theblaze | CNN anchor Michael Smerconish tried on Saturday to explain away black
men openly questioning Vice President Kamala Harris' racial identity.
Harris' racial identity became headline news last week after former
President Donald Trump brought attention to the fact that Harris and the
media have emphasized the different aspects of Harris' familial
background — her mother is Indian and her father is Jamaican — at
different points in her political career.
"She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian
heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago, when
she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black," Trump said. "So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?"
Those comments sent the media and Democrats into an outrage. But how do everyday black Americans feel?
Last week, WHP-TV anchor Joel Smith visited a barber shop in
Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, to speak with black men about the 2024
election.
One moment from Smith's interview generated significant attention over
the weekend: It happened when Smith invoked Harris. At that moment, one
of the interview participants immediately questioned whether Harris is
black.
"Is Kamala going to make you a little more likely or less likely to vote Democrat?" Smith asked.
"Hold on. Wait. Is Kamala black, yes or no?" one participant interjected, asking the barber shop owner to answer the question.
"I'm going to let her speak on it. But to me, no," the barber shop owner responded.
Another participant said he agreed with the owner's view, while another said he has only "heard" that Harris is black.
What is fascinating about this exchange is that it happened before
Trump's comments about Harris at the National Black Journalists
Association event. This suggests that Harris' racial identity is already
an open question among black voters.
polskieradio | The war in Ukraine has weakened the Franco-German axis that once defined
Europe, with the balance of power now shifting toward the UK and
Poland, a British political scientist has claimed.
In an op-ed featured in the British news magazine The New Statesman,
Maurice Glasman, a political scientist from St Mary's University in
London, highlights the profound impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine
on the existing order in Europe.
Glasman argues that the invasion has not only disrupted the balance
of power across the continent but has also had consequences for the
European Union, Poland's wpolityce.pl website reported on Thursday.
Prior
to the crisis, the EU functioned under a shared leadership model, with
France and Germany at the helm. France assumed a dominant role in
military and diplomatic affairs, while Germany focused on economic
matters, according to Glasman.
However, he says the legal framework governing the EU was rooted in
the primacy of EU law within member states, which ultimately created
tensions in both eastern and western Europe.
These tensions were exemplified by Britain's decision to withdraw
from the EU, as well as the opposition voiced by Poland and Hungary on
social issues.
“The status quo was based on an understanding over the export of gas
(as well as oil and coal) from Russia to Germany, most obviously through
the Nord Stream pipeline," according to Glasman.
He writes: "Berlin and Moscow held the fate of Central Europe in
their hands once more. German economic interests were predominant,
partly because the EU did not develop a unified military strategy of its
own."
Significant shift in European landscape
Glasman further states: “This is what made the status of
Ukraine so explosive. Its integration into either the EU or NATO was
not in German interests. It would undermine its economic interests, as
the only serious industrial economy within the EU, which were predicated
upon cheap energy imports from Russia.”
In his analysis, Glasman highlights the fact that the
invasion of Ukraine by Russia has resulted in a significant shift in the
European landscape, particularly in the realms of economics and
military affairs, wpolityce.pl reported.
Glasman says this shift has exposed Germany's relative weakness and
hesitancy in the military sphere, sentiments that are shared by France.
He argues that in the event of a military confrontation with Russia,
power and resources within Europe would gravitate towards NATO,
subsequently leading to a resurgence of influence from the United States
and the United Kingdom.
He writes that “it was widely assumed within academic and elite
political discourse that Brexit would lead to the marginalization of
Britain within Europe, and to the consolidation of the Franco-German
axis within the EU. The opposite has been the case.”
He continues: “Following the invasion of Ukraine, Britain took an
unambiguous position of military and political support for the
beleaguered Ukrainian state. While the US was offering
President Volodymyr Zelensky asylum, Britain immediately transferred
weapons and led the western European political response with an
unprecedented array of economic sanctions against Russia. It seemed as
if Brexit had strengthened its freedom of action at a time of war."
NYTimes | Ali-Rashid
Abdullah, 67 and broad-shouldered with a neatly trimmed gray beard, is
an ex-convict turned outreach worker for Cincinnati’s Human Relations
Commission. He or his co-workers were at the scenes of all five of
Cincinnati’s shootings with four or more casualties last year, working
the crowds outside the yellow police tape, trying to defuse the
potential for further gunfire.
They
see themselves as stop signs for young black men bound for
self-destruction. They also see themselves as truth-tellers about the
intersection of race and gun violence — a topic that neither the city’s
mayor, who is white, nor its police chief, who is black, publicly
addresses.
“White
folks don’t want to say it because it’s politically incorrect, and
black folks don’t know how to deal with it because it is their children
pulling the trigger as well as being shot,” said Mr. Abdullah, who is
black.
No
one worries more about black-on-black violence than African-Americans.
Surveys show that they are more fearful than whites that they will be
crime victims and that they feel less safe in their neighborhoods.
Most
parents Mr. Abdullah meets are desperate to protect their children but
are trapped in unsafe neighborhoods, he said, “just trying to survive.”
And some are in denial, refusing to believe that their sons are carrying
or using pistols, even in the face of clear evidence.
“
‘Not my child,’ ” he said, adopting the resentful tone of a defensive
mother. “ ‘It may be his friends, but not my child, because I know how I
raised my child.’ ”
His
reply, he said, is blunt: “These are our children killing our children,
slaughtering our children, robbing our children. It’s our
responsibility first.”
