Originally published by ANewDomain.net:
Americans used to talk about tokenism. That’s what they called it when ruling elites elevate a member of an unprivileged or oppressed group in order to legitimize themselves without substantially changing the basic order of things.
During the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s, blacks who joined white-dominated organizations were called Uncle Toms and Oreos. Leftists who worked for large corporations were deemed sellouts.
But this racial, class and general minority self-consciousness is no longer part of politics in this country. It’s a trend I blame at least in part on the triumph of the identity politics that now dominates liberalism and progressivism. (I omit leftism because, by international and historical standards, there is no organizational socialist or communist “left” in the United States worth even mentioning.)
Freed of the constraints of the criticism and social opprobrium of 50 years ago, tokenism has become not just tolerated, but celebrated, and not merely by what hippies used to call The Establishment — ie., the ruling elites, the media, the educational system and other institutions that support the existing power structure. Now, even within what passes for the “left” — the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, progressives, academics and other intellectuals — people have no problem with it.
Among liberals, tokenism is no longer viewed not as something disgusting, no longer viewed roundly as a violation of personal integrity that undermines the struggle for emancipation by validating corrupt, oppressive rulers.
Instead, it’s prima facie evidence that that the struggle is advancing!
Exhibits A and B? Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
As is typically the case with political tokens, the president and leading contender for the 2016 Democratic nomination for president are not truly representative of the “minorities” whose advancement they purport to embody.
Unlike the vast majority of American blacks, who are descended from slaves, Obama is the biracial son of a white mother (pictured at right) and an Kenyan father.
Hillary Clinton is obviously a “real” woman, true.
But she is one whose major leg up is the fact that she married a president.
This hardly reflects any kind of a new and improved status for American women.
Rather she comes to us via the very old tradition of wives inheriting their politician husband’s status, like the widow of Hubert Humphrey, who inherited his senate seat, or Benazir Bhutto of the universally acknowledged patriarchy, Pakistan.
Despite their weird (in Obama’s case) and all-too-average (Hillary’s) career narratives, liberals and conservatives alike point to the president and former secretary of state as evidence that, respectively, we are either living in a “post-racial” society or soon will be, and that ladies “have come a long way, baby,” in the words of the old Virginia Slims cigarette ad.
To the political right, Obama and Clinton’s personal successes “prove” that discrimination against African-Americans and women, if they ever occurred (if they ever admitted it at the time, I missed it), are gone or at least quickly vanished, and thus require no further action (not that, in their minds, they ever did).
Never mind the statistics about black poverty.
Never mind the great likelihood that black men will go to prison at some point, sentencing disparities, slums, or the endless accounts of cops shooting black men who were unarmed, by the thousands.
And never mind the ongoing salary differentials between male and female workers, or hey, ever noticed how male the room looks (see crowd image, at right) when the camera pans across members of Congress during a State of the Union Address?
For liberals, by which I mainly mean members of the sports franchise that goes by the name the Democratic Party, the First Black President and the strong possibility of a First Woman President are evidence that liberalism is working.
Sure, the signature legislative achievement of First Black President Obama, the Affordable Care Act, is a corporatist initiative whose final form differs little from and has its origins in a healthcare scheme developed by the Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank that conceived it to suck the wind out of support for single-payer “socialized medicine.”
Yes, the possible First Woman President Clinton’s politics are, from trade to foreign affairs to taxes to privacy rights, firmly aligned with today’s Republican Party.
You do realize that Hillary Rodham Clinton would have been far too conservative to be viable even as a Republican candidate in the 1960s or 1970s?
But tokenism doesn’t value policies, ideas or ideology.
Tokenism is about individual personality.
Tokenism says: Look how great America is! Progress may come slowly, but comes it does. We have a black president! And now, maybe a woman too! Could a gay or lesbian, or a Jew, or a trans person be far behind?
Tokenism replaces ideology.
Ask a black American about Obama. Go ahead. Odds are he views him favorably.
