#REACTIONARY SWEEPING STATEMENT

[coffinup]

I am not going to name names, and I’ll keep this brief, but I need all my baby mortician followers and mortuary students to be VERY discerning when it comes to social media influencer “morticians”. I mentioned this briefly in an ask reply, but ALWAYS take their opinions and content with a grain of salt. A lot of them tend to prey on negative emotions, make wide sweeping statements about the industry based on their experience (which is sometimes actually very limited!) and can rely on reactionary or divisive statements designed to make them sound right because they are being contrarian. I also find they tend to speak outside the scope of their field of knowledge, which is not a good idea! Morticians are not doctors, heath/safety experts, statisticians, or lawyers. Always ALWAYS do your own research, look into these creators before following them or sharing their videos. I think that can be said of any content creator.

I hope to share information that I know without overstepping my bounds, and try not to speak to things outside my experience, my blog is mostly for my thoughts/opinions and you should absolutely apply what I just said to ME and other mortsci peeps on here too!

Stay safe out there guys!

Memento Mori

[theculturedmarxist]

In the first days of 2023, the reactionary and repulsive dynamic of American capitalist politics has been on full display.

For decades, the following process has played out time and time again: No matter how small its numerical presence, the far-right wing of the Republican Party dominates, the Democratic Party adapts in the name of “bipartisanship,” and its “left” flank capitulates without a fight in the name of “unity against the right.” As a result, the political axis of bourgeois politics moves to the right, and the process repeats itself. Each episode is more degrading than the last.

To socialists, this spectacle demonstrates that imperialism is reaction all down the line and that a movement of the working class is necessary to sweep both parties out of power and enact the revolutionary transformation of society.

To the Democratic Socialists of America, it is another opportunity to promote the tired fiction that the Democratic Party can be pushed to the left.

On January 7, Jacobin published an article by DSA member Neal Meyer entitled “The right played hardball in Congress. The left should take notes.”

As the title suggests, the article argues that socialists should pressure “progressive” congresspersons to “use the bully pulpit” and “fight” the Democratic Party leadership “just as hard as the right does against their leadership.” Meyer writes, “We should be prepared to go to war against Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries and others…”

Meyer asserts that this is the strategy of the DSA: “Democratic socialists use electoral politics and our position in legislatures to build our popular base,” “spread democratic socialist ideas” and “rally millions to a program of transformational change.”

As a preliminary matter, the DSA’s record in Congress is not rallying anyone for transformational change, except in the negative sense. The DSA’s representatives have used their electoral positions to illegalize railroad strikes, fund the Israeli military and provide the American military industrial complex with tens of billions of dollars to wage the US-NATO war against Russia, risking nuclear catastrophe.  

Meyer papers over these votes, writing, “As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said in the past, in any other country she would not be in the same party as Joe Biden. That has never been more clear than in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s decision to crush railroad workers’ right to strike to win paid leave.”

This is an unfortunate example, given the fact that Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the DSA slate (save Rashida Tlaib) voted “to crush railroad workers’ right to strike to win paid leave.” There is a reason why Ocasio-Cortez and Biden are in the same party: The DSA plays a critical role in this sordid right-wing process, by trapping social opposition within the Democratic Party where it can be suffocated and eliminated.

Jacobin’s article is yet another example of this role. Meyer writes in a manner which makes clear the DSA is sensitive to the growing realization of the true role played by Ocasio-Cortez and her DSA cohorts. He presents the relationship between the DSA and the Democratic Party leadership as follows: “We ought to sit very uncomfortably inside the Democratic fold. It is, at best, a temporary and fraught marriage of necessity, one that we should want to exit as soon as possible.”

This is a falsification of the relationship between the DSA’s own congressional members and the Democratic leadership, as evidenced by the recent speakership fight. The DSA’s representatives unanimously voted for Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on every round in last week’s leadership contest, despite Jeffries’ 2021 statement that “there will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism.” In fact, Jeffries started a Political Action Committee (Team Blue) specifically to oppose left-wing challengers to Democratic incumbents. Even so, he won the votes of all those he is trying to unseat.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, confronting growing left-wing opposition to her subservience to the Democratic Party, gave an explanation which was as revealing as it was pathetic. “I see some people say Dems should negotiate to get concessions,” she said in a social media post this week. “We do, but what we don’t do is bring them publicly in order to empower not just Republicans but the fascist flank of the Republican Party.”

This statement tracks with her record in Congress: The class struggle must be suppressed for the sake of the institutional security of the imperialist Democratic Party and the Biden administration. For this same reason Ocasio-Cortez and the DSA’s congressional representatives illegalized the rail strike and denounced left-wing criticism of Biden as “privileged” and racist.

In comments to MSNBC responding to the Republican speakership fight, Ocasio-Cortez confirmed the DSA’s role, saying, “What was important today was to send the message that we were united behind Hakeem Jeffries as the new minority leader, that there would be no defections, that Democrats are here, we’re not going anywhere.”

Undermining her own claim about the efficacy of secret negotiations, she pledged the Democratic Party would “stay 100 percent united” no matter what, adding, “We absolutely have differences,” but she is “willing to put that aside.”

Here, Ocasio-Cortez has accidentally told the truth. For the sake of the stability of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Socialists of America is willing to put aside its differences with the establishment, however minor they may be, by backing a party leader who has pledged to ignore them until he can remove them from Congress.  

There is nothing unexpected or unusual in this behavior. Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the DSA’s slate are not socialists, they are conformist politicians, and they are acting in conformity with the DSA’s political essence as a pro-imperialist faction of the Democratic Party.

The DSA exists not to extract reforms from the Democratic establishment, but to trap social opposition and channel it behind the Democratic Party. Only an organization with such a long practice in pseudo-socialist gymnastics could try to present Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s concessions to the far right as a rallying cry for reforming the two-party system from within.

[fanonical]

Holy shit the terf is claiming Miles and Gwen can't be in a het relationship if Gwen is trans. That's so unbelievably transphobic

🤷‍♀️ i think they’re trying to say that all relationships with trans people in are queer, because trans people are queer? i sorta get where they’re coming from but they’re making sweeping statements about literally thousands if not millions of people who all have different ways of discerning their identities.

also they’re also saying that they want specifically representation for cisgender heterosexual interracial couples so they can see more multigenerational mixed race families, which i respect & share as a desire but… this is a sci-fi animated movie. they can cross to different universes, become lizard monsters, build brain-computer interfacing prosthetic tentacle arms — but a trans girl having biological kids with a cis guy is too far? also they just keep implying that Gwen being trans means she isn’t a real woman and wouldn’t count as representation towards interracial couples… i don’t know, they obviously have some really reactionary ideals they’re trying to fanfiction force into the source material whilst simultaneously saying we are doing that about the very apparent trans storyline that is actually in the film. bizarre

[bugbastard]

Your take essentially boiling down to “ai art isn’t art because it’s not hard to do” is exactly why they’re calling that viewpoint reactionary. That kind of sweeping statement only makes sense if you only consider the needs and experiences of able-bodied people making classical art

I explicitly said I don't oppose AI art in the abstract. But I *do* oppose their reason for defending it. My take isn't about AI art, it's about art in general.

If I consider kid colouring in a colouring book art, and consider embroidering from a pattern art, clearly I don't actually think the things you're trying to ascribe to me.