African-Americans
make up 44 percent of Cincinnati’s nearly 300,000 residents. But last
year they accounted for 91 percent of shooting victims, and very likely
the same share of suspects arrested in shootings, according to the
city’s assistant police chief, Lt. Col. Paul Neudigate.
Nationally,
reliable racial breakdowns exist only for victims and offenders in gun
homicides, not assaults, but those show a huge disparity.
The
gun homicide rate peaked in 1993, in tandem with a nationwide crack
epidemic, and then plummeted over the next seven years. But blacks still
die from gun attacks at six to 10 times the rate of whites, depending
on whether the data is drawn from medical sources or the police. F.B.I.
statistics show that African-Americans, who constitute about 13 percent
of the population, make up about half of both gun homicide victims and
their known or suspected attackers.
“Every
time we look at the numbers, we are pretty discouraged, I have to tell
you,” said Gary LaFree, a professor of criminology at the University of
Maryland.
Some
researchers say the single strongest predictor of gun homicide rates is
the proportion of an area’s population that is black. But race, they
say, is merely a proxy for poverty, joblessness and other socio-economic
disadvantages that help breed violence.
Scott Adams was trying to use this opportunity to demonstrate that the concern about racism in the US is a veneer: it’s about virtue signalling but not actually helping people get out of the social trap they find themselves in due to bad education. And he was demonstrating that people are happy to trash freedom of speech to maintain this virtue signalling.
I’m still a loooong way from knowing what exactly Scott Adams set out to accomplish. Since his self-immolation, he’s tweeted that “the media is racist” and in the process gotten Elon Musk on board.
This doesn’t seem like a particularly controversial claim.
In addition to the fact that black folks didn’t cancel Adams, I believe we can also rather safely conclude that he doesn’t have any black friends. He doesn’t know any of the handful of black folks who live in the segregated California town he’s lived in for the past 30 years.
A little unguarded time in the company of true friends would’ve innoculated him against his original egregious miscalculation. Conversation with a B or C-list black public intellectual friend would’ve been a better rebound than conversation with manosphere D-lister Hotep Jesus.
What transpired between Gonzalo Lira and Hotep Jesus was painful to listen to, and, it shed no further light on the mystery of Scott Adam’s self-immolation. Jimmy Dore does a nice job roasting the breadth and depth of Adam’s misfire.
gilbertdoctorow | To be sure, the demand that all Russians be barred from Europe as
punishment for their war on Ukraine has not met with universal approval
within the EU. Even Germany came out against the initiative, with Scholz
saying that exceptions must be made for humanitarian reasons. Others
have debated the legality under EU law of such generalized prohibitions
directed at an entire population. But the debate rages on.
Finally, a statement made yesterday by Latvian President Egils Levits
got the full attention of Moscow. He said that Russian-speaking
residents of Latvia should be ‘isolated from society’ if they oppose his
government’s policies with respect to the war in Ukraine. Just what is
meant by “isolate” is not clear. Does Levits intend to intern them in
concentration camps? Given the absolute failure of Latvia to respect EU
human rights norms going back from the first days of the country’s
independence from the USSR in 1991, such an atrocity would not be out of
character.
I have dealt with precisely this issue in essays going back to 2014 which were included in my collection Does Russia Have a Future?:
see chapter 22 “Latvia’s 300,000 Non-Citizens and the Ukrainian Crisis
Today” and chapter 33 “Latvia’s failed U.S. inspired policies towards
Russia and Russians.” I further explored these issues in my 2019 book A Belgian Perspective on International Relations, chapter38 “Republic of Latvia, Apartheid State Within the EU.”
The point is that upon achieving independence thanks to the active
support of many of its Russian-speaking citizenry, the government of
Latvia turned around and stripped 400,000 of them of their citizenship,
close to 40% of the total population at the time, and offered them a
path to regain passports that only a tiny fraction of them could
follow. When President Levits speaks today of Russian-speaking
“residents” of Latvia, he has in mind those who were deprived of civil
rights including passports and remain stateless up to the present time.
Everything that Latvia did to its Russian-speaking population going
back 30 years set the precedents for Kiev’s repressive policies towards
its own 40% who are Russian speakers after the nationalists from Lvov
came to power in 2014.
These various developments were the main topic for discussion in yesterday’s Evening with Vladimir Solovyov
political talk show, which stood out as especially valuable. Although I
have made reference to this particular talk show frequently over the
years as a good source of information about what Russia’s political and
social elites are thinking, I freely acknowledge that the presenter
cannot and does not fill every program with material and panelists worth
listening to. Indeed, there is a lot of sludge on air between the
gems. By ‘sludge’ I mean the kind of ‘kitchen talk’ in which expert
panelists talk the same non-facts-based drivel that ordinary Russians
will engage in when they follow the principle of socializing described
by Chekhov in Act Two of The Three Sisters: “They are not serving us tea, so let’s philosophize.”
In any case, last night’s Solovyov was definitely worth
listening to. The question of neo-Nazism in Europe was the glue binding
together different elements of the discussion, ranging from Levits’
obnoxious declaration of the same day to the fate of ordinary Russians
in Kazakhstan and Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
and what to do about all of these challenges to the Russian World.
