Michelle Goldberg writes about the #CancelColbert fiasco and, naturally, uses it as an excuse to go after radicals, and does so, naturally, at The Nation, America’s preeminent source of bloodless, fretting progressivism. She blames the radical left for the rise of censoriousness and the focus on affective politics in the broadly defined left. It’s a classic liberal attitude– when threatened, punch left, not right. But it’s also just wrong, a fundamentally incorrect read on the history of identity politics.
Goldberg fundamentally misunderstands who is behind the obsessive focus on language policing and social “respect” over structural and economic reform. Don’t be fooled by the jargon; the politics behind Twitter activism is pure progressivism, an obsessive focus on cultural affinities and good feelings over changes to the basic class character of our society. In complaining about “political correctness,” Goldberg is deliberately invoking the 90s and our last embrace of linguistic politics, and the subsequent backlash. But what was the dominant political force of the 90s, radicalism? Of course not. It was Clintonite triangulation. It was Bill Clinton’s saccharine insistence that he “feels your pain” while being responsible for a welfare reform effort that invoked the worst impulses of the white mainstream. By the 90s, the coffee shop politics of American liberalism had become a kind of empty insistence on mutual grooviness, with your typical liberal more likely to complain about anti-globalization protesters than to praise them. The fact that people are using the word “intersectionality” to complain about language doesn’t make them radicals. At its heart, Suey Park-style engagement is AIDS quilt politics, all symbolism, all the time.
I mean, ask yourself: who is more likely to call for the elevation of identity politics above all other kinds of political engagement, liberals or socialists? Liberals. Who has thrown their shoulder behind the gay rights movement with all of their fervor but demonstrated nothing resembling a similar commitment to economic justice? Liberals. Who’s more likely to accept the empty symbolic politics of the Obama administration, rather than calling for deeper change and a real alternative to American plutocracy? Liberals. Who identifies people as being “the right kind” through the kind of limp social signalling expressed through buzzwords, rather than based on deeper concerns about the fundamental social order? Liberals. Salon gives readers a never-ending parade of complaints about who used the wrong word when; Jacobin questions the basic power structures that make the oppression those words signal possible. The Nation wants people to say nice things about women and people of color; In These Times wants to reorganize our economic order so that it doesn’t matter if white men say nice things about women and people of color. I suspect Goldberg knows that.
I have lots of radical queer friends, socialists and anarchists, who are totally contemptuous of the kind of politics involved in #CancelColbert or the recent Mozilla CEO freakout. They are far more likely to complain about Brendan Eich’s salary and power than they are to complain about his boneheaded views on gay marriage. Nor are they likely to think that enshrining the ability of gay people to engage in bourgeois marriage contracts represents some sort of ultimate victory, in a world where stultifying social and economic norms are otherwise untouched. And since so many of the genuine radicals I know have exposure to street level activism and local politics, unlike those who went straight from high school to a liberal arts college to the numbing embrace of Twitter, they are far more resilient and less fragile than the obsession with policing language would suggest.
It’s precisely because mainstream liberalism has so thoroughly surrendered on issues of economic justice and class war that so many young people think of politics as a game of word policing and loud noises on Twitter. Andrew O’Hehir recently argued that people turn to hashtag “activism” because they see no other way to engage politically at all. If that’s true, it’s true because decades of preemptive surrender and Sister Souljah moments from mainstream liberalism have so thoroughly disarmed the left that there’s nothing to do but complain about whether Katie Couric misused the indefinite article. Obsession over language and decorum is an alternative to class politics and historical materialism, not an expression of it. And The Nation has certainly had a hand in privileging the former over the latter.
Being polite is important. Talking to people with compassion and respect is important. Not being an asshole is important. But none of those things actually helps change the structural inequality and injustice that actually hurt people, and they don’t represent a long-term plan for helping people secure their own well-being. The goal isn’t for everyone to be nice, but to empower people so that the people who aren’t nice no longer matter. I have heard an awful lot about Suey Park’s politics in the last week, and yet I have absolutely no idea what kind of economic restructuring she’d undertake if given the chance. If Goldberg wants to be a part of the effort to reorient left-wing discourse towards the project of empowering marginalized people rather than being nice to them, then I’m all for it. But if she wants to be useful in that effort, she needs to do a better job of recognizing where, exactly, the bad habits come from. She needs to ask herself if writing for The Nation puts her outside of the scope of this culture or squarely within the heart of it.
