THE OTHER SIDE OF RACISM

DAVID HOROWITZ has commented on Facebook today concerning the continued silence of the liberals with regard to the historical peoples revolt against the totalitarian theocratic dictatorship. His remarks are as spot on...

And let us not get carried away. No one, not even the neo-cons are advocating interceding militarily in Iran, but a voice of support for those marching hordes who are not only exercising the rights of free expression in calling for free elections that we support here in the United States, but they are also voicing opposition to an unquestionably sworn enemy of ours in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

How much plainer can this opportunity to extend textbook American graciousness to an oppressed people be? But I suppose in this case, only the wistful teleprompter of our much heralded Barack Obama knows for sure.

Horowitz writes:

Here's one scene from the historic revolt in Iran. Everything liberals pretend to be concerned about is on the line in Tehran today. Basic freedom to vote and have your vote counted; basic freedom to protest and not be killed. Even the style of the revolt is something for liberals to celebrate—the Tweeter revolution, the women's revolution, the revolution of the young. But liberals are silent. They want their government, their White House, to pretend it has no stake in the outcome, that it can deal with either Iran, the Iran of the Islamo-fascists who oppress their own people and want to kill us, or the Iran of those freedom loving citizens whose blood is running in the streets. Shameful.

Props to Mr. Horowitz for pointing out what seems to be obvious to anyone not blinded by party shenanigans, those poor souls who prefer a knotty grudge match to anything remotely akin to what some of us prefer to call principles. Don't misunderstand me. I speak plainly here. As far as I'm concerned, the Left and the Right are opposing butt cheeks of the same dumb-ass political machine.

As a staunch constitutionalist I prefer a strict adherence to those founding principles that inform individual liberty with abiding responsibility and uniform and unifying justice. But why did we and why do we continue to waste the perceptions and inertia our founders left us in writing and in deed? Our nation is floundering in a mess. Both parties have contributed heavily to the burdens now foisted upon the American people. And as a result, I fear the worst is closing in upon us all. But I can appreciate the work David Horowitz and Anne Wortham is doing for America today, even though folks of our intellectual ilk will continue to be called racists and nazis by small minds.

So even as we note that the landscape is littered with false assumptions and intellectual scoundrels, let us turn to another important American voice on the issue of racial politics gone awry, Professor Wortham as she writes with a special combination of intelligence and self-awareness:

MY FELLOW AMERICANS, please know I am black. I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul’s name as my choice for president. Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a Black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not require a Black president to love the ideal of America.

I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival—all that I know about the history of the United States of America, all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the “change” that Obama asserts has come to America.

Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million Blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that Blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared “progressive” whites who voted for him because he doesn’t look like them.

I would have to wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration—political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University ’s Kennedy School of Government.

I would have to believe that “fairness” is equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that a man who asks me to “go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice” is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the “bottom up,” and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.

Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago irrationally chanting “Yes We Can!” Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead—and no one including, especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.

So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a Black man to the office of the president of the United States, the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over—and Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a Black person.

So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America. Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a Black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to—Do Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine—what little there is left—for the chance to feel good.

There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.

Dr. Anne Wortham is author of “The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness” which analyzes how race consciousness is transformed into political strategies and policy issues. She has published numerous articles on the implications of individual rights for civil rights policy, and is currently writing a book on theories of social and cultural marginality. Recently, she has published articles on the significance of multiculturalism and Afrocentricism in education, the politics of victimization and the social and political impact of political correctness. Shortly after an interview in 2004, she was awarded tenure.

THOSE STILL PUFFING ON RACISM

SO, IT'S TRUE. FINALLY. After all these years the word is out—everyone is a little bit racist. Somebody needs to tell the Obama administration that it owns a chunk of nasty racism itself, all by its lonesome. The firestorm over Eric Holder's astonishing remark is an apt response to his patronizing notions. But I'll stop here, and put on my NATIONAL COWARD cap I grabbed off the air, and give a nod to Suzy Rice whose assessment of Holder, Clyburn, and Pelosi are nothing short of barbed wire retributions. No coward is Rice.

