The Republic of Dissent

You are who you are truly in bed!

Sugary excerpt of the day from Norm Geras:

A psychiatrist once told me that you can get to know people's real natures in bed, and that our sexual personas were the truest manifestations of our actual natures. But we are often ashamed by our true natures, partly because they can conflict so horribly with the characters we present on the pavement or by the fireside. As a result, we do our best to keep our secret lives just that.

I want to agree with Geras. I cannot disagree for I know he is on to something, but I cannot agree either because I know that for too many, sex has become about performance or rather performing.  Ah la jouissance n'est plus ce qu'elle était parce qu'elle a été désinfectée par sa banalisation et une gourmandise niaise (There are advantages to learning/knowing French, one of the non-negligible ones is to fully get me).

Herman Cain's African-Americanness

As always great stuff from Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.  Didn't I make the point since the beginning that Herman Cain was a race man?

Embarrassment, race, and identification

Ta-nehisi Coates is embarrassed by Herman Cain:

Fallows finds Herman Cain likeable. I feel utterly embarrassed by him. It's not his politics -- I've never felt embarrassed by Condi Rice, Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas. It's more akin to feeling I got when Jesse Jackson got caught claiming he wanted to cut Barack Obama's nuts off. Or watching Marion Barry attack black people for moving out of the city. There's a hucksterism there that transcends.

I agree that with the assessment that Cain is not a serious candidate for POTUS, but Coates's embarrassment makes me cringe because of what it shows about America, Americans, and identity politics. 

To the contrary of Coates, I'm not embarrassed by Herman Cain because I do not/cannot identify with him. I don't think he represents me and more importantly, I do not feel that I have to delegitimate his point of view to show that he is wrong and that he is just a race man and wrong on the issues.

In short, I think the unseriousness of Herman Cain's candidacy doesn't mean that he is an embarrassment for he is just wrong.  That fact makes very much like Obama for there is a lot to admire about him, but very little that shows that he would make a good POTUS unless you agree/identify with him

J'aimerais pouvoir aimer Herman Cain...

Jonathan Capehart on Herman Cain and racial politics:

Cain is now the second African American Republican of late to brand the Democratic Party a plantation. Rep. Allen West (Fla.) said so during a Fox News interview in August. He also likened himself to Harriet Tubman. File that one under “delusions of grandeur.”

There are plenty of things to say about the Democratic Party and how it has let down people of color in general and blacks in particular. But invoking slave imagery is unnecessary. And it is especially galling coming from a member of a party whose policies and politics generally speaking haven’t been exactly welcoming to African Americans.

Is Capehart right? Yes, but Herman Cain isn't disgustingly wrong, he is just wrong and not playing racial politics in  the expected way. I'm trying to say that Capeheart is slamming Cain solely for using racial politics to support the 'wrong policies' when he should be slamming him for being as much a race man as Cornel West and Harry Belafonte for they agree that race matters, but just disagree as to how and as to the consequences of what for them is an existential fact. Those three manly men  have another thing in common: a huge ego who convinces them that anybody who kind of looks like them ought to think like them.

My problem with Cain is that he loves too much Hermain Cain and can't get out of his own way to see the big picture and to have empathy for those who in spite of their best efforts, not because of race or anything else, can't be Herman Cain. In short,  Herman Cain is too Hobbsian for  his own good and not really able to get past race because of his ego-centrism.  I would love to be able to love Herman Cain for he almost has the right tune when it comes to affirming that individuality matters, but I cannot.  He is too comfortable playing racial and identity politics instead of sticking to what matters.  Cain takes too much pleasure in fighting perpetually old and passé rumbles in the jungle (it is a sign of a lack of imagination) and desacralizing an undivine and unsavory histoiry.

Anger and the 'black' president

Conclusion of John McWhorter's interesting article (I swear that I don't go looking for articles on Obama and race, they are just finding a way to me) advising Obama to become angry for America needs an Angry Black president:

Don't worry about people saying you're an Angry Black Man. For one thing, your supporters think Angry Black Men are prophets anyway. As for the other side, almost none of them will dare haul this out, just for fear of alienating the center with racially unsavory language of too obvious a nature.

And as for those who will -- and they will -- just own it. Again, the sky will not fall. After all, you are angry (I presume), and you're black, too. The country could use an Angry Black Man president just about now.

I have a lot of respect for John McWhorter, but his words make me uncomfortable they are racializing an issue that is  already very polarized. Lastly, I have to admit that it's extremely tiresome to have too many Americans make race the essential element of Obamism (which partly confirms its vacuity) and to put on the shoulders of Obama all the frou -frou of an imagined and superficial blackness. What is alarming is that the fact that many Americans are advising Obama to play a role and to become someone else just shows that for them, race skin color trumps/kills/negate/obliterate individuality.

By the way, America doesn't need an angry black president, it just needs, as always, a good president.

The unbearable futility of the erotic capital and of feminism

Nichi Hodgson 's 'review' of Catherine Hakim's Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital made me laugh to tears. Sugar except:

The reason women have failed to capitalise on their erotic capital, says Hakim, is the fault of feminism allied with Christian conservatism. Puritan Anglo-Saxon feminism, including post-feminism, Hakim claims, is "profoundly uncomfortable with sexuality, and frames it in a relentlessly negative perspective." As such, "feminists have been so brainwashed by patriarchal ideology that they have been quite unable to understand how sexuality and erotic capital can be sources of erotic power." Feminism has established a "false dichotomy" between beauty and brains.
While I doubt Hakim would recognise a post-feminist if fondled by one in a bi-curious flurry, she seems to be blaming mind-body dualism on feminists, despite identifying "Western thought" as its source elsewhere in the book. She also seems to have missed the point of what feminism has ever wanted from sex. A minority of radicals excepted, all feminists have ever asked for is women's stake in imagining and enacting sexual desire. Employing your erotic capital may be sensible opportunism but it's also pretty boring manipulating men whose sexual fantasies are predicated on the script for a "Girls Gone Wild" episode; depressing too, if these same men constitute your pool of potential life partners.(...)That erotic capital enhances professional, market-place performance makes perfect sense. But applying it to personal, intimate relationships overlooks one very important point. You don't need to be living in a tree house and swapping sacks of millet for acorns to want to leave commercial transactions at the bedroom door. In the Anglo-Saxon West, now that we don't need to marry to preserve family fortunes, secure male heirs or find someone to "keep" us, some things are worth more than erotic capital­-love, for example.

My view on Hodgson's take of Hakim is that it is unnecessary and a further indication that too many still don't understand that there is a difference between feminism and femininity and that feminism is to women's identity and rights (I have an deepening aversion for the term women's rights) what socialism is to liberalism/progressivism. It is tiresome even though often comically entertaining to see women still elevating and generalizing their personal views and differences as if speaking as a woman or as feminism means speaking for women and representing some other than an individual and therefore limited (and often irrelevant) viewpoint.