Update: I am not, and have never been, an “it’s not about race” lefty. It’s most certainly about race, and sex. What I am is a lefty who thinks that the only way for permanent racial justice and equality between sexes and genders to be achieved is for people of color and women to have the economic and political strength necessary to secure their own best interests. Justice cannot be given, but it can be taken. The question is whether you think the current tactics embraced by the social justice movement (whatever that is) are a real route to securing that kind of economic and political power.
Karen Lewis of the Chicago Teacher Union, an organization filled with women of color fighting daily for economic justice through street level activism and labor organizing, has less than 3,000 Twitter followers. Suey Park has almost 23,000. Yet Lewis does more for women of color in a day than Park has done in her whole life. If attention is the coin of the realm in a world of hashtag politics, then something is clearly wrong here.
Point taken. I liked Goldberg’s article, because I too disagree with this movement to police speech and favor symbolic politics over substance. But I see how she was wrong to not place the blame for that movement on liberals. Though, I have to say, I’ve read The Nation for a long time, and I think you’re being too broad in saying they don’t advocate for structural change.
Bourgeoisie social contracts are a economic issues. They have a variety of economic benefits and having that edge better positions those in monogamous same-sex relations to have to worry less about not-nice people on a variety of fronts. As you say it doesn’t blow up all stultifying social conventions but it results in a material improvement to the lives of many people in a comparatively common social arrangements.
Moreover, same-sex marriage was a logical place for a strong push because the peculiar nature of the issue made dramatic victory possible once a few legal beachheads were established. Decriminalization of marijuana is probably a ‘social’ cause more appealing to some radicals. It seems to be following a similar path and that’s a real opportunity to undercut the war on (certain classes of people that use) drugs.
I’d hypothesize that while there was an opportunity cost in pursuing both agendas versus more direct economic fights, in many ways this can be a positive-sum game. Successful campaigns that achieve meaningful results in their own right also do have the benefit of getting people engaged with politics and training them to organize. The most default alternative to low-level engagement with politics is not meaningful engagement but disengagement.
I buy your case that much of the word policing and the like are a waste of time and that radicals are not its main originating source. U.S. radicals and socialists are relatively uncommon, when liberals such as myself grapple with unproductive form of activism, we should expect that much of the origin will typically lie within our own movement.
The tendency to bash radicals as the source probably arrives from two sources. First, radicals, by virtue of being radical, often take any given campaign further than incrementalists and thus make for easy choices of examples. Second, radicals often aren’t within a given coalition, and so knocking them is a superficially low-risk way of sending a message to people within the coalition.
Ultimately, the risk of doing so is that it undermines liberal/left cooperation on economic issues of common interests. Bourgeoisie social contracts are an admittedly incrementalist reform but the opportunity costs are balanced by the very real benefits of taking advantage of the comparatively easy win. Liberals such as myself would have wasted a valuable opportunity if we didn’t pursue same-sex marriage or marijuana decriminalization.
I think you’ve got a fair point when liberals either throw their back into causes that will gain little support and little benefit or neglect strategic opportunities for gains on economic issues. We totally do both of those things! But the dividing line isn’t always a clean one of social issues versus economic issues.
I think libs have thrown their support behind gay marriage and pot legalization because rich people can be gay and often love the mota.
Why haven’t these same libs seized on the humongous public support for increasing SS benefits?
Obviously issues with support from rich people do make easier ground to make progress on. That said, it’s only one component, the rapid shifts in public support as the unfamiliar becomes routine was a far bigger deal.
On Social Security, they’ve admittedly been playing defense, but fairly effectively so. Bush’s 2006 push was soundly defeated, the compromise wing of the party has been beaten back (admittedly with the help of Republicans that don’t want to say yes), and the status quo has been largely preserved.
