Simon_Jester wrote: ↑2018-02-12 11:18am
1) A representative example of what I think of when I say this is my suggestion that the federal government grant all Native Americans of sufficient 'consanguinity' (the proper term escapes me) a permanent guaranteed minimum income benchmarked to the income enjoyed by the 75th percentile of whites. This is well outside the American Overton window, but to me it comes across as simple fairness. My idea of suitable reparations for blacks is comparable but less generous. Mainly because I suspect the economy would literally collapse for everyone if a minority as numerically large as "all black people" received that high of a guaranteed minimum income, not so much because I think it would be fundamentally unfair to institute it.
This point is largely irrelevant. Whatever your stances are on proper methods of reparations for societal harms it doesn’t either win the larger framing questions of how society functions or that the original article was wrong. But I’ll discuss a few things here:
First, you do exactly what Frank Wilderson critiques. The moment serious reparations to Black people are discussed the question is always short-circuited by issues of supposed equity or practicality. Bullshit that there isn't a way to give every black person a comfortable and secure life. They built this country, literally on their backs, while being under-compensated and uncompensated for their labor. They are owed it, it might suck for White folk and take a little while but recompensation can be arranged.
Second, none of this handles to the framing arguments I made above. Every push
for Black people in this country has met with monstrous opposition. The only one that actually worked for any length time involved one half of the country physically occupying the other half with armed soldiers and disenfranchising the majority of the local white populace. Without fixing that pushback there’s no way this ends well for the Black community (see how Welfare and Affirmative Action have both been used to actively erode Black access to aid and education). There has to be something more than just “Here’s cash.”
Third, I think you’re in a double-bind here with your arguments re: taking the White majority into consideration when making demands. The White Majority will
despise this. If this is a good normative demand then we really don’t need to consider what they want which begs all sorts of other questions, if this should be weighed by the White Majority before being promulgated then we’re back to square one.
Don’t get me wrong, these demands aren’t necessarily bad but they can’t be made alone, it has to be part of mosaic of broader reform.
I'm just trying to communicate that my actual standards of what would constitute social justice on racial issues in America are pretty far from the median viewpoint of American whites.
Good. That’s a start.
2) Despite this, I am strongly opposed to any behavior that I view as an attempt to break discourse, break conversations, or destroy spaces in which productive conversations can be had about racial issues. Even if such behavior is carried out in the name of minorities, and doubly so if such behavior is carried out in the name of the established and dominant majority. This is not about appeasing my ego, or satisfying my desire to avoid social disruption (see (1)). It is about not failing. Attaining racial justice is literally impossible if there are not spaces where people with different positions on the spectrum of race-issue opinion can meet, discuss, and move each other along the spectrum a bit.
A. Even if this is true, you haven’t won that this particular call from Rudy Martinez should be policed out, or even that the call itself is wrong. Those are a prioris before we even get to your argument because if what they’re calling for is right then this is all a non-starter.
B. You also haven’t answered the discussion I (and others) have made about how this gets policed unevenly and resolutely in favor of the dominant White majority. My posts discuss this with some large scale societal examples and nuance above, but I’m actually going to focus on this particular thread as an example of how this goes down:
In this thread we saw two people make some pretty fucking incendiary claims. Kane ran through dogwhistle bingo about Black people and got told off days later in an incredibly mild manner. Meanwhile FaxModem came out an explicitly said, and then defended, that colonial violence and chattel slavery were good for humanity and part of the “melting pot” experience. And nobody else said a thing.
The mod response (in a public space) was to call it “dumb… [but he didn’t] actually come out and say it” and that’s that. This is how policing works culturally: Calling colonial violence good is allowed while saying ‘the categories that create the possibility of colonial violence and sustain it to the present should be destroyed’ is condemned and the author punished to public adulation. That’s
fucked up. It's also incredibly normal (hell, the fact that it was recognized at all by mods is probably better than 'the Real World').
As long as you're allowing for society that looks something like the squo to do the policing then there's no way around this inherent inequity.
(And, really, if the argument is dumb ideas need to be circulated, discussed, and shot down that’s fair. But then this thread itself is unnecessary and Rudy Martinez shouldn’t have been fired.)
3) Pursuant to (2), it may be necessary to establish norms that permit the spaces in question to exist, since they will not reliably survive without some degree of rule-enforcement. Sometimes these rules may need to be unequal in the name of fairness, while at other times they may need to be unfair in the name of equality. Because both fairness and equality are important traits in a space that people can safely use for discussion. A space that gives you perfect freedom to scream insults may seem fair to you, but will be useless to you if your goal is to discuss your needs with other people, because people who don't already agree with you won't bother to stick their heads in the door of such a space, inasmuch as they have no incentive to do so.
This is answered above both in this post and the thread. To be somewhat technical:
I am impact turning your vision of fairness as being incredibly violent towards minority subjects and making the argument that your vision of fairness precludes any progress towards true equality which can only be accessed by attacking norms around society, culture, and the state.
4) Also pursuant to (2), any person who adopts a nihilistic stance of "discourse is useless, there can never be peace or justice" is being massively and gratuitously destructive, unless their explicit goal is to make their own stance into a self-fulfilling prophecy and trigger a race war. The literal, millions of dead people kind. Furthermore, literal, millions-dead wars tend to be won by the side with more bullets and more shooters to fire those bullets. God being famously quick to side with the big battalions, a literal war is not in the interests of the racial minority of any given society, or in the interests of anyone in the society who thinks the racial minorities deserve a BETTER set of outcomes, as opposed to a worse set of outcomes.
