The Woke think everything is "rooted in white supremacy." Understanding why they say this is key to cracking the code of woke ideology.
So let's look at it
A Thread 🧵
2/ "Rooted in White Supremacy" is a term from woke academic literature, so it comes loaded with the worldview of wokeness; And the worldview of the wokeness is NOT the same as the worldview of enlightenment liberalism.
The worldview of wokeness is postmodernism.
3/ This means there's more going on then it first appears.
In 1997 the critical race theorist Charles Mills wrote "The Racial Contract," and the first sentence in that book is: "White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today."
4/ Mills redefines "white supremacy" so white supremacy is no longer a belief based on prejudice, it's an *unnamed political system.* How the woke cash out the claim White Supremacy is a political system and not just a belief is what allows them to say everything is rooted in it.
5/ In 1995 Paul Quin argued the Source of Racism in the deep south was not prejudice, but a "system of culturally sanctioned beliefs and attitudes which condemned African-Americans to a subordinate position."
The whole quote here is essential reading:
6/ The idea is that racism is caused by a system. That system exists because a set of interlocking beliefs and attitudes that oppress Black people gain social currency by being "culturally sanctioned."
Well what does it mean to be culturally sanctioned?
7/ What it means is that the institutions of cultural production (music, media, churches, universities, etc) that produce art, science, beliefs, ideas, and politics have accepted and perpetuate the beliefs and attitudes that place white people above black people.
8/ This means woke people think White Supremacy is not the name of a belief, it is the name given to the "pervasiveness, magnitude, and normalcy of white dominance and assumed superiority" that results from cultural institutions sanctioning racist beliefs in what they produce.
9/ We have one more concept to unpack and then we can explain why this is all nonsense.
Postmodernism, which the worldview operating here, comes in part from the French Philosopher Jacques Derrida. You can see the influence of Derrida's ideas about language are present here.
10/ Derrida said that words are always defined in terms of other words, they do not get their meaning from their relationship to the world or how they are used by people, but rather they get their meaning from their relationship to other words. This has 2 consequences:
11/ 1. The meaning of words is no longer tied to the world, and 2. Derrida said words contain "traces" of other words.
It is 2 that concerns us here. The idea being words contain "traces" of other words. IE: the word 'pig' has traces of words like 'pink' 'animal' and 'mammal.'
12/ The idea that word contain traces of other words, ideas contain traces of other ideas. The result is that the woke think that documents, texts, and stories can contain the traces of ideas that are not mentioned directly. This applies to all types of communication...
13/ For example, a woke person might say the scientific term "black hole" contains traces of ideas about race because "black" can refer to both a color and a race. As such, using the term black hole to refer to something negative is racist.
Here's a video of someone doing that:
14/ If you combine all of this together, you get the idea that all ideas, concepts, and values are fruit of the culture tree that they grew on, as such, they always contain the seeds, the "traces," of the culture they came from.
So now the conclusion is obvious...
15/ Because of past racism, the woke think every ideal America is founded on is fruit of the poisonous tree of "white supremacy."
Capitalism, due process, free speech, equality under the law, objectivity, the scientific method; all contains the seeds of White Supremacy.
16/ The woke think the notion of free speech arose in the enlightenment period when slaver was still practiced, and so came out of a racist culture. They would say the cultural soil free speech grew out of was racist, and so free speech is "rooted in White Supremacy."
17/ This logic can be applied to every single idea, concept, art piece, text, poem, scientific discovery, philosophy, or anything else that showed up in an American or Western context.
Thus everything from black holes to medicine to Disneyland is "rooted in white supremacy"
18/ The flaw in all of this is it assumes every idea takes on all the characteristics of the culture that created it. It's cultural guilt by association that says everything a culture ever did and every belief it ever had is contained in everything it ever made.
This is nonsense
19/ Imagine thinking synthetic antibiotics are racist because a German, Paul Ehrlich, invented them in the early 1900's and there was some serious racism in Germany at that time
I'm an ethnic Jew, and let me tell you if I get Pheumonia y'all best be giving me my damn amoxicillin
20/ So, that's what's going on when you hear woke activists and social justice activists talk about things being "rooted in white supremacy."
It's an idea that uses a theory which is detached from reality, and it is used to smear enlightenment liberal ideas as racist.
21/ It is complete nonsense, so when someone pulls this out on you, call it out for what it is and push back.
/fin
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1/ I mean, dude, it's right in your own quote. Mills likes what postmodernism does politically and he says so in the highlited portion of the bit YOU quoted. Also, he seemingly accepts large portions of Postmodernism via postcolonial theory (hence his focus on deimperialism)....
2/ Yes, he rejects the move of some of the postmoderns to be skeptical of all meta narratives.
But postmoderns did away with the "incredulity toward meta narratives" since Kimberlee Crenshaw wrote "Mapping the Margins" and she states explicitly that....
Intersectionality a
Is a “provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory."
So yeah, they don't accept the postmodern conclusion that doubts all and every metanarrative. They do accept many other aspects of postmodernism and he says so...
This is the philosophical equivalent of a biologist examining every tree, leaf, and branch, and then proclaiming he had not seen a forrest...just some leaves, branches, trunks and seeds.
This is common :
"that isn't what Derrida meant by trace."
I could talk about how every experience must point beyond itself, or about oresence and absence and differance and meaning is always endlessly differed and all the rest...
Or .....
I could say "this is the bit about what Derrida said that people took and ran with, and here is what they did with it"
I'm not getting bogged down in a discussion of Greman Phenomenology.
I'd read the Crisis of the European sciences if I was.
2/ If she gets dragged she will cry "this is harassment" and play victim.
Everything they do is like this. All of it.
All the little rules and conventions they try to make us adopt are just they attempts at making social rules that allow them to bully people. That's it.
3/ Every one of their silly little social expectations, all their social memes are just attempts at justifying their power moves, treating people badly, or excusing their terrible behavior.
And all of it is laced with bitterness and resentment.
Today Mazie Hirono said the term "sexual preference" is offensive. @SteveKrak showed as of September 28 Merriam-Webster didn't say it was offensive, but today it does say that.
So I checked when the entry was last changed according to merriam webster and *THEY CHANGED IT TODAY*
1/ To understand why Social Justice (woke) advocates think the way they do, you need to understand that they have been completely poisoned with cynicism.
This is why they act like they "see right through your bullshit" even when you are being 100% honest.
Let me explain:
2/ When I say poisoned with cynicism, I mean that woke people have adopted a worldview that says that the words and actions of other people are not to be trusted or taken at face value:
3/ This means that the woke view every conversation or discussion with a person who disagrees with them like it is a conversation with a dishonest car salesman, and the goal is to unmask the "real motives" of the other person.
This guy says anyone who doesn't agree with him is just dying to say the n-word.
Professors like this destory their fields of study because if ever a colleage disagrees with them, they accuse that colleague of hidden motives and arguing in bad faith...
If you're a moderate like me and have to take a class with a prof who acts like this, avoid getting noticed and avoid unecessary contact.
You don't need his mentorship or connections. There will be other mentors, I promise. He can't help you, and even if he could he won't...
he would just destroy your reputation with rumour and innuendo. Enforcing absolute political agreement and making sure everyone is as woke as he is is is first priority; medieval history is a very distant second place.
There are people who care deeply about medieval history...