Also at this point I'm perplexed at how any American can give a shit about 9/11 when you have the equivalent of one every 3 days for the last couple of months. I guess American deaths brought about by American hands are harder to gave a shit about. The country would invade someone if the state apparatus wasn't already captured by a bunch of corporates milking the population for all they're worth. Who needs oil when you can trade in a population of deliberately cultivated idiots?

Imagine - Trump can take credit for some non-event like Bahrain-Isreal but when it comes to near 200k dead on his doorstep it's 'BuT iTs ThE StATeS ReSpOnSiBiLiTY'. These fucking propagandists.

:up:

Afropessimism, Frank Wilderson III — 180 Proof

Let me know how you find this. As a book I thought it was an incredible read. I even think he's exactly right to point out that there is a certain class of subject ('slave') which escapes the major emancipatory frameworks of either Marxism or post-colonialism (the slave neither fights for a different relation to the means of production, nor for a claim to land); but I don't understand why this class of subject *must* be black. Like the whole book made me think very hard about the way in which racial issues - black racial issues in particular - cannot simply be assimilated or amalgamated with other claims for emancipation (there is a specificity to racial struggle that is not simply class or land based), but I still don't see why this warrants his afropessimism. Like, what is it about the slave that warrants the slave being 'inherently' black? I feel like there's a step missing in his argument. Still, I really enjoyed it.

What could be calmer than dead person? — Baden

191,000 dead people.

I think the consequences are really different, largely invisible, but no fewer. — Srap Tasmaner

That's all that 'white privilege' is meant to bring to the fore! To make visible what is, in the main, invisible.

We're probably saying the same thing, but keep swapping who's pointing at the underlying context. — Srap Tasmaner

I think so. By racially marked I simply mean that one's race is, as it were, re-marked upon, whether in word or deed. A kind of racial intentionality as it were - to experience race as race; as distinct from those experiences of race which are not experienced in racial terms - as with your hypothetical police interaction.

I am saying that within these confines, we should strive for language and thinking that is more accurate and nuanced than "white people bad!" — Pro Hominem

Cool, 'cause that's not what white privilege is or implies - although I understand that for you, seeing the word 'white' can mean nothing other than some kind of slight because at no point have you ever had to deal with being racially marked in that way.

Are you sure that your rejection of their rejection of race isn't too focused on what they're thinking and too little on how they experience the world? — Srap Tasmaner

No it's absolutely experience, and it's that experience that informs thought. When one doesn't experience racial marking in one's day-to-day, then racism unsurprisingly ends up being some kind of pick-your-own-adventure story where if you just 'reject' it, it can't exist. A kind of Disney anti-racism. When racism isn't lived, the most it apparently can become is just a matter of words - as if it's real locus isn't at every level social behaviour. The white experience of race is largely one of having experiences which are not racially marked at all, which is why the "solution" ends up being a kind of "if I can do it so can you!". Easy, of course, for this person to say - given that 'saying' is all they know - informed by their own experience of non-experience.

We all lack some awareness of how we affect others... But then there's lack of awareness of the society you're a part of — Srap Tasmaner

This isn't it though. The language of privilege is simply a discourse meant to de-universalize one's experience and to remind one that one's experience is not some kind of standard or paradigm by which all others are to be measured up against. A reckoning with 'white' privilege in particular is a recognition that the ability to sail through life being racially unmarked is not something that many others are afforded. I mean, there's something comic - truly hilarious - about the dude above who reckons that he can just 'reject' racial labels. One has to ask: how does this play out when you're being shot at by a cop? "I reject this!". Oh goody, racism is cancelled, everyone can go home. I mean these people really think racism is some kind of discursive phenomenon, the kind of thing you can just reason about over a coffee table. Their experience of race - or lack thereof - is so far removed from any reality that they really think it's just some kind of moot-court exercise in which if one disavows with a clear, strong voice, then all will be right with the world. If only George Floyd had 'rejected' being knelt on.

It's not a question of knowing 'how we affect others' or an 'awareness of the society we are part of'; it's a simple question of humility about just how universal one's own experience is.

The question that interests me is, what part of the way others see me that differs from the way I see myself -- a difference I'm not even aware of -- is down to my race? What part of my behavior is enabled and encouraged (note) by awareness, on the part of others, of my race, when my race is the furthest thing from my mind? — Srap Tasmaner

One of the markers of white privilege in an overwhelmingly racist society is, of course, the luxury of being able to have one's race being 'the furthest thing from one's mind'. For a great deal of others, the mark of one's race is just what one is reminded of at every point of social interaction, from the shopkeep who follows you around to the officer who shoots you multiple times in the back. For the racially marked, the issue isn't the 'unknowability' of how one's race determines their interactions with others, but the overwhelming, crushing, and often fatal knowability of it.

Part of the resistance to the discourse of white privilege is nothing more than the desire to maintain the blissful, bambi-like state in which one can go around wondering - as though some kind of intellectual exercise - but how does race affect me? What's that stuff got to do with me? For little bourgeois white boys who have been told their whole life that they're the masters of their own destiny, there's nothing more traumatic than the idea that their skin - something over which they have no control of - may in fact have played a role in the outcome of their lives. Hence the consistent desire to translate the terms of race into, say, the terms of economics, which are far more 'controllable', far more amenable to intellectual grappling than the sheer irrationality of being treated like a subhuman - and conversely, a proper human - because of a contingency of melanin.

I mean, I get it. It's not easy to think that one can be arbitrarily murdered on the basis of one's skin alone - and equally, not arbitrarily executed because of one's skin. Much easier to translate this all into economic terms - less horrific, more palatable. Even if it means blinding oneself to reality because it's more comfortable that way.

"CR: It’s about separating economic privilege from white privilege. Because what you actually get with whiteness is the ability to move freely, and to live. And people don’t understand that before they are negotiating economics, they have been given the right to just live in their poverty or their wealth. That’s the piece of the conversation that I think needs to be said more, because the minute they hear privilege they think money, and we’re not talking about money. Also, they can’t conceptualise it because none of us should have to conceptualise it. None of us should have to be living with the precarity of [thinking that] maybe if we leave our house, we will be shot for no reason at all simply because of the colour of our skin. They cannot comprehend that, because that should not exist. White people think when I say white privilege I mean economic privilege but I mean white living. The ability to stay alive."

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/05/claudia-rankine-by-white-privilege-i-mean-the-ability-to-stay-alive

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/05/politics/michael-cohen-book-trump-white-house/index.html

"Trump's disdain for Obama was so extreme that he took his fixation a step further, according to Cohen: Trump hired a "Faux-Bama" to participate in a video in which Trump "ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired him." Cohen's book, "Disloyal: A Memoir," doesn't name the man who was allegedly hired to play Obama or provide a specific date for the incident, but it does include a photograph of Trump sitting behind a desk, facing a Black man wearing a suit with an American flag pin affixed to the lapel. On Trump's desk are two books, one displaying Obama's name in large letters."



:rofl:

Our little Trump prostitute NOS still pretending that there's any possible way to think that Trump is not a soulless wasteland of a human being hey?

On Android if you hold your finger down on a word it will eventually highlight, with the option to expand or contract the selection and quote it. Does that not work for iOS?

As I read somewhere else - these people would eat a shit sandwich just so that some 'lib' somewhere could smell their breath. Trump being said sandwich.

the Theory concept of "the event" — fdrake

The Deleuze entry of the wiki article made me twitch a bit.

But yeah - Graeber was a singular mind. He wrote works that challenged the order of things in a way that was accessible and even aspirational - he made you want to see the world like he did, to know the things he'd come to know, and occupy the perspectives that he offered on things. As regards the event:

There is a well-known parable about the Kingdom of the Messiah that Walter Benjamin (who heard it from Gershom Scholem) recounted one evening to Ernst Bloch, who in tum transcribed it in Spuren: "A rabbi, a real cabalist, once said that in order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything nor to begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup or this bush or this stone just a little, and thus everything. But this small displacement is so difficult to achieve and its measure is so difficult to find that, with regard to the world, humans are incapable of it and it is necessary that the Messiah come." Benjamin's version of the story goes like this: "The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different."

