Joy Reid takes the cake for liberal-left race-baiting stupidity and viciousness:
1) Tucker Carlson has a distant ancestor who immigrated legally to the USA from Switzerland.
2) Tucker Carlson is opposed to illegal immigration.
Ergo
3) Tucker Carlson is a hypocrite and a white nationalist.
Here are some facts that 'progressives' ignore:
Who is killing and shooting black crime victims? Overwhelmingly, not whites, not the police, but, tragically, other blacks. The high black homicide-victimization rate is a function of the black homicide-commission rate. Blacks commit homicide nationally at seven times the rate of whites and most Hispanics, combined. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at 10 times the rate of white and most Hispanic males between the ages of 14 and 17. Officer-involved shootings are not responsible for the black homicide-victimization rate, either. In fact, a greater percentage of white and Hispanic homicide victims are killed by a police officer than black homicide victims: in 2015, 12 percent of all whites and Hispanics who died of homicide were killed by a cop, compared with 4 percent of black homicide victims who were killed by a cop. Nor is white violence responsible for the black victimization rate. Blacks commit most interracial violence. Between 2012 and 2015, there were 631,830 violent interracial victimizations, excluding homicide, between blacks and whites, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Blacks committed 85.5 percent of those violent victimizations, or 540,360 felonious assaults on whites, while whites committed 14.4 percent of those violent victimizations, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks.
So we are not all the same?
Heather Mac, I salute you for your civil courage!
Related: There is no Systemic Racism
Derbyshire's Defenestration Revisited
UPDATE (1/6)
A reader from St. Louis refers us to this St.Louis Post-Dispatch article in which it is reported that the majority of the 200+ STL slayings in 2017 were of black men.
Yet more proof, as if we needed it, that 'liberals' are insane. A Tucker Carlson tweet-storm preserved for posterity by Malcolm Pollack. Glad I found this. Now I don't have to talk about those damned racist Tamarisks.
By X. Malcolm. Trigger Warning! Not for snowflakes. Second in a series on the degeneration of black music. Part I here.
In part I, I summarised the elements of the rap genre as I see them, in particular how it seems to be influenced by Malcolm X’s brand of identity politics. In Part II I shall try to assess the genre. Does it succeed as art, or as political philosophy, or anything else?
In trying to assess the genre, I shall ignore the first two, namely repetitive groove sampled from the beats of Starks and Stubblefield, and the use of speech rather than song. One is simply a musical style: nuanced repetition is the stock in trade of composers such as Philip Glass, and speech song or Sprechgesang is a technique long practised in the classical tradition and a significant part of the canon. This is style, it could reasonably be argued that style is a matter of taste, and I shall not quarrel with taste.
The third and the fourth are peculiar to rap. One is an aggressive style of delivery in the language of the streets, the other is broadly anchored in the politics of Malcolm X. I say ‘broadly’, for if a position is a political ideology, then it must as such possess some form of internal consistency or coherence. The assumptions behind it do not have to be true, but they must be consistent. If we say that the agenda of black politics should be set by radical organizations that advocate armed self-defence against the police, this is a version of the just war doctrine, which sees violence as sometimes morally justified under certain circumstances, and it is perfectly consistent.
The problem with rap is the lack of such internal consistency.
Take money. Most ideologies have a view on it, e.g. love of it is the root of all evil. Now the wealth that rappers have made from their craft is legendary. The net worth of Jay Z is currently estimated at $600m, of Dr Dre at $750m. This equals long-established performers like Madonna $800m, McCartney $660m. Their wealth is ostentatious: the typical rapper’s mansion might be worth $20m, 25,000 sq ft, with 15 bathrooms, perhaps a theatre or helipad, in one case a private night club. Is that wrong? No, it is patronising to criticise members of a poor and oppressed class for escaping poverty and oppression. ‘Middle finger to you hatin’ niggas, That hate to see a nigga do his thing’.
But the rap is all boast and braggadocio. The first commercially successful rap single was full of it. ‘Hear me talkin’ ‘bout chequebook credit cards mo’ money than a sucker could ever spend.’ NWA waxed philosophical. ‘Life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money . . . Fuck bitches, get money, Fuck niggas, get money’. To brag about wealth is hardly a position, and such ostentation is not the basis of any political philosophy, and it does not address systemic racial and socio-economic oppression. Nor is this ‘oppressed people’s music’.
Take violence. Rap lyrics, and especially so-called gangsta rap, is famous for it.
For every one of those fuckin’ police, I’d like to take a pig out here in this parkin’ lot and shoot ‘em in their mothafuckin’ face.
Cop Killer, fuck police brutality!
Cop Killer, I know your family’s grievin’ … Fuck ‘Em!
So they complain about the police, and seek redress for the injustice, but what are they doing to attract this unwelcome attention from the law in the first place? Well, only some dope-dealin’, some gang-bangin’, takin’ niggas out with a flurry of buck shots etc. Where is the consistency? Unfairness requires a presumption of innocence. Again, NWA complain about the police searching cars, ‘thinking every nigger is selling narcotas’, yet other black artists openly boast of the practice. ‘I was only 17, had the neighborhood hooked / Had ‘em stealing out they crib ‘cause my crack taste like ribs’.
They may say they document the violence of street life, yet the words celebrate it. Famously ‘Hit ‘Em Up’ by Tupac Shakur: ‘Killing ain’t fair but somebody got to do it, You’d better back the fuck up before you get smacked the fuck up .. Takin’ a life or two, that’s what the hell I do, You don’t like how I’m livin’? Well, fuck you!’ Famously, Shakur was murdered only three months after its release.
It has too often been real. In 1991, Dr. Dre attacked presenter Dee Barnes, slamming her face and body against a wall. Dre commented ‘[if] somebody fucks with me, I’m gonna fuck with them. .. Besides, it ain’t no big thing – I just threw her through a door.’ In 1993, Snoop Dogg’s bodyguard shot and killed a member of a rival gang, although he was later acquitted on grounds of self defence. After becoming annoyed by his persistent questions, producer Suge Knight dragged a journalist across the room and shoved his head over a tank of piranhas: ‘How about if my fish eat your fucking face?’ See also this rap sheet.
In their defence of rap, the liberal left have naturally avoided this aspect of the genre. Theresa Martinez (‘Popular Culture as Oppositional Culture: Rap as Resistance.’ Sociological Perspectives 40: 2, 265-86) has claimed it as a form of ‘oppositional culture’ promoting ‘resistance, empowerment, and social critique’. But as Sikivu Hutchinson has complained, this passes over how gang rape, pimping and the murder of prostitutes are ‘chronicled, glorified and paid homage to’ as the spoils of street life. ‘Black female survivors suffer on the margins in a culture that still essentially deems them “unrapeable”’. Nor is there anything liberal about some rappers’ views on gay rights. Try this. ‘Won’t play basketball cause your nails ain’t dry’. ‘I ain’t into faggots,’ added 50 Cent, ‘I don’t like gay people around me, because I’m not comfortable with what their thoughts are,’ although he claimed ‘I’m not prejudiced,’ and that it was OK because on the street they ‘refer to gay people as faggots, as homos. It could be disrespectful, but that’s the facts.’
This is not a position.
As for the overall success of the genre, if it attempts to be serious, it needs to be serious. But rap, in becoming the court jester of black music, has also, with considerable irony, turned into the house negro. Of course, sometimes the fool gets to tell the truth, the truth that would be trouble in the mouth of another, but that is the problem of the fool: we can only take him seriously on the assumption we do not take him seriously. ‘Truth has a genuine power to please if it manages not to give offence, but this is something the gods have granted only to fools’.
Indeed, has the history of black music been about playing the fool? In Golliwogg’s Cakewalk (1908) Debussy not only ‘appropriates’ the rhythms of the negro minstrels, but also the music of the white German nationalist Wagner. Listen out at 1:09 for the opening theme of Tristan. Perhaps Debussy is having a snigger at the pompous high-culture aesthetic of Bayreuth, yet he must contrast it with the vulgar and comical cakewalk – which itself began as black people aping the manners of the white upper class of the American Golden Age: ‘the bumbling attempts of poor blacks to mimic the manners of whites’ (link).
The later American fascination with Harlem was part of a larger fascination with black culture that Nate Sloan believes was imported from France in 1900s, with artists like Picasso painting ‘African’ art, and Debussy writing ‘minstrel’ music. The project was sincerely intended as respectful of ‘primitive’ or ‘exotic’ art, but it was a condescending form of respect. Berliner has complained about the ‘stereotypical representations of black as grands enfants – whether savage, servile or hypersexual’ which helped define the colonial and civilising ‘French self’. ‘Duke’ Ellington’s style of symphonic jazz began at the Cotton Club, open only to whites, where blacks were depicted as jungle savages or ‘darkies’ in the cotton-fields of the South. So the signature sound of probably the greatest black composer of the early twentieth century is located in a white primitivist fantasy. Sloan views this as Western ‘romantic re-imagining’ of non-Westerners as charmingly primitive and primal, but black writer Langston Hughes was more direct, speaking of the Club as ‘a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites’, and likening it to the entertainment provided at a zoo.
Is rap any better? As I have argued, it is not a coherent political philosophy, but a form of entertainment. And do not forget that about 70% of people who buy the stuff are white. Spike Lee has argued that it is just a modern version of the Victorian minstrel performer. Lee grew up aspiring to be like the educated black men he saw reading books and going to college, when young black kids ‘didn't grow up wanting to be a pimp or a stripper like they do now’. Are the personas of the pimp, the pusher and the gangsta just another kind of blackface?