Race and American delusions

I have a problem with Bill Benzon's post on Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad at the Valve in which he compares them to Ike Turner and Sam Philips and finishes by suggesting that the solution is to get beyond the boundaries of language. Sugary excerpt:

The point of this exercise, no, this demonstration, is that language and its reasonings and arguments cannot, in principle, encompass everything. That life itself is greater than language goes without saying – or does it? What matters is how we conduct ourselves around and about, in the shadow of, language.

Because I believe as Eluard that les mots ne mentent pas, I have a problem with  what Benzon is demonstrating.  The attempt should never be to get beyond the boundaries of language, but to acknowledge them and to break them down. 

I know I promise to stop bashing constantly Obama (I believe that I'm doing it rationally and analytically), but I believe that his 2008 campaign showed that Benzon is wrong and that America's problem with race isn't about its people not being able to get along, but rather about their need to believe that race is all encompassing and that  it is about something grand, when it is about petty stuff and about that itch that Benzon seems to have to want Achebe and Conrad get along.  It is far too obvious that Achebe didn't want to get along with Conrad, but needed to punch him in the gut to affirm his own existence and to define in his own terms what it meant or rather didn't mean to be 'african' (my contention is that it doesn't mean anything for Achebe has much more in common with Joseph Conrad than he does with Ferdinand Oyono).

In short, my point to Benzon, to America, and to Americans  is get over it already! Race isn't about race and instead of obsessing about getting along or pretending that you want to or that you do get out your own way and stop being so self-involved!

Women, men, and writing about sex

Something about this passage by Monique Ruffey bugs me:

(...)sex is still riddled with social stigma and taboo. Church and state still patrol what is deemed OK, moral, loving and safe. Anyone who chooses to write about sex will attract stinging criticism from the moral right and so, relatively speaking, sexual memoirs are still rare. And they are mostly written by women.

Men, by and large, leave this subject alone. Somewhere it's a given that men don't have anything too reflective to say about sex, or they feel silenced by feminists. Where is the male Suzanne Portnoy, the male Melissa P? What men will write honestly about their highs and lows, their triumphs, their sexual sorrows? What man is brave enough to express himself freely about his desires? Few. My guess is that male sexuality has been so heavily associated with violence that men suffer an even stronger taboo than woman. Best keep quiet.

Really? I must be living  in a different planet than Roffey for it seems to me that the problem about sex or rather about your sex life is that you have to be able to view it about than a pornographic and a solely pleasurable/carnivorous experience, which makes it a challenge difficult for both sexes, but particularly for men. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

Shoot the Slut

I agree almost completely and for different reasons with Amanda Marcotte on this:

We’re in the throes of a cultural bout of misogyny, and its focus is on sex. And the people who pay the highest price are women whose access to abortion and contraception is threatened by this national game of “Shoot the Slut”. 

The word 'slut' is in need of a re/definition and an explanation of why being a slut is the worst thing that a woman can be.

Class and class

Sugary excerpt of the day from the always pertinent Chris Dillow:

Successful power structures persist in large part because the way in which power is exercised is hidden from us. The importance of class and the lack of discussion of it are two sides of the same fact.

For some reason, I have this unnerving feeling that we are back in the time of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Molière) when class was determinative, what saddens/disturbs me is that that reality is true particularly in America where there is a strong and maniacal denial about the existence and the relevance of 'class.'

Réflichissez-vous!

Paul Berman needs to revise his French, but that said he makes a decent point on the impact of the DSK affair on the French-American relationship when he says this:

The more he is defended, the thicker and chillier will be the trans-Atlantic fogs, in the future. Dear champions of DSK, réflichissez-vous! But no one is going to reflect. Anyway, a bit more caution on the part of his loyalists would scarcely help, at this point. The ocean-liner of American justice and the ice floes of French conspiracy theories are already bobbing in one another’s direction, and nothing is to be done about it, and, oh dear, has anyone figured out what to do next, post-collision?

Since my bet is that DSK is going to be acquitted , I think that it will become only more obvious how different France is from America, even from Obama's America and there is as Jean Daniel of the Nouvel Obs would say a 'civilization gap' between America and France, which is essentially created by both countries's fanatical beliefs that their way is not only the best, but the only way to civilization. I'm still wondering why being part of an older county makes one more civilized or less barbaric.

Old and new lefties

Interesting stuff from Chris Dillow:

We old lefties see politics as one activity among others. We see no connection between Marxist politics and Marx’s, ahem, colourful sex life. And I, for one, have combined leftist politics with jobs in the City and non-political journalism.
The newer left, though, is less compartmentalized - hence the slogan, “the personal is political” and the desire to politicize everyday life.
On this point, though, I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I’m tempted to defend my conception of politics on the grounds that it is more liberal: seeing everything as political is the road to fanaticism and totalitarianism.

I'm just confused about one thing, does being a Leftie is about politics or something else? Does it matter? I have to admit that I'm bothered with the idea that the personal is political because it makes politics sentimental. It reminds me of the 2008 Democratic primaries or even of George W. Bush in the 2000 election when in response to critical examinations of his record as Governor in Texas, he would talk about how hurt he was that people could question his heart. In short, the idea that 'good' people are good politicians bugs me and is moreover dangerous. That isn't to say that the personal doesn't matter or is irrelevant, but simply that more often than not, it is a part of a wider context and can be unessential, but titillating.

Obama is Swiss

The sugary excerpt of the day is from Mick Hume's interesting take on Obama, Libya and interventionism:

The response of US president Barack Obama, aka the West’s commander-in-chief, has apparently evolved from speechlessness to impotence, leading one veteran commentator to wonder, in an ironic reference to the debate over Obama’s ‘true’ nationality, whether he might actually be Swiss. The administration quickly shot down European kite-flying about setting up an immediate no-fly zone over Libya. US commanders pointed out to their European partners that this would involve a full-scale military operation against Gaddafi’s air force. Some might naively wonder why that would pose such an insuperable obstacle to the mighty US air force. But after the damage done by Iraq and Afghanistan, the US authorities lack the political authority and will to impose themselves on Libya and fear getting dragged into another civil war.

The trouble is of course that Obama suffers from a lack of imagination due to the fact that in spite from what people wants to believe about his "difference" he is a typical president who has trouble accepting powerlessness and not making every crisis about America and his own political legacy. When I hear Charlie Rose for example repeating his delusion that the fact that Obama spent some time in Indonesia when he was a kid gives him a different world view, I shake my hand and realise how americancentric even the most cultured and most worldly American are to be able to transform insignificances because they seem peculiar into essentialities.

Outgrowing Black history month

One comment: I don't think that enough Americans want to 'overcome;' (my point here isn't just  abou 'race') too many want to hang on and to never let go because their past defines them. I'm still waiting for John McWhorter to define what he means by postracial because when he was supporting Obama, it seemed to mean something elses that it means now.

