The Republic of Dissent

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?

Race and race card

Ta-nehisi Coates on Conservatives, Herman Cain, and their reaction to his 'small' problem:

(...) conservatives don't really understand racism as a force in history, but as a political attack. Racism isn't something that you, say, discuss the Confederate flag. It's something you use to deflect an attack.

Coates isn't wrong, but he is iased and as always restricting a legitimate point of view to fit his ideology. It isn't just conservatives who use race to deflect a punch or rather to just attack, liberals do it too and very effectively. I cannot forget the fact tat Bill Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro became racists in the primaries of 2008.  In short, race in America is mostly/almost solely about politics and ideology.

With prejudice

Sugary excerpt from Pankaj Mishra's critical, but fair piece on Niall Ferguson:

The banner of white supremacism has been more warily raised ever since in post-imperial Europe, and very rarely by mainstream politicians and writers. In the United States, racial anxieties have been couched either in such pseudo-scientific tracts about the inferiority of certain races as The Bell Curve, or in big alarmist theories like Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’. It’s not at all surprising that in his last book Huntington fretted about the destruction by Latino immigration of America’s national identity, which is apparently a construct of ‘Anglo-Protestant culture’. As power ostensibly shifts to the East, a counterpoise to dismay over the West’s loss of authority and influence is sought in a periodic ballyhooing of the ‘trans-Atlantic alliance’, as in Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent (2008), which Niall Ferguson in an enthusiastic review claimed will ‘be read with pleasure by men of a certain age, class and education from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to London’s West End’.

I wish I could read Mishra's writings without reservations, but I cannot even though I like him as a writer. Oh well, it's always good to be aware of one's own prejudices.

 

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

Mad men and race

Another munchable quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Mad Men, as I've said before, has taught me a lot about race -- even though there are virtually no black people on the show.

My smart-ass response is : may be it is because race is the best political fiction of all!

 

Merit and reverse racism

Words to munch on this weekend from Mitsuko Uchida:

For me, what counts is judging things on their merit. That’s why I am against positive discrimination for African-Americans. [In the US] every board has to bend over backwards to select African-Americans. It’s a fact – they really need to push it. Music schools and orchestras have to be seen to have them. If there are two people applying for a place, they take the African-American, even if the other is a little bit better. That’s reverse racism. I don’t go for colour, race or sex. I don’t give a damn. I’m not a feminist. If there is a heaven – I’m not a Christian – and if I arrive at the gate and they ask me what I am, all I will say is, ‘Musician.’”

I'm going to have to find out why Uchida's words don't offend me [even though they make me uncomfortable].

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.

Liberal electoral racism

Another sugary excerpt , this time from Melissa Harris-Perry on Obama as the victim of the racism of people who not only didn't vote for him, but who voted for him, but are not disappointed:

The 2012 election may be a test of another form of electoral racism: the tendency of white liberals to hold African-American leaders to a higher standard than their white counterparts. If old-fashioned electoral racism is the absolute unwillingness to vote for a black candidate, then liberal electoral racism is the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors.

Plus ça change...Wasn't the argument in 2008 that Obama was the best thing since sliced bread and is it really racists to be disappointed and to feel that you voted for Jesus and that all you got is Lot, a decent ma who can neither change nor lead America, but can solely speak, dazzle, fizzle, disappoint, but survive.

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.

Obama and invisibility

Sugary excerpt from a Michael Moore's interview with the Financial Times :

“I was overcome with emotion, voting for [Barack Obama] on that day,” he says, suddenly looking down, jowls bulging under his chin’s pale stubble, arms folded as if hugging himself. “I think he’s a person of good heart and he means well, but ...” There is a long pause. “I thought he’d come in swinging ... come in like Franklin Roosevelt ... What an opportunity to go down as a great president – squandered.” He looks pained.

The Republicans “decided to treat him as the invisible president”, he adds bitterly, making sure I catch the reference to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel about racial injustice.

What year are we again? Well, it's alarming to realize that Obama doesn't exist for too many people for they never take into account what he does since they are so certain that they know who he is or rather who he cannot be not matter what he does/says. 

I wonder if Michael Moore realizes that fo him too Obama is an invisible president.

Obama doesn't act black...

Sugary excerpt of the day from Ta-nehisi Coates:

If you paid more attention to Obama's skin color, than to his speeches, the voluminous amounts of journalism noting his moderation, his two books which are, themselves, exercises in moderation, then you have chosen to be ignorant. 

You are now being punished for that ignorance. No one should feel sorry for you. Try not being racist.

I agree with Coates except that voluntarily and disingenuously, he stops in the middle of the road in order not to drive his truck in the ditch. Obama is indeed what he does as I have always argued and the fact that he is black/says that he is black or African-American doesn't change that. However, too many are making race a part of his presidency to either objectify him by making him a victim or an intelligent little man or to  give him a pass for his failures and for the fact that he has shown that to the contrary to he argued in 2008 experience does matter and that he is afraid to lose. The point is that Obama is the POTUS and his actions or inactions speak louder than his words or his 'race.'

Acting black and being black in America and unfortunately in most of the world is about nothing more than following stereotypes and submitting to traditional and nonsensical notions about what blackness is when it is nothing more than an illusion created to soothe thoughtlessness and ideology.

In short, Coates and America are going to realize when the love/lust is really gone with the help of Obama that there is such as things as black people. Obama has so much more in common with Mitt Romney than he does with Ta-nehsi Coates!

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!

Quand on est con....

This sugary excerpt from Gary Younge is infuriating because it shows that people who have grand theory about identity politics without acknowledging its frivolity are cons:

Thinking of identities as being part of a fixed hierarchy is a terrible mistake. Being gay and black doesn’t mean that person has it twice as bad as a straight white woman. That’s the kind of mess some white feminists got into with the 2008 presidential debates between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They suggested that somehow a black male candidate had it easy, and that it was much worse to be a white woman candidate, which is just crazy. Not that it was more difficult for Obama than her. It’s just that the terms of the discussion weren’t helpful to either of them.

One of the many reasons this is an obstacle is that identities aren’t fixed in place and time. Their meaning and relevance is always shifting. As much as anything, this book is an attack on essentialism, because one thing essentialists have always tried to do is suggest there is a fixed notion to who and what we are. Actually, we are many things to many people while also being one thing to ourselves. Whatever else is said about Hillary Clinton, no one questions her being born in America or claims she is a Muslim. They have certainly said other things – demeaned her on the basis of her relationship with her husband or etched out every laugh line, crease and wrinkle – but identity should not be a competition. And if it is made a competition, then everybody loses.

Hey Younge leave Hillary Clinton alone, isn't Black the new president ? So deal with it and explain to us one more time why the One had to be the One.

Race men

I like John McWhorter and Glenn Loury and their conversation on race is fascinating especially for somebody like me who believes she got beyond race. That isn't to say that race doesn't matter, but rather that it does because people want it to matter in order to make the world simple and to put people within tiny and beautiful boxes.

To talk about Cornel West, I think he epitomizes of the fact that race forces people to be inauthentic and to hold on to bad faith in a pointless, vile and desperate attempt to make race matter more than anything else.

Evolution, race, and friction

Interesting stuff from Jesse Bering, but I'm just wondering why I have become numb to issues of race or at leas to the unintellectual and stupid way that they are usually presented and discussed :

When it comes to skin color and the societal friction that characterizes race relations, the most plausible evolutionary account is that we consciously or unconsciously exploit this surface cue as a way to rapidly demarcate ingroup and outgroup members. It is abundantly clear that, since time immemorial, human societies have waged wars and been in conflict with other neighboring groups competing for the same limited resources. In the ancestral past, even the slightest physical, behavioral, or linguistic difference between camps would have served as a heuristic to help determine who was “one of us” and who was “one of them.” Again, evolutionarily, people of different skin colors would not have come into contact in the same geographic space (the divergent evolution of melanin-producing cells between human populations meant that, for the vast majority of our ancestral history, our ancestors would have never seen or known of another person with a skin color dramatically different from their own), other signals included accents and dialects, customs, gaits, fashion styles, and so on. In Northern Ireland, racism is subtly exuded by people trying to suss out the Protestant versus Catholic countenance of surnames, neighborhoods, word pronunciations, and facial features. One of the most startling pieces of evidence demonstrating the innateness of ingroup favoritism, reported a few years ago by psychologist Katherine Kinzler of the University of Chicago, is that, regardless of their nationality, ten-month-old infants actually shun adult playmates with foreign accents and prefer to interact with native speakers.
So it’s only in recent centuries, when the human animal found itself rather suddenly face-to-face with those of an entirely different hue, that this especially salient cue triggered our species’ more general pre-existing mechanism for ingroup- and outgroup-member demarcation. Being “color blind” is a beautiful idea, but unfortunately our retinas are sensitive to light of different wavelengths, and our visual systems cannot help but to process the color of people’s skin.

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.

The N word and cleanliness

I agree with Roger Ebert on this:

Anyone offended by the use of that word the way it is used in Huckleberry Finn cannot read and possibly cannot think.
The word is spoken by an illiterate 11-year-old runaway on the Mississippi River of the mid-19th Century. He has been schooled by his society to regard the runaway slave Jim as a Nigger and a thief. Jim's crime: Stealing himself from his owner. Huck reasons his way out of ignorant racism and into enlightenment and grace. He makes that journey far in advance of many of his "educated" contemporaries. Part of reading the novel is learning to be alert about how the N-Word is used in that process.

In an outbreak of mealy-minded Political Correctness, an edition of Huckleberry Finn has now been published which meticulously replaces the word nigger with the word slave. The argument is often put forward that a young reader might be traumatized by finding a word in a 19th century novel that he hears a hundred times a day. If I were that young reader, I would be more disturbed by the notion that I was incapable of learning how and why it was used.

One of my favorite Eluard's quotes is, 'les mots ne mentent pas' (words don't lie). Nowadays, people have this childish notion that words are the problem when it is quite obvious that they are not. I'm wondering how did the apparent consensus that cleaning up language was the way to cleansing a society started and why too many believe that cleanliness is the surest way to Godliness as if people had to stop being imperfect. Is accepting that people are bad and can have disgusting thoughts and beliefs about one another really that unacceptable nowadays ? The answer seems to be yes, and it is a further proof of intelligence or rather common sense as Thomas Paine would say has lost a lot of ground .

It isn't about color

Ahhh or should I sa nooo ?:

Why is it that cab drivers–who are sometimes they themselves Black–still refuse to pick up Black people on a Saturday night?

Here are some of the reasons I’ve heard from other people when I’ve  posed the question:

1.-the fear that Black people won’t have the money for a cab.

2.-not wanting to go into a “bad” (read: Black) neighborhood.

3.-the overwhelming belief that White people give really huge tips.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so shocked that this kind of thing still happens but I am surprised because I’m not sure where it comes from. It should be so hard for two black girls to find a cab that we’re forced to go the other side of town to find one.

One word on the neighborhood issue: Overwhelmingly, it turns out that a lot of White people are going to the exact same destinations as Black people when it’s time to go home–especially in the advent of gentrification. So that can’t be it.

Or is it?

Insignificant disclosure: I just spent a few days in a land here most people are black and it was difficult to get a cab if you weren't well dressed or didn't look you are supposed to look when you have money. My point isn't that racism doesn't exist, but that it isn't extraordinary for it is about social prejudices and stereotypes.

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.

I am Glenn Loury

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

The illusory 'we'

Problematic words from Lindsay Johns to defend a worthy cause:

Parts of the black community, however, continue to rail against the whiteness of the canon and try to promote second or third tier black writers such as novelist
E Lynn Harris or poet James Weldon Johnson. They are abetted by trendy educationalists in the establishment who feel acute post-colonial guilt and wish to show their anti-racist credentials by stressing the “diversity” of works taught in schools.

As black people, we cannot change history, and should not try to reject knowledge because of its provenance. It would be far better to focus our attention on understanding the atrocities that have been committed in the name of the canon, or why the humanities have, on the evidence of history, so comprehensively failed to humanise.

We should accept the truth of history, which is that white men have dominated intellectual life in the west. Let’s not resist this; let’s run with it. It is western history that has indelibly shaped our consciousness. We live in Britain, not Timbuktu. We might hail from Africa or the Caribbean, but our lives, for better or for worse, are lived in the modern western world, and shaped by the traditions that have moulded it. If we acquaint ourselves with the grammars of the west, it will indubitably help us to understand it and then duly succeed here.

Hum, there isn't such a thing as a black people for experience. history, and the present show that race is only an artificial and  unifying force in societies where the message, because of the past or inculture, is that people's identities are shaped by the color of their skin and not by the reactions that people have to it thus conditioning or rather 'blackening' their experience. Blackness as whiteness is a blank slate where people put everything that they want not to have to justify their choices and to avoid the eternal burden that all human beings must bear the responsibility for their essence. It might be harsh to say it so bluntly but a writer who put  'race' before her/his art isn't a write for literature when it is about solely about color is denatured and is as artistic and sublime as junk food..

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.

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.

Who am I?

I was unapologetically for the US yesterday in their match at the World Cup against Ghana. Somebody asked me how I couldn't support the Ghanaians and I have to admit that I was puzzled by the question because the assumption was that identity is 'racial' and I had to identify with Ghana rather than with the US because I share the color of their skin. My answer was that I have never been to Ghana while I love the US and that I am too cultured and too well read to make the stupid assumption that race skin color trumps everything else including experience. I am proud to say that I wanted the Americans to win against Ghana yesterday and that it broke my heart that they didn;t win. Their loss hurt me because I 'identify' with the American players, because I know America more than I know Ghana and because I love America not in the shallow way people from afar do but in a Tocqueville way: I admire its strength and acknowledging its ills.

In a time, when people are drunk with the disturbing sacrality of race while forgetting conveniently that for everybody, even those with a darker skin color, existence precedes essence, I refuse to follow the majority and to let the past or whatever else define who I am or rather whom I should be.  To quote once more time Hannah Arendt quoting René Char: notre histoire n’est précédé d’aucun testament.

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.

Racial fetishism

Sugary excerpt of the day from Thea Lim:

The idea that interracial relationships are anti-racist, and having a mixed race family will fix racism is not only naive; it may even go hand in hand with racial fetish.  A few weeks ago I met a freshman college student – a good-looking black guy with a bright future – who told me that he doesn’t want to date black women because he has a thing for mixed race girls*, specifically ones that look like Alicia Keys. (So of course I emailed him CVT’s article about how mixed race people on the whole may actually *not* be that hot.)  When I suggested that his racial dating preference was messed up, he said that the bad balanced out the good, because isn’t dating outside of your race a way to end racism? The more we mix up, he reasoned, the less there will be reason for people to hate.Please! Yuck! No. Date someone because you like them inside and out, not because a) you have a racial preference or b) you think that dating out will end racism when you have little beige babies. That’s just asking for parental trouble when your beige babies have their own consciousness and their own desires, and don’t want to be poster kids for your personal crusade. And anyways, racism is not truly about racial phenotypes; it’s a social campaign to assign power based on ethnocultural group.  There will always be ways to demarcate ethnocultural group, even when people are “all mixed up.”

My reaction to this viewpoint is that the trouble with racial fetishism isn't the fetishism part of it, but the racial component of it. Lim can make all the points that she wants about race, but she cannot change the fact that the fetishism of race in the context on personal relationships exists because of its sacralization period. Fetishism always take on its most perverse and disturbing form when its object is perceived as capital, sacred or forbidden. Thus, the trouble here isn't that people involved in mixed relationships have a racial fetish for they would be having it about something other race if it wasn't such an artificially essential concept particularly in American society.

Injustice not race

I agree with John Holbo on this:

what made Jim Crow ‘special’ was not that it had, particularly, to do with race, but that it had especially to do with injustice.

Americans have become so obsessed with race that they no longer focus on social justice or rather on injustice especially if it occurs within the racial or racially charged context.

Projection and 'American racism'

Interesting bit from Bill Benzon's essay, the best thing I've read this weekend, on the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

European-Americans, some more than others, and some little if at all, have used African-America as a means of discovering and acting out aspects of their own desires and needs which they cannot deal with directly.  Such psychological maneuvering is quite common on an individual level.  American culture has made such projection a part of its collective culture.

America as a weird country

I agree with Conor Friedersdorf on this:

America is a deeply weird country filled with colorful individuals whose identities almost never fit into the categories that are so often discussed in the media.

The problem is that those individuals are a minority or rather are forced to to join a category when their goal is not be marginalized and to 'make it' in America.

