But the propaganda and lunacy go even deeper. Jacqueline Battalora, professor of sociology and criminal justice at Saint Xavier University, informed conference participants that “white people did not exist before 1681. Again, white people did not exist on planet earth until 1681″ (http://tinyurl.com/lkoqj9b). That’s truly incredible. If Professor Battalora is correct, how are we to identify William Shakespeare (1564), Sir Isaac Newton (1642), John Locke (1632), Leonardo da Vinci (1452) and especially dear Plato (428 B.C.)? Were these men people of color, or did they not exist?Har de har har. Now here's what Battalora was talking about, from her book: When American colonists devised their early anti-miscegnation law, which law was "neither derived from the statutory laws of antiquity nor from the common law of England but was a creation of colonial North America," they took a while to refine their phrasing, starting with "free borne" women who should not marry "slaves" but proceeding finally to a new distinction:
The Maryland law of 1681 includes the first appearance of the term "white" used to designate a distinct group of humanity in law, and served as a corrective to the antimiscegnation law of 1664 that had the unintended effect of encouraging slaveholders to promote the very marriages the law expressly intended to discourage (Arch. Md. 7: 203-205). The law provides that freeborn English or "white" women who enter into marriage with a slave of African descent do so "to the satisfaction of their lascivious and lustful desires" and to the "disgrace not only of the English but also of many other Christian nations" (Ibid. at 204). This language reveals important perceptions and reflects persuasive efforts to shape a human group now being referred to as "white."Whatever you think of Battalora's scholarship, it's obvious that she didn't mean that darker and lighter people did not exist before that law -- she was talking about a specific and real legal event. I don't know whether Williams knew this or not, but it probably wouldn't matter if he did -- indeed, other conservatives express similar incredulity even when they demonstrate awareness of what Battalora is talking about. The mere idea that the category "white" might not be God-given is risible to them.
Don't let it get around, but I really do try to get what these guys are saying and, at least going in, admit the possibility that they have some kind of argument. But so often -- I'm tempted to say increasingly , though it may just be that I'm noticing it more -- conservatives are so obviously just making propaganda out of whatever sticks and mud they find lying around that I find myself tuning out and assuming they're full of shit from the get-go.
I appreciate your giving these goobers the benefit of the doubt. It's necessary for avoiding logical fallacy on our side, but it's more than I'm capable of - I'll just go as far as reading your and similar analyses of the spew.
ReplyDeleteBut so often -- I'm tempted to say increasingly , though it may just be that I'm noticing it more -- conservatives are so obviously just making propaganda out of whatever sticks and mud they find lying around that I find myself tuning out and assuming they're full of shit from the get-go.
ReplyDeleteWell, yeah. You're an intelligent guy, and you can only see the same behavior repeated so many times before you realize that they aren't interested in discussion, merely reiteration and reinforcement of their hard clung-to yet ill-examined beliefs.
I think you nail it in the last paragraph. He gets it. Maybe not all the ins and outs and nuances, but he gets that Battalora is NOT saying that there were no people living before 1681 who we were what we would call "white" today, but that the term and the category of "white person" were not invented until then. It is actually a fairly common claim, not the exact date and the particular miscegenation law, but the general argument that biological "races" did not exist as a concept in the ancient and medieval worlds, but was created around the time of the Enlightenment and then given a fake "scientific" basis in the 1800's (which many on the right still buy into).
ReplyDelete-----And I don't even think the excuse that the very notion of "whiteness" is not inevitable and does not come from God is what has riled them up. Rather, it is as you say: they are now constructing their stupid arguments out of any old thing, and don't really care if they hold water or not.
" Again, white people did not exist on planet earth until 1681."
ReplyDeleteActually, Walter may have a point. Before 1681, the only recognized HUMANS were white people... any hominids who failed the Brown Paper Bag Test were considered draft animals or farm machinery, and if any of those managed to, say, learn to read, or play an instrument, the most that any REAL human would grant them was that some of the smarter sub species might prove to be trainable. Walter Fucking Williams is such a precious wingnut treasure... he belongs on Karl Rove's charm bracelet.
That Blaze link is really bizarre. They present the basic facts using direct quotes and everything, not plain bullshit like "“white people did not exist before 1681. Again, white people did not exist on planet earth until 1681″, and then seem to want to make the reader see them making a circle around their ear with their finger, like "can you believe the crazy shit liberals think because of the actual history they read and the historically-correct context they place it in?