The overriding point was that the Russophobia and ‘cancel Russian
culture’ movements that have swept Europe during 2022 mean that
Russians are the Jews of today. They are what the Hitlerites called Untermenschen,
against whom all manner of rights violations if not outright murder can
be practiced. This arises in its worst form in Ukraine, where Russians
as a people are systematically dehumanized in statements from the top
leadership of the country. In Ukraine, the ultra-nationalists call
Russians “Colorado,” a reference to the bugs that infest potato crops.
These insects carry the orange and black colors of the St George’s
ribbons that patriotic Russians wear. This is the same logic that made
possible the biological weapons attack on Russian soldiers in the
Zaporozhie that was carried out last week by Ukrainian forces, sending
the victims to intensive care treatment for botulism poisoning. That
development probably did not get coverage in your daily newspaper.
The conversation on Solovyov was particularly interesting in
the ‘what is to be done’ segment. Acknowledging that a ‘special
military operation’ against Latvia is not practicable yet given Latvia’s
membership in NATO, a panelist who heads the State Duma committee on
relations with the Former Soviet Union states, said that those Russians
who profited from the transit business between Russia and Latvia for
decades should now pay up and contribute financially to relocating the
Russian speakers in Riga to the Russian Federation, meaning providing
good housing and jobs that till now were never on offer to incentivize
immigration. A fellow panelist broadened the proposed assistance to
suggest a government program of resettlement modeled on what Israel did
some decades ago to facilitate the relocation of certain Black African
Jews from their country of persecution to the State of Israel. And it
was suggested that similar relocation offers should be extended to
Russian speakers in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries where
they have all been second class citizens since these countries became
independent of the USSR.
usatoday | If race were real – in a biological sense – it would stay the same across history. But it doesn't. It changes.
That's how people like me became white. Yes, you read that right. Jews weren't white … until we were.
The
horror of the Holocaust thoroughly discredited the idea of Jews as a
race. But race itself – as a concept – was still going strong. Slowly,
and unevenly, white Americans welcomed Jews into theirs.
Tensions between Jewish and Black people
That has been a source of tension between Jews and African Americans ever since. James Baldwin wrote in 1967
that Black people were tired of Jews claiming that their own experience
of prejudice was “as great as the American Negro’s suffering.” That was
false, Baldwin wrote, and it fueled Black antisemitism.
“The
most ironical thing,” Baldwin added, “is that the Negro is really
condemning the Jew for having become an American white man.”
You
could hear echoes of that frustration in Whoopi Goldberg’s comments on
Monday, when she denied the racial dimensions of the Nazi genocide
against Jews.
She
was wrong about that, and – to her credit – she apologized for it. But
she was right that most Jews have changed their race since that time,
which has never been an option for African Americans.
Race
makes us imagine that our differences are inherent. And from there,
it's just a short step to the idea that some people are inherently
superior – or inferior – to each other. We need a new language to talk
about all of this, openly and honestly. Jews aren’t a separate race,
biologically speaking. But neither is anyone else.
israelnationalnews | The Anti-Defamation League, which has faced charges in recent years
that it has become too politically active, changed its definition of
racism for the second time in two years after critics attacked its
previous definition as narrowly focused.
According to a report in Breitbart,
the ADL’s original definition of racism was: ”Racism is the belief that
a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person’s
social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn
biological characteristics.”
In late 2020, during the height of
the Black Lives Matter movement, the ADL changed its definition of
racism to state: “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of
color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges
white people.”
The ADL said that the new definition was created to
“reflect that racism in the United States manifests in broader and
systemic ways.”
Yet, critics argued it was too narrow and
left out other types of racism. The ADL also began to categorize Jews
based on skin color – with fellowships aimed at “Jews of Color,” Breitbart reported.
But this week, the ADL again changed its definition of racism to an
“interim” definition that was broader and was more reflective of the
previous definition.
The interim definition states: “Racism occurs
when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or
treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.”
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt explained the change in a Medium
op-ed published on Wednesday, saying that while the updated definition
“explicitly acknowledged the targeting of people of color – among many
others – by the white supremacist extremism we have tracked for
decades,” the “new frame narrowed the meaning in other ways.”
“By
being so narrow, the resulting definition was incomplete, rendering it
ineffective and therefore unacceptable,” Greenblatt said. “It’s true,
it’s just not the whole truth. It alienated many people who did not see
their own experience encompassed in this definition, including many in
the Jewish community.”
ADL | New Orleans, LA, February 26, 2018 … Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
South Central Regional Director Aaron Ahlquist issued the following
statement regarding Joshua Bonadona’s employment discrimination lawsuit
against Louisiana College:
“ADL is deeply offended by the perception of Jews as a race found in
both allegations against the College and the plaintiff’s assertions in
the lawsuit. According to a court filing, the administration was
motivated in its actions because of Mr. Bonadona’s “Jewish blood” and
Mr. Bonadona is attempting to circumvent the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s
religious employer exemption by characterizing his “Jewish heritage” as
racial.
The notion of the Jewish “race” originated from the 19th
Century concept of “racial science,” which took root in Western Europe.
In response to the decline of the influence of traditional
Christianity, as well as the rise of Jewish assimilation and social
mobility, anti-Semites adopted racial arguments as a new rationalization
for their hatred of Jews.
