Some people are paywalled out of this. The argument is Bernie subtly expressed privilege by showing up to the inauguration so casually dressed. What the author implies he should have done to avoid showing his privilege is to show up more luxuriously dressed, like Michelle Obama!
The man just ran two highly competitive presidential campaigns, sparked a generational movement, recovered from a heart attack and still seems genuinely more focused on substance than performance, but she would have appreciated if he tried to look a little more nouveau riche...
Finally, there's not even the acknowledgment that he's Jewish. He's just reduced to some monolithic whiteness, as though it's the same exact experience to be a Jewish guy named Bernie from Brooklyn as it is to be a Mayflower-descended WASP. All of this is madness.
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The tweets were deleted, but this needs to be seen and understood. People still say this is a made-up issue. How can accumulated actions like this *not* have an effect on our intellectual and artistic culture?
They both make a valid point about one half of the problem: We should take politics seriously and organize, but we should also step back from this level of personal emotional investment. It’s not healthy, normal or useful.
When identity, self-expression and one’s "personal narrative" become the basis for the collective politics/morality, it perverts our electoral politics––which take on the spectacular and tribal dimensions of sport.
I implicate myself here, of course, Trump became too much a part of my life. Am increasingly influenced by Mark Lilla's argument (stated wonderfully in the most recent @readliberties) that we ought to all try to be indifferent. "Nothing is everything," he writes.
I filed it a month ago, but my new column in the latest issue of @Harpers turns out to be a long response to the kind of mentality that leads to wildly misguided and patronizing rhetoric like "multiracial whiteness." harpers.org/archive/2021/0…
If you find yourself reaching for arguments about “multiracial whiteness” to explain why there are non-white people who think and act differently than you’d expect them to, you should at least *consider* the possibility that race can’t explain everything washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
You should also consider that you’re giving way too much power to “whiteness,” which becomes the force behind really everything. Non-whites can’t even make their own mistakes without it somehow deracinating them and actually being the fault of omnipotent whiteness.
It’s so insanely condescending. Non-whites can’t just be islamophobic, xenophobic, intolerant of radical black politics, or just plain stupid. They have to lose their racial/ethnic authenticity and actually become “white” in the process of espousing these views.
Admittedly, I have ESL kids, but are there really any actual human babies out there who are using vocabulary like “disrupt” in a meaningful way?
Also, my toddler doesn’t understand the concept of confessing anything at all; five minutes ago was an eternity in his moral universe. He believes his stuffed animal is alive.
"The French passion for anti-Americanism began in the 19th century with Charles Baudelaire, who translated Edgar Allan Poe. Channeling Poe, Baudelaire described the United States as “gaslight barbarism.” " (Nice opening by Bruckner. @tabletmag's on a roll) tabletmag.com/sections/arts-…
"racism does exist in our country, but one can also point to major differences with the US ... the French approach is not to assimilate communities but individuals, whom it strives first to emancipate from their origins. That is why it refuses to collect statistics on ethnicity."
This is a massive🔑and why Bruckner rightly notes James Baldwin said France rid him of the "crutch of race": "The French republican ideal is to free each individual from his community of origin and make him a citizen, whereas the US defends identity affiliations tooth and nail."