Culture of poverty

Sugary excerpt from Stephen Steinberg's must-read essay in the Boston Review on the return of the culture of poverty arguments:

Notwithstanding the election of Barack Obama, the last 40 years have been a period of racial backlash. The three pillars of anti-racist public policy—affirmative action, school integration, and racial districting (to prevent the dilution of the black vote)—have all been eviscerated, thanks in large part to rulings of a Supreme Court packed with Republican appointees. Indeed, the comeback of the culture of poverty, albeit in new rhetorical guise, signifies a reversion to the status quo ante: to the discourses and concomitant policy agenda that existed before the black protest movement forced the nation to confront its collective guilt and responsibility for two centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow—racism that pervaded all major institutions of our society, North and South. Such momentous issues are brushed away as a new generation of sociologists delves into deliberately myopic examinations of a small sphere where culture makes some measurable difference—to prove that “culture matters.”

I don't believe in culture even though I'm a strong believer in free will in the sense that I'm convinced that personal decisions matter especially in difficult circumstances. That said, I think that blaming poverty on culture is as stupid as asserting that race  determines culture. What I'm trying to say without finding the words to do so eloquently is that culturalism is dangerous because  it encourages both scapegoating and prejudices, without the important acknowledgments that who people are matters and that the type of society within which they evolve has a role in what they are and can become.

Right diagnostic, wrong solutions

At least Chinua Achebe, to the contrary of Obasanjo, gets part of the diagnostic  of the ills of Nigeria right:

We have endured a terrible failure of leadership – not just individuals, but a whole class of potential leaders, from which I do not absolve myself. The role of the intellectual is difficult. We should live by what we preach and we should speak out. In that way we always seemed to be superior to our former western leaders. For them, writers and painters just had to write and paint and keep out of politics. Leadership in all its forms is a sacred trust in a democracy, almost like an anointed priesthood.

Is it just me or isn't there something wrong when people  are too obsessed with 'identity', authenticity, an all the glitz to focus on just getting things right? I may be a petulant child, but I'm coming to the conviction that there can only be a decline of intelligence when the focus is on the 'who' especially when there is neither a collective nor a single answer to that question. 

There isn't such a thing as the African being and the fact that Achebe and Obasanjo are desperately looking for it explain why they never saw the forest through the trees.

Self-reliance is for others

Quote of the day is from Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria's former president :

Africa needs as many friends as possible. And if anything there should be co-operation from east and west, to pull Africa up.

I find this sentence appalling. As always 'Africa' is used to create an imaginary entity, which one doesn't have to define, but simply has to dream and to be able to assert something that is illogical without being challenged.

Africa is as real as Xanadu. There are only african countries, which have to realize that their destiny is in their hands and that it is foolish to believe that all countries on a continent have a common destiny and identity. In short, Obasanjo, as all of his peers, uses the word 'Africa' to hide from the sad reality that he has no imagination and not enough no-how to help Nigeria. He is suffering from what I like to call the Caligula complex, which is the obsession with the sun to avoid focusing on what one considers small and prosaic things, but which are, alas, essential.

The evolution of the charge of racism

John McWhorter on Kanye West,  George W. Bush, and the evolution of the charge of racism in America:

Prototypically, we associate a person charging racism with powerlessness. This is what is behind the good-thinking idea that black people can’t be racist by definition – they are only responding to what is dumped on them; they are the subalterns, as a certain terminology has it.

But West’s charge came from a position of, actually, rather awesome power. To call someone a racist today is only a notch or two less potent than calling them a pedophile. Racism may still be “out there,” but it is socially incorrect. It is whispered, hedged, released unintentionally amidst frustration. It is an embarrassment, disavowed even by racists.

Note, for example, that whatever you think of West’s antics, the natural response to his calling Bush a racist is a loaded kind of “Ooooooh,” with a downward intonational contour, signalling, roughly, “It’s on!” That means that we consider a charge like West’s potent, at least at first – it is a deft play. The accused now must defend himself – and probably cannot. “I’m not a racist” works generally about as well as saying some of your best friends are black.

Therefore, West had the power, and Bush being President lent him no complimentary power whatsoever.  It’s late summer, 2005. Which person had more moral power in America? You have two choices. A: A white, swivel-tongued Republican fifty-something widely assumed to have been instated illegitimately, who had led the country into a deeply unpopular war going extremely badly. B: A charismatic twenty-something black rapper just recently risen to superstardom, cherished for rapping about serious issues. There is no contest.

The naked power of the racism charge makes something understandable that may have seemed a little off when it was announced – that Bush would call the West episode, of all things, the most disgusting point of his Presidency. Despite all of the stingingly awful revelations we endured during those eight years and all of the hideous things that were said about Bush daily during them, it does not surprise me in the least that the one that would actually hit home the most would be someone calling him a racist – and specifically, someone with the moral authority of a young black rap artist.

John McWhorter begs the essential question for he doesn't tell his readers whether the punishment for the conviction of or even simply the charge of racism in America ought to be a death sentence and therefore something that dooms one for life. I have always wondered where society was supposed to put its suspected and convicted racists. America is a country who believes so religiously in good and evil, in the notion that people are either good or bad cannot change their nature and therefore cannot be rehabilitated. This belief and its spiritual and moralist naturalism are hindering America's ability to become something more than a leviathan nation stuck in its past and whose archaic views on race, human nature and crime and punishment are infecting its society.

I stopped believing that racism was the worst of all its ills when I was forced, through the power of experience, to realize that people aren't the sum of their fears and their shortcomings and are actually able to overcome them. It is for that reason that I always feel unease with the orgasmic delectation that the American public takes in public shaming especially when the person shamed has no possibility for redemption and must her/his crucifixion. In short, I find it fascinating and not too surprising that the puritan nation is one, which enjoys crucifixions and believes in nonredeemable sins.

America is a nation that is waiting for Jesus Godot even though its history and a refined common sense ought to tell it that Godot is never going to come.

 



Language and premises

I agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates on this:

I think a lot of us are more interested in deploying terms like "white privilege" and "patriarchy," then exploring what they really mean, and how they, specifically, curtail the ambitions of humanity. I strongly suspect that this vague language accounts for some of our inability to connect with people who don't share our premises.

Obama is what he does

Shelby Steele (whom I like more and more even though he is so often wrong) on Obama and his Americanness:

Barack Obama is not an "other" so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new "counterculture" American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America. So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity. When he bows to foreign leaders, he is not displaying "otherness" but the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement.

