I was reading some back-issues of The New Yorker when I encountered this: an article entitled "The Big Uneasy" in the May 30th, 2016 issue of the journal. I was horrified by these passages. I think you will understand why. They are redolent of my assertion that American Liberalism, hijacked currently by political-correctness, white guilt, & identity politics, has forsaken the core of Leftism for something quite different. I will present a substantial portion of this article, for I believe the article was both well-written & evocative of some core problems we are facing now-- fissures that the Radical Left is not even necessarily involved in. For many, the problem of 'political correctness' occupies a globality but also covered in this article is the inter-sectional (pardon the pun) feud within the American Liberal-Progressive movement. So, my perspective & stake in this is three-fold: 1) I am an American who feels restricted in my speech by political correctness culture, 2)I am an outsider, a spectator to the sectional conflict within AL-P 3) A member of the Communist movement occupying the greater Leftist spectrum with people who (I feel) are pushing to negate core values of the political left. Since my initial reading, I have heard the article referenced on a Conservative Talk Radio programme, so I understand that its circulation is larger than just the general New Yorker audience.
"At Oberlin, it started in December, when the temperatures ran high, although the weeping willows & the yellow poplars that had flared in the fall were bare already. Problems had a tendency to escalate. Students had noted the inauthenticity of food at the school's Afrikan Heritage House, & followed up with an on-site protest" The true account already sounds like a parody of Political Correctness culture.
"(Some international students, meanwhile, complained that cafeteria dishes such as sushi & banh mi were prepared with the wrong ingredients, making a mockery of cultural cuisine.)" Is a mistake a 'mockery' only because the cuisine was 'non-white'? Should not the apparent attempt to engage in multi-cultural cuisines at least be seen as a willingness at Oberlin to provide a diverse experience? Does the copy have to be exact? And how could it, being that the appropriators were (we are to presume) not of the culture they are appropriating? How could Oberlin win? Not attempting at all? Serving only 'white bread?' Then the accusation would be that they are being racially 'exclusive' to the multi-cultural cuisine that they cannot competently reproduce!
"A student wanted trigger warnings on 'Antigone.'" I will let this issue lie right now to retain the continuity of the article, but will come back to the function of University as a place where one is to be disturbed & exposed to new things that, by their very nature, may 'trigger'. If anything, they should 'trigger' ....something.
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| Tamir Rice was murdered near Oberlin |
"A year earlier, a black boy with a pellet gun named Tamir Rice was killed by a police officer thirty miles east of Oberlin's campus, & the death seemed to instantiate what students had been hearing in the classrooms & across the widening horizons of their lives. Class & race mattered." Well, if that's what it took for them to engage with these realities of Amerikkka, than they really haven't been paying attention in their lives growing up in this nation. I mean, even 'private school' children can be expected to understand that there are implicit hierarchies, evidenced by their daily life. Even private schools have 'the poor kid'.
"In mid-December, a group of black students wrote a 14-pg letter to the school's board & president outlining 50 nonnegotiable demands for changes in Oberlin's admissions & personnel policies, academic offerings, & the like" Non-negotiable demands? Who do they think they are? These sound more like entitled American multi-cultural bourgeois-tariats than the oppressed sub-altern, deprived of power. Also, they seem to have taken their negotiating advice from Lenin.
"It said, 'when in fact this institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, & a cisexist heteropatriarchy.'" Welcome to America. & understand that I am not saying this as in 'Welcome to America, take it or leave it', I am just seriously wondering whether these students understood how neophytic they appeared addressing this paen to oppression to academics (or at least those who work with them). The elements of the very orthodox Intersectionality theory these protesters ascribe to may have been introduced on that very campus by these people.
"The president, Marvin Krislov, rejected the letter's stance, urging 'collaboration.'" Uh-huh.
