Dear Robin:
I watched your video. No, not that free one on YouTube, but the one you presented to me and my co-workers and for which you probably charged ten thousand dollars. Nice work if you can get it, as Ira Gershwin once quipped. (Do Jewish folks count as white, too?)
No, I haven’t read your book on white fragility. The video was enough for me, riddled as it was with execrable reasoning directed against ridiculous strawmen such as: individualism is the doctrine that human beings are utterly uninfluenced by the culture in which they live. Also, reading all those little black letters surrounded by an expanse of white paper is kind of a metaphor for structural racism, isn’t it? So reading must be bad.
Although I’m not buying what you’re selling, I’ll grant that you’re full of passionate intensity for your cause. Sadly, this reminds me of that great poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, in which he observed that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” (Do Irish folks count as white, too?)
The exact nature of your cause is somewhat unclear, couched as it is in the fog of critical discourse analysis and other Marxist claptrap; yet apparently it has something to do with establishing the cultural hegemony of your black-and-white ideology in which skin color is the only thing that really matters in life: in other words, a cleverly manipulative repackaging of the ideas of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. (Do Italian folks count as white, too?)
As you no doubt know but wish to suppress, 100 years ago there was no such thing as whiteness. Instead, the Anglo-Saxon majority in America drew cultural, not color, distinctions between themselves and the Irish, Italians, Slavs, and everyone else – at best barely tolerating some of these peoples. Your precious notion of whiteness is a more recent ideological construct, into the origins of which you and your ilk likely don’t want us to inquire.
So Robin, what’s really the point? All I got out of your talk is that anyone who doesn’t have really dark skin (yes, I noticed your jibe about light-skinned blacks and their distasteful “colorism”) should feel endlessly guilty in an original sin kind of way and therefore should endlessly atone for their sins through self-renunciation, confessions of complicity in systemic racism, and preferably re-education at the hands of high-paid diversity consultants like you.
Finally, your talk didn’t mention any actual Black people – like, say, Martin Luther King, Jr. The reason isn’t hard to find: MLK eloquently said that “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Yet to you that is unacceptable, because you believe a money-grubbing, power-hungry, paleface re-education professor has the right to dictate to Black folks what they can think and how they can live (and if they don’t submit to your dictates, I guess they too must count as white, at least on the inside). Last I heard, that kind of dehumanizing condescension was called racism.
There you go being reasonable again. We’ve warned you about that, comrade.
Last I heard, that kind of dehumanizing condescension was called racism.
I’m not sure if anyone of influence and action believes in anti-racist ideology.
Leftists started with class (“A bayonet is a weapon with a worker at each end”) but WW1 proved the illusion of class and reality of nation. Since 1914, Leftists began incorporating more race* into their theories, beginning with Mussolini and on to Hitler. American Leftists, like their European counterparts, couldn’t stand that race, no class, supplied motivation to the people, but Americans did something about it: they invented gender socialism. The current attacks on White women again show that race is the real, powerful motivator for the mobs, the academics, the politicians and that class and gender are distant secondary consideration, an extra pebble to add to the indictment of the Left’s enemies.
That is why charging Leftists with hypocritical “racism” fails**. They’re not serious, as someone worried about their soul (Leftists are atheists) or moral standing (Leftists celebrate living in the muck) would be. The Left wants power and will use any club at hand. The hatred of Whites is the nearest and most largest.
Class theory after the overthrow of aristocracy, is the hatred of the bourgeoisie [Smithian success] (as an example, Kulak, Capitalist Roader, etc.); race theory, the hatred for the culturally successful(and it’s not restricted to Whites; the Left will go on to demonize Chinese, Japanese, Koreans…); gender theory, the hatred of those who are successful [Darwinian success] (which is why the Left celebrates abortion and alternative sexualities).
* I write “more race” because socialists from Engels and Marx to Wells and Stalin held frighteningly awful theories of inferior races being driven to extinction by “the forces of history” [= their armed forces].
** Of course within anti-racist ideology, only Whites can be racist, proving that the charge of “racism” has nothing to do with morality and proving the Left is all about race, first, last, and always. Similarly, charges of the “New Class” (see Djilas) being a new feudal aristocracy failed to halt the spread of socialism/communism after WW2.
The election of Barack Obama and the fact that he wasn’t greeted with universal adulation for everything he ever did has led to the bizarre phenomenon (well documented in scientific studies, not just blog comment sections) of white liberals absolutely loathing their own race.
Black people in their world are nothing but a cudgel to beat lower class whites who don’t subscribe to their political preferences.
If white people move out, it’s white flight; if they move in, it’s gentrification. If they eat burgers and fries and do their reading in English and German, they’re monocultural; if they eat spring rolls and learn Chinese, they’re guilty of cultural appropriation.
White people talking about how to be “non-racist” strike me as dumping on fellow whites lower on the status chain. “You’re racist and I’m not.” “See how enlightened I am, you klutz.”
@ Gringo – yes, it is Goodwhites verus Badwhites, top to bottom. They allow the black people involved to think they are important in this, but they have only symbolic value.
The ‘white fragility’ thing is basically – upper middle-class whites feeling vaguely guilty for their class privilege. So deflection, by dumping on working-class whites.
Yeah … nope. Not buying that load.
It’s brilliant marketing. You can’t sell economic class conflict in America but you can get people steeped in the idea that half the country is ‘deplorables’ to buy into implementing the same policies to combat ‘racism’.
I agree with anonymous: antiracism or whatever it’s called today, is just a tool, as is Me Too and whatever they’re calling transgenderism these days. What we’re seeing here is a power grab. The useful idiots camping out on city streets may believe it, but I doubt that anyone else does. A big part of this is keeping everyone off balance. A perfectly valid statement today may prove tomorrow to be untenable and grounds for dismissal. And now they’re combing through people’s past statements to find objectionable material, like the Boeing executive who objected to women in combat in 1987.