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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31253 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I was reflecting on how western politicians today use terms and words that have double meaning with the media and the electorate, with one meaning the one that people usually understand, while the other is academia-made and is often a true example of Motte-and-Bailey.

For example, terms like minority;

Minority for the common man (and the electorate!) means a group that is inferior in numbers in comparison to a majority. So, if you survey with a poll the opinion of the people, it appears that the majority (!) is in favour of helping minorities (because it is the right thing to do!).

Meanwhile, the de facto academic term for minority is "a group that is ontologically oppressed, and so it needs social justice in order to destroy the oppressive hierarchy of the majority"

This has as a consequence;

  • That politicians and their class of activists have the second definition in their minds, and do policies that follow it.

  • Meanwhile you (an individual in a debate, a party, a media organization) cannot dispute the effect and the reasoning of the former set of policies because, if you do, everyone and your mom assume that you are against the minorities as affirmed by the common sense definition, and so you are a political extremist!

This manipulation of language at a core level create a situation where extremists do policies that are extreme and unpopular while being elevated as sympathetic moderates, and the moderates that try to oppose them for whatever reasons are labeled as political extremists.

I have no idea if this kind of method to do politics was common in the pre- internet or pre-neoliberal era or whatever, but it creates an insurmountable situation where, unless the people "begin to notice", it is impossible to oppose the manipulators, starting from the point that the manipulators have probably the majority of media and capital behind them.

the de facto academic term for minority is "a group that is ontologically oppressed, and so it needs social justice in order to destroy the oppressive hierarchy of the majority"

...Politicians and their class of activists have the second definition in their minds, and do policies that follow it.

Isn’t this assuming the conclusion?

There is room for plausible deniability between common, practical definitions and academic ones. Politicians are capable of exploiting this for tactical advantage. I’m sure they do so...occasionally.

I scanned a few Democrat sites to see if I could find any examples.

  • Beto O’Rourke: no dice, even on the LGBTQ or voting rights or immigration pages.

  • Adam Schiff only uses “disadvantaged communities” or “people of color” when laying out his priorities.

  • Bennie Thompson doesn’t use “minority” either.

I don’t think this sort of word game is as popular as you suspect. If you have examples, I’d be happy to discuss whether or not they really meant the strong form.

"People of color" still includes Asians, who the left often wants to exclude.

Unless you're trying to get into Harvard...

BIPOC to the rescue.

BIPOC still includes "people of color" at the end, therefore literally including Asians.

According to set theory, whether you say "the integers" or "58, 59, and the integers", you get literally the exact same set. According to Grice's Maxims, though, only in the latter case do 57 and 113 need to make sure they know their place. Keeping such distinctions overtly deniable feels like just an attempt to placate literalists, like reiterating "All animals are equal" before clarifying that "some animals are more equal than others"?

Well, that's the whole point of the original post. The public understands the phrase to mean its literal definition, but academics are manipulating language so that they can intend one thing and have their own supporters take it to mean something else.

But no. It is exclusively just the black and indigenous ones. So the not-Asian POCs.

BIPOC is generally known to be an acronym for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Given that People of Color covers the 1st 2 anyway, it seems like there's an implicit "other" before "People," and it serves as a rank ordering.

That's not my understanding. Black and Indigenous People of Color. Asians need not apply.

As a further piece of evidence:

As a light-skinned East Asian man, I have never been randomly stopped by the police, and no doorman has ever assumed I was the delivery boy. None of the serious indignities and disadvantages of being a minority in America has been inflicted on me, yet I have accrued all the benefits of being a person of color, particularly when it comes to my career.

…

[the white people in my life don’t realize I am, if not white, then about as close to it as one can get.]

(It is telling that the author of that piece reveals to being of mixed East Asian/white heritage but is still handwringing about all this.)

The entire issue was ostensibly about “Asian-Americans”, but my East Asian girlfriend got was not very happy about the coverage (she said outright that she thinks it is discriminatory from the progressive writers, that if it were South Asians or black or any other race/ethnicity, they wouldn’t have done such a dreadful job and had such awful art). While I am agnostic to those particular claims, I am inclined to agree that it represents ; most of the pieces don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Nevertheless it is evidence of attempting to equate “Asian” (esp. East Asian) with being white-adjacent, whatever that means.

