In reading the mainstream responses to Derbyshire's article, I have not found anyone who decided to dial back the outrage and deal with the content. It's all about screeds and rants and shock and outrage and insensitivity and offense. Waves of adjectives, all ramping up the Ultimate Sin: racist. Were I in therapy with the mainstream, I'd say he hit a nerve, right in the middle of the autonomic system.
But it reminded me that whenever a liberal, be it someone I just met or someone who knew me when, has discovered my political views, I am never asked a curious question about why I think that way or why I changed my mind. There is always some ad hominem reaction to me or my background or my mental health, --ranging from pitying to contemptuous--but never, "Really? What makes you think that way?"
But it reminded me that whenever a liberal, be it someone I just met or someone who knew me when, has discovered my political views, I am never asked a curious question about why I think that way or why I changed my mind. There is always some ad hominem reaction to me or my background or my mental health, --ranging from pitying to contemptuous--but never, "Really? What makes you think that way?"
3 comments:
In addition to holding us upside-down at birth and slapping us, the obstetrician should welcome us to reality by saying "Trigger Warning."
... I suppose the Standard Narrative or Standard Imply'd Narrative is that White America began abolishing Jim Crow and Segregation (for instance in the Arm'd Forces by order of President Truman; or Brown v. Board of Education) only because of the Civil Rights protests and even riots.
That is, the racist capitalist militarist White Supremacy or White Privilege system (Tim Wise seems to use "Supremacy" and "Privilege" as synonyms) which did Western history as a series of war crimes from the Crusades up to and including the Bombings of WW2 was too intimidated by Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi to put down these protesters by another routine war crime.
But the Standard Imply'd Narrative means, contra the self-presentation of white liberals or progressives, that there is in whites or at least white men no reservoir of good will toward POCs. And indeed when one looks slightly further "left" than the NYT, one sees that the MSM and Democrats are deem'd as militaristic racist capitalistic etc as Republicans and Tea Partyers; and such interpretions of Democrats and the MSM are never entirely inaccurate. Accordingly, Derbyshire's hate screed is surely only the most presentable elements of what all whites really feel and "think" about blacks.
But in view of whites' treatment of other whites (WW1, Civil War, Appalachian coal mines, etc), there is in whites no reservoir of good will toward whites!
I suppose if POCs took the Standard Imply'd Narrative seriously, they'd run for their lives and flee anywhere possible out of Europe and Anglo-Saxony. And maybe as in the movie Buckaroo Bonsai they could hope that from outside white areas all POCs plus 'race-traitor' whites could put together a global system for containing white 'fascist' hatred within a matrix. ... That movie explains the motives of the race-treacherous whites as getting to have most of the beaux rôles in the anti-fascist containment drama, but to me the motives of the fascistic haters was left opaque.
... Or maybe the Standard Imply'd Narrative is misleading somehow.
P.S. When Julius Caesar was at high school, did any English teacher ever warn him "Beware Middlemarch"?
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