This is despite nearly seven years in office, during which, by all accounts (said accounts sourced from black civil rights leaders), the president has studiously avoided pressing for policy measures that would benefit black people — aside from a few measured statements following racially-charged controversies. Recall, after the Florida shooting of Trayvon Martin (pictured at left), Obama’s comment was: “If I’d had a son he would have looked like him.”
In his politics and policies, the president has been more non-racial than post-racial, and he has been an absentee leader on, say, employment discrimination and racism in the application of the death penalty.
Joe or Jane Average Black probably know all these things, yet they defend Obama against political attacks, even including those from his left, because they view him as a symbol of, perhaps not Hope or Change for black America, but perhaps as useful personal symbols for themselves.
If that “sort-of-black guy” became president, then maybe I, or my son or my granddaughter, might actually land a decent job!
You will see the same phenomenon at work among those Democratic women, mostly over 50 years of age or so, who are excited at the prospect of a President Hillary.
These women largely identify as liberal or progressive.They are mostly against wars of choice, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, mostly for a progressive tax code, mostly protectionist and mostly skeptical of free trade deals that outsource American jobs, mostly in agreement with Edward Snowden that the NSA shouldn’t be listening to our phone calls. For them ideology is subordinate to symbolism.
Many of them are aware that Hillary isn’t one of them politically. They’re willing to overlook that.
They’re even to willing to vote for someone whose policies, and recent documented history of policies — they disagree with, for one reason: she’s a woman. They’ve waited 226 years for the First Woman President. Hillary might not be the perfect First Woman President — but she’s viable.
And if she wins the presidency, she then is able to serve as the Right Answer to little girls when they ask their moms: “Has there ever been a woman president?” Oh, yes, sweetie. There has.
The pro-Obama blacks (and non-blacks) and the pro-Hillary women (and men) mostly identify politically far to the left of those candidates. And what they are missing is the fundamental truth of tokenism.
Obama didn’t achieve the presidency despite the fact that he identifies as black.
Obama achieved the presidency because he is a conservative.
Similarly, Hillary Clinton has not gotten as close to the presidency as she has despite being a woman; she’s where she is because she is a right-winger.
Tokenism is what the system sells you and me. And to the ruling classes, ideas and ideology are everything.
The right-wing extremist Barry Goldwater (pictured above right) said of gays that he didn’t care if they were straight, he cared if they shot straight. As long as they killed on behalf of the American imperialist state, propping up militarism, Goldwater was cool with fags.
Now in 2015, the Establishment is open to individual blacks, women, gays and other members of traditionally oppressed segments society who are willing to do its bidding. If Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton are willing to sign off on drone assassinations and NSA spying and bailouts of Wall Street brokerage houses while millions of ordinary people lost their homes, why not let them?
The system goes on.
That is all that matters.
Indeed, the system is stronger because of these tokens, these sellouts.
The regime of Bush and Cheney wound up hated and reviled, but does anyone doubt that their long run on the high end of the opinion polls was extended by the Administration’s Uncle Toms, General Colin Powell (pictured left) and Secretary of State Condi Rice (pictured below right)?
Let’s look at it another way.
What are the chances, in the American system today, of a leftist achieving high political office, or a high-profile position in the media? Of even a white, tall, handsome, Ivy League-educated, able-bodied, Protestant leftist doing so?
Zero.
Some reading this will scoff. A leftist? In America?
Well, why not?
All the other nations with political systems, economies and cultures similar to ours — Canada, Mexico, the UK, Australia, the countries of Europe — have high-profile progressives, socialists and communists in public life.
It’s not like there’s no interest in socialism or communism here in
the U.S. — polls consistently show that about half of American voters would like to get rid of capitalism and replace it with socialism and communism. This is remarkable considering that these ideologies are rarely discussed here, except as objects of scorn and terror.
So it’s not that people wouldn’t vote for a leftist or buy her books or tune him on TV or read her column in The New York Times.
The fact is, the Establishment won’t allow a leftist — whether said leftist is white or black, male or female.
The worst thing about tokenism is that it distracts us from the fact that we are not allowed to have a free-ranging political debate that considers a wide variety of possible solutions to problems.
Instead of this horrifying truth (we don’t live in a democracy), tokenism tells us that everything is peachy keen. We’re making progress! Look! You too, or maybe not you but someone who sort of looks like you, might be able to score a good gig within the system.
Tokenism thus appeals to that basest and rawest motivations, tribalist self-interest.
Taken to its logical conclusion, it is perfectly fine that white cops pull over black men without cause and shoot them in the back for no reason. Why? Because Barack Obama is president. Why? Because there might be more black Senators. Why? Because there are more black millionaires.
Extrapolating from this way of thinking, it doesn’t matter that women can’t walk city streets without fear of being raped, or that when they’re raped city police departments can’t be bothered to process their rape kits to try to catch their rapists.
Because Hillary Clinton might become president. Because Sheryl Sandberg (left) made friends with Mark Zuckerberg and so scored a great job at Facebook, which gave her an in to pitch and promote her book.
Because the gap between men’s pay and women’s pay has shrunk a little (never mind that it’s because men’s wages have gone down, not that women’s have increased).
It is true that, as an able-bodied heterosexual Ivy-educated white male (albeit raised Catholic, with a foreign-born mother), I am open to attacks by those who say I am speaking from a position of privilege. My response to this point is this:
Yes, I enjoy a privileged position in American society. But I wish I didn’t. I wish and want, and am doing my best to help create, a country in which everyone is equal. I want to be deprivileged.
I want privilege itself to vanish.
I believe that what matters is not the color of your skin, or the shape of your genitals, but what’s in your brain and in your metaphorical heart. Until we achieve emanicipation, the oppressed would be far better off under the leadership of benevolent leftist WASPs than under the jackboots of evil right-wing trans lesbian disabled people.
Tokens like Obama and Clinton are unworthy of admiration.
To the contrary, they are repugnant and disgusting.
Consider what would happen if women and blacks and other oppressed sectors of American society refused to have anything to do with a system that gave us corporate welfare, the NSA’s police state, endless wars against nations few Americans can point to on a map like Yemen and Libya, the widening income gap, job outsourcing, police shootings and so on.
Apartheid America would collapse for lack of support and legitimacy.
We could get to work on a just, equal society.
Regardless of your identity politics classification, participating in this system endorses the oppression of billions of people around the world, and propagates it.
Even if it had been allowed, no Jew would have served in the SS, even if his idea was to work “within the system” “for reform.” Those who worked as the trusties — called “capos” in the death camps — were widely condemned and, after liberation, murdered.
It is time to restore the clear distinctions of class identity and consciousness before it is completely and totally eroded by the scourge of vacuous tokenism.
28 Comments.
As the Democratic Party moves “to the right, to the right, ever to the right” (as in the stage play “1776”), tokenism is now owned by liberalism.
The right’s remedy for inequality was tokenism. And it still is, in the absence of a left.
The word “priviledge” has its roots in ” a private law” as in “one law for the few and another for the many.”
Thanks, Ted, for making this point on tokenism so easy to understand for those who don’t, or can’t, see it without some thoughtful guidance such as you present here.
This could be, or should be, the theme song of the Democratic Party.
http://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/1776/coolcoolconsideratemen.htm
…
Come ye cool cool considerate set
We’ll dance together to the same minuet
To the right, ever to the right
Never to the left, forever to the right
May our creed be never to exceed
Regulated speed, no matter what the need
We sing hosanna, hosanna
Enblazoned on our banner
Is keep cool
What we do we do rationally
We never ever go off half-cocked, not we
Why begin till we know that we can win
And if we cannot win why bother to begin?
Everything Ted’s said is correct. But OTOH, we are indubitably making progress. Sixty years ago a black president was absolutely inconceivable, no matter what his politics. Ditto a woman president.
