blue Earth who is both capable of becoming the POTUS in the coming term and more sympathetic to the vicious nature of racism against minorities that has occurred in these United States. It reveals a failure of discretion in an underlying Manichaeism of the black radical: a failure to distinguish "good" whites from "bad" ones. Perhaps in the ontology of the black radical there is simply no place for white people. Perhaps the more that the black community is radicalized the more they will want their own space at a healthy social distance from whites--the kind of distance that creates enclaves and exclaves, not a harmonious unitary global community.
The System of White Supremacy and its Insidious Linguistic Machinations
Many if not most of the black women I've dated recently are looking for some sort of genuflection from me so that I signal that I'm racially sensitive enough to be worthy of dating. Those of you who know me know how cynical, irreverent, and satirical I am and know I'm simply not capable of that (at least sustaining it). I lose a black friend a day over racial policy or politics. I have many black friends. I live in Atlanta and could go all day without seeing or talking to another white man. To my credit, I draw my social circle from members of my community. I don't go looking specifically for other white people outside of this community on the hunt for friends of my “own kind”. Losing friends happens. The problem is the black friends I lose over disagreements of substance seem to be associating all white people with individual incidents of hyper-racism through a systemic process they call "white supremacy". Under this systems-based logic of analysis, a white person can have racism predicated of them simply by tacitly accepting the status quo. They've built a straw man out of white people that they can hack and slash. For instance, a white person who shows a blithe lack of sensitivity to the subtle ways in which discrimination works is, by extension, responsible for the propagation of that racism to pernicious effect. The degree of nuance involved and level of sensitivity required to perceive the subtle ways in which racism works. We'll soon be going over every jot and tittle to find veiled racial insensitivity.
There are also other forms of fallacious reasoning at work. For example, a white person who makes fun of black culturally black names is complicit in perpetuating all the worst kinds of racial discrimination and connected to a broader history of monstrous oppression, and responsible for the propagation of the system at the level of the microaggression (Note: when I asked if uniquely black names could ever be subject to humor from white people the response from my black friends was “fuck you”.). To argue in this way without showing a connection is just positing a slippery slope from microaggression to macroscopic institutionalized racism. Cleary fallacious isn't it. Also, and related to this, the causal connections between every possible act of racial insensitivity and a larger process of white supremacy are unclear and somewhat spurious. How can we draw a fair line of demarcation between when one interlocutor is being too sensitive and when this interlocutor's counter-party is being hypersensitive? Is hypersensitivity okay, or does it serve as an indicator that a person might have emotional or psychological problems they need to work through or seek help to resolve?
The clever ways in which racism is drawn out of seemingly anodyne racial interactions (even if some level of genuine misunderstanding is involved) by the professionals and amateurs of the equality movement reminds me of the way the Continental deconstructionists used to do philosophy. The goal doesn't seem to be to maintain fealty to a consistent set of analytical commitments or to develop of deeper understanding of language and the misunderstandings that result from its use, misuse, and abuse. It's simply another language game where the goal is just to expose some underlying counterintuitive reality. It's true that the natural sciences and rigorous analysis in the spirit of the hard sciences often involves drawing out strange facts of the reality beneath the surface that confound intuition and expectation alike. And, I hope we can all grasp that some statements are compact and that when one unpacks them one can find many layers of meaning, reference, and signification with various communicative effects. But we shouldn't make a game out of simply reading counterintuitive inferences into any given situation or utterance of these peculiar patterns of sounds we primates make. It is ironic isn’t it that some liberal college professors who were once proponents of equality and sensitivity now fail to live up to the more intense standards for what counts as acceptable discourse in polite company, and to the extent that they once used these wedge issues as a weapons they are now being hoist with their own petard.
White Identity Politics or Racism by Other Means
I certainly hope no one tries to make a straw man out of my statements herein. This is another thing I hate about talking to liberals and progressives. Someone misinterprets a statement by imputing the wrong quantifier, and assumes I'm making a universal generalization about a class, and then chimes in thinking they are going to cleverly disprove the argument I've made by offering a counterexample. One can hack away at straw men if one likes. My burden of proof isn't that high. This shouldn't be difficult. I'm certainly not intending to say that black frustration with white America is constructed of sheer caprice or that ALL cases of racial insensitivity are harmless. There is a rational basis for an intelligent black person to be frustrated with, resentful towards, and angry at (perhaps even to hate) white America, past and present. Perhaps I can cover in more detail what I mean by this in subsequent writings. There’d be too much to unpack to say it loud here. Suffice it to say this: the atrocious history that makes this true should not be forgotten, else it will be a derogation of the memory of blacks' ancestors who lived (and in some cases did not live) through it; yet, to dwell on it may be to foreshorten a bright future of racial reconciliation and the construction of a common social identity or at length an American leitkultur.
