7 ms·

Third-wave antiracism makes sense, but it's a dead end

fallingfrog 8y ago
I love how all the hand wringing about how protesters are really just virtue signaling is basically the same argument that the joker gives when hanging by his toes: YOU KNOW YOU’RE JUST LIKE ME UNDERNEATH BATMAN I mean come on. The argument that we need to just have a calm, rational debate over whether some groups of people are just racially inferior is so absurd it deserves to be treated with ostracism and disgust. I’m sorry that these old Ivy League gentlemen are offended by a bit of truth. But this is not about idealized debate, it’s about power, and violence, and transformation, and you’re not going to get that without getting a little mad and making some noise.
- dang 8y ago
  Please do not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News. It's beyond tedious, and we're hoping for something more interesting here. It's good to remember that authors of magazine articles don't pick their titles. We've switched to the subtitle above (shortened to fit HN's 80-char limit).
  - fallingfrog 8y ago
    The article doesn’t belong on hn at all, but if people are going to upvote it, then I think it’s fair game to trash it. I mean it’s got nothing to do with technology and it’s not news.
    - zepto 8y ago
      Given that the tech sector is accused frequently of being institutionally racist and sexist, it seems like at least some analysis is relevant.
    - dang 8y ago
      Please read the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The first paragraph says "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." The second half is an extended plea not to engage in "trashing" on this site.
      - T2_t2 8y ago
        And startups are populated by young people, so the cultural shifts that exist matter. If you have any employees at all between 18 and 30, the current culture is something you need to understand. And I don't think even big companies like Google do. The backlash against drones and that China SE were telling. I don't have any answers to those problems, and these sorts of articles are interesting as background to what it all is.
- but4rillTho 8y ago
  You know what happens when people dig into the closet, pull out the skeletons, and try to initiate some chit chat about how it's time to feel bad about some collective crime committed 100 years ago by people who aren't even my direct ancestors? I go find some cool people to hang out with, and have fun with them, ignore you, and try to live and enjoy my life instead. It doesn't matter your background, who your parents were/are/aren't. Some people are about living in the now, looking forward, and not dwelling on sob stories. All the best people aren't whining about some archeological find that shows that dead people from last century were mean. People these days really aren't up against a whole lot of boogie men, and there's PLENTY of room to steer clear of the tough guy piece of shit psychos that try to cause harm. Shit was so much worse forty years ago, but hey, now? Now, it really isn't that bad anymore. And not because of some ultra-vigilant two minute hate, WRT the super villains of millennial politics. The news is fucking full of shit. You walk the streets, and on a daily basis, the world is almost nothing like the headlines. Make no mistake, there's some really bad shit going down in certain parts of the world. Drug violence is some of the worst shit ever captured on a cell phone. People being mutilated alive in ways that would make a medieval executioner blush. Sectarian violence is pretty rough stuff too. People captured and decapitated with det cord ( ...slightly more palatable way to die than drug violence to be honest). And throughout it all opiods killing more people than HIV ever did. And no attention in the news is ever paid to what fans those flames. But endless, endless debates about political bugaboos that will never go away. So, unless you're solving real problems, that affect real people, right now, today, I've got no time for you.
  - fallingfrog 8y ago
    Most of those monuments were erected in the last 50 years, many in the last decade, and they were put there to remind people of the system of white supremacy that exists right now, today. Not 100 years ago. And the fact that you can just kick back with some chill people and ignore it speaks volumes about you, and your insulation from the real world. Some people are not so lucky.
    - but4rillTho 8y ago
      Get mad at scribbles made with crayons. Insulate yourself from happy people.
JPKab 8y ago
" In fact, however, third-wave antiracism is a profoundly religious movement in everything but terminology. The idea that whites are permanently stained by their white privilege, gaining moral absolution only by eternally attesting to it, is the third wave’s version of original sin. The idea of a someday when America will “come to terms with race” is as vaguely specified a guidepost as Judgment Day. Explorations as to whether an opinion is “problematic” are equivalent to explorations of that which may be blasphemous. The social mauling of the person with “problematic” thoughts parallels the excommunication of the heretic. What is called “virtue signaling,” then, channels the impulse that might lead a Christian to an aggressive display of her faith in Jesus. There is even a certain Church Lady air to much of the patrolling on race these days, an almost performative joy in dog-piling on the transgressor, which under a religious analysis is perfectly predictable." Very accurate analysis imho. Growing up around fundamentalist Christians, I'm pretty tuned into people who use moral posturing to gain status within their social group. The resemblance with the virtue signalling is uncanny.
- badcede 8y ago
  Religion isn't going away. It's becoming unconscious.
- haberman 8y ago