ReplyDelete. . .conservatives are so obviously just making propaganda out of whatever sticks and mud they find lying around . . .
ReplyDeleteOh, they wish their propaganda had as much substance as sticks and mud!
"Impervious to facts and evidence (and even face-smacking reality)" is not just something we say in jest, or even as a matter of hyperbole. It's as real as Limbaugh or Coulter or Boehner--as each of them demonstrate daily.
The problem is that in order to fill up blog space in the tens of thousands of conservative blogs, conservative writers end up having to scrape the bottom of the barrel for anything resembling an original thought. The result is something that looks like a conservative game of Mad Libs, where you look at random items and attempt to discern either a conservative resurgence or a liberal conspiracy.
ReplyDelete"Did you ever notice that in the standard box of eight Crayola crayons, there are black crayons and there are brown crayons - and even red crayons - but no *white* crayons? Clearly, political correctness has infected every strata of society, down to the liberal pre-schools!"
Yes, it sounds stupid, but a wingnut welfare stipend might depend on it. Besides, stupid is a feature, not a bug.
So, Walter Williams thinks that one morning in 1681, everyone woke up and suddenly realized they were white or black? Or he's accusing liberals of believing that? So does that mean he believes that pre-1681 the world was a raceless utopia of brotherly love? The ironic thing is that there's an argument to be made that 17th century America was less racist than antebellum/Jim Crow-era America would be, but I'd put that more on the effects of capitalism and class (the one thing conservatives are less honest about than race) rather than a single law retroactively rewriting race relations.
ReplyDeletemyrwo6 comments at that Blaze link: "These progressive self-elevating false sense of words that mean something to everyone types of people should feel lucky they even have a voice on this wretched planet of ours."
ReplyDeleteOh, myrwo6, you have no idea how lucky we feel. No idea at all.
But so often -- I'm tempted to say increasingly , though it may just be
ReplyDeletethat I'm noticing it more -- conservatives are so obviously just making
propaganda out of whatever sticks and mud they find lying around that I
find myself tuning out and assuming they're full of shit from the
get-go.
That's a good labor-saving approach nowadays, especially in response to what is already a right-wing labor-saving device: Exploiting the fact that debunking takes slightly more time, and gets little-to-none of the exposure of the original bowel movement of mendacity. "If you're explaining, you're losing."** Williams might know better, Williams might not know better ... As you say, it probably wouldn't matter if he did. In the meantime, there's another smear available to fling at "politically correct liberal indoctrinators" who control everything and have been brainwashing children since John Dewey's day, but whose views somehow still aren't in the actual majority. Fox News might even be able to fit in a mention, if only to give some downtime to the choir they have chanting "Benghazi!" around the clock.
**I was going to use the statement attributed to Mark Twain about a race between a lie and the truth, but when I Googled(TM) to get the wording correct, the fourth hit was to a Reddit MRA denunciation of the "lies" about the murderous Santa Barbara misogynist PUA POS, and the fifth hit was a Legal Insurrection post about "false racism accusations." So, you know, sorry, Samuel, but fuck it.
No no no! It was all the fault of those "women... and their lascivious and lustful desires".
ReplyDeleteA nuanced view of race based on the evidence provided by primary sources? Well, there are three big problems from the get-go.
ReplyDeleteGot any David Barton books?
Don't let it get around, but I really do try to get what these guys are
ReplyDeletesaying and, at least going in, admit the possibility that they have some
kind of argument.
A GOOD ARGUMENT: "I believe you're incorrect, because of reasons X, Y and Z backed up by these sources, etc"
THE BLAZE'S ARGUMENT: "Well that's ridiculous. (stares at the audience until they either raucously applaud or melt into Alinskyite goo from shame)"
Gorbachev sings tractors: Turnip! Buttocks!
ReplyDeleteYou forgot the third category. Prey.
ReplyDeleteThey don't even have a hive-mind, but a hive-ass that they pull all of their BS out of.
ReplyDeleteShame?
ReplyDeleteAh, well, when it comes right down to it, Logic is the Louisville Slugger and Walter Williams is the ball.
ReplyDeleteMaybe that explains why he gets so much mileage out of nonsense.