There is a new reality of white identity politics in the Western world which we will also have to contend with if we are to have justice in our time. In a not too distant past age, Donald Trump (that proper name find its way even into my diary--it will soon become a synonym for ubiquity) would have paid a dear social price for his clumsily over-broad and hastily generalized categorical statements about Mexicans. The price would probably be in the form of effective conversational pressure to make sense and retrieve some semblance of acceptable speech from the comments in the next interview, if not outright ostracism at the social level. In the new 1991, Trump paid a negative price in skyrocketing poll ratings. It strikes me as quite preposterous and silly as a spectacle, and would be nothing more than laughable if it weren't so potentially dangerous. It is a mean-spirited sort of politics. And is increasingly overtly racist. This is coupled with a historical reality which obtains of the present moment of discrimination in criminal justice, housing, and all the evil that flows from it.
I'll bring a close-to-home example to market. Atlanta has a comparatively large black middle and upper class. Almost 30% of blacks in Atlanta have a baccalaureate degree, which makes it the second most educated black community in America. The real discrimination blacks in Atlanta face is the invisible race war of housing discrimination, where apartment and house sizes are defined by the government in residential zoned areas in such a way that developers cannot design profitable efficiency housing. This relegates clusters of the black population to areas of south Fulton County and south central Dekalb County, where I live. Areas without access to good jobs and good schools. There is heavy gentrification going on. This is the real battlefield of racial conflict and the way institutionalized discrimination still works. But liberals want to police the language and are worried about stereotypes (many of the local political liberals have even been complicit, at least tacitly, in what has happened to the poor black Bantustans in south Fulton County, among other places). Stereotypes aren’t any trivial problem. But generational poverty and discrimination are much more onerous. Perhaps conversational language isn't the junction at which we should alight.
Political correctness really isn't about constructing a decent, livable society. It's about speaking from an acceptable narrative. It's about conventionalizing beliefs about the world and what can be said based on their consequences, and suppressing differing perspectives. That is 1. A logical fallacy known as argument from consequences and 2. A dangerously subversive practice in an open society. I understand that political correctness is designed as a tool to prevent open racism á la 1960s Selma, Alabama. But it's too broad an instrument for America. For Singapore, suppressing what can be said in public by fiat may work. But in America, we are playing the free and open society strategy. We want the benefits of understanding things in a way congruent with reality as it is. We aren't a planned society like so many in Europe. We conduct business. And business requires dealing with the facts on the ground, not the tropes of the ivory tower or politburo. Not that, at some point, a smidgeon of censorship may be called for in some cases. The First Amendment was only clearly geared toward the protection of political speech, but its protections have been extended to virtually all other kinds of speech that are not overtly libelous or slanderous.
We cannot will reality to be anything other than it is by merely exercising the careful use of politically correct language. To believe so is to miss the way that language can fail to be coextensive with reality. One can utter coherent language that fails to be congruent with the world. The truth of a declarative non-tautological utterance is a function of the triangulation of reality, language, and logic.
I feel like Balaam's ass. People have attacked me for reacting to the harsh realities of life as I see them. I'm responding to the road based on what I see in front of me, even if others cannot.
And just to clarify, I'm not using "liberals" to refer to left wingers. I'm using it to refer to the kinder, gentler breed of right wingers we have here in America, who want liberal markets and open societies, but with some rules about propriety that basically amount to: you can do whatever you want to disadvantaged groups with business practices or public policies, so long as you don't say anything harsh about them. America has bona fide progressive leftists, but they are in short supply in public life.
Another dangerous feature of white identity politics is its closeness with the militarized law enforcement community. I appreciate that there exists a thin blue line between order and chaos. That being said, America's law enforcement community needs to be restructured. And measures need to be taken to control police aggression. We don't need police forces to become nothing more than the white street gang. Maintaining public order--good order and discipline in society--is essential. When those charged with maintaining law and order are out of control, then there is little hope for public order. Some redneck imbecile in a blue suit who shoots an unarmed black man in the back is no hero. Choosing whose side to be on based on the superficial qualities or social roles of those involved is not the pathway towards justice. All sides are guilty of this to some extent. It is true that only whites currently have the capacity to institutionalize racism in the form of official discrimination. This should be monitored and ameliorated, but its prospect should not be the basis for continual renegotiation of social norms of multiracial interaction.