The simple fact that people are obsessing about who Obama is shows that American politics is about personality and that Obama chose purposely to be a symbol to be able to use freely and shamelessly identity politics. Nevertheless, the narrative about who Obama is too complaisant and indulgent because it is solely one about flash, symbolic gestures, and words, as Obama would say matter.  The catch for Obama, of course, is that being a symbol means also facing irrational and gross fantasies about his identity, which are in part a backlash to the  fact that he made himself the issue because he knew that the Left likes flair and intellectual brilliance and elegance and that Americas have trouble resisting super-men. What is getting lost in this debate, because the game is about identity, racialism, and Americanism , is the what, the how, and the inescapable reality that a person, especially a politician is what s/he does.

In short, it was always a pleasing and self-indulgent fantasy for America and even for Obama himself to believe that he would 'redeem' America solely by becoming president because of who he is. Obama is what he does, all the frou-frou, the brouhaha don't and won't matter in the long run for experience shows that in the United States election politics is solely about the short term and that politicians who are good a winning elections are not necessarily good presidents and can even be awful ones.

I am Glenn Loury

In this video, Glenn Loury explains perfecty and coherently what are my feelings towards Obama.

American racism

Salman Rushdie says the darnest things:

It's very strange being somebody of Indian or south Asian ethnicity in the US, because in some way we are excused American racism, which is mostly whites against African Americans … American racism is not aimed at people from India and Pakistan, you feel almost guilty about it.

I wonder what being 'African American'  and 'racism' mean to Rushdie.

Obama, blood, origins and symbols of change

Self-indulgent fluff from A.Jay Adler which proves that America is stuck in the cesspool of identity politics and culturalism:

The Untied States, as now a long-time great power, is not aligned in the world political mind, or in the conservative mind, with one-time colonies, but with the civilization of their colonizers that it leads – and (here, now, is the point) their European, Western culture. However independently American culture may have developed from its European origins – so that Europeans themselves love to hate it and hate to love it – there are its origins nonetheless.

But we know that the nation is changing, if not in its origins – which cannot literally, and should never in its ideas and cultural foundation, be altered (we are always unalterably, in part, what we have been) – in its current and developing character. As much as the Right would seek, in its unceasing reactionary nature, to stave off modernity, the waters of the world flow and mix with ever diminishing impediment, to form new seas and spring new rivers, and nothing in the geopolitics of the earth, or the Untied States, will stop it.

Nothing represents the change more visibly than the election of the first Black president, a president whose father was born in Africa, not emigrant Europe, and whose place of birth was colonized in the post-Columbian era, not a colonizer in it. That is profound change. This president – this son of a man born in the colony when it was still a colony – takes office and (ah, you were wondering what Churchill had to do with any of this) returns to Britain a bust of Winston Churchill that had been lent to George W. Bush, as a symbol, after 9/11.

At some point, can we get over the fact that the artificial categories in our minds created by prejudices and received ideas that make us believe that change is about race, culture, and whatever are subliminal and nonexistent? When I read that Obama represents change because of his absent Kenyan father, the ways he looks and due to the fact the United States are changing because its 'racial' makeup is changing, I laugh  and shake my head in despair. I understand that some still have to understand that people aren't no their 'origins,' their 'race' or their gender, that culture isn't about genetics, and that people 'are'  being for themselves because of their blood unless of course, they stop thinking.

'Africa' and Vile psychologization

I found the following sugary excerpt from Brendan O'Neill vile :

It isn’t because they have been brainwashed that many Africans choose not to wear condoms. It could be because, in a continent where there are still high levels of infant mortality, they want to have as many children as possible, since children are frequently needed to work on the farm, earn money and care for older generations. Or it could be because they want to express their love for each other in the most intimate way possible, without a sheath. Or – and I know this will be hard for the Home Counties humanists to comprehend – it could be because in countries where life is short and expectations low, people have different attitudes to risk than we in the West do. There are many reasons why Africans – both Catholic and non-Catholic – might choose not to wear a condom, and they are not irrational. And, of course, there’s the very basic fact that in very poor countries with little medical infrastructure, diseases spread faster and have worse consequences than they do in the developed West, with or without papish propaganda.

First, I don't know who O'Neil is talking about when he talks about 'Africans.' Second, I wonder why the behavior of some people from the african continent is analyzed as the norm for all, as something that all those people  do because they are from there. In short, in an attempt to make a fair point, Brendan O'Neill took a shortcut, which led him to the middle of nowhere for after reading him, he succeeds in doing only one thing, which is forcing people who come from the same geographical location the same who act a certain way, by implying that the action in question is conditioned mysteriously in part by that strange place, where nothing is the same, that isn't part of history, where gravity doesn't function, where people are particular, a place that is the Babylonia of culturalists and of tribalists: Africa.

What is most disturbing and distressing is that it never occurs to O'Neill that the 'Africans' he is talking about are just people like him and their behavior have nothing to do with a supposed and nonexistent Africanness, but their own individuality. I mean why and where guys would get the idea that having children and sleeping with a lot of women without protection is a sign of manliness as Harvey Mansfield would say?  Eh oui, a lot of people from the heart of darkness are just Harvey Mansfield's disciples  and believe selfishly, in a manly manner, that they are such masterpieces of nature that they need to breed as much as possible to create 'little thems' to make the world a better place. The foolishness of unapologetic and deified manliness are universal.

Ethnicity, origins and one's politics

Because I respect Ilya Somin, I'm still munching on the following sentence that is part of his post on the craziness of Dinesh D'Souza's and Gingrich's assertions about Barack Obama's ideology (it's funny how America's race obsession can make normalcy appear alien and foreign. Obama is so American and so mainstream that people believe that he is hiding his true self and hiding his peculiarities  when he is in fact a normal and unremarkable American president):

It’s not inherently bigoted to assume that a person’s ethnic background or national origin played a role in determining their politics.

Naipaul and writing about 'Africa'

Excerpt of Aminatta Forna's review of V.S. Naipaul's latest The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African belief in the Guardian:

It is a quest through the continent for the spirit of African belief, the belief systems that preceded the arrival of Christianity and Islam – which is very much in keeping with the legacy of Joseph Conrad, who is referenced several times in the book. Already this feels cliched and tiresome; one yearns for the day when an author from outside can approach Africa without invoking the "heart of darkness" mythology. In 1975, Chinua Achebe published an essay attacking Conrad's best-known work as racist and already the novelist Robert Harris has described The Masque of Africa as "toxic".

This review makes me feel uncomfortable for two reasons. The first reason is that again, it is assumed that there is a such a thing as an "Africa" populated by Africans, with a particular identity and beliefs, which make them atypical or rather which explain why their continent is conventionally believed to be unmodern or in the back of the train of civilization. The second reason is that it seems that too writer who wants to write about the African continent like to make it feel as if it is an unique undertaking that must be judge by different standards and that their work must be judge with compassion and while having a forgiving consideration that they are doing something too difficult by going to the barbarians. The trouble is that reviewers and critiques enable them more often than not and judge their work as if it is different, out of the margins of literature because the subject matter is particular and so dark and foreign.

Since having my book published, I have realized that in France, in particular, it assumed that Africa and Africans are so different and atypical that their writings have to be belittled or graded with a curve and that more importantly, they are only entitled to talk about darkness, africanity, colonialism, and post-colonialism. The trouble comes when you refuse to fit that mold...I have wondered whether Conrad's The Heart of Darkness would be such as classic if it had been written by one of the 'savages.' Culturalism is destroying literature.

Political identities and crisis of leadership

I disagree strongly with Yascha Monk on this:

In America, the rise of neoconservatism, in both its cultural and foreign policy guises, has masked this crisis of the traditional Right. But in Europe, neoconservatism never won much traction. Neoconservatives, whether their branding is Tory or Labour, have been able to land a few punches in British debates about foreign policy. (The Guardian recently described Tony Blair’s appearance at the latest inquiry into the Iraq War as “a seminar on neoconservatism for slow learners.”) But when it comes to other issues that arouse the passions of their American brethren—like religious education, the (un)truth of evolution, homosexuality, and abortion—the tiny set of true British neocons couldn’t be more out of step with their compatriots. The same holds true all over Western Europe. No major right-wing party is inclined to declare the European version of the culture wars. If it did, the Left would surely be overjoyed. On the contrary, Merkel, Cameron, and Sarkozy got elected because under their leadership the Right has fully endorsed left-liberal views on family, lifestyle, and procreation.

It is easier in Europe or in America to get elected in the Right because the Left doesn't know what it is, but solely what it despises. Moreover, when Mounk asserts that Merkel, Cameron, and Sarkozy have endorsed left-liberal views on family, lifestyle and procreation, I wonder if he knows anything about French politics. The culture wars are well and alive in France. This summer has shown that Sarkozy knows full well that in France you get elected by going right on certain issues and by making them a matter of identity and culture. In short, the Right in Europe is well alive politically and no so much disoriented as it is led by figures who have great frailties.The fact that they found themselves in power in spite of those frailties is in fact a proof of the good health of the Right or rather that it is the Left that is disoriented.

The romantic Mannschaft

Alexander Osang on the Mannschaft, German football team at the South African World Cup and why its players were the ambassadors of a new Germany:

There was something soothing and liberating about watching this team play, and it was even more soothing and liberating to see the expressions of joy on the players' faces. They embraced each other when Klose, who had been out of form all season at Bayern Munich, finally scored a goal again in the first World Cup match, and the team hugged him as if he had just recovered from a long, serious illness. Klose later said that Podolski wouldn't let him go -- and that it was a nice feeling. They all seemed like boys having a fantastic time on a school outing. Löw thanked the players he substituted, and they thanked him, an act that was not a gesture but an expression of need. Everyone trusted everyone else. The most German of feelings that this team triggered was romanticism.

Having read and listened everything that was written and said about les Bleus, French football team and its South African debacle, I have realized that it is always easy to made footballers representatives/scapegoat of their country's successes or its ills because it is easy and because in both cases, the analogy and the analysis are convenient and so pleasurable for the ones making it weather their intent is to praise or to criticize violently and too often unfairly.

To come back to the Mannschaft, it is undoubtedly that its image is new and young, but I wonder whether that visible change is indicative of lasting and profound social transformations within Germany, in other words, if the Mannschaft different because Germany is different or just because it had to change and to adapt to the realities of football to remain the Mannshaft, that is a consistently good national football team.

Obama as the Philosopher King without philosophy

I agree withl the following assessment of Obama by Peter Wehner but disagree about the effect of this assessment on the US-Israel relationship:

Obama regards himself much like a teacher who oversees a classroom of sometimes unruly, sometimes dim-witted children. His magnificence is sometimes hidden from them. And so it is left for America’s philosopher-king to explain — in simply, easy-to-understand words — why things are the way they are.

I'm still waiting for Obama to show that he is what he believes that he is that is better than the ones that came before him not just as a politician. but as a leader. I'm realizing that hope is his chosen word for the simple fact that he is convinced that what matters is identity and not much else and that therefore since he is an American with a rich history and diversified experience, having a political philosophy and an unshakable belief system, which remains steady in trouble waters does not matter.

The allusory and illusory African World Cup

Interesting and informative words from Sanza Tshabalala (first quote) and Ann Berstein (second) on the South African World Cup, the obsession with race and the horrendously stupid and anti-intellectual notion that it was the African World Cup:

The more the African teams were going down, the more I started getting worried about our race relations. I thought, we [Africans] are not doing well otherwise and I thought we would do well in football and it would maybe do something with our pride.
I’m obsessed with race issues. South Africans should be behind African teams. Then I went to see the Argentina-Nigeria game, at Ellis Park. And I see young Indian professionals, white people, all dressed up in Lionel Messi jerseys, and the few of us [who] are supporting Nigeria – probably 2 per cent of the stadium. I sat there thinking, ‘What’s this society going to?’ Because we’re meant to be supporting an African team, aren’t we?

---

Why? Why should we support an African team? There isn’t a black view, nor is there a white view. What’s striking to me, going to a Soccer City game, was that you were seeing very large numbers of this emerging black lower middle class. They could afford to come to the game, they had all the right clothes and they were there. Class is more important now.

This World Cup confirmed my belief  that Africanity/Africanness  is a concept created by those who refuse to acknowledge the complexities and the diversity of the African continent either because it challenges their prejudices and received ideas or because it is more convenient for them to believe that the populations of the African continent, as Conrad's cannibals, are the same and therefore have the same views, the same needs, and the same identity. It would be too inconvenient for Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, the football international governing body, to accept the idea that the South African World Cup was solely the one of a country not of a continent because it would mean taking the risk to have another country on the same continent host the World Cup sooner than in a decade or two. In short, africanity/africanness is about anything but reality for it is an attempt to take short cuts to avoid acknowledging unsettling realities and to be content with bienfaisant paternalism or simply paternalistic humanism.

Colored and different realities

Worrisome:

For most of George W. Bush's two terms, a majority of Republicans thought America's economy was in good or excellent shape. Less than one-quarter of Democrats agreed. Today Hispanics and blacks are more optimistic than whites, and Democrats are more optimistic than Republicans, even though Democrats have lower income and have suffered more job-related losses.

Isn't Postracial Obama's America awesome !!