"There was instead talk of 'allyship'. If you are a white male student, the thought goes, you cannot know what it means to be, say, a Latina; You can make yourself her ally, though - deferring to her experience, learning from her accounts, & supporting her struggles." Look, I am quite familiar with the ineffable 'knowledge' gained from personal experiences, whether these involve RCG (race-class-gender) or not. I frikin' collect life stories for the gods' sakes. However, the assertion that the experience of being in what society considers a 'minority group' makes you fundamentally different than others, & even gives a specific pedestal on which to speak on cultural, social, & other matters is anti-equality. Hasn't this entire project been boldly to sunder onward, erasing differences as we work to understand but not cement the differences that undergird the class structure? Has AL-P left unity-building in the Working Class behind? Defer? If assuming that we are striving toward a unified future under which all people are truly treated equally, why would we want to set up a post-racist order of the opposite? White people deferring to black people, because of race. Were we not trying to create the opposite not that long ago. And so what if it is a white guy producing speech? (say, giving analysis on a blog) Perhaps he has some good, incisive things to say about a topic regarding race. Of course, if he were to began speaking for groups (if that is even 'really' possible) that he is not a part of, that is a problem, but is it a purpose of experience, living life, & certainly the university system to help us think beyond our own experience, not to codify & cement that experience of our one-lived life as the knowledge akin to the sacred. There is, I believe, also an argument that not being personally involved in a certain situation (membership in a group, possibly) could give you a more 'objective' account, with less of the emotion & defensiveness that would accompany an invariably emotional & subjective ego-defense.
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| Professor Karega of Oberlin |
"On February 25th, TheTower.org published an article that included screenshots from the Facebook feed of Joy Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric & composition at Oberlin. The post suggested, among other things, that Zionists had been involved in the 9/11 plot, that ISIS was a puppet of Mossad & the CIA, & that the Rothschild family owned 'your news, the media, & your government.' And so, with spring approaching, students & faculty at one of America's most progressive colleges felt pressured to make an awkward judgment: whether to ally themselves with the black community or whether to ally themselves with the offended Jews." In this situation you can see how outrage culture & sectional identity-politics can castrate would could potentially be a student movement for something, something other than to not have one's feelings disturbed, to avoid being offended, or the like. To have to 'choose' between blacks and Jews is not something a truly Leftist movement should ever have to do. Post-modern American identity politics has fractured, even balkanized the proletariat, so that they are competing in the symbolic space not for their class base, but the smaller, fractured ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, lingual, & associative groups. All of these now have their short-sighted, selfish right to not be offended or slighted. I am not going to mince words: Identity politics has taifa-ized the proletariat, turning them into the equivalent of market segments. Is this not how post-modern American political campaigns treat 'interest groups' now?
"During the academic year, schools across the country have been roiling with activism that has seemed to shift the meaning of contemporary liberalism, without changing its ideals." Hmm...
"At Yale, the associate head of a residence balked at the suggestion that students avoid potentially offensive Halloween costumes, proposing in an e-mail that it smothered transgressive experience. Her remarks were deemed insensitive, especially with someone tasked with fostering a sense of community, & the protests that followed escalated to address broader concerns. At Claremont McKenna, a dean sparked outrage when she sent an e-mail about better serving students- those of color apparently- who didn't fit the school's 'mold', & resigned" Let me put this into perspective for you- A woman was fired for trying to make the experience of students who historically the school has not been so great with better, but in the very act of recognizing the school's implicit POV ('checking their privilege' as the lingo would go) she was captured in the web of saying something 'offensive' and had to be canned. WTF? What was this woman supposed to do? Act blind to the fact that the school does have a 'mold', while at the same time be tailoring certain programmes to the needs of minority students? This makes it seem like an unearned, un-needed entitlement, nay, privilege, of exactly the kind that the Right attacks when it invokes the concept of 'reverse racism'. It is these accounts that are making that worldview closer to reality than the one profferred by AL-P. Untrammeled freedom of expression is not heralded in all sectors of the Left, but typically the Left-Liberals have cherished this principle in their movements. Among these campus activists, the potential to 'offend' any minority group takes precedent instead. The balkanization of the working class into special interests, along with the jettisoning of Free Speech makes a Left which I do not recognize as my own. & so that, along with Liberals support of American Empire under President Obama, this constitutes another incontrovertible fissure within which the radical left & liberal left cannot share common ground.