Shame, stupefied vacuity, poleaxed wonder. Hard to tell with that audience.
ReplyDeleteWell, but-but-but-but Santa Claus is white, so how can that be?
ReplyDeleteAnd an awful lot of it is a blend of forced sophistry and the kind of insight one might hear in a college dorm at 2AM after lots of heavy pot smoking.
ReplyDeleteI have the feeling that both Williams and Beck are sort of tiptoeing around the fact that the laws were kind of backhandedly acknowledging that distinctions would have to be made if the neat and highly profitable trade in (certain kinds of) human beings was not to be subverted by familiarity.
ReplyDeleteMaybe that's a corollary to the old adage about the Puritans, that they came to do good, but stayed to do well.
Was "dear Plato" white? I did not know that.
ReplyDeleteShh, no one tell him what America used to think of the Irish.
ReplyDeleteMust have been all those alabaster busts of his visage.
ReplyDeleteBut, all joking aside, that's not even true. There was a huge debate about the very nature of humanity. Las Casas http://www.pbs.org/kcet/when-worlds-collide/people/bartolome-de-las-casas.html advocated fiercely that the South American Indians had souls, with all that that implied. And there was a world prior to the exclusive slave trade in Africans in which not only was slavery not associated with color but color was not associated with servility or inhumanity or animality.
ReplyDeleteOoh, scary! Is there anything more pathetic than someone who dreams of ruling the world and crushing his foes and rivals into dust, but is such a lazy ankle-biter that all he does is wish it would just magically happen in the abstract?
ReplyDeleteActually, when he went to Ellis Island, they changed his name to Platts.
ReplyDeleteAnd the comments, wow. One sensible guy tries very eloquently and clearly to explain to the dunderheads that there's no evidence that slavery prior to the Atlantic slave trade was racial. Yes, there was slavery, but it was based on differences other than race, e.g., religion, nationality, or language---in fact the concept of race didn't even exist. Etc., etc. But the other commenters' skulls are impenetrable.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a great opening for his manifesto.
ReplyDeleteDon't let it get around, but I really do try to get what these guys are
ReplyDeletesaying and, at least going in, admit the possibility that they have some
kind of argument.
I worry about this too, actually, that I'm dismissing them because of who they are rather than the merits of their arguments. The problem is, as always, that their arguments have no merits.
I mean, "White people were not explicitly recognized by the law" vs. "people with pale skin did not exist" is like a logical fallacy they'd put on a short-essay test for 7th-graders, yet hear we have Walter Williams either unable to tell the difference, or well aware of the difference, but lying his ass off just to make liberals look stupid. Williams is a tenured professor of economics and a fellow at approximately 32,000 Foundations: like Gingrich and Barton, he's one of those guys regular-grade wingnuts point to as a genius. This is what they think a genius is. I mean...gah.
I'm one of those people who thinks that it would be worthwhile to have some conservatives who actually were intelligent and intellectually honest and challenging to debate with, because having your beliefs questioned is what makes them stronger. Having them actually be decent human beings with a functioning soul and an understanding of the basic tenets of reality even if they disagree with my interpretation of them would be even better. I'm always on the lookout for any conservative, let alone a prominent one, who fits that category. In a normal world, that position would be filled by someone other than Walter Williams.
Sure it wasn't Platt? Because Oliver Platt is playing a very convincing Greek guy on Fargo.
ReplyDeleteCome on now...EVERYBODY!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boO4RowROiw
~
Or the Chinese, for that matter (they were treated approximately the same--except that the Chinese got to go down in baskets to stuff dynamite in the holes of the cliffs that were in the way of the railroad).
ReplyDeleteHence the old adage, a Chinaman's chance.
We've always been wonderfully adept at inviting people here in order to exploit them.
Yeah, but I think its a mistake to project specifically American white slave owner (and post slavery) ideas about race back onto the moors or the arabs or any other group pre-colonialism. There was a lot of race mixing and interrmarriage, there was a lot of cultural contact between racial groups that doesn't break down easily into white master/dark skinned animal.
ReplyDeleteBut then you do find the ones who will volunteer to you that Slav meant Slave and then they use it as proof that racism must no longer exist because modern day slavs and their descendants don't suffer from having been slaves a thousand years ago so what is the fucking problem with Michelle Obama and Al Sharpton anyway?