We just threw open the doors for gay marriage across the country. Sixty years ago homosexuality was outright illegal in most states. Alan Turing was one of the heroes of WWII – but because he was gay, the British gave him a choice: chemical castration or jail after the war was won.
When I was young, we said “Lady Doctor” – now a woman with an MD is no big deal.
Unfortunately, societal change is a generational thing. We can hope to give our children a better world, even though we ourselves will never see the promised land. Ted’s right, we can’t let tokenism lead us into believing that the war is over. But we can see how far we’ve come, just the same.
We have achieved new levels of excellence in tokenism, meanwhile class divisions increase to ever greater extremes.
I take that back.
“We” didn’t do anything. What was done, was done to us by the plutonomy and their most excellent marketing, thereby securing their class privileges while flattering us about the wisdom of our token choices.
Such a gullible herd. Over the cliff with you all.
The class divisions have been growing (again) no doubt about that.
But the civil rights we’ve gained on have been purely grass roots efforts.
Police have gained the “civil right” to shoot suspects and let god sort them out.
Of course, from the safety of a white enclave the world may actually look the way you say it is.
That is, unless you are one of the victims of plutonomy profit mongering, overpriced under performing health insurance, college debt enabling…does the litany need repeating?
“Sixty years ago a black president was absolutely inconceivable, no matter what his politics. ”
CrazyH,
We come back to my initial question. What does “black” mean? From what I’ve read, black Europeans are often embarrassed by the behavior of “inner city” black Americans.
I keep NOT being able to define black cogently. “Poor”? Oh, that’s easy to define. But “black”? Not so much.
You’re working too hard. Generations of bigots have had no problem defining black. (I’ve never noticed any bigotry from you – we’re talking generalities here)
One of the stupidest damned words in the English language is “Octoroon” – where else do we define someone based on one-eighth of their heritage? The person in question is 7/8 European.
Bigot
Noun
A person who is intolerant toward those holding different opinions.
Gasp! Bigot-dar malfunction! It would appear one CrazyH(ypocrite) owes one DanD an apology.
“Consider what would happen if women and blacks and other oppressed sectors of American society refused to have anything to do with a system that gave us corporate welfare, the NSA’s police state, endless wars against nations few Americans can point to on a map like Yemen and Libya, the widening income gap, job outsourcing, police shootings and so on.”
What would happen is those in power would get what they wanted – for all the undesirables to go away and self-segregate.
A parallel to this “tokenism” is discrimination against the white male for decades. I was personally denied opportunities for advancement simply because of my white-male categorization. “You guys have it all, so what is your complaint?” Unfortunately, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth — or as Ann Richards put it, “a silver foot n his mouth.” I had to fight against both sides — and for the most part, I lost.
Stereotyping is always a problem because no group of people can possibly be a monolith.
Being male is overrated if you also happen to be black. Female blacks are advantaged in areas where male blacks are disadvantaged (for example in certain work environments where black males are felt to be threatening).
Instead of removing the discomfort of racism, the state seems to have met its goal of greater equality by making everyone feel some level of discomfort by infliction rather than uplift.
It’s not reasonable to expect capitalism to place social needs above profit, because then it wouldn’t be capitalism.
So if anyone has a complaint of unequal treatment expect everyone to move toward equality by affliction of the comfortable rather than by comforting the afflicted.
Reminds me of a joke: A man with a crippled hand asked God to make one hand like the other. After the miracle, the man then complained to God about having two crippled hands.
Ted mentions the gap between men’s and women’s wages narrowing by the reduction of men’s wages.
As a member of the National Education Association, I attempted to adapt their opportunity for training offered to minorities (for advancement into administrative positions) by opening the program up to everyone, including white males. It was soundly defeated with the excuse that white males already enjoy all the privileges. If I enjoyed that privilege, how was I exempted from the track? Why would I have bothered, if I were already among the privileged? Discrimination is not a one-way street.
There is no such thing as Reverse Racism. There is only Racism.