That said, increasing social security benefits does cost real money and a revenue neutral way of doing involves reasonable tax increases that would notably drop the levels of public support. I’m certainly willing to deficit spend, but popular or no, Social Security would have been the wrong place to put our efforts on economic issues. Those on Social Security also benefit from Medicare, the war on poverty has been most successful with retired populations. At the margins, deficit fueled or tax fuels, that’s not the part of the safety net that needs the most shoring up.
By comparison, same sex marriage and marijuana decriminalization both have no significant budgetary cost. As a result, they compete with other causes on the fundraising and volunteer side time of things. The more germane comparison would be some economic regulatory policy shift, e.g. something involving the minimum wage, Wall Street regulation, or immigration.
I don’t care where the blame lies, I care about who’s going to stop it. I fall on the radical end of liberalism, but with radicals scolding liberals and liberals scolding radicals, the only place I can have a decent political conversation online is the American Conservative. And it carries over to real life; the only colleague I talk politics to without biting my tongue is a conservative.
Yeah, liberals may criticize leftists to cover the fact that they’ve sold out, but radicals aren’t saints either. In one of the blogs I follow, a radical feminist admitted it straight out; she said she picked on other feminists for minor transgressions online because she was afraid to pick on the kind of men who committed major transgressions. Both factions try to convince themselves that being pure on twitter is as laudable as actually getting out there and standing on street corners getting spit on. We all know in our hearts that’s a load of BS, but there’s nothing so in need of self-righteous distraction as an uneasy conscience.
I think the use of words like “transgression” to describe this sort of thing makes Freddie’s point pretty well. Liberals have reappropriated a Christian notion of sin by viewing political incorrectness as a “transgression.” Leftists like myself have a hard time taking such moralizing about language seriously while workers are being exploited by capitalists and innocents are being bombed by imperialists. To be honest, I’m not interested in working with liberals if they are more concerned with identity politics than with fighting for better conditions for all working class people. There’s a very real difference in values there. Dialogue is always good, but I think that Freddie overestimates the common ground that actually exists between liberals and leftists at this point.
My post can’t provide evidence about what kinds of words liberals as a whole use; as far as I know I’m the only one who used the word transgression, and I was using it slightly pejoratively to criticize language policers. So I think you can’t build a case that the word typifies ‘liberal’ discussion unless you find it in more primary sources.
As far as the basic concept goes, I agree with you that it is pretty ridiculous. I was pointing out that I had seen it used by, and against, both liberals and radicals.
But really, are liberal and radical the relevant groups? I agree with you that most of the folks I’ve seen police language on twitter are practitioners of identity politics, and the folks I’ve seen do it on tumblr appear to be about 15 years old and probably have no politics to speak of. I don’t see why either group should be classified as ‘liberal,’ but I’m certainly no expert on the term and would love to be educated about it.
About “transgression,” I only meant that you were right to use that word. It fits the thing that you used it to describe.
Who identifies people as being “the right kind” through the kind of limp social signalling expressed through buzzwords, rather than based on deeper concerns about the fundamental social order?
I beg your pardon, but I think the right answer to this question is “some of everybody.” That is, the impulse is expressed in all groups large enough to discuss, and exists, suppressed or otherwise, within all of us. A weakness for “limp social signalling” is part of the human condition.
It’s too bad Goldberg judges an “anti-liberal left” to be the problem, and centers her article around this, because she otherwise makes a lot of good points, ones which overlap with many Freddie has made.
“activism becomes less about winning converts and changing the world and more about creating protected enclaves and policing speech.”
This made me think of Freddie’s critiques of those who’d rather indulge in social signalling and build up walls to keep out the unenlightened. Apparently Goldberg just misses out on liberals being the culprits too.
Goldberg also makes the intriguing contention that this censoriousness (ugh! what a word) arises not from power, but lack of power. It’s easy to imagine a group gaining the majority and then using their power to stamp out speech they don’t like. Goldberg suggests we’re in a moment “when liberalism seems to have failed but the right is not yet in charge”. Frustrated, disenchanted people might seize upon policing thought as a way to finally get what they want. This may also dovetail with what Andrew O’Hehir (as referenced by Freddie) and Freddie himself describe.
