Alien Abductions and the End of White People - REDUX

Another oldy but goody. This time from subrealist commentator Annalee Newitz;

Let us consider another, even more widely discredited, theory about UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence. A few members of the scientific community and certain elements in the UFOlogy community claim that the US Government has been in contact with extraterrestrials since the late 40s. It has been suggested that the government actually possesses alien space craft and has captured aliens who crash-landed. The government is covering up its secret knowledge by ridiculing and threatening those who attempt to make public the existence of these alien 'visitors'. This theory can hardly be proven true or false without further evidence. However, it certainly seems like the kind of thing the US Government would do if confronted with something uncontrollable and highly organized. In other words, just because the aliens may be a hoax doesn't mean the government hasn't lied to us in similar situations. During the civil rights protests of the 50s and 60s, one of the ways the government attempted to quell social unrest was by pretending nothing was going on or claiming that the protesters were just a bunch of crazy children. This strategy backfired when people across the country began receiving images on television of African-Americans being beaten and menaced with firehoses during peaceful protests in the South. People formerly unaware of the civil rights violations endured by African-Americans were galvanized by these images and a national movement was born. What I am trying to point out here is that whenever the social status quo is threatened by a united group, the US Government's position has always been one of official denial. For the government, the civil rights movement was just a 'fantasy' in the minds of a socially isolated group of people until widespread publicity made it 'real'.

In the early 90s, one might say civil rights movements of the late 50s and 60s have had a substantial effect on mainstream politics, culture and the law. A majority of people in the United States would probably agree that slavery and segregation were indeed 'real' abuses of power. While the plight of African-Americans was once accurately called 'invisible' by Ralph Ellison, it is now quite visible and deemed a force to be reckoned with. What I want to suggest at this point is that minority power and multiculturalism, like the old world order, are predicated upon keeping a particular 'invisible' group of people hidden from sight. The group I mean is white people. This is an incredibly unpopular position to take in a time when white people are often blamed for global injustice. Asking a multicultural society to recognize white people as a marginalized group is perhaps as absurd as claiming aliens are abducting Earth people.

Proponents of minority discourse and multiculturalism claim white people spent most of history recognizing themselves and therefore don't need any more recognition; after all, isn't history written by 'dead white men'? I think the problem with the multiculturalist idea that white people must be stopped like this is that it perpetuates the same old problem of center vs. margin, with the margin coming out a bit whiter this time around. We still live in a divided society, but every race gets to be the people in the center. That is, racial minorities get to occupy the same position white people had in the old world order. As long as we tell ourselves that imperialism was the white people's problem, we make the mistake of thinking that somehow non-white people aren't capable of being just as fearful, ignorant and oppressive as those white people on the ships were centuries ago. Therefore when I say we must recognize white people, what I'm really saying is that we need to recognize the 'white people' in all of us. We are all — white and non-white — capable of taking advantage of each other for power or profit; a non-white ruler can be just as cruel and terrifying as a white one. But as long as the white person bears the burden of guilt for the horrors of imperialism, it will be too easy to forget that imperialist oppression can and does exist without white people at all. The invisible white person in the margin reminds us that oppressive power can exist even when non-whites rule the world.

Here ends the subrealist exposition for this morning. While I intended to take on the subject of dopamine hegemony as monster of the id, I got sidetracked a little bit. Ah well, the weekend's still young and we seem to be on a roll, what with cognitive dissonance and imperial dissolution at alltime historical highs. If we are to speak of action directives, it makes sense to look at the situation from the perspective of centuries, rather than decades, from the long view of possible psychological evolution, and from the new physics, rather than the Cartesian-Newtonian blind alley.

If the situation is going to cusp, and I believe that it will, I think that it is in the cusp and only in cusp that the long-term controlling variables reach critical instability. It is those momentarily unstable states within which small nudges can have big effects.

How can the controlling variables be identified? What is distraction and what is real? Originally posted March 29, 2008.