The idea that Jews are not only a religious group, but also a racial
group, was a centerpiece of Nazi policy, and was the justification for
killing any Jewish person who came under Nazi occupation –– regardless
of whether he or she practiced Judaism. In fact, even the children and
the grandchildren of Jews who had converted to Christianity were
murdered as members of the Jewish “race” during the Holocaust.
Based on Congress’ 19th Century conception of race, the
U.S. Supreme Court in the 1980s ruled that the definition of “non-white
races” found in post-Civil War anti-discrimination laws, includes Arabs,
Chinese, Jews and Italians. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which
explicitly covers national origin and religion, does not embody these
antiquated views. Although Mr. Bonadona’s attorney certainly could try
to bring claims under these 19th century laws, we believe
that attempting to create similar legal precedent under the Civil Rights
Act perpetuates harmful stereotypes and views about Jews.
What unites Jews as a people, whether they come from Europe, Asia,
Africa, or the Americas, is a common culture, rooted in a common
religion. Jews throughout the world are joined by a religious and
cultural heritage rather than a racial sameness. The allegations
against Louisiana College, if true, would indicate a very troubling and
deeply offensive view by the institution that it perceives and
discriminates against Jews as a race.”
suntimes | In the book, Stuart cites a University of Chicago study that says Black teens create more online content than any other racial group. In February, the Sun-Times reported that less than 5 percent of workers at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are Black.
Drill also crosses paths with hip-hop’s “Blog Era’ — a
period where local artists such as The Cool Kids and Kidz in the Hall
made names for themselves by releasing new content via music blogs
instead of relying on music industry gatekeepers, along with rappers
with strong, national DIY followings such as Wiz Khalifa, Mac Miller,
Curren$y, and Gary, Indiana, native Freddie Gibbs, among others.
“These guys all blew up and had all these videos with
millions of plays, and all this notoriety and songs and mixtapes getting
downloaded,” said Andrew Barber, owner/creator of “Fake Shore Drive,” a
Chicago music blog. “But none of it counted toward the new
certifications that the RIAA has in place or the Billboard charts.”
Due to the subgenre’s reputation, many record companies refused to sign drill artists; their music was banned by venues.
“I just thought you need to have these ridiculous bar
guarantees and rental fees, and later in life I find out that was just a
Black thing, or a risk assessment type of thing, even though there was
never a risk,” said concert promoter and Complex Studios co-founder
Marques “Merk” Elliston, who says he partnered with Hologram USA to have
Chief Keef’s hologram perform at a Hammond, Indiana, venue before local
police shut it down citing safety issues. “That’s why you see the lack
of remorse for a lot of these people [venues].”
Due to those fears, some of the genre’s artists are opting to move away from the drama.
“It was a part of our lives; we saw it as normal,” said Bronzeville
native Sasha Go Hard, who is featured in the theme song for the Comedy
Central series “South Side.” “It became a trend to start dissing people.
… These are not just songs that people are making; it’s really
happening. It was easy for me to branch away from drill. I went a
different route by touring overseas and making EDM songs.” Fist tap Big Don
tremr | Tada is correct
in his insistence on the need to approach politics from a partially
personological (rather than a purely systemic) approach. In order to
understand the roots of Oluo's deeply deficient and distorted
perspective, it is very important to understand that studies indicate major differences in narcissistic personality traits among individuals from different racial groups.
In
general, African Americans tend to exhibit the highest rates of
narcissistic personality traits, with East Asians (perhaps with the
exception of Tada) possessing the lowest levels of groups measured.
While some have suggested that the alleged "black self-esteem advantage"
that is well-known among social scientists, may explain these
heightened levels of narcissism, as a kind of compensatory attempt at
preserving self-esteem in the face of marginalization, other
marginalized groups, such as Hispanics, do not exhibit this heightened
self-esteem, throwing this hypothesis into question.
Such
a self-esteem advantage is likewise absent among East Asians, and East
Asians have lower levels of self-esteem than whites. Of course, since
East Asians, on average, have higher levels of income than Caucasians in
the U.S., we may rightly question whether it is proper to consider them
"marginalized" in any meaningful sense of the word. Virgil Zeigler-Hill
and Marion T. Wallace stated their "Overview and Predictions" in their
three studies as follows:
"Our
goal for the present studies was to examine whether racial differences
emerged for narcissism in a manner that was similar to the Black
self-esteem advantage. This was accomplished by conducting three studies
that compared the narcissism levels of Black and White individuals. The
present research extends the findings of Foster et al. (2003) by using
various measures of narcissism rather than relying solely on the NPI.
Also, the present studies accounted for factors related to narcissism
such as self-esteem level and socially desirable response tendencies in
order to clarify the nature of any racial differences in narcissism that
emerged. Given previous research concerning racial/ethnic differences
in narcissism as well as the fragile nature of the high levels of
self-esteem reported by Black individuals, we expected Black individuals
to report higher levels of narcissism than White individuals. Finally,
Study 3 included indicators of psychological adjustment so that we could
examine whether race moderated the association between narcissism and
psychological adjustment."
In
their second study, they found that "Black individuals possess higher
levels of narcissism than White individuals. The magnitude of the
differences varied across the facets of narcissism such that the largest
differences were found for those facets that captured grandiosity and
self-absorption...". Consistently across these studies, they found that
black individuals exhibit higher levels of narcissism than white
individuals. This is exactly what one would expect in a cultural context
in which activists in the Black Lives Matter movement insist that
blacks cannot be racist. Their claim is that the definition of "racism"
was changed a few decades ago, so that it can only be used to speak of
those whose systemic power allows them to express their prejudices
institutionally. Of course, the only reason they insist on this
definition is because of the tremendously negative emotional payload the
word "racism" has.