I liked how she reminded us of the dark days of the early Bush admin, when the conservative media was so suppressive that it fired or unplugged people like Phil Donahue and the Dixie Chicks if they got critical. You can add Bill Maher to that list. And remember the loathing aimed at Susan Sontag when she refused to settle for self-congratulatory therapy after Sept. 11 and insisted on a wiser, deeper way forward that also dared to address the subject of blowback.
“I have heard an awful lot about Suey Park’s politics in the last week, and yet I have absolutely no idea what kind of economic restructuring she’d undertake if given the chance.”
Since you’re not on Twitter you can’t be blamed for missing this, but she tweets *consistently* connecting what you call “identity” to the economic structure, and has been very vocally anti-capitalist (and anarchist). But like with many aspects of #NotYourAsianSidekick (tweets critiquing white supremacy, anti-Blackness among Asians, etc. being ignored to focus on Asian stereotypes and representation in the media) this is not covered in the media review of these conversations, if those are what you are using for reference.
As for her writing, which you can access without Twitter, she wrote in Youngistabout unpaid labor at HuffPo more generally but also in its creation of an “Asian Voices” section: “the creation of Asian Voices was merely an attempt to mask Huffington Post’s long history of empire-building-by-free-labor. If we did well enough, there was the chance that we could then become paid writers. Of course, the colonial logic is blatant in this equation. Much like the American Dream that is dangled before our noses, this offer is a trap. The trap being that labor exploitation, is masked as inclusion. We cannot broadcast progressive issues when the base of a project is already creating oppressive structures. The Huffington Post shows its not-so-progressive values when asking that we co-sign their exploitive practices. This project also echoes ideas of meritocracy, which is capitalism’s favorite way of brainwashing us into believing that American individualism works if we just try hard to overcome structural barriers such as discrimination.” In this post she also references the #EconomicViolence conversation, which she did not start but did signal-boost (having gained visibility after the mainstream media highlighted the parts of #NotYourAsianSidekick that didn’t threaten them). She criticizes Sheryl Sandberg and capitalist feminism constantly, as she also does in this ModelViewCulture piece, where she also writes, “Corporate interests will want to trap justice in a place that is forever foreign–that place being the giant cesspool of flashy trends called The Internet.” Interestingly, her detractors feel like these hashtags just constitute momentary spectacles, but that is exactly the problem she’s bemoaning here as well.
Basically, we may still disagree with Suey Park about many things including even her approach to economic restructuring specifically, but it’s absolutely incorrect to claim that this has no role in her analysis and that her politics is “AIDS quilt politics, all symbolism, all the time.” That understanding comes from your own (and many others’) ignorance of her politics, which I can definitely understand given the mainstream media’s obsession with #CancelColbert specifically to the neglect of basically everything else, and its whitewashing whenever it covers anything else (though, honestly, you can easily google her to see what she’s written in ‘longform’).
Ultimately, I think we all need to pay more attention to what the media (which we recognize as having vested economic interests in opposing the kind of change we desire) is doing here, making it all about Suey as an individual personality—to turn her into a joke (while often deliberately misunderstanding the arguments made about an actual joke and giving no voice to the Native Americans for whom that joke supposedly did a favor). She’s been centered *by the media* for starting the hashtag (although she alone could not have made it popular; again, it’s not about her as one individual), and here you and others are responding to that. And then for becoming so visible she gets called self-promotional, and just as with the supposed invisibility of her views on capitalism, this has less to do with anything in her own politics (except perhaps her embrace of the hashtag) and more to do with the organ both you, presumably, and her oppose.
Do mainstream liberals and Democrats actually care about the type of broad-scale restructuring that genuine street-level leftists support? I’m not convinced they do, especially since at the absolute apex of the left in this country – the largest Democratic majorities in the 1930s, when you had Democrats with overwhelming dominance in Congress and a popular Louisiana Governor-turned-Senator openly advocating for policies involving maximum incomes, a basic income stipend, and a job guarantee – you didn’t see widespread support for that. They might have supported the unions when there weren’t any labor protection laws on the books and felt they weren’t earning enough money, but there was not and generally is not any desire to go beyond that.
