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Notes -
The tweet said:
It should also be noted that Noel Ignatiev regarded anti-semitism as a "Crime against humanity." So according to Harvard professor Ignatiev there's a moral impetus to abolish the white race by any means necessary, but anti-semitism is a Crime against Humanity. The surge of anti-semitism is caused by the Noticing of this bitterly hostile social consensus. The actions of Israel are going a long way in revealing this social consensus for what it is.
It would probably be prudent to offer the full context here:
...
So, he's objecting to what he sees as specific Jewish privilege and is specifically answers the claim that this action would make him an anti-Semite. Seems like context that one would want to include and not just drop this one individual sentence here, whatever one things about Ignatiev's other statements.
Can you explain how the context contradicts my summary? He vocally supported ending the white race, while at the same time declaring anti-Semitism a Crime against Humanity. That was my statement, and your context does not refute that in any way. Sure, he made that affirmation in order to defend himself from the accusation of anti-Semitism for his position on Harvard food accommodations but that is no matter. What I have said is not changed whatsoever by the context you provided, he simultaneously held both positions exactly as I described.
You are being intentionally obtuse. You are obviously intelligent enough to parse Ignatiev’s actual beliefs, yet you intentionally flatten their nuance whenever they appear to deviate from your simplistic framing.
Let’s assume for a moment that Ignatiev is forthrightly representing his own beliefs. He wishes to abolish the cultural belief that appearance and ancestry should confer any prestige or preferential treatment upon any individual. He, like any committed critical theorist, believes that an inherent quality of “whiteness” — not simply a broadly European phenotype, but the cluster of meaning and historical importance retroactively applied to people with that phenotype — is a belief in a hierarchy in which white people are in some sense more important, more valuable, etc., than non-white people are.
In that sense, it is also true that he wants to “abolish the black race”; not to abolish the African phenotype, but to abolish the idea that anyone should care what ancestral group an individual appears to descend from. However, it means something different to lead with a call to abolish a powerful, hegemonically-empowered group than it does to lead with a call to abolish a more vulnerable, historically-persecuted group. When it comes to Jews, it makes sense for Ignatiev to say that Jewish people have just as much a right to their own private religious beliefs as anybody else, but that these religious beliefs should not be made into a template for policymaking, nor should Jews be treated as any more special than anyone else. (As they are in Israel, which is why Ignatiev has repeatedly expressed opposition to the existence of Israel.)
In this framing, anti-Semitism is bad specifically because it is one example of a larger category of beliefs: namely, that an individual’s ancestry or inherited religious beliefs should have any bearing on one’s treatment of, or expectations about, that individual. It happened that the context of the conversation Ignatiev was having centered around a Jewish-specific issue. (And one on which, as @Stefferi pointed out, Ignatiev came down on the side that did not advantage Jews rather than the one that did.) Had that conversation been about a black-centric issue, he would have said that anti-blackness is a crime against humanity.
Now, if all of these beliefs are his actual beliefs, there is no hypocrisy there at all. He is a standard-issue hardcore blank statist secular progressive who wants to abolish nations, dissolve unchosen bonds between individuals in order to liberate them to pursue a life of pure self-discovery and voluntary commitments. There’s no secret undercurrent of wanting to see Jewish people secretly privileging themselves while dissolving other macro-scale unchosen identities.
And of course you can say he’s lying, and that in fact his commitment to blank-slate liberated individualism does actually have a secret exception clause for Jews. (This appears to be your claim.) But then, if you’ve opened the door to accusing him of cynically lying, why are you certain that he’s honest about wanting to abolish whiteness, but also certain that he’s lying about not thinking anti-Semitism is any worse (or any better) than any other form of bigotry? Why couldn’t he be making a bombastic call to “abolish whiteness” because it’s catchy, provocative, and likely to get him a lot of attention, interview requests, and speaking engagements? Why is it that you believe Jews are liars, except when they say negative thing about white people?
Like, Ignatiev’s contention is that there is a society-wide belief that phenotypically-European people are more special than other races, and that’s it’s somehow important to keep them pure and make sure they continue to hold all the important positions of power in as many advanced first-world countries as possible, both because they’re entitled to those countries (“we built them”) and because they’re more qualified to competently run them, whereas other races would fuck it up. That’s what he means when he talks about “whiteness” and what he has explicitly argued for abolishing.
And this appears to be a pretty accurate descriptor of your beliefs! You do think those things about white people! When I’ve expressed enthusiasm about miscegenation between white people and East Asians, you’ve reacted with shock and horror, because you take it for granted that preserving the genetic purity of the white race is of considerable importance. When others have argued in favor of skilled non-white immigration into white countries, you’ve expressed fervent opposition because you don’t think non-whites would be responsible, capable, conscientious wielders of power within white countries. Basically you want non-white people to stay in the parts of the world that currently have all the non-white people, because you want them to stay separate from white people. You’ve made this explicit! The caricature of “whiteness” which Ignatiev attacks — one which, in truth, vanishingly few white people in the 21st century believe in — is the reality of your belief system.
If you want to claim that Ignatiev is making sone larger, more genocidal claim about wanting to directly harm all people of fair skin, or all people of European descent — and also that he wishes to exempt himself from this by retreating into a defensive and subversive Jewish identity — then you have to actually contend with the substance of his stated arguments.
Obviously I understand Ignatiev's beliefs, better than you apparently. No, I don't think Ignatiev is calling for a literal murder of all white people. Instead he is using his own non-negligible cultural influence to deconstruct and pathologize White Identity, in an effort to undermine it. I understand that perfectly well, I more than most here understand that you don't undermine a race by just committing murder, you do it at a symbolic and ultimately cultural level. It remains an expression of a strong ethnic hostility even if it's not actually advocating for physical violence.