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| Bowdoin distributed 'offensive' sombrero hats |
"Bowdoin students were disciplined for wearing miniature sombreros to a tequila-themed party. The president of Northwestern endorsed 'safe spaces,' refuges open only to certain ethnic groups" This exclusivity could be accepted, for at least a time, but spaces open to only particular ethnic groups is again anti-equality & counters the notion that mixing in general is a good practice. This even goes against some base 'multi-cultural' tenets. |
| Black Lives Matters activists organized a petition to defund this paper that spoke against them |
& here comes one of the most shocking pieces of this article. This reveals the truly chilling fact that classic Liberal values are being jettisoned by Black Lives Matter & those whites who go along with it, out of guilt or well-intention. "At Wesleyan, the Eclectic Society, whose members lived in a large brick colonnaded house, were put on probation for two years, partly because its whimsical scrapbook-like application overstepped a line. And when Wesleyan's newspaper, the Argus, published a controversial opinion piece questioning the integrity of the Black Lives Matter movement, some 170 people signed a petition that would have defunded the paper" I feel speechless reading this. These are some of the main opponents to free speech in the United States; the forces that would make you pay for expressing unpopular opinions, & it is not the government, but student activists. This is a radical change in the space occupied by 'Liberalism' in the political imaginary. If this is representative of Black Lives Matter at large, than it is unclear if BLM is anti-Liberal or if it is a mutation of it. We in the Radical Left must oppose this individualistic, market-segmentation of the proletariat, even if the call is in the name of 'racial equality'. We must forge ahead, support free speech, unpopular opinions of all variety, & stand strong in defense of Unity, as well as our position that race, gender, & the attendant 'categories of difference' are constructs, & what gives them power is society. We must not feed into ideas of racial difference or privilege, even if they are in the false name of 'equality'. The concepts of 'black' & 'white' were created long ago to justify economic privilege, & have been cemented over time. There is no 'special knowledge' to be gained from having brown, black, or white skin, but there is different experience from having lived in a society in which that mattered. We must not bend to essentialism & validate the Right's assertion of 'reverse-racism'. Some of the positions of BLM seem to actually be that, & that further discredits Liberalism with whites. We must work to build a liminal space where proletariat of all colours are united by the concrete, real factors of their economic lives, seeing beyond ways in which societies would segment them. Respecting & recognizing difference of experience does not mean that these 'differences' are more than fictions. We must stand strong in the existence of one race-- the Human Race.
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| Chalk endorsement of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump provoked outrage at Emmory |
"Sensitivities seemed to reach a peak at Emmory when students complained of being traumatized after finding TRUMP 2016' chalked on sidewalks around campus. The Trump-averse protestors chanted, 'Come speak to us, we are in pain!,'" Really? Literally who are these people, who are so offended that there is expression of support for a political leader they disagree with? This is bizarre, & seems quite childish. Do they want an environment cleansed of any discord, of any difference of opinion, of any dialogue, or even opportunity for it? That would render the 'democracy' of the United States even more of a sham. While there is documented evidence of a growing discomfort among American in engaging in political dialogue with those who disagree with them (see the work of Sarah Sobieraj), this has previously been more prominent on the Right.
"Such reports flummoxed many people who had always thought of themselves as devout liberals. Wasn't free self-expression the whole point of social progressivism? Wasn't liberal academe a way for ideas, good & bad, to be subjected to enlightened reason? Generations of professors & students imagined the university to be a temple for productive challenge & perpetually questioned certainties. Now, some feared, schools were being reimagined as safe spaces for coddled youths & the self-defined, untested truths that they held dear." Well, I wonder where they got that idea from!
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| Activist Cyrus Eosphoros, quoted in The New Yorker article |
"This spring at Oberlin, I tracked down Cyrus Eosphoros, the student who'd worried about the triggering effects of "Antigone". Eosphoros is a trans man. He was educated in Mexico, walks with crutches, & suffers from ADHD, & bipolar disorder (He'd lately been on suicide watch.) He said, 'I'm kind of about as much of a diversity checklist as you can get while still technically being a white man.'" Of course I know that this person is invariably 'real', but this person would have plausibly been a creation of someone attempting to parody the new 'intersectional hierarchy'.
"Half a century ago, Eosphoros might not have had access to elite higher education in the United States. In that respect, he is exactly the sort of student - bright, self-made, easily marginalized- whom selective colleges like Oberlin have been eager to enroll. So I was taken aback when he told me that he'd just dropped out for want of institutional support." What did he want? What was his problem with life at multi-cultural haven Oberlin? "'There's this persistent, low-grade dehumanization from everyone,' he said. 'Somebody will be, like, 'Yeah, I had a class with a really great professor, & it was wonderful,' & I'll be sitting there, like, 'Oh, yes that was the professor who failed me for getting tuberculosis,' They generally acquired the requisite vocabulary in college. If the new campus activism has a central paradigm, it is intersectionality: a theory, originating in black feminism, that sees identity-based oppression operating in crosshatching ways." It is this idea (& its misuse to form new 'hierarchies of oppression') that I was also exposed to. My degree is in the very field that this thinking seems to emanate from-- American Studies. So I am well acquainted with this style of thought. In fact, it is was practically obvious it was the orthodoxy of the field-- combined with a vague Marxist outlook & a more refined idea of how power was distributed throughout society (not simply top-down). It was my field that was purporting & promoting the ideas that have inspired these student activists to police other's Halloween costumes, speech, & Facebook posts. Cultural Studies, which shed the name 'Cultural Marxism' in the 1980's & migrated west-ward over the Atlantic Ocean became quite obsessed with RCG to the point that students of the field would almost stop hearing the 'holy trinity' because it had become so oft-repeated. Ask any American Studies student & I have faith they will tell you the same thing: It is RCG all day, 'erry day. & to that point, it becomes meaningless.
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| Graphical depiction of the 'intersectionality' concept |
We are seeing the fruits of 'intersectionality', & they are little more than attempts to establish hierarchies with the 'subaltern' at the top, in an almost Bolshevik style. Intersectionality, encourages people to think of themselves as atomized members of multiple groups, with none necessarily trumping the other, but beyond that as an individual 'mark' on a grid, concretizing one's position in society based on how conventionally 'minority' one is. The more 'identity tokens' one has, the more one is allowed or able to speak on various subject matters, especially those regarding RCG. If one is white, or male, or heterosexual, or not particular 'minority' at all, the less one is seen as able to speak on topics regarding RCG. How has Liberalism, once the champion for universal free-speech, become a vehicle for the restriction of speech to certain groups at certain points. Like the Bolsheviks who just created a 'New Class' of party bureacrats which, in essence, took the place of the ancien nobility, the end point of intersectionality is a reverse of what they see as the current system-- the more disabled, dark, homosexual, gender-queer, or ethnic one is, the more privileged in the new system they become-- the more open to speaking freely, without worry of privation or criticism. Do these basic proponents not see they are just creating what they view as the hierarchy of America in mirror-image?
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| A noveau-Liberal idea of speech seen as 'aggressive' |
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| The Dialectical Process Of Developing Knowledge |
"'It's just a massive catastrophe,' Eosphoros reported of the microaggressions he encountered even in his work-study life. He feels that he's been drawn into a theatre of tokenism. 'It's always disappointed to be proof of concept for other people,' he told me." It is easy to see how trying to navigate the world of intersectionality-politics can make one feel that way: That they only add up to their 'categories of difference' & not much else. "In September, the pundit Greg Lukianoff & the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published a cover story in The Atlantic called "The Coddling of the American Mind." Shielding students from unwelcome ideas was unhealthy for the workforce & for the democratic commonweal, they wrote. A guiding principle of today's liberal-arts education - is the cultivation of the individual...We celebrate the idea that through disorientation & challenges we find growth. We'll programatically educate a group of you by drawing out your individuality- is inherent in modern liberal education, & a lot of classroom pedagogy tries to finesse the contradiction."
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| "The Coddling Of The American Mind" |
"'In yoga, the practice is you breathe to the point where you're just being challenged - & then you stretch a little more & breathe,' Wendy Hyman, as associate professor of English at Oberlin, told me one day at Aladdin's Eatery, half a block from Slow Train. The field of 16th & 17th literature is full of misogyny & violence she says, but she's never not taught something because of what it contained...Her generation, she said, protested against Tipper Gore for wanting to put warning labels on records. 'My students want warning labels on class content, & I feel- I don't even know how to articulate it,' she said. 'Part of me feels that my leftist students are doing the right wing's job for it.'" Why yes, they are.
"Whatever job they're doing, they appear to do it diligently. 'In class, sometimes I say, 'Is your identity a kind of knowledge?' James O'Leary, an assistant professor of musicology at the Oberlin Conservatory, told me. 'The answer, for forever, has been no.' In the post-Foucaltian tradition, it's thought to be impossible to isolate accepted 'knowledge' from power structures, & sometimes that principle is turned backward, to link personal discomfort with larger abuses of power. 'Students believe that their gender, their ethnicity, their race, whatever, gives them a sort of privileged knowledge- a community-based knowledge- that other groups don't have," A belief in definite, provable differences between different ethnic groups, races, genders, sexes & colours & then acting based upon those assumptions is......racism. How has Liberalism been drawn full circle into creating conditions of what it once sought to eradicate?