You can criticize people for having beliefs that they won’t practice or push for because they fear the political consequences, something that’s undoubtably true with Clinton and welfare reform. But it’s pointless to criticize people for not pushing for beliefs they don’t have.
I’d say card check support for Unions and the like has reasonable but not overwhelming support among mainstream Democrats. Similarly, most mainstream Democrats are up for saying that we have been backsliding on economic issues as inequality rises and median income stagnates.
So I think you’re correct that there isn’t support for broad-based restructuring. However, there are any number of economic items that have been on the party platform in past years that Dems haven’t effectively gotten through. So I’d say in principle, the critique that Dems haven’t made progress on many aspects of economic reforms is a fair one. I do proudly defend what we pulled off on health care, but that’s been a fight ongoing since the Nixon administration and one in which we’re playing catch up with other developed countries, so obviously not time to sit on incrementalist laurels.
When you talk about Twitter and Tumblr, who, specifically are you talking about? Who are you reading? How often? Do you distinguish between people of color and white people who follow and agree with people of color? And if you draw that distinction, why isn’t it reflected more in your writing? When you’re describing their naivete and making absolute portrayals of their lack of involvement within “real activism,” are you accounting for people like Chief Elk, Prison Culture and BrownFemiPower – who make their online activism inseparable from their real world activist work? Are you accounting for the fact that Suey Park – who you dismiss – is frequently responsible for highlighting marginal causes – particularly with indigenous and trans people – and helping raise funds/visibility for them? Are you familiar with her function as someone that’s attempting to critique and bridge the anti-blackness that takes place inside of a lot of Asian American activism and as someone that was influenced by some of the most radical/outspoken black women on twitter? And if you are, why do you dismiss her pertinence anyway? And if it’s not “dismissal” why did you frame it in such competitive ways?
And separately, do you think oppression actually hurts? Do you think it affects your self-respect and self-expression? Do you think its marginalizing qualities are social, emotional and perceptional as well as material? Do you think it’s lonely? Do you think it’s isolating? Do you think that media and social culture excludes the lives of people of color and doesn’t describe that life as they see and live it? Do you think there’s value in having a marginal reality and someone’s otherness explored and affirmed in places where it’s not othered, not scorned, not open to the need to defend itself from parties that have no interest/knowledge in them, and where oppression doesn’t absolutely sculpt how honestly their lives are articulated and to what degree?
And really, the most fundamental question is one I’ve shared and articulated since I’ve started disagreeing with you. I don’t see myself or my people in your descriptions. I never have. I feel your perspective is absent of and almost willfully non-cognizant of the vantage points, needs, perceptions and political work/expression that Twitter/Tumblr constantly speaks to. Why do you think you can adequately and accurately set our goals and our focus for us? Who do you think you are and how valid is the pretense that you can capably determine what’s workable and legitimate for us? You want to claim you’re on our side and you want to claim that you want what we do, but when you try to describe what our priorities should be and would be if we were Serious, you miss every single little thing that draws me to it and you completely misstate the politics and political actions of those involved. And you summon the inner recesses of practiced, white condescension to do it.
My invective aside, charity is what makes me continue to engage with you. I mean everything I say when I outline the revolting and suffocating whiteness of your standards and influences – nearly all of which are on display with this post – and I find the premises of most of your arguments absurd and objectionable. But I also take you at your word (with some necessary caveats) when you paint yourself as a radical that’s capable of appreciating radicalism. So imagine my frequent confusion when I come here and find that you don’t display an elementary or remotely empathetic conception of necessary and beneficial racial radicalism. You define proper radicalism in comparison to your leftism and in comparison to a state power we’ve never had real access to, not in comparison to the environment that POC’s are frequently forced to operate in. And you insult the awful Michelle Goldberg (who you approvingly linked just a few weeks ago!) for doing the same thing I see you doing every time you write about this subject.
And let’s be honest here. When we beg on the street for you people to honor our dead teenagers and give them justice, you invoke and reproduce the arguments for shooting and segregating us. When we scope out the homes we want to live in, walk around our neighborhoods or listen to music – like free people – you shoot us. Our participation in all economic systems is colored by racial disparity and the exclusion that creates the ghettos we live in and the homes we’ve had foreclosed in the past several years. When we create spaces of engagement for ourselves, you take them over and make yourself better paid and more visible bridges between POC and whites in ways that exclude non-whites (e.g Tim Wise).