(Agamben, Halos)

Pierre Clastres - Archaeology of Violence
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro - Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology
David Graeber - Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
David Graeber - Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination

:up:

Yes it does look like that. But it was the phrase "internalizing and reproducing all the most distressing aspects of the neoliberal economism" that particularly caught my eye, because that seemed like it could point to something more than simply the negative approach of Leftist analyses. — jamalrob

My instinct is to read it as an aversion to a kind of academic "war of all against all" so that the 'winner' is the Darwinist ubermensch who can provide the most comprehensive critique to the shame of the other losers who can't ("but have you considered this? What about that? - betchya didn't!"). I dunno. It's a reach. To read it this way is to think the comment is about the form of left academic discourse rather than it's content. I think there's definitely 'content' that the comment is pitched at, but its hard to make out.

Does anyone know what kind of academic analyses they're talking about? — jamalrob

I'm curious as well, actually. My sense is that the sentence before gives the target of the critique:

But if all you’re willing to talk about is that which you claim to stand against, if all you can imagine is what you claim to stand against, then in what sense do you actually stand against it?

Given that this prefaces a book on mutual aid - which is something to 'stand for', rather than against, as it were - I suspect the critique slings at all those analyses of capitalism and the present that show, again and again, what the problem(s) are, without offering models or enactable principles for a resolution to them. Less standing against, more standing for. Probably pretty much 90% of left academic writing falls under this rubric tbh.

I'm talking about the Gospels. — Gregory

Then you aren't talking about 'the historical record'. At least no more than you would be if you were talking about Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

The standard argument, used by apologists in countless books and all over the internet, for Christianity is that the alleged resurrection of Jesus makes the most sense out of the historical record. — Gregory

Huh? There is barely any 'historical record' of Jesus, save a pair of fleeting mentions by Tactius and Josephus, and neither makes any reference to his resurrection. So there is no possible way that this is a 'standard argument' unless you've (1) made this up or (2) taken what other people have made up for face value.

I think to be privileged, in terms of the above scheme, is not characterised by acting negatively to the unprivileged; that reproduces privilege and is a component part of systemic racism; to be privileged in some way is to be a member of the category that receives advantages and avoids disadvantages associated with that membership. It can't be 'denounced', it can only 'fail to apply', but you can try and mitigate how much you reproduce the conditions that perpetuate the advantage - through personal effort and activism. — fdrake

:up:

Basic.

ITT: Bunch of people complaining about their own hermeneutic ineptitude while others worry about making it out alive on the other side of a 'routine' traffic stop.

:clap:

Oh I will sweetie pie, knowing that you're my biggest fan :kiss:

Maybe you can continue plastering me with labels while whining about how you hate identity politics so much.

These sheltered two-bit liberals have gone all their lives without having to deal with any personal racial animus whatsoever, so the most insulting thing they can imagine is even being called a racially marked name. Meanwhile no one who actually has grown up under the sign of race actually gives a shit because they're busy avoiding being killed by cops, followed at in shops, and bypassed for jobs. And these kum-ba-yah motherfuckers think they can get their their post-racial paradise if everyone is just really polite and stops talking about race because it's just so damn uncomfortable for them. Hence why they'll tip-toe around with condescending names like 'person of color' and die of anxiety at the thought of using a nominative like 'black'.

Oh and while the 'real issues' are elsewhere, and 'white privilege' is 'just a distraction', the only energy these wankers can endlessly expend is precisely on the very topic that, it just so happens, affects them.

Racist = uses racial categories in arguments = can think about people in terms of races.

I put it to you that there is no way to talk about racism and not be racist under that series of equivocations.

...So long as there are social+economic dynamics that are strongly determined by race, race will remain a useful analytic category. It's a shitty thing to have to make sense of some things on those terms, but those are the breaks. — fdrake

Dunno why this is so hard to grasp.

whites are at comparable risks to PoCs for police violence in poor communities, PoCs are at higher risk everywhere else. It's not just a class thing. — fdrake

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/police-killings-black-white-poverty

"Meanings as Species" by Mark Richard — Saphsin

This looks great! How are you finding it?

CR:

Fred Moten and Stefano Herney - The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
Frank B. Wilderson III - Afropessimism
Frank B. Wilderson III (ed.) - Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction

after Trump loses in November — Baden

You're more optimistic than I - I'll believe it when I see it.