[dragonomatopoeia]

i get what people mean when they post about the 'complete' sanitization of media and spaces etc for marketing, but it doesn't really gel with my own observations and experiences. after all, 'outrage marketing' is its own prolific sub-industry, it feels like ads for phone games are about three seconds away from becoming rotoscoping snuff films, and there's a definite trend in pop culture towards what i would term Rick and Mortification

i'm not denying that there is a push to punish and suppress anything outside the dominant cultural norms; after all, we are living in profoundly reactionary times. I also want to clarify that the presence of shock-value or gross-out does not negate the concurrent focus on/push for family-friendly content.

i just think that when we make sweeping statements about The Culture as a whole, it becomes easier to lose sight of the ways different factors, influences, and modes of discourse can influence one another, and can also lead to the development of other reactionary ideas or movements

[drbased]

what is it with radblr and its love of sweeping statements about everyone in this generation being shit and useless. paternalistic reactionary nutjob shit, genuinely. you aren't the arbiters of the human condition, stop pretending that you're able to 'tap into' something ~~deep and dark~~ about society simply because you're over 25 and society hates your political position. you're on tumblr whining about the state of the world, you're no different than those you puport to be better than. you're not automatically more emotionally mature simply for hating the transes

[darkshrimpemotions]

I hate that the phrase "it's not that deep" has been used to shut down basic-ass media analysis so often that it's become a meaningless reactionary script. Because like. Sometimes I see someone making these profound-sounding, sweeping general statements about humanity or whatever based on some observation that could just as easily be explained by a basic fact like "people are different from each other" and I want to be like "it's not that deep."

[drbased]

(putting points I've not seen in the reblogs)

Radblr cares way too much about 'collecting' instances of tims being shitty/predatory. As you can imagine, most of said instances are from right-wing publications. And yet another daily mail article of some guy in a woman's changing room doesn't add to the discussion at all.

Radblr low-key thinks of itself as better than those liberal snowflake sjws with their trigger warnings. As a result, since joining radblr I have seen some traumatising shit shared with no warning (the images of women after acid attacks comes to mind. Deliberately sharing traumatising violent imagery to already traumatised women is just crabs in the bucket shit - same with the point above.

Radblr is, at the very least, centrist in nature and low-key reactionary, often emphasising that what's bad about transactivists, poly people, bdsmers etc. is how cringe, ugly and weird they are.

Radblr has a borderline spiritual belief surrounding sex and love, making sweeping statements about both as if we could ever possibly know that casual sex is universally bad, or you're only supposed to love one person at a time. They'll cite hookup culture's damage to women as some sort of 'proof' that casual sex/polyamory is a uniquely patriarchal invention and therefore damaging the pure, monogamous sex we should be having (well, unless you're heterosexual, in which case you shouldn't be having sex at all) - despite the fact that monogamy has also been very much utilised by patriarchy!

Radblr's single-issue nature places it in a bubble where members are low-key discouraged from engaging with any leftism outside it. Therefore, most radblr members are very quick to tar all leftism with the same brush whilst not knowing even the most basic of right-wing dogwhistles. Leftists get insulted way too much on radblr, and whilst I understand this is done out of frustration/betryal, radblr members are way too keen to boast about how they are super normal and can get along with everyone, and would rather hang out with their 'normie' conservative relatives than the strawman sex-positive transactivists which, as according to my point above, are always painted as cringe, ugly and weird.

Radblr is ableist as fuck, once again keen to boast about just how normal we are and making fun of people for things like 'not being able to answer the phone'. Radblr places itself in a bubble where we never have to be challenged, and then brag about how much more mature we are than those mentally ill freaks who can't hold down a job. Because radblr's fiscally centrist mentality also has this weird obsession with jobs being some metric of what a normal healthy person you are and also what a good feminist you are. I'm constantly on the lookout for radfems who are willing to criticise both the tradwife phenomenon and also recognise that those tradwifes aren't stupid, pathetic and lazy - because maybe they're women who recognise the evils of work under capitalism and have tried to escape that with the only avenue they know.

I'm so glad I was a libfem first because only in the classic 'sjw' spaces have I found a greater dedication to mental health awareness, intersectional politics and actual leftist critique. I try to bring my actual leftism into this space, and I'm so, so appreciative of OP for changing the nature of the space much faster and more effectively than I ever could.

radblr hot takes? 🔥

what nuanced take do you feel easily shamed for on radblr?

[fidelishaereticus]

some thoughts on sexism and how we talk about it. (this got kinda long, sorry, i tried not to post it)

Can we kill this debate that’s like “Women are Good and Pure and Never Hurt Each Other and All Men are Abusive Monsters” versus “Men are All Good, All Soft Soft Beautiful Boys Incapable of Harm, Sexism Must Be A Conspiracy of Cartographers (read: If Women Are Still Oppressed It’s Their Own Dam Fault)” ? 

can we kill it? canwecanwe pleeeease??

because both extremes are just so obviously wrong and yet i see people going out of their way to die on these hills every day. people taking any benign post that’s like “ugh i hate having to experience sexism as a woman, really throws off my groove” and interpreting it as An Attack on All Men. Or, on the other end, people ASSUMING that a person (or character) is gonna be a gross sexist abuser just because they’re a man. 

So on the one hand, we’ve got the Reactionary Gender Defense Squad for Men being all outraged at the slightest suggestion that the sexism in our society is the responsibility of any men ever (like “hey girls if you’re experiencing sexism, remember it’s your own damn fault or maybe the fault of your female friends, but certainly not the fault of any men. remember! men are all Pure and Good.  its the Perfect Gender :D”). (<—i s2g every time i read a post implying this i strangle the air like. please stop. please. yes girls can be sexist too, but please stop casually blaming women for their own experience of sexism, it is ….very rude and upsetting)

On the other hand, heaven forbid we recognize how, even in the most sexist of cultures, men women are all individuals who exist beyond the categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed”. Yes, some women do in fact espouse and perpetrate sexism. Some women are abusers. And some men are truly gentle and harmless and kind; some men find themselves in situations where they may experience disadvantages (non-structural sexism, if you will) on account of their sex (kinda like how a white person in america can be bullied for their whiteness by a group of black peers, and it really can hurt them, and it is real bullying and a real problem in that situation, even while lacking the clout of Structural Racism).  So (this is a delicate point) while it is extremely understandable that oppressed classes be distrustful of oppressor classes, many of us are in situations where we are capable of transcending a strictly survivalist mentality. We can understand situational complexities and evaluate individuals as whole people rather than judging them by crude categories. And those of us who have the mental energy to do that….should? Yes, rage is cathartic, and sometimes a very important part of healing and fighting back. And god knows reactionary ideologies and hyperboles can be good cheeky fun and also a part of healing / combatting the drudgery of being oppressed (i meanbcatch me flippantly yelling things like FUCK THIS HET BULLSHIT and HELLO NAUGHTY CHILDREN GENDER IS CANCELLED 8D on the regular). But it can go too far. Sometimes, we slip into deliberately espousing rage and digging our heals hard into catchy reactionary ideologies and making snap-judgements and wide sweeping statements about other groups more because it’s easy and “the cool thing to do” than because it’s helpful or healing. Like…maybe we just do it because group mentality takes hold, and that’s gratifying and secure, and we feel righteous doing it, and idk this is just a thing humans do (forge reactionary ideologies around group identities and then fling them at eachother like grenades)? It’s natural, and to an extent inevitable, be we can catch ourselves, we can apologize where we have hurt, we can do better. So yeah, idk, as an afab, agender individual, i fucking hate that sexism exists, i hate it every goddamn day, and yeah it kinda fucked me up a little, its probably a huge part of why I’m agender*, but i personally am not suffering SO MUCH that i need to take it out in blind rage on every man i encounter. So I don’t, not even online. Because guess what? That guy who sits next to me in microbiology? It’s not his fault. Is he part of the priveleged class in a sexist soceity? Yes. But “privilege” does not automatically make a person bad (hell, it doesn’t even automatically make them lucky: some other disadvantage might might come along and completely counteract all the advantage that privilege could be giving them; you never know). Evil is not inherited or biologically bestowed. The bad parts of our culture rub off on all of us: we live and speak and breath them, and yeah, within that structure, historically oppressive classes are in general endowed with more power to abuse / don’t have to deal with all the layers of bullshit that oppressed classes have to put up with. But those realities and trends don’t define who we are as individulas, and pretendign they do really flattens the world into a very bleak, helpless determinism. 