Not Funny “Ha Ha”
Many of my disagreements with black friends haven't even been about substantive racial policy, they've been about pure racial politics. They've been about humor and who gets to say what when, where, why, and how. I get that white people are subject to sport for our tendencies toward blitheness, insouciance, arrogance, provincialism, and general plain vanilla lameness. Few people are crueler and snarkier in ridiculing white people and the absurd spectacle of white identity politics than this writer (for an example see my, “It’s Hard to Be a White Man America, and I’m Tired of It”). It's all in good fun. But if we accept the logic that historically disadvantaged groups can make light of white people to expose lingering enclaves of racial bias or even as a cathartic release for their frustration but white cannot respond in kind, then we create separate principles of action for white people and everyone else. How fair is that? How much weight on my shoulders should I be obliged to carry for the sins of my fathers? At the individual level, one cannot have healthy relationship on the basis of being a punching bag for another person's racial frustrations, insecurities, and status anxieties. At least if such a relationship were to exist, it's unlikely to persist as a one-way street. Other primate species are like Homo sapiens in having an in-built sense of injustice over social asymmetries. Perhaps only human are sensitive enough to see unfair distributions in social rewards for being the possessor of a protected status, however. Over time, this state of affairs will lead to frustration that may be released in less than salubrious ways. Does justice mean returning the favor to whites for the injustice that our ancestors visited on others?
I'll admit that some of this is deeply personal frustration and may be idiosyncratic. I am an amateur insult comic, as anyone who's familiar with my internet trolling can attest. It's become something of an unhealthy pastime for yours truly. Sometimes I go too far (sometimes intentionally). Like many citizens with at least a touch of antisocial disorder, I can at times have a callous lack of regard for the feelings of others. Needless to say, this isn't conducive to eusociality. It's probably hard to find anything I've written of any substantial length that doesn't contain some kind of jab at some person or group. In many cases, in retrospect, I realize it was undeserved. My personal character flaws aside, sometimes a joke is just a fucking joke. If you want to dish it out then sometimes you have to take the hit like a big boy or girl. There are comedians on both sides of the racial divide who won't play colleges anymore because they are hotbeds of hypersensitivity and vindictive retaliation. Perhaps when I dare to commit language acts I am using the wrong monikers, signifiers, semantics, and semiotics. One gets to define the scale of specificity one uses for analysis. At the level of species, these categories of race and class don't matter. At a lower level, such as social interaction between members of the species, they might on any given plateau. And I probably am using the wrong words in many of my interactions (though I think "hyphenated euphemisms" have become passé). At some point, society will become so sensitive that the very notion of using words to describe things will be considered a form of violence!
I hope that the equality game is not a race without a finish line. The more that social equality is achieved, the more the professional left and cynical actors will find forms of speech acts and other conduct that violate the unwritten rules of the social road. Once emotion and outrage have taken over, no explanation will suffice or be regarded as anything more than an ex post facto rationalization of an inexcusable act. What prospect for reconciliation exists? At least in Christianity—far from a progressive enterprise—a sin, once committed, can be atoned for. Can anyone ever apologize profusely enough be cleansed of the label of being an “intolerant” in a community that absolutely will not tolerate intolerance—to the point of becoming militantly intolerant of intolerance (trust me, the irony is missed on them). These kinds of social discourse are more about emotion and passion than about reason and truth. We cannot escape from emotion’s orbit and be grounded in our truly human selves, but we can pull away from the locus of its gravitational pull in order to make more sense of the world.
1990-Sick
Another harsh truth is that, once we privilege pure emotion and intent over dispassionate discourse (to the extent such is possible for emotional creatures) how much of the self-righteous indignation and outrage comes from the moral organ, and how much of its comes from one's own personal frustrations about life and distance between the circumstances of moment and one's real social objectives? Public immolations have perhaps always performed a cathartic function for the hive, and our dark history of ritualistic human sacrifice reveals more complex and base motivations than a mere effort to propitiate the divine other. Now public immolations take the form of torpedoing the careers of intellectuals, administrators, and public figures who make the mistake of saying the wrong things or saying things that aren't altogether wrong but that are said without what is arbitrarily deemed to be sufficient forewarning.
There may even be evidence that there are and always will be whites among us who simply don't like blacks and blacks among us who simply don't like whites. But they are the true minority. And we cannot let this tail wag the dog and have them pit the rest of us against each other over the battle lines they, in their prejudice, have drawn. How do we tell if a person who is outraged against the oppressed or the oppressor and determined to have their voice heard is just a racist who wants this internal conflict raging inside them borne out in our shared world?
On the plus side, we've had another major release from NWA this year (a movie and not an album). I don't know that I like this recapitulation of history though. Have we only come this far over the course of my life? Can we go no further? If 2015 is the new 1991, will 2016 be the new 1992? To paraphrase Spice 1, this has me feeling 1990-Sick...