Thread by @drvolts

All right, a thread about white epistemic hegemony (only less pretentious than that sounds).

As a specific illustration of the larger phenomenon I want to discuss, we begin with @zchace's superb recent podcast miniseries, The Improvement Association.
nytimes.com/2021/04/22/pod…

It's really worth listening to the whole thing, but I'll give a quick Cliff Notes. In Bladen County, NC, there's a longstanding org called the Bladen County Improvement Project, which basically organizes the country's black vote into a single voice, to maximize its impact.

Though Blacks are a minority in the county, the BCIP (a PAC) has been extremely successful at uniting them so they consistently get at least some representation & exercise at least some power. It's led by a crusty old guy w/ a huge personality, Horace Munn.

The conservative white majority has always suspected BPIC of cheating. As several interviewees say: how else could it maintain such unity & discipline? How else could it do so well? (Unspoken: they're black! We know they can't win w/ smarts or hard work! So it must be cheating.)

White people have accused BCIP of cheating for years. County officials have dutifully investigated several times & never found anything.

This must be emphasized: there is not now, nor has there ever been, any *actual evidence* of BCIP cheating. None. There's no there there.

Nonetheless, the rumors have been ubiquitous for so long the county's whites "just know" BCIP cheats. Everyone they know says so! Where there's smoke there's fire! And my cousin's mechanic heard from his brother that he saw a thing ...

So: no actual cheating, but a white establishment that universally believes there is cheating. What follows from this? Two consequences.

First, whites worked up about black cheating convince themselves, heck, they have to cheat too! Just out of self defense, mind you.

And so Bladen County becomes the site, in 2018, of one of the only bona fide examples of US voting fraud in years. Not just questionable shenanigans -- outright, explicit, caught-red-handed voter fraud. BY REPUBLICANS. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Because the fraud is so obvious, county authorities have no choice but to convict & punish the wrongdoers. But even some of the authorities in question say to Chace later that they think the fraudsters got a bad rap, because, what about BCIP?

Really can't emphasize this enough: whites in the county, even in positions of authority, basically take the position, to this day, that the fraud wasn't so bad because after all it was just a response to BCIP's (fictional!) fraud. Whataboutism absolutely dominates.

Second consequence: the ubiquitous public accusations of fraud put BCIP under immense stress & even some members of the org start feeling they have to distance themselves from it, because of *how it looks*, you know. The optics. So BCIP fractures.

Now. I'm less interested in the exact details of the podcast than in the basic shape of the narrative, which is: white people, by believing something it's in their tribal interests to believe, basically *force the world to behave as though it were true*.

There's no reason to think BCIP ever broke any laws, but the county's whites forced the same consequences that would have come if it *had* been true. They made the world warp & reshape around their delusion. They willed their shared delusion into existence.

Then, just a few weeks later, I'm listening to the latest season of Slow Burn, about the runup to the Iraq War, & lo, a similar narrative: a group of reactionary whites shares a delusion (Iraq attacked us) ... slate.com/podcasts/slow-…

...and through sheer will, force the delusion into reality. Cheney demands the "raw intelligence" from which he can stitch together a story that supports his delusion. The cowed journalistic establishment meekly submits to the delusion. The world behaves *as though it were true*.

All of which serves as background to this story, which is very much ongoing: reactionary whites have once again convinced one another of a delusion (the election was stolen from Trump) & are forcing it into reality. nytimes.com/2021/05/13/us/…

They are passing voter suppression laws in response to the delusion. They are seeding loyalists in key state positions in response to the delusion. They are setting the stage for stealing the 2024 presidential election in response to the delusion. GOP lawmakers ...

... are even saying outright that it doesn't matter whether the election was fraudulent -- their voters *think it was*, and so the world must reshape itself around their feelings. Real voters must be suppressed & excluded in response to imaginary voter fraud.

If you wanted, you could go back through US history & pick out a thousand stories with this same basic structure: reactionary whites (wrongly) convince one another that their opponents are doing something unethical or illegal in order to justify their own violence & lawbreaking.

They convince one another of delusions & then force the world to behave as though the delusions are real. They convince one another of delusions in order to excuse themselves doing the very thing they're accusing others of.

This is what cultural hegemony means: your feelings about things matter more than reality. You have a right to believe whatever you want & the rest of the world must accommodate. Though I doubt they could or would articulate it this way, this is precisely what they are defending.

They'll cheat in elections, and when called to account, they'll say "what about Dem cheating," and it won't *matter* that in reality there was no Dem cheating. They'll engage in violence and then when called to account will say, "what about antifa," and it won't *matter* ...

... that antifa is about 95% imaginary.

They get to believe what they want to believe, whatever's in their interests to believe at the moment, and the world must rearrange itself around the delusion. That is the core white privilege. </fin>