Rolling 2015 Thread on Race

DYAC

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/23/black-churchesforgive-white-people-shame

excerpt from kiese laymon's new book

Oh man

I enjoyed scrolling through the comments in that NYT CCC article, but "Chris" wrote this:

The Left's media machine is forever trying to tie republicans to some disreputable group or another. I'm quite involved in conservative politics, and I've never even heard of this group. They sound like any number of fringe leftist militant marxist groups. There are far-out left and right groups, that most folks would know to avoid just out of simple decency. Sorry... not buying your tale of conspiracy here. More leftist noise.

I have my own first-hand sources - people in my family who were into conservative politics, then left...and they left because they could not attend a conservative event without encountering racists and racist groups. I find this hard to believe. These racist groups are very vocal in the Tea Party.

Then again, "Chris" could be one of a zillion white supremacists who are online and who pretend to be "conservative".
In any case, it is irresponsible to be active in politics and not know who these people are.

have mixed response to that. there’s some strand of validity to what he says (& his defensiveness is psychologically understandable, imo sincere)

tracing ‘affiliations’ (finding ‘associations’ or ‘links’) is important & relevant, but sheer fact of connection or overlap (without further analysis) is informative in limited sense only. tend to be uncomfortable with political over-extrapolation & overgeneralization (critics of israel are antisemites; muslims are terrorist sympathizers; progressives (let alone democrats) are communists; conservatives (let alone republicans) are racists)

yet in this case, confronting those associations may be necessary thing, e.g. jolting some conservatives’ consciences with respect to flag

What are the big fringe leftist militant marxist groups? Is he talking OWS or something?

don't know. maybe some of the groups affiliated with a.n.s.w.e.r.?

I don't think there are "big" "militant marxist" groups, I think that's an oxymoron/convenient lie that no one will call him out on.

Segregationists have not just been Dixiecrats, historically. It IS fair to take conservatives to task for racism. Many conservatives have also opposed desegregation measures. Far-right groups have leant their support to conservatives for decades. Conservatives have also been weak on the Confederate flag. Like I said, these groups solicit among conservatives. It's not some anomalous, rare thing. They have always had a home on the right.

Also anti-communism went hand in hand with opposing the Civil Rights Movement.

Also, the neo-Confederates on Twitter dug this one up - from Walter Williams in 1999:

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams111799.asp

I'm from Illinois, so I know you don't have to sympathize with the Confederacy to be a conservative. All the more reason the apologists have no excuse.

i imagine the same dude ("chris") was probably /furious/ about obama's association with jeremiah wright.

It must be ignorance, an ignorance I once shared. The NAACP crowd sees the Confederate battle flag as a flag of slavery. If that's so, the United States flag is even more so. Slavery thrived under the United States flag from 1776 to 1865, while under the Confederate flag a mere four years.

man, i wish there had been ruthless twitter shaming in 1999. this is just laughable.

huh I wonder what happened during those four yeasr

weirdly that puts me in mind of this awesome article about the connection between the CIA and the Iowa Writers' Project:

http://chronicle.com/article/How-Iowa-Flattened-Literature/144531/

Creative-writing pedagogues in the aftermath of World War II, without exception, read Partisan Review, The Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, and The Sewanee Review. They breathed the intellectual air of New Critics, on the one hand, and New York intellectuals on the other. These camps, formerly enemy camps—Southern reactionaries and Northern socialists at each other’s throats in the 1930s—had by the 50s merged into a liberal consensus that published highly intellectual, but at the time only newly "academic," essays in those four journals, all of which, like Iowa, were subsidized by the Rockefeller Foundation. John Crowe Ransom, who believed in growing cotton and declined to apologize for slavery, found common ground with Lionel Trilling, who believed in Trotsky—but how?

The consensus centered on a critique of instrumental reason as it came down to us from the Enlightenment—a reaction against the scientific rationality that led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bureaucratic efficiency that made the death camps in Poland possible, and the materialism behind the increasingly sinister Soviet regime.