As for this gem, which I began with, I find no redeeming qualities whatever. It does not even pass as entertainment, except for disturbed adolescent boys. Aristotle pointed out long ago that music has a power of forming the character, and should therefore be introduced into the education of the young. ‘For young persons will not, if they can help, endure anything which is not sweetened by pleasure, and music has a natural sweetness’. But this has no sweetness, nor does it seem capable of forming the character.
In summary, rap music is for the most part a form of entertainment. It has made a lot of black people wealthy, but that is precisely because it is entertainment, which needs no coherence or system or ideology, nor the kind of difficult writing or subtlety of thought that is less financially rewarding. Perversely, its ‘oppositional’ and separatist black identity politics has become absorbed into the mainstream culture of America, as another form of stereotype, and has even turned into a weird form of integration, namely the house negro as court jester. Just as Malcolm X complained there are ‘house negroes among us’, so Lee laments that ‘Minstrels are still with us today’. And that irony is still with us today, too.
By X. Malcolm
Bill suggested I wrote a post on how we get from gospel music such as Richard Smallwood’s uplifting Total Praise, to the uncompromising lowness of this gem (lyrics) by West Coast rappers 2 Live Crew? What is the bridge, if any, between ‘I will lift mine eyes to the hills’ (Psalm 121) to ‘Put your lips on my dick, and suck my asshole too’?
I think the whole story would be a long story, and might not be the true story, which would include the engagement between high and low culture, the history of jazz and popular music in America in the twentieth century, and the troubled relationship between African and Western musical culture. That would be too much. But I will have a stab at part of the story, as follows.
The story of rap begins with two men, in my view. The first is uncontroversial: the music of James Brown has its roots in the late 40s and early 50s, when jazz, originally a popular genre, split into a high and a low form. The high was the ‘bop’ and ‘cool’ style which emerged in the mid-1940s: a musician’s music, played at an impossible tempo, with strange harmonic intervals. Opus de bop by Stan Getz (a white musician) gives you a good sense of the type. It was music to sit and listen too, as in a concert hall. It was highbrow, it was not dance, and it had little popular appeal.
The low form was Rhythm and Blues. It is generally agreed that the genre begins with ‘Flying Home’ by Lionel Hampton (1942). Here is a superb reconstruction by Spike Lee of how the number might have gone down at the Roseland Ballroom in the 1940s, in his film biography of Malcolm X. Listen out for the solo by Illinois Jacquet (0:53), the kind of honking tenor that became a staple of R&B, such as in Brown’s Chonnie Oh Chon (1957, Cleveland Lowe on tenor).
Brown began his career as a gospel singer in Georgia, after meeting Bobby Byrd, who had formed a gospel group called the Gospel Starlighters. Brown had wanted to be a preacher, fascinated by the power of the preacher over his audience, and by the flamboyance and pageantry of preachers like Sweet Daddy Grace of the United House of Prayer. Here he is playing the part in John Landis’ incomparable The Blues Brothers (1980). The hymn is ‘Let Us Go Back to the Old Landmark’, by W. Herbert Brewster. ‘Let us kneel in prayer in the old time way’. Here is a less breathless version by Clara Ward.
It is well known that Brown’s music had an influence on rap, although this was more because of the killer grooves of backing drummers such as Clyde Stubblefield and Jabo Starks. Here is Starks explaining the art of the slippery beat and the ghost note, also Clyde. Beats such as Funky Drummer (1970) were the basis of nearly all rap beat, and Brown’s work is recognised as the most sampled in hip-hop. This is well-known, I shall pass over it for now. But his style of singing (or shouting, or speaking) was also important: what Smitherman calls the songified quality of the political raps of Stokely Carmichael and especially of the ‘preaching-lecturing’ of Martin Luther King. Listen to King’s famous speech on August 28 1963, where he takes off on a middle C, drops to a B then back to C then D and then takes a long flight ending in Isaiah 40:4 ‘Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low’.
In using the semantics of tone, the voice is employed like a musical instrument with improvisation, riffs, and all kinds of playing between the notes. This rhythmic pattern becomes a kind of acoustical phonetic alphabet and gives black speech its songified or musical quality. (Talkin and Testifyin, The Language of Black America by Geneva Smitherman, 134—35)
King’s speech was at the March on Washington, when demonstrators such as Joan Baez sang negro spirituals like ‘We Shall Overcome’. (Baez is of Mexican extraction on her father's side and is a sort of vicariously oppressed person).
The second influence is Malcolm X, who did not like ‘We Shall Overcome’ at all. ‘Any time you live in the 20th century and you start walking around singing ‘We shall Overcome’, the government has failed us’. His ideology hung on two points: black separatism and black identity. The first was negative: complete separation of blacks from whites, a separate homeland for blacks, and none of this God’s children joining hands singing ‘free at last’, etc.
He thought MLK and other civil rights leaders were stooges of the white establishment, and his story of the field and the house negro is a sort of parable for their relation to the white power structure. The house Negro lived in the house, ‘close to his master’. He dressed like the master, ate the master’s food, and identified with the master. ‘So whenever that house Negro identified himself, he always identified himself in the same sense that his master identified himself’, using the word ‘we’ to mean the master, and other house negroes. But the masses were the field negroes. ‘When the master got sick, they prayed that he’d die’. Why were so many black people excited about a march on Washington, ‘run by whites in front of a statue of a president who has been dead for a hundred years and who didn’t like us when he was alive?’
He rejected the religious basis of Western culture, joining the Nation of Islam in the 1940s, and changing his surname to ‘X’ from his birth name which ‘the white slavemaster’ had imposed upon his forebears. He never spoke much about music, but he would have surely rejected the symphonic Western style of Smallwood’s introduction to the gospel song as the child of a house negro. Recall that the moment of Jake’s ultimate conversion is not prompted by black music, but by a short overlay written by Elmer Bernstein in the classical idiom. ‘At one moment I needed God to touch John Belushi’, said Landis. God touches man not in the African genre of dancing and shouting but through the harmonic complexity of the western tradition? According to Malcolm, when a black man is is bragging about being a Christian, ‘he's bragging that he's a white man, or he wants to be white .. in their songs and the things they sing in church, they show that they have a greater desire to be white than anything else’.
Unlike King he rejected nonviolent civil disobedience, saying that black people were entitled to defend themselves ‘in the face of the horrific assaults and murders that black people faced on a daily basis’. ‘Bleeding should be done equally on both sides’. At one time, he espoused a form of black racism, in a sort of Manichean worldview that viewed white people as devils, with black people as the original humans. ‘Do you know what integration really means? It means intermarriage.’
His positive ideas on black identity were less clear given, as he freely admitted, that black identity had been obliterated by slavery. ‘A people without history is like a tree without roots’. To be sure, there was the identity moulded by the idiom of jazz, but this had its origins in the ‘jungle’ music of the Cotton Club. The growling trumpet of Cootie Williams is distinctive of Ellington, but it is set to scantily clad light skinned African American girl dancers apparently transported from some jungle tribe. X sought a different identity, locating it the civilisation of Egypt.
Many of his ideas were taken up by the rappers in the 1980s. The first is easy to overlook. Malcolm complained that singing was the problem of black politics. ‘This is part of what’s wrong with you – you do too much singing’. Right. Songs are just bad poems. ‘Take the music away and what you’re left with is often an awkward piece of creative writing full of lumpy syllables, cheesy rhymes, exhausted cliches and mixed metaphors,’ claims poet Simon Armitage. Rap ended that. Speech introduces a different character to music. It commands your attention, invites you to consider its meaning. The rapper is not singing to you, he is telling you something, in the manner of an aggressively young black male.
Here are rappers Public Enemy with Too black, too strong, which is to say, black coffee is strong, but only becomes weak if it is ‘integrated’ with cream. Listen out for Clyde Stubblefield’s groove 1:07. Rapper KRS-One developed a sort of rap manifesto. Like Malcolm, he recognised that civil rights is not designed to solve the problem of racism, and that rap involves ‘rethinking what you think is normal, by rethinking society’. Rappers rejected the integration that was fundamental to the golden years of American popular music. Paul Robeson sang ‘Old Man River’, written by Jerome Kern. Billy Holiday sung ‘Strange Fruit’, written by Abel Meeropol. The embrace of violence is essential to the rap of the late 1980s, but I shall discuss this later.
Thus the elements of the genre as I see them are (1) a repetitive groove sampled from the beats of Starks and Stubblefield (2) the use of speech rather than song, (3) the attitude of the genre, reflected in its aggressive style of delivery, and (4) the political position of the genre, particularly the ideas of Malcolm X. In Part II I shall try to assess the genre. Does it succeed as art, or as political philosophy, or anything else?
(Minor edits by BV)
Addendum by BV (12/11/17)
Long-time reader E. C. sends us to rapper Joyner Lucas, I'm Not Racist. It warms my heart this holiday season to see how wonderfully race relations have improved since the '60s in this country.
It would have to be, right?
Logically prior question: what is anal bleaching?
Filed under: Decline of the West
The lovable Howie Carr takes the fraud to task:
How much longer do we have to pretend that Elizabeth Warren is anything but a Fake Indian?
It happened again yesterday — President Trump referred to the senior senator from Massachusetts as “Pocahontas,” and the alt-left media went into paroxysms of fake outrage, as if it’s somehow “racism” to call out a fraud like the Fake Indian.
Isn’t the left supposed to despise “cultural appropriation?” What greater cultural appropriation could there be than for Elizabeth Warren to have falsely claimed an ethnic heritage in order to win not one, but two tenured Ivy League law professorships she had absolutely no shot of ever getting until she checked the box?
All of the alt-left pajama boys and trust-funders who were hyperventilating about this yesterday, let me ask you a question:
How come Pocahontas won’t take a DNA test so that we can find out, once and for all, how much Indian blood she really has, if any? Why has she refused my multiple generous offers to pay for her DNA test?