A RACE TO NOWHERE

AS AN AFRICAN AMERICAN, I'm amazed at how Obama has hookedwinked so many whites. There is a wealth of factual data out there, from his books, speeches, associations and even his wife's comments including her Princeton paper, that this guy has a large disdain for white people. Notwithstanding the fact that his mother was white. Do whites feel so guilty about our history as a nation that they will overlook these obvious facts and vote this light-weight into office. America may not be perfect but show me another nation that would not like to be like us or people who would not want to live here.

Thanks to a writer from VA known as Clinging to My Gun.

THE ARC OF SUPERFICIAL PRAISE

Strange news off the wires today. A blogger known as Max Publius writes of his own amazement in learning that the esteemed "The Color Purple" author Alice Walker has publically endorsed the anti-Islamic book "Infidels" penned by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who in her writings and eloquent interviews and speeches is beseeching the West to tackle this global jihad phenomenon seriously all the while busy ducking death threats made against her from the self-appointed Islamic thugs in the Netherlands (where her colleague, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was assassinated) and elsewhere who are actively pursuing her for daring to speak out against this barbarous regime. Max explains his surprise:

THERE I WAS INNOCENTLY DRIVING in my car listening and cursing left-wing author Alice Walker as she was interviewed on CSPAN. Then she does the unimaginable. She endorses right-winger Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book "Infidel." As any good anti-jihadist knows, Ali is the Somalian immigrant to the Netherlands who is under death threats because of her outspoken antipathy toward Islam, which has left her scarred for life, both literally (female circumscion) and emotionally, from the stress of death threats based in Islamic Sharia "apostate" laws. Ali is also a true intellectual who writes knowledgeably of the giants of Western philosphy, as well as a former politician in the Netherlands before she moved for a time to the United States to work for a conservative think tank.

Walker's endorsement came after her usual left-wing drivel and subtle black supremacist statements. Oddly, considering the endorsement, there were pro forma condemnations of "religious intolerance" and specifically, anti-Muslim intolerance. It makes one wonder: Did Walker get past the cover of Ali's book? Is Walker aware that Ali was throwing down the gauntlet with Islam? The book is many things, including brilliant, but tolerance is not high on the list. I have no doubt that Walker was drawn to Ali's book because Ali is black.

I dare say Walker not only wouldn't endorse the same book if written by a Bosnian ("white") Muslim, she would actively spurn it. It leads one to ask: Do the same facts resonate differently to Walker when a black woman says them than if they were said by a white male speaking about Islam? Experience says yes. This seems to be a defining characteristic of leftists: Facts are judged politically correct or not depending on the person speaking them. With conservatives, a fact is a fact, regardless of who says it.

SHORT CIRCUITING PRESUMPTIONS

Originally published on September 16, 1999

I did not reply to Joseph, but will make a point of it here. To quote Joseph:

As Blake says in "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," opposition is true friendship. Certainly some of these ideas we have encountered are painful—and problematic—but they do have their value, especially the ideas of Althusser. Your response reminds me of Zizek's book "The Sublime Object of Ideology," in which he (following Althusser and Lacan) emphasizes the invisibility of ideology. He claims that while we believe we are outside of ideology, that we understand our own positioning, we understand only an illusion, a fantasy, that the cynical (or, better, Kynicial (a borrowed term from Sloterdijk)) distance we create between ourselves and the ideology that we think engulfs (informs) us blinds us from the Real. We say things like "work sucks. Work has always sucked," and think that they are true—yet these statements perpetuate the system we live in, make the "suckiness" of work a transcendent truth that cannot be overcome—so why try? That is what the ISA wants (excuse the personification—but it is useful) us to believe. Slavoj Zizek provides an interesting example of how the supposed "objective" analysis of an ideological system from within only rationalizes that ideology.

Let me close with that lengthy section: "In the Germany of the late 1930s, what would be the result of such a non-ideological, objective approach? Probably something like: "The Nazis are condemning the Jews too hastily, without proper argument, so let us take a cool, sober look and see if they are really guilty or not, let us seee if there is some truth in the accusations against them." Is it really necessary to add that such an approach would merely confirm our so-called "unconscious prejudices" with additional rationalizations? The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not "Jews are really not like that " but "the anti-Semitic idea of Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system." The idea that "work has always sucked," stitches up an inconsistency in our own ideological system: we value freedom, but in order to provide for ourselves, we must "freely" sell our labor—enslaving ourselves to capital (and turning ourselves into commodities.) Thus we forgive this system of enslavement by constructing a notion of work that necessarily involves the property of "suckiness."