I recall at my job hearing a Sri Lankan colleague remark casually about how “we three ethnic people” (in a group) have culture and whatnot, while white people didn’t; I remarked that the rest of the group there were not white, but East Asian; she replied kind of dismissively that “you know what I mean, you know, brown people”. I think that is as clear a sort of equivocation of East Asian with white as I can find, and that it can be said casually to other people in a work environment tells me much.

Or take this piece of ridiculousness, such that it is.

This was before racialised thinking was popularised in the 18th century.

It was then that scientists started to divide the world up into groupings of colour. Colour denoted civilisation. At the top were white Europeans, at the bottom black people and all others, graded on a sliding scale.

This idea that white people invented the concept of racism and racial supremacy and that they did so relatively recently is an idea that's absolutely ridiculous. I find it very difficult to believe that tribalism based on appearance is something that just became entrenched in the 18th century and that one race is responsible for - race is a fairly strong visual indicator of cultural similarity and in-group status, and would've been an even more useful heuristic in the past when international travel was more difficult and people couldn't so freely move from one place to another.

And not to mention, of course, the obviously tautological nature of this:

For the past three centuries, power and whiteness have been synonymous. From the British Empire to the American century, white nations have exported violence, committed genocide, stolen land and made it all legal.

If whiteness is power, Xi Jinping is its champion. The continuation of white power, in darker skin.

If you define every act of imperialism and racism as an act of "whiteness" regardless of if the people who are doing it are actually white or not, then of course over any time frame power and whiteness are going to be synonymous since you have by definition made it so. There is no circumstance where it won't be whiteness.

This idea that white people invented the concept of racism and racial supremacy and that they did so relatively recently is an idea that's absolutely ridiculous. I find it very difficult to believe that tribalism based on appearance is something that just became entrenched in the 18th century and that one race is responsible for - race is a fairly strong visual indicator of cultural similarity and in-group status, and would've been an even more useful heuristic in the past when international travel was more difficult and people couldn't so freely move from one place to another.

I don't know whether phenotype-based tribalism was a thing before 18th-century Western racism (I suspect it was in China, at least), but it wasn't the main thing. Our very word for a tribal membership test (shibboleth) is a reminder that the OT Jews (who were a tribe defined by common genetic descent) nevertheless used diction and not appearance as the practical sorting algorithm. There is an ongoing argument about how many "Aethiopians" (actual Sub-Saharan Black Africans, as opposed to "Africans" who were whitish North Africans) there were in the Roman Empire, but the number was a lot greater than zero, and they were seen as just as Roman as anyone else who ate garum and aspired to own and wear a toga.

In the Middle Ages in Europe, religion-based tribalism trumped phenotype-based tribalism. When the Crusaders established contact with Christian Ethiopia, they didn't think "Black and heretic - must be outgroup". They thought they had found the lost kingdom of Prester John and immediately sought an alliance.

I don't know whether phenotype-based tribalism was a thing before 18th-century Western racism (I suspect it was in China, at least), but it wasn't the main thing.

There is always a mix of factors influencing how tribal lines get drawn. However, I think there's evidence that phenotype-based tribalism is very old, challenging the idea that race thinking developed in the modern West. And it's not just China that did this, there's other pre-modern societies where racial prejudices are evident.

For example, the medieval Arabs had a phenotypic race classification, and seemed to have quite a negative view of African blacks (having enslaved a lot of them).

"Many medieval Arabic texts categorise people phenotypically into three types of skin-colour: white (al-bīḍān, 'the white ones' associated particularly with Arabs), red (associated particularly with Romans, or Europeans more generally), and black (al-sūdān 'the black ones', associated particularly with darker complexioned Africans)."

