I tend to agree. There was a time when it seemed like we (our country) had decided, pop-culturally, that one way to try and navigate the history of racism and first de jure and then statistical inequalities, was to (in a relatively light and seemingly harmless way) lampoon everything white as being hopelessly lame. Given that major part of the history of this country and its overhangs, it didn't seem such a terrible price to pay for being born with a certain complexion (and grossly-generalized ethno-racial heritage. It's not so unusual for a relatively powerless group to satirize even ridicule a relatively powerful one (even if many of the source of the ridicule weren't so powerless and most of the targets weren't so powerful. What came next, though, seemed less even notionally humorous and both nastier and more a part of a program: you have no culture; you have zero accomplishments that are your own - everything is stolen (and, worse, stolen and then commercialized and ruined). A good friend who was finishing a master's degree at The New School (and who has a biracial half-brother and was sympathetic to the some of the discourse around The New Jim Crow, etc) recited to me some of what he heard both from classmates and peers and students in various workshops he was part of outside of school: we love our music, our dance, our food, our women(!), our proud history of this and that). The clear implication from such people was white people have none of these things. The official white ethnic cuisine is Wonder Bread (or perhaps unlimited breadsticks at Olive Garden). All PoC ar noble strivers with both proud and distinctive traditions and an even brighter, almost inevitably victorious future (perhaps because that outcome was to be gradually mandated and engineered, and enforced?) White people had nothing but cultural poverty so profound it deserved vicious mockery. White was somehow both (hilarious) actual, profound poverty (all the tropes about toothless hillbillies at the milder end) - and, simultaneously, C-level suites, yachts, and (racist) country club memberships for all as a racial birthrite. White had become an epithet in and of itself. One could quickly ridicule and delegitimize anything or anyone simply by labeling it or them as white.
As just one example of how this played out at the urban, knowledge/creative class level, I'd been reading Josh Marshall's TPM (at least once most days and most of the stories and posts) since Fall 2002. As the site expanded and more and more recent graduates did stints there (seemingly all from elite liberal arts colleges or Ivies) and as Marshall himself focused more and more on The Coalition of the Ascendant and The Emerging Democratic Majority, the site began to feature at least once daily what I began to call "something a dumb redneck did today". Almost always by some patrician-looking recent college grad from an elite institution. It got so bad, Pro Publica
called out TPM for relentlessly, superficially mocking poor white people, in many cases just for being poor, culturally alien to the east coast media elite, and for suffering some failure or misfortune (maybe of character; maybe they just had the wrong views or party allegiance) which was usually portrayed as their just desserts. I completely stopped visiting the site around that time
Across much of American culture, high, low, and in between, there is now an open attack on all white people (at least the unfancy ones) simply for being white. And that means the inherited, immutable physical characteristics, though it's often presented disingenuously as "dismantling whiteness". And there's a giddiness, a smugness, a sense of singular culture license these days to these attacks. For example, Marc Lamont Hill's ridiculous (if clever in its nastiness) recitation of several of the things he loves about being black - and attempt to trap Chris Rufo into either appearing to advocate for a white racial identity, or conceding there was zero about which anyone born white could be proud. Of course when one tries to answer that they don't make a focus of walking around thinking of themselves as a white person let alone nurturing a specific racial pride, the response is always that that is itself an enormous privilege of being white: never having to think about one's race. To the extent any of that argument is true, a large part of it is simply based on growing up as part of a large majority. I'm sure Koreans at the very minimum feel like the naturally dominant group and center of culture and policy, in Korea. But the claim that white people alive in America today have never had to think about their race in a critical way is another feint and bluff. It's just laughable. It's similar to the ludicrous claim that virtually nothing honest about the history of slavery and Jim Crow has been taught in classrooms until very recently (and all of these racist white people want to purge even that). Tellingly, I'm seeing a number of very identiarian black writers arguing a direct connection between the horrific racially-motivated slaughter in Buffalo and any resistance to the divisive, demonizing curricula they demand be imposed nationwide. In all kinds of community hobby and volunteer groups, most as far away in focus from politics as one can imagine, I've seen a wave of usually upper-middle-class millennials enter the group and immediately begin haranguing (other) white people for being white and daring to have been active for so long and for having contributed so much (in a welcoming, egalitarian way!) Imagine showing up for a group event on a weekend morning, maybe the highlight of your day, and having a group photo distributed with the acid label: "_________ so white".Maybe your mom is in the hospital and your employer's been downsizing and your knees and back are hurting - but here's a chance to be social and do something positive and active. And you get slimed for how you were born. Your images individually and collectively have no meaning other than a horrible and oppressive whiteness the good people have to put up with. You could be the most progressive white person in town. That's sort of the point: there's no way for you to be active and present and visible and for it to be OK. It'd be hard to blame you if you didn't want to get out of bed the next weekend. And that's sort of the point, too: you have a responsibility to remove yourself and, even better, to be demoralized about something you can't control. If you do show up, your presence has been racialized as an inherent affront to more deserving people. The people pushing this demonization, whatever their own skin color, are not by and large disadvantaged or marginalized in any way. And their goal appears to be to make this kind of ridicule for existing, this actual effort to demoralize and marginalize people on the basis of skin color alone, something ubiquitous and inescapable.
When I see Chris Rufo (who is, beyond his invaluable muckrating and exposure of damning primary evidence, actually as much of a conservative culture warrior as he is an Enlightenment liberal) being giddily dared by Marc Lamont Hill to say anything positive about his heritage, I don't think of race or racial pride. I think of my family. Specific people who usually didn't have it so easy and who struggled to keep it together and sacrificed personally to make good choices for their kids and pass on some model of integrity to the following generations. That's what i'm proud of. It's just laughable - an obvious provocation - to say Americans of Italian or Russian or Irish heritage have no heritage, no ethnic inheritances, no culture. What we were busy doing was trying to share an American culture and one which belongs to and is enriched by all of us. None of this demonization of skin color people have no control over makes me want to elevate my own skin color or race, nor does it make me more hostile to anyone with a different complexion. But I do now call out this neo-racist toxicity to friends. A few years ago, it was hard to find a movie which had attracted more universal, lavish critical praise than Get Out. It's got something silly like a 100% positive critical response on Rotten Tomatoes. I was sure there had to be more to it. It couldn't all be based on just one supposedly satirical but obviously openly racist, hateful hook, a one trick conceit. But while staying with an ailing parent, I turned on cable TV and watched the last thirty or so minutes of it. Yep: all white people are sadistically murderous, enslaving, horror movie monsters - and the ones who act nice are even worse. Umm...fuck you? A friend recently mentioned that movie to briefly praise it. And I was equally brief but honest in reply: it's the shallowest of one trick ponies, and is based on pure racial hatred and scapegoating. Jordan Peele, whatever his talents, and his wife notwithstanding, appears to have a major personal problem with white people. That movie isn't satire. It isn't boldly countercultural. It's raining down group hatred from the commanding heights of pop culture. It's only deeper trick and i'm sure a very conscious one, is to get large numbers of younger people, particularly well-meaning white people to show up and laugh and cheer at all the inherently evil white people being - what's the term the left has become besotted with? - *held accountable* for their evil. The great catharsis of young black men running over and blowing up white people of all ages, sexes, *because we know they're all irredeemably bad*. That's literally all the movie is. But the reply of course would be: why are you so fragile? It's just a movie, can't you take a joke? Four hundred years of brutal oppression (as if I'm comparing the two) and this man wants to complain about a movie!
I wasn't gonna comment, because this I'm so late to the party. But this was really good. I made it all the Way through because-a that.
"All PoC ar noble strivers with both proud and distinctive traditions and an even brighter, almost inevitably victorious future (perhaps because that outcome was to be gradually mandated and engineered, and enforced?)"
Would just remove the question mark.
"To the extent any of that argument is true, a large part of it is simply based on growing up as part of a large majority."
This is something I wondered about, but dunno much about. There's always gonna be a tension between a large majority and a large minority, right? Dunno Korea, but assume that was Your point. But I don't see *anybody* trying to figure that out, and see how it can be ameliorated.
I agree with Substack Reader below, that it boils down to political strategy, in the end. And couldn't help but notice those at the very top-a the food chain (KenDiAngelo, Hannah-Jones and Coates, to name a few)... Well, they all cashed their chips in for fame and (mostly) fortune.
But I don't think it pays to overlook the Marxist aspect to this. The original Critical Race Theory outta the 80s. And up to the present time. There are people who wanna "dismantle the institutions" because-a their "systemic racism." Since "systemic racism" is a hoax, AFAIK, their ultimate motive is to tear down the society however they can and replace it with dreams.
Or, I should say, that's one motivation for destroying society, but not necessarily the only one.
You make some interesting points, but you need to throw in some paragraph breaks! I didn't make it all the way through because of eyestrain. The parts I got through were interesting, though.
Anyway, I think a lot of it is a deliberate political strategy. People will do just about anything for power and/or money, long term consequences be damned.
I tend to agree. There was a time when it seemed like we (our country) had decided, pop-culturally, that one way to try and navigate the history of racism and first de jure and then statistical inequalities, was to (in a relatively light and seemingly harmless way) lampoon everything white as being hopelessly lame. Given that major part of the history of this country and its overhangs, it didn't seem such a terrible price to pay for being born with a certain complexion (and grossly-generalized ethno-racial heritage. It's not so unusual for a relatively powerless group to satirize even ridicule a relatively powerful one (even if many of the source of the ridicule weren't so powerless and most of the targets weren't so powerful. What came next, though, seemed less even notionally humorous and both nastier and more a part of a program: you have no culture; you have zero accomplishments that are your own - everything is stolen (and, worse, stolen and then commercialized and ruined). A good friend who was finishing a master's degree at The New School (and who has a biracial half-brother and was sympathetic to the some of the discourse around The New Jim Crow, etc) recited to me some of what he heard both from classmates and peers and students in various workshops he was part of outside of school: we love our music, our dance, our food, our women(!), our proud history of this and that). The clear implication from such people was white people have none of these things. The official white ethnic cuisine is Wonder Bread (or perhaps unlimited breadsticks at Olive Garden). All PoC ar noble strivers with both proud and distinctive traditions and an even brighter, almost inevitably victorious future (perhaps because that outcome was to be gradually mandated and engineered, and enforced?) White people had nothing but cultural poverty so profound it deserved vicious mockery. White was somehow both (hilarious) actual, profound poverty (all the tropes about toothless hillbillies at the milder end) - and, simultaneously, C-level suites, yachts, and (racist) country club memberships for all as a racial birthrite. White had become an epithet in and of itself. One could quickly ridicule and delegitimize anything or anyone simply by labeling it or them as white.
As just one example of how this played out at the urban, knowledge/creative class level, I'd been reading Josh Marshall's TPM (at least once most days and most of the stories and posts) since Fall 2002. As the site expanded and more and more recent graduates did stints there (seemingly all from elite liberal arts colleges or Ivies) and as Marshall himself focused more and more on The Coalition of the Ascendant and The Emerging Democratic Majority, the site began to feature at least once daily what I began to call "something a dumb redneck did today". Almost always by some patrician-looking recent college grad from an elite institution. It got so bad, Pro Publica
called out TPM for relentlessly, superficially mocking poor white people, in many cases just for being poor, culturally alien to the east coast media elite, and for suffering some failure or misfortune (maybe of character; maybe they just had the wrong views or party allegiance) which was usually portrayed as their just desserts. I completely stopped visiting the site around that time
Across much of American culture, high, low, and in between, there is now an open attack on all white people (at least the unfancy ones) simply for being white. And that means the inherited, immutable physical characteristics, though it's often presented disingenuously as "dismantling whiteness". And there's a giddiness, a smugness, a sense of singular culture license these days to these attacks. For example, Marc Lamont Hill's ridiculous (if clever in its nastiness) recitation of several of the things he loves about being black - and attempt to trap Chris Rufo into either appearing to advocate for a white racial identity, or conceding there was zero about which anyone born white could be proud. Of course when one tries to answer that they don't make a focus of walking around thinking of themselves as a white person let alone nurturing a specific racial pride, the response is always that that is itself an enormous privilege of being white: never having to think about one's race. To the extent any of that argument is true, a large part of it is simply based on growing up as part of a large majority. I'm sure Koreans at the very minimum feel like the naturally dominant group and center of culture and policy, in Korea. But the claim that white people alive in America today have never had to think about their race in a critical way is another feint and bluff. It's just laughable. It's similar to the ludicrous claim that virtually nothing honest about the history of slavery and Jim Crow has been taught in classrooms until very recently (and all of these racist white people want to purge even that). Tellingly, I'm seeing a number of very identiarian black writers arguing a direct connection between the horrific racially-motivated slaughter in Buffalo and any resistance to the divisive, demonizing curricula they demand be imposed nationwide. In all kinds of community hobby and volunteer groups, most as far away in focus from politics as one can imagine, I've seen a wave of usually upper-middle-class millennials enter the group and immediately begin haranguing (other) white people for being white and daring to have been active for so long and for having contributed so much (in a welcoming, egalitarian way!) Imagine showing up for a group event on a weekend morning, maybe the highlight of your day, and having a group photo distributed with the acid label: "_________ so white".Maybe your mom is in the hospital and your employer's been downsizing and your knees and back are hurting - but here's a chance to be social and do something positive and active. And you get slimed for how you were born. Your images individually and collectively have no meaning other than a horrible and oppressive whiteness the good people have to put up with. You could be the most progressive white person in town. That's sort of the point: there's no way for you to be active and present and visible and for it to be OK. It'd be hard to blame you if you didn't want to get out of bed the next weekend. And that's sort of the point, too: you have a responsibility to remove yourself and, even better, to be demoralized about something you can't control. If you do show up, your presence has been racialized as an inherent affront to more deserving people. The people pushing this demonization, whatever their own skin color, are not by and large disadvantaged or marginalized in any way. And their goal appears to be to make this kind of ridicule for existing, this actual effort to demoralize and marginalize people on the basis of skin color alone, something ubiquitous and inescapable.
