As if those in power do not relinquish it voluntarily... — unenlightened
Quote? — gurugeorge
This is the problem of teaching expression of oppression. The form itself corrupts and devalues the very real content. If everyone who reads the nyt loves the bluest eye, then the bluest eye had been castrated.
If you are content with letting someone recognize your suffering (even if you hold that they cant actually recognize it, and are constitutively incapable of it) you've ceded something.
I vaguely remember that you see all politics as identity politics. — fdrake
Well, people will be incentivized to simulate oppression even when they’re actually oppressed. And the flimsy film of performative oppression will fire up detractors and lend credence to their false cause.
This is the problem of teaching expression of oppression. The form itself corrupts and devalues the very real content. If everyone who reads the nyt loves the bluest eye, then the bluest eye had been castrated.
If you are content with letting someone recognize your suffering (even if you hold that they cant actually recognize it, and are constitutively incapable of it) you've ceded something. — csalisbury
Yes. It seems to me that what is objected to is always the identifications of the oppressed. It is not confederations of business people, gated communities, millionaires clubs, armies, nations, etc. — unenlightened
There is a danger to identification as oppressed, and the man to go to for its deep analysis is Franz Fanon. But to put it into a handy slogan, I could say, "there is no virtue in being oppressed".
I think a common error along the way, which (fairly or unfairly, I can't say at this point) I'm seeing as exemplified in gurugeorge's responses, is to make this conceptual generalisation of identity politics while still treating identity politics in a more derogatory sense. All politics as identity politics, all identity politics as mere identity politics. — fdrake
I think a common error along the way, which (fairly or unfairly, I can't say at this point) I'm seeing as exemplified in gurugeorge's responses, is to make this conceptual generalisation of identity politics while still treating identity politics in a more derogatory sense. — fdrake
So which examples of identity politics do you think of as irredeemable rubbish and why, then? — fdrake
So which examples of identity politics do you think of as irredeemable rubbish and why, then?
— fdrake
Anything modeled on the Marxist type of societal analysis (of oppressor/oppressed groups, with the groups marked by their closeness to, or distance from, "power", arbitrarily defined). — gurugeorge
So: anything based on good, old-fashioned Marxism — gurugeorge
Self Help programs generally are ethnicity based--because they arise out of a specific community. The gay response to AIDS was identity based self help. Organizing west coast agricultural workers and the grape boycott was self help with an ethnic base. The National Farmers Organization (now long gone) was a rural white-ethnic based agricultural self help drive. The civil rights movement was a black ethnic self help movement.
↪fdrake It depends on the grain of one's analysis obviously. There are things different about the groups on my helicopter list, sure, but there are also linked genealogies, similarities; and it's the things shared that are causing the problems - as I said, the problem is the typical social analysis in terms of oppressor/oppressed, first practiced by Marx in terms of socioeconomic class, that's been translated wholesale into the idioms of gender and race.
as I said, the problem is the typical social analysis in terms of oppressor/oppressed,
book-burning ways — Baden
What're the shared things? — fdrake
I don't think that anyone is sitting there believing society is structured to fuck over individuals with certain properties; people are marginalised through omissions, legal restrictions, or accumulated advantages. These structural problems usually have suffering as a blind consequence rather than as a conspiratorial drive. If you notice that people in category X have in rough in way Y, you produce a schism between X and not X, effected by Y and not effected by Y. How else are you supposed to locate sites of historical struggle and of the resistance of individuals to their societal conditions than by coupling those effected with the reasons they were effected? What's so wrong with that? — fdrake
On the other hand, suppose there are lingering traces of oppression, cobwebs of it here and there in our institutions and working life, should we do nothing about them at all? Sure, you could have, for example, a "Nightwatchman Feminism" to stick around and tidy up the loose ends. But what we have instead is a Feminism long past its sell-by date trying to justify its keep by proposing ever more absurd, made-up categories of human interaction as "oppression of the wamenz." And it's the same for the race-baiting machine, the Diversity Industry in business, etc.
I was hoping that you'd chime in and provide some decent historical context, it was why I included the needle exchange thing as an example. — fdrake
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