"[E]thnocentric prejudice towards black people is widely evident among medieval Arabs, for a variety of reasons. ... [I]n the Islamic period, dark-skinned Africans in the Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere in Caliphate tended to be slaves. For example, al-Ṭabarī estimated that in Southern Basra alone there were around 15,000 around the 870s.[6]: 122  This situation encouraged Arabs to view themselves as superior to Black people, not least as a mechanism for Arabs to justify the enslavement of others.[6]: 98–101  For example, Ibn Buṭlān composed a noted, stereotyping description of the qualities of slaves of different races, which is relatively positive about Nubians, but otherwise particularly negative about the characteristics of Black people.[7]: 108, 122–23  These negative characteristics included the idea that black men were sexually voracious; thus the most recurrent stereotype of black people in the Thousand and One Nights is the black male slave fornicating with a white woman,[12] while the Egyptian historian al-Abshibi (d. 1446) wrote that "[i]t is said that when the [black] slave is sated, he fornicates, when he is hungry, he steals."[13] Allegedly, such was his distrust of Black people, Abu Muslim al-Khurasani massacred four thousand of his own Black soldiers after completing the Abbasid Revolution.[6]: 122  Abuse of phenotypical features associated with Black African people is found even in the poems composed by al-Mutanabbī (d. 965) in both praise and criticism of the Black vizier of Egypt Abū al-Misk Kāfur (d. 968), which variously seek either to excuse or to lambast Kāfur for his colour and heritage."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Arab_attitudes_to_Black_people

Of course when it comes to things that far back, there's often a problem with simple lack of documentation. And there's also a lack of drive or motivation to assess historical racism perpetrated by non-Westerners (because it can't be slotted into the woke worldview, and because they believe acknowledging this would shift a portion of the blame off the people they would like to scapegoat for the social ills they denounce). But the evidence that we do have seems to suggest that phenotypic tribalism was very much a thing long before the time that the social constructionists believe white Westerners to have "created" or "popularised" racism.

the medieval Arabs seemed to have quite a negative view of African blacks

The 9th and 10th century attitudes you quote weren't just a Dark Ages fluke, either. Look at Ibn Khaldun, 14th century. Wikipedia still calls him "one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages", but Wikiquote reveals that some of his social "science" was ... not so great.

From your link:

"The only people who accept slavery are the Negroes, owing to their low degree of humanity and proximity to the animal stage. Other persons who accept the status of slave do so as a means of attaining high rank, or power, or wealth, as is the case with the Mameluke Turks in the East and with those Franks and Galicians who enter the service of the state [in Spain]."

And this from an Arab who lived long before the 18th century.

Or take this piece of ridiculousness, such that it is.

Oh, my.

The Japanese derided the Chinese as "yellow". As Michael Keevak points out, Japan saw itself on par with Western powers. Its imperialism mirrored the imperialism of white colonisers. In the West, the Japanese were still seen as "coloured people", Keevak says, but "maybe not as yellow as the Chinese." For the past three centuries, power and whiteness have been synonymous. From the British Empire to the American century, white nations have exported violence, committed genocide, stolen land and made it all legal. China, like so many other non-white nations, has felt the sting of white imperialism.

Uh... is the claim here that the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere was a white supremacist project?

the Chinese Communist Party itself mirrors whiteness. The irony is Xi has also become what he opposes. He is a Han nationalist — his idea of Chinese power is ethnic Han superiority — persecuting non-Han, non-white people in his own country. If whiteness is power, Xi Jinping is its champion. The continuation of white power, in darker skin.

And that the CCP and Xi are white supremacist? Like, is the idea that anyone who's not a helpless victim and who has agency in the world is white?

Uh... is the claim here that the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere was a white supremacist project?

Not even just that, but:

For the past three centuries, power and whiteness have been synonymous.

So the Manchu domination of the Han, quite explicit in the Qing, is also white supremacy.

And that the CCP and Xi are white supremacist? Like, is the idea that anyone who's not a helpless victim and who has agency in the world is white?

I assume that is what they are getting at.

Is this some sort of AUKUS plan to poke the Chinese Tiger? Publish journalistic equivalents of this meme aimed at Xi?

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