Basically, individualism is a central facet of liberalism, of a free society. Beware of those who would try to pressure you out of it.
This is mental:
"DiAngelo is monetizing white guilt on a grand scale, and there’s an extraordinary irony in the fact that she’s got a home-field advantage in this game over someone like, say, Ibram Kendi, because she’s more accessible to people like herself, the same phenomenon she decries."
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Essentially child abuse. Hard to imagine anything a genuine white racist could say that would be *more* damaging to the self-image and academic development of a young black child than this:
I can’t even imagine what would have happened if an “educator” tried to say something like this to my black father when I was a student. I feel like the space-time continuum would have ripped.
It's also especially pernicious to pretend that black Americans are somehow not "western," as @NewLiberalsPod pointed out. This was Baldwin's point, and Ellison's and Murrays and many others'. US blacks aren't *really* from elsewhere, in fact they predate most whites here.
Only beginning to read Foucault systematically, but this jumped out at me:
“Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men.”
Question: For those who have spent time on Foucault, how does a statement like that complicate the common assumption that racial and feminist discourses emphasizing "the body" are derived from his thinking?
People criticize artists for failing to represent their particular lived experiences. I've never seen a movie that encapsulates my own, so I co-wrote a screenplay. Maybe it'll be made, maybe not. I'm not complaining about anyone else. How many of Manuel's critics have even tried?
*Miranda's
Furthermore, it’s not the representation of personal experiences or identity alone that amounts to art or insight. Those are simply starting points, raw materials to be drawn from and transformed through empathy and imagination into something striving for the universal.
Here we go. The struggle will never be over—can never be over—because whiteness will always be redefined:
“The problem is believing that “Latino-ness” presents a worthy “alternative” to U.S. whiteness, when it is simply White hegemony by another name.” washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Lin-Manuel Miranda is an agent of “white hegemony” now.
Really starting to intuit the logic of the guillotine more and more. You see how deep approval, deference and admiration can flip in an instant against even the likes of Miranda or Adichie and you learn something about the nature (and shortsightedness) of revolutionary fervor.
"And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow." chimamanda.com
and if you fell down the rabbit hole after reading the whole piece, this is the person CNA is talking about in part one:
This piece by @karpmj in the new @Harpers is sensational. On the right we have lost sight of our complex history and in many precincts of the elite left we have been utterly blinded by its glare. harpers.org/archive/2021/0…
🔑"unlike an older generation of new-left radicals, [today's] sit not at the margins but near the core of the American cultural elite, writing for the nation’s most influential journals, winning its most prestigious prizes and receiving acclaim from its most powerful politicians"
The paradox of the new, elite left is that it frames the past as *determining* the present yet also somehow demands transformational change––even as it rejects class analysis in favor of what seems like identity essentialism and pseudo-religious original sin.