Actually, maybe one could come up with a genuine “Reverse Racism” example but it takes imagination: Maybe a cosmetician putting the same colour on everybody instead of matching their skin tone?
“There is no such thing as Reverse Racism.”
——
I think I expressed this adequately when I wrote: “Discrimination is not a one-way street.”
🙂
From the tokenism I’ve observed from just past last mid-century to the current age, the vast majority of people who were chosen to perform as a token truly believe(d) that they actually earned their less common position of privilege simply because they “had the right stuff.” As Ted himself has described the political cartooning industry, while much through his own insightful perseverance, he’s also been allowed to sustain himself as a “visually-enhanced” politically commentating token by — through trial-and-error — appropriately self-censoring his own written and illustrated compositions.
Ted well knows what third-rails to pre-emptively insulate himself from. A prime example of this is that he rarely touches on the wholly evil war-crimes committed by Zionland against a torturously imprisoned Palestinian population.
When confronting this particular flaw of American institutional bigotry, even Helen Thomas discovered that she had become a no-longer tolerated goy-female token of the White-House press room.
DanD
Can someone please define what “black” is? I don’t mean that as some smart-ass comment. I mean that literally. Black Barack Obama, college graduate, university professor, etc. vs. Black Barack Obama straight outta Compton high school dropout.
Is “black” the same in both cases? I think not. The big problem isn’t race or gender or any of the rest. Those are all simply used to keep us infighting.
Economics is the only determinant we should be looking at. I have a lot more in common with some Latina slinging coffee at the Starbucks than I do with Mrs. Clinton and how poor she was when she and Bill drove away from the White House in a limo.
Maybe you could ask that question of the North Charleston, South Carolina police officer, Michael T. Slager, who shot 50-year-old Walter Scott in the back. I really don’t it was the determinant of economics, but the fact that Scott had a different skin color.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1173602/GRAPHIC-Charleston-cop-fatally-shoots-man-runs-away.html
“… don’t [think] it was….”
Walter Scott was a victim. Clearly. The video is all anyone needs to see to conclude that. He was murdered. But he wasn’t murdered just because he was black. His murder came at the end of a long string of events, most of which relate to his economic status.
Cops have a pecking order. Occasionally, they stray from it, but it goes like this most of the time:
Rich White: Never Hassle
Rich Black: Seldom Hassle
Poor (screw whatever the next word is): Fuck with them all the time.
I know of only one thing that makes the cops back down: collective, politically active organization by a group against the police.
Black Lives Matter? It will be about as successful as Occupy Wall Street unless they change their tactics. Why? Their focus is wrong. Their tactics are hostile. (I.e., it’s the whole “uppity black” thing. For the people who understand the problem, it isn’t “uppity.” But those people are already on the BLM side. For those who don’t “get it” the behaviors are alarming and offputting. “Oh, they’re so hostile. I’m actually afraid of them. Should I buy a gun?”)
I understand the hostility but marching is pretty much useless. Disrupting debates is pointless.
Only two things work: economic pressure and political pressure. Economic pressure controls the businesses who control the politicians. Political pressure controls the politicians.
How many voters has BLM registered? What candidates are BLM placing up for office? And not just elected office but appointed offices? School board members? Any boycotts?
Right now, BLM is making a lot of noise and a few people are feeling pretty pleased with how “effective” they’re being. What they’re doing isn’t effective unless it leads to something. And, as I said, there’s only two effectives in play.
A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty.
-Milton Friedman
Prescient words. And how could they not be when history shows us this? And we get America 2015 in which we have liberals such as yourselves who are anything but as opposed to the odd classical liberals such as myself who are “conservative.”
If you’re about class struggle you’re not a liberal, you’re a Marxist. Leftism IS identity politics. It is the foundation. The assumptions upon which you base your arguments. The origin of all your political thought.
You seek “social and economic justice” to be accomplished by legislation restricting and controlling people’s lives. The founders meant equality before the law. You mean equality of outcome, which is mutually exclusive with liberty.