  James Lindsay has been making a case for this lately. Here is a (very long) article on the subject that I haven't read yet: https://areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-the-faith-of-social-justice/ https://areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-...
- wwright 8y ago
  Shunning of heretics was designed to centralize power in the church and affiliated groups. Modern social progressives do perform analogous shunnings, yes, but these acts are for the explicit purpose of decentralizing power _away_ from groups who have it.
  - haberman 8y ago
    Shunning of heretics was ostensibly done to defend the honor of God. The fact that it increased the power of the people doing the shunning was surely viewed as a means to a noble and right end, just as today.
cazum 8y ago
Our author seems to be quite drastically mischaracterizing the intentions of what he calls the "contemporary left": >The contemporary left’s concern is with the underlying biases that bolster the racism that remains. It seeks, as a way forward, a society not only without racist structures, but without racist thought, which, for one, can foster race-based disparities that eerily parallel those conditioned in the past by overt segregation. This, as someone who spends a lot of time both in a very liberal college and in lefty online "safe spaces", is an ideology I've never encountered. Leftists generally Subscribe to an ideology that explains material conditions as the force that causes struggle in a society. Those conditions usually being economic structures, but usually include specific things like the power structure of a police force, private ownership of prisons, the "war on drugs", etc. The author complains heavily about how "SJWs" call people White Supremacist too often, but doesn't give any specific example of this happening and why the label was inappropriate. In fact, nearly every one of the "examples" of leftist speech seems to be your average dismissive "laugh at the cuck cringe complication" quotes attributed without context to nobody in particular: >The new normal is, “If you don’t like it, cry loudly and then louder, because you’re always right and they’re just bad.” I don't actually think anybody really thinks this. I've never heard this ideology espoused by anybody, except anti-sjws, as they're sometimes referred to as, who are trying to strawman and discredit someone. The times I have heard people call people White Supremacist is, for example, when a white person starts arguing about IQ scores, which is an explicitly white supremacist argument, and uncontroversially so unless you're unfamiliar with WHY iq tests are inherently biased, in which case you might not see why the label is appropriate and will only see a lib getting mad for no reason. I believe the author has simply collected a few instances of college liberals losing their temper on camera and extrapolated that into an entire incoherent worldview without any analysis of what the leftist cucks actually believe. Additionally, the phrase "virtue signalling" is extremely sloppy. Is there any action done, aside from those done under the privacy of total anonymity that could not be motivationally attributed to wishing the signal virtue? Perhaps I'm virtue signalling for writing this reply. Maybe you're virtue signalling for upvoting it. Maybe the author is virtue signalling for having written the article about virtue signalling. Even if what he says about progressives was true, why would wishing to change the psychology of percieved white racists be "virtue signalling"?
- 8y ago
dragonwriter 8y ago
> Feminist history is typically described in three waves: No, even when using the (profoundly flawed, but not entirely useless) “waves” framework, it's usually described in at least four waves now. > The struggle to secure voting rights, then workplace rights, and third—roughly—to upend stereotypes. This is not an accurate summary of the usual description of the first three waves of feminism; first wave feminism is typically associated with the early struggle for legal rights in terms of access to basic political and economic institutions (suffrage, independent property rights, access to work, access to education). Second-wave feminism is typically associated with a fight for equality within institutions to which women already had access as a result of successes of first-wave feminism (especially education and employment) and recognition of rights addressing areas where women were uniquely situated either inherently or by traditional gender roles (reproductive rights including contraception and abortion, protection against domestic violence and marital rape, etc.) Third-wave feminism is associated not merely with upending stereotypes (that's part of it, but more in the context of recognizing a diversity in the female experience and the challenges of women that feminism should be addressing; intersectionality is probably a better short summary than upending stereotypes.) > The battle against racism and its effects is often described in a similar three-part timeline, with movements against slavery and segregation, and then—vaguely—the post-civil-rights era. No, it's not often described that way especially by people in the activist community, who describe themselves as civil rights activists, not add part of some vague post-civil-rights antiracism wave. To the extent that multiple waves are identified in racial justice activism in the US, they tend to be abolition, the immediate post-abolition civil rights movement, and the modern civil rights movement. > third-wave antiracism may seem parallel to third-wave feminism in moving on to a different form of abuse, psychological rather than institutional. Third-wave feminism doesn't focus on psychological abuse (though that's an emergent focus of fourth wave feminism, though it does focus on informal social and institutional discrimination (as opposed to legal and other formal social and institutional discrimination.) The author here send to conflate the two concerns. > But this focus on the psychological has morphed, of late, from a pragmatic mission to change minds into a witch hunt driven by the personal benefits of virtue signaling, obsessed with unconscious and subconscious bias. No, it hasn't; first, virtue signalling is a social hack targeting members of a movement by those who are not genuinely committed who wish to be seen as part of it. Second, feminist virtue signalling had been around at least as long as the suffrage movement, and continuously evolves to target current tends in feminist thought, ditto with racial justice since at least the immediate post-abolition period; the current level is nothing novel. Third, targeting unconscious and subconscious bias isn't a recent evolution compared to either “third-wave” (by feminism standards) style thought it the second-wave style thought the author misattributes to as characterizing third wave initially (or, a fortiori, the fourth-wave style thought he later claims is the focus of the third wave.) It's classic third-wave feminism (and, if anything, even older within the racial justice movement), because sucks and unconscious vitae at the individual level is a pillar on which informal structural and institutionalized discrimination rests. But, moreover, while it is a concern of modern feminist and racial justice movements, is not the central focus on either a genuine or virtue signalling sense; this is particularly obvious if you look at the marquee hypercurrent racial justice group, BLM. They aren't focussed centrality on vague psychological bias, whether as a witch hunt or any other way; their central focus is material accountability for concrete instances of material injustice. > The virally popular Stuff White People Like blog of 2010 was a wry self-parody of the cultural mores that had settled in by roughly the late 1990s amidst a certain stripe of educated white people. “Being Offended” was one of the cleverest entries, describing a kind of almost recreational quest to take umbrage on behalf of people other than whites. Already, the satirical tone of this entry dates awkwardly: Many of the people it describes would read it today as disrespectful to the urgency of attesting to one’s white privilege. The whole point of the original satire “of the cultural mores that had settled in by roughly the late 1990s amidst a certain stripe of educated white people” if that everyone it describes would eat it that way. That's what was being satirized. White knighting isn't a new thing, not yet or suddenly become obligatory in the perception of the wider recital justice community, which is now, more than ever, not defined predominantly by the attitudes of the “educated white people” that are, of try to be by virtue signalling, associated with it. And then, after all this confused, muddled inaccurate mess of framing, the examples (still generalizations that are far from concrete) he points to are all about efforts targeting institutional acceptance of concrete offensive behavior directed at members of minority communities or institutional endorsement and involvement in racist speech. While there might be valid complaints about these, either genuine or virtue signalling adherence to a movement that has moved on to a phase that has gotten away from dealing with concrete institutional discrimination to focus on un- or sub-conscious bias isn't among the them. As it progresses from the most abstract background to the more detailed (but still fairly abstract and generalized) complaints, this piece builds a narrative that is both internally inconsistent at frequently misrepresents facts. But it manages to fit a litany of the standard complaints by elite defenders of the status quo about the modern racial justice movement (a perfect blackout of the bingo card is avoided only by the failure to work in the phrase “identity politics”.) Perhaps the author is genuinely confused enough to believe this incoherent mess, or maybe it's just virtue signalling for a different audience. Whatever it is, it's not a useful or meaningful or even well-thought-out contribution to the discussion of racial politics in modern America.
pesmhey 8y ago
Postmodernists had it right. It’s all socially constructed. Where the modern left gets it wrong is that they’ve destroyed the foundations of the house that we lived in without building a new one. Truly, black and white (and yellow, ugh) don’t describe the world so much anymore. We’re already in a post-racial society, and so few people realize it. The new language to describe our 21st century America will be lords (the .01%) and peasants (not pejoratively either, peasants historically enjoyed nice things in life). We’re for sure in a multi-ethnic society. There’s no question about this. But when a ‘black’ man is elected to the highest office, when ‘black’ people continue to hold institutional power, both in government and universities, the actual practice of racism becomes hard to prove. It becomes ethnocentrism. The irony of this fact is how so many ‘whites’ (mostly uneducated) know it to be true, and so many ‘blacks’ refuse to believe it, instead calling on the European-American burgousie to feel guilt and dole out pity. There’s this belief that to be ‘black’ means to be cursed. Fuck that, African-Americans have reason to be proud of their accomplishments in this country. If anything, white guilt is racism. You can’t look someone in the eye when you’re looking down on them.
squozzer 8y ago
What bothers me most about the discussion today is how tightly bound sins and virtues - even traumas suffers by one's ancestors - are to genetics. So we now have not just a racism / sexism morality based on actions and statements, but a religious viewpoint (good / evil), eugenics (because it's all baked into our genes), and caste (separating and ranking various human phenotypes.) History may not repeat itself, but it sometimes has a similar chord progression.

I love how all the hand wringing about how protesters are really just virtue signaling is basically the same argument that the joker gives when hanging by his toes: YOU KNOW YOU’RE JUST LIKE ME UNDERNEATH BATMAN I mean come on. The argument that we need to just have a calm, rational debate over whether some groups of people are just racially inferior is so absurd it deserves to be treated with ostracism and disgust. I’m sorry that these old Ivy League gentlemen are offended by a bit of truth. But this is not about idealized debate, it’s about power, and violence, and transformation, and you’re not going to get that without getting a little mad and making some noise.

dang 8y ago
Please do not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News. It's beyond tedious, and we're hoping for something more interesting here. It's good to remember that authors of magazine articles don't pick their titles. We've switched to the subtitle above (shortened to fit HN's 80-char limit).
- fallingfrog 8y ago
  The article doesn’t belong on hn at all, but if people are going to upvote it, then I think it’s fair game to trash it. I mean it’s got nothing to do with technology and it’s not news.
  - zepto 8y ago
    Given that the tech sector is accused frequently of being institutionally racist and sexist, it seems like at least some analysis is relevant.
  - dang 8y ago
    Please read the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The first paragraph says "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." The second half is an extended plea not to engage in "trashing" on this site.
    - T2_t2 8y ago
      And startups are populated by young people, so the cultural shifts that exist matter. If you have any employees at all between 18 and 30, the current culture is something you need to understand. And I don't think even big companies like Google do. The backlash against drones and that China SE were telling. I don't have any answers to those problems, and these sorts of articles are interesting as background to what it all is.
but4rillTho 8y ago
You know what happens when people dig into the closet, pull out the skeletons, and try to initiate some chit chat about how it's time to feel bad about some collective crime committed 100 years ago by people who aren't even my direct ancestors? I go find some cool people to hang out with, and have fun with them, ignore you, and try to live and enjoy my life instead. It doesn't matter your background, who your parents were/are/aren't. Some people are about living in the now, looking forward, and not dwelling on sob stories. All the best people aren't whining about some archeological find that shows that dead people from last century were mean. People these days really aren't up against a whole lot of boogie men, and there's PLENTY of room to steer clear of the tough guy piece of shit psychos that try to cause harm. Shit was so much worse forty years ago, but hey, now? Now, it really isn't that bad anymore. And not because of some ultra-vigilant two minute hate, WRT the super villains of millennial politics. The news is fucking full of shit. You walk the streets, and on a daily basis, the world is almost nothing like the headlines. Make no mistake, there's some really bad shit going down in certain parts of the world. Drug violence is some of the worst shit ever captured on a cell phone. People being mutilated alive in ways that would make a medieval executioner blush. Sectarian violence is pretty rough stuff too. People captured and decapitated with det cord ( ...slightly more palatable way to die than drug violence to be honest). And throughout it all opiods killing more people than HIV ever did. And no attention in the news is ever paid to what fans those flames. But endless, endless debates about political bugaboos that will never go away. So, unless you're solving real problems, that affect real people, right now, today, I've got no time for you.
- fallingfrog 8y ago
  Most of those monuments were erected in the last 50 years, many in the last decade, and they were put there to remind people of the system of white supremacy that exists right now, today. Not 100 years ago. And the fact that you can just kick back with some chill people and ignore it speaks volumes about you, and your insulation from the real world. Some people are not so lucky.
  - but4rillTho 8y ago
    Get mad at scribbles made with crayons. Insulate yourself from happy people.

JPKab 8y ago

" In fact, however, third-wave antiracism is a profoundly religious movement in everything but terminology. The idea that whites are permanently stained by their white privilege, gaining moral absolution only by eternally attesting to it, is the third wave’s version of original sin. The idea of a someday when America will “come to terms with race” is as vaguely specified a guidepost as Judgment Day. Explorations as to whether an opinion is “problematic” are equivalent to explorations of that which may be blasphemous. The social mauling of the person with “problematic” thoughts parallels the excommunication of the heretic. What is called “virtue signaling,” then, channels the impulse that might lead a Christian to an aggressive display of her faith in Jesus. There is even a certain Church Lady air to much of the patrolling on race these days, an almost performative joy in dog-piling on the transgressor, which under a religious analysis is perfectly predictable." Very accurate analysis imho. Growing up around fundamentalist Christians, I'm pretty tuned into people who use moral posturing to gain status within their social group. The resemblance with the virtue signalling is uncanny.

badcede 8y ago
Religion isn't going away. It's becoming unconscious.
haberman 8y ago
James Lindsay has been making a case for this lately. Here is a (very long) article on the subject that I haven't read yet: https://areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-the-faith-of-social-justice/ https://areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-...
wwright 8y ago
Shunning of heretics was designed to centralize power in the church and affiliated groups. Modern social progressives do perform analogous shunnings, yes, but these acts are for the explicit purpose of decentralizing power _away_ from groups who have it.
- haberman 8y ago
  Shunning of heretics was ostensibly done to defend the honor of God. The fact that it increased the power of the people doing the shunning was surely viewed as a means to a noble and right end, just as today.