Ghana not Africa

Ghana lost yesterday. I had predicted that the Black stars would win if they were capable of ignoring the symbolic "crap" about Ghana representing the whole African continent and some type of imaginary "Africanity." Ghana lost yesterday mostly because the pressure of representing something other than itself crushed its players. Asamoah Gyan, the poor guy who missed the penalty that would have sent his country to the semi-final, thought undoubtedly about all the fluff, about the idiotic and anti-intellectual notion that he was carrying the hopes of 'Africa' on his shoulders instead of calming himself down to remember that Ghana isn't 'Africa'  and the game against Uruguay wasn't another absurd and futile identity struggle.
Next time, because there will be a next time for Ghana, its players should just think of themselves, their country, and ignore the burden of a nonexistent common identity and of a idealized history. Ghana isn't 'Africa' and remembering it can only be productive for it is a liberating reality.

Before or after whatever

Scenery: It's hot, humid, and quiet, but this calme trompeur will not last for it is less than an hour from the game between Ghana and Uruguay... It's amazing to see how all-encompassing sports can be when it becomes about something other than fun, but about identity. I'm sports fanatic, but I wouldn't die for it. In any case, I'm not watching the game for I'm going to bed. I watched too much tennis (Nadal  won!!!) and Brazil lost, which made my day. Besides I know the outcome of the game already: Ghana is going to win. The Black stars will win because they are the better team and because the only thing that can stop them is all the fluff and the burdensome symbolic noise, which may paralyze them and make them believe that they are fighting for something bigger and that football is an identity struggle which can repair injustices or rather fix a country's and  a continent's ills. Thus, Ghana will win if the Black Stars make the temperate choice to play just football and to ignore the chatter about its meaning.

Payback

The quote of the day is from John McWhorter:

The old idea was that black people should work twice as hard to prove themselves. That wasn’t fair – but today’s tacit idea is too often that black people should not have to work as hard as everyone else, as a kind of payback.

Consumerism and sameness

I agree with Helmut Holzapfel on this:

A “distance-intensive” lifestyle has emerged and is taken for granted, at least in modern industrialised societies; it has become a typical way of living shaping attitudes and behaviour for part of the population. A distance-intensive lifestyle means large distances covered in ever-smaller units of time, not only in personal travelling, but by the products consumed. Even in health food shops, Argentinean honey or apples from oases in the Brazilian jungle are freely available. The lifestyle means constant availability and spatial accessibility for people and products: Australian or Californian wine, strawberries at Christmas, most likely from South Africa. People fly from Hamburg to Milan for an evening at the opera, and back the next morning. And they live in the suburbs in a detached house with a double or triple garage outside (an SUV is a must); the house is in a beautiful location, yet a blot on the landscape.(...)The disadvantages of the lifestyle gradually become apparent: being everywhere, people are increasingly nowhere. The freedom they search for far and wide means more than dependence on transport systems. Since everyone wants to get everywhere else, everywhere looks the same; same products, same supermarkets. And since everyone wants to go somewhere else and consume products from all over, transport infrastructure is congested. If we consume yogurt made from milk and fruit sourced all over Europe, we shouldn’t be surprised about a lorry jam on the motorway near London or Milan.

It's striking to realize that how identical ultra-consumerists are no matter their race, religion or ethnicity. After all, if buying and stocking stuff is one's 'religion' then all other variables such as race and ethnicity are not essential. For some reasons, that reminds me of the term 'poor white trash' used in the United States, which puts the emphasis on the fact that social condition is in fact more defining than race.

Black and White cultures

Problematic assertion from Bill Benzon:

Through assimilation of black expressive culture, music especially, white American culture has changed and grown.

I have no idea what Benzon means by assimilation or by culture and that makes his statement problematic. He assumes that what he means is obvious when it isn't especially since assimilation has a negative connotation and culture is a political instrument, but a meaningless and misleading concept.

In short, I find both appalling and distressing the idea that there are such things as a black and a white cultures.

America, bisexuality, and the categorization imperative

I agree wholeheartedly with Eugene Volokh on this:

Whether Elena Kagan is straight, lesbian, bisexual, or asexual doesn’t matter to me. Moreover, to the extent a number of her close friends, who are likely to know her recent love life, say that she’s straight rather than lesbian or bisexual — and that seems to be something that one of her friends quoted in the Politico article I linked to above is saying — that should be pretty reliable evidence for those who care about the subject. Among other things, if she understandably concludes that it’s beneath her dignity to discuss her love life in public, evidence from a number of friends is the most that can be provided: “[C]ontrast the ease of proving one is straight or gay in a world in which bisexuals are not acknowledged to exist with the difficulty of proving the same thing in a world in which bisexuals are recognized.”
But the sort of bisexual erasure that takes place when we say “X can’t be lesbian, she’s dated men” (or “X can’t be gay, he’s dated women”) strikes me as pretty unsound, and not fair to a group that makes up a pretty big chunk of the non-straight population.

One has to wonder why a Supreme Court nominee's sex life ought to matter in the United States in America and realize sadly that it does because America loves categories. For it, categories especially when they are sexual and racial clarify issues of identity, which are key to its politics and to its society. People are obsessed with Elena Kagan's sexuality because they assume that it will them everything that they need to know about her views for after all, America still believes that the sex that one defines who you are and informs society about one's values. More importantly, Americans get easily confused by complexity when it comes to race and sex because they are pillars of its societal establishment. This fact explains why it is difficult to be 'bisexual' or 'biracial' and not to be marginalized in the good old USA.

Treme, New Orleans, Culture, and the authenticity fallacy

John McWhorter on the new HBO Treme and its implicit assertion of the superiority of the so-called New Orleans culture:

How, precisely, do people in Minneapolis have “less culture” than people in New Orleans? To a tribesman from New Guinea, Minnesotans would appear to have a “culture” indeed, and I’m not sure they would process New Orleans as “more cultural.” (Maybe more fun, but that’s different, isn’t it?) Why are the drinks and culinary traditions of Baltimore less “cultural” than the ones in New Orleans?

The idea here is that 'culture' is about a subtle form of primitiveness or rather to put things in more political correct fashion that it is about indigenousity untouched by modernity as if that wasn't a contradiction for the New Orleans of today isn't the one of Yesterday  and will not be the one of tomorrow and its inhabitants will change. Of course, the fact of the matter that questions of authenticity linked to 'culture' are more about politics and dogmatism than anything

Cinco de Mayo and the American Flag

Original take from Professor Bainbridge on the controversy about High School Kids who wore American flags on Cinco de Mayo:

(...)When I was growing up, it was generally regarded as a serious social faux pas to wear orange on St Patrick's Day even if you were descended from Ulster Protestants. It was something you just didn't do. Wearing US flag clothing on Cinco de Mayo is the modern equivalent of wearing range on St Patrick's Day. (...)When I was growing up, you treated the US flag with respect. You didn't make clothing out of it.  Indeed, Section 176 of 36 US Code provides rules for respect of the flag, which includes the following: "(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery" and "(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform." So the kids were not only disrespecting their fellow Hispanic students, they were also disrespecting the flag.