We’re singularly responsible for the Democratic party’s political power and the relevance of liberalism/leftism and we have no representation and the most filtered, whitewashed kind of influence in your arguments, your links, your blogs or your newly started websites. Whenever our acquisition of power is conventionally institutional and merged with resources, institutions and arguments you recognize, you take it over, you filter us out, you insultingly and one-dimensionally caricature us (as we’ve seen with both Mikki Kendall and Suey Park) or you absorb it until it’s laden with whiteness, replicating the logic and propaganda surrounding white supremacy or entirely irrelevant/derided. Debating with you puts us at risk. Engaging with you is a risk to our minds, our bodies and our reputations. When we dare to contest you, we get rape threats, murder threats and we get raped and murdered. And we know it. When you insist that our discourse is nothing but silly white college-types and vapid, white Millennial strivers at Gawker using social signaling to high five one another, you miss the real and internalized danger that’s attached to POC engagement, you ignore our actual words and what motivates those words and you miss the need for political expression that doesn’t make catering to you central to how it understands its relevance.
With this in mind, is it truly astonishing and naive that we would gravitate to and perpetuate spaces where you are completely irrelevant? Is it surprising that we would move to a discussion that’s held on our terms and that emphasizes and shares needs that WE can define? Is it really that out of the question that our political priorities wouldn’t look like what YOU recognize as Serious Political Priorities? Is it any shock that some of us might have a few problems constantly arguing with people – who will NEVER see you as human and who have dangerous social/political power over you – about why we’re worthy of an empathetic consideration that you can get just by waking up in the morning? Is convincing you worth getting stressed and shot? What does it say about you and how much you care about us and the problematic ways you value yourselves when your answer to that question is “yes?”
There’s an underlying dishonesty and, again, a painful lack of empathetic regard in both conflating the POC and white social justice left while using the latter to call the whole project into question. And there’s a critical absence of both the causal factors for its existence and the actual benefits it produces, which causes you to frequently misstate and miss the undercurrents of relevant radicalism that seep through it. We’re in a segregated society. It’s hardly shocking that our moral systems, how we define value and what facts we use to inform our worldviews are segregated. And if it’s going to remain so, I’d at least ask for a little honesty.
You’re speaking of a movement about POC’s, guided by the intellectual insights of POC’s, FOR POC’s as a white dude. Many of us are not going to adjust our glasses, sit and have college bull sessions about how to properly restructure the economy when we can’t even drive without potentially fatal police interaction. We’re not going to make arguments premised on presumptive eventual state access when whether or not we’re going to be able to vote in elections is a wholly threatened and open question. When we discuss our lives and our realities, we’re not going to sound like white academics and our radicalism will not relate to the radicalism influenced by white academics and white canon. When we craft solutions and see our expression and our affirmation as a solution, it’s going to be responsive to an emotional pain you don’t share and a political expression you can’t naturally see the origins of.
That means many of us are going to actually connect microaggressions to the logic of racial extermination and white power. That means when “free speech” comes up, many of us are probably going to remember how “free speech” gives white people the propagandic capacity to define, encourage and reproduce the logic for our exclusion, imprisonment and murder without consequence and how a power that we rarely ever possess determines its reach and import. That means we’ll think of that much sooner than we’ll think of it as magically liberating. That means many of us will see deracialized efforts to conceive of poverty and to address economic disparities as things that will never touch segregated black lives. That means many of us don’t trust that your political tools can, do or will work for us and that its functioning isn’t a requirement for our expression to have legitimacy. That means survival comes before utopianism. That means we value getting through the day without being isolated and depressed. How much of your almost completely useless analysis so far is inadequate precisely because you haven’t engaged with any of this and incorporated it into how you view social justice-minded e-expression?
You said a lot, there.
