Political Interest wrote:So what you're saying is that it is fine for black people to be racist because of a tradition of racism against black people? And that because of tradition this is not really racism?
Therefore context makes any racism against whites not really racist and excuses the excesses of black racists.
Do you not see how this is a slippery slope?
I am going to break this down a bit.
First, you seem to be assuming that the speaker was being racist. Please note that I have already discussed the possible motives for this action, and that it is not known that this person is actually racist.
Secondly, you seem to be assuming a moral dynamic to what I am saying that is not present. Regardless of whether or we not think this behaviour of sending white people to the back is good or not, it is a fact that it does not perpetuate a tradition of racism.
Third, context
is important. We cannot simply pretend that history did not happen, nor can we pretend that everybody is treated equally in society. Or we could, but then our understanding of social phenomena would be unrealistic. And with this understanding, we are aware of the fact that this person may be racist against whites but this person does not actually have the power to exclude whites or force them to the back or otherwise implement their racism in any significant way.
What about the whites who agitated for African American Civil Rights in the 1960s? The American communist party, a highly white and also black organisation was arguing against segregation as early as the 1930s.
Yes, small numbers of white people did participate in egalitarian movements before these beliefs became widespread, and I thank you for noting that many of them were communists and socialists.
And this does not contradict my point that these movements became popular or trendy many decades after that. Gay rights is a good example. When I was a young man, the local young men would often cruise up and down the streets looking for homosexuals to violently assault. Now, every high school in my area has a "queer/straight alliance".
My point is that this mainstream acceptance is actually very new. And since it is new, it is difficult to claim that it had a significant impact on movements that came before it.
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Conscript wrote:I'll take your word for it. Regardless, it's still racist, illiberal, and worse, pandering to bourgeois, center-left media.
Centre-left is an oxymoron.
It is not necessarily racist.
It may be illiberal, but since most people in this discussion are not liberals, I do not understand why we should hold BLM to liberal standards. As far as I can tell, the BLM is directly chanllenging the use of force by liberal gov'ts against their communities.
I have no idea how it panders to any media, as this person has received, as far as I can tell, absolutely no support from the media about this. Considering how people can and do use this episode to condemn BLM, it would seem to be the exact opposite of a media boon.
Bell Hooks didn't coin 'white supremacist capitalist patriarchy' until the 90s. Intersectionality was not a thing until 1989. Critical race theory and 'deconstruction' was not widespread until well after the 60s. So much of this new new left, heir of the 60s, did not come around until after the collapse of communism and the old left in the form of pre-thatcher labour party, for example.
Yes, and all of this supports my claim that mainstream participation in social justice movements came after the dwindling interest in labour politics.
From there on working class issues went to the wayside, and identity politics became surmount. As a successor to the old left and the era of labor struggles, it's coincidentally very compatible with liberalism and acts as ideological justification for globalization (which you exemplify by, when in reply to claims of globalization collapsing the middle class and social mobility through mass immigration and outsourcing, you say 'muh colonialism payback')
You seem to think that the mainstream interest in social justice movemnets somehow caused working class issues to go to the wayside. This is contradicted by the fact that these issues went tomthe proverbial wayside before this mainstream acceptance.
Good article on this:
Much better in this regard is a longer article by the feminist Marxist blogging at Unity and Struggle: “I Am a Woman and a Human: A Marxist-Feminist Critique of Intersectionality Theory.” Here, while some unfortunate lapses into a humanist essentialism are apparent, the author otherwise argues rather convincingly that identity groups, such as “straight white man,” “gay black man,” “lesbian black woman,” “trans* person,” etc., are not natural categories into which people are born and sorted. Rather, they are relatively recent formations possible only under capitalism, equivalent to occupations with their own forms of alienation attendant upon the division of labor. As Marx wrote in The German Ideology, “as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape.” Similarly, identity, like an occupation, is a trap, because it curtails human potential and bars workers from participation in the social totality as fully developing individuals. Identities are reified social categories from which we should emerge, not within which we should be compelled to remain.
I think the assumption here is that people involved in identity politics choose this identity. I am not certain that is the case.
People get put into these groups by the capitalists as a way of dividing the working class, and are "compelled to remain" in that identity by the system that is oppressing them.
Black people, for example, are not a single group. They are different communities with different agendas and different beliefs. The thing that unites blacks from these different communities is the shared experiences of being treated like second class citizens because they are black.
The problem with identity politics, then, is that it is one-sided and undialectical. It treats identities as static entities, and its methods only serve to further reify those categories. It aims to liberate identity groups (or members thereof) qua identity groups (or individuals), rather than aiming to liberate them from identity itself. Identity politics fails not because it begins with various subaltern groups and aims at their liberation, but because it ends with them and thus cannot deliver their liberation. It makes identities and their equality with other “privileged” groups the basis of political activity, rather than making the overcoming of the alienated identity, for themselves and all identity groups, the goal. The abolition of the one-sidedness of identity — as worker, woman, man, or what have you — represents real human emancipation. Always failing this, identity politics settles for mere linguistic emancipation, which is offered (and policed so assiduously, as Fisher notes) by the defenders of the sanctuary of identity.
As I previously noted, people of colour and others who have to deal with the short end of the identity politics stick would be happy to stop being identified for political oppression and would love to be treated as just people.
In other words, they wish to realise the "overcoming of the alienated identity". The author of the article seems to have this idea that people want the identity that others have imposed on them, when this is not the case.
As I suggested above, the most common response to Fisher’s article has been that his position is explicable strictly in terms of his identity. No sooner does one make a critique of identity politics, than is one’s identity deemed the cause of said critique. It is as if identity explains the argument itself, and causes it. Once identity is deemed the actual causal factor of a statement, nothing that is said means what it says. Everything is explicable only in terms of identity, and the content of the statement becomes identity itself. Once set, identity is a trap from which no one escapes. Of course, such defenses are circular, reverting to that which is being critiqued to explain those doing the critiquing.
I agree with the author's point that people may be critiquing identity politics froma perfectly rational perspective and may get slammed for being of a certain identity.
However, this does not mean that many white men do not understand what it is like to be targeted due to the color of your skin or the shape of your genitals. This lack of understanding can and does lead to inaccurate dismissals of social justice movements.
https://thecharnelhouse.org/2013/12/07/ ... ty-theory/
http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11425This link would have been better.
Identity politics begets identity politics and there insofar savages the left. ...
Identity based oppression begets identity politics, and this divides the left insofar as they accept the capitalist divisions of identity based oppression. This is why capitalism does not care about those social justice struggles that do not affect the bottom line. H. Clinton supports LGBTQ rights because it has no impact on the currect economic system. But because indigenous struggles directly threaten resource extraction, she sends letters to indigenous activists telling them to accept state oppression.
Sorry to pick on you PI, because this fanciful notion of some proletarian Marxist Golden age before it got taken over by Middle Class types is very widespread.
There's no excuse for racism. You're also wrong by the way, they consistently send white people to the back so black media gets privileged access. 
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