The
obvious underlying psychological motive in insisting that the
definition of "racism" can only refer to discrimination by those with
the institutional power to enforce their prejudices is that blacks
cannot be held accountable for their actions in spite of the fact that,
on an individual basis, they tend to engage in much higher rates of
race-based crime, and they likewise feel comfortable accusing whites of
being racist merely for being white, despite the fact that whites are
far less likely than blacks or Hispanics to engage in interracial crime
on an individual level. While systemic racism exists, we must emphasize
that in this post, we are merely following Tada's approach in looking at
racism from a purely personological perspective.
Time |We all know getting entangled in the
criminal justice system leads to serious consequences. But few among us
really understand that the slightest brush with the law bears an even
stricter potential sentence – a lifetime trapped in an inescapable cycle
of poverty.
A new report
from the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law shows that
$372 billion in earnings are lost in the United States each year for
those who have a criminal conviction or have spent time in prison. That
is enough money to close New York City’s poverty gap 60 times over.
While it is no secret that our criminal justice
system has economic implications for those who serve time, we now
understand just how devastating those impacts are. Time in prison
slashes annual earning potential in half, which results in a loss of
nearly half a million dollars over the course of a career. But if you
are a person of color, these gaps widen even more dramatically. Blacks
and Latinos who have a prison record experience a nearly flat trajectory
in earnings after imprisonment, while their white counterparts’
earnings climb steadily across a lifetime.
These lost earnings impact the entire country, and they
disproportionally drain resources and wealth from communities of color.
Blacks are jailed at more than triple the rate of whites, and nearly
half of all people serving effective life sentences are Black. This
overrepresentation exacerbates an already disturbingly wide racial
wealth gap that sees the median white family holding 10 times the wealth of the median Black family.
strategic-culture | People living in the western world are in the greatest fight for the
future of pluralist and republican forms of governance since the rise
and fall of fascism 75 years ago. As then, society had to be built up
from a war. Today’s war has been an economic war of the oligarchs
against the republic, and it increasingly appears that the coronavirus
pandemic is being used, on the political end, as a massive coup against
pluralist society. We are being confronted with this ‘great reset’,
alluding to post-war construction. But for a whole generation people
have already been living under an ever-increasing austerity regimen.
This is a regimen that can only be explained as some toxic combination
of the systemic inevitabilities of a consumer-driven society on the
foundation of planned obsolescence, and the never-ending greed and lust
for power which defines whole sections of the sociopathic oligarchy.
Recently we saw UK PM Boris Johnson stand in front of a ‘Build Back Better’ sign, speaking to the need for a ‘great reset’.
‘Build Back Better’ happens to be Joe Biden’s campaign slogan, which
raises many other questions for another time. But, to what extent are
the handlers who manage ‘Joe Biden’, and those managing ‘Boris Johnson’
working the same script?
The more pertinent question is to ask: in whose interest is this ‘great reset’ being carried out?
Certainly it cannot be left to those who have built their careers upon
the theory and practice of austerity. Certainly it cannot be left to
those who have built their careers as puppets of a morally decaying
oligarchy.
What Johnson calls the ‘Great Reset’, Biden calls the ‘Biden Plan for
a Clean Energy Revolution & Environmental Justice’. Certainly the
coming economy cannot be left to Boris Johnson or Joe Biden.
How is it that now Boris Johnson speaks publicly of a ‘great reset’,
whereas just months ago when those outside the ruling media paradigm
used this phrase, it was censured by corporate Atlanticist media as
being conspiratorial in nature? This is an excellent question posed by
Neil Clark.
And so we have by now all read numerous articles in the official
press talking about how economic life after coronavirus will never be
the same as it was before. Atlanticist press has even run numerous
opinion articles talking about how this may cut against globalization – a
fair point, and one which many thinking people by and large agree with.
Yet they have set aside any substantive discussion about what exists
in lieu of globalization, and what the economy looks like in various
parts of the world if it is not globalized. We have consistently spoken
of multipolarity, a term that in decades past was utilized frequently in
western vectors, in the sphere of geopolitics and international
relations. Now there is some strange ban on the term, and so we are now
bereft of a language with which to have an honest discussion about the
post-globalization paradigm.
sagepub | An early reader of this article posed a provocative question: is
there anything analytically distinct about the Internet? My answer
revealed my priors. “Of course the Internet is distinct,” I wanted to
say. But that is arguing from an embarrassingly basic logical fallacy.
The question of what the Internet does analytically that, say, “capital”
or “economy” or “culture” or “organizations” does not already do is
important. My answer is debatable, but the debate is worthwhile. I do
not know if the Internet adds something analytically distinct to our
social inquiries, but it adds something analytical precision. Other
constructs capture important dimensions of social life in a digital
society. For instance, one can argue that Silicon Valley is a racial
project (Noble and Roberts 2019; Watters 2015) or a sociohistorical construction of racial meanings, logics, and institutions (Omi and Winant 2014). White racial frames (Feagin 2020) or color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2006)
can elucidate how ironic humor about Black people, Muslims, and
immigrants in online gaming platforms reproduces “offline” racism (Fairchild 2020; Gray 2012).