cazum 8y ago

Our author seems to be quite drastically mischaracterizing the intentions of what he calls the "contemporary left": >The contemporary left’s concern is with the underlying biases that bolster the racism that remains. It seeks, as a way forward, a society not only without racist structures, but without racist thought, which, for one, can foster race-based disparities that eerily parallel those conditioned in the past by overt segregation. This, as someone who spends a lot of time both in a very liberal college and in lefty online "safe spaces", is an ideology I've never encountered. Leftists generally Subscribe to an ideology that explains material conditions as the force that causes struggle in a society. Those conditions usually being economic structures, but usually include specific things like the power structure of a police force, private ownership of prisons, the "war on drugs", etc. The author complains heavily about how "SJWs" call people White Supremacist too often, but doesn't give any specific example of this happening and why the label was inappropriate. In fact, nearly every one of the "examples" of leftist speech seems to be your average dismissive "laugh at the cuck cringe complication" quotes attributed without context to nobody in particular: >The new normal is, “If you don’t like it, cry loudly and then louder, because you’re always right and they’re just bad.” I don't actually think anybody really thinks this. I've never heard this ideology espoused by anybody, except anti-sjws, as they're sometimes referred to as, who are trying to strawman and discredit someone. The times I have heard people call people White Supremacist is, for example, when a white person starts arguing about IQ scores, which is an explicitly white supremacist argument, and uncontroversially so unless you're unfamiliar with WHY iq tests are inherently biased, in which case you might not see why the label is appropriate and will only see a lib getting mad for no reason. I believe the author has simply collected a few instances of college liberals losing their temper on camera and extrapolated that into an entire incoherent worldview without any analysis of what the leftist cucks actually believe. Additionally, the phrase "virtue signalling" is extremely sloppy. Is there any action done, aside from those done under the privacy of total anonymity that could not be motivationally attributed to wishing the signal virtue? Perhaps I'm virtue signalling for writing this reply. Maybe you're virtue signalling for upvoting it. Maybe the author is virtue signalling for having written the article about virtue signalling. Even if what he says about progressives was true, why would wishing to change the psychology of percieved white racists be "virtue signalling"?

8y ago

dragonwriter 8y ago

> Feminist history is typically described in three waves: No, even when using the (profoundly flawed, but not entirely useless) “waves” framework, it's usually described in at least four waves now. > The struggle to secure voting rights, then workplace rights, and third—roughly—to upend stereotypes. This is not an accurate summary of the usual description of the first three waves of feminism; first wave feminism is typically associated with the early struggle for legal rights in terms of access to basic political and economic institutions (suffrage, independent property rights, access to work, access to education). Second-wave feminism is typically associated with a fight for equality within institutions to which women already had access as a result of successes of first-wave feminism (especially education and employment) and recognition of rights addressing areas where women were uniquely situated either inherently or by traditional gender roles (reproductive rights including contraception and abortion, protection against domestic violence and marital rape, etc.) Third-wave feminism is associated not merely with upending stereotypes (that's part of it, but more in the context of recognizing a diversity in the female experience and the challenges of women that feminism should be addressing; intersectionality is probably a better short summary than upending stereotypes.) > The battle against racism and its effects is often described in a similar three-part timeline, with movements against slavery and segregation, and then—vaguely—the post-civil-rights era. No, it's not often described that way especially by people in the activist community, who describe themselves as civil rights activists, not add part of some vague post-civil-rights antiracism wave. To the extent that multiple waves are identified in racial justice activism in the US, they tend to be abolition, the immediate post-abolition civil rights movement, and the modern civil rights movement. > third-wave antiracism may seem parallel to third-wave feminism in moving on to a different form of abuse, psychological rather than institutional. Third-wave feminism doesn't focus on psychological abuse (though that's an emergent focus of fourth wave feminism, though it does focus on informal social and institutional discrimination (as opposed to legal and other formal social and institutional discrimination.) The author here send to conflate the two concerns. > But this focus on the psychological has morphed, of late, from a pragmatic mission to change minds into a witch hunt driven by the personal benefits of virtue signaling, obsessed with unconscious and subconscious bias. No, it hasn't; first, virtue signalling is a social hack targeting members of a movement by those who are not genuinely committed who wish to be seen as part of it. Second, feminist virtue signalling had been around at least as long as the suffrage movement, and continuously evolves to target current tends in feminist thought, ditto with racial justice since at least the immediate post-abolition period; the current level is nothing novel. Third, targeting unconscious and subconscious bias isn't a recent evolution compared to either “third-wave” (by feminism standards) style thought it the second-wave style thought the author misattributes to as characterizing third wave initially (or, a fortiori, the fourth-wave style thought he later claims is the focus of the third wave.) It's classic third-wave feminism (and, if anything, even older within the racial justice movement), because sucks and unconscious vitae at the individual level is a pillar on which informal structural and institutionalized discrimination rests. But, moreover, while it is a concern of modern feminist and racial justice movements, is not the central focus on either a genuine or virtue signalling sense; this is particularly obvious if you look at the marquee hypercurrent racial justice group, BLM. They aren't focussed centrality on vague psychological bias, whether as a witch hunt or any other way; their central focus is material accountability for concrete instances of material injustice. > The virally popular Stuff White People Like blog of 2010 was a wry self-parody of the cultural mores that had settled in by roughly the late 1990s amidst a certain stripe of educated white people. “Being Offended” was one of the cleverest entries, describing a kind of almost recreational quest to take umbrage on behalf of people other than whites. Already, the satirical tone of this entry dates awkwardly: Many of the people it describes would read it today as disrespectful to the urgency of attesting to one’s white privilege. The whole point of the original satire “of the cultural mores that had settled in by roughly the late 1990s amidst a certain stripe of educated white people” if that everyone it describes would eat it that way. That's what was being satirized. White knighting isn't a new thing, not yet or suddenly become obligatory in the perception of the wider recital justice community, which is now, more than ever, not defined predominantly by the attitudes of the “educated white people” that are, of try to be by virtue signalling, associated with it. And then, after all this confused, muddled inaccurate mess of framing, the examples (still generalizations that are far from concrete) he points to are all about efforts targeting institutional acceptance of concrete offensive behavior directed at members of minority communities or institutional endorsement and involvement in racist speech. While there might be valid complaints about these, either genuine or virtue signalling adherence to a movement that has moved on to a phase that has gotten away from dealing with concrete institutional discrimination to focus on un- or sub-conscious bias isn't among the them. As it progresses from the most abstract background to the more detailed (but still fairly abstract and generalized) complaints, this piece builds a narrative that is both internally inconsistent at frequently misrepresents facts. But it manages to fit a litany of the standard complaints by elite defenders of the status quo about the modern racial justice movement (a perfect blackout of the bingo card is avoided only by the failure to work in the phrase “identity politics”.) Perhaps the author is genuinely confused enough to believe this incoherent mess, or maybe it's just virtue signalling for a different audience. Whatever it is, it's not a useful or meaningful or even well-thought-out contribution to the discussion of racial politics in modern America.

