The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

the hat and attached dreadlocks of white supremacy

My experience with this kind of discourse -- and it really is it's own discourse, which in many ways feels different from how people spoke out against various forms or oppression when I was an undergrad -- has generally been hearing white "allies" talk about checking their privilege, or feeling "unsafe" when a classmate had a patriotic American flag cover on her macbook. In that capacity it's often felt condescending, like white people telling minorities what they should need to feel "safe" and constantly patting themselves on the back for "checking their privilege" and "complicity" in the system, which sometimes even felt to me like they were bragging about how advantaged and educated they are. If my grad program had more racial minorities of a political bent -- most of them tended to steer clear of these conversations last year -- I'd probably have a very different, more favorable view of modern day campus activism. What I saw was very performative and weirdly solemn and annoying.

https://cdn-img-3.wanelo.com/p/b27/16d/78e/d7d2291583b9b74d0c13584/x354-q80.jpg

This was definitely a trend in the small graduate program I attended last year. one of my professors posted a poem on her tumblr a few days ago about a white colleague wearing a hat with fake dreadlocks for Halloween and she called it something like "the face of white supremacy."

― Treeship, Wednesday, November 11, 2015 8:30 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean...

i think my default position concerning pretty much every tempest-in-a-teapot controversy around campus life and "political correctness," in re. all sides, is mutating into "fuck all y'all."

as a disaffected and probably soon to former academic there's a tiny bit of glee in the back of my mind at the carnage.

on the other hand i think the logical outcome of all this is the further quarantine and fragmentation of the humanities, or some even worse fate.

"in the system, which sometimes even felt to me like they were bragging about how advantaged and educated they are."

the dead kennedys talked about this on their first album.

this also goes waaaaaaay back to that blog post by the professor and her white student who was so upset by the melvin van peebles movie.

"What I saw was very performative and weirdly solemn and annoying."

in other words, the work of teenagers. or people who were recently teenagers. i do give up the grain of salt in a lot of cases to the youngness. i remember how completely wrong i was a lot at that age.

xposts
but on a positive note, maybe im misreading the situation and what we're seeing is the embryonic development of a greater (if conflicted) pluralism in American society and culture, a pluralism not of an ever-expanding whole but the proliferation of ever-more-specific subgroups. maybe this is a more realistic idea of what democracy is or will be than the one we've been working with.

They weren't undergrads though. The worst offender was this professor who was in her fifties. Other activists who rubbed me the wrong way were in their twenties, like between 22 and 27.

Sorry xpost to scott.

i always think that academic settings are strangely artificial. or unreal. or they seem unreal. sometimes in a good way. they give people the room and time to think. but sometimes you get meningitis.

Adolph Reed talks about this, ryan. Identity politics is a neoliberal ideology because it breaks people into narrow, conflicting special interest groups, and also rarely seriously tries to undermine the basic power structure in society, preferring cultural battles regarding issues of representation etc

in his view that is. So the increased pluralism you mention would be a disaster not just for the humanities, but for left wing politics because you can never build a broad coalition

i always think that academic settings are strangely artificial. or unreal. or they seem unreal. sometimes in a good way. they give people the room and time to think. but sometimes you get meningitis.

― scott seward,

post of the day

reed is obviously very good and astute on race, but when generalised that position is just the standard marx bro line that all struggles that are not class struggle are just distractions, comrade. seems important to recognise that even if there are the vast, all-consuming power structures at work (and there are), sometimes there are important differences in the way that individual types of exploitation and oppression are structured.

one thing the marx bro does not allow for is a pro-capitalist anti-racist position which should not be unfeasible. if you believe capitalism for all of its flaws has been an extraordinary generator of wealth throughout the world, and you just think that wealth should be shared more equitably among participants, then marx bros have nothing of note to say to you.

one thing the marx bro does not allow for is a pro-capitalist anti-racist position which should not be unfeasible. if you believe capitalism for all of its flaws has been an extraordinary generator of wealth throughout the world, and you just think that wealth should be shared more equitably among participants, then marx bros have nothing of note to say to you.

― Mordy, Wednesday, November 11, 2015 9:15 AM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pro-capitalist anti-racist position is untenable, the system is built upon the surplus labor of a slave class

that's one opinion but there's no reason to believe it has an exclusive claim on truth. capitals exploitation of labor does not necessitate that labor be racially organized.

leftist agitation before business school a time-honored tradition.

that's one opinion but there's no reason to believe it has an exclusive claim on truth. capitals exploitation of labor does not necessitate that labor be racially organized.

― Mordy, Wednesday, November 11, 2015 9:57 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sure but that's been the ongoing state of things since prior to the country's founding so

via a link from The Raggett Report:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123431/student-activism-serious-business

so someone who believes in the power of capitalism to generate wealth but dislikes the racial discrimination that has been linked to that system in the US might have reason to reject the racism but not reject the capitalism xp

what's all this about the marx bro.?

https://xinageco.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/groucho-marx_tinima20120819_0077_18.jpg

via a link from The Raggett Report:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123431/student-activism-serious-business

― scott seward, Wednesday, November 11, 2015 10:19 AM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

amusingly, that article /does/ use the "...run amok" phrasing... but puts it in other folks' mouths. ("Some have suggested that students are frivolous activists, that they no longer have senses of humor, and that liberalism has run amok on college campuses, ruining them in the process.")

which lends credence to my idea that almost nobody uses that phrase anymore /except/ to implicitly mock or discredit those who you are attributing it to.