I find that Joseph's approach using what appears to be the standard either/or solution is much the same ditch I can often fall into, as Kubhlai is wont to point out. I for one believe that nearly every damning and uplifting stereotype (although liberals say uplifting s-types are equally damaging in serving up impossible dreams, yeah gotta have the cake and eat it too) has, or had at some point in history, a grounding in relative truth, however perverted the mechanism or circumstances of how, when, and by whom that "relative truth" was first observed, or remains in place.

But today we classify such statements as unredeemable bigotry and absolutely false, and tis better to utter a lie (to continue with his own example of Jewry), by saying that Jews resolutely DO NOT CONTROL Hollywood, rather than to dare suggest with a non-sensical over-generalized bigotry, alias a well-worn sterotype which soapbox liberals and hardshell Jewish apologists themselves will both translate to mean that the speaker infers that every Jew in the world has conspired to lock out the OTHER from the lucre of said Hollywood. In fact it is damned dangerous to utter anything about any person anymore without appearing to be soaked in bigotry, unless of course minority status (often a misnomer in itself) casts an emperor's new cloak of immunity on the vitriolic in question.

Where is the "common sense" in that? Let me rephrase, where is the ABSOLUTE TRUTH in that?

Notice how the Bulworth character in Warren Beatty's recent flick of the same name danced past those flames about big money in Hollywood by first uttering the stereotypic language, then retracting it in mock liberal honesty, then again roaring back to ask if 4 out of 5 powerful money figures in the room are Jewish then where is the hell resides the untruth of his remarks. . .

Joseph's "correct" response of "the anti-Semitic idea of [the] Jew has nothing to do with Jews" reads soothing at first glance, but as anyone who crawls in on hands and elbows, keen eyes and ears seeking fresh avenues of learning, to enter these vivacious worlds of the OTHER, whether they be of the Jew, the Negro, the White Man, the Southern Man, the Homosexual, the Feminist, the Revolutionary et cetera, soon discover that political correctness and its aim to eradicate all generalizations except the ones deemed to support its own multicultural aims, whatever the cost, denies or excuses every sliver of statistical evidence those generalizations form as social signposts, which are rather obvious to every group within itself, but are ruthlessly untolerated putside the group, especially in a political context. Every yawn becomes a vicious attack. Every assault a hate crime. Every position of comraderie a sneaky attempt at infiltration where one does not belong. Whilst within each group the same accusations and petty habits are hurled at each other and implicitedly acknowledged as simple observable facts of daily life.

Fact one according to Gabriel, the OTHER breeds fear and suspicion. This is the natural result of experience with self-protection. Fact two according to Gabriel, the OTHER breeds fascination and admiration. Man is a social animal. Inquisitive man seeks to refresh himself at the font of others he presumes are inheritors of a healthy measure of similarity as well as diversity. Synthesis of these two facts before other consideratons manifest themselves?

I believe it is a mark of INDIVIDUAL character that each of us is expected to CHOOSE one or the other of these FACTS to exploit given the specific circumstances of a confrontation, and chances are, each OTHER is tempered by the host of contributing traits which fall under the domain calculating those ratios of power, beauty, and exchange feasibility which legislate any integration or cooperation desired at the social level. Such a belief is common sense, but on the contemporary political and philosophical circuit, pure dynamite.

After all, as a self-professed specimen fingered across racial lines as poor white trash myself, I wonder how many folks on this list can escape conjuring up stereotypical imagery of that one example of unavoidable access to the language of bigotry, thus justifying my critical departure from several points Joseph made.

I suppose Joseph's make or break hypothesis is that while "work" may or may not have "sucked" in the past, that this distinction is irrelevant to the issue of "work" in the post-industrial age today. But I'm not sure. Anybody wish a shot at parcing Joesph’s words before I attempt a response to Joe on the forum Crash offered up as fodder to our aims? I do know that Bob Black, Len Bracken, and those of similar ilk, have no problem embracing that particular idea.