So on the one hand, it’s really hurtful to deny the very real disadvantages that many women have and continue to experience simply by virtue of existing in a culture that traditionally empowers men at the expense of women. It is ESPECIALLY rude to make sweeping statements blaming “women” for their own sucky situation (by denying the responsibility and/or existence of an oppressive class). AT THE SAME TIME, it is deeply fucked up to imply that anyone is inevitably going to become a monster because of their gender identity and/or because of the way they were born. We can’t treat race and sex/gender like they’re some kind of original sin, whereby one inherits the collective guilt for all the evil deeds of one’s predecessors. Its just….its a very fucked up hole to go down and i’ve been down it and, no. Bad shit. 

So idk, forging a think-space somewhere between “All Men Are Monsters” and “Sexism Against Women Doesn’t Exist / Is Women’s Fault” would be a really nice.

*transphobes DO NOT TOUCH THIS WITH  A 10 FOOT POLE, I WILL CUT YOU and your gender WILL be cancelled

[grandhotelabyss]

No matter the offense, anyone who demands this style of apology—in which the one apologizing is made to bow and scrape, to cringe and grovel, and generally to divest herself of her dignity—is not running a liberation movement, they’re running a cult. It’s too bad they’ve been permitted to run one in academia. But this stops when people begin saying no. No position or paycheck any institution could offer would be enough to make me abase myself like this, helplessly spewing out mindless jargon, to anyone on earth. Pay me, I’ll write you a statement in under a minute:

We here at [X] journal rejected Dr. [Y]’s review because it contained unsubstantiated assertions and ad hominem polemics that do not meet our standard of scholarship. We stand by this decision.

Ironically, even 15-20 years ago I thought of medievalism as the one English-department period specialization that still harbored right-wingers, but obviously no more. (Though the issue in question is a cross-disciplinary medievalist controversy, including but not confined to literary studies.) This may not be as paradoxical as it seems, however. The Catholic reactionary and the Maoist revolutionary have a similar complaint against the epoch of the bourgeoisie and therefore a similar interest in burnishing the reputation of the Middle Ages against which this bourgeois modernity defined itself. 

By the way, I do take for granted that much of what we inadequately caption “wokeness” as distinct from other forms of liberalism and Marxism is just recrudescent Maoism, hence the struggle-session style of abject contrition that the movement mercilessly exacts. This is not a hyperbolic comparison, but an assessment of the actual intellectual lineages involved; see, e.g., Richard Wolin’s The Wind from the East. Le pensée soixante-huit, which is behind so much of this, modeled itself substantially on the Cultural Revolution:

This notion of power as ubiquitous and its corollary notion of dispersed and local resistance were by no means Foucault’s discovery alone. Such precepts were central to the ethos of post-1968 gauchisme. In the aftermath of the May events, the student activists became convinced that there was no such thing as second-order, or lesser, political struggles. The fight for sexual liberation and for freedom of expression in the high schools and universities, the struggles against racism, discrimination, and homophobia—each and every local struggle against oppression was central to the fight against late capitalism as an oppressive and totalizing mode of domination.

[...]

This situation helps to explain why in the post-May period Mao’s notion of a cultural revolution resonated so deeply with student radicals. In traditional Marxist thought, culture had always been regarded as epiphenomenal: a pale reflection of society’s socioeconomic base. Mao’s doctrine of cultural revolution, conversely, postulated that the arrows of causality linking “base” and “superstructure” could also be reversed. Culture represented an intrinsically legitimate locus of revolutionary struggle. The gauchistes still believed that proletarian revolution was a sine qua non for the creation of a socialist society. They continued to organize in the factories to prepare the workers for this eventuality. On the other hand, following Mao, they also believed that socialism could not be realized without a sweeping transformation of bourgeois values and mores.

Therefore, forcing one’s colleagues to humiliate themselves on Twitter is radical praxis. One of my own professors, admittedly broadening the context from Maoism to Leninism tout court, of which Maoism was a local adaptation, wrote of his own capture and then emergence from this ideology:

It was at this moment, a moment of deep undergraduate disillusionment, that I started attending seminars on European realism by a young lecturer named Stephen Heath. His lectures were underpinned by what, in retrospect, can be called an alliance between poststructuralism and leftism, but which, at the time, presented the analysis of culture, and particularly of modernism now stretching from Mayakowsky to Benjamin, from Brecht to the surrealists, as a crucial political task. The focus of this understanding was the journal Tel Quel, during the period from 1969 to 1971. The exemplary text was Barthes’s S/Z, published in 1970, and the promised analysis can be seen in Kristeva’s mammoth La Revolution du langage poetique of 1974. This was a defining moment in my intellectual life.

I use the words political task both advisedly and ironically, because what came with this position was the full panoply of Leninism, and in particular the notion of the party as the union of theory and practice, which would transform and liberate the world. It is no part of my purpose today to analyze Leninism; suffice it to say that it is now my opinion that it was the most disastrous and evil of the fruits of German idealist philosophy and that its contribution to history—from its slaughter of the most advanced and progressive capitalist class in Europe, to the formation of fascist parties in both imitation and opposition to Bolshevism, to its perversion of Third World liberation struggles according to the tenets of Stalinism—was overwhelmingly negative. 

What I do want to stress is that Leninism and the discourse of the Third International provided a rationale for one’s work and study. One was not a literary critic mired in a socially useless liberal humanism but a historical materialist providing elements of the theory of ideology, which Althusser so persuasively argued had been missing from the perversion of Stalinism. I have no wish to rehearse the exact stages of my disillusion with the faith; certainly when I read Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind, in the early eighties, I wondered how on earth I had avoided reading it earlier, or how I would have dismissed it on an earlier reading. Suffice it to say that my reading of [Doris] Lessing and science fiction meant that the literary component went very early, and events in Portugal, France, and Italy meant that the Leninist politics that Althusser argued for so ably when I studied with him at the École Normale Supérieure in the early seventies seemed barren and worthless by the late seventies. It is still worth noting, in this context, that the rapid ideological collapse of Bolshevik power in the early nineties might suggest that the Leninist regime was profoundly illegitimate, from the very moment of the storming of the constituent assembly. It is also worth noting that this discourse of the Third International, long dead on any political level, still animates much, if not all, of the ‘‘politics’’ of contemporary literary criticism.

He wrote that final sentence over 20 years ago! On the other hand, where did Maoism come from? I’m no political scientist, historian, or Sinologist, but I do recall that one of Mao’s own favorite books was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. So much for “the wind from the east.” Fears of foreign influence, as ever, prove inadequate; maybe we’ve never left Massachusetts Bay after all. To quote a later and better novel about some of the same themes as Stowe’s, “Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.”

[its-uh-bella]

Some people do deserve bodily harm for thinking things. Sorry I didn't know the context of the post that randomly appeared on my feed without context attached, sorry you couldn't bother to just call someone out directly and instead had to make a big sweeping statement. There are things that people have said to me as a Trans person that in my own opinion do warrant a counterattack. You're no different than the teachers who would punish me for attacking the bullies calling me a faggot. In their eyes and in your eyes it's all the same. I am not saying that instigating doesn't happen the other way, but someone calling someone a slur and getting beat up for it and someone saying I'm gay and getting beat up for it are not the same thing. I'm very aware that instigation is something that can be made up by reactionaries. I don't have the energy to explain to someone who does gender astrology with beverages about how sometimes, yes, people need to get beat up for saying hateful, bigoted, or plain wrong things. Again, I don't know what magic context you claim I'm missing out on is, but it doesn't change the fact that your sweeping generalization lumps all of these different nuances into one. Some people do deserve to get their shit rocked. Some people do say awful things that would result in them getting attacked irl. Equating that to reactionary violence towards someone because of their identity is complete nonsense. I can only interpret your sweeping generalizations at face value but if there's some drama with someone who used this phrase that I'm missing then just leave me out of it. Instigation is something that was levied at me when I eventually fended off homophobic bullies, but it's still different than someone saying "I'm gay" and then getting beat up, which is a poor example to use for your kindergarten violence is bad lesson.

"saying this irl would get your ass kicked" is not really a great refutation of an idea you disagree with. one might point out that a sentence to which that response is accurate in many situations is "I am gay"

[three--rings]

I think while the spirit of your meta is fine, it makes such painfully sweeping statements about 'arrogance' from a novel told by an unreliable narrator (if I recall he wanted to hit himself for ignoring lwj? which at the time why wouldn't he?) or guilt, that you lose the nuance of character you were trying to actually illustrate. I truly hope ppl who don't read the novel don't take your meta as factual, becuase it seemed more reactionary than anything else lol

Well, conveniently, I just reviewed the chapter in question last night while I was writing my post.  So allow me to quote:

He saw himself walk with hands behind his back, wearing all black. A flute in the shade of ink stuck to his waist, hanging down with crimson colored tassels. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Jiang Cheng, he nodded in this direction to show respect. Attitude slightly arrogant, he took on a profound, disdainful appearance. As Wei WuXian saw the stance of his younger self, the root of his teeth even cringed in soreness. He felt that he really was pretentious, and itched to just beat the hell out of himself.

Then LXC, NMJ, and LWJ are discussing why WWX is not wearing his sword.  LXC says that the explanation WWX gave was:

“Young Master Wei has said before that he does not want to care about any of the redundant formalities. Let alone carrying his sword, even if he does not wear his clothes, what can others do about him? How truly youthful.”

Hearing from another person’s mouth the arrogant words he had once said did indeed bring up an indescribable feeling. Wei WuXian felt a bit ashamed, yet he couldn’t really do anything either.

No one could stop him, even if he decided to show up naked!  Then there’s a clamor again from WWX:

a series of clamor suddenly came from the other end of the base. Wei WuXian heard his own raging shout, “Jin ZiXuan! Don’t you forget about what things you said and what things you did? What do you mean by this, now?!”

Wei WuXian remembered. So it was this time!

On the other side, Jin ZiXuan also fumed, “I was asking Sect Leader Jiang, not you! The one I was asking about was also Maiden Jiang. How is that related to you?!”

Wei WuXian, “Well said! How is my shijie related to you? Back then, who was the one whose eyes grew on the back of their head?”

Jin ZiXuan, “Sect Leader Jiang—this is our sect’s flower banquet, and this is your sect’s person! Are you going to look after him or not?!”

JZX approached the Jiang Sect Leader and says “Hello, how is your sister?” and WWX starts YELLING at him.

He was about to go over when Jiang Cheng’s voice came, “Wei WuXian, you can just shut your mouth. Young Master Jin, I’m sorry. My sister is doing quite well. Thank you for your concern. We can talk about this next time.”

Wei WuXian laughed coldly, “Next time? There is no next time! Whether or not she’s doing well isn’t any of his business, either! Who does he think he is?”

He turned around and started to leave. Jiang Cheng shouted, “Get back here! Where are you going?”

Wei WuXian waved his hands, “Anywhere is fine! Just don’t let me see that face of his. I never wanted to come, anyway. You can deal with whatever’s here yourself.”

And he leaves.

Hands behind his back, Wei WuXian walked at a fast pace. His face was dark, and he didn’t pay attention to anyone. Lan WangJi walked a step toward him, but before he had a chance to speak, the two of them brushed shoulders and parted.

Jin GuangYao couldn’t catch up with Wei WuXian. He stomped his foot on the ground and sighed, “And there he goes. Sect Leader Jiang, just… just what should I do?”

Jiang Cheng stowed away the clouds on his face, “Don’t mind him. Look at how impolite he is. He’s used to such rude behavior at home.”

Everyone treats this as typical behavior for WWX.  NMJ says basically “what is it THIS time?”  And I can’t come up for any word for this kind of behavior, at a formal event, in public, than arrogant, entitled, and jerky.  He’s not being righteous, or standing up for injustice, as other people have commented in replies to my post.  He’s mad because someone he doesn’t like likes his shijie.  Jin Zixuan isn’t a terrible guy.  He hasn’t done anything other than be an arrogant teenage boy (pot-kettle, ahem).  He turns out to be a good husband as far as we know and truly has feelings for her at this point.  Not to mention, from everything we know JYL is actually in love with him, but WWX doesn’t care about his sister’s wishes, only his own.

Can you imagine going to, say, a family wedding and having someone throw a tantrum like this?  A full adult person? 

Look, I’m not here to Tarnish His Name or Cancel Wei Wuxian or do whatever some people seem to have decided the point of my post was.  Like, this isn’t about your fave being problematic.  I ADORE Wei Wuxian.  I love him to little pieces.  He’s a fantastic character.  He exhibits tremendous growth and even at his worse I have deep affection for him.

But he’s not a poor, maligned, weak little victim who never did anything wrong either.  I’m not Making Stuff Up.  Did I, in less than 3000 words, accurately describe every single aspect of his character?  Did I talk about each thing he does in a very long book?  Nope, sure didn’t.  I was specifically pointing out the places that I saw that he diverged from WWX as portrayed in CQL.  That doesn’t mean those are all there is to his character.  I recommend people reread the first part of the paragraph of my meta that starts with “Whereas the novel is a story of redemption” because several responses to my post seem to just say the exact things I say in that paragraph.

Absolutely there was context and causes behind his behavior.  But that doesn’t mean he’s blameless for his actions and the harm they caused. 

[definitelynotplanetfall]

if gnc males are scabs, "male positivity" shit is pinkwashing

first off it's gc men that are the scabs (weird that that's not a common abbreviation but yea). gnc men are doing the lord's work. the way people use that term is often very narrow like, specifically about intentionally trying to pull off a certain look (and succeeding) - and people that try that and fail or have a different aesthetic or are just for lack of a better term "slobs" (want to be released from performativity rather than perform something different) are often still fair game for mocking for manning wrong, even by people who like to loudly talk about how important gender nonconformity acceptance is. (this may be me Von Wokensteining a bit. [god that's such a good evocative name for the potentially hallucinated coalition thing, shame it was coined by a reactionary]). the point is when i say gnc here i am not talking solely about on-point androgynous tiktok stars, and in fact it makes more sense i think if they're explicitly excluded. they're being praised for doing things up to spec in the realm of gender presentation, just not traditional braindead caveman masculinity. (of course, if you're surrounded entirely by socons who do not believe in men-wearing-makeup even if it is done exactingly, that's a different story. diversity of norms-as-stated and norms-as-experienced and norms-as-enforced is part of the problem of talking about this sort of thing in sweeping terms. it also doesn't help that there do exist people that think basic hygiene norms are performing femininity, and others that think performing femininity should be treated as a norm on the level of hygiene [THESE ARE DIFFERENT STATEMENTS!])

actually i think that is the crux of it. it's being sick of having to perform constantly, and the people nominally offering liberation from that performance just offering other performances to choose from. and since they're still asking for adherence to fairly arbitrary norms and still a mixture of mockery and being-ignored if you don't measure up, of course not many people are going to choose to strive for a standard that feels just as alienating and external and imposed but that additionally unlike normie man they have no experience faking. when there is advocacy for gender-nonconformity, it is generally for nonconformity that is Done Extra, rather than “i Extremely Do Not Vibe With x norm, so i will just not do it and not replace it with anything.” i think ultimately the best endgame is just to like, get rid of a lot of gender norms entirely? this entire setup of “the norms are still there, but you don’t have to do them, so that there can be this defined demographic of gnc that you have to respect” leads to a bunch of doubletalk and only getting away with not conforming if it’s high effort or hot etc. also i think in general that sort of goal is better poised to make progress into socon type places - “yes, people will notice you gending wrong, and to be clear it IS gending wrong, but you’ll be valid” is a lot harder sell than “x should have no gender valence, anyone can x, anyone can refrain from x” in terms of actually lifting prohibitions on harmless behavior.

there were in general a lot of diffuse cultural Things about be yourself or whatever and these constant reminders of don’t worry and there is a lot of uh. upset that they have not come true. with the timing of it in my own life i can’t tell if the culture really did become more restrictive or it was just an “okay no more childish lies, you will be beef now” sort of situation.

it should go without saying that "x happens to y" does not imply "x does not happen to not-y" but no i am not pretending that in fact there is none of this for women. i have to keep repeatedly reminding myself that the world at large does not share tumblr’s support of gnc women, and even that support here is often contingent on doing The Butch Lesbian Aesthetic (tm), see also the accursed eternal cycle whenever someone mentions the concept of not requiring makeup. but i do find it a bit... telling that there is a quadrant of the gc/gnc/m/f matrix where it’s like. extremely hard to find any community with active valuing and praise for that form of expression?

anyway a lot of different things fall under male positivity and i don't know if pinkwashing is the right term to describe any or many or all of them. we may be at the limits of this particular strained metaphor. also this ask has been sitting around long enough i should probably finish it

[angelstuffing]

I’ve been thinking about the callout posts from anti-terfs, using anecdotal incidents (that don’t even have any proof, but I’ll let it slide) in which a ‘terf’ is calling an intersex woman a man, or a black woman a man for being too ‘masculine’.

In order to criticize an ideology, you need to recognize the best version of their ideas and defeat those. However, how these people may approach it is they use people that, in this case, don’t have a correct view of how sex works.

The problem with using people that don’t know how sex works, and therefore calls an intersex woman a man is that we’re using someone who’s incorrect about what sex is. If you were to push forward with this criticism of ‘terfs’ by making a sweeping statement, you’re telling me that this is how sex works in reality and it harms people (in this case intersex women or men) to acknowledge that first.

It’s already suspicious, because that reveals that they’ve adopted this ignorant view of sex and believes that the intersex woman is actually a male, (or at the very least, uses a false definition of ‘female’) but a ‘woman’ (which is incorrect) and that is used to ideologically justify trans people under a false pretense.

And also, the problem I have with using examples of black women being misgendered as an example that we’re all racist is that these incidents are the cause of reactionary tendencies which is not the ideology at hand-- because what we believe is that no matter how someone perceives you, your sex will still intact, and this happening is an occurrence of a phenomenon that is not exclusively unique to “terfs”, so you’ll have to get to the fundamental beliefs and prove that these beliefs are inherently racist.

[theculturedmarxist]

Published below is the introduction by World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North to the forthcoming book, The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. It is available for pre-order at Mehring Books for delivery in late January 2021.

The volume is a comprehensive refutation of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a racialist falsification of the history of the American Revolution and Civil War. In addition to historical essays, it includes interviews from eminent historians of the United States, including James McPherson, James Oakes, Gordon Wood, Richard Carwardine, Victoria Bynum, and Clayborne Carson.

***

I should respectfully suggest that although the oppressed may need history for identity and inspiration, they need it above all for the truth of what the world has made of them and of what they have helped make of the world. This knowledge alone can produce that sense of identity which ought to be sufficient for inspiration; and those who look to history to provide glorious moments and heroes invariably are betrayed into making catastrophic errors of political judgment.—Eugene Genovese [1]

Both ideological and historical myths are a product of immediate class interests. … These myths may be refuted by restoring historical truth—the honest presentation of actual facts and tendencies of the past.—Vadim Z. Rogovin [2]

On August 14, 2019, the New York Times unveiled the 1619 Project. Timed to coincide with the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves in colonial Virginia, the 100-page special edition of the New York Times Magazine consisted of a series of essays that present American history as an unyielding racial struggle, in which black Americans have waged a solitary fight to redeem democracy against white racism.

The Times mobilized vast editorial and financial resources behind the 1619 Project. With backing from the corporate-endowed Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, hundreds of thousands of copies were sent to schools. The 1619 Project fanned out to other media formats. Plans were even announced for films and television programming, backed by billionaire media personality Oprah Winfrey.

As a business venture the 1619 Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical revision it has been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in large measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site, with the support of a number of distinguished and courageous historians, which exposed the 1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy journalism, careless and dishonest research, and a false, politically-motivated narrative that makes racism and racial conflict the central driving forces of American history.

In support of its claim that American history can be understood only when viewed through the prism of racial conflict, the 1619 Project sought to discredit American history’s two foundational events: The Revolution of 1775–83, and the Civil War of 1861–65. This could only be achieved by a series of distortions, omissions, half-truths, and false statements—deceptions that are catalogued and refuted in this book.

The New York Times is no stranger to scandals produced by dishonest and unprincipled journalism. Its long and checkered history includes such episodes as its endorsement of the Moscow frame-up trials of 1936–38 by its Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, Walter Duranty, and, during World War II, its unconscionable decision to treat the murder of millions of European Jews as “a relatively unimportant story” that did not require extensive and systematic coverage. [3] More recently, the Times was implicated, through the reporting of Judith Miller and the columns of Thomas Friedman, in the peddling of government misinformation about “weapons of mass destruction” that served to legitimize the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many other examples of flagrant violations of even the generally lax standards of journalistic ethics could be cited, especially during the past decade, as the New York Times—listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of $7.5 billion—acquired increasingly the character of a media empire.

The “financialization” of the Times has proceeded alongside another critical determinant of the newspaper’s selection of issues to be publicized and promoted: that is, its central role in the formulation and aggressive marketing of the policies of the Democratic Party. This process has served to obliterate the always tenuous boundary lines between objective reporting and sheer propaganda. The consequences of the Times’ financial and political evolution have found a particularly reactionary expression in the 1619 Project. Led by Ms. Nikole Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, the 1619 Project was developed for the purpose of providing the Democratic Party with a historical narrative that legitimized its efforts to develop an electoral constituency based on the promotion of racial politics. Assisting the Democratic Party’s decades-long efforts to disassociate itself from its identification with the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal to Great Society era, the 1619 Project, by prioritizing racial conflict, marginalizes, and even eliminates, class conflict as a notable factor in history and politics.

The shift from class struggle to racial conflict did not develop within a vacuum. The New York Times, as we shall explain, is drawing upon and exploiting reactionary intellectual tendencies that have been fermenting within substantial sections of middle-class academia for several decades.

The political interests and related ideological considerations that motivated the 1619 Project determined the unprincipled and dishonest methods employed by the Times in its creation. The New York Times was well aware of the fact that it was promoting a race-based narrative of American history that could not withstand critical evaluation by leading scholars of the Revolution and Civil War. The New York Times Magazine’s editor deliberately rejected consultation with the most respected and authoritative historians.

Moreover, when one of the Times’ fact-checkers identified false statements that were utilized to support the central arguments of the 1619 Project, her findings were ignored. And as the false claims and factual errors were exposed, the Times surreptitiously edited key phrases in 1619 Project material posted online. The knowledge and expertise of historians of the stature of Gordon Wood and James McPherson were of no use to the Times. Its editors knew they would object to the central thesis of the 1619 Project, promoted by lead essayist Hannah-Jones: that the American Revolution was launched as a conspiracy to defend slavery against pending British emancipation.

Ms. Hannah-Jones had asserted:

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade … [S]ome might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy. [4]

This claim—that the American Revolution was not a revolution at all, but a counterrevolution waged to defend slavery—is freighted with enormous implications for American and world history. The denunciation of the American Revolution legitimizes the rejection of all historical narratives that attribute any progressive content to the overthrow of British rule over the colonies and, therefore, to the wave of democratic revolutions that it inspired throughout the world. If the establishment of the United States was a counterrevolution, the founding document of this event—the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the equality of man—merits only contempt as an exemplar of the basest hypocrisy.

How, then, can one explain the explosive global impact of the American Revolution upon the thought and politics of its immediate contemporaries and of the generations that followed?

The philosopher Diderot—among the greatest of all Enlightenment thinkers—responded ecstatically to the American Revolution:

After centuries of general oppression, may the revolution which has just occurred across the seas, by offering all the inhabitants of Europe an asylum against fanaticism and tyranny, instruct those who govern men on the legitimate use of their authority! May these brave Americans, who would rather see their wives raped, their children murdered, their dwellings destroyed, their fields ravaged, their villages burned, and rather shed their blood and die than lose the slightest portion of their freedom, prevent the enormous accumulation and unequal distribution of wealth, luxury, effeminacy, and corruption of manners, and may they provide for the maintenance of their freedom and the survival of their government! [5] 

Voltaire, in February 1778, only months before his death, arranged a public meeting with Benjamin Franklin, the much-celebrated envoy of the American Revolution. The aged philosophe related in a letter that his embrace of Franklin was witnessed by twenty spectators who were moved to “tender tears.” [6]

Marx was correct when he wrote, in his 1867 preface to the first edition of Das Kapital that “the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class,” inspiring the uprisings that were to sweep away the feudal rubbish, accumulated over centuries, of the Ancien Régime. [7]

As the historian Peter Gay noted in his celebrated study of Enlightenment culture and politics, “The liberty that the Americans had won and were guarding was not merely an exhilarating performance that delighted European spectators and gave them grounds for optimism about man; it was also proving a realistic ideal worthy of imitation.” [8]

R.R. Palmer, among the most erudite of mid-twentieth century historians, defined the American Revolution as a critical moment in the evolution of Western Civilization, the beginning of a forty-year era of democratic revolutions. Palmer wrote:

[T]he American and the French Revolutions, the two chief actual revolutions of the period, with all due allowance for the great differences between them, nevertheless shared a great deal in common, and that what they shared was shared also at the same time by various people and movements in other countries, notably in England, Ireland, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy, but also in Germany, Hungary, and Poland, and by scattered individuals in places like Spain and Russia. [9] 

More recently, Jonathan Israel, the historian of Radical Enlightenment, argues that the American Revolution 

formed part of a wider transatlantic revolutionary sequence, a series of revolutions in France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, Haiti, Poland, Spain, Greece, and Spanish America. … The endeavors of the Founding Fathers and their followings abroad prove the deep interaction of the American Revolution and its principles with the other revolutions, substantiating the Revolution’s global role less as a directly intervening force than inspirational motor, the primary model, for universal change. [10] 

Marxists have never viewed either the American or French Revolutions through rose-tinted glasses. In examining world historical events, Friedrich Engels rejected simplistic pragmatic interpretations that explain and judge “everything according to the motives of the action,” which divides “men in their historical activity into noble and ignoble and then finds that as a rule the noble are defrauded and the ignoble are victorious.” Personal motives, Engels insisted, are only of a “secondary significance.” The critical questions that historians must ask are: “What driving forces in turn stand behind these motives? What are the historical causes which transform themselves into these motives in the brains of the actors?” [11]

Whatever the personal motives and individual limitations of those who led the struggle for independence, the revolution waged by the American colonies against the British Crown was rooted in objective socioeconomic processes associated with the rise of capitalism as a world system. Slavery had existed for several thousand years, but the specific form that it assumed between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries was bound up with the development and expansion of capitalism. As Marx explained:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of the era of capitalist accumulation. [12]

Marx and Engels insisted upon the historically progressive character of the American Revolution, an appraisal that was validated by the Civil War. Marx wrote to Lincoln in 1865 that it was in the American Revolution that “the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century...” [13]

Nothing in Ms. Hannah-Jones’ essay indicates that she has thought through, or is even aware of the implications, from the standpoint of world history, of the 1619 Project’s denunciation of the American Revolution. In fact, the 1619 Project was concocted without consulting the works of the preeminent historians of the Revolution and Civil War. This was not an oversight, but rather, the outcome of a deliberate decision by the New York Times to bar, to the greatest extent possible, the participation of “white” scholars in the development and writing of the essays. In an article titled “How the 1619 Project Came Together,” published on August 18, 2019, the Times informed its readers: “Almost every contributor in the magazine and special section—writers, photographers and artists—is black, a nonnegotiable aspect of the project that helps underscore its thesis...” [14]

This “nonnegotiable” and racist insistence that the 1619 Project be produced exclusively by blacks was justified with the false claim that white historians had largely ignored the subject of American slavery. And on the rare occasions when white historians acknowledged slavery’s existence, they either downplayed its significance or lied about it. Therefore, only black writers could “tell our story truthfully.” The 1619 Project’s race-based narrative would place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” [15]

The 1619 Project was a falsification not only of history, but of historiography. It ignored the work of two generations of American historians, dating back to the 1950s. The authors and editors of the 1619 Project had consulted no serious scholarship on slavery, the American Revolution, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, or Jim Crow segregation. There is no evidence that Hannah-Jones’ study of American history extended beyond the reading of a single book, written in the early 1960s, by the late black nationalist writer, Lerone Bennett, Jr. Her “reframing” of American history, to be sent out to the schools as the foundation of a new curriculum, did not even bother with a bibliography.

Hannah-Jones and Silverstein argued that they were creating “a new narrative,” to replace the supposedly “white narrative” that had existed before. In one of her countless Twitter tirades, Hannah-Jones declared that “the 1619 Project is not a history.” It is, rather, “about who gets to control the national narrative, and, therefore, the nation’s shared memory of itself.” In this remark, Hannah-Jones explicitly extols the separation of historical research from the effort to truthfully reconstruct the past. The purpose of history is declared to be nothing more than the creation of a serviceable narrative for the realization of one or another political agenda. The truth or untruth of the narrative is not a matter of concern.

Nationalist mythmaking has, for a long period, played a significant political role in promoting the interests of aggrieved middle-class strata that are striving to secure a more privileged place in the existing power structures. As Eric Hobsbawm laconically observed, “The socialists … who rarely used the word ‘nationalism’ without the prefix ‘petty-bourgeois,’ knew what they were talking about.” [16]

Despite the claims that Hannah-Jones was forging a new path for the study and understanding of American history, the 1619 Project’s insistence on a race-centered history of America, authored by African-American historians, revived the racial arguments promoted by black nationalists in the 1960s. For all the militant posturing, the underlying agenda, as subsequent events were to demonstrate, was to carve out special career niches for the benefit of a segment of the African-American middle class. In the academic world, this agenda advanced the demand that subject matter that pertained to the historical experience of the black population should be allocated exclusively to African Americans. Thus, in the ensuing fight for the distribution of privilege and status, leading historians who had made major contributions to the study of slavery were denounced for intruding, as whites, into a subject that could be understood and explained only by black historians. Peter Novick, in his book That Noble Dream, recalled the impact of black nationalist racism on the writing of American history:

Kenneth Stampp was told by militants that, as a white man, he had no right to write The Peculiar Institution. Herbert Gutman, presenting a paper to the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, was shouted down. A white colleague who was present (and had the same experience), reported that Gutman was “shattered.” Gutman pleaded to no avail that he was “extremely supportive of the black liberation movement—if people would just forget that I am white and hear what I am saying … [it] would lend support to the movement.” Among the most dramatic incidents of this sort was the treatment accorded Robert Starobin, a young leftist supporter of the Black Panthers, who delivered a paper on slavery at a Wayne State University conference in 1969, an incident which devastated Starobin at the time, and was rendered the more poignant by his suicide the following year. [17] 

Despite these attacks, white historians continued to write major studies on American slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction. Rude attempts to introduce a racial qualification in judging a historian’s “right” to deal with slavery met with vigorous opposition. The historian Eugene Genovese (1930��2012), the author of such notable works as The Political Economy of Slavery and The World the Slaveholders Made, wrote: 

Every historian of the United States and especially the South cannot avoid making estimates of the black experience, for without them he cannot make estimates of anything else. When, therefore, I am asked, in the fashion of our inane times, what right I, as a white man, have to write about black people, I am forced to reply in four-letter words. [18]

This passage was written more than a half century ago. Since the late 1960s, the efforts to racialize scholarly work, against which Genovese rightly polemicized, have assumed such vast proportions that they cannot be adequately described as merely “inane.” Under the influence of postmodernism and its offspring, “critical race theory,” the doors of American universities have been flung wide open for the propagation of deeply reactionary conceptions. Racial identity has replaced social class and related economic processes as the principal and essential analytic category.

“Whiteness” theory, the latest rage, is now utilized to deny historical progress, reject objective truth, and interpret all events and facets of culture through the prism of alleged racial self-interest. On this basis, the sheerest nonsense can be spouted with the guarantee that all objections grounded on facts and science will be dismissed as a manifestation of “white fragility” or some other form of hidden racism. In this degraded environment, Ibram X. Kendi can write the following absurd passage, without fear of contradiction, in his Stamped from the Beginning:

For Enlightenment intellectuals, the metaphor of light typically had a double meaning. Europeans had rediscovered learning after a thousand years in religious darkness, and their bright continental beacon of insight existed in the midst of a “dark” world not yet touched by light. Light, then, became a metaphor for Europeanness, and therefore Whiteness, a notion that Benjamin Franklin and his philosophical society eagerly embraced and imported to the colonies. … Enlightenment ideas gave legitimacy to this long-held racist “partiality,” the connection between lightness and Whiteness and reason, on the one hand, and between darkness and Blackness and ignorance, on the other. [19]

This is a ridiculous concoction that attributes to the word “Enlightenment” a racial significance that has absolutely no foundation in etymology, let alone history. The word employed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1784 to describe this period of scientific advance was Aufklärung, which may be translated from the German as “clarification” or “clearing up,” connoting an intellectual awakening. The English translation of Aufklärung as Enlightenment dates from 1865, seventy-five years after the death of Benjamin Franklin, whom Kendi references in support of his racial argument. [20]

Another term used by English speaking people to describe the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been “The Age of Reason,” which was employed by Tom Paine in his scathing assault on religion and all forms of superstition. Kendi’s attempt to root Enlightenment in a white racist impulse is based on nothing but empty juggling with words. In point of fact, modern racism is connected historically and intellectually to the Anti-Enlightenment, whose most significant nineteenth century representative, Count Gobineau, wrote The Inequality of the Human Races. But actual history plays no role in the formulation of Kendi’s pseudo-intellectual fabrications. His work is stamped with ignorance.

History is not the only discipline assaulted by the race specialists. In an essay titled “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” Professor Philip A. Ewell of Hunter College in New York declares, “I posit that there exists a ‘white racial frame’ in music theory that is structural and institutionalized, and that only through a reframing of this white racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music theory.” [21]

This degradation of music theory divests the discipline of its scientific and historically developed character. The complex principles and elements of composition, counterpoint, tonality, consonance, dissonance, timbre, rhythm, notation, etc. are derived, Ewell claims, from racial characteristics. Professor Ewell is loitering in the ideological territory of the Third Reich. There is more than a passing resemblance between his call for the liberation of music from “whiteness” and the efforts of Nazi academics in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s to liberate music from “Jewishness.” The Nazis denounced Mendelssohn as a mediocrity whose popularity was the insidious manifestation of Jewish efforts to dominate Aryan culture. In similar fashion, Ewell proclaims that Beethoven was merely “above average as a composer,” and that he “occupies the place he does because he has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for two hundred years.” [22]

Academic journals covering virtually every field of study are exploding with ignorant rubbish of this sort. Even physics has not escaped the onslaught of racial theorizing. In a recent essay, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, assistant physics professor at the University of New Hampshire, proclaims that “race and ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes in physics,” and introduces the concept of “white empiricism” (italics in the original), which “comes to dominate empirical discourse in physics because whiteness powerfully shapes the predominant arbiters of who is a valid observer of physical and social phenomena.” [23]

Prescod-Weinstein asserts that “knowledge production in physics is contingent on the ascribed identities of the physicists,” the racial and gender background of scientists affects the way scientific research is conducted, and, therefore, the observations and experiments conducted by African-American and female physicists will produce results different than those conducted by white males. Prescod-Weinstein identifies with the contingentists who “challenge any assumption that scientific decision making is purely objective.” [24]

The assumption of objectivity is, she claims, a major problem. Scientists, Prescod-Weinstein complains, are “typically monists—believers in the idea that there is only one science … This monist approach to science typically forecloses a closer investigation of how identity and epistemic outcomes intermix. Yet white empiricism undermines a significant theory of twentieth century physics: General Relativity.” (Emphasis added) [25]

Prescod-Weinstein’s attack on the objectivity of scientific knowledge is buttressed with a distortion of Einstein’s theory.

Albert Einstein’s monumental contribution to our empirical understanding of gravity is rooted in the principal of covariance, which is the simple idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other. All frames of reference, all observers, are equally competent and capable of observing the universal laws that underlie the workings of our physical universe. (Emphasis added) [26]

In fact, general relativity’s statement about covariance posits a fundamental symmetry in the universe, so that the laws of nature are the same for all observers. Einstein’s great (though hardly “simple”) initial insight, studying Maxwell’s equations on electromagnetism involving the speed of light in a vacuum, was that these equations were true in all reference frames. The fact that two observers measure a third light particle in space as traveling at the same speed, even if they are in motion relative to each other, led Einstein to a profound theoretical redefinition of how matter exists in space and time. These theories were confirmed by experiment, a result that will not be refuted by changing the race or gender of those conducting the experiment.

Mass, space, time and other quantities turned out to be varying and relative, depending on one’s reference frame. But this variation is lawful, not subjective—let alone racially determined. It bears out the monist conception. There are no such things as distinct, “racially superior,” “black female,” or “white empiricist” statements or reference frames on physical reality. There is an ascertainable objective truth, genuinely independent of consciousness, about the material world.

Furthermore, “all observers,” regardless of their education and expertise, are not “equally competent and capable” of observing, let alone discovering, the universal laws that govern the universe. Physicists, whatever their personal identities, must be properly educated, and this education, hopefully, will not be marred by the type of ideological rubbish propagated by race and gender theorists.

There is, of course, an audience for the anti-scientific nonsense propounded by Prescod-Weinstein. Underlying much of contemporary racial and gender theorizing is frustration and anger over the allocation of positions within the academy. Prescod-Weinstein’s essay is a brief on behalf of all those who believe that their professional careers have been hindered by “white empiricism.” She attempts to cover over her falsification of science with broad and unsubstantiated claims that racism is ubiquitous among white physicists, who, she alleges, simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of research conducted by black female scientists.

It is possible that a very small number of physicists are racists. But that possibility does not lend legitimacy to her efforts to ascribe to racial identity an epistemological significance that affects the outcome of research. Along these lines, Prescod-Weinstein asserts that the claims to objective truth made by “white empiricism” rest on force. This is a variant of the postmodernist dogma that what is termed “objective truth” is nothing more than a manifestation of the power relations between conflicting social forces. She writes:

White empiricism is the practice of allowing social discourse to insert itself into empirical reasoning about physics, and it actively harms the development of comprehensive understandings of the natural world by precluding putting provincial European ideas about science—which have become dominant through colonial force—into conversation with ideas that are more strongly associated with “indigeneity,” whether it is African indigeneity or another. (Emphasis added) [27] 

The prevalence and legitimization of racialist theorizing is a manifestation of a deep intellectual, social, and cultural crisis of contemporary capitalist society. As in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, race theory is acquiring an audience among disoriented sections of middle-class intellectuals. While most, if not all, of the academics who promote a racial agenda may sincerely believe that they are combating race-based prejudice, they are, nevertheless, propagating anti-scientific and irrationalist ideas which, whatever their personal intentions, serve reactionary ends.

The interaction of racialist ideology as it has developed over several decades in the academy and the political agenda of the Democratic Party is the motivating force behind the 1619 Project. Particularly under conditions of extreme social polarization, in which there is growing interest in and support for socialism, the Democratic Party—as a political instrument of the capitalist class—is anxious to shift the focus of political discussion away from issues that raise the specter of social inequality and class conflict. This is the function of a reinterpretation of history that places race at the center of its narrative.

The 1619 Project did not emerge overnight. For several years, corresponding to the growing role played by various forms of identity politics in the electoral strategy of the Democratic Party, the Times has become fixated, to an extent that can be legitimately described as obsessive, on race. It often appears that the main purpose of the news coverage and commentary of the Times is to reveal the racial essence of any given event or issue.

A search of the archive of the New York Times shows that the term “white privilege” appeared in only four articles in 2010. In 2013, the term appeared in twenty-two articles. By 2015, the Times published fifty-two articles in which the term is referenced. In 2020, as of December 1, the Times had published 257 articles in which there is a reference to “white privilege.”

The word “whiteness” appeared in only fifteen Times articles in 2000. By 2018, the number of articles in which the word appeared had grown to 222. By December 1, 2020, “whiteness” was referenced in 280 articles.

The Times’ unrelenting focus on race during the past year, even in its obituary section, has been clearly related to the 2020 electoral strategy of the Democratic Party. The 1619 Project was conceived of as a critical element of this strategy. This was explicitly stated by the Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, in a meeting on August 12, 2019 with the newspaper’s staff:

[R]ace and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the American story … one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that. Race in the next year—and I think this is, to be frank, what I hope you come away from this discussion with—race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story. [28]

The New York Times’ effort to “teach” its readers “to think a little bit more” about race assumed the form of a falsification of American history, aimed at discrediting the revolutionary struggles that gave rise to the founding of the United States in 1776 and the ultimate destruction of slavery during the Civil War. This falsification could only contribute to the erosion of democratic consciousness, legitimize a racialized view of American history and society, and undermine the unity of the broad mass of Americans in their common struggle against conditions of social inequality and exploitation.

The racialist campaign of the New York Times has unfolded against the backdrop of a pandemic ravaging working-class communities, regardless of race and ethnicity, throughout the United States and the world. The global death toll has already surpassed 1.5 million. Within the United States, the number of COVID-19 deaths will surpass 300,000 before the end of the year. The pandemic has also brought economic devastation to millions of Americans. The unemployment rate is approaching Great Depression levels. Countless millions of people are without any source of income and depend upon food banks for their daily sustenance.

[ergativeabsolutive]

I just realized I my brain got mixed up for a second and I didn’t say the words I meant to say. While what I said, that “violence isn’t neutral”, is correct and does apply to my overall statement, and is related to what I meant to say in its place, it’s actually the (related) opposite of what I meant to say.

What I was going to say was that violence isn’t some monolithic thing, it is not merely bad in all instances, nor merely good in all instances, nor, indeed, is it neutral, or rather devoid of content in general.  Hence, as I said, there are the two types of violence, which must not be conflated or confused with one another, and on which you cannot take a neutral position, you must always take a position according to the type of violence. To oppose both revolutionary violence and reactionary violence, or to oppose neither, to equate them whatsoever, is a betrayal of the people.

If you think that we will ever overcome imperialism, overcome the rule of capital, take control of our own society, if you think Black people will ever have their liberation, if you think we can ever crush, utterly annihilate antisemitism and wipe it, and all forms of chauvinism, off the face of the earth, without revolutionary violence, without bloodshed, without war, you are sorely mistaken. After all, as we know, “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. And it is that “means” that is ultimately necessary to sweep away the obstacles to the imposition of the rule of the working class, to Black liberation, to destroying antisemitism, etc. and to crush and pacify the resistance to those things once victory is achieved. Pacifism will get us nowhere, nor will the fragmentation of the three either do anything but harm, they have a common basis and enemy, it is only through the first that the others can be achieved, and none will be achieved by peaceful means.

On the other hand, as I already said, we should resolutely and unconditionally stand against reactionary violence in all its forms, whether it be from these putschists or the police. The answer to reactionary violence is unwavering resistance and the application of revolutionary violence whenever advantageous. Never peace, never capitulation, never handwringing, never whining “WhAt AbOuT oThEr CoUnTrIeS?”, never equivocating about “danger”. Forces must be preserved, yes, but you preserve nothing with surrender, and there is nothing more “dangerous” than the enemy’s “peace”, where the people remain exploited, most oppressed continually suffer, and war, both amongst the enemy and against the people, is inevitable, as we see today.