#anti-yang supremacy

[cannedpeachess]

Anti-Yang supremacy for life

[communistkenobi]

thank you so much for the transmisogyny reading post! im definitely gonna be reading into those. in a similar vein, do you have a recommended reading list for decolonization/anti-imperialism?

Do you mean molsno's post? def cannot take credit for that but yes I have a couple!

high-level recommendation is discourse on colonialism by aime cesaire (this link goes to a pdf that is a collection of essays, you can skip to cesaire's essay). probably one of the most formative essays for me personally in terms of how i think about colonialism

decolonization is not a metaphor by Tuck & Yang is a famous article in decolonial scholarship and will likely come up pretty frequently if you're reading academic work. if you read that article, i recommend following it up with Slavery is a Metaphor by Garba & Sorentino - its a Black critical commentary by two marxist scholars i believe on Tuck & Yang's work, working through the anti-Black thinking that is present in the work, particularly the deeply problematic conceptual attention given by Tuck & Yang to slavery when historicising and analyzing settler colonialism in North America. These are both academic articles and they're both jargon-laden so your mileage will vary

I originally included decolonizing transgender 101 by b binaohan on here before realizing that it's already in the linked post above lol. in that post is a link to the full book that i'll repost here (usually you can only find the introduction online) so definitely make use of that. anyway great work, very accessible and insightful, makes direct linkages between white supremacy, settler colonialism, and transmisogyny in a way i found extremely helpful

i read beyond white privilege: geographies of white supremacy and settler colonialism during my master's about four years ago (jesus christ the passage of time!!!) and found it very insightful - the authors talk about white supremacy as a process rather than a historical event, as well as talk about some of the conceptual limitations of the popular focus on white privilege (as opposed to white supremacy) that i found very helpful for me personally. its another academic article

I've been recently introduced to Anibal Quijano's work, particularly the Coloniality of Power. this is an extremely theoretical work that focuses on the construction and universalization of race, the 'invention of Europe,' modernity as a colonial construction, and a bunch of other pretty dense topics. thats not to scare you off, but its probably the most theory heavy article i've linked here

this list skews towards academic work because that's what im most familiar with (all the links i provided are open-access links so you should not need institutional access to read them). For books, you can read Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon or Orientalism by Edward Said, they're both pretty foundational decolonial texts and are also pretty formative for me. Fanon's work is on decolonial struggle and the pathologization of colonized people, Said's work is on the construction of "the East" to justify and reproduce Western hegemony.

Hope this was helpful! I'm by no means an expert and this is only scratching the surface of scholarship on the subject. I'm still in the process of reading, but hopefully this is a good starting point for you!

[tumblasha]

book reviews: texas lightning round

at age 7 i fell in love with the public library system <3 now as a 21 y/o, every time that i visit home (my parents' house), i go to the public library and try to consume as much as i can, usually graphic novels! below are the ones i Devoured in the last 26-ish hours

all events are mentioned within the first ~20% of each book! mild spoilers oops

crumbs by danie stirling

overall rating: ★★★/5

cute story literally about being in a magic society where people have powers and (some) go to a special school to be a part of a council that saves people from many types of disasters & thematically about choosing between work (hard-to-meet goals, expectations) and love (familial, romantic, reality). art was good. traditional publication of a webtoon. kinda suffered from pacing bc it's a webtoon lol

slip by marika mccoola and aatmaja pandya

overall rating: ★★★/5

(cw: suicide) high schooler jade goes to a summer arts camp (for ceramics!). the week before she leaves for the camp, her friend phoebe attempts to commit suicide and is socially pulling away from her as she recovers. the premise sounded really raw and hard-hitting, but the authors added a fun supernatural-ish element to the story (still furthers the plot tho)! all of the ceramic animals that jade made come to life! art was good : )

superman smashes the klan by gene luen yang and art by gurihiru

overall rating: ★★★★/5

(cw: kkk, anti-asian racism) def my fav of all three graphic novels!! main characters are chinese-american siblings roberta and tommy lee who move from chinatown to the suburbs of metropolis. unfortunately, the klan decides to commit several hate crimes towards the lee family : ( superman also suffers from "not fitting in" (bc he's literally an alien) and trying to hide his powers his entire life. v cool to see superman going back to his roots of hating nazis. i wish this book were longer and dove into the themes of white supremacists being influential in the media, being non-white in a majority-white town, and more. the end of the book had a brief look into the rise of white supremacy in the usa and superman as an anti-nazi hero (also a cute story of how the author's parents met hehe)

though i push for restorative justice and other such topics for the long-term future, i truly believe in the next sentence for the short-term future: the only good nazi is a dead nazi!

[batmancomicanalysis]

Psycholinguistic problems with "white" for ethno-conservationists

1. Taken literally it's just a shade on the colour spectrum (and not even an accurate one: virtually no ones skin is as white as a sheet of paper, albinos possibly excepted) and thus trivialised (“white” isn’t even capitalised), stripped of history, biology, territory, culture and ethnicity

2. Although it represents masculinity in the yin-yang dichotomy and has historically been linked to political (European colonialism, monarchy) and religious (light, God) power, white has become feminine-coded archetypally, associated with beauty and bridehood (white woman, white wedding dress), surrender and peace (white flag), civilisation, sterility, neuroticism and masochistic violation (morality, cleanliness, purity, innocence), cold (snow, ice), vanilla (blandness, boredom), absence, nothingness and emptiness (blank canvas), receptivity and recessiveness (artistically and phenotypically)

3. Its literal opposite is the now masculine-coded black, which implies necessity, equality (or even black supremacy) and ultimately symbiosis/death, potentially creating a black-white neurosis for white racialists (white women and black men are polar opposites in this linguistic duality, possibly implying greater attraction and the relative androgyny of white men) when no such unique or inherent duality exists between Europeans and Africans, nor is politics accurately understood primarily as a conflict between Europeans and Africans, which a “black and white” view of race encourages

4. It's potentially inclusive of non/anti-Europeans with light pigmentation (for instance, Noel Ignatiev and Tim Wise have claimed to be white while advocating for "the destruction of whiteness")

5. It's a term that has been heavily demonised: people (and even white racialists subconsciously) have been reflexively conditioned to associate the racial-political category of white with evil, catastrophe and defeat (Confederacy, Nazi Germany, Neo-Nazism), as though its ultimate destruction is a historical, biological and metaphysical good and a law of nature

Its contemporary status as a negative exonym is revealed by the fact that opponents of European ethnic preservation affirm the framing of “white vs everyone else”, claim that “whiteness” is inherently evil and label their enemies “white supremacists”.

This collection of points makes “white nationalism”, “white identitarianism”, “pro-white” etc. massively counterproductive as self-identifying labels.

[blue-village]

The impossibility of fully becoming a white settler - in this case, white referring to an exceptionalized position with assumed rights to invulnerability and legal supremacy - as articulated by minority literature preoccupied with “glass ceilings” and “forever foreign” status and “myth of the model minority”, offers a strong critique of the myth of the democratic nation-state. However, its logical endpoint, the attainment of equal legal and cultural entitlements, is actually an investment in settler colonialism. Indeed, even the ability to be a minority citizen in the settler nation means an option to become a brown settler. For many people of color, becoming a subordinate settler is an option even when becoming white is not. “Following stolen resources” is a phrase that Wayne has encountered, used to describe Filipino overseas labor (over 10% of the population of the Philippines is working abroad) and other migrations from colony to metropole. This phrase is an important anti-colonial framing of a colonial situation. However an anti-colonial critique is not the same as a decolonizing framework; anti-colonial critique often celebrates empowered postcolonial subjects who seize denied privileges from the metropole. This anti-to-post-colonial project doesn’t strive to undo colonialism but rather to remake it and subvert it. Seeking stolen resources is entangled with settler colonialism because those resources were nature/Native first, then enlisted into the service of settlement and thus almost impossible to reclaim without re-occupying Native land. Furthermore, the postcolonial pursuit of resources is fundamentally an anthropocentric model, as land, water, air, animals, and plants are never able to become postcolonial; they remain objects to be exploited by the empowered postcolonial subject. Equivocation is the vague equating of colonialisms that erases the sweeping scope of land as the basis of wealth, power, law in settler nation-states. Vocalizing a ‘muliticultural’ approach to oppressions, or remaining silent on settler colonialism while talking about colonialisms, or tacking on a gesture towards Indigenous people without addressing Indigenous sovereignty or rights, or forwarding a thesis on decolonization without regard to unsettling/deoccupying land, are equivocations. That is, they ambiguously avoid engaging with settler colonialism; they are ambivalent about minority / people of color / colonized Others as settlers; they are cryptic about Indigenous land rights in spaces inhabited by people of color.

- Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization is not a metaphor (2012)

[schraubd]

Multicultural White Supremacy

Buzzfeed has an interesting piece up on the 4chan/ex-MAGA/reddit trolls who have been flocking to Andrew Yang's presidential campaign. Of course, being 4chan/MAGA/reddit trolls, they're also engaging in vicious harassment of a Yang staffer they've come to dislike. But that's not what I want to talk about. Buzzfeed reports that Yang has gotten enthusiastic backing from some luminaries of the White supremacist right -- folks like Richard Spencer or the Daily Stormer. Despite, you know, clearly not being White. And he's not the only one. Tulsi Gabbard already picked up an endorsement from none other than David Duke, who also infamously praised Ilhan Omar for supposedly being willing to tackle the "Israel lobby". Several far-right figures have reported being inspired by Ben Shapiro. The self-described "Imam of Peace" Mohammad Tawhidi garners endorsements from notorious Islamophobes like Tommy Robinson and Paul Joseph Watson. In his "Skin in the Game" article, Eric Ward recounted how he -- a Black man -- was able to be accepted in far-right White nationalist circles based on a presumed anti-Jewish alliance. And it cuts both ways: last year Arun Gupta had a fascinating article on young men of color outright joining far-right, White supremacist organizations. I'm not saying in any of these cases that the White supremacist praise was invited by its recipients. There's no reason to think Yang or Gabbard or Omar or Shapiro are anything other than repelled by the prospect of being "endorsed" by White supremacists (Tawhidi is actually a potential exception). And often what one White supremacist hand giveth, another taketh away: the Yang story, after all, is about this same quadrant of "support" turning on his campaign with a misogynist vengeance. Omar is regularly targeted with death threats from the far-right, and Shapiro is the most harassed Jewish journalist online by some measures. So I'm also not saying that any of these figures are simply and without qualification beneficiaries of White supremacist grace. But that's not the point. The point is that this sort of affinity -- in any form -- wasn't supposed to be even possible. White supremacists aren't supposed to be enthusiastic about non-White public figures. That's kind of their whole shtick. So what do we make of this seemingly bizarre phenomenon: multicultural White supremacy? I am not the first to come up with that term -- as best I can tell, it was coined by Dylan Rodriguez at the cusp of the Obama presidency. But we are using it slightly differently. Rodriguez is speaking of how, in his view, the standard liberal multicultural political arrangement -- exemplified by someone like Obama -- nonetheless can uphold a broader structure of White supremacy. My focus, by contrast, is on "traditional" White supremacists who nonetheless come to praise and work with non-White public figures. So what gives? One answer is that it's all a form of trolling -- a way of leveraging their own toxicity against groups who they otherwise hate (think Richard Spencer calling his ideology "White Zionism"). There might be something to that -- I think something like that probably was in play when he "praised" Omar, for example -- but I don't think it's the whole story. The outright endorsement of Gabbard goes well beyond what can be explained by mere "trolling", for example. Likewise the favor with which many on the far-right hold Shapiro. Another answer is that it falsifies the idea that the figures in question are truly "White supremacist".  Literally: how could they be White Supremacist if they're praising those whom are deemed non-White! Under this view, the fact that these supposed "White supremacists" sometimes praise and endorse non-Whites is a great big gotcha to the liberals tarring everyone they disagree with as bigots and cheapening the term "White supremacist" beyond recognition (hello, Laura Ingraham!). The problem here is that a good chunk of the figures I'm talking about describe themselves as "White supremacists" or use synonymous terms that are quite clear that they think specifically racial advocacy on behalf of Whites is an important part of their politics. If the Daily Stormer isn't "White supremacist", then nothing is. My take is that this is best understood as a further disintegration of a Platonic Ideal of "White supremacy" which no longer (if it ever did) exists. The vision of the White supremacist as someone who simply, blindly, and uncritically hates all members of the racial outgroups, for no other reason than that they are members of that outgroup, is collapsing. In its place is someone who certainly sees inter-group conflict as central to their ideology, and views certain despised outgroups as avatars of that which they loathe in contemporary politics or society. But it's overlaid onto more complex set of political commitments (which could be anything, but often centers around a sort of paleo-conservative vision of isolationism and insularity), and so there's always the possibility that some individual member of the group will have (or be perceived as having) an aligned ideology. Such persons will be accepted as (literally) "exceptional" -- they may even be trotted out as proof that the supposedly blind hater are actually discerning and "meritocratic". In reality, they prove the opposite: they demonstrate that occasional acceptance of certain "exceptional" outgroup members who meet highly specified criteria is perfectly compatible with even "traditional" White supremacy (let alone more subtle or ambivalent forms of racial inequity). If, as Bernard Williams reminded us, even the Nazis "pa[id], in very poor coin, the homage of irrationality to reason," this is the contemporary version of that. The Nazi anthropologists were speaking a particular language of an era that sought to warrant their hatred based on prevailing ideologies of the time. Today, the relevant ideologies have changed and thus so does the attempted payment. There's something faintly inspiring about this -- that today even the most inveterate White supremacists nonetheless must concede some possibility of connection to or alliance with those they supposedly hate. Nonetheless, it hardly dissipates the danger. An antisemite who likes Ben Shapiro is still an antisemite. An Islamophobe who likes Mohammad Tawhidi is still an Islamophobe. A racist who likes Andrew Yang or Tulsi Gabbard is still a racist. It might be a little weird that White Supremacy could go multicultural. But such is the era we live in. via The Debate Link http://bit.ly/311AwH9

[kitkatopinions]

*deep breath* you ever think about how yang’s yellow trailer hints at her losing her arm by addressing asymmetry and how weiss ALSO uses asymmetry in her ponytail to rebel against her abusive father and how weiss knows yang’s struggle with loneliness as the self-proclaimed “loneliest of them all” and how she knows yang’s struggle with her mom leaving her because weiss’s own mom was distant too.

but anyways 🐝🐝 BUZZ BUZZ GARDEN OF ECSTASY THE ONE THING I CAN COUNT ON IS I CAN’T COUNT ON YOU 🐝🐝

so romantic of blake to compare yang to her abusive ex-bf adam in v3 right??

Gonna be honest, I don't fully get the asymmetry thing being like, an early indication of Freezerburn, but boy howdy, Weiss and Yang were a great potential ship and I cannot and will not understand how the writers went with Blake and Yang as a ship when it was right there outside of doing what they thought was popular because they wanted fan clicks.

Like, I've talked before at length about how I think Blake and Yang could have worked, but that doesn't mean that's the ship I think would've been best for either of them, and partially because freezerburn was such a good potential ship. Admittedly, it suffers from a lot of the same things as early bumblebee in that any moments they have can easily be read as only friendship driven and it's not explored as much as it should be (you know, to convince us that these four are super tight best friends who love each other very much.) But I would almost argue that their casual interactions, challenging each other, showing interest in the same things (like party planning and board games) while also having these huge differences... All of that makes them way more appealing as a ship than Blake and Yang, to me. All of this comes into play when Yang and Weiss reunite in volume five and have all these cute small moments.

I've talked about how Blake and Yang seem like they could be better together after season five because the journeys they take make them better people who were working through their toxic traits, but that's true of Freezerburn too, only we see a natural shift from 'casual friends' to 'good friends,' instead of 'friends with contention' to 'friends with contention and romantic tension.'

The fact that Yang literally canonly reminded Blake of Adam at least to some extent doesn't mean their relationship couldn't have ever been, but it was a wedge and a roadblock that the writers didn't treat with much importance when they actually started writing the romance in volume six when Yang acted like Blake promising to never leave her again is good and affirming to Blake that it's what she wants "I know you won't," while they wrote Yang to be just as impulsive and anger driven in V7 and V8 as she was back when Blake was rightfully acting hesitant to even befriend her (remember Yang exploding and going red eyed because Marrow suggested they should take missions with other people every now and again.) And not to mention, I never like shipping Blake with anyone who's been anti Faunus or done anything anti Faunus, but especially if it goes by without apology or even getting called out. Yang using a laser pointer to get Blake's attention is casual anti Faunus behavior that's just dismissed as a joke, and that's a major roadblock that makes their ship just feel a little worse to me. Weiss and Yang are superior just in the fact that one of them isn't (totally validly) reminded of their abuser by the other, and one of them hasn't been discriminatory to the other.

But also you bring up their songs and like ??? I also have no idea how both of those songs are heralded as super romantic blake and yang exclusive amazing songs and proof of the ship's supremacy.

First off, we have the BMBLB song, which had pretty much nothing to do with Blake and Yang other than referencing bumblebees, which is what Yang and Blake's team attack is called. When you look at Boop, it's clearly about Nora's feelings for Ren, referencing having known him for a long time now, referencing Nora's weapon, using her 'queen of the castle' lines as inspiration, and making the whole thing about her booping Ren on the nose. That song is clearly about Nora and Ren and Nora's feelings for Ren. Shine, which isn't officially about Pyrrha, but seems to be about her, references "I've been watching you, helping you, wishing that you could see, that the girl you've been waiting so long for could be me." And "I think that you're the one who'll rescue me this time," and "When I needed a hero you knew it and you were there." Those are things which at least indicate that they're talking about Pyrrha, things that feel like they're referencing her dynamic with Jaune - the one who frequently rescues Jaune, pining after him while watching him go after Weiss - Most of which is echoed in Dream Come True. Even Not Fall in Love With You, which is really, really vague and easily read as not about Blake and Sun still is about pining after someone and wanting them to feel the same way, while being unable to hide your feelings, which is at least in line with the volume three interactions of Blake and Sun.

Why - what - When have Blake or Yang ever been in a garden? When have Yang and Blake ever had a secret relationship? Unless it was so freaking secret that it was a secret from Blake and the audience as well. Outside of initiation and their conversation about Raven, were Blake and Yang ever even alone together on screen? That's an honest question. And assuming this song is supposed to be from Yang's POV (since she's the only one who I can even see having had romantic feelings for the other prior to V6,) then why is she saying Blake chased away her darkness and gloom? Like yeah, Yang had darkness and gloom, but... Blake sure wasn't helping with that. And the release of the song as an addition to the volume four soundtrack, when Yang was in a depression, partially because Blake had left her with no explanation after her arm was cut off by Blake's abusive ex... And it's like, this boppy up beat love song... I one hundred percent buy that this was just some peppy love song that Jeff Williams made that wasn't actually about Blake and Yang (although I don't buy that MKEK had no idea the song would be read that way and were just so innocent in it and didn't intend to queerbait.)