ReplyDeleteconservatives are so obviously just making propaganda out of whatever sticks and mud they find lying around that I find myself tuning out and assuming they're full of shit from the get-go.
ReplyDeleteRoy, I don't know how old you are, but I came to that realization during WhitewaterTravelBlowjobMenaVinceFosterLesbianGate. Before then I was able to read newspaper columns and articles by people with whom I disagreed, even violently, engage with their ideas, and feel like I was actually learning something (even if what I was learning was, you can't trust this guy's arguments). But then we got to condoms on the White House Christmas tree and the Clinton Death List and since then it's been bullshit all the way down.
We only invited people here to exploit them after the Spanish managed to exhaust the supply of exploitables already here. However, I can't quite decide whether biologic warfare (intentional or not) was considered a feature or a bug by the Europeans in the New World.
ReplyDeleteI like this comment so much, I want to act now and order the complete 3 CD set.
ReplyDeleteApologies for the self-promotion, but I just wrote a long-ass post, jumping off of Ta-Nehisi Coates's piece on reparations, about how the federal government, particularly during the New Deal, basically redefined what "white people" means. Like, as in FHA rules literally incentivized "probationary" whites—like, literally, financially incentivized them—to ally against blacks.
ReplyDeleteFortunately, thanks to racialized early-20th-century economics, we can actually say how white the famous people Williams mentions actually were, circa 1930. Shakespeare? English, he's definitely white. Da Vinci? Italian, but Northern Italian, so pretty white but not as white as Shakespeare. Plato? Greek, sorry—white-ish, but will bring down your property values.
As a result of writing this, I've been puzzling about the history of whiteness and how it so quickly unified people who weren't actually white a century ago, and how that history of not-quite-whiteness disappears so fast. It seems that paying people to sign up for whiteness is a start.
That isn't a barrel they're scraping the bottom of.
ReplyDelete"Manly, yes. But we like them too."
ReplyDeleteWattle-and-daubaganda, to fit certain peoples' wish to transport humanity back to the ninth century AD
ReplyDeleteThis attitude is a long way from gone. In my hometown, in Canada's Deep South, there are still enclaves of people (oddly, usually the type of British Isles-extracted folks who might have been "probationary" whites themselves at one point, Scottish people mostly) who don't really think of Italians, Iberian peninsulars, Greeks, Jews, and maybe Lebanese people as really white. The code word people use is "ethnic." In this particular discourse, it means someone who they kind of grudgingly have to admit isn't brown enough to be really brown, but isn't really white, either.
ReplyDeleteGod's gift, most like. Smallpox had killed anywhere from 75-90% of the natives on the east coast before the Puritans arrived. If they'd had to compete for farmland (and hadn't scored some stored food that the natives were too dead to eat) it's likely that the Massachusetts Bay Colony would have failed.
ReplyDeleteAnd if, later on, the hand of God needed a little nudging by passing some contaminated blankets along, well....if He didn't want me to do it, He would stop me, wouldn't He? And His failure to do so thus demonstrates that those heathens were definitely less than fully human.
Likewise homosexuality was invented in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn.
ReplyDeleteDear Mr. Williams,
ReplyDeleteThis should help with your remediation in the understanding of labels, how they are invented arbitrarily by people in order to gain advantages in social or economic status, and applied to others in order to enforce rigid barriers to privileged status.
Quite frankly, I'm stunned that you haven't already read this work 50 years ago or more.
Agreed. But per my original point, Williams target audience is Wingnutticus Americanis, which is the descendant of the white American slave owner, and which is not famous for caring about the humanity of Moors, Arabs, or any of the duskier-hues subhumans of the world.
ReplyDeleteNo, I get that. I just come from the same tribe as that poor woman giving the talk about whiteness. 'Twas not always thus, is my point.
ReplyDeleteI have a tough time ascribing this behavior exclusively to right-whingers. Without "you clearly said blah-blah-blah," and "I didn't explicitly say blih-blih-blih," most arguments wouldn't have the fuel to burn for very long.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed this cartoon as a child, but I didn't realize how brilliant it is as social commentary.
ReplyDeleteThis is what they think a genius is. I mean...gah.
