TheAtlantic | A week and a half ago, I watched the Kony2012 video. Afterward, I wrote a brief seven-part response, which I posted in sequence on my Twitter account: 1- From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.
2- The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.
3- The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
4- This world exists simply to satisfy the needs—including, importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah.
5- The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
6- Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about that.
7- I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.
These sentences of mine, written without much premeditation, had touched a nerve. I heard back from many people who were grateful to have read them. I heard back from many others who were disappointed or furious. Many people, too many to count, called me a racist. One person likened me to the Mau Mau. The Atlantic writer who'd reproduced them, while agreeing with my broader points, described the language in which they were expressed as "resentment."
This weekend, I listened to a radio interview given by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof is best known for his regular column in the New York Times in which he often gives accounts of his activism or that of other Westerners. When I saw the Kony 2012 video, I found it tonally similar to Kristof's approach, and that was why I mentioned him in the first of my seven tweets. Fist tap Dale.
25 comments:
Of course, an alternative is The Black Savior "Industrial" Complex
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2012/s3462536.htm
How in the world does your article remotely resemble an 'opposite' of the topic in this article? SMDH...
Fiction toxicity. We're not just content to live in a movie, we demand our right to live in a movie.
The White Man's Burden has evolved into the White Man's Delusion. The improved media has caused it to change its style, but not become fundamentally different.
I've not heard the term "White Man's Burden". What does it mean?
My primary takeaway lesson from all-a-dis..., if you are a faithful servant of The Man, producing agitprop effective on a low-information mass audience and useful to his plans and schemes - you can run around nekkid doing some FLAMING ranting, covered in skittles and iced tea from head to toe, and nothing in the world will happen to you except mebbe a medical professional will take to the air explaining how you were a little stressed and dehydrated.
Patently transparent, priceless.comedy.gold...,
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kipling.asp
Yeah we're trying to help these people, man!
Big Don!!!
Man, I need to drop by KC just to listen to your tunes.
lol, only in his imagination...,
And race is a marker in the game, though the game is a lot bigger than that. But the brain-anaesthethesis (sp) that privilege brings (to whoever has it: white priv is obv not the only kind of priv) is why it's so hard to discuss politics with most mainstream people. They expect to be treated as if they already know the answers.
IMHO the poster boy for privilege (and privilege-induced dementia) is the boss on Dilbert. In 1,000 years our races and color lines may be unrecognizeable or even nonexistent ... but the pointy-haired boss will still rule.
Why can't you just believe the true core - Kony is a true African witch doctor and hexed dude to run around naked and babbling?
anaesthesia, that's the word I was going for
Oh no! We are going to have to flunk you out of English class.
Rudyard Kipling
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kipling.asp
lol, see...., {SMDH}
You KNOW that that thought crossed my mind and had to be dismissed, suppressed, and denied.
Since you speak of Anesthetized Brains, there's a new public schools altered-test-scores scandal now breaking in WashDC, similar to the outrageous cheating exposed in Atlanta schools a couple years ago, to make the IQ-75'z look smarter.
Juicy stuff here:
http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2012/03/school-days-bill-turque-buries-lede.html
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/dc_cheating_scandal_a_conspiracy_of_silence.html
http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/excellent-dcps-teacher-fired-for-low-value-added-scores-because-of-cheating/
BD is not making this up...
Tom, agree with you completely about the pointy-haired boss. There are levels of arrogance and stupidity encountered in the ranks of navel-gazing "thought leadership" that are utterly shocking because of the operational incompetence they reveal.
But the brain-anaesthethesis (sp) that privilege brings (to whoever
has it: white priv is obv not the only kind of priv) is why it's so hard
to discuss politics with most mainstream people. They expect to be
treated as if they already know the answers.
But since my poster boy for reverse-racist grievance has chimed in with some of his automatized chindribble - I'm compelled to show him the back of my hand.
BD - surely you understand that it's the pointy-haired bosses in these school districts that are the only possible beneficiaries of these misguided cheating efforts? Has nothing whatsoever with trying to make their "constituents" look smarter, rather, it has everything to do with trying to make themselves and their own incompetent and ineffective school administrations and operations look more effective.
BD is not making this up...
lol, the data is the data - and nobody has called that into question. What's suspect, however, is BD's anaesthetized brain interpretation of that data. The issue is not one of making the "IQ-75's" look smarter dumbass, the issue is one of making the ineffectual school administrations look more effective. Perhaps if you were more intelligent, more insightful, and had a better grasp of what's really going on, you wouldn't be stuck playing the same two imbecilic notes over, and over, and over again?
Yeah. Probably on some level the in-my-face incompetence is really what makes me start freaking out. I mean, racism bad, yes, angry, ok, but proud militant strutting incompetence is no joke either, especially society-wide.
What's going on is IQ-75'z as a group have genetic cognitive deficiencies which wimpy liberals feel compelled to cover up, hence all the rampant standardized test cheating. What has been revealed is just the tip of the iceberg. Every new urban public school superintendent makes the obligatory announcement that one of their main goals is to close the Achievement Gap. All the billions in wasted funding being flushed down this hopeless rathole would be much better focused on students who show real academic promise. Let's have some superintendents who make their prime goal to ensure serious academic promise is completely fulfilled, instead of mashing all student accomplishment down to the lowest common denominator to maintain a ridiculousness facade of "equality."
This issue is endemic and extends to all levels of education. Here's another recent one: "Heavily edited" IQ-75 PhD dissertations ----> http://pjmedia.com/blog/affirmative-action-and-radical-politics/?singlepage=true
Again, you just can't make this stuff up....
Silly Rabbit.
First and foremost, the urban public education system writ large DOES NOT exist to properly educate its constituents - rather - its primary raison d'etre is to serve as a very mildly regulated economic honeypot for vendors and teachers. If it existed to truly educate children, not only would corporal punishment have been retained intact as it was back when I attended an "urban" public school, but in addition, it would've been militarized a VERY long time ago.
The primary "threat" for lack of effort or non-compliance in the household in which I was raised, was that if I couldn't get it together for my parents, then perhaps I would do better with a military school level of motivation.
Nothing has changed wrt the underlying truth of that contention. That said, I wish you would drag your droopy drawls back in here now with some of that lame-assed HBD horseshit with which you keep your shrivelled-dick calm at night...,
What can't be made up is the insecure, punk-assed, bee-hotch type of loser who makes heroic efforts to pretend that he's got an intrinsic edge on a demographic, that, in his heart of hearts he fears like a bunny rabbit fears the wolf.
If any of you and your'n ever had to go toe-to-toe with me and mine, I think we both already know what the outcome of that border intersection would be. (^;
I took the little boy to his first gun-show yesterday. He was a little nervous at first. All those big-bellied, pick-up truck driving good ole boys, and we were the only black faces in sight for four hours.
I told him to be respectful, smile, and be himself, much as I would do, and everything would be copacetic. By the time we were rolling up out of there, three separate little skinhead-ette exhibitor daughters were stalking a young bruvva cause he had so much courteous, charismatic, sunshiny swagger in his game. He brought them the beef jerky and dried fruit samples that were rained on him by the old wrinkled up prepper grannies who just wanted to hear him say something in french to them right up in front of their old saggy bellied prepper grandpappy husbands.
lol, GLOBAL SYSTEM OF BLACK SUPREMACY Big Don - in full muhphuggin effizi....,
and that's just it, the carefully cultivated corporate-speak, the vendor and trusted, independent third party mediated orthodoxy, and the backdrop of brick and mortar socially networked normalcy - permit this proud, militant, strutting, incompetence to proliferate unchallenged and unquestioned.
Fools sincerely don't remember the absolute necessity of intellectual and interpersonal cross-pollination with the robust and grounded hoi polloi any longer - to the detriment of us all...,
@Gun Show: Bet you weren't wearing hoodies, scarfing Skittles, and flashing gang signs.... BD agrees on the PS corporal punishment and militarization thang....
Great observation Bro. Dunn. Kony is going to need many more dolls and needles.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2012/03/2012325145413579660.html
The AU can organize a force to hunt Kony, and suspend Mali. But they will not do a damn thing about the Libyan KKK slaughtering Black people in Libya. Apparently they only respond to issues that have been approved by the "white saviors."
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