These are just two examples of noteworthy approaches taken to studying
Internet technologies and “mainstream” sociological interests (i.e.,
economic cultures and discourses, respectively). Still, sociological
practice does not systematically engage with the social relations of
Internet technologies as analytical equals to the object of study. If
there is anything particular about Internet technologies for
sociological inquiry, we should make it explicit. And once explicit, we
should give it the same theoretical care as states, capital, and power. Daniels (2013) points us in the right direction when she argued that
the
reality is that in the networked society . . . racism is now global . .
., as those with regressive political agendas rooted in white power
connect across national boundaries via the Internet, a phenomenon that
runs directly counter to Omi and Winant’s conceptualization of the State
as a primary structural agent in racial formation.
Daniels
named to the global nature of both racism and the networks of capital we
gesture to when we say Internet or digital. It is an argument for
bringing back the political economy of race and racism. Internet
technologies are specific in how they have facilitated, legitimized, and
transformed states and capital within a global racial hierarchy. An app
with which underemployed skilled labor sells services to customers
(e.g., TaskRabbit) might be a U.S. racial project. But the capital that
finances the app is embedded in transnational capital flows. Global
patterns of racialized labor that determine what is “skill” and what is
“labor” mediate the value of labor and the rents the platform can
extract for mediating the laborer-customer relationship. Even the way we
move money on these platforms—“Cash App me!”—is networked to
supranational firms such as PayPal and Alibaba (Swartz 2020).
Internet technologies have atomized the political economy of
globalization with all the ideas about race, capital, racism, and
ethnicity embedded within. An understanding of the political economy of
Internet technologies adds a precise formulation of how this
transformation operates in everyday social worlds: privatization through
opacity and exclusion via inclusion. Both characteristics are
distinctly about the power of Internet technologies. And each
characteristic is important for the study of race and racism.
Understanding platform capitalism helps us understand how these two
characteristics are important.
Internet technologies have networked forms of capital (Srnicek and De Sutter 2017; Zhang 2020), consolidated capital’s coercive power (Azar, Marinescu, and Steinbaum forthcoming; Dube et al. 2020), flattened hierarchical organizations (Treem and Leonardi 2013; Turco 2016), and produced new containers for culture (Brock 2020; Noble 2018; Patton et al. 2017; Ray et al. 2017).
By that definition, the Internet has amplified and reworked existing
social relations. Platform capitalism moves us toward the analytical
importance of Internet technologies as sociopolitical regimes. Platforms
produce new forms of currency (i.e., data) and new forms of exchange
(e.g., cryptocurrencies), and they structure new organizational
arrangements among owners, workers, and consumers (see “prosumers”).
Even more important for the study of race and racism, platforms
introduce new layers of opacity into every facet of social life.
advancingtime |We need a new demographic category: WALMARTIANS.
They are almost always overweight, usually functionally
illiterate, often incapable of all but the most basic personal hygiene,
not merely unemployed but also unemployable, addicted to corn syrup junk
food and TV they were force-fed as children, convinced that nothing is
their fault because they've never heard otherwise and physically
aggressive whenever there is no prospect of immediate punishment.
Such types were rare when I was a lad but now they are 10 to 20 percent of the population and increasing.
It's not their fault but it's time to cull the herd.
It should be noted that I started witting this article in December of
2019 but dropped it onto the back burner because of its questionable
nature. At times, it seems deviant and dysfunctional behavior overlap.
On occasion I have found myself, surprised, shocked, amazed, and even
appalled at just how much the shape of the human body can be distorted
by obesity or a lack of exercise. Widening the scope to people
"deviating from the norm," at times it appears these often atypical
humans are
in a race to present us with the most bizarre. Some of these folks are
not just offbeat or unusual but seem to be making an over the top effort
to give
new meaning to the term freaky.
An article by Ralph Nader that appeared on Common Dreamsexplored
the idea that if you want to see where a country’s priorities lie you
should look at the direction its culture is moving.The article
which is linked above exhibits a very strong bit of a "leftist tinge,"
however, some of the points he makes seem valid. Nader writes, Plutocrats like to control the range of permissible public
dialogue. Plutocrats also like to shape what society values. If you want
to see where a country’s priorities lie, look at how it allocates its
money. He contends that while teachers and nurses earn comparatively little for performing
critical jobs, corporate bosses including those who pollute our planet
and bankrupt defenseless families, make millions.
It may be simplistic to label this or that, good or bad but it could be
argued our culture and society is geared much like the caste system.
Today we are seeing inequality soar and it can be argued this tends to
reduce the ability of individuals to move up the social ladder. The
question is just how much of this is by design and due to the culturally
elite putting their foot on the head of those below them.
Circling back to the subjects of weirdos, diversity, and individuality
could it be this is all being encouraged to weaken and divide the power
of the masses? For years Japan has been pointed to as a society that
functions with little friction. Much of the credit is attributed to
their culture and its homogeneous nature. Japan has a strong sense of
group and national identity and little or no ethnic or racial diversity.
Another unique
aspect of Japanese society has a highly structured approach to managing
and resolving these differences.
jacobinmag | Simply put, Jessica Krug was a minstrel act, a racist caricature. But
while Krug’s persona was certainly offensive, what’s far more offensive
is that there is a demand for this kind of performance in liberal
academic circles.
I don’t know George Washington University history professor Jessica
Krug. I have no special insights into either her motives or personal
struggles, nor do I have any reason to feel personally betrayed by the
recent revelations that she had been passing for black for many years.
But while the court of public opinion has already found her guilty of
at least one, perpetual count of “cultural appropriation,” in my view
this conclusion misses the mark. To be clear, if I did not find “Jess La
Bombalera” offensive, I wouldn’t have bothered writing this essay.
Still, if one considers, first, that culture — the folk’s shared
sensibilities informed by common experiences — exists, on some level, to
be appropriated, second, the variety of black experiences precludes the
existence of a singular black culture, and third, the implications for
mass culture of thirty-years of mainstream hip hop, then calling Krug’s
performance “appropriation of black culture” only compounds the problem
Krug personifies.
If Krug is not guilty of appropriating “black culture,” she is guilty
of attempting to establish her bona fides as a scholar of black people
through a persona that both pandered to and reinforced commonplace
stereotypes about black and brown people. Simply put, Krug was a
minstrel act, a racist caricature.
But while Krug’s persona was certainly offensive, what’s far more
offensive is that there is a demand for this kind of performance in some
liberal academic circles.
Because I’ve lived most of my life either on the near periphery or
within academia, I’ve had nearly four decades of experience with the
creepy essentialist language of “racial authenticity” that lives and
thrives in more than one corner of putatively liberal academia. As a
result, I learned a long time ago that some white liberals expect black
and brown people to “perform” in ways that comport with their
well-meaning, usually underclass-informed, and fundamentally racist
expectations of black people.
counterpunch | One learns what it means to be white from other white people. It
comes in stories and warnings and descriptions as part of childhood.
Most of those stories are about black people. For white racialized
consciousness, black or brown people become characters in a system of
narratives, anecdotes, and images. In later life, white people relate to
black people through those stories. And they relate to other white
people who see those stories the same way. They enter into friendships
and find social residence in their common understanding language and
attitudes of those stories. In effect, it is not black people they
relate to as they become white, but the white people who tell them the
stories, and to their a white community.
In sum, racism is not a relation between white people and black. It
is a relation between white people for which “black people” are the
means. (As Simone de Beauvoir used to say in a parallel vein, marriage
is a relation between men for which women are the means.) How is a white
person to talk about race if they look at it as a black-white relation?
There is no reciprocity with respect to black people. The power,
gratuitous hostility, domination, inferiorization, patronizing
attitudes, etc. that characterize racism only go in one direction. The
stories are just there to teach white people how to do it. Violence also
only goes in one direction. White people kill, harass, patronize, and
renarrativize black people as part of racializing them. They know they
are dealing from the bottom of the deck. It is a power given them by
white supremacist institutionalities. Thus, racism provides the terms by
which white people can take each for granted.
When black people appear to reciprocate, to fight back, to scorn, to
ignore, to placate, those are not gestures of violence but of
self-defense and possibly rebellion. When done individually, the deck is
stacked against them.
If racism is a form of street-level solidarity among whites, it will
often be enforced by various means, even those of violence. The
solidarism among segregationists, for instance, can take the form of
enlistment to action, sometimes as a racializing project, and sometimes
as “behavior modification.” Against the segregationists, the liberals
argue that a hard exclusionary stance against black people will only
cause trouble and rebellion. The better path is to integrate with its
subtle long-range stratifications. Both see themselves looking out for
the stability of white society, while preserving different forms of
black subordination.
Both segregationists and liberals are fulfilling duties of membership
in whiteness. And neither will disown it. Perhaps they refused to hear
Kaepernick’s gesture of revolt out of a premonition that it would
require them to deny their whiteness. But that is not the question. If
one learns one’s whiteness from other white people, from whom could one
learn to unlearn it?
In closing, we might mention one great vulnerability in whiteness,
the esthetic dimension. It resides in the recognition that the
difference in color between people is actually beautiful. The contrast
between a white arm and a dark brown one set alongside each other is
imminently pleasing if seen in its reality, free of the imposition of
“good vs. evil.” The early colonists in Jamestown saw this immediately
when the first Africans arrived in 1619. The colony quickly tried three
times to outlaw mixed marriages, each time with harsher penalties. And
each time it failed miserably. (Cf. Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization, Temple UP, 2003, pp 54-57)
The theory has long been in vogue within academics. Trump now seeks
to root it out within the administrative state. Among the ideas
underpinning CRT, now formally condemned by the White House, is that the
law and all accompanying legal institutions are inherently racist, and
that race itself has no biological grounds. The concept of ethnicity is,
instead, the product of a white society that uses systems and
institutions to advance its own interests at the expense of minorities.
Why does this academic thesis matter? Because it drives government
action. And because, during this summer of unrest following George
Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, the
president has been asked numerous times if he believes that systemic
racism is a problem in America. His answer has been no, and a clearer
picture of his thinking comes in the form of a memo authored by OMB
Director Russ Vought.
“It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch
agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’
government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,”
Vought writes in the memo, obtained first by RCP.
“For example, according to press reports, employees across the
Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are
told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where
they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism,’” he continued.
As the country grapples with questions of race and equality in
policing, Trump has ordered that any programing relating to “white
privilege” end immediately. According to the White House, such ideas are
“divisive, anti-American propaganda.”
nonsite |In light of recent events we thought to republish Adolph Reed’s
2016 essay on racial disparity and police violence. We include a new
introduction to the piece by Cedric Johnson, “The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption,” that considers the essay in view of the contemporary situation.