When I see Chris Rufo (who is, beyond his invaluable muckrating and exposure of damning primary evidence, actually as much of a conservative culture warrior as he is an Enlightenment liberal) being giddily dared by Marc Lamont Hill to say anything positive about his heritage, I don't think of race or racial pride. I think of my family. Specific people who usually didn't have it so easy and who struggled to keep it together and sacrificed personally to make good choices for their kids and pass on some model of integrity to the following generations. That's what i'm proud of. It's just laughable - an obvious provocation - to say Americans of Italian or Russian or Irish heritage have no heritage, no ethnic inheritances, no culture. What we were busy doing was trying to share an American culture and one which belongs to and is enriched by all of us. None of this demonization of skin color people have no control over makes me want to elevate my own skin color or race, nor does it make me more hostile to anyone with a different complexion. But I do now call out this neo-racist toxicity to friends. A few years ago, it was hard to find a movie which had attracted more universal, lavish critical praise than Get Out. It's got something silly like a 100% positive critical response on Rotten Tomatoes. I was sure there had to be more to it. It couldn't all be based on just one supposedly satirical but obviously openly racist, hateful hook, a one trick conceit. But while staying with an ailing parent, I turned on cable TV and watched the last thirty or so minutes of it. Yep: all white people are sadistically murderous, enslaving, horror movie monsters - and the ones who act nice are even worse. Umm...fuck you? A friend recently mentioned that movie to briefly praise it. And I was equally brief but honest in reply: it's the shallowest of one trick ponies, and is based on pure racial hatred and scapegoating. Jordan Peele, whatever his talents, and his wife notwithstanding, appears to have a major personal problem with white people. That movie isn't satire. It isn't boldly countercultural. It's raining down group hatred from the commanding heights of pop culture. It's only deeper trick and i'm sure a very conscious one, is to get large numbers of younger people, particularly well-meaning white people to show up and laugh and cheer at all the inherently evil white people being - what's the term the left has become besotted with? - *held accountable* for their evil. The great catharsis of young black men running over and blowing up white people of all ages, sexes, *because we know they're all irredeemably bad*. That's literally all the movie is. But the reply of course would be: why are you so fragile? It's just a movie, can't you take a joke? Four hundred years of brutal oppression (as if I'm comparing the two) and this man wants to complain about a movie!
I wasn't gonna comment, because this I'm so late to the party. But this was really good. I made it all the Way through because-a that.
"All PoC ar noble strivers with both proud and distinctive traditions and an even brighter, almost inevitably victorious future (perhaps because that outcome was to be gradually mandated and engineered, and enforced?)"
Would just remove the question mark.
"To the extent any of that argument is true, a large part of it is simply based on growing up as part of a large majority."
This is something I wondered about, but dunno much about. There's always gonna be a tension between a large majority and a large minority, right? Dunno Korea, but assume that was Your point. But I don't see *anybody* trying to figure that out, and see how it can be ameliorated.
I agree with Substack Reader below, that it boils down to political strategy, in the end. And couldn't help but notice those at the very top-a the food chain (KenDiAngelo, Hannah-Jones and Coates, to name a few)... Well, they all cashed their chips in for fame and (mostly) fortune.
But I don't think it pays to overlook the Marxist aspect to this. The original Critical Race Theory outta the 80s. And up to the present time. There are people who wanna "dismantle the institutions" because-a their "systemic racism." Since "systemic racism" is a hoax, AFAIK, their ultimate motive is to tear down the society however they can and replace it with dreams.
Or, I should say, that's one motivation for destroying society, but not necessarily the only one.
You make some interesting points, but you need to throw in some paragraph breaks! I didn't make it all the way through because of eyestrain. The parts I got through were interesting, though.
Anyway, I think a lot of it is a deliberate political strategy. People will do just about anything for power and/or money, long term consequences be damned.