Ransom and his fellow Southerners had developed their ideas in the 1920s as agrarian men of letters resentful of the specter of Northern industrialism. Meanwhile, Trilling and his fellow socialists were reeling from all that had discredited the Popular Front: the purge of the old Bolsheviks in the late 1930s, the Soviet conduct of the Spanish Civil War, the nonaggression pact that the Soviets signed with the Nazis in 1939, and so on. These were chastened radicals who believed in the avant-garde and saw in totalitarianism the consequences of pure ideas unchecked by the irrational prerogatives of culture.

So the prewar left merged with the prewar right. Both circles thought that the way to avoid the likes of Nazism or Stalinism in the United States was to venerate and fortify the particular, the individual, the situated, the embedded, the irreducible. The argument took its purest form in Hannah Arendt’s essays about the concentration camps in Partisan Review.

You probably can see where this is going: One can easily trace the genealogy from the critical writings of Trilling and Ransom at the beginning of the Cold War to creative-writing handbooks and methods then and since.

(sorry, hueg -- but it kind of mirrors the new deal-cold war democratic coalition)

Adding "encouraging introspective, individual-centered expression and making people emphasize their personal narrative" is another evil I am going to blame on U of I now

wow goole that essay is all kinds of amazing

*apologies for spoiling one of the best lines, but I O_O'd and @_@'d over
It [Iowa fiction] was like going to an arboretum with a child. You want exactly that from life, and also more.

ha, that was good but also kinda unintended lol; lots to unpack, take apart, & contest there

his own ‘genealogizing’ is as tendentious & reductive as 50s genealogizing he critiques & makes fun of

while agree some re provincialism of dominant mfa style, it’s very convenient to diagnose literary style not his own or not preferred by him as ideologically suspect

clearly he has his own ideological & personal axe to grind, issues as ‘ambitious & frustrated’ writer/academic

like, no one (not even frank conroy) is preventing you from writing great novel of ideas dude, go for it

btw cia also fostered & promoted abstract expressionism

strange cold-war bedfellows thing sorta goes to my general point upthread re argument via ‘affiliations’ (amateurist otm that rightwing frequently engages in this mode of arg too)

problem not just potential overgeneralization, but flattening & essentializing ideological constellations which (historicized) are to an extent contingent; correlation (though significant) does not = necessity

e.g. to say “anti-communism went hand in hand with opposing the Civil Rights Movement,” or (example from another thread) to equate “gun culture” (or pro-2nd amendment sentiment) with segregationism; those conflations are shorthand for longer political/genealogical args (which may or may not be valid), but those kinds of shorthand equations by themselves, i tend to find problematic

& on a pragmatic political level may be counterproductive (in terms of political persuasion, changing policy, e.g. wrt gun control, etc)

Frances Stonor Saunders' The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters is the book to read about the CIA, New Criticism, Robert Lowell, and how the Cold War made possible the flowering of AMerican arts and letters.

Yeah, I reviewed that book when it came out. It's insane.

That Chronicle author has, ah, some hangups: Raymond Carver, trained by writers steeped in anti-Communist formulations, probably didn’t realize that his short stories were doing ideological combat with a dead Soviet dictator.

(xps)The anti-communism/anti-civil-rights linkage is pretty straightforward though?? Like, we have plenty of documentation of southern whites who could *only* conceive of demonstrations as "communist agitation", because their worldview left no room for an independent/grassroots Black political movement.

xp ^lol, exactly

bernard, true; but you've spelled out the linkage in a concrete, specific, localized sense (i.e. unpacked the shorthand)

it may be 'straightforward' but it's qualified

Don't make things more complex than they are, just to make them more complex. If a connection is true, shorthand is obviously acceptable. Learn why the connection is true, don't take everything for granted, but you don't need to spell every little thing out, that just makes the discussion that much slower. And when we're talking race, where black people are killed due to racism pretty often, the discussion should not be slowed down for no reason at all.

Fundamentally, racism isn't a question of logic. It's a question of power.

That Chronicle author has, ah, some hangups: Raymond Carver, trained by writers steeped in anti-Communist formulations, probably didn’t realize that his short stories were doing ideological combat with a dead Soviet dictator.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, June 24, 2015 8:29 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

guys this is a wry joke at Engle's expense

"hangups" lol is this the 70s or something

you're right – let's have a rap session about it

http://blog.teeter-inversion.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Roger_50-Thumbs-Up.jpg

groovy

goole it’s wry, but author does mean to draw straight line from cia funding to carver’s style

frederik, wasn’t thinking of ilx so much as political argumentation in general. & imo sometimes slowing down & seeing things as more complex isn’t just matter of logic, but pragmatic politics (to have effect on minds & policies & relations of power). but i take your point

And I take your point too. It's def about pragmatism for me as well. And learning the historical connections behind the shorthands is always important, and telling them if people ask (though I guess every everyone who debates racism or anti-semitism or feminism knows the deal with correcting the same historical misconception for the 1000th time, and being ignored).

Fundamentally, racism isn't a question of logic. It's a question of power.

― Frederik B, Wednesday, June 24, 2015 8:58 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

word porn

sry i meant why do i hate that artist thing that people keep posting on my facebook so much? why am i such a jerk?

missed the thread till now and posted this elsewhere:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/06/misty-copeland-athlete/397364/

i would welcome some thoughts on if this is trolling, poor consideration or a reasonable point
― like a giraffe of nah (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, July 1, 2015 3:07 PM

not sure. is the point of the article that her career breakthrough goes hand in hand with her total commercialization?
― Nhex, Wednesday, July 1, 2015 3:41 PM

just that the first black prima ballerina at ABT is presented as an "athlete" not an artist; seems like charged language
― like a giraffe of nah (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, July 1, 2015 4:14 PM

Clickhole totally nailed it with this one. oh wait...

http://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000003773643/a-conversation-with-white-people-on-race.html?action=click>ype=vhs&version=vhs-heading&module=vhs®ion=title-area

i don't see how ballet can be considered a "sport" even if it involves something we might consider "athleticism"

There's no was a competitive element to it, but what if there was?

LOL, again:

There's no competitive element to it, but what if there was?

Bobby Jindal releasing a t-shirt to troll Hari Kondabolu wrt Twitter allegations of being a race traitor probably deserves a mention in this thread:

http://i.imgur.com/FjBLVKN.jpg?1

http://mic.com/articles/121382/bobby-jindal-hari-kondabolu-twitter-so-white

that J logo looks weird. like a hook or something. some sort of wall fastener...

looks like a water slide

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31wGVaDMC%2BL.jpg

haven’t followed or looked into jindal thing (beyond passing online refs), so hesitate to comment

but, of all things to criticize (or mock) jindal for…

dunno, generally speaking, more often than not, find political criticism based on ‘race traitor’ or ‘whitewashing’ theme… nagl

of course, conservative politician is likely to have certain views on certain issues related to race—
insofar as those views are objectionable, criticize those views;
but race-betrayal, race-denial angle seems like form of 'racial-identity policing' which bothers me

related trope bothers me in other areas than politics, cf criticism of mindy kaling’s show (which i haven’t seen) bc, apparently, it didn't thematize her race sufficiently

so maybe some counter-trolling is justified…? maybe i’m wrong

Jindal's official governor's portrait looks like it was literally whitewashed tho

http://images.dailykos.com/images/127268/large/jindalportrait.jpg?1423001935

xp, Yes, i think it's pretty unhelpful. Jindal is clearly a piece of work but there's plenty of room to call him out on his politics (including his political statements on race) without going down that road. For a start, positioning social conservatism and crass racial politics as "white" ignores how common those things are within sections of the Indian-American (and wider NRI) community.

The weird portrait's apparently not the official one.

xp ^def true, and works as joke
but extending that into serious criticism?
ah but then none of this is v serious, it's twittertown

agree, sharivari

xp, Yes, i think it's pretty unhelpful. Jindal is clearly a piece of work but there's plenty of room to call him out on his politics (including his political statements on race) without going down that road. For a start, positioning social conservatism and crass racial politics as "white" ignores how common those things are within sections of the Indian-American (and wider NRI) community.

The weird portrait's apparently not the official one.

― who epitomises beta better than (ShariVari), Wednesday, July 1, 2015 6:09 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah i feel like calling them 'white' and excluding them from the community masks the fact that those sentiments areprevalent in the community - i think it's better to try and wrestle and unearth them within the community rather than to just sweep it under the rug. same goes for conservative east asian americans imo