It’s no surprise that many Americans would prefer communism or socialism since they believe capitalism is what we have. What we have is government intervention in every facet of our lives. Another reason is that socialist ideas are ubiquitous–which just don’t label them as such.
The main ‘evidence’ that right wingers are in charge is the level of violence, but violence belongs to no one side. There are almost no self-described conservatives in news, entertainment or academia. You think Republicans are good at messaging? Leftists are masters. Drunken sex became rape. Marriage went from being about family and procreation to being about love–from there it is no small step to throwing out the gender part. And Ted tells me that I’m racist because I am not attracted to black women. By this logic lesbians are man haters and gays are misogynist. I don’t have all week to make an exhaustive list. The point is that if people accept widely circulated Marxist ideas without knowing it is Marxism, then it matters not if people are against the label.
“Tribalism self-interest” For all the love Leftists purport to have for science, they conveniently ignore that which undermines their convictions. The desire to have one’s own group succeed is not going away because biology. Same with sex roles. Or the problem of incentives in a socialist “utopia.”
Black men are discriminated against in sentencing? Yes. But I’ll only take someone seriously as a serious egalitarian when he goes out of his way to point out that men get stricter sentences than women for the same crimes. I can just imagine–and imagine is all since feminism was never about equality but rather female primacy–liberals declaring that we need an equal amount of women garbage collectors, miners, sailors. Workplace deaths are overwhelmingly men! Oh, the shameful ambivalence our society has toward men’s lives! Men make up the vast majority of the homelrss and suicides and homicides. Half of domestic violence victims are male! This pattern of violence is more than apathy–it’s hatred! We have a culture of violence against men! The statistics prove it. When is our society going to start caring and doing something?
Yeah. It truly strains the limits of my imagination. Mens’ issues? Fuck off, misogynist. Yeah. That’s more like it!
You say right wingers are in power, but I’m right wing and agree with almost nothing they do. If we look at the facts–I know, I’m really going out on a limb here. And no, I do not disagree with the whole of the forthcoming list. The point is to show the Left dominates. Left won on abortion, gay ‘marriage,’ VAWA, EOE, civil rights, sexual harassment laws, the expansion of the definition of rape, easy divorce, affirmative action, gender is a social construct, transgenders are ‘brave,’ most conservatives hold feminist beliefs, no prayer in schools, the massive welfare state, and deficit spending. And on and on and on. The narrative is yours. And again, no wonder since liberals dominate the cultural institutions.
Ted, rape rates are DECLINING. Incidences of innocent men accused/convicted of rape are on the rise. Guilty until proven innocent. Few things destroy a man’s life like a false rape charge, but liberals tell me it’s a small price to pay to believe the victim always since real rape happens. They also tell me that informing women to protect themselves is victim blaming. I know of no other crime treated this way. Are all accused murderers guilty? Does locking my car mean I blame myself for the crime of theft?
The increase of false rape accusations is no surprise to anyone familiar with human nature. A false accusation is all upside no downside for the accuser. Consequence-free attention and/or revenge? You allow a system to be taken advantage of and some people will do just that.
Please sober up and try to post a coherent, understandable comment. This is totally incomprehensible. (There must be something in your thinking that you might convey to others in an intelligent and cohesive manner, no?)
Actually, JH is just “free-associating” his ideas as he addresses various elements of Ted’s post.
Independently and by itself, it lacks a cohesive focus. As a response, its cohesion much depends on the text it responds to. Is it intelligent? Well, that mostly depends on just how passive or aggressive your critique is. and also how that is filtered through your own prejudices.
Was he sober when he wrote the above? Let’s ask him. You know, this is just a blog.
DanD
Oh, I forgot one of my guiding principles: “Never respond to a TROLL!”
😀
Cohesive? No, Dan is right. I think I wrote plenty without trying to tie it altogether. Intelligent? Everything I wrote is true which is far more important. If you don’t understand, it’s because you’ve never left your liberal bubble. If you need sources, then that shows me you have not educated yourself on the issues.
I responded to some points in Ted’s essay and the rest is a critique of this way of thinking. I nearly made a ‘disclaimer’ about ‘cohesion.’ No issues exist in a vacuum. In something as complicated as a society, everything is interrelated. The focus was to show how delusional it is to believe that right wingers and conservatives are in power. They’re Leftists. They don’t call themselves that, and they’re perhaps not your kind of Leftist, but Leftist they largely are. They hold none of my conservative principles. That’s for sure. Traditional they are most certainly not.
Oh, and a troll is not simply someone who disagrees with you…
Spot on, Ted ! So-called «identity politics», while superficially appealing for oppressed ethnic or gender groups, has, as you point out, shown itself to be a prescription for disaster. «Tokenism», or the placing of (almost always conservative) members of these underprivileged groups in elevated positions serves as a means to mitigate what otherwise might become irresistible calls for significant change in the relations obtaining between the group in power, i e, economically and politically privileged «white» (in North America and Europe) males and these groups….
Blacks may be proud of Mr Obama, women of Ms Clinton, but that «pride» (not to say those illusions) changes little, which is precisely the point, It is not the fact that Mr Obama has been elected president of the United States which has changed so-called «race» relations in that country, it has been the struggle of millions, both black and white, which have made it possible for a «black» man to gain that post. It is not the tokens which have paved the way for meaningful changes in these relations ; it is rather these changes, inadequate as they are, which have paved the way for a few tokens to make their careers….
Henri
This was true when Condelezza Rice and Colin Powell were in the Bush White house. Tokenism has triumphed.
However Ted, I worry that you are still not attacking the fundamental problem in some Identity Politics, popular in the mainstream, where the term “privileged” is used to silence certain voices.
Instead you’ve given us a White Man Apology. Albeit with some laudable aspirations for equality. But the fact is you should not be doing that based on your skin colour or other aspects of your individuality. It doesn’t matter. You aren’t fundamentally different due to the colour of your skin. It’s not something that is relevant. To assert that you are intrinsically different and privileged likewise, by your blood, is the definition of Racism. And with pop identity politics (PIP) the meaning of Racism has been lost. It’s not that we should one day have this be so. It is the truth. Racism is truly wrong. And we now substitute the appearance of racism (using the N word, or doing something else otherwise vulgar, as if free speech and politeness were different than they are) for actual critique of racism: believing and treating people differently based on the scientifically debunked but socially popular concept of Race.
I’m going on too long here, but I complaining that your sticking to the very PIP language you are trying to debunk. And one of the correct lessons we have learned from PIP – is that language does matter. But not in tweets or soundbites, because that language is constructed PR by other people. It does matter in how we think. We need to think that an Injury to one is an Injury to all, and that includes people from ALL backgrounds.
And what of the term “privledge.” Is that even a real complaint or just envy? If it’s used in a different context than PIP it clearly is envy. But all the time now we have Faux News commentators “calling out” those “priveledged” in Unions or Universities and holding up the ideology of Ayn Rand or Donald Trump as if it were speaking for the masses.
We need more rigorous left wing politics where we don’t fall for this stuff and it takes us less than a few decades to notice it.
…
In other news, Why isn’t Trumps Billionaire background used against him more effectively? We need to call out that kind of Privilege where the powerful abuse their power instead of wasting time on white man apologies from Cartoonists.
The takeaway should be: don’t be afraid of who you are. Pay attention more to how to work and organise with others.
Quite a bit of PIP has a Romantic and Conservative ideology behind it. There is obsession with “Deserving” victims, and a romance for Innocence.
There was a backlash against “Political Correctness” in the 1990s. But that was misguided and easily taken over by the Rush Limbaugh right.
Ultimately I recommend viewing the films of Adam Curtis which layout the history of the last century leading us to this era were Individualism of a certain consumable variety blinds us tothe need to build a coherent left.