Judy, as is well known, likes to fantasize about me, even when - or rather especially when - not engaged in conversation with me.

In any case, it's no accident that certain posters here get so incredibly offended when either racially, sexually, or economically marked. They find it an affront to their iNdIVIDuAlITy and a denial of their InTrInSiC SeLf WoRtH. There's no greater horror to these snowflakes than being construed as social or cultural agents who don't, in fact, occupy a position of pristine universality. Being marked in any such way is only ever for Others. Do it instead to these beings of pure, skinless, reason, and they'll lose their comprehensive shit.

NOS is whatever wing Trump decides to be on the day. Our resident prostitute.

This discussion was merged into Uproar

This disconnect is a problem because it removes the hook that the discourse initially had back into the reality of the situation is claims to be about, and discussion removed from any attachment to lived reality can end up castles in the air, a distraction from what really needs doing. — Isaac

It can become this, but you're probably right about circles. Like @Banno, my experience of the use of the term 'privilege' is that it tends to come about in the context of acknowledging disparate experiences. To take a banal example, I grew up in an environment in which reading and self-education was placed at a premium. When I was younger, I used to scoff at those who, say, made silly grammar mistakes or were unfamiliar with classic authors and the like. Now I recognize that's just classist bullshit for the most part, and that to expect, a priori, that others should be as versed in the kinds of things I was lucky enough to have been versed in is utter shite.

At no point here is there any question of guilt or blame or shame or insult. At stake is instead a tempering of what I ought to consider 'normal' and the ways in which that modifies my own behaviour. Acknowledging privilege here isn't about some kind of Maoist self-denunciating ritual - it's quite the opposite: a contextualizing and broadening of behavioural vocabulary. As you said, it's not about achievement - it's about starting points. This is how I understand invocations of privilege. There's nothing academic about it. It's just a certain humility and openness with respect to human interaction.

Talk of 'white privilege' is just bourgeois dinner-table chatter by comparison. — Isaac

I don't disagree, but that's kind of the point, no? That one is able to talk about one's privilege in a critical way is precisely, a mark of it. It no doubt accounts for the fact that people like Pro are so violently offended over what seems to be, at best, a nominative injustice. In my experience, the people most liable to actually talk about 'white privilege' tend to be those who have nothing to say other than to whine about it. A perfect kind of bourgeois black hole.

That right-wing punditry toxifies everything is nit in itself a reason to throw one's hands up and say "we might as well not give it any thought". — Isaac

That it toxifies everything is all the more reason to be clear about our terms and not cede ground to them. More thought, not less.

A lovely series of indignant assertions, lacking argument and still wrongly assocating the term with 'blame'. Beyond argument I suppose.

The study was specifically on the impact such approaches have on assumptions about poverty where it did indeed seem that talk of 'white privilege' promulgated 'lazy and feckless' tropes in regard to poor whites, and even generated an increased use of individualist language regardless of race (ie, talk of privilege merely ressurects ideas of assessing achievement by comparison with origin rather than as a indicator of it). — Isaac

Interesting. On paper, the term ought to do the exact opposite of this - insofar as privilege is a social relation and speaks precisely to supera-individual factors that shape behaviour. Perhaps there's a degree to which the term is simply too complex, with rife misunderstandings that have colored its use in ways detrimental. On the other hand that also strikes me as elitist bullshit, and that its misunderstanding can be attributed to it being a favourite target of conservative identity politics, which toxifies everything it touches.

In any case, as a term which simply marks the sad situation in which normalcy has indeed become a case of privilege, I believe it still has purchace, and rather uncontroversially so.

So you're admitting that the term does not accurately describe what it says it does. You are asserting that its non-descriptiveness, its falsehood is exactly the point of the term. — Pro Hominem

I did the exact opposite of that. I 'admitted' that the term captures something quite real about our state of affairs, in which normalcy has acquired a sense of privilege. At stake is not 'accuracy' or falsehood but normativity. What is currently a state of affairs should be otherwise. Once that is so, then the term will no longer have purchace. That is currently not the case.

I'm not referring to any definitional origin in critical theory or whathaveyou. I'm not even sure it has such a provenance. Just my understanding in its rather prosaic, everyday use. What's your underastanding of it?