The first paragraph especially: YES. I didn’t bother getting into addressing that argument with my comment, but I do think the dismissal of Twitter utilization is fascinating because few of those people could credibly say something like that to Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture, usprisonculture.com, Project NIA) or Lauren Chief Elk (@ChiefElk, Save Wiyabi Project), who have collaborated with Suey on a lot. Also, do people making these arguments even know anything about cases such as Marissa Alexander’s? Can you really claim nothing came out of the organizing around that (do you dismiss that as negligible)? Obviously none of that occurred on Twitter *alone*, but the idea that any changes are supposed to come from Twitter alone, and not in conjunction with other organizing, is a strawman that is too easy to knock down.
Anyways, I see that Freddie has given short replies to some of these comments, curious if he has anything to say to mine? Like maybe just an acknowledgement that perhaps he was just mistaken. (Unless you’re going to follow up with another post or something). Not that I’m entitled to a reply, I am just genuinely curious about what you have to say to that challenge to your claim.
I have to say that you haven’t remotely proven anything of substance about Suey Park specifically or Twitter “activism” generally.
What you, Andrew O’Hehir, and Michelle Goldberg have in common is that none of you will come out and say that Stephen Colbert was a shithead for two minutes on TV, and that Suey Park was correct to call him out on it. Goldberg and O’Hehir are defending Colbert explicitly. You haven’t, that I’ve seen, signed onto the notion that what Colbert did was just a joke that was misunderstood by less sophisticated people, though I take it to be the subtext of your claim that the “conventional wisdom” was dismissing Colbert’s intentions.
For my part, I took Colbert’s intentions to be to reward himself with a treat of a few minutes of racial caricature, knowing that he was very well insulated from consequences or criticism by the context of who he was and what he appeared to be doing. And I’m very happy that Suey Park was able to partially penetrate those protective layers; I applaud her.
I agree with you that she didn’t end racism forever, and she simultaneously failed to outline a multi-year plan to end economic inequality. But I never held her to those standards. I never took #CancelColbert to be the last word in anything, and neither did Park.
So, here are some other articles, also from Salon and The Nation, that you’re ignoring. These writers have a much more substantive disagreement with you, but you leapfrog their perspective straight to the assumption that #CancelColbert was a “fiasco.” You think it’s paternalistic and disrespectful to refrain from interrogating Suey Park on her political goals. But when she speaks for herself, or when others speak for her, you tune them out.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/179084/whos-afraid-suey-park
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/28/in_support_of_cancelcolbert_why_stephen_colbert_needs_to_make_this_right/
On the contrary: I read the Salon interview with her very, very carefully. Far more carefully, I’m willing to bet, than you did.
That’s nice. How often do you read her twitter feed? And were you following her any time before last week?
Look. Your continuing coyness about whether you yourself are white– playing with race, casually, through the mechanism of internet anonymity– is really the only response that I ever need to make to you. I could go through your points one by one, as I have in the past. But ultimately, at the heart of all of your weird aggression on this issue is your own racial baggage. There are times when I think you almost recognize that. I see pure panic in you, when you write about race. I see a roiling mass of fear and unhealthiness. It’s absolutely palpable when you write about this stuff. And I think it’s clearly the case that you’re so obsessive and forward with me because you want to deflect, deflect, deflect away from your own baggage.
I read you and I think to myself, god, what must it be like when you meet an actual black person? How do you interact as one human being to another? How many pages of theory do you run through in your mind, in panic, when that happens? How desperately do you search for the enlightened and noble response?
Here’s what I can tell you. Whatever the origin of all of this, you will not engage this way forever. You won’t continue to write and speak and engage the way you do now. I’ve seen this over and over again. Maybe in five years, maybe in ten. But you’ll fizzle out. You’ll have some ugly encounter with someone who is equally interested in waging psychic warfare, someone who is just as willing to make racial politics a matter of personality and purity, and that’ll be it. You’ll find yourself, suddenly, part of the apolitical muddle. It’s going to happen.
Now: here comes the part where you dance, dance, dance away from confronting your own glaring issues about race, and push, push, push those uncomfortable thoughts and feelings onto me.
I’m black.
Tell me more about the issues I have about race.
