Here's a pet sociological theory about culture warring, followed by a quasi-black-nationalist call to rid ourselves of it. There is, at present, some sort of internal fight among many white people in parts of the West going on about their own attitudes to race and their past...
...One side, the Penitents, desperately wants to do things that will relieve them from a sense of guilt. The other side, the Repressors, desperately wants to do things that will hold guilt at bay. Each has an anti-guilt strategy which exacerbates what the other flees from...
...Penitents want to read books about white complicity and how to struggle against it, employ black people whose almost-explicit job is to say "there's lots of racism and racists, here's what the bad whites do" creating an implicit contrast class to be part of, etc...
...but all that raises racism to salience, which is just what the Repressors don't want! The Repressors want to read books about how racism is overblown, and employ black people whose almost-explicit job it is to say that the employees of the Penitents are lying...
...but all that leads to the spectacle fo white people being blasé about racism, which is just what activates the Penitents guilt. So now they hate each other a lot, and much of the culture war is basically this culturally-white-internal psychodrama playing itself out at large...
...both of these strategies admittedly do create jobs programmes for a small number of educated and eloquent black people, but beyond that neither side is much interested in making the sort of socio-economic changes that would actually help black people en masse...
...The Penitents might in theory be interested in making changes and their strategy for this would be to first Listen To Black People and Centre Our Voices. But the particular black people they'd actually listen to are those they employ who are directly paid to keep this going...
...what's more, since white people have more money and own more stuff and control more institutions, their Discourse becomes our Discourse, and so we now also have this astroturfed black intelligentsia. Very colonial vibe imo, but whatever I'm obvs a product of this system too...
...the point is, though, that I think this psychodrama (whose causes I do not understand) is actually strictly irrelevant to the rest of us. It's a problem for a certain set of white people in the west; I (genuinely) wish them well, cultural fights are hard and they matter...
...But for the rest of us, the vast global majority, mentally emancipating ourselves will mean coming to just not care about this whole white culture war psychodrama, or its categories or alliances, or the issues or persons it raises to salience.
