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I looked at the references on the other end of the link. I expected it to be a particular article with all four of those words in the title. It was not; it was
by geofft 6y ago
I looked at the references on the other end of the link. I expected it to be a particular article with all four of those words in the title. It was not; it was just a search for those four words.
The top result is an article about the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (d. 1968), who was among other things one of the leaders of the theological opposition to the Third Reich and its subversion of Christian belief in service of white-supremacist ideology. The article says that Barth's interpretation of Romans 2 provides us a way today to avoid commingling Christian identity and whiteness.
It's certainly possible for someone who believes white supremacy exists (and is worth opposing) to think that academic work that reads Barth today to counter racial superiority disguised as Christianity is of low value. I'd say it's pretty unlikely.
To be fair, this is not the most charitable interpretation. The most charitable interpretation is that the author of the essay has never seriously read any academic work involving the words "hermeneutic," "dialectic," "hegemonic," or "whiteness" and they're just four words that he thinks mean nothing, and that he didn't actually read the results in the Google Scholar search before a middlebrow dismissal (to use his own term) of the results. That would make him like the vast majority of the folks who deny the existence of white supremacy - dismissing serious opposition to it as silly instead of specifically disbelieving it.
- pseudalopex 6y agoIt's worth mentioning Paul Graham has a degree in philosophy. He should know what hermeneutic and dialectic mean.
- geofft 6y agoBy the way, he has now silently changed the link to remove "whiteness" and add "racialized" and "phenomenology," which I guess confirms - no, he did not read the results and had no specific academic work in mind, he just listed some words he didn't like - he still doesn't like words about the academic study of race - he somehow didn't learn the meaning of "phenomenology" in his Ivy-League philosophy degree, either