Mugabe and nonracialism

It is both ironic and distressing to compare what Mugabe said before his country's independence (exactly 30 years ago) when he was trying to get the support of the outside world in his fight for independence and what he started doing and saying when he lost grip of  powers and realized that he his country's prosperity and its citizens' welfare only mattered if he was the state. To put things simply, racial politics are seldom based on sincerity and conviction, but solely based on greed, ambition , and fears. Thus, racial politics is solely about power and legitimating appalling ways to distribute or redistribute it. Mugabe became both a racialist and a racist politically when he realized that it was the only for him to keep Zimbabwe as his personal possession just as the Congo used to be King Leopold's machin. The point of this comparison is that there isn't much difference between a racialist like Mugabe and the leaders of the former Colonial countries. The tragedy for Zimbabwe and for many African countries is that their political leaders recolonized them by making the state their private thing.

Zimbabwe and the race narrative

I wish that I could agree with Douglas Rogers on the fact that Zimbabwe due to Mugabe's miscalculations is on his way to becoming a postracial state, but I cannot:

(...) in 2000, within weeks of losing a constitutional referendum to entrench his power, Mr. Mugabe began the catastrophic land invasions that resulted in the eviction of almost all the country’s 4,500 white farmers and the ruin of what was once a model post-colonial African country. Ever since, the narrative of Zimbabwe has been one of race. Rare is the speech in which Mr. Mugabe does not rail against whites, colonialists, imperialists or the West. Members of his ZANU-PF party have spoken of a “Rwandan solution” for Zimbabwe’s whites.
Westerners have simply accepted this narrative of blacks and whites pitted against one another. But, in doing so, they have missed the inspiring story of what has actually been happening in Zimbabwe over the past decade. After years of mass unemployment, mutant inflation, chronic shortages and state violence, Zimbabweans simply don’t care about skin color. In fact, Mr. Mugabe has managed to achieve the exact opposite of what he set out to do in 2000: the forging of a postracial state.

Unfortunately, in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, race becomes the central narrative and the determinative issue when people don't believe that politics and economics are a zero-sum game. Mugabe has done a very good job at convincing people of the fact that for the majority to become winners, the minority, the 'non africans' (whites) have to lose.

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?

Racialized!

This video depicts, I'm afraid, a reality that ought to be expected when identity politics become the supreme form of politics and when race becomes supra-essential. How different is South Africa from the United States? Or rather would the United States be South Africa if the majority was impoverished since it too is racialized society

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.

Racism is omnipresent in Obama's America

The latest accusation of racism against a critic of the POTUS in Obama's America as described by Nick Gillespie:

Gingrich pronounced that

Shooting three-point shots may be clever, but it doesn't put anybody back to work....What we need is a President, not an athlete. We need somebody who actually focuses on getting people back to work.

Now Gingrich is nobody's idea of an athlete and while it might be easy to write this off as water-boy envy at its most obvious, it's also a great line, especially given Obama's annoyingly public displays of jump shots (see above, which comes from the White House's official site!). O'Donnell insisted that the proper reading of Gingrich's comment was that the Georgia Peach was channeling Jimmy the Greek (not a stereotype!) and dredging up racist stereotypes of African Americans as born to play basketball.

"I’m not sure what he means by this particular soundbite and I think it’s open to some criticism because it suggests that the President is an athlete and some people may suggest, you  know, because all black people are good athletes. I mean that’s what it sort of sounds like to me... Well what’s this suggestion about him playing basketball? That he’s not doing his job?"

Wonderful, I thought the point of electing Obama was to get past this kind of thing meaning the easy branding of anything/anyone as racist because it criticizes brutally somebody who has a different color of skin or hurts their feelings. Well, it is established that it takes more than a man, a symbol to change America and its obsession with race.

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.

Mandela wasn't enough

Thought provoking quote from an observer in David Smith's article in the Guardian comparing Julius Malema to Robert Mugabe and trying to understand his appeal to millions of young South Africans:

I went into a toilet and saw some graffiti on a wall. I've never forgotten it. It said: 'Blacks have Nelson Mandela so they think they're free. Pathetic race.

In other words, identity politics rarely solve real problems because they use the symbolic to ignore social and economic questions or rather make social and economic issues into ones about identity by focusing on race or whatever else.

Obama, 'blackness,' and America

Hum, John B. Judis is almost getting my enduring point about Obama, his chosen blackness and what it says about America and him:

When asked about his race on the census form, Barack Obama, the child of a white Kansan and black African, did not take the option of checking both “white” and “black” or “some other race.” Instead, he checked “black, African American or Negro.” By doing that, Obama probably did what was expected of him, but he also confirmed an enduring legacy of American racism.

