[FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

[David Eric Smith]

Here I think we have to ask Ta-Nehisi Coates, and simply accept whatever he says, making a good-faith effort to not pick nits in the sentences out of context, but to engage with the causal picture he argues at the system level.

One part of the argument is: Whiteness is a myth (both figuratively and in the more analytical sense).  It is fluid and opportunistic, and constantly reconfigured to maintain and concentrate power structures.  So there is no real intrinsic to it; it is only instrumental and must be understood in that functional way.

The other part of it, which looks opposite if nitpicked, would be: You don’t get to claim there is no white and therefore you have it as tough as everybody else.  There are real oppressed and real oppressors, and if you are in the group that contains the oppressors, then you are an oppressor, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not.  The oppressed don’t get to opt out of their group, so neither do you.  So it’s not _all that_ fluid, or at least not fluid in a way that would let you off the hook.

There was a nice article in the NYT about two weeks ago (or three?), arguing that the US is in important ways a caste society first and foremost, and that race is recruited as an instrument to define and implement caste.  I find the logic of that argument both plausible in mind and viscerally appropriate in experience.  It also gets around the awkwardnesses of language in talking about whether “whiteness” is or is not fluid, to whom and for what purposes, because caste is a language specifically about the implementation of power, so it is automatically functionalist.  

However, tread carefully:  I hear Bernie saying what in essence is the same thing — maybe because I know something about the historical data on social mobility through Sam Bowles over years at SFI, and those who start trapped also stay trapped when everybody is trapped, so mechanistically I hear that part of Bernie’s characterization as correct — and yet a very large majority of black voters did not think Bernie was their ally.  I don’t know if they disfavored him for the same reasons I preferred others (by quite a lot) to him, or for completely different reasons such as hearing him as denying that race oppression is a problem.  In the small bit of his heavily repetitive rhetoric that I heard, I never heard that, but I’m not black and I didn’t listen to it all with fine attention, so what I did or didn’t hear doesn’t count.

Once the society is full of mines, it doesn’t matter where you walk, you are going to lose a leg.  So probably best to accept that everybody is in the same boat, and be on each other’s side trying to get to something better.

Eric



> On Jul 31, 2020, at 11:29 AM, jon zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Frank says: "The Republic by Plato"
> Merle says: "Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading
> requirements were written by White men."
> 
> One point that interests me here is the determination that Plato was white.
> Perhaps he should be considered white: he likely owned slaves, he was
> educated, and likely had about as much privilege as anyone could imagine at
> the time. On the other hand, if any of his ancestors found themselves in the
> new world circa 1900 they likely would have found themselves digging the
> most profound ditches. What exactly is meant by white anyway? Is it possible
> that producing work powerful enough to influence 2500 years of white
> thinking is what makes Plato white? What about white Jesus?
> 
> 
> 
> --
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