I agree with Bainbridge. Nevertheless, it is my contention that although the whole Cinco de Mayo Flap was much to do about nothing, it is another indication that America just like Europe (as the Brit election showed) no longer knows what to do about Immigration because it is undergoing a identity crisis due to the fact that its politics are relying solely on the erroneous belief that identities and cultures are stable, never evolve and more importantly define a country and its citizens.

The obsessive quest for the perfect body

Susie Orbach on the "femininization" of the male body image:

Men's magazines today resemble Cosmopolitan of 20 years ago. They encourage guys to reach for the same rotten solutions to the problems of living that have been endlessly proffered to women. Transform your body, use male moisturiser, make up, get rid of those man boobs, see yourselves as a diminutive pouting strutting yet vulnerable boy/man whose ideal body is ever shrinking. Aspire to that and distinguish yourself by your ability to sculpt a body as the fashionistas imagine it. Separate yourself from the diverse physicalities so magnificently captured by Spencer Tunick in his bodies of flesh. Make a new body. Make a new self.
It's working. Boys, young men, men of all ages are being captivated by the new visual grammar which pushes men to pout and posture. The more it is there, and the more we succumb, the larger will men's girths become and the bigger the profits of those companies praying on transforming men's bodies. Don't do it, guys. Reject this new uniformity. Dare to be as physically robust and varied as you always were. Don't fall into being the latest bait in the breeding of body insecurity.

In short, skinny, when it comes to both genders, is the old and the new black. The necessary conclusion here is that the gender works because it is marketable and that societal norms when it comes to women and men subsist when they are not in conflict with the market.

Neoliberalism, unclear political identities, and the Brit hung parliament

Astute observation over at Potlatch on Britain political 'quagmire':

What Britain is witnessing right now is this paradox imploding. For the past thirty years, British political parties have gradually converged on the perfect neo-liberal model. Their policies have moved gradually closer to the prescriptions of The World Economic Forum, starting with guaranteeing adequate security and policing, then stabilising the macro-economy, then turning to market competition and regulation, and finally nurturing the right sorts of social 'externalities' and 'public goods' in the areas of education, infrastructure and culture. The problem is that this neutering of political difference ultimately leads to the very ambivalence that the markets so hate. They want someone to be in control, they just don't want that someone to have any clear political identity.

This observation would apply to the United Sates where it seems that political identity has nothing to do with politics, but everything do with constructed identities to avoid resolving political issues. Case in point: I still don't know what is Obama's political identity ( I would say the same for Sarkozy). I know that he is an excellent politician, but I just don't what it is that he wouldn't do to get himself elected and to beat down his opposition.

Free will and antisocial behavior

Fascinating:

One of the most striking findings to emerge recently in the science of free will is that when people believe—or are led to believe—that free will is just an illusion, they tend to become more antisocial.

Multifaceted identity question

It's hard for me to dismiss Tony Judt because I respect him even when I disagree with his position. So when he writes the following, it makes me pensive and a little bit uneasy, which isn't necessary a bad thing:

Some years ago I attended a gala benefit dinner in Manhattan for prominent celebrities in the arts and journalism. Halfway through the ceremonies, a middle-aged man leaned across the table and glared at me: “Are you Tony Judt? You really must stop writing these terrible things about Israel!” Primed for such interrogations, I asked him what was so terrible about what I had written. “I don’t know. You may be right—I’ve never been to Israel. But we Jews must stick together: we may need Israel one day.” The return of eliminationist anti-Semitism was just a matter of time: New York might become unlivable.
I find it odd—and told him so—that American Jews should have taken out a territorial insurance policy in the Middle East lest we find ourselves back in Poland in 1942. But even more curious was the setting for this exchange: the overwhelming majority of the awardees that evening were Jewish. Jews in America are more successful, integrated, respected, and influential than at any place or time in the history of the community. Why then is contemporary Jewish identity in the US so obsessively attached to the recollection—and anticipation—of its own disappearance?
Had Hitler never happened, Judaism might indeed have fallen into deliquescence. With the breakdown of Jewish isolation in the course of the later nineteenth century throughout much of Europe, the religious, communitarian, and ritualistic boundaries of Judaism were eroding: centuries of ignorance and mutually enforced separation were coming to a close. Assimilation—by migration, marriage, and cultural dilution—was well underway.

The duplicitous nature of Globalism

Michael Kimmelman on Globalism and the fact that it hasn't transformed the world into one big and unified society and made people the same:

(...)globalism, beyond banking, climate change and warfare, has always been a dubious concept, a misleading catchall for how the world supposedly works, to which culture, in its increasing complexity, gives the lie.
The integration of markets and the Internet have certainly brought billions of people into closer contact. Everybody has access to the same American movies and music now, and not just American, also Indian, Romanian, South African and Chinese. But far from succumbing to some devouring juggernaut, culture — and Europe, with its different communities and nations living cheek by jowl, is a Petri dish to prove the point — has only atomized lately as a consequence of the very same globalizing forces that purportedly threaten to homogenize everything.
(...)Nationalism, regionalism and tribalism are all on the rise. Societies are splitting even as they share more common goods and attributes than ever before. Culture is increasingly an instrument to divide and differentiate communities. And the leveling pressures of globalization have at the same time provided more and more people with the technological resources to decide for themselves, culturally speaking, who they are and how they choose to be known, seen, distinguished from others.

Unfortunately people tend to hang on to their differences when they fell that they have no choice about what is happening around them and that they are being forced to live and to be a certain way.

Uncivilized culture wars

Thomas C. Reeves deploring the uncivilized nature of the culture wars:

Examples of uncivilized blather abound. For example, if one has serious objections to the public display and approval of sodomy, one is called a "homophobe." Opponents of racial preferences are branded "racists." (Blacks who find special favors demeaning and patronizing are called a variety of vile names.) To believe that a pregnant mother bears a person rather than a thing is to be labeled a "religious extremist." The same label is applied to people who believe that organized religion should participate in the public square.
If you object to even one feminist dogma, you're a "sexist." Support efforts to purge the public airwaves of obscenity and violence and you're a "bigot," just like the "dummies" who believe in objective right and wrong. (Comedian George Carlin, a pioneer in public obscenity, said that all censorship is a function of "religious superstition.") Those wishing to restrain propagandizing in the classroom are called "right wingers," and are often shunned by colleagues. Those who oppose the nanny state are labeled "uncaring," "inhumane," and the like. Using the "n" word is one or another brand of racism---unless, of course, the word is used by African-Americans themselves, which it often is. Spending huge sums of tax dollars to save the economy is labeled Socialism. And on and on.

Reeves's observations are more accurate than not, but he forgets that the point of culture wars is to excommunicate, to use a term that the Vatican would love, the ones of the other side by arguing that they are bad people who should be ashamed for what they feel and of who they are,.