I wouldn't have used the word racism, I would have use the word racialism to emphasize the fact that America has believed and till believes in its majority that race defines you and that therefore not choosing is cop-out, an act of cowardice, which brands someone as ashamed of who s/he is and therefore unelectable and nonintegrable within American society. Barack Obama wouldn't be president, he has branded himself as an other than people believe that he was. Americans don't like to complicate their identity politics and like everything/everyone to be either black or white, pun intended. My point has always been that blackness is as real or rather as artificial as négrititude, which explains why Obamamism feels empty to me.

Obama and the perils of belonging

Reading this about Obama and African-Americans is irritating because it shows the delusions of Americans and others on the question of race and he dangers of forcing something, a identity, a mission or whatever else because of their skin color:

African-Americans also account for more than 90 per cent of southeast Washington's residents and Barack Obama's visit was another example of how, when it comes to the still volatile issue of race, the first black President has tread cautiously – too much so for many black Americans.
By attending the service, where he sang and swayed with the rest of the congregation, Mr. Obama pointedly reminded Americans of his own complicated trajectory: raised by a white mother and grandparents, appropriating his black identity only after a wrenching voyage of self-examination.
Yet, in office, he has drawn attention to the race issue only carefully and occasionally and, as New Yorker editor David Remnick states in his newly published biography of the President, he has above all done so on his own terms. What he has emphatically not done is use the power of the presidency to usher in a New Deal for African-Americans.
This has been a source of consternation for many members of the black community, who expected more activist policies that would single out African-Americans for special treatment. With an unemployment rate among black Americans of 16.5 per cent (compared with 8.8 per cent for whites), the 42-member Black Congressional Caucus has chastised Mr. Obama for failing to adopt measures aimed specifically at creating jobs for African-Americans.

Obama's job as Potus isn't to take care, to do more for African-Americans, but for all Americans. On the issue of race, my only reproach to Obama isn't that he doesn't talk about it enough, but rather that he talks about it when it is useful politically for him and that he has chosen the easy way out, but choosing/accepting to be branded as 'black' when he isn't and especially when he is too smart to know that doesn't mean anything. Somebody told me that Obama is of African American culture and my answer to that shallow point was "please!" In short, Obama in a way is a living proof that being branded the first black president is symbolic and that there isn't such a thing as blackness, there may be such a thing as African Americanness, but it has nothing to do with blackness.

The nonexistence of 'black' racism

Suntosh Pilay has a great post on the assertion of a South African scholar Andile Mngxitama that "blacks" cannot be racists. It's a must read. Sugary excerpt:

Andile reckons the definition of “racism” must include the ability of one group to subjugate another, and since black people have never had the social, economic or political power to subjugate white people, they cannot be racist, by definition. He sees racism as “discrimination by a group against another for the purpose of subjugation or maintaining subjugation” (Biko, I write what I like).
Does this mean black people cannot be racially prejudiced against whites? No. Does this mean black people do not utter racial slurs? No. Does this mean black people do not commit nasty acts of atrocity against other race groups? No. Black people are fully capable of doing unsavoury things to other race groups, but Andile maintains that we must call it something else, just don’t call it racism.

Mngxitama lives in a parallel universe and needs to explore a little more what is outside of view. However, my biggest issue with Mngxitama is that he dehumanizes "blacks"or rather "whites" depending on how where you choose to put the lens on by asserting that one group is essentially different than the other and that race color determines essence, particularly when one can be a racist or not. This viewpoint is troubling to say the least.

White culture

I'm currently reading Kelefa Sanneh's article in the New Yorker about 'White Culture." It's a great read even though it reminds me why I'm appalled by the racial essentiality of America when it is so obvious that race is no longer about race, but about something else. Sugary excerpt:

In 2008, a canny young white Canadian named Christian Lander started a blog called “Stuff White People Like,” which soon became a best-selling book bearing the same title; it listed a hundred and fifty of white people’s favorite things, from recycling to the Red Sox. (...)
Which means that Lander isn’t really talking about white people, or, at any rate, not most of them. In fact, he sometimes defines “white people” in opposition to “the wrong kind of white people,” because his true target is a small subset of white people, a white cultural élite. Most white people don’t “hate” Republicans—they have voted Republican in every Presidential election since 1968. A few months ago, a different and more demographically precise portrait of white culture arrived, bearing a fulsome blurb (“Revelatory!”) from Lander himself. The author is a black journalist named Rich Benjamin, and his book, “Searching for Whitopia” (Hyperion; $24.99), chronicles the years he spent in overwhelmingly white enclaves across America, from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to Forsyth County, Georgia. The people he meets tend to be politically conservative, and although they talk readily about the urban blight they left behind, they talk much less readily about race. Many in Idaho seem to agree with Helen Chenoweth-Hage, the late congresswoman, who responded to a question about the region’s lack of diversity by means of an ingenious euphemism. “The warm-climate community just hasn’t found the colder climate that attractive,” she said. Benjamin hears many disavowals of racism, and he has to drive an hour north of Coeur d’Alene, to a tiny Christian Identity church, in a town called Sandpoint, just to find someone willing to say, “I’m glad I’m white.” Even that statement, delivered from the pulpit, is swiftly followed by a disclaimer: “The Indian, the Mexican, and the black can be proud of what they are, too.”

My only observation is that I wonder why it is assumed that race isn't something that we learn, accept, integrate and choose to cling on to when it is to identify, categorize, and to dictate to people who they should be, how they should live, and who they should interact, bond with, and marry. To put it differently, I'm making almost the exact point that Beauvoir made about gender, by accepting that race is all in the becoming. Applying this principle to the use of 'white culture,'  I think that it is an foreseeable (not appropriate) reaction to the supremacy of racial and identity politics. It is impossible to define minorities by their race, and to then deny that same rights to the majority or to people who, supposedly, look like people are expected to look like not to be victims of prejudice or hurt fr things they have no control over. In short, I find the terms white, black or yellow when applied to culture as vacuous as Chick lit. I am reminded of the reaction of an "African-American" classmate in High-school , when he saw me watching Seinfeld, "boy, you are really white." I never took offense because I understood that he meant that I wasn't behaving like his type of black persons. But then again, on the race issue, I'm un-American. I'm black, but I don't feel it because it's an accident and something, which means less to who I am than the fact that the big toe of my right foot points to the south.

Obama and post-Americanness:

I agree in part with this:

There is a difference, of course, between arguing that Obama’s policies are somehow post-American-exceptionalism, and saying that Obama himself is post-American. The insinuation blatantly is that he is not really American, a notion that will doubtless give succour to “birthers”, racists, and other nidiots. Indeed, one might even suspect that the phrase is designed to do just that, to act as a little slow-fused bomb of hatred and contempt secreted within an ostensibly rational discussion of foreign policy in a broadsheet newspaper.

Obama is  not a post-American exceptionalism president. He is a normal American president trying to capitalize on his best asset that is his popularity in the world, and the belief that he is special because of what he symbolizes because he looks different.  He will always do whatever he has to do to protect American interests. He is a firm believer in American exceptionalism whenever that belief suits his political purposes and advances them. It is disturbing that race and the fact that America and the rest of the world sees Obama as 'black' make it difficult/impossible for them to realize/accept/acknowledge that he is a typical American president and not some kind of exotic or eccentric creature that got to the White House.

Racist slurs, theTea party movement and the American political dialogue

I agree in part with Michael Moynihan on this:

(...) it is my instinct to distrust politicians (an instinct the media typically avails themselves of—except in situations like these), and especially politicians trying to push through health care legislation, but these claims seem suspicious. It would be useful if those covering the story asked if the shouts were from just one jackass or it constituted a "chorus?" Was it really as bad as the desegregation battles of 1960's South Carolina? If someone did shout a racial slur at Lewis—and again, this seems entirely possible, though no one has corroborated it and the paucity of video evidence is curious—it is certainly deserving of strong condemnation, though hardly proves Olbermann's assertion that racism is at "the heart" of the Tea Party movement.

I have the sense that both parties in America have accusations that they use to shut each other up and to discredit one another. The Democrats have the racism, religious extremism, and the ignorant cards. The Republicans have the hate-America, wimp, and Socialism cards. The point is that Republicans and Democrats are not interested in debating one another, they are just trying to win elections and to delegitimize one another. I don't understand why people are so obsessed  with the Tea parties as if they represented something new in American history and as if they are going to take over America. Experience shows that their message will be co-opted by smart politicians and that their most marketable members will get off the margins and integrate the America political establishment.

Multiculturalism and diversity

Kenan Malik on the differences between multiculturalism and diversity:

The irony of multiculturalism as a political process is that it undermines much of what is valuable about diversity as lived experience. When we talk about diversity, what we mean is that the world is a messy place, full of clashes and conflicts. That's all for the good, for such clashes and conflicts are the stuff of political and cultural engagement.
(...)Multiculturalism, on the other hand, by reposing political problems in terms of culture or faith, transforms political conflicts into a form that makes them neither useful nor resolvable. Rather than ask, for instance, "What are the social roots of racism and what structural changes are required to combat it?" it demands recognition for one's particular identity, public affirmation of one's cultural difference and respect and tolerance for one's cultural and faith beliefs.
Multicultural policies have come to be seen as a means of empowering minority communities and giving them a voice. In reality such policies have empowered not individuals but "community leaders" who owe their position and influence largely to their relationship with the state. Multicultural policies tend to treat minority communities as homogenous wholes, ignoring class, religious, gender and other differences, and leaving many within those communities feeling misrepresented and, indeed, disenfranchised.

Britain's brand of multiculturalism has failed because it placed at its center the cult of diversity and thus sacralized differences in the name of culture and of religion making moral judgments difficult and segregation/sectarianism unavoidable. I'm uncomfortable with drawing sharp distinctions between Britain's multiculturalism and diversity because  in the mind of too many those two concepts have merged. Nowadays, people who argues fanatically for diversity are in fact doing so  by categorizing people, by hierarchizing particularities, and thus deciding which ones ought to more important than others. The trouble with both multiculturalism and diversity as they are commonly understood is that they lead to desindividualization. People are forced to identity with a group of people in order to matter and to avoid marginalization because identity politics is the most potent form of politics.
To put things more simply, the only acceptable multicultural society is one, which sees that people as individuals, not as member of a group/community/whatever else and recognizes that culture and particularities are never legitimate justifications for the erosion of the social compact and the unjustifiable.

'Black' boys and feminization

My only reaction after reading Tony Sewell's assertion that the trouble with 'black boys' is over-feminization is to wonder on what planet he lives on:

More than racism, I now firmly believe that the main problem holding back black boys academically is their over-feminised upbringing. First, because with the onset of adolescence there is no male role model to provide guidance and lock down the destructive instincts that exist within all males. Second, in the absence of such a figure a boy will seek out an alternative. This will usually be among dominant male figures, all too often found in gangs. This is the space where there is a kind of hierarchy, a ritual and, of course, a sense of belonging.
We have wasted years, and lives, looking in the wrong direction as to the causes of crime and education failure. We've had endless studies attempting to prove institutional racism – while all along our boys' psychological needs weren't met.

According to Sewell's logic, the absence of a father leads to over-feminization, which he doesn't define because to him, it is means simply the contrary of manliness and anything that impedes a black boy being a boy according to his definition of normalcy. What is frightening about Sewell's arguments is that his perception of gender is so inflexible that it leads one to wonder whether his issue isn't really that he believes that 'black' boys ought to fit the stereotype of black manliness as represented by Jacob Zuma and others by accepting that they are the king of the castle and that 'black' girls exist only to meet their needs.

The scars of invisible racism

Interesting stuff from Margaret Wente, but what does it mean? :

Sensitivity to perceived discrimination is so acute these days that it can lead to perverse results. One instructor at the University of Toronto was told not to criticize foreign-born students for their poor language skills, even if they were unintelligible. Some aboriginal students say they shouldn't be evaluated by the same standards as everyone else, because they have different ways of knowing. Yet, as Mr. Al-Solaylee sensibly observes, his students will be working in an English-speaking, Eurocentric world. So they might as well get used to it.

I have to admit that I'm no longer sure what racism is and whether all racisms are equal and all 'racists' equally despicable. The screams of people who love to be outraged have gotten to my brain. One of the most surprising and remarkable lessons that I have learned in the last few years is that people who have prejudices might be more willing to help the people who are the victims of their prejudices than anti-racists who believe that their openness is a sign of purity and virtue and doesn't mean that they have to do more or at least to remain open. It is always unsettling to me to realize that the first thing  that most "white" New Yorkers say to me to approach is about race and the ways that they assert  it is still holding "my people"  down, then my lack of enthusiasm for the subject and my silence lead them to conclude when they are from the creative or other elitist class that I'm a legal alien in New York.