Now let's talk about All That Matters, or as I like to call it Fans Dismissing Yang's Pain and Ignoring Her Struggles! People really heard a song about Yang's inner thoughts surrounding her abandonment issues and how Blake - intentionally or otherwise - played right into that and how Yang felt like she couldn't depend on Blake and how it was breaking her down and exhausting her but she was pushing it down just to be happy Blake was with her right at that moment... And the main take away was 'Yang really likes Blake.' I do get how this song is read as romantic, because it reads that way to me too, but I feel like the romantic undertones point to toxicity, and just make it harder for me to see this ship as good and stable and healthy. So if I'm supposed to see this song as canon or at the very least canon compliant, I'm meant to think that Yang in V5 was with Blake again and her thought process was "Whelp, here's the girl who ditches me and has proved that she doesn't seem to care about me as much as I care about her, who I can't fix but who doesn't even see the pain and struggle that I go through, but I'm just glad to see her now in this moment so even though I can't trust or count on her, she's still here now and that's good enough." And then... What, that completely vanishes by the end of V6 without Yang's feelings ever having been addressed and all of a sudden it's "Blake's never ever going to leave me and I know that and now I'm going to get super angry if anyone suggests we do anything apart because her independence doesn't matter and she should stay with me." Like, I don't understand how people don't get that both of those things are problematic. I actually think All That Matters is a very pretty song that's great for Yang even with all its unhealthy vibes, because I do think that's what she was doing - pushing down her own feelings to try to just be happy Blake was there in the moment even though she was hurting and demoralized and felt like she couldn't count on Blake to be there for her, especially because I think she clearly was putting more effort into her relationship with Blake than Blake was and could have had feelings for Blake when Blake didn't seem to reciprocate. But that should've been addressed in the show, it should've been part of the plot instead of being brushed aside! And seeing fans presenting that song as basically 'proof of feelings' without recognizing how it reflects on their relationship is just bonkers crazy. If the problems between Blake and Yang had gotten addressed and worked through, their relationship could be stronger.

I mean tbh I myself love the concept of Yang pining and then not winding up with Blake and instead winding up with Weiss, which could've been hinted at as a possibility in the earlier seasons, but if they were going to do Bumblebee, they should've done it better, and All That Matters and BMBLB are both songs that seem very misrepresented in this fandom in general. Man, making this post makes me want to listen to All That Matters for the first time in awhile for that sweet Yang angst, and writing this post also makes me want to work on my RWBY rewrite. If I ever get around to writing and publishing that thing, it'll for sure contain Yang pining after Blake, but then her and Weiss being end game.

[mitigatedchaos]

On Having “Whiteness”

(~2,200 words, 11 minutes)

Summary: A metaphysics of “Whiteness” has overtaken actual sociology in the Democrats’ popular consciousness - blinding them to racial interventions that might actually work and taking them off the table of political discussion.

-★★★-

Donald Moss - On Having Whiteness, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (emphasis mine)

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

So both @arcticdementor [here] and @samueldays have linked me to this allegedly “peer-reviewed” article.  The Federalist has a bit more context, but it doesn’t really make the situation better.

Race Theory Problems

Obviously, this is a work of sloppy thinking.  The categorization of “white supremacy culture” or “whiteness” used by people like this is vague handwaving that describes being bad at management as “white supremacy culture,” and which in general labels universal human problems, like organizations being resource-constrained, or people being impatient, as somehow uniquely “white.” 

But this sort of article is really what I mean when I say that social justice’s approach to “whiteness” is about “spiritual contamination.” 

Samueldays called it “the ‘I’m not touching you’ of inciting race war,” and I may cover more of his response to it later.  Suffice it to say, it has the same general kind of problems as “stolen land” arguments (where an entire present population’s living area becomes undefined), unbounded “reparations” arguments where no amount of transfers by the designated oppressor are considered to clear the debt, and so on.

This is exactly the sort of material that conservatives are seeking to remove government funding for and prohibit from use in employment training.  This is the kind of material that the Trump Anti-CRT executive order prohibiting racial scapegoating was meant to cover.

Race Theory Definitions

This kind of stuff is, of course, not really defensible, so usually at this point people will argue that 1), “that’s not real critical race theory,” and then 2), “it’s just a few weirdos.”  For those, I would say...

1) If it’s not real “Critical Race Theory,” then what is it?

We can’t measure or disprove Moss’s proposed “Whiteness,” and this malevolent psychic entity said to “deform” white people obviously isn’t based on a comparison with other human populations or historical periods.  When it comes to “insatiable” appetites, one study argued that the Mongol invasions killed so many people that it showed up in the carbon record.

At best, it’s sloppy race science as practiced by an amateur, like twitter users idly speculating whether whites have ‘oppressor epigenetics’ - but with the veneer of official status.  And it has similar risks to proposing that there is such a thing as biologically-inherited class enemy status, and other collective intergenerational justice logic.

Presumably, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association is intended as a journal of science, or at least serious scholarship, and not of bad racist poetry with no rhyme or meter.

Moss provides a relatively pure example of whatever-this-is. I need to know what it’s called, so we can get rid of it.

Race Theory Prohibitions

2) If it’s just the product of a few race-obssessed weirdos, then it won’t hurt to get rid of it.  So get rid of it.

The actual text [PDF] of the Trump Anti-CRT order does not ban teaching about the Trail of Tears, or Jim Crow, and so on, and both of those topics were taught in school before this recent wave of whatever-this-is was popularized.

Trump’s order banned teaching that any race is inherently guilty or evil due to the actions of their ancestors, and the level of resistance to this has been bizarre.

These teachings don’t seem to provide gains in relatively objective metrics like underrepresented minority test scores (or at least that’s not something I’ve seen - and the continued opposition to standardized tests suggests proponents do not expect it to), so it’s unclear just what of value is going to be lost here. 

Collateral Damage

Samueldays wrote,

Because right now the conservatives talking about "critical race theory" as they fire in the direction of Moss et al. are very important in preventing another race war and you have a moral duty to help them aim, not throw smoke for Moss.

Right now Conservatives are assessing just how much stuff they’re going to have to rip out to make “standardized tests are racist” and “it’s impossible to be racist to white people” stop.  While this may not be the message that Liberals are intending to send, it is the message that many people are receiving.  (I discuss problems with both, and some alternatives to handle them better, in another post.)

Liberals need to get out in front of this.  Sooner is better.

If Conservatives think that they have to gut hostile work environment law in order to avoid their children being taught that they’re permanently morally contaminated by their race, and Liberals have no means to actually close race gaps within a 4-8 year period (and right now it’s slim pickings on that front), Conservatives are just going to gut hostile work environment law.

Aether

From their perspective, why not? 

Everything in the world is only six degrees of separation from something racist.  Anything in the world can be tied to something racist.  (So can anyone.)

But nowhere in this pervasive atmosphere of tying things to racism are there solutions.  There are guesses based on correlations.  Proposals.  But usually when you reach out to grab them, to really get a grip on whether it’s correlation or causation, they dissolve in your hands.  The few that do have any solidity to them are moderate in their success (such as Heckman’s involvement in the Reach Up & Learn study in Jamaica) - and don’t appear to be based on the same style of thinking as shown by Moss and others.

It isn’t just that trying to turn combating an invisible, non-measurable, unfalsifiable, parasitic psychic force into an actual political program would inevitably be oppressive and totalitarian.  It isn’t just that articles like Moss’s are an in-kind donation to the 2024 DeSantis Presidential campaign for that very reason.

It isn’t just that unfalsifiable Metaphysics of Whiteness content like White Privilege Theory has been found to lower sympathy for the poor, and that present diversity training doesn’t work...

Race Content Crowding

This stuff is crowding out legitimate scholarship.  I don’t just mean in terms of funding, tenure track positions, or high-flying magazine coverage - all limited by their nature.  I mean among the base.  I have been interrogating Democrats on Twitter for months, and not a single one has been able to cite a strongly-demonstrated intervention that’s being held back, or even a past one that was conclusively demonstrated to be effective.  They can often recite a list of racial grievances on cue.

Tucker Carlson could run boomer_update.exe on a list of every educational failure since the 1970s, and they would be reduced to sputtering accusations of racism against people who increasingly don’t care.  He could do this tomorrow.  The only thing that prevents this is Tucker Carlson’s conscience.

I discovered the Reach Up & Learn program through Glenn Loury - described as a ‘conservative.’ Scott Alexander, attacked by the New York Times crew, brought some success with multivitamins to my attention.  When I first heard about the Perry Preschool program, I believe it was from someone well to the right of him.

About the only one brought to my attention by the Democratic establishment constellation proper was lead removal, and the gains on that are probably getting tapped out.  The frame it was proposed in was not Critical Race Theorist, as this was likely in 2012. 

As it stands, I’m more likely to find something that works from someone the New York Times would disapprove of than someone they wouldn’t.  Or, as Wesley Yang wrote,

Reality has been contrarian for a while.

Succeed Early

Even if we suppose that Conservatives are inherently racist, Liberals have a duty to support interventions that work.  In fact, the more that Conservatives are a seething, undifferentiated mass of uniform racial hatred, the more important it is that Liberals stick to racial interventions that work, because nobody else is going to fix the problem if Liberals get it wrong.

It isn’t just a matter of resources per year.  It’s also a matter of time.

From Heckman’s website,

Although Perry did not produce long-run gains in IQ, it did create lasting improvements in character skills [...] which consequently improved a number of labor market outcomes and health behaviors as well as reduced criminal activity.

Even if we propose an unlimited amount of funding (which is not the case), people and politicians only have a limited amount of time and attention each year.  Newspapers only publish so many issues with so many pages each week.  Television programs only cover so many hours for so many viewers each day.  Even the dedicated can only read so many books in a year.

Even though the Perry intervention was imperfect, and the sample size was not as large as desirable, every second Democrat I talked to should have been able to answer the question “can you name an effective intervention?” with “what about Perry Preschool?”

Every year that we have entire cottage industries working on and popularizing contentious, ineffective, and backlash-provoking Metaphysics of Whiteness content, based on oversimplified oppressor/oppressed binaries, or theories in which power is held collectively by races as monolithic blobs (rather than modelling power as a network of relations between individuals, in which an individual of any background might be destroyed by the racialized relations in their environment), is another year we haven’t spent that energy on finding or implementing something that actually works.

This isn’t just an individual failure by Democrat voters, who typically have day jobs to focus on - it is a failure by the institutions who are supposed to inform and guide them.  This institutional failure likely contributed to the popularization of Metaphysics of Whiteness content in the first place.

Okay, now what?

Donald Moss is a crackpot.  Metaphysics of Whiteness content is unfalsifiable.  The idea that there is a psychic parasite of “Whiteness” is not a legitimate field of study; it’s parasociology.  The idea that “a sense of urgency” is “white supremacy culture” isn’t much better. [1]

We already tried isolating this content to obscure corners of academia, where individuals with high racial attachment could write about it.  It leaked out. 

We need to get this stuff out of the popular consciousness to make room for stuff that might actually work.  The best way to do that may be to cut off the source.  Since Donald Moss is a crackpot, perhaps it’s time we started treating him, and everyone else like him, as what they are.

People involved in Metaphysics of Whiteness content, like Donald Moss, need to be (figuratively) grabbed by the shoulder, and firmly, but politely, told to stop.  Society has been recklessly handing out race-colored glasses to the general population since around 2014, resulting in a rise in amateur race science, of which both right-wing Twitter users memeing about Italians and Metaphysics of Whiteness participants like Moss are examples.  If they do not stop, they must be stripped of institutional authority.  Metaphysics of Whiteness content is unfalsifiable and we should not be certifying it.

If institutions refuse to reduce the authority of Metaphysics of Whiteness practitioners, those institutions must have their accreditation penalized, and their government funding reduced or eliminated, just as if they insisted on producing study after study on magic or ESP which failed to yield results.  If they do not comply, they must be replaced.

It’s possible that Metaphysics of Whiteness content might have had some obscure, niche function in terms of the exploration of the idea space. 

However, as it has displaced popular knowledge of interventions that might work, and the attention given to them in the political system, Liberals should seek to surgically remove it, at the very least until some more effective interventions see the political light of day.

If not, Conservatives will attempt to remove it with a bludgeon.  "They described an entire race as ‘voracious, insatiable, and perverse,’ and here’s the citation for the exact page where they did that,” is perfect material with which to abolish entire departments.

-★★★-

[1] If we go a bit farther out, scholars of “Decolonization” argue that the field is wholly unconcerned with “settler futurity,” a phrase not much less ominous than describing “whiteness” as “incurable.”  It seems that their entire job should be to answer the very difficult questions they have decided not to.

[chaeryybomb]

current wips

will i ever post these? i do not know. more will be added in the future.

title: sunny smiles pairing: hwang hyunjin x reader featuring: yang jeongin, han jisung and wang yiren genre: camp!au, exes to lovers current wordcount: 566

“Hyunjin! Jeongin!” Jisung yelled as he raced across to two other boys.

You furrowed your eyebrows at the unfamiliar names. Did Jisung already have friends here? You looked over at his direction and saw him with two boys with mops of black hair. Jisung noticed you staring and gestured to you to go over.

He grabbed you by the arm and pointed to the taller. “This is Hyunjin, my classmate,” and then to the one with braces, “and this is Jeongin! My neighbor.”

You shyly glanced at the two boys and bowed, hiding half of her face behind her hair. “This is Y/N, my cousin,” Jisung introduced you when he realized that you weren't speaking up.

You looked up at the boy in front of you, Hyunjin, he was beaming at you. “It’s nice to meet you Y/N,” he said. “I hope we can be friends!”

Thirteen-year-old you wouldn’t admit it, but your heart started beating quickly at his smile. That was the first time it did so.

title: (currently untitled)  pairing: na jaemin x reader featuring: nct dream, skz 00 liner, jung yunho, yeh shuhua, choi lia & hwang yeji genre: lowkey enemies to lovers, college au, angst, fluff, jaemin’s a dick sorry- current wordcount: 851 

“Are you sure this is legal?” you inspected the weird green looking liquid in your red solo cup. 

Yeji lifted the cup to her nose and sniffed it. The liquid gave out a sickeningly sweet odor. She then turned to you and shrugged, but opted to not take a sip for safety measures. 

“This looks like one of the ionic liquids I made in chemistry last week,” you said, swirling the liquid in the club. You made a disgusted face and placed the cup back down on the table, slightly pushing it back. 

You crossed your arms and leaned against the counter. The sparkly tank top Shuhua lent to you did not really give you warmth, at least you managed to convince her to let you wear ripped jeans instead of a leather skirt. Yeji scanned the crowded area for your friends but she lost track of them the moment they entered the frat. (Hyunjin dragged them off somewhere, she doesn’t know.)

The air smelled like sweaty bodies and alcohol. You shifted uncomfortably in your place, Your heart was beating in your ears due to the loud music. Why did you let Shuhua convince you to come? You could’ve been at the library studying about human bone structures instead but no, you just had to come. And you don't even know where Shuhua went!  

Your eyes roamed the dancing crowd, hoping to find one of your friends' faces. But to her luck, you locked eyes with someone else instead. Someone you hated. 

Na Jaemin. The epitome of an idiot.

You both met at freshman year of college when Jaemin accidentally signed up for your biology course. He was a photography major. And an idiot, in your eyes. What kind of idiot mistakes “bio” for biography and not biology? He was also the reason why you got a C for one of their pair projects in bio. A C! And it wasn’t even a C+! That grade ruined your pristine grades for the first semester. Thankfully you were able to raise it back in the second semester, it was even better that he dropped biology then too. 

title: (currently untitled) pairing: electric guitarist!han jisung x song writer!reader featuring: stray kids & itzy genre: friends to lovers, bulleted form, fluff current wordcount: 1.9k 

"welcome to chan's studio" ヾ(^▽^)ノ

"chan this is your garage" 

"studio." ヾ(^▽^)ノ

"it's a garage—" 

"studio." ヾ(^▽^)ノ

"bu—" 

"s t u d i o." ᕦ(#^▽^)ᕤ

(hyunjin, gulping in fear) "y-yes sir" 

they play gigs at an underground club called jyp wow so original dhshdhs

usually on the weekends because they have school on weekdays—

"you guys are you still growing so you need your sleep—" 

"chan you don't even sleep" 

"shut up seungmin that's not my point, the point is—" 

"is that you don't sleep" 

"jisung I will kick you out from this band" 

"YOU WOULDN'T" 

"I WOULD" 

title: anti-everything pairing: zhong chenle x reader featuring: nct dream, lee daehwii, osaki shotaro, yang jeongin, lee chaeryeong & honda hitomi genre: strangers to lovers, fluff, song fic song: anti-everything by lost kings ft. loren gray current wordcount: 823

"c'mon, y/n, it wouldn't hurt you to hang out with us," shotaro nudged you with his shoulder as he gave you his infamous eye smile. 

"i can't skate, 'taro" you deadpanned. 

"we can teach you!" he offered with a grin. 

"the last time you taught me anything, we almost set hitomi's kitchen on fire," you retorted, scrunching your nose at the memory of hitomi's fire alarm going off because shotaro burned the sugar. (he wanted to make the dalgona coffee but ended up putting too little cornstarch powder and basically made burnt sugar.)

shotaro winced a bit at the mention of his one of too many failed cooking attempts. but he quickly regained his composure and defended himself, "that was one time!"

"the burnt marks are still on the pot," hitomi chimed in from the side and you can hear chaeryeong stifling a laugh while daehwii and jeongin did nothing to hide their laughter.

title: (currently unamed) pairing: hwang hyunjin x reader  featuring: skz 00 line, seo yoorim(aisha) and wang yiren genre: college au, strangers to lovers, fluff current wordcount: 490

is roomies with felix because i believe in hyunlix supremacy

was actually roommates with jisung for the first year but jisung doesn't shut the fuck up so he traded roommies with seungmin

despite seungmin's protests

he tries to sneak kkami in for god knows how many times but is always caught by the TA

[solacekames]

From the article:

Japanese American military service did play an undeniable role in easing anti-Japanese sentiment after the war — but so did coalitions with other communities of color, the nation’s attention shifting to the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement, and many other historical events that make Yang’s analogy ring false today.

Yang is severely mistaken if he thinks the lesson we should take away from our history is that Asian Americans can, or should, escape racism by appealing to racists. Japanese Americans tried to prove their loyalty to this country during WWII, through military service, through quiet endurance, and, in some cases, through the vilification of those who chose to exert their American-ness in acts of civil disobedience. These demonstrations did not prevent the uprooting of our community, the years of incarceration without trial, or the onslaught of rhetorical and physical hate directed at Asian bodies.

Should we, as Yang says in his op-ed, “step up, help our neighbors… and do everything in our power to accelerate the end of this crisis”? Absolutely. Many Asian Americans are already creating community support networks to supply our elders with groceries and ensure that Chinatown and Nihonmachi businesses stay afloat. But flag-waving allegiance should not be a prerequisite for ending anti-Asian violence.

Putting on a model minority show of hyperpatriotism and unrequited loyalty will not protect us. What will protect us is solidarity. With Black folks creating pathways to liberation through both white supremacy and anti-Blackness from other people of color. With Indigenous peoples fighting to protect and nurture the land on which we stand. With survivors who are already intimately familiar with the consequences of victim-blaming, and actively engaged in building a world where we need not “prove” our worth. And with Asian Americans striving for true justice, not proximity to whiteness.

Now is not the time to cull the dissenters and resisters from our communities. Now is not the time to retreat to the center and erase those who live on the margins. Rather than appealing to notions of loyalty and “American-ness” that demand we sacrifice our cultural and political identities as a price of admission, let us instead build our own power and mutual support.

We are enough, and we have nothing to prove.

[cannedpeachess]

@rabidrekijo

[kingbennyboyyy]

benny’s RWBY rewrite: the white fang

so this is something that’s been on my mind for a while, and i’ve been trying to formulate my thoughts about it. the white fang in RWBY, as it stands now, is a really poorly thought-out approximation of the black panther party, an actual organization that fought for the equal rights and the equal treatment of black people in the united states. the black panther party’s actions have been long pathologized by white society and academia at large, and have been falsely contrasted with the ideals and teachings of MLK. the false dichotomy of violent and non-violent action is reductive at best, and blatantly racist at worst. while there is a whole fuckton to be said about the real-life consequences of these discourses, i’d like to focus on their impact on the writing of RWBY. i’d also like to talk about how i’d change how the white fang looks in order to make things a little less uncomfortable.

content warning for real and fictional racism, antiblackness, violence against marginalized people, and discussions of white supremacy under the cut.

so, the white fang. the RWBY wiki describes the group as “ a Faunus organization in Remnant. Founded following the Faunus Rights Revolution, the White Fang was initially a peaceful activist organization created to improve relations between Humans and Faunus and improve the civil rights of the latter.” more concisely, i would describe the white fang as a faunus rights activist group, whose modes of operation have changed over time. within the story, after the peaceful leader ghira stepped down, the faction as a whole took a notable nose-dive into violence. but why did this happen? why was the white fang written like this?

first of all, all of the following talk comes from the subjective opinion of one black genderqueer writer. i am not the voice of the entirety of my community, and i can bet that there are people who disagree with me. i’m just here to say my piece.

that said, i think that the white fang’s writing grossly misunderstands what oppression looks like to marginalized people. the RWBY writing team obviously wanted to handle racism in some kind of way- they wrote racism into the story. however, it’s incredibly clear that most of the writers don’t really understand how deeply racism runs in given societies. the oppression of the faunus is clearly mirroring the oppression of black people in the united states, and yet there’s little to this oppression other than surface-level discrimitation. ghira’s direction of the white fang doesn’t seem to understand that personal prejudice is a very small aspect of the continued oppression of the faunus. alarmingly, it’s only when “radicals” such as sienna khan and adam taurus take control that actual, structural avenues of racism are acknowledged. this has several issues.

- whether the RWBY writers intended this or not, attributing the acknowledgement of actual systemic issues to violent radicals is inherently a really bad call. the dismantling and destruction of racist structures is the baseline of most avenues of anti-racist thought, but by only assigning these beliefs to people like adam “kill all humans” taurus, you’re telling the audience that only people like adam “i’m gonna kill all my ex’s loved ones b/c she hurt my feelings” taurus think that these things are a reality. make no mistake, institutional racism and structural violence against marginalized people is a thing. by giving these ideas to violent actors, you’re sending a really shitty message. 

- another thing to note is the role of fear in the white fang’s activity. blake is quoted as saying that under adam taurus, people only pretend to respect the faunus because they’re afraid of the white fang. this is also bad. there is an actual line of racist thought that thinks that people who just want equality are a bunch of thugs using intimidation tactics to get special treatment, and by affirming this in-canon, you’re giving credence to these beliefs. in addition, adam’s literal desire to put humans in cages and make them go extinct is also an actual white supremacist talking point. actual fucking white supremacists go on about how the white race is going extinct as a means to manipulate otherwise well-meaning people into committing acts of violence against marginalized people. but RWBY says, “no, the white fang actually wants humans to be wiped off the face of the earth.” i shouldn’t have to tell you how buck fucking wild this is. 

- there’s also the role of violence in activism. the black panther party has long been attributed with senseless and anger-fueled violence against white people, but this assessment of the party is completely false. in truth, the arming of black panthers was a direct response to overpolicing and police violence against black people. the black panther party advocated self-defense, and acted as its own protective force for black americans. they had guns so that they could protect themselves from the cops, who were assaulting and killing them in absurd numbers. if the RWBY writers wanted to draw parallels between the white fang and the black panther party, they could have very easily done so by actually doing their research.

the question becomes, is it at all possible to have members of the white fang as actual villains within the RWBY universe? i’d say that it is possible, but it has to be done very carefully. there’s several things that have to be kept in mind here, and the entire understanding of faunus oppression has be to restructured in order for this to work. i’ll outline what i would change below:

- firstly, there needs to be more evidence of faunus marginalization past the surface level. this could be evident in a phethora of ways, anywhere from the trend of faunus hiding their animal traits being more common (an important thing to note is how accessible passing as a human is to the faunus), to beacon actually having much more bias than humans are aware of. blake highlighting these biases would be extremely helpful in establishing how deeply anti-faunus sentiments run. the only racists being cartoon bullies and shady billionaires rings too closely to the sentiments that white people have about racism. this is also a comparatively minor gripe, but the whole “becoming the monster people think they are” mask thing is just so... dumb. there are legitimate reasons for faunus to hide their identities during protests, and pathologizing this is just such a shitty thing to do.

- next, the white fang as a whole cannot be a terrorist organization in actuality. people can believe that the white fang are a bunch of terrorists, sure, but this can’t be the truth. for example, it would make perfect sense for weiss to think such things. her being the heiress to the schnee dust company, being fed stories about scary faunus with weapons trying to hurt her and her family would make sense. but the stereotypes humans have about faunus activism can’t be true. in addition, there should at the very least be more than one faunus activist party. the fact that there’s only one in the entire continent of remnant is so fucking stupid. you don’t think that some group of people would be dissatisfied and go and do something else?

- adam and sienna cannot be the leaders of the entire white fang. i’m sorry, but it’s just way too fucking easy for racists to say “oh, the entire thing’s just an excuse for (insert minority here) to ransack property and hurt people!” ilia could have been promoted after ghira stepped down. it would be interesting to see how she uses her ability to pass as human to actually make some changes for the people of menagerie, and the power structures that led to its creation. sienna has the potential to be someone disillusioned by strictly pacifist ideals of ghira, but she can act more in accordance to the actual black panther party, advocating for self-defense and knowing one’s rights. the arming and training of faunus, as frightening as it may be to the humans in power, cannot and should not be depicted at the beginnings of terrorism. there’s potential for actual discussion of the effectiveness of pacifism and respectability politics in activism, but all of that was overshadowed by the gross villification and oversimplification of the white fang.

- finally, adam. i think that adam is able to remain mostly the same, with a few adjustments to the environment around him (along with the previously discussed changes). i don’t think that adam should be the only person whose violent oppression is readily visible. the trope of the oppressed person going “mad with vengeance” is just adding fuel to the fire of the belief that those who speak out against their oppression should be put down. as satisfying an arc blake and yang beating the shit out of blake’s abusive ex was, it did just kind of feel like two people being like “yeah! violence wrong! pacifism good!” the unification of faunus SDC workers shouldn’t be attributed to adam. the advocacy for faunus to be able to defend themselves shouldn’t be attributed to adam. adam needs to be labled extremely clearly as an outlier, and even then this is risky. i think that adam’s group should be miniscule in comparison to the other sects of the white fang, and i think it would be interesting for his dealings with roman and company to be based on the distribution of android soldiers. adam shouldn’t come from a good place. yes, he suffered atrociously at the hands of his oppressors, but as a character and as an element of the story, he should be uniquely evil. for the few actual people in his group, he should rule through fear and violence, and defectors should be common. his brand of violence should be unique: rather than actually aiming to make changes to help the faunus, he should be solely focused on revenge. blake’s leaving him makes more sense in this way: rather than her leaving because of the inherent evil of violence, she should leave him because of his twisting the good intentions of the white fang into a self-serving cruelty. this all has to be contrasted against the well-intentioned actions of the actual white fang. the terrorist logo that appears universally on white fang regalia should either be solely adam’s, or his group should have a different name entirely.

so there. there’s my thoughts on the white fang and the stuff that the RWBY writers were trying to do. what should be taken away from this discussion is this: it is possible to write racism into a fantasy story without it being an absolute garbage fire, but it takes work. it takes understanding racism, the fact that it’s not just cruel people, but people complicit in the structures that uphold it. it takes being mindful of actual racist talking points, and making sure that your work doesn’t play into them. finally, if you’re going to make a main antagonist a member of the fucking civil rights movement, please for the love of god make it abundantly clear that they aren’t the villain because they want equal rights.

i’ve read so many stories where this defanged, platitude-ridden form of activism is treated as the only valid form of activism. in reality, it’s the form that people in power are most comfortable with. people approve of the idealized version of MLK because his activism was one that made white people feel good. the MLK we read about in schools is an illusory one. the real man kept a gun on him because he knew that as much as white media would have you believe that people liked him, he knew that people still wanted him dead. 

[tw-koreanhistory]

Joe Biden is no better than Trump in advocating de facto white supremacy with his foreign policy, and corporate media fan the flames of anti-Chinese racism.

“The media in this country always use non-white people as the focus of suspicion.”

Ever since a white Georgia man killed six Asian women and two others in Atlanta, the corporate media have jumped onto the “stop Asian hate” bandwagon as if they are innocent bystanders. It is easy to point fingers at a murdering local redneck and leave unexamined the media role in spreading hatred based on race and nationality.

Sinophobia in particular has been quite overt, with the corporate media following the dictates of U.S. foreign policy. When Donald Trump was president they repeated his every lie and insult, and supported every decision intended to thwart China. They may have sneered when he spoke of the “China virus” but they joined in telling lies about the beginnings of the COVID pandemic and ignored China’s successful response which resulted in fewer than 5,000 deaths while Americans have more than 500,000 and counting. When those narratives were combined with typical American racism it is little wonder that mass murder and hatred will take hold.

“When Donald Trump was president corporate media supported every decision intended to thwart China.”

Joe Biden is no better than Trump in regard to advocating de facto white supremacy with his foreign policy. He continues all of Trump’s initiatives including any and all interference in the affairs of other countries, bombing Syria, imposing sanctions, keeping a dictator in place in Haiti, and taking vain yet dangerous actions to curb China’s influence around the world. Biden has even maintained Trump’s massive reduction in the number of refugees who may enter the U.S., a racist policy which could easily be reversed. Racism is the undercurrent of many decisions made in Washington.

But the rest of the world doesn’t accept bizarre American fantasies. They assert their own rights, as was seen when Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese counterparts in Anchorage, Alaska. Before the meeting began the U.S. openly demonized China by harping about Hong Kong, which belongs to China, and by promoting more false tales of Uyghur oppression. An anonymous official who obviously has administration ties wrote an anti-Chinese screed published by the Atlantic Council which posited that president Xi Jinping is an evil man who can and must be dispatched. As if to ensure that the meeting was a complete debacle, the U.S. sanctioned 24 Chinese officials before the talks even began.

“Biden has even maintained Trump’s massive reduction in the number of refugees who may enter the U.S., a racist policy which could easily be reversed.”

Nothing positive can come from verbal attacks, especially when the Secretary of State used the press to witness his scolding of the Chinese. But he was not prepared for an enumeration of America’s sins and human rights abuses recounted by Chinese officials. Yang Jiechie correctly pointed out, “Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.”

No one should be surprised about a rise in bigotry when Trump invoked cold war rhetoric against the Chinese communist party, words which apparently replaced “radical Islamic terrorism” as the go-to right wing talking point. United States senators complained about Chinese students and said they were all spies who shouldn’t be allowed to study science while in this country. Democrats predictably join in and speak of China as an adversary which must be kept under control. So-called progressives join in the hatefest just as eagerly as Trump and now Biden do.

“So-called progressives join in the hatefest just as eagerly as Trump and now Biden do.”

Although if the state narrative calls for it even Europeans can be lumped into the undesirable category. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper famously said that Russians were “almost genetically given to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor...” The Russiagate fraud has made them an acceptable target for the foreseeable future.

But China looms large as the biggest target of white supremacist bias. Their crime is daring to have successfully remained a socialist state which has survived for more than 70 years and to be on the verge of surpassing the U.S. economically.

If the State Department and leading newspapers express animosity towards a country and its people, no one should be surprised by assaults and even murder against that group. In any case the biggest killers are all safely at the top of the pyramid, untouched and unbothered. But their words and deeds have consequences. When the consequence is death no one should be surprised or let the worst bigots off the hook because they meet inside the White House.  

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at patreon.com/margaretkimberley and she regularly posts on Twitter @freedomrideblog. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

[unwellpodcast]

Content warnings: police violence, racial violence, victims of hate crimes, white supremacy, and police violence.

Read by: Shariba Rivers, Pat King, Alexander Danner, Ryan Schile, Bilal Dardai, Duo Yang, Eli McIlveen, Amelia Bethel, Joshua K. Harris, Michael Turrentine, Kathleen Hoil, Marsha Harman, Ele Matelan, Jeffrey Nils Gardner, and Eleanor Hyde.

Transcript below the cut.

Today is Wednesday, June 10, 2020. There will not be a new episode of Unwell today. Following the example and the words of Black Lives Matter Chicago, we call for an end to the state violence against and criminalization of Black communities through police forces, an unjust legal system, and federal, state, and local political organizations.  

As the artists of HartLife NFP, we call on our fellow art makers in positions of institutional power and privilege to take concrete actions to make your institutions and artistic work explicitly and actively anti-racist.  

We affirm our commitment to do the same here. We will interrogate ourselves when we have fallen short of this goal and recommit to do better every time.  

The United States is a country founded on land stolen from indigenous peoples, built with the stolen labor and lives of enslaved Black people. We call especially on White listeners to reckon with this fact, today and every day.    

The following list is both incomplete and horrifyingly long. These people were victims of hate crimes, police officers and of an unjust, white supremacist system.

We say their names and we remember their lives. Tamir Rice Samuel Dubose Walter Scott Jordan Davis Tony McDade Dion Johnson Dante Parker Michelle Cusseax Laquan McDonald Richard Perkins Nathaniel Harris Pickett Benni Lee Tignor Miguel Espinal Michael Noel Kevin Mathews Bettie Jones Quintonio Legrier Keith Childress Jr Janet Wilson Randy Nelson Antronie Scott George Mann John Crawford III Ezell Ford Aaron Bailey Ronell Foster Stephon Clark Antwon Rose II Tanisha Anderson Alton Sterling Philando Castile Botham Jean Pamela Turner Akai Gurley Rumain Brisbon Trayvon Martin Jerame Reid Mathew Ajibade Frank Smart Alexia Christian Brendon Glenn Victor Manuel Larosa Jonathan Sanders Freddie Blue Joseph Mann Salvado Ellswood Albert Joseph Davis Darrius Steward Billy Ray Davis Michael Sabbie Brian Keith Day Christian Taylor Troy Robinson Natahsa McKenna Tony Robinson Anthony Hill Mya Hall Phillip White Eric Harris Walter Scott William Chapman II Asshams Pharoah Manley Felix Kumi Keith Harrison McLeod Junior Prosper LaMontez Jones Patterson Brown Dominic Hutchinson Anthony Ashford Alonzo Smith Tyree Crawford India Kager La’Vante Biggs Michael Lee Marshall Jamar Clark Wendell Celestine David Joseph Calin Roquemore Dyzhawn Perkins Christopher Davis Marco Loud Peter Gaines Torrey Robinson Darius Robinson Kevin Hicks Mary Truxillo Demarcus Semer Willie Tillman Terrill Thomas Sylville Smith Michael Brown Eric Garner Sandra Bland Fredie Gray Terrence Crutcher Paul O’Neal Alteria Woods Jordan Edwards Dominique Clayton Christopher Whitfield Christopher McCorvey Eric Reason Michael Lorenzo Dean Breonna Taylor Atatiana Jefferson Ahmaud Arbery Doug Lewis George Floyd Manuel Ellis Maurice Gordon

Black Lives Matter.

[arcticdementor]

Can you believe ...?

Perhaps no question has been repeated more times in reaction to more events this year than that one.

The most recent major outrage in the Jewish community, now several news cycles behind us, came on the Shabbat before Yom Kippur—the holiest day in the Jewish calendar—when many American Jews seemed dumbfounded by what was to me predictable news: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, progressive superstar, had pulled out of an event honoring Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister assassinated because of his efforts to make peace with the Palestinians. Rabin was, as Bill Clinton said at his funeral, “a martyr for his nation’s peace.”

…

But it wasn’t AOC who was mixed up. The savvy politician had read the room and was sending a clear signal about who belongs in the new progressive coalition and who does not. The confusion—and there seems to be a good deal of it these days—is among American Jews who think that by submitting to ever-changing loyalty tests they can somehow maintain the old status quo and their place inside of it.

Did you see that the Ethical Culture Fieldston School hosted a speaker that equated Israelis with Nazis? Did you know that Brearley is now asking families to write a statement demonstrating their commitment to “anti-racism”? Did you see that Chelsea Handler tweeted a clip of Louis Farrakhan? Did you see that protesters tagged a synagogue in Kenosha with “Free Palestine” graffiti? Did you hear about the march in D.C. where they chanted “Israel, we know you, you murder children too”? Did you hear that the Biden campaign apologized to Linda Sarsour after initially disavowing her? Did you see that Twitter suspended Bret Weinstein’s civic organization but still allows the Iranian ayatollah to openly promote genocide of the Jewish people? Did you see that Mayor Bill de Blasio scapegoated “the Jewish community” for the spread of COVID in New York, while defending mass protests on the grounds that this is a “historic moment of change”?

Listen, it’s been a hell of a year. We all have a lot going on, much of it unnerving and some of it dire. Moreover, many of these stories only surface on places like Twitter; they don’t make it into the pages of The New York Times or your friends’ Facebook feeds, which is where most Americans get their news these days. Reporters don’t cover these stories adequately, contextualizing them, telling readers which ones are true and which ones aren’t, which ones matter and which ones don't.

So it makes sense that many smart, well-intentioned people are confused. Or rather: Looking for someone to explain why an emerging movement that purports to advance the ideals they have always supported—fairness, justice, righting historical wrongs—feels like it is doing the opposite.

…

To understand the enormity of the change we are now living through, take a moment to understand America as the overwhelming majority of its Jews believed it was—and perhaps as we always assumed it would be.

It was liberal.

Not liberal in the narrow, partisan sense, but liberal in the most capacious and distinctly American sense of that word: the belief that everyone is equal because everyone is created in the image of God. The belief in the sacredness of the individual over the group or the tribe. The belief that the rule of law—and equality under that law—is the foundation of a free society. The belief that due process and the presumption of innocence are good and that mob violence is bad. The belief that pluralism is a source of our strength; that tolerance is a reason for pride; and that liberty of thought, faith, and speech are the bedrocks of democracy.

The liberal worldview was one that recognized that there were things—indeed, the most important things—in life that were located outside of the realm of politics: friendships, art, music, family, love. This was a world in which Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg could be close friends. Because, as Scalia once said, some things are more important than votes.

Crucially, this liberalism relied on the view that the Enlightenment tools of reason and the scientific method might have been designed by dead white guys, but they belonged to everyone, and they were the best tools for human progress that have ever been devised.

Racism was evil because it contradicted the foundations of this worldview, since it judged people not based on the content of their character, but on the color of their skin. And while America’s founders were guilty of undeniable hypocrisy, their own moral failings did not invalidate their transformational project. The founding documents were not evil to the core but “magnificent,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, because they were “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” In other words: The founders themselves planted the seeds of slavery’s destruction. And our second founding fathers—abolitionists like Frederick Douglass—made it so. America would never be perfect, but we could always strive toward building a more perfect union.

I didn’t even know that this worldview had a name because it was baked into everything I came into contact with—my parents’ worldviews, the schools they sent me to, the synagogues we attended, the magazines and newspapers we read, and so on.

…

No longer. American liberalism is under siege. There is a new ideology vying to replace it.

No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology”—as in, the successor to liberalism.

…

The new creed’s premise goes something like this: We are in a war in which the forces of justice and progress are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. And in a war, the normal rules of the game—due process; political compromise; the presumption of innocence; free speech; even reason itself—must be suspended. Indeed, those rules themselves were corrupt to begin with—designed, as they were, by dead white males in order to uphold their own power.

…

Critical race theory says there is no such thing as neutrality, not even in the law, which is why the very notion of colorblindness—the Kingian dream of judging people not based on the color of their skin but by the content of their character—must itself be deemed racist. Racism is no longer about individual discrimination. It is about systems that allow for disparate outcomes among racial groups. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, then the course must have been flawed and should be dismantled.

…

In fact, any feature of human existence that creates disparity of outcomes must be eradicated: The nuclear family, politeness, even rationality itself can be defined as inherently racist or evidence of white supremacy, as a Smithsonian institution suggested this summer. The KIPP charter schools recently eliminated the phrase “work hard” from its famous motto “Work Hard. Be Nice.” because the idea of working hard “supports the illusion of meritocracy.” Denise Young Smith, one of the first Black people to reach Apple’s executive team, left her job in the wake of asserting that skin color wasn’t the only legitimate marker of diversity—the victim of a “diversity culture” that, as the writer Zaid Jilani has noted, is spreading “across the entire corporate world and is enforced by a highly educated activist class.”

The most powerful exponent of this worldview is Ibram X. Kendi. His book “How to Be an Antiracist” is on the top of every bestseller list; his photograph graces GQ; he is on Time’s most influential people of the year; and his outfit at Boston University was recently awarded $10 million from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

…

And just in case moral suasion is ineffective, Kendi has backup: Use the power of the federal government to make it so. “To fix the original sin of racism,” he wrote in Politico, “Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals [sic]: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals.” To back up the amendment, he proposes a Department of Anti-Racism. This department would have the power to investigate not just local governments but private businesses and would punish those “who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” Imagine how such a department would view a Jewish day school, which suggests that the Jews are God’s chosen people, let alone one that teaches Zionism.

Kendi—who, it should be noted, now holds Elie Wiesel’s old chair at Boston University—believes that “to be antiracist is to see all cultures in their differences as on the same level, as equals.” He writes: “When we see cultural difference we are seeing cultural difference—nothing more, nothing less.” It’s hard to imagine that anyone could believe that cultures that condone honor killings of unchaste young women are “nothing more, nothing less” than culturally different from our own. But whether he believes it or not, it’s obvious that embracing such relativism is a highly effective tool for ascension and seizing power.

It should go without saying that, for Jews, an ideology that contends that there are no meaningful differences between cultures is not simply ridiculous—we have an obviously distinct history, tradition and religion that has been the source of both enormous tragedy as well as boundless gifts—but is also, as history has shown, lethal.

By simply existing as ourselves, Jews undermine the vision of a world without difference. And so the things about us that make us different must be demonized, so that they can be erased or destroyed: Zionism is refashioned as colonialism; government officials justify the murder of innocent Jews in Jersey City; Jewish businesses can be looted because Jews “are the face of capital.” Jews are flattened into “white people,” our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely “white on white crime.”

This is no longer a fringe view. As the philosopher Peter Boghossian has noted: “This ideology is the dominant moral orthodoxy in our universities, and has seeped out and spread to every facet of American life— publishing houses, tech, arts, theater, newspapers, media,” and, increasingly, corporations. It has not grabbed power by dictates from above, but by seizing the means of sense-making from below.

Over the past few decades and with increasing velocity over the last several years, a determined young cohort has captured nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life. Rather than the institutions shaping them, they have reshaped the institutions. You don’t need the majority inside an institution to espouse these views. You only need them to remain silent, cowed by a fearless and zealous minority who can smear them as racists if they dare disagree.

It is why California attempted to pass an ethnic studies curriculum whose only mention of Jews was to explain how they, along with Irish immigrants, were invited into whiteness.

It is why those who claim to care about diversity and inclusion don’t seem to care about the deep-seated racism against Asian Americans at schools like Harvard.

It is why a young Jewish woman named Rose Ritch was recently run out of the USC student government. Ms. Ritch stood accused of complicity in racism because, following the Soviet lie, to be a Zionist is to be nothing less than a racist. Her fellow students waged a campaign to hound her out of her position: “Impeach her Zionist ass,” they insisted.

It is why the Democratic Socialists of America, the emerging power center of the Democratic Party in New York, sent a questionnaire to New York City Council candidates that included a pledge not to travel to Israel.

It is why Tamika Mallory, an outspoken fan of Louis Farrakhan, gets the glamour treatment in a photoshoot for Vogue.

And this is why AOC, the standard bearer of America’s new left, didn’t think Yitzhak Rabin was worth the political capital, but goes out of her way, a few days later, to praise the Black Panthers. She is the harbinger of a political reality in which Jews will have little power.

It does not matter how progressive you are, how vegan or how gay, how much you want universal health care and pre-K and to end the drug war. To believe in the justness of the existence of the Jewish state—to believe in Jewish particularism at all—is to make yourself an enemy of this movement.

…

If you’re nearing the end of the essay wondering why this hasn’t been explained to you before, the answer is because, yet again, we find ourselves in another moment in Jewish history at a time of great need and urgency with communal leadership who, with rare exception, will not address the danger.

I understand why people have been blind to this. Life has been good—exceedingly good—for American Jews for half a century. Many older communal leaders seem to lack the moral imagination to see this threat. It’s also hard for anyone to hear the words: They’re just not that into you.

So when I try to discuss this with many Jews in leadership positions, what I face is either boomer-esque entitlement—a sense that the way the world worked for them must be the way it will always work—or outright resistance. Oh please, wokeness isn’t important anywhere but in silly Twitter microclimates. When you explain that no, in fact, this ideology has taken over universities, publishing houses, the media, museums and is now making quick work of corporate America, you hit another roadblock: Isn’t this just righting some historical injustices? What could go wrong? You then have to explain what could go wrong—what is already going wrong—is that it is ruining the lives of regular, good people, and the more institutions and companies fall prey to it, the more lives it will ruin.

…

Last month, I participated in a Zoom event attended by several major Jewish philanthropists. After briefly talking about my experience at The New York Times, I noted that if they wanted to understand what happened to me, they needed to appreciate the power of that new, still-nameless creed that has hijacked the paper and so many other institutions essential to American life. I’ve been thinking about what happened next ever since.

One of the funders on the call launched into me, explaining that Ibram X. Kendi’s work was vital, and portrayed me as retrograde and uncool for opposing the ideology du jour. Because this person is prominent and powerful enough to send signals that others in the Jewish world follow, the comments managed to both sideline me and stun almost everyone else into silence.

These people may be the most enraging: those with the financial security to oppose this ideology and demur, so desperate to be seen as hip; for their children to keep their spots at the right prep schools; so that they can be seated at the right tables at the right benefits; so that they are honored at Brown or Harvard; so that business does well enough that they can renovate their house in Aspen or East Hampton. Desperate to remain in good odor with the right people, they are willing to close their eyes to what is coming for the rest of us.

Young Jews who grasp the scope of this problem and want to fight it thus find themselves up against two fronts: their ideological enemies and their own communal leadership. But it is among this group—people with no social or political capital to hoard, some of them not even out of college—that I find our community’s seers. The dynamic reminds me of the one Theodor Herzl faced: The communal establishment of his time was deeply opposed to his Zionist project. It was the poorer, younger Jews—especially those from Russia—who first saw the necessity of Zionism’s lifesaving vision.

Funders and communal leaders who are falling over themselves to make alliances with fashionable activists and ideas enjoy a decadent indulgence that these young proud Jews cannot afford. They live far from the violence that affects Jews in places like Crown Heights and Borough Park. If things go south in one city, they can take refuge in a second home. It may be cost-free for the wealthy to flirt with an ideology that suggests abolishing the police or the nuclear family or capitalism. But for most Jews and most Americans, losing those ideas comes with a heavy price.

[metalshea]

Let's Talk About Alcest... and Agalloch... and Behemoth… and Racism

A couple months ago, I wrote an article about Alcest and their second single, "Sapphire", ahead of the release of their latest album, "Spiritual Instinct".  It was building off a previous post I had written about the use of space in metal music.

I never published it.

Nor did I publish my year end list because—spoiler—I list “Spiritual Instinct” on it. 

I've been struggling with how to square the circle that is my love of the Alcest's music with the thorny problem that is Niege's history performing in the racist band, Peste Noire, and the ties he appears to maintain to racist black metal and national socialist black metal (NSBM).  It didn't feel right publishing that article when I knew the history of the band but hadn't yet addressed it. 

To that same end, it doesn't feel right discussing black metal on a public platform without addressing some of the ethics of consuming the genre.

This is my attempt to do that.

