Sunday, July 01, 2012

Enantiodromia again

Anti-racism. Sounds very ethical. High-minded. Not just "not-racist" but "anti-racist." Moral passion. Ultrasensitivity. The less evidence for racism there is, the more does the anti-racist find it. Malleus racistificarum.

White supremacy. The embodiment of evil. Same as Nazi. Unthinkable. Beyond the pale...as it were.

Thing is, when anti-racism is the value, the outcome of any racial conflict is already decided...just as with White supremacy. When anti-racism is the stance, the peeps of color can never be negatively judged, not really. In the end, the White side must be in the wrong.

So if White supremacist implies racism against non-Whites, how can anti-racist not imply racism against Whites?

Take the latest info from the Detroit schools, which are 98% Black. Educational disaster. Only 6% passed the math exam, 3% science. 1.8% are college ready. A cause for "concern". But if we are to avoid racism, we cannot think that the disaster has anything to do with the demographic.

State officials are concerned that the results show the gap between white and minority students either remaining flat or widening – at a time when they’re pushing to see those gaps close. 
“We have shameful* gaps in achievement for various student populations not only in test scores, but also in graduation, college access and success, and student suspensions and expulsions,” State Superintendent Mike Flanagan said. “We cannot simply accept these as how things are. We need to end this disparity in education and we need to do this together as a state.” 
The widening of the gaps mean Michigan must maintain its rigorous high school standards and invest more in helping teachers improve their practice through a stronger statewide teacher evaluation system...


It has to be lack of money, or some kind of pedagogical flaw, or not trying hard enough or some kind of legacy of racism...We...society, or America, or leukophores...must be responsible. Like the 90% Black city itself, which has become the Mogadishu of North America. It cannot be about the people who live there. We must have failed. It can't be them. It has to be us.

Doesn't it?


PS. Interesting word choice. Shameful. Who is supposed to be ashamed? What's your guess? 

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

But perhaps "we" are at fault in this. I mean, if whites inherit the karma for all evils from the Crusades and the only important slavery (the slavery done by us) on up to Watergate, Irangate, and Old-Testament-link'd Creationism, then presumably we also inherit the karma for desublimation, which admittedly was devised by Jewish and Gentile whites (although accepted by black leaders en pleine connaissance de cause).

Desublimation. You know, the Calvinist work ethic, Freudian repression and sublimation, the nuclear family, were simply the tools of capitalist robber barons, etc.

So easy to prove that family ethics and repression etc have been oppressive to women, but in fact the desideratum for feminist women has always only been the sort of thing said by women writing for Time magazine, NYT etc -- that is, the double-career work-ethic nuclear family. Admittedly, this agendum has been said in such a way as to undermine repression and sublimation for most of the population, who now live in Charles Murray's 'Fishtown' rather than in 'Belmont' -- but since African-American etc Fishtowns are deem'd "vibrant," I don't see why this valuational label couldn't have been apply'd to Murray's Fishtown by journalists who would thereby refute his out-of-nowhere value judgements.

Anonymous said...

If Brown v. Board of Education had imposed mandated per-student equal funding for all officially and unofficially segregated school systems in the USA -- that is, separate but really equal, the social progress of blacks, generation by generation, could perhaps have been continued, with blacks in the beau rôle struggling against hostile prejudice.

But instead, white anti-racists have taken more and more of the beaux rôles. Even with the absurdity that the Ivy League educational institutions that formatted the power elite for nightmare oppressive America could suddenly become as if liberational, fight-the-power institutions that properly take the best students who would formerly have gone to black colleges and instruct them in how to get law degrees plus learn how to make civilization untenable via critical theory.

So blacks have been sort-of integrated into white Anglo-Saxony driving off a cliff. ... The test scores in Detroit are dismal and make me wonder if somehow blacks too have instituted family policy as whites have: the smartest don't have any children. One would suppose that Friedan's valuations for white girls would result in an equalization of white and black populations in terms of capability for excellence in knowledge work.

A white friend of mine has black relatives some with sons who won't study and yet who despise entry-level jobs of the sort that they could get. She remark'd that entering the military seems the only possibility for such guys.

I remark'd that it's marvellous that guys who won't make any effort at school will make utmost efforts in the military and in criminal gang activity, even though I suppose that most such toil is even more stultifying than English, mathematics, history, physics etc.

But the military and criminality have street cred, whereas "school" and ordinary labour [I see white males working at McDonalds in Canada and the US] are contemptible. ... Memorizing complex gang semiotics feels worth doing )the primacy of valuation( whereas learning French or even basic English grammar has no 'relevance.' (Education theorists say that we are obliged to come up with reasons why it makes sense and thus is valid that youngsters feel learning basic English is irrelevant and thus can't reasonably be expected of them. For instance, the history of oppression in the West. Thus, before we can reasonably expect especially minority young males to learn basic grammar total social justice must be establish'd -- by educated whites, not by MLK-inspired blacks.