This requires that you win that true progress is possible without radical structural shifts. There are plenty of links above where I make the argument that it’s not with statistics. It also requires you to win that there isn’t already a race war ongoing against Black people, an argument also made above at some length. Finally, you need to win that liberal pushes like the kind you’re outlining won’t trigger violent backlash from Whites, something that has happened consistently throughout the last two hundred and fifty years of American history.
5) Pursuant to (2) through (4), I would argue that the desire to make "strong" calls for sweeping changes to the American social system in the name of racial justice (e.g. (1)) is NOT served by being willfully disruptive or destructive of other people's ability and willingness to accept certain rules of order and openness to discussion. Or by defending others who do so.
See above.
We can take decisive and strong actions (general strikes, boycotts, mass protests) without telling people we hate them or saying things easily confused for "and we think you should all die." Conversely, we can impotently rage and say we think people should die, while having effectively no power to actually reshape society along the lines we desire, except by coincidentally piggybacking on a more successful and less powerless mass movement.
A few responses:
1. I don’t know how many times this needs to be said before it clicks but nothing in the original post called for anyone’s actual death. It called for Ontological Death. This has been hashed and rehashed at least half-a-dozen times in this thread. To say that the original article called for any actual violence is, at best, intellectually dishonest and straight up misleading at worst. I can cut people slack for a kneejerk response when they don’t know better, but this is page six of a thread where this has been discussed at length.
2. General strikes, boycotts, and mass protests have all been cast as dire threats to Middle Class existence. Remember, the Swat teams got called out to boot the Occupy movement out of public spaces which is the last we even got close to a ‘general strike’. But, there’s a more telling point here. You’re describing class mobilization. Class mobilization worked from the 1890s until the 1970s. But historically it only worked for White People. Class mobilization didn’t include Black people because they weren’t seen as being part of the same class as white folk.
Unions, perhaps, tell the best tale here. The unions that prospered and survived were almost all segregated, and the corner-stone unions of the AFL and CIO were explicitly racist until the 60s. By contrast the Unions that tried to work across racial lines, like the ARU and the IWW, were violently repressed by the government and other unions.
I’m also going to crib from Knocking on Labor’s Door by Lane Windham (which, I’ll admit, I’ve skimmed and not read in full yet), because it’s also telling that union organization and activism was strong well into the 1970s. But that the decline in Union organizing and membership occurs almost simultaneously with the integration of Unions after the Civil Rights movement coupled with the use of union busting tactics by companies around tactics of racial antagonism. In other words, once Black people get into the union White folks fled them.
Similarly, when Unions and other class organizers had their hands on the levers of power during the New Deal they went out of their way to screw over Black people through selective building and employment practices, and isolating economic aid through processes like red-lining.
3. Which brings me, I think, to the larger point here. What you offer in this discussion is implicitly a vision of the structure of society. What you’re saying, in effect, is that Anti-Black violence is a by-product of the structures of society and is not necessarily intrinsic to them. In other words, that Anti-Black violence is a bug, not a feature, that can be troubleshot and gotten rid of. You’ve given class, money, and the Law as ways to resolve this. Here’s the thing:
If Class is the nexus of antagonism for structural oppression then Unions should have been more than willing to include more workers inside themselves to have greater leverage over the ownership class. They weren’t. When organized the White poor did everything the could to keep Black people out to the point of Salting the Earth in the South by literally shutting down public schools rather than integrating them.
Similarly, if American culture is benignly capitalist (a contradiction in terms but run with it) then the idea of a permanent underclass of undereducated poor citizens who live in prime sites of commercial exposure should be anathema. Everyone would be an un-tapped potential worker and consumer who should be educated for explicitly self-serving reasons (to give more labor access, lowering costs, and to offer a larger market for exploitation.) Yet, the money does not flow and even when it is gained it can be destroyed without consequence, something unthinkable for the White middle class.
Finally, If the United States is a country based on upholding the Law then it should never have allowed the taking of Native Lands done in contravention to the constitution because to do so would threaten its very raison d’etre. Yet it did. Happily. It also allowed for blatantly illegal and unconstitutional violence to be committed against Black people again and again and again all the way down to the present.
If the structures of money, class, and law don’t offer a path forward for Black people but historically
did for other groups like Irish immigrants and White women the question becomes: Why not?
The best explanation offered here, and academically, is the notion of Whiteness as a foundation for how society structures and values itself and inexorably tied to Blackness as a category which is always a legitimate target for gratuitous violence. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here because all of this has been explained at some length in the past four pages. The end result, if that’s true, is that for progress to actually be feasible and attainable we have to make the destruction of Whiteness a societal goal. Hence the op-ed.
'After 9/11, it was "You're with us or your with the terrorists." Now its "You're with Straha or you support racism."' ' - The Romulan Republic
'You're a bully putting on an air of civility while saying that everything western and/or capitalistic must be bad, and a lot of other posters (loomer, Stas Bush, Gandalf) are also going along with it for their own personal reasons (Stas in particular is looking through rose colored glasses)' - Darth Yan
