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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28521 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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Abolish the family is a 19th century concept. Loyalty to family above state and class, all that. Complicates the revolution.

Rhetorical tactics are mostly new. A big chunk of it is due to:

In 1977, a group of black lesbian activists working together as the Combahee River Collective followed Davis’s lead and published the landmark Combahee River Collective Statement, which gave birth to the term “identity politics” and operationalized Davis’s unified theory of oppressio

And why was Davis who bought guns for the criminals who used them attack a trial walking free, writing?

Davis and her attorneys had beguiled the all-white jury, persuading them that the Marin courthouse revolt was a “slave insurrection” and that Angela was a “symbol of resistance.”56 They turned the tables, identifying the state as the victimizer and Davis as the victim. During thirteen hours of jury deliberation, the facts of the case seemed to melt away and the political narrative took hold.

Then her ideas were elaborated into a system by that 'lesbian collective'.

But this cage of oppression also contained the key. The program of revolution could begin with an excavation of personal complexes, pathologies, and traumas, which can be transformed into emotional weapons, using the status of the oppressed as a means of establishing credibility and a method of organizing resistance. “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics,” they wrote, coining the phrase that would devour American politics for the next half century. “We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity.” The Combahee River Collective’s goals were unoriginal: they proposed the old tripartite solution of anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-patriarchy. But their means were revolutionary. The activists eschewed the masculine inclinations toward violence, system-building, physical power, and the seizure of the means of production, and created a uniquely feminine program that marshalled identity, emotion, trauma, and psychological manipulation in service of their political objectives. The Combahee Statement recast left-wing politics as an identity-based, therapeutic pursuit. The language of the document is strikingly modern: the reconceptualization of the activist organization as “an emotional support group”; sentences that legitimize themselves with “as Black women” or “as Black feminists”; gratuitous capitalization of identity markers such as Black and Lesbian; embarrassing neologisms such as “herstory” instead of “history”; emotional references to “pain,” “joy,” and “sisterhood”; venomous hostility toward white women in particular.7 Despite its shortcomings,8 the Combahee Statement is a triumphant document: a declaration of independence from “white male rule,” using a vocabulary and a method of argumentation that would become commonplace in every corner of American society.9

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