We know she has no card from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, because if she had one, we would have damn well seen it five years ago, when the questions were first raised.
With Hillary out of the picture, the sorry Dems are stuck with Pelosi the Stupid, Waters the Vile, Warren the Fraud. Looks good for 2020.
David French lays into the Cherokee maiden here.
Music directly imitates the passions or states of the soul . . . when one listens to music that imitates a certain passion, he becomes imbued with the same passion; and if over a long time he habitually listens to music that rouses ignoble passions, his whole character will be shaped to an ignoble form.i
Aristotle recognized that music communicates emotion, and that immoral music can shape our character for the worse.
More here.
Rap sheets of rappers.
Here are a couple of quick observations on last night's debate.
1) Carlson is a liberal about race. Dennis Prager provides a good explanation of the difference between being a liberal and being a leftist about race:
Race: This is perhaps the most obvious of the many moral differences between liberalism and leftism. The essence of the liberal position on race was that the color of one’s skin is insignificant. To liberals of a generation ago, only racists believed that race is intrinsically significant. However, to the left, the notion that race is insignificant is itself racist. Thus, the University of California officially regards the statement “There is only one race, the human race” as racist. For that reason, liberals were passionately committed to racial integration. Liberals should be sickened by the existence of black dormitories and separate black graduations on university campuses.
Carlson on his show regularly speaks of race in terms of skin color as Prager does above. Now if race is skin color, then race is reasonably regarded as insignificant given that one's color is a relatively superficial feature of a person. It would then be 'racist' in some pejorative sense of this term to judge people negatively on the the basis of their race, i.e., skin color. If you hate me just because of my skin color, what kind of miserable bigot are you?
That, in a nutshell, is the old liberal position on race. It is one shared by many present-day conservatives, many of whom invoke Martin Luther King, Jr.'s admonition that people should be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." That famous admonition, as stirring as it is, clearly conflates race with skin color and is therefore superficial, literally.
Interestingly, its superficiality has been recognized on both the Right and the Left. While color of skin is a phenotypical manifestation of race, race is not the same as skin color. One proof of this is that a person can change his skin color but no person can change his racial ancestry. If you were born of two black parents, then you are black, and nothing you now do or have done to your body can change that fact. Not even Michael Jackson, "the one-man melting pot" as a certain talk jock called him, could pull it off. Jackson, you will recall, took steps to lighten his skin.
It is also clear that attitudes towards blacks are based on their behavior not their color. Most white liberals would not think of buying a house in a predominantly black area. Is that because of skin color or typical behavior patterns? The question answers itself.
It cuts the other way as well. Why do many blacks hate whites? Because they are white or light in color? No, because they 'act white.' It's about behavior not skin color.
Note that while it would be irrational to avoid a person or group of persons because of his or their color, it would not be irrational to avoid a person or group of persons because of his or their behavior.
In sum, to speak of race in terms of something as superficial as skin color is to assume that race is of no significance. But this is a question that ought not be begged.
Why do leftists hold that it is 'racist' to think that race is insignificant or to hold that there is only one race, the human race? This is a very interesting question. Let's leave it for later.
2) Holding as he does that race is a superficial matter of skin color allows Carlson to conclude that we are all the same deep down and that the "definition of 'racism'" is to think that one can infer something about a person's motives solely on the basis of their race/skin color. And so Tucker goes on to accuse Yankow of being a racist. (2:55)
The underlying difference which neither of the discussants manage to bring into the open is that Tucker is a liberal who thinks that race is superficial and insignificant whereas Yankow appears to be a left-wing race realist.
Myron Magnet – -Is he an attractive man? – - gets it right, or rather the author he is reviewing does:
What gives Gene Dattel’s Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure its special power is that, even after its bracingly original and thoroughly researched account of the racism of the abolitionist North from the late eighteenth century until long after the Civil War, the book nevertheless does not shrink from laying the ills of today’s black American underclass not at the door of a painful history, with ample blame for northern as well as southern whites, but squarely at the feet of black Americans themselves. Yes, shameful, deeply shameful, were slavery, Jim Crow, and northern racism, and who can doubt that they left grievous scars? Still, America fought a war to end the evil institution, had a civil rights movement to try to erase its malign remnants, and spent decades on affirmative action and other nostrums to expunge even the faintest remaining traces. Whatever white Americans could do to atone for and repair the damage they caused, they have done, as much as imperfect humans in an imperfect world can do. Now, Dattel argues, it’s up to black Americans to save themselves.
Exactly right. It is time for blacks to take responsibility for their lives and get off the plantation. Will the Left let them?
