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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32148 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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tyre nichols, a 29 year old black man in memphis, was beaten up by several cops on jan 7th and died three days later. all five of the cops, who are black, were fired, arrested, and charged; the police chief denounced their actions as 'inhumane'. the bodycam video will be released about 3 hours after this post at 7pm EST. hopefully we won't see a recurrence of the floyd riots, although several cities, including atlanta which is dealing with its own controversial cop shooting incident, are preparing for an eventful evening. the police reform movement, which has stalled, may also be pushed back into the forefront of public consciousness.

4 videos have been released on the city of memphis vimeo account: https://vimeo.com/cityofmemphis

I'm kind of unsettled by the fresh new wave of Twitter excitementspew that it doesn't matter if you have black cops, black chiefs of police, black prosecutors, black judges, black city councils, black mayors, black members of Congress, black Presidents: systemic white supremacy makes them all racist too. Just going to chuckle nervously and assume that all of these online people aren't real.

Hard not to wonder if 100 years from now, white people could be only 5% of the population of the US but every bad thing that's done is considered latent white supremacy.

Most of the rhetoric around "white supremacy" is, of course, infantile nonsense, but surely it is not so unthinkable that some might buy into a system or a set of ideas that rationalized their own disadvantage, is it? Untouchables in India certainly did so historically, as did the person quoted [here}(https://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/12/magazine/god-created-me-to-be-a-slave.html). And that is what Gramsci meant by "cultural hegemony", which certainly seems to have some truth to it. And note some of its similarities to the concept of The Cathedral.

Note, also, the claim that that black cops are also racist against black defendants is hardly a new one. See this scene from Boyz in the Hood (1991) and these lyrics from "Fuck Tha Police" (1988): "But don't let it be a black and a white one; 'Cause they'll slam ya down to the street top; Black police showin' out for the white cop." John Singleton was 22 or 23 years old when he made Boyz in the Hood; Ice Cube and MC Ren were 19 when they wrote the lyrics to "Fuck Tha Police"; perhaps they had personal knowledge of what they spoke?

People who have escaped from a vicious culture, in this case one which tolerates criminality, celebrates noncompliance, and internally punishes snitching, tend to react negatively when they meet people they perceive as still advocating that culture through their actions.

We see the same with atheists who escape a vicious religious culture, Christians who escape a vicious nihilistic culture, furries who escape a vicious culture of hierarchical power-mad humans, transgender people who escape a vicious gender binary culture, detransitioners who escape a vicious culture of love-bombing and single-minded purpose, alcoholics who escape a vicious culture of “casual” social drinking and enabling into the discipline and companionship of AA, converts to Mormonism, converts out of Mormonism, former (name political party here), and so on.

It’s a very human (great ape) dynamic which should be expected wherever one culture can be an escape from another which has hurt them. In the case of police who grew up on the mean streets, they become mean cops, no matter their race.

Of course, they of all people have no excuse for following this dynamic to its logical end, because a society with mean cops is a vicious society everyone wants to escape from.

(I think I just discovered a good B-plot hook for Zootopia 2: Nick Wilde gets a bit rough with another fox while arresting him, and both the petty criminal and Judy notice.)

I don't mean to dismiss the idea of systemic white supremacy completely. Cultural baggage is obviously real and doesn't go away at the stroke of a pen.

More like immediately jumping to 5 black cops exhibiting lethal brutality towards a black civilian = systemic white supremacy at work.

This is blaming every bad thing that ever happens to black people on white people. Both the victim and the cops In this case, sorry, it's a bit much for me.

It comes across as saying black cops in 2023 are still not responsible for their actions. Give me a break?

The first Untouchables that have equal rights are probably going to be pretty baggage laden. After, oh, I don't know, 2-3 generations of Untouchables achieving the heights of power I have less sympathy for the seemingly complete disavowal of ownership of decision making.

When do we get to stop kneejerk blaming every bad thing on systemic white supremacy? That's the roadmap I want to see.