For the uninitiated, Niege (née Stéphane Paut), is the musical mastermind of Alcest, one of the premier blackgaze bands in metal music today.  They are the genre's quieter, more contemplative yin to Deafheaven's cacophonous yang.  Alcest frequently use spacy and atmospheric effects, midrange tempos, and ephemeral vocals in their music, and contrast these with more typical black metal musical tropes like blast beats and shrieked vocals to create dynamic, haunting, intense, and beautiful songs.  Lyrically, Alcest is a vehicle for Niege to transcribe and memorialize visions that he had as a child of a distant, far off fairy realm.  As an act, Alcest are distinctly focused on bringing this artistic vision to fruition, and from what I've seen, I have to say they are pretty much laser focused on that task.  Niege has also been hugely influential to the development of the blackgaze genre as a whole and has participated in other successful backgaze acts, such as Les Discrets, as well as collaborated with Lantlos and Deafheaven.

However, Niege and the other members of Alcest have very troublesome histories and connections to Europe's white supremacist music scene.  Niege was previously a member of the French anarcho-racist band, Peste Noire, for 8 years before being fired.  During that time he performed on an album titled "Aryan Supremacy" and even holds writing credits on one of the band's songs off of their album, "Folkfuck Folie".  More troubling, the band members that make up Alcest's studio and live bands have similar resumes, and a number of them did time in Peste Noire.

As the black metal music scene has rightfully come under increased scrutiny for its racist associations, Niege's time in Peste Noire has similarly found itself under the microscope.  In a 2011 statement, Niege specifically addressed criticisms around his past in Peste Noire:

"I never was involved in any way with any political, racist or xenophobic ideologies. I was just a musician in Peste Noire, most of the time session musician, I never took part of the lyrics or philisophy [sic] of the band. At the "Aryan Supremacy" period I was 15 years old and I didn't think about the consequence of recording some music with that band, it always was just musical participation for me. Alcest has NOTHING to do with any hate-based philosophy like racism and as a person I am absolutely NOT into nazism, racism and such ideologies." [emphasis Niege's]

In an interview with Avantgarde Metal in 2011, Neige said about his time in Peste Noire:

"Oh, that was a long time ago now… Don’t even ask me about the concept behind it, it is very complex. It was basically the exact opposite of Alcest: love for evil, but in a real way. In any case, I was only a guest on his project as I played drums for him, but I did/do not share his views at all."

Finally, an article on stereoboard.com dated October 2019 quotes Niege as saying:

With hindsight, Neige dubs this tenure as one of his biggest regrets. Peste Noire are less well-known for their music than for their far-right views and racist imagery, which Alcest have since publicly disowned. “I was never into the ideas of the band,” Neige clarifies. “I was naive enough to think that just being a musician in a band like that didn’t mean anything. But, that really does mean something, and that was my mistake. I was a teenager when I joined, but it’s still a big regret that I have.”

Alcest is at the absolute pinnacle of their career.  They recently signed to Nuclear Blast, have a new album that has earned a number of year-end honors, and have honed a distinctive sound that is very much genre-defining; but in the face of all the accolades, Niege's explanations of his time in Peste Noire are still problematic.

Why does he still associate with other musicians from Peste Noire?

Why doesn't he specifically denounce Peste Noire or it's broader racist project?

If he was just a session or "guest" musician, how does he account for his writing credit?

If the timeline that Niege paints holds up, he was 23 when he was fired, certainly old enough to know better about Peste Noire's project and intentions.  Why did he spend 8 years in the band if he didn't ascribe to its philosophies?  Why didn't he leave Peste Noire voluntarily?  Why did he have to be fired?

Neige may indeed have very rational answers to any and all of these questions, and, to give Niege some credit, his statements are far more direct than similar statements from other artists that have found themselves in the crosshairs of concerned fans.  It's also probably worth noting that in comparing this statement to those from unabashedly racist artists, who fully make use of the opportunity to spout their atrocious beliefs on a public platform, Niege does the exact opposite by distancing himself from hate-driven ideology and publicly declaring his regrets. But even still, it's hard to simply dismiss Neige's time in Peste Noir, and his participation in spreading that band's racist philosophies will forever be a stain on Alcest.

--

After the release of The Faceless', "In Becoming A Ghost", I had a conversation with my wife around whether it would be moral to stream or buy the album.   Shorlty after the album's release, Michael Keene's drug addiction struggles came to light and were pasted all over the metal music press.  While I firmly believe that artists should receive financial benefits when others enjoy their creative output, I also believe that educated consumers should absolutely question how that material support is going to be used by the artist. I don't want to fuel Michael Keene's addictions.  I didn't buy the album.  I streamed it once.  I haven't listened to it since.  I probably won't see The Faceless perform again until I'm sure that Keene has cleaned up. Maybe he has, I haven't followed him that closely to know for sure.

I'm in similar straights with Alcest.  And Behemoth. And Agalloch.  And black metal more generally.

In the case of Behemoth, Nergal's disgusting position on an apparent sexual assault, his murky ties to the NSBM scene, and his continued defiance in the face of such disgusting behavior and views makes my decision about supporting Behemoth a no-brainer: I'm not going to spend my money on their albums anymore, I won't see them live, I won't buy their merch, and I'm not going to promote the band's output on any of my platforms.  I was wrong to do so in the past.  I know better now.  I'm not doing it any more.

But Agalloch was trickier: John Haughm stuck his foot in it when he made disgusting anti-Semitic comments in a facebook post.  However, the former members of the band quickly denounced him for it (as did his bandmates in Pilloran).  I'll certainly listen to the now defunct Khorada and whatever projects the non-racist members of the band move on to.  And, hey, Haughm apologized, so there's that.

But there are still some serious questions about Alcest that need to be wrestled with, especially because of Neige's ongoing relationships with musicians also "previously" connected to white supremacy.  Which begs the question: is it ethical to support or promote the artistic output of a band that on the face of it appears non-controversial, but when the views of the actual artists are themselves questionable?

Roland Barthes, in "The Death of the Author", once wrote:

“The modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.”

I have some issues with Barthes.  As I see it, a text is inherently subject to the influences and views of the author.  The creative force that is ultimately responsible for the artwork itself is inherently subject to the whims of the artist, and it is forever tied to the creator. However, artistic output can be siloed such that the created art can simultaneously stand separate from the completed whole that makes up the artist.  That is to say that while the artist as a person can be complicated or even problematic, the work that is created is an offshoot that is not necessarily subject to the full scope of experiences or biases of its creator. This siloing of the art from the artist means that a project can exist as an entity that can be examined on its own merits, when appropriate, rather than only within the framework of the creator.

Agalloch as a project was concerned with nature, death, the seasons, and nihilism. While John Haughm has been proven to have some despicable views, his collaboration with the other members of the band resulted in an output that seems fully divorced from his views on race. It feels wrong to punish the other members of Agalloch for Haughm's views, especially after they so thoroughly denounced him for it.

In the case of Alcest, I have found zero evidence that the band represents a racist project.  Its lyrics are decidedly apolitical, ephemeral, and esoteric.  They are an exercise in poetic worldbuilding and a sort of musical sleep diary for Niege's childhood dreams and visions. In contrast, Peste Noire is an unabashedly political and racist project that is a direct extension of its creator's views and philosophies.  Peste Noire's vision and project is to enable a world underpinned by racial supremacy, structural deconstruction, and personal elitism. There's a damned big difference between Alcest and Peste Noire and how their respective creators utilize the bands as thought vehicles, even though personnel have been shared between the two bands.

So, what to do about Alcest?  I'm certainly not going to be person that goes out and says: absolutely you should go out and buy their records.  The past associations of Niege and his compatriots means that Alcest will forever have an asterisk next to its name, and every consumer of their music should certainly take time to consider the ethical ramifications of supporting the band.

Niege asserts that Alcest is not rooted in hate-based ideologies.  Over the course of numerous albums, this has proven true over and over again.  At a certain point, you have to judge someone for their current actions while informed by their past.  Niege will have to continue to reckon with his time in Peste Noire and his current choice of musicians.  But Alcest as a vision has fully matched his assertion: there is no evidence that I can find that Alcest is itself a racist project.  I remain open to being swayed to the contrary, but at this point in time, the evidence simply does not exist.

I also believe we need to reward to people when they perform actions that are themselves moral and correct.  I reject that we should condemn a person in perpetuity while they still retain the ability to seek forgiveness.  I enjoy Alcest's music; I appreciate that it's apolitical; I want Niege to continue to make music that fits the vision he has laid out for Alcest; and I want to tie Niege's successes and the success of his compatriots to a benign project like Alcest. 

As a consumer, the only real way that I can have an impact on someone like Niege is through my wallet.  Capital becomes a vehicle for my opinions and my voice.  Boycott is one way to do it; providing material support is another.  Had I not known about Niege's history in Peste Noire, I would have had no idea that Alcest had this adjacency to hate.  And that's kind of the point: because that connection is so opaque and so irrelevant to Alcest's music output, it actually makes some ethical sense to materially support Alcest as a project.  It is the equivalent of rewarding my dog with a treat when he sits on command even though he used to gnaw on my socks as a puppy.

Above all else, though, we also have to have room to allow people the space to regret, feel contrition, and atone for their past actions.  Niege's statements seem clear: he regrets his time in Peste Noire, and he's worked hard to keep Alcest as distant as possible from Peste Noire's agenda.  If Alcest continues on as it is--a veritable sleep diary--and Niege and crew continue to distance themselves from their previous associations with white supremacy, then I think that it is moral to continue to buy Alcest's music, as it is to listen to Agalloch, and for similar reasons. 

There are still numerous bands in the black metal genre that have instead doubled down on their racism when confronted by fans, instead blaming PC culture and Antifa when really they are the ones that need to look in the mirror.  It is unfortunate that as consumers we need to research the bands we listen to so thoroughly.  But in our world of extreme information sharing, we do have to tools to do so, and indeed we should.  After all, it is the fans that truly hold the power to encourage and denounce such despicable bands, if through no other means than our wallets.

 \m/