Related: The Importance of Self-Control
This entry continues the discussion with my Right-identitarian interlocutor. My current position is one of rejection of both Left- and Right-identitarianism. I am open, however, to a change of position. That is part of what makes me a philosopher as opposed to an ideologue. I wrote in my critique of Dennis Prager:
"The correct view is that racial differences are real and significant just as sexual and age differences are real and significant, but for purposes of social harmony and political cooperation we had better not identify ourselves racially but in terms of attributes more conducive to comity." My correspondent responds:
I agree with your criticisms of Prager. In a normal society men don't pretend that they're just human beings rather than men (who are also human beings) and women don't pretend that they're just human beings rather than women. Rather, in a normal society the distinctive male and female abilities and interests and ways of being are accepted, and society adapts itself to these differences–these male and female 'identities' in other words. But then, if race is similar to sex and age in this respect, why would it be bad for people to 'identify' in terms of race along with attributes like sex and age? Shouldn't we say instead that this is also reasonable and healthy?
In discussions like these it is always a good idea to seek (and rejoice over) points of agreement. Points of disagreement will emerge soon enough.
One thing we can agree on is that no human being can be just a human being if that implies having no sex or no race or no age or no height, etc. And so if I pretended to be a human being indeterminate with respect to one or more of the above-listed attributes, then my pretense would empty and absurd. My talk of treating people as individuals rather than as tokens of ethnic or racial types does not imply that they are bare individuals bereft of all attributes.
But there is nothing empty or absurd about prescinding from this or that characteristic in certain contexts. Characteristics prescinded from don't matter for the purpose at hand, but they are still there. For example, age and citizenship matter when it comes to voting, but race and sex by current law do not and ought not. But if we don't take into consideration a person's sex when it comes to the right to vote, it does not follow that the person is sexless. In general, if attribute A is instantiated by the members of a given population of individuals, and abstraction is made from A, it does not follow that the members of the population are indeterminate with respect to A.
So far, near-platitudes, unless my opponent questions my voting example which I fear he might. (If he does, then that discussion belongs in a separate thread.) We have yet to locate the bone of contention.
Are there "distinctive male and female abilities and interests"? I would say so, and I would add that they are not merely socially constituted. The biology of the female plays a role in the explanation of why women are more nurturing than men, more cooperative and conciliatory, make better real estate agents, but also why they are more emotional than men and why their political judgment is not as good. (I would argue, however, that the last two points are not reasons to withhold from women full voting rights.) So far, then, no disagreement. No disagreement with my conservative interlocutor, that is. I have already said enough to elicit howls of rage from the lunatic Left. Their howling, however, is music to my ears. Their destructive extremism only galvanizes the resoluteness of my opposition to them.
Does it follow that there are male and female 'identities'? Here is where it gets tricky and sticky. 'Identity' can be used in different ways. What is meant by 'identity 'here ? A stereotype? That is apparently what my sparring partner has in mind. I will assume that he agrees with me that stereotypes, most of them, or at least many of them, have a fundamentum in re and are true in the way that generic statements can be true. (It is surely true, for example, that Germans are more rule-bound and respectful of authority than Italians. See this list of generic statements.) Stereotypes are not, most of them, expressions of mindless bigotry or irrational hatred of the Other. What are truly mindless and irrational are liberal denials of this plain truth.
My opponent is going to agree with me that women as a group are more nurturing, caring, cooperative, conciliatory, averse to heated disagreement, better with children, etc., than men as a group. But that is a positive, accurate stereotype which not all women fit. Women are nurturing and Sally is a woman; it does not follow, however, that Sally is nurturing. 'Women are nurturing' is a generic statement: it cannot be replaced by a universal generalization such as 'Every woman is nurturing.' Sally is a chess-playing, nerdy engineer who works for Google, worships Ayn Rand, enjoys heated debate, and has no interest in children or in taking care of anybody. And all of this without prejudice to her being, and being essentially (as opposed to accidentally), a full-fledged biological female with the 'plumbing' and chromosomal make-up to prove it.
It may be that my opponent is conflating stereotype with identity. In one sense of 'identity,' the identity of a thing is what it is by nature, what it is essentially. Since Sally does not fit the gender stereotype, and yet is essentially biologically female, we ought not conflate identity with stereotype. (I am assuming a distinction between sex, which is a biological reality, and gender which, while it reflects sex, is in part socially determined. Anyone who elides the distinction I would have to consider very foolish indeed.)
My claim is that there are no "male and female 'identities'." There are male and female stereotypes and gender roles but no male and female identities. If there were a female identity or nature that included such stereotypical features as being nurturing, being conciliatory, shying away from heated argument, then every female would fit that identity; Sally does not fit the female identity; ergo, there is no female identity.
And because there is no female identity, if Sally so self-identifies, then her self-identification is a false self-identification. She falsely self-identifies if she so apperceives herself as to be nothing but an instance of that identity. And if we deny Sally her right to be a nerdy, chess-playing, Rand-reading, non-nurturing engineer, then we reduce her to a gender stereotype in violation of her true identity as a free, self-determining person. As an animal, Sally's biological identity or nature is essential to her; as a person, however, she is free to pursue engineering in defiance of the stereotype.
