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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33256 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Uh huh. So you guys both swear I won't find him denying anti-white racism is a thing, in the paragraph after conceding the concept is theoretically possible, or things that would sound straightforwardly racist if the races were reversed, right?

bothers with the throat-clearing and fig leaf

Again, it's a whole chapter in his book, argued at length and referring straightforwardly to his own life in an embarrassing sense (as I said, the whole book is structured like some sort of an confession at length, a personal casting out of the sins of racism in Kendi's own personal life). He could have just as easily not written the chapter, and I suspect few would be any the wiser; considering how few people in general I've seen who have even noted that Kendi has a chapter on anti-white racism, expect for lazy dunks about the fact that he mentions his college-era belief in NoI crap in this chapter (precisely in the self-confessional sense), I doubt that many people have even bothered to read the book in even a cursory way, whether supporters or opponents.

He's got a whole chapter about the concept in the book. It's not exactly a hard book to obtain, you can indeed evaluate it yourself. Undoubtedly your average Motte-poster would still disagree with much of what he says in the chapter, since he is still a leftist, but he quite specifically talks of anti-white racism as an existing thing and lists multiple ways in which he says it's harmful.

Months before being assassinated, Malcolm X faced a fact many admirers of Malcolm X still refuse to face: Black people can be racist toward White people. The NOI’s White-devil idea is a classic example. Whenever someone classifies people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior, whenever someone says there is something wrong with White people as a group, someone is articulating a racist idea.

The only thing wrong with White people is when they embrace racist ideas and policies and then deny their ideas and policies are racist. This is not to ignore that White people have massacred and enslaved millions of indigenous and African peoples, colonized and impoverished millions of people of color around the globe as their nations grew rich, all the while producing racist ideas that blame the victims. This is to say their history of pillaging is not the result of the evil genes or cultures of White people. There’s no such thing as White genes. We must separate the warlike, greedy, bigoted, and individualist cultures of modern empire and racial capitalism (more on that later) from the cultures of White people. They are not one and the same, as the resistance within White nations shows, resistance admittedly often tempered by racist ideas.

To be antiracist is to never mistake the global march of White racism for the global march of White people. To be antiracist is to never mistake the antiracist hate of White racism for the racist hate of White people. To be antiracist is to never conflate racist people with White people, knowing there are antiracist Whites and racist non-Whites. To be antiracist is to see ordinary White people as the frequent victimizers of people of color and the frequent victims of racist power. Donald Trump’s economic policies are geared toward enriching White male power—but at the expense of most of his White male followers, along with the rest of us.

We must discern the difference between racist power (racist policymakers) and White people. For decades, racist power contributed to stagnating wages, destroying unions, deregulating banks and corporations, and steering funding for schools into prison and military budgets, policies that have often drawn a backlash from some White people. White economic inequality, for instance, soared to the point that the so-called “99 percenters” occupied Wall Street in 2011, and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders ran a popular presidential campaign against the “billionaire class” in 2016.

Of course, ordinary White people benefit from racist policies, though not nearly as much as racist power and not nearly as much as they could from an equitable society, one where the average White voter could have as much power as superrich White men to decide elections and shape policy. Where their kids’ business-class schools could resemble the first-class prep schools of today’s superrich. Where high-quality universal healthcare could save millions of White lives. Where they could no longer face the cronies of racism that attack them: sexism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, and exploitation.

And so on. It's not a particularly good book, in my opinion, but it's still a good exercise to read to know what the specific claims are.

The particular chapter actually got a bit of press since he detailed his momentary youthful, college-era belief about the NoI Yaqub thesis and the idea that melanin gives you superpowers and whatever as examples of anti-white racist beliefs that he believes it is good that he got rid of, which, at the very least, shows that he thinks it is more than theoretically possible to be an anti-white racist.

Big "Kill the Indian, save the man" energy there.

The entire book kind of has that energy, though - with the caveat that it's mostly speaking about Kendi killing the Indian in himself. The whole book is basically about Kendi telling how he had this and this and this racist or problematic belief (anti-white racism, colorism, anti-immigration, sexism, transphobia) and how he got better, with the ideological content then branching off from these personal anecdotes.

Good info. I would have bet the same as the others, having never read the text in question.

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