It’s interesting that most people who disagree with you are just “deflecting away from their own baggage” … I’ve lost count of how many times you’ve said this in your blog’s comments. Maybe this is just your go-to response when you don’t have anything substantive to say?
Are you now! And you’ve chosen to divulge this after literally years of complaining at me… Why, exactly? Hmmmm, “Q”?
Tell you what: tell me your real name. Tell me where you’re from. Tell me what you do. Collapse your advantage in information over me. A little bit.
I’m sure, in your head, that you were playing a trump card here. But I don’t know you. You’ve danced around sand played games in my space for over a year. I have no interest in dancing with an anonymous internet commenter. Sorry.
“Stephen Colbert was a shithead for two minutes on TV”
Two minutes? He’s done this same schtick over a thousand times for roughly a decade. Racial and ethnic minorities, women, LGBTs, the disabled, non-Christians, the poor, victims of crime and catastrophe… He’s even run the “Ching-Chong” bit multiple times. It’s like noticing about a week ago that Gallagher smashes a lot of watermelons.
Freddie is a fatalist who embraces a politics that will inevitably fail in order to justify his fatalism. And if anybody rejects fatalism, he criticizes them for giving false hope to all the inevitable losers out there.
No, I’m just someone who doesn’t roll over to people simply because they say the typical magic words that at note supposed to mean you don’t actually have to argue your position.
Again, the only correct answer here is technology.
TECHNOLOGY not politics has delivered weed and gay marriage, in a state by state solution, where liberalism in strong centralized DC failed.
And technology ultimately will deliver economic equality by dismantling the bureaucracy of the public sector.
First, let’s remember that “consumption poverty” (which includes wealth transfers) has fallen to less than 3% in America.
Second, note that I (an anarchocapitalist) have developed a plan that Freddie himself happily embraces:
https://medium.com/labor-related/1d068ac5a205
Third, pls UNDERSTAND that a free market digital economy means two things: 1. digital socialism is inevitable (as in books, movies, songs, 3d printing plans, online college classes, and the equipment to consume it all for free). 2. the delivery of digital socialism is built on the back of strong atomic property rights.
It’s basically impossible to give everyone free digital everything (which is what people want), and undermine the legal framework of atomic property rights.
1,2,3 reasons you ought to all be very thankful for technology.
Incidentally, if you’d like to see the way that Q’s self-presentation has… evolved, let’s say, I encourage to check the comments on this post:
http://lhote.blogspot.com/2013/02/bullshit-social-climber-faux-antiracism.html
Freddie, the logic of your argument leads not just waving away the preferred approach of academic liberals, but ALSO the preferred approach of socialists.
Libertarians and anarchocapitalists want to topple government.
So if they offer a small government solution with less economic inequality and a more even distribution amongst the races… and they do it by bringing say the 20% most free market members of the minority groups up into their club, and they generally get rid of the Oligarch extremes, then the left SHOULD and OUGHT support this, right?
Meaning, if the solution to having less outright economic inequality from both top- to-bottom and with a far better mix of sexes and races… comes from technology, deregulation, and “smarter” government… and doesn’t deliver either socialism OR a new rhetoric of grievance based language, that’s OK with you?
My point is, if I and other technolibertarians are confident that we’ll soon finish delivering gay marriage state by state, and a host of other historically desirable social progressive causes, create a Guaranteed Income, make everyone work, and be far fairer statistically to minority groups in the process, WHY should we care the preferred solutions of the left?
It’s a real Q, bc it’s not like we don’t want the same things, it’s just that like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, the most painful thing is listening to the townsfolk belly ache.
Why do the technologists have to respect the plans of non-technologists making so much noise?
“What I am is a lefty who thinks that the only way for permanent racial justice and equality between sexes and genders to be achieved is for people of color and women to have the economic and political strength necessary to secure their own best interests.”
The “colored” as a group used to have their separate interest: before 1964, in the South, when there were specific laws targeting this group. Not anymore; they don’t have any separate interests, and neither do women. Unless you’re suggesting something like monopoly on operating casinos for the “colored”, the only reason to advocate identity-specific political movements would be, imo, splitting the only one movement that matters: movement of the exploited, against exploitation.
Good post, Freddie.