Some readers will know that I’ve contended that, despite its
proponents’ assertions, antiracism is not a different sort of
egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class
politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial
class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a
political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations.
Moreover, although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but
empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things,
antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that
its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the
distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes
the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable
along racial (and other identitarian) lines. As I and my colleague
Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the
burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair
if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the
dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever
LGBTQ, etc. That is the neoliberal gospel of economic justice,
articulated more than a half-century ago by Chicago neoclassical
economist Gary Becker, as nondiscriminatory markets that reward
individual “human capital” without regard to race or other invidious
distinctions.
We intend to make a longer and more elaborate statement of this
argument and its implications, which antiracist ideologues have
consistently either ignored or attempted to dismiss through
mischaracterization of the argument or ad hominem attack.1
For now, however, I want simply to draw attention to how insistence on
reducing discussion of killings of civilians by police to a matter of
racism clouds understanding of and possibilities for effective response
to the deep sources of the phenomenon.
Available data (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/?tid=a_inl)
indicate, to the surprise of no one who isn’t in willful denial, that
in this country black people make up a percentage of those killed by
police that is nearly double their share of the general American
population. Latinos are killed by police, apparently, at a rate roughly
equivalent to their incidence in the general population. Whites are
killed by police at a rate between just under three-fourths (through the
first half of 2016) and just under four-fifths (2015) of their share of
the general population. That picture is a bit ambiguous because seven
percent of those killed in 2015 and fourteen percent of those killed
through June of 2016 were classified racially as either other or
unknown. Nevertheless, the evidence of gross racial disparity is clear:
among victims of homicide by police blacks are represented at twice
their rate of the population; whites are killed at somewhat less than
theirs. This disparity is the founding rationale for the branding
exercise2
called #Black Lives Matter and endless contentions that imminent danger
of death at the hands of arbitrary white authority has been a
fundamental, definitive condition of blacks’ status in the United States
since slavery or, for those who, like the Nation’s Kai Wright,
prefer their derivative patter laced with the seeming heft of obscure
dates, since 1793. In Wright’s assessment “From passage of the 1793
Fugitive Slave Act forward, public-safety officers have been empowered
to harass black bodies [sic] in the defense of private capital and the
pursuit of public revenue.”3
This line of argument and complaint, as well as the demand for ritual
declarations that “black lives matter,” rest on insistence that
“racism”—structural, systemic, institutional, post-racial or however
modified—must be understood as the cause and name of the injustice
manifest in that disparity, which is thus by implication the singular or
paramount injustice of the pattern of police killings.
But, when we step away from focus on racial disproportions, the
glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or nearly half of all those
killed annually by police. And the demand that we focus on the racial
disparity is simultaneously a demand that we disattend from other
possibly causal disparities. Zaid Jilani found, for example, that
ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with
median family income of less than $100,00 and that the median family
income in neighborhoods where police killed was $52,907.4 And, according to the Washington Post data,
the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of
population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages
6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota
4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible
that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated
among their very small black populations—New Mexico 2.5%; Alaska 3.9%;
South Dakota 1.9%; Arizona 4.6%, Wyoming 1.7%, and Colorado 4.5%.
However, with the exception of Colorado—where blacks were 17% of the 29
people killed by police—that does not seem to be the case. Granted, in
several of those states the total numbers of people killed by police
were very small, in the low single digits. Still, no black people were
among those killed by police in South Dakota, Wyoming, or Alaska. In New
Mexico, there were no blacks among the 20 people killed by police in
2015, and in Arizona blacks made up just over 2% of the 42 victims of
police killing.
What is clear in those states, however, is that the great
disproportion of those killed by police have been Latinos, Native
Americans, and poor whites. So someone should tell Kai Wright et al to
find another iconic date to pontificate about; that 1793 yarn has
nothing to do with anything except feeding the narrative of endless
collective racial suffering and triumphalist individual
overcoming—“resilience”—popular among the black professional-managerial
strata and their white friends (or are they just allies?) these days.
politico | In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County,
Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new
whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status,
arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being
considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in
the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in
motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In
1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students
enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the
following year, that number fell to zero.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the
treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a
preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies”
tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government
was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President
Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new
policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United
States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which
forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools
were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and
therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations
to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible
contributions.
Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.
In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially
white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican
Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties,
vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy
Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard
Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely
stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he
could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would
constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal
behind conservative causes.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives]
in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated
throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the
mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will
have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed
that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited.
“The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just
waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority
acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard
around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own
account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique
evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal
Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to
get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,”
Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially
as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation
academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School,
inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some
states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor
than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in
Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its
first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain
whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school
responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial
segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly
sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in
terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation.
For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their
educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of
course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how
to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The
Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own
way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob
Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a
part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an
attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the
student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans.
The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial
dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated
interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of
warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax
exemption.
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally,
Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger,
longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview,
the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school
community about what could happen with government interference” in the
affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue
that got us all involved.”
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Such types were rare when I was a lad but now they are 10 to 20 percent of the population and increasing.
It's not their fault but it's time to cull the herd.