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| The mural in-question that was destroyed |
"For years, a campus cafe & performance space called the Cat In The Cream had a music-themed mural, painted by an alumnus, that celebrated multiculturalism: it featured a turbanned snake charmer, a black man playing a saxophone, & so on. Students recently raised concerns that the mural was exoticizing. 'We ended up putting drywall over it, & painting over that.' 'They were saying ,'students are being harmed.' But if individuals' feelings were grounds to efface art work, he reasoned, ever piece of art at Oberlin would be in constant danger of being covered up, or worse - a practice with uncomfortable antecedants. 'The fear in class isn't getting something wrong, but having your voice rejected," he said. "People are so amazed that other people could have a different opinion from them that they don't want to hear it'...Aaron Pressman, a politics & law-&-society major, told me that he has always felt free to express his opinions on campus, but has faced "a lot of social backlash.' 'A student came up to me several days later & started screaming at me, saying I'm not allowed to have this opinion, because I'm a white cisgender male,' He feels that his white maleness shouldn't be disqualifying." Works of art are being destroyed in the name of Liberalism. Young people are being silenced in the name of Liberalism.
The article describes a person, Bautista, "who was finishing her 5th & final year, devoted a lot of time to activism, & she told me that she had lost interest in hanging out with people who didn't share her views. 'I do think that there's something to be said about exposing yourself to ideas other than your own, but i've had enough of that after my 5th year,' she said. Bautista identifies as 'Afro-Latinx.' (The 'x' signifies independence from overdetermined gender roles.) She was on campus in early 2013, when flagrantly bigoted, posters, & graffiti appeared over a period of weeks. (Two undergraduates are said to have been responsible, one of of whom told police that it was 'a joke to see the college overreact.') The episode led to the cancellation of classes for a day, & galvanized many students. More than 1300 students signed a petition calling for the college to eliminate any grade lower than a C for the semester, but to no avail...They move to rural Ohio & perform their identities & perform their identities, whatever that might mean. They bear out their school's vision. In exchange, they're groomed for old-school entry into the liberal upper middle class" & perhaps this is what is truly behind the discontent. The old Marxist hunch is that it always comes back to the $, & Oberlin does not exist in isolation from larger social problems well-known: College is growing more expensive, Americans are being told getting a degree is more necessary for gaining entry into the 'middle class', jobs that could sustain the previous 'middle class' lifestyle are declining in number, college debts held by young people (many without jobs or prospects, but with degrees) are rising. Part of American Liberalism's promise was that of ever-increasing prosperity under the flag of the United States-- that by robust social programmes & the election of Democratic Party politicians, that they could inherit the living standards of those coming before them. Trends larger than the individuals have swept that away like footprints in the sand, as Capitalism always does. Marx stated this clearly in his manifesto. No social situation is ever definite in the land of Capitol. & this 'middle-class' lifestyle is becoming more & more of a product of nostalgia, rather than Reality. Perhaps this evil-twin Liberalism is Reaction of a very particular Post-Modern Left-ish variety, a reaction to the declining promise of not only America, but Liberalism as well. |
| Women that stormed the Bastille were not necessarily starving & ragged |
It is said that revolution doesn't occur when people are starving, when conditions of privation are at their height, but that revolt happens when people's expectations are not fulfilled. Expectations of Americans of a certain age are not being fulfilled. They are seeing the hollow promise of 'America' (if not the larger paper-dragon that is American Empire) & they are mad about it. How did this happen to them? They were promised a certain standard of living, & now the promise has vanished. Anti-free speech, tokenistic, racialized Liberalism's attempts to create new hierarchies based on RCG are attempts to retain some sort of power in an age when every member of the proletariat's power is waning.
It blows living in a descending Empire, & young Americans are acting out their anger & disappointment at the system that has reared them. Unfortunately for everyone, it is sectional groups like Black Lives Matter that have captured the energy, reifying social divisions, rather than a genuine movement of the full working class. In times like this, a Vanguard Party of the Leninist style wouldn't hurt, & may actually help us to do something other than patrol Halloween costumes & deface 'offensive art'.