Again, as I said, most of the rhetoric around "white supremacy" is infantile nonsense, but "systemic white supremacy at work" is not the same as "blaming . . . white people." Or at least not current white people. It is blaming a system. (Yes, I am sure that there are some people who conflate the two. But that does not seem to be the claim made in this specific instance).

Typically, proposed solutions to "systemic white supremacy" involve extracting some cost from white people, or holding non-white people to a different standard. Whether or not this is actually "blaming white people" is a matter of the bow that's put on it.

"systemic white supremacy at work" is not the same as "blaming . . . white people." Or at least not current white people. It is blaming a system.

In principle, I could see how this could be true. In practice, the "systemic racism" argument seems only ever to be deployed as part of motte-and-bailey arguments.

If you think that, you need to broaden your reading. Even people like Glenn Loury talk about systematic racism (while expressing skepticism re its causal effects)

It’s the world’s most perfect motte-and-bailey: most people hear “white supremacy” and think KKK meetings or maybe poll taxes and poll tests. Academics, meanwhile, have been trained to think of whiteness as an orderly society where people take personal responsibility for the consequences of their choices, big and small.

This is blaming every bad thing that ever happens to black people on white people.

Yes. This is unironic white supremacy, the core belief that black people are not agentic, are not capable of being responsible for themselves in the way that white people are. If black people do something wrong, be they criminals or criminal cops, the true blame goes to the nearest relevant white men, even if those nearest white men are actually hilariously far away. In much the same way you blame the parents for the anti-social antics of unsupervised middle-schoolers. This belief, as an unexamined, unadmitted premise is fairly common among the more ideologically-dedicated woke people, especially white ones.

The KKK now see their worldview mirrored in academia. The party who fought a war to free slaves and bring equality find themselves blamed for everything Black Americans have suffered since the Civil Rights Act. The party of slavery and Jim Crow get to be the arbiters of all things racial justice. It’s white supremacy meets 1984.

They have defined "whiteness" as a set of cultural norms. That Smithsonian museum infographic made the mistake of plainly stating the claims of academics in an easy to read format. Plenty of serious academics claim the same things, but that's not easily viewed by the general public so they aren't subjected to the same public derision.

That’s the motte. The Bailey is tons of unjustified racial hatred.

As a white skinned person I kinda wish I had some of those attributes.

It is still absolutely unbelievable to me that this infographic got published.

Yeah, me too. It's hard to envision how nobody at any point said "man it's kind of racist to say that black people don't have these positive traits". Horseshoe theory wins again, I guess.

I'm pretty sure they think those are negative traits, at least most of them.

Some of them clearly seem negative, at least the way they're been portrayed. Some are mentioned in the way that hints white people don't have some other positive trait.

It would be more accurate to say that in the minds of the authors, the positive traits are held to be positive largely because they correlate more strongly with having white skin. That if non-whites had a greater say in the culture, other attributes (not necessarily the opposite of the “white” traits) would be held as markers of good character.

Fair enough. It's hard for me to comprehend how someone could view "shows up on time" and "takes responsibility" as negative traits, but if someone does so then I guess there's no cognitive dissonance there.

No, that's all pretty fair. Their only mistake is that they identify "whiteness" with civilization, and it ironically underscores that white supremacy is suffusing their minds as well. Black cops enforcing the law – sometimes in an unjustifiable way and with terrible consequences – are pawns of the faceless, bloodless, colorless, merciless Power that forces orderly conduct on the mass of bipedal animals, and it's not so much their occasional violence as it's their normal job of discriminating against criminals at all, tribal loyalty be damned, that reveals this fact. Ditto for other black people who do not put their brothers and sisters above the general rule set. They de facto rescind their allegiance to the genetic collective, and this is what defines someone as white in common parlance.

When have you last heard of white racism as actually preferentially treating whites? Today, that's just... beyond the pale.

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Man, this person is so close to getting it.

"...fresh new wave of Twitter excitementspew". Don't worry it's only trivial figures like VAN JONES, at insignificant news outlets like CNN running this narrative.

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