Oh, white people "don't want to" lend the term denoting their racial identity to a concept designed to pick out "group entitlement," with no ameliorating qualification like "nationalism" or "supremacy" to signal that *being white* isn't the problem? The absolute nerve.
I should note that @deonteleologist is a good dude and I only screenshotted so that I could get both tweets in view, not because I'm going for a stealth dunk.
Imagine grammatically structuring a concept denoting entrenched power, unearned advantage, and group entitlement around a single group's race, with no alleviating qualifier signaling that only *some* are the baddies, and being miffed when they're less than enthusiastic about it.
lmao
There's a sense in which some of us (myself, @rasmansa, @roderickgraham, etc.) are talking past each other.

Mansa is invoking historical usage against my concerns about folk semantic alienation. Rod is stressing the term's usefulness in an academic context.
What has precipitated our talking past each other is that ours is an age in which the barriers between academic constructs and the broader discourse are more porous. So you have the phenomenon of reality TV presidents invoking the specter of deconstructionism.
Mansa says that my tweet "misunderstands the history of the term." But my tweet doesn't *misunderstand* it so much as sidestep the history as entirely irrelevant.
Just as the semantic history of other racialized terms doesn't entail all that much about their reception today, "whiteness" as a linguistic option for current discourse can't be assessed by how Du Bois used it way back when.
Graham's point that an academic context is the term's only safe space is instructive, but not for the reasons he thinks. Academia is far more hospitable to reifying historic racial sin into labels and terms designating permanent disrepute than broader society is.
Graham's video, which I think says some very helpful things, discusses the importance of reserving a term that captures something we might describe as white normativity.

The problem is taking a contingent fact about historic white supremacy and reifying it into a conceptual proxy for social privilege and racial normativity.
Mark Lilla and the reception his book got anticipated some of this, but part of what it means to build out a better future is pushing our in the direction of a universalist bent. This does the opposite.
Permanently stamping white racial identity with an ignoble linguistic role, i.e., to function as a conceptual analog for a number of attributes having to do with illicit social domination, is actually harmful. We can talk about the various problems of social privilege without it.
This does *not* mean whitewashing the contingent historical fact of white domination. The point is far more narrow than that: it's about not taking that historic fact and using it to build out terminology suggestive of white racial identity being *essentially* problematic.

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More from @bernybelvedere

23 Feb
One thing I respect about Young Pharaoh is he is all caps, all of the time. He’s not interested in whispering anything.
Oh, you’re not interested in TRUTH BOMBS flying at you at a thousand miles per hour? Go read a safe person’s tweets. This is a soy free zone.
wtf @ this unbelievable censorship

all because he was flagrantly and unapologetically antisemitic???? somethin ain’t right here
Read 4 tweets
22 Feb
It is hard to make sense of this claim. (Bret calls it an "argument," but no argument is actually given.) Why the use of "inherently"? What does "even if it worked" mean? What does it say about Bret's philosophy that a robust form of equality is tagged as "undesirable"?
This isn't pedantry. If he's going to substantiate his claim, he should grapple with it a bit more. There are elements in it that require support.

Take the subclaim that "equality of outcome is inherently unjust."
If equality of outcome is "inherently" unjust, then it's impossible for there to be a just instance of it. EOO would necessarily be unjust.

But we can easily imagine a world (a) whose beings enjoy equality of outcome and (b) is just. This would mean EOO isn't *inherently* unjust
Read 5 tweets
11 Feb
honestly dying at this being MTG’s side crush
the hat/sweatshirt combo is absolutely wrecking my life
this is king level
Read 5 tweets
11 Feb
What a spectacularly blinkered thing to say.
Seriously what in the hell is this?

ht: @Aelkus
In a sense, this column articulates the other side of the pitch frequently made about what the promise of a Biden presidency would bring: the idea that Biden represented a recovery of the boringly normal.
Read 6 tweets
11 Feb
I'm in favor of Trump's impeachment for lots of reasons.

One is that as we continue to be plagued by political movements that defiantly resist tethering themselves to reality, one thing we can no longer allow is for politicians to enable them without meaningful accountability.
Obviously legal accountability, like the kind Smartmatic and Dominion have pursued, provides a massive disincentive to engaging in defamatory nuttery.
But bad actors will learn from this. They'll smarten up. They'll steer clear of invoking specific companies in the future.

We need accountability that disinclines politicians from doing things like fomenting insurrectionist fantasies.
Read 4 tweets
11 Feb
Mollie Hemingway is a genuinely despicable person. Never forget how utterly vile this crowd showed themselves to be.
To suggest that applying political accountability to a literal assault on our democracy is some sort of masturbatory lib fantasy is the kind of trash take that could only come from a person with a genuinely broken brain.
Stop wanking to this obvious political theater attempting to <checks notes> hold accountable the person who got five human beings killed and hundreds badly hurt.
Read 4 tweets

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