If I were in a classroom I would suggest Jesse describe what he thinks "white gaze theory" is, in his own words. Then you compare the student's assumptions to the social facts of the theory. Then you collaborate on where those two deviate. But it's Twitter and all that.
If you are engaging in debates about very complex social phenomena you have to make peace with levels of abstraction. If you refuse to do so, then you are not engaging in debate but in warfare.
It stretches the bounds of incredulity to think that people who argue about, say, sports or the top 100 guitar solos of all time cannot grasp the idea of levels of analysis.
By the proffered logic, there is no category that holds. Categories flatten differences up to the bounded claim of sameness. That's what they DO. If you want to argue that category isn't meaningful it makes no sense to randomly point out internal inconsistencies.
A smart attack would be to point out that a category is consistently flawed, not internally inconsistent. So you would have to say that "whiteness" when applied yields no meaningful implications.
But if you argue that by citing the diversity of "white people", you have already conceded the point. If they category is meaningless then your point isn't with the analytical category but with the people who claim to be white. Which, um, is sort of our point, btw.
So welcome to the Critical Race Theory resistance, I guess.
Or you can say you are a rabid post-structuralist (damn all the categories!) but based on prior arguments I suspect Jesse isn't keen on that.
Or, to shift the level of abstraction for the sake of illustration: if being white has no meaningful coherence why do people call themselves white? It must mean something? If it does then it isn't radical hooey to think that the shared worldview, or dare I say gaze, is a thing
Anyway, I don't care enough to dunk on a single person. This is something that annoys me generally and just accepting that a lot of people in the sandbox should instead be on the seesaw really helps the Twitter UX.