Race as the only important political issue

Sugary excerpt of Adam Serwer's post on some 'conservatives's' questionable beliefs about Obama and his family history:

John Podheretz and Peter Wehner argue that whether or not Obama's mother slept with men who weren't white is incidental to the fact that Obama hates America, but Michael Ledeen thinks it's a valid subject for discussion:

The character of our president is an important matter. I think both John and David have tried to illuminate it, but I wish John had taken more time with his latest tirade, gotten the facts right, and focused his considerable talent on the serious matters that rightly concern us.

Apparently being attracted to people outside of your own race reflects not just on the character of the parents, but on their children who have no choice in the matter. This kind of racial determinism seems like a lateral movement from the days when conservatives were debating whether or not interracial sex made you love communism. Again, there's a sort of mystical power accorded the phalluses of nonwhite men here that begs some serious psychological analysis from a qualified professional.

Why don't black people vote Republican again?

I'm amazed by Serwer's last question. He implies that it is an abomination for any people with dark skin to vote for republicans because they ought to be single issue voters  and solely focus on race to the detriment of economics and any other thing  that they believe because race is the only important political issue, the one who defines them and ought to determine their politics. If that isn't racial determinism, I don't know what is. I'm not addressing the views Sewer are excoriating because it isn't just some conservatives who feel that Obama is different because of his background, many liberals and Americans share that perception except that for them it is a positive difference. In my view, it isn't a meaningless different for Obama is as American as George W. Bush. It is thus hypocritical for Serwer to argue that 'conservatives' are the only people who believe that race is all defining and that one is her/his color of skin. In short, Serwer is in fact legitimizing the vision of race that appalls him, racial determinism by making the point implicitly that people shouldn't vote for people who don't share their views of race. As the Church Lady in Dana Carvey's sketch would say, isn't that special !!!!

Inauthentic 'blackness'

Maxine Williams on the 'blackness' of people with dark skins who come from an Island:

In March 2007, I attended an Obama fundraiser in New York. Michelle Obama, in delivering her cute, I-didn't-expect-to-fall-in-love-with-him speech said, with a purposeful sneer: "They told me his name was Barack Obama and he was from Hawaii and I thought, what kind of a black man comes from an island?" The crowd erupted in laughter, warmed to Michelle, and by extension her doesn't-quite-fit-in-our-black-box husband. I presumed that at least some of the people in this crowd had either read, studied or at least heard of people such as Derek Walcott, George Padmore, Bob Marley, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. In principle, then, they knew about the "kind of black men" who come from islands. And yet, they all seemed to share in the joke.
Michelle's joke was a light-hearted nod to the competition for authenticity among minority groups, but it gnawed at me. I am black, and I am from an island. I'm a lot of other things, too, but faced with that minor slight, an instinctive defensiveness arose in me. My "islandness" and my "blackness" rose swiftly up the hierarchy of characteristics by which I define myself. The reaction stunned me and has made me consider that central issue of self-identification: why and how do we choose to be defined, and why does it matter?

 Williams's story simply shows that even Michelle Obama as cultured and intelligent as she is can be insensitive about 'race' questions for the simple reason that she doesn't feel that she need to be as careful as others do on this issue. I suspect that she believes that she knows more than anybody what 'blackness' is and isn't and what is means to be 'black.' The simple point of this story is that 'blackness' is simply about perceptions, history, and transmitted biases. It is a manufactured identity as all racial and ethnic identities are.  'Blackness' is for this reason becomes key when identity politics are predominant and enables the ambitious to use to convince the electorate to vote for people like "them." I'm not offended b Michelle Obama for she is the product of her environment: a good American who believes in the essentiality of race and that 'blackness' is the only identity that people with dark skins can or ought to have when they are true to themselves, 'normal,' and raised with the right values and within the right circumstances. In short, there isn't such a thing as authentic 'blackness' for every 'blackness' is inauthentic for it is chosen and totally subjective meaning that it is also possible to assert if one wants to cling on to racial identities (it isn't my case) that every blackness is authentic.

Isn't Obama's America the coolest place to be when you don't believe that race is self-defining?

Books, memory, and identity

Quote of the day from Fernando Báez cited by Scott McLemee in his post on book destruction:

The book is an institution of memory for consecration and permanence,and for that reason should be studied as a key element in society’s cultural patrimony.... There is no identity without memory. If we do not remember what we are, we don’t know what we are. Over the centuries, we’ve seen that when a group or nation attempts to subjugate another group or nation, the first thing they do is erase the traces of its memory in order to reconfigure its identity.... Only through the destruction of books can the murder of memory be accomplished.

Calling students 'black bitches'

Appalling:

The students -- both African-American women in Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center who have asked that their identities not be made public -- got to the event, at the University of Rochester, late. But they still didn’t expect that after their professor, Grant Farred, thanked them for making the unfamiliar two-hour drive, he’d briefly pause and then add, “When you came in, I thought, ‘Who are these black bitches?’ ”
Yet, that was the response they say they got from Farred, a professor of Africana studies and English. And, in the more than two months since the alleged incident on Friday, Feb. 5, the students and others contend, the Africana center and the university more broadly have failed to foster a public dialogue on the incident and to address deeper tensions involving the center and its role on campus.

I thought that universities such as Cornell and the University of Rochester were supposed to be liberal places and that liberals couldn't be racists. To make more than a cheap point, it think the incident show s again that race and racism in American is not longer essentially about color, but about something else, which makes the issue ideological, political and unsavory much like the one of autochtony in African and European countries. Of course, it is important to point out that I'm assuming that the story is true. I'm betting in case that the Professor of Africana studies thought that he was being funny and hip which is more telling.

Choosing blackness

Adam Serwer on Obama's and other people's who are 'mixed' choice to identify as black:

To the extent that biracial black people identify as black, they are choosing to embrace a once-painful element of their history. It is not being forced on us. I happened to check both white and black on my census form, but that was my choice. Every mixed person has a right to tell their own story on their terms. You might as well tell Jews to stop celebrating Passover because it is part of the enduring legacy of Jewish slavery in Egypt. That's exactly what it is, but that doesn't tell you anything about its value to the culture or why it continues to endure.

Serwer doesn't really address the issue by ignoring the context and by feigning to believe that America is a place that is comfortable with people choosing their 'racial' identity or rather refusing to belong to the category people and history tell them they ought to belong to. There is no question that Obama is entitled to define or rather to see himself as 'black.' The question then becomes if race is a choice, then why not accept that race is America is no longer about race and that some whites in America are as 'black' as Obama and I are supposedly are. This would mean letting go of the idea o racial identity and not accepting that there is such a thing as blackness and whiteness and clinging, to use a word Obama like, to the past. Serwer pretends not the see the greater point, which is that Obama didn't have much a choice when he decided that he wanted to go into politics and to be 'the one' that meant belonging and in America to belong you can't have an identity that is too controversial or rather too complicated for the masses.