Citation strongly needed! He regards the Black Race as a social construct also, but one that is sympathetic and he does not call to Abolish Blackness. If you're going to provide a claim for that, please provide evidence. While you're at it- provide evidence that he called to Abolish Jewry. Of course he did neither such thing, it is Whites who who receive the enmity of his ideological worldview and no other racial group.
Calling for the Abolition of Whiteness while simultaneously declaring anti-semitism as "Crime against Humanity" is a far more important demand for Jewish privilege than the question over whether Jews at Harvard should be given dedicated kitchens. He is demanding Jewish privilege by socially deconstructing White identity while declaring in-kind criticism of Jewish identity to be a Crime against Humanity. His position on dining at Harvard notwithstanding, which is entirely irrelevant to the question at hand.
Please provide evidence Ignatiev called for the Abolition of Blackness or Jewry. He did not. He called for the Abolition of Whiteness, and he declared anti-semitism to be a crime against humanity. Which is exactly what I said in my original post.
I challenged your absurdly naive notion that combining all the races of the world would magically combine all the relative strengths of each group into one superior specimen:
That was the juvenile claim you made which I challenged.
I don’t believe that this is what he meant by “anti-Semitism”! I believe he meant a far more quotidian antipathy towards individual Jewish people as a result of their religion or ancestry. I believe that his frequently-expressed opposition to Israel is part of his larger opposition to the reification of unchosen identity groups. If “Jewry”, as you’re using it, means “Jews cooperating and seeing each other’s fates as inherently tied together, in both past and present, on account of their shared inherited identity,” then yes, I think he pretty clearly wants that to stop.
What I think you’re either ignoring or failing to recognize, though, is that as a leftist he believes it’s important to prioritize. Leftists believe in tackling the very big problem (the centuries-long privileging of fair-skinned people over dark-skinned people, which is still ongoing and still profoundly negatively impacts the latter’s lives) right now, and then later on down the line, once that’s been done, future progressives can start working on dissolving the other, less currently-powerful unchosen identity groups.
Again, why would Ignatiev waste his time writing books and giving speeches about “abolishing blackness” when he knows full well that this would simply introduce massive friction and mutual recriminations within his political coalition? Just to prove to you that he’s not a hypocrite? It’s not like you’d hate him or oppose him any less if he did so. So why should he care about appeasing your sensitivities?
One possible answer is that it makes white people feel bad and defensive when he fails to do so, and that this is bad — either because it is a priori bad to make people feel bad about their race, or because it’s politically counterproductive and unnecessarily makes enemies of a numerous and powerful group. And certainly the latter, at least, is a good reason to not to what Ignatiev is doing, even if one shares his philosophical priors. I was precisely one of those white progressives who got scared off by the explicit anti-white antipathy expressed by guys like Ignatiev, and who discovered a positive white identity as a result. (I’ve since lost some of the enthusiasm I had about that identity at the time, but it was sufficient to ensure I could never again be a leftist.)
Still, there are, demonstrably, plenty of white people who are comfortable with the proposition that whiteness could be fully deconstructed, without that having any serious negative impact on the material reality of their lives. That the hegemonic culture centering whiteness could be dismantled, and that instead of another group taking up the whip hand and using it to take their own turn as the hegemonic oppressor, everyone could just all agree to be deracinated self-inventing individuals. You and I both agree that they’re wrong about this — that there will always be a hegemonic culture in any given polity, and that such a culture will likely always have something to do with unchosen/inherited identity groups. But that’s a testable claim, and committed leftists really do believe that, in the fullness of time, they can stop that pattern from recurring. And given that belief, I think it’s fair to say that they are anti-Whiteness™️ without being anti-White People.
Their main problem is that they are, unwittingly or otherwise, politically allied to vindictive non-whites who are very consciously committed to simply changing which group(s) will be the next up to hold the whip. I see Ignatiev as more of the naïve idealist who really believes this time will be different and we can finally defeat racial identitarianism for real. You appear to see him more as the consciously-vindictive aggrieved minority who wants to be the next one to hold the whip hand. Is this an accurate characterization?
Ok, well let's just take a look at the undefeated Uno Reverso.
If I said: "The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the Jewish race" do you think Ignatiev would regard that as anti-semitism? Obviously he would. So you just switch "White" from "Jew" in his own rhetoric and it goes from "moral good" to "crime against humanity."
This is funny Hoffmeister. Firstly, I never accused Ignatiev of hypocrisy, he's a Jew who is hostile to White Identity. That's not hypocritical. Ben Shapiro is not hypocritical for strongly opposing White Identitarianism while strongly supporting Jewish identitarianism. He's not being a hypocrite, he's being a Jew who is strongly motivated by his religion and ethnic identity.
But secondly, you were the one who said "In that sense, it is also true that he wants to 'abolish the black race'" without providing a shred of evidence.
In fact, the situation is worse. You, Hoffmeister, accuse me of being an equal-offender racist- racist against everyone, while I accuse you of being even worse- only racist against blacks. It's telling then that you are defensive of Ignatiev who defends Black Identity on the basis that it musters resistance to White Identity. So his real position is the precise opposite of what you imagine. He supports using Black Identity as a tool to undermine White Identity, which is why his ideas found such prominent reception during the BLM Great Awakening. In this way, his position is basically equivalent to the anti-semitic conception of the conniving Jew who wants to manipulate Blacks to get back at whitey. This is literally Ignatiev, but you remain totally blind to this pattern of behavior and the writ-large alliance between Jewish intellectuals, Blacks, and the Civil Rights movement.
He hates White Identity, he wants to destroy it- and there's no evidence for hatred of Black or Jewish identity, in fact precisely the opposite. That is my characterization of his beliefs.
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