And school even in education-theory's anti-capitalist era remains grip'd by the idea that learning is for career success. A totally anti-longing, anti-sublimational idea. Even though at the same time, English and social studies and history are themed with a view to as-if protest and as-if resistance, sc tearing down any and all claims to validity in Anglo-Saxony's repression and sublimation institutions.

Even the president promotes this idea. I remember that we believed this in high school, especially for mathematics and sciences -- I mean, that they were necessary for career success (whereas writing, and reading comprehension supposedly weren't). But obviously most book learning isn't applicable to work-a-day work. And even low-class youngsters see this. If one isn't going to be a lawyer, why bother listening during sixth-grade English class?

Anonymous said...

The complexity of activism à la Tim Wise against "white privilege" is so complex that only those capable of super-excellence in knowledge work really can participate.

If one has a knowledge-work job and spends one's discretionary time reading opinion blogs and media, one can fall into unconsciously assuming that Anglo-Saxony is full of whites who can go around with ideations against white privilege in their noggins. But a simple road trip to Kansas can strike one with the reminder that this is not so.

A simple morality of interpersonal decency and fairness is doable -- including with a Christian add-on of esteem for saints who sacrifice their own temporal interests for their eternal interests, or in order to witness to Jesus Christ etc.

MLK spoke more or less for the comprehension of ordinary white and black Americans. Anti-racist theory has made this impossible, and indeed we have lost sight of creating a value system that judges content of character, and instead are all race-identity bean counters, who ask not whether Congress is being fair to the president and the attorney-general but whether or not Congress is 'racist' against the president and the attorney general. Since the Republicans are white and the president and the attorney-general are somewhat black, the overwhelming race narrative makes all over considerations impossible.

This even though (white) Republicans were perhaps not always fair to (white) President Clinton, and who knows but white Democrats weren't always fair to GWB.

Simple morality is repressive and requires sublimation. It is inconvenient, even though presumably it is fairness and decency etc that is to guide the meaning of abolishing racism.

Anonymous said...

Re Ex Cathedra's P.S. I suppose that the desublimators should feel ashamed -- except that according to desublimation shame is a bourgeois moral weakness, an inability to candidly to candidly declare and reject what one doesn't want (sublimation, ennoblement) and to candidly declare and go for what one really wants (letting it all hang out in direct instinctual gratification; the tohu of perversity and the bohu of polymorphousness, as is).

This is our version of the honnêteté or cultural decorousness that Pascal found fault with in the kalokagathos of early modernity. We even bring in Jesus of the Beatitudes as an enforcer: Jesus associated with the devalued, therefore shame-based civilizational value systems offend the authority of Jesus Christ Pantocrator even granting the validity of the separation of religion and politics.

Jesus flunky for desublimation and destruction of Western civilization declares that Murray's Belmont is obligated to dissolve its value system in solidarity with especially the minority's Fishtown. Perhaps so. And no surprise then that He was condemn'd not only by Romans but even by Jewish authorities -- since He required Jews to destroy their value system and the families that depended upon that value system in solidarity with the ruin'd, the devalued. (Restoring the ruin'd to okay lives via shame-based morals etc would have been paternalistic, etc, and co-opted the oppress'd as beneficiaries of the very system that oppress'd them, I guess).

Islam won't use Jesus this way: they cover Him with old-style piety and moralism. Jesus condemns shame-based moralism, work ethic middle-class values within western Christianity, but He enthuses for the five pillars and new moon festivals of Islam. if an Islamic Caliphate doesn't work out so well especially for women and blacks, white anti-Islamophobia activists will be able to deny karmic responsibility "Thatsnot the Allah I know!"

Anonymous said...

I suppose we should see in events such as WW1 etc letting it all hang out direct instinctual gratification. ...

Anonymous said...

Or we could cease writing war of spirit up into the world cave that way and instead fight out war of spirit directly in the world cave.

Anonymous said...

... Hugo Schwyzer says »I have to ask myself a question over and over again: How is my “WASPy privileged maleness” distorting what I see?« ...

Okay, I'm mistaken for feeling stress and anxiety vis-a-vis desublimation: it's only to distract from my inherited karma for the evil and oppression that is white privilege western civilization that I'm jumping up and down vs desublimation's controlling the racism, sexism, class-homophobia agenda so that neo-Islamic Shariah seems the only way to restore 'embody'd order' in the social basis for the military-industrial complex.

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