...but maybe this is rhetorical analysis run amok.

dislikes the racial discrimination that has been linked to that system in the US

let's not pretend this is/was just restricted to the US cuz it is not

i watched A Day At The Races yesterday. tootsi frootsi ice cream run amok.

Love 'A Day at the Races'.

if you believe capitalism for all of its flaws has been an extraordinary generator of wealth throughout the world ... then marx bros have nothing of note to say to you.

it's true that "duh" is not of note

i mean marx acknowledges this at length and in detail. idk what "marx bros" do, besides fuck with dowagers.

they were emma goldman fans.

anyway i support mordy's dream of a racially disinterested capitalism where the underclass is selected by merit but looking at capitalism's history from the Company on it seems a taller order than full communism, whatever that is. i also support that dream.

idk about that - i don't have a dream of racially disinterested capitalism first of all, but speaking generally i think that capitalism can incorporate meaningful diversity much easier than the full implementation of communism, cf.

so someone who believes in the power of capitalism to generate wealth but dislikes the racial discrimination that has been linked to that system in the US might have reason to reject the racism but not reject the capitalism xp

― Mordy, Wednesday, November 11, 2015 10:20 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is such a bad post

idk about that - i don't have a dream of racially disinterested capitalism first of all, but speaking generally i think that capitalism can incorporate meaningful diversity much easier than the full implementation of communism, cf.

― Mordy, Wednesday, November 11, 2015 11:36 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

then why hasn't it done so? no matter—let's just pretend it has already or we're being unnecessarily divisive

like, how many hundreds of years of capitalism will there be before 'meaningful diversity' takes place?

as if there was a pure capitalism anyways rather than the corporate-state revolving door subsidized system we have now

i make fun of kids/youngs all the time because they bug me but they do honestly give me hope for the future. their attitudes seem - on the whole - to be much healthier as far as race goes. or at least that's how it anecdotally seems to me. talking to old people is depressing when it comes to that stuff. even smart old people who should know better by now. they make me cringe like nobody's business.

i mean there probably won't be a future cuzza the warming and all that, but still...

idg where mordy's goin with this - meaningfully diverse capitalism and fully implemented communism both being completely theoretical/hypothetical constructs

well blame me for the first hypothetical construct comparison.

Yeah if they go into activist work they can say oh you are the famous person who got wrote up in the Atlantic.
Not to mention the opportunity to see how their ideas are received by the community at large and the establishment in particular. Activists growing up in this turbulent period have a much broader scope and who knows maybe in the future all this awkward stuff will be finely tuned from decades of mass market research.

i honestly don't know which of this is sarcastic and which isn't, and i'm not sure who the sarcasm is directed at. :(

― wizzz! (amateurist), Wednesday, November 11, 2015 3:29 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was responding to "this will follow them around their whole lives" with a positive spin on it. If they are activists now then maybe they will take part in that work in the future. If so then having a newspaper article on your embryonic attempts at activism could be a plus in that field.

I'm not exactly commenting on a specific case or anything in that second statement. This is the first activist generation w instant global communication. Protests that would only reach a dozen or so people are now given global mainstream attention. If activists are paying any attention to the reception and criticisms they can take them to heart and in the future not make the same mistakes. I'm calling this "market research" but really all they have to do is google it and see what the entire spectrum of reactions are. Not just from fellow activists but from the extreme opposite of the spectrum as well.

Who knows maybe nobody will learn anything from it.

this is abut the university of missouri incident that is an ongoing discussion in this thread, but we should really move it to the race thread:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-would-university-of-missouri-students-protest-jewish-20151110-story.html

a cheap piece that pretends to not answer it's central "provocative" question

like instead of pointing out why Jews and blacks have historically been treated quite differently in the US (the reasons for which are rather glaringly obvious), it just makes some oblique assertions that maybe they have been

can't say easily dismissing his meandering thought is any better

every time you see "coddled" used in a headline, take one drink...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/college-is-not-for-coddling/2015/11/10/6def5706-87db-11e5-be39-0034bb576eee_story.html

the problem w/ the latimes piece is that he doesn't have any evidence, just some anecdotal assumptions. there is plenty of consternation in the jewish community about claims of antisemitism being minimized or dismissed as either unserious or just the fevered hysteria of jews. there's an entire mamet flick on this theme. iirc jews are the number target of hate crimes in america; that they aren't perceived that way is just one of the reasons why the latimes article is unserious about interrogating its central claim.

sorry, number one* target

(nb it might have been number one target of religious-based hate crimes i really don't remember the data exactly but it should be googleable)

i take mordy's silence in response as a concession