pesmhey 8y ago

Postmodernists had it right. It’s all socially constructed. Where the modern left gets it wrong is that they’ve destroyed the foundations of the house that we lived in without building a new one. Truly, black and white (and yellow, ugh) don’t describe the world so much anymore. We’re already in a post-racial society, and so few people realize it. The new language to describe our 21st century America will be lords (the .01%) and peasants (not pejoratively either, peasants historically enjoyed nice things in life). We’re for sure in a multi-ethnic society. There’s no question about this. But when a ‘black’ man is elected to the highest office, when ‘black’ people continue to hold institutional power, both in government and universities, the actual practice of racism becomes hard to prove. It becomes ethnocentrism. The irony of this fact is how so many ‘whites’ (mostly uneducated) know it to be true, and so many ‘blacks’ refuse to believe it, instead calling on the European-American burgousie to feel guilt and dole out pity. There’s this belief that to be ‘black’ means to be cursed. Fuck that, African-Americans have reason to be proud of their accomplishments in this country. If anything, white guilt is racism. You can’t look someone in the eye when you’re looking down on them.

squozzer 8y ago

What bothers me most about the discussion today is how tightly bound sins and virtues - even traumas suffers by one's ancestors - are to genetics. So we now have not just a racism / sexism morality based on actions and statements, but a religious viewpoint (good / evil), eugenics (because it's all baked into our genes), and caste (separating and ranking various human phenotypes.) History may not repeat itself, but it sometimes has a similar chord progression.