ReplyDeleteI don't know who said it (too lazy to Google), but the characterization of Newt Gingrich as "what a stupid person thinks a smart person sounds like" really does hold true.
Yes, more like scraping the bottom of the septic tank.
ReplyDeleteKrugman?
ReplyDeletenot only was slavery not associated with color
ReplyDeleteThere was (if memory serves) a Papal edict at one point, forbidding the enslavement of the American natives unless they were cannibals (can't be arsed checking the details from Arens' book). That was the point when the conquistadors stopped describing various Caribbean tribes as peaceful swidden farmers -- starting with the Caribs themselves -- and started noticing their cannibalism.
Martin Mull's got the chapter on White People in America covered. http://youtu.be/uxa0iVgGmtU
ReplyDeleteGoogle says Krugman
ReplyDeletehttp://www.businessinsider.com/krugman-gingrich-herman-cain-2011-11
Okay, forced me to Google. Turns out it was Krugman quoting Ezra Klein:
ReplyDelete"As usual, Ryan makes me think of Ezra Klein's old line about Dick Armey: he's a stupid person's idea of what a smart person sounds like." (Krugman's NYT blog of November 18, 2011)
All fackwerk and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
ReplyDelete[joke stolen from tigris]
The Irish used to be "non-white" and now they are "white" which is central to Battalora's point. Ditto the I-Talians and the Jooos
ReplyDeleteHistory and science and Google are liberal elitists engaged in a global conspiracy to make them look foolish.
ReplyDeleteShakespeare, Locke, and Newton would identify as English. da Vinci would identify as Italian, and Plato as Greek (two groups that only recently received 'white' status in the USA). If you called them white, they'd wonder what you were on about. So why is Williams proclaiming their whiteness anyway?
ReplyDelete"What is the fucking problem with Michelle Obama and Al Sharpton anyway?" I don't know but I'm pretty sure the answer is Robert Byrd.
ReplyDeleteSanta Claus became white while Finns were still defined as swarthy
ReplyDeleteMongoloid types.
Is this about the same time that Jesus became white.
ReplyDelete"The mere idea that the category "white" might not be God-given is risible to them."
ReplyDeleteWhich is totally not racist at all.
"If Professor Battalora is correct, how are we to identify William
Shakespeare (1564), Sir Isaac Newton (1642), John Locke (1632), Leonardo
da Vinci (1452) and especially dear Plato (428 B.C.)?"
Englishmen, Italians and Greeks. And you had a serious fking bar fight on your hands if you tried to group them all together in one ethnic category up until at least about 1900, in some areas more like 1950.
But of course, I have special knowledge in this area that Walter Williams can't possibly be expected to have, given that I finished high school and all.
A "white" crayon, that is, sickly puce/beige, would be a ghastly waste in an 8-crayon box.
ReplyDeleteI'd go with that, but there's too many ripe floaters in their arguments.
ReplyDeleteSee, for example, How the Irish Became White. There's also the anecdotal example of my grandfather, who was born out of wedlock (my great-grandmother emigrated to the US pregnant with him, and no father was named or in evidence), and who deliberately obscured his origins, I believe, because of fear that he might be biracial.
ReplyDeleteAnddon't get me started on Pushkin http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/pushkingenealogy.html, everyone knows that Russians are white.
ReplyDeleteI used to read National Review for the challenge. Imagine.
ReplyDeleteHey, Whetstone, that is a GREAT article. Its so full of meat that I have bookmarked it for a longer read later today but I want to tell everyone here to run, don't walk, to read it and send it around. Just a wonderful piece.
ReplyDeleteWogs begin at Calais.
ReplyDeleteBeethoven. Black guy.
ReplyDeleteThanks to Jeffrey, Lord Amherst, we can't really call Smallpox "God's Gift."
ReplyDeleteor Walter Williams' ancestors.
ReplyDeleteAnd the town, and the college.
ReplyDeleteThere is a Moor character in Don Quixote book 2 (1615), a very sympathetic character, who is sad because he must leave his homeland. Cervantes clearly thinks the law expelling the Moors was very stupid, and there is little racial language about that character or the Arab characters, at least in the translation by Cohen (Penguin, from the 1950s, which is the one I read).
ReplyDeleteIago has racially charged speeches in Othello (the black ram is tupping your white ewe and so on) but he is hardly a respectable character and others seem uