This post began as an email reply to Benjamin Galbraith's A Diversity of Whiteness essay. |
Most minority empowerment before the death of Martin Luther King Jr was about allowing minorities full access to the monoculture, to the economy. Around the time of MLK's death, a new American Left was coincidentally coming into existence. This was a critical mass of ( usually white ) academics or pop visionaries. They were opportunists in a wave of truly experimental sonic exploration and widespread use of somatic drugs. While it should be kept in mind that the FBI, Nixon, and the assassins of Kennedys and MLK where mean people supporting an unfair status quo; it is also plausible that the new American Left was prone to societal abuse because of their distance (per their professions) from such mundane pragmatics as running a Fire Department or building durable Interstate bridges. In short, the new American Left lacked exposure to the practical, making the development of their ideas prone to pathos, prone to malformations, prone to deformations.
When this Postmodern Left took on the fight for minorities, they locked those minorities out of engineering schools, medical schools, and running the Fire Department. To the new Left, those schools are superficial manifestations of the disease. The "disease" is the monocultural economy. This new Postmodern Left had a case of very fundamental worship of a horrible, white, romantic idea from earlier centuries -the noble savage. The Postmodern Left assumes non-whites of the world are better, always, because, always, they are more strongly bonded with something humans did 10,000 years ago. In short the Postmodern Left believes the dark skinned person is always more savage, and that savagery is always better. (Equally despicable, the Postmodern Right equate the same as always savage and that savage is always worse.)
Fortunately this idealization called "noble savage" doesn't really map onto the world I've seen. From my experience in life, the world is full of many people that are the top candidates for engineering schools, medical schools, and the Fire Department. An inconvenient truth for the KKK, myself the white guy, and the Postmodern Left is most of these top candidates are East African, Vietnamese, Indian, Arabian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
This fact about the real world castrates every hateful scumbag KKK member, and every loving scumbag Postmodern Left revolutionary.
And like everyone that is castrated, the KKK types and the Postmodern Left won't have representatives later in this century.
For anyone noticing the excitement around Senator Obama, here is a label to put on that excitement: He is representative of the minorities I speak of, and the symbolic demise of the Postmodern Left and Right. He is the rise of a Postmodern Center, with the discussion of minority inclusion or exclusion negated by a real world asserted over privileged people's idealizations.
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4 comments:
The academic Left in the United States has adopted a European system (Postmodernism) that handles European problems of multiculturalism and so forth quite effectively, but the US is not Europe.
Warning: politically incorrect language will follow. I will discuss things that political correctness was designed to eradicate but did not, so it's a bit like discussing Voldemort:
The US has a unique concept of "race" based on slavery and genocidal expansion. The basic concept is: People are black, white, or red. If you don't fit into that system, your race is ignored (which often means being treated like a white person or foreigner.)
If you have a drop of black, you are black (though not all blackness is equal.) Black people are forced to stay outside the white mainstream by pressure from both whites and blacks. This horrible situation is necessary to maintain the distinction. Without it whites lose their central position and blacks lose their identity.
To be red, you have to meet a minimum purity requirement (even though some of the tribes had more old world ancestry as new when the system was established.) While blacks are forced out of the mainstream, red people have fled the mainstream intentionally, and are generally monitored and managed as threats.
The Indian Wars and Emancipation are not ancient history. There are people living today who grew up around people who lived during a time when people were property and "indians" were the enemy.
The black/white/red situation is not diversity, it is the uniform structure of American Monoculture which spread across the continent with the railroads, Sears-Roebuck catalogues, electricity, telephony, highways and the internet.
Multiculturalism has done a lot of good for the US, but the core race concept of America is a completely different kind of problem which the prescribed solutions from the Left and Right only reinforce.
I'm sort of disagreeing with you a little. I think the long term trajectory of the US has been towards empowerment of the previously disenfranchised.
And I also think multi-ethnic socialism of the pre-1960's were after a lot of the right things ( workers rights, living wages, etc ).
I believe the turn for the worse was UC Berkley academia and the new conservatives ushered in with Reagan. And hopefully these two subcultures have gotten past the zenith of their power.
I agree about the long-term empowerment trajectory, but in the US the "multi-ethnic socialism" movement was called "communism". The US "socialist" movement was focused on the interest of whites first, while the communists actively worked to dismantle the race system by holding (often illegal) integrated dances and so forth.
The dismantling of social services during the reagan-clinton era actually reversed some of the progress made by the previous generation, but the reagan-clinton era was also a time of a successful campaign of multiculturalism (led more by hollywood than by academics or political activists) which has empowered people on the fringes of the old black/white/red system such as recent immigrants and middle-class blacks.
What I am seeing now is a new concept called "class" which replaces the black/white/red race system and the vague concept of "socio-economic status". The class concept allows people to maintain separate ethnic and regional identities while also having a place in a mainstream economic culture which only sees it's own internal "class" divisions. I think class is the direct descendent the old "race" system based on the problem of property rights vs. human rights.
Now for a different tangent:
As new as this class awareness is, the system is already outdated. Globally, as countries advance socially and economically their ancient three-tier class systems become pear-shaped blobs with a majority of varyingly-empowered workers and a large minority highly-empowered workers. (These roughly correspond to the old working class and middle class of three-tier societies, both of which are now empowered so that there is no sharp division between them)
But in the US we have two other special classes: people whose lives are defined by the criminal justice system (we have finally passed the 1%-of-the-population-locked-up watermark) and certain corporations who are powerful enough for their legal status as people to make them god-like entities based on their massive property holdings, lawyer farms and political influence. These special classes routinely violate the ground rules of economic intercourse. We may always have career criminals and greedy, dishonest businessmen, but whether we have entrenched classes of career prisoners and robber barons is a policy decision.
" but whether we have entrenched classes of career prisoners and robber barons is a policy decision."
Note my very next blog entry deals with this.
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