And the same goes for race. There are different races as a matter of biological-anthropological fact. (Race is not a mere social construct.) And there are different racial and ethnic stereotypes, accurate stereotypes, i.e., stereotypes with a basis in reality, some negative, some positive. But there is no white identity or black identity or Italian identity or Polish identity. Granted, I am essentially Caucasian and essentially of Italian ancestry; no change is possible in these respects. But there is no white identity that includes stereotypical features since there is no such identity had essentially by every biological white. Bear in mind that 'white' in this context does not refer to skin color but to race. It is a mistake to confuse race with skin color.
So I continue to maintain my thesis that, "for purposes of social harmony and political cooperation we had better not identify ourselves racially but in terms of attributes more conducive to comity." The opponent hasn't given me any good reason to abandon this thesis.
Is a reversion to tribalism, even if inevitable, something to be regretted, or is it healthy?
But then, in my critique of Prager, after listing some candidate attributes, I waxed pessimistic. For example, can we Americans identify for political purposes as Americans, as people committed to the values and principles enshrined in our founding documents? Obviously not. Too many of our fellow 'citizens' have no respect for these documents. The universities of the land are lousy with such people. There are leftist knuckleheads who speak of a 'living constitution,' which, of course, is no constitution at all. And in what sense are these fellow 'citizens' fellow citizens if they don't accept our great Constitution? Think of the liberal-left liberty-haters who call for the elimination of the Second Amendment.
"So I end with a dark thought: in the end tribalism wins."
Again I wonder why this is a dark thought. You seem to be considering the possibility that identities like 'citizen' or 'American' are too weak to form the basis for a healthy society. But suppose that's true. Then it's _good_ that people will eventually reject these identities in favor of some 'tribal' identity which could serve as a better basis for society–something that is more "conducive to comity". Suppose it's not true, and identities like 'citizen' are enough. Then it seems to me that people should be able to get along and share a society simply on the basis of being 'citizens' or 'Americans' while at the same time having distinct racial or tribal identities, just as they can share a society and get along despite having distinct identities based on sex and age.
Amazingly, my opponent thinks that tribalism is good and that tribal identification can unify us. I can't see that this makes any sense at all. So here we find a bone of serious contention! If we can no longer identify as citizens or Americans, it does not follow that tribal self-identification with the resultant Balkanization would be good.
I am saying that we conservatives, through inattention and inaction, have allowed things to get to the point where identities like 'citizen' and 'American' can no longer form the basis of a healthy society and polity. We are now in a very bad state of affairs. But tribalism makes things worse. The reversion to tribalism may be inevitable, but as I see it, it can't be good. Tribalism can't be the basis of comity or social harmony precisely because different tribes with different values and interests oppose one another. Furthermore, when we think and act tribally we fail to see important individual differences. Clearly, there are important differences between Clarence Thomas and Trayvon Martin, Jason Riley and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Walter E. Williams and Michael Brown. Coates is a despicable racist fool and an enemy, but I would love to have Riley and Williams and Thomas as next-door neighbors. No social harmony is likely to ensue if we lump all these blacks together as members of the opposing tribe. It is of course different in war. But we want to avoid war. Don't we?
I am saying that, as a matter of contingent fact, we are no longer united under an umbrella of shared values and principles, and that tribal identification will only make it worse. If, on the other hand, we were united under that 'umbrella,' then of course there would be no problem. We would be united publicly, and privately people could do their tribal thing.
Of course, there is a crucial disanalogy: Human nature is such that differences of sex and age occur naturally and inevitably within a given human community, since these are part of the basic structure of the extended family. By contrast, differences of race and ethnicity do not occur within the natural human community. On the contrary, since the natural community is based on the family and extended family, that kind of community eliminates racial or ethnic differences–any natural community ends up being a single racial-ethnic community.
So it's doubtful that racial difference and racial identity can be accepted as part of the normal structure of society in the way that these others already are. To the extent that racial and ethnic differences exist within a society, that society must be somewhat artificial; it must be made up of sub-cultures that have a stronger claim on the natural loyalties and identities of its members. Racial-ethnic differences are a primordial sign of Otherness, of Not Belonging–of potential danger and competition rather than safety and co-operation. We can try to pretend otherwise, but this is contrary to our own instincts, and it probably won't work in the long run. But, again, is this dark?
Well, intermarriage among different European ethnicities has worked hasn't it?
My opponent seems to be suggesting that racial/ethnic uniformity is essential for a well-functioning society. I don't buy it. Suppose blacks had never been brought as slaves to North America. The other racial and ethnic groups get along tolerably well. But the key is assimilation and commitment to a set of values and principles that transcend blood. Unfortunately, the Melting Pot is a thing of the past never to return. Leftists have destroyed it by exploiting racial tensions to forward their agenda. And of course we no longer agree on values and principles.
Horribile dictu, leftist filth are now attacking free speech!
Is invocation of Blut und Boden dark? I would say so. For one thing, blood ties and racial purity do not insure comity. I have more in common with Korean and Turkish philosophers than with anyone in my family. Consanguinity is no guarantee of spiritual affinity, and spiritual affinity can exist without consanguinity. We are told that "To the extent that racial and ethnic differences exist within a society, that society must be somewhat artificial; it must be made up of sub-cultures that have a stronger claim on the natural loyalties and identities of its members."
This begs the question by assuming what I argued against, namely, that there are ethnic and racial identities. Beside, the emphasis on narrow natural loyalties works against social harmony. That's the mentality of mafiosi. Social harmony requires a commitment to higher loyalties. John Gotti's children should have 'ratted out' their father. The Unabomber's brother was right to turn him in. He was acting under the inspiration of a higher loyalty.
Multi-culturalists and Leftists would say it's 'dark' to imagine shutting down mass immigration of Muslims into Europe–because for them, the attempt to force incompatible cultures together into some kind of incoherent mess seems good! But a conservative doesn't want to force people to live in weird new ways that (we think) go against human nature, so a conservative doesn't think it's 'dark' to imagine Muslims in Muslim lands, Christians in Christian lands, etc. Feminists think it's 'dark' to imagine a world where most women are focused on having kids and staying home to care for them, because they think the ideal is to have women be just like men in all respects; but a conservative thinks it's better to let the sexes live in ways they find natural, and so doesn't think this scenario is 'dark'. Of course, excessive tribalism is possible (and 'dark') but why not allow for some degree of tribalism? A sound conservative position, I think, is that society must provide people with healthy ways of expressing their instincts rather than forcing us to suppress them. Telling people they have to think of themselves as just 'citizens' or 'humans' is telling them to suppress some very powerful instincts. So (I think) conservatives should regard this as an oppressive and unhealthy policy.
We agree that allowing mass immigration of Muslims into Western lands is suicidal. This is because they don't, as a group, share our superior Western values and because they want to replace them with unenlightened Sharia-type values. It is not because of their being Turks or Arabs or whatever. (The few that do share our values can be allowed to immigrate.) And of course there is nothing 'dark' about traditional Muslims staying in their lands.
Nor is there anything 'dark' about women devoting themselves to the noble and difficult task of being good mothers and homemakers. The feminists who attack motherhood have a lot to answer for.
What I see as 'dark' is the racial self-identification on the identitarian Right. It amounts the deliberate erasure of one's unique personhood in favor of being an interchangeable token of an ethnic or racial type. (This has some connection to the Marxist notion of man as Gattungswesen, but I am not in a position to explain it clearly.) How can my identity reside in an attribute shared with billions of others?
My identity is what make me be me and no one else. It is therefore impossible to locate one's identity in being an interchangeable token of a racial type. For every token of a type, qua token of a type, is the same as every other one.
There is also a slippery slope consideration. If you identify as white, then why not as Southern white, and if Southern white, why not rural Southern white, and so on until you identify as a Hatfield or a McCoy?
Furthermore, race is part of my animality. So if I identity racially, then I identify myself as a particular instance of a particular race of animals. But I am more than an animal, and my true self cannot be located in my animality.
But now we move into metaphysics. This is unavoidable in a thorough discussion. But this entry is already too long. Tomorrow's another day.
. . . the bizarre liberal displacement of responsibility for crime onto inanimate objects, guns, as if the weapon, not the wielder, is the source of the evil for which the weapon can be only the instrument.
What explains this displacement? A reader proffers an explanation:
Maybe they displace responsibility here because, if we blame the person shooting the gun, next we have to notice just how often that person is black, and how rarely he is white. And noticing that, for liberals, would be racist. Nothing that makes blacks look bad, or worse than others in any way, can be noticed. It must be a gun problem because otherwise it would be a black problem. (Largely, on the whole — given what a small proportion of the population is black and what a huge proportion of the 'gun problem' consists of black people shooting people for no good reason.)
Right. It is politically incorrect to take note of differences between blacks and other groups when these differences show blacks to be worse in some respects than these other groups.
On the other hand, when once in a while the person shooting the gun is a white person–and, best of all, a white person who just might conceivably be associated with conservatism or even some kind of white consciousness –liberals will find that the problem is, for once, not just a gun problem but also the problem of 'angry white men', 'racists', 'white supremacists' or even just 'white people'… And then we learn that it's those people — those bad white people–who are responsible for this awful gun culture and gun problem. So once again, the liberals are really engaged in race hatred and race baiting and maybe, some day, open race war. So as with so many other things, it seems they don't really believe their own supposed principles, e.g., that the problem is guns not people shooting guns . . . .
My reader's point seems to be that leftists try to have it both ways at once. By blaming the weapons rather than the wielders, leftists can uphold their cherished but plainly false conviction that blacks are no more criminally prone than whites: there is nothing about blacks that makes them more criminally prone; it is the availability of guns! But their real agenda as destructive leftists is to foment racial division. So when a white man goes on a rampage, then they drop the notion that the availability of guns is the problem and play the race card.
