Unlike my usual and restrained self, I got into a silly comment-fest about "Ta-Nehisi" Coates' name. He's a writer who called for John Derbyshire to be fired as a raciss. (Which he was.) Zzzzz. Another commentor of African extraction named Funke made elitist and classist comments about my FB avatar's clothing. Jack Donovan defended me. It was epic.
Truth is, I have long been both amused and disimpressed with fantastical Black names. Invoking my utterly Eurocentric and class privilege, I tend to assume that people without real names are not real people, having the cheap fake-gold jewelry knockoff version of onomastics. Sue me. (If this were Europe, someone actually could.)
Silly White Boomer names also make me roll my eyes, but that seems to me just shallow class faddishness, not some morally sacrosanct attempt to overcome historical adversity through hyper-naming. (Although there is silly Facebook White liberal who call himself Michael Equality Smith or something...) You can call it The Kwaanzaa Effect: pseudo-African pretense.
One of my illiberal non-libertarian impulses is to make a law that Americans have to have a Western first name. Your family name is your family name and none of my business. But please don't expect me to call you Kwame or Laquishanonda (or Cinnamon or Apple for that matter) without an internal giggle.
Truth is, I have long been both amused and disimpressed with fantastical Black names. Invoking my utterly Eurocentric and class privilege, I tend to assume that people without real names are not real people, having the cheap fake-gold jewelry knockoff version of onomastics. Sue me. (If this were Europe, someone actually could.)
Silly White Boomer names also make me roll my eyes, but that seems to me just shallow class faddishness, not some morally sacrosanct attempt to overcome historical adversity through hyper-naming. (Although there is silly Facebook White liberal who call himself Michael Equality Smith or something...) You can call it The Kwaanzaa Effect: pseudo-African pretense.
One of my illiberal non-libertarian impulses is to make a law that Americans have to have a Western first name. Your family name is your family name and none of my business. But please don't expect me to call you Kwame or Laquishanonda (or Cinnamon or Apple for that matter) without an internal giggle.
3 comments:
And yet (also vis-a-vis your previous posting) without liberal progressive indignators, how would everyone's attention get drawn to Taki's Magazine where Mr Deryshire's offensive article is publish'd?
I wish they'd ask'd moi what to respond, because simply suppressing the article or such "thinking" as one condemner proposed doesn't ensure that Mr Derbyshire's ostensible warnings to "nonblacks" about blacks will be perceived to be mistaken, inaccurate, misleading etc.
For instance, one item on Derbshirya's list was that dereliction results from blacks' domination of a municipal government. Couldn't liberals have pointed out by reference to certain California municipalities that whites can drive a town to insolvency? (Why would liberals not wish to emphasize the financial harm done by white municipalities?) Or again, the whites who do ruin on Wall Street?
As for nonblacks' violence, obviously as Ex Cathedra has remark'd, blacks' violence usually occurs in small numbers of deaths and maimings, whereas whites' violence is in sprees (for instance the shootings in Tulsa whose alleged perpetrators seem to come from the movie Deliverance). Fair for liberals to point out that just because violence by whites isn't as easy to guard against, by blacks or by nonblacks, doesn't mean whites' violence isn't dangerous.
More fair would have been for Derbyshire to consider how nonblacks' apprehensions about blacks-in-general perhaps overlap another "talk" given by blacks to their children, namely vis-a-vis avoiding violence by other blacks, since these same liberal journalists do mention such violence, simply interpreting it as white racism internalized into blacks who are thus coerced into enacting it.
For it might seem fair for whites to avoid gangster-ish blacks in the same way as blacks-in-general avoid gangster-ish blacks. Perhaps "avoid large groups of blacks you don't know" is advice given by black parents to their children.
... If there are signs for what whites to avoid -- white males or maybe the odd Asian male who are likely to snap and shoot up a room full of people -- I would like to hear them: such advice would be useful to me. Also which anti-Islam Islamists to avoid. ...
If Rev Jesse Jackson remark'd to the general American media the dangerousness of young black males especially in a group, presumably responsible black parents give a "talk" to their children about certain blacks and certain situations.
Thomas Sowell would point out that despite great hostile prejudice, blacks were doing well in America, better and better, step by step, gradually but quite remarkably, until the Great Society and the revolutionary culture that arranged for blacks-in-general to rally around criminal and semi-criminal blacks, on grounds that black crime and misbehaviour is caused by white ill-will. Women and subaltern males have volitional independence only in protest! and resistance! etc. White males have volitional independence in the oppression (which is necessary if women and subaltern males are going to be able to do being as resistance! and protest!).
The volitional independence that white males seem to have in good achievements is really only a figment of white male privilege: the "culture" credits them with achievement even though our achievements are simply handed to us on a privilege platter as a matter of course.
Apparently, though, we make a really independent effort in oppressing and exclusioning etc, which is the beau rôle from the perspective of "Evil and Good" à la first essay, Nietzsche genealogy. ... Everyone wants to take credit for Resistance! Even "white nationalists" take the stance of asserting "resistance!" Who takes the karma for doing the stuff that resisters resist? I guess white males who are neither white nationalists nor liberal-progressive protesters. ...
Another area of common experience for whites and blacks was proposed 5 April 2012 in Slate's XX Factor. A journalist reminded white women that many of their black sisters have long preceded them in having to function both as primary earners or income-providers and as primary care givers for their families because of the exclusion and hostility that black males experience in American society.
That is, white males are increasingly behaving as the (stereotypical) absent etc black male, although we don't have the excuse and validation that black males have: they are forced, but we volitionally choose to be slackers who do dereliction of duty.
In any case, as one black woman puts it »Black women who have been able to navigate this new frontier may be able to offer some guidance [to white women] as we’ve been here first«. Evidently Moynihan should have revalued his report as a project for social engineering.
And a Ta-Nehisi is not a Tanuki. You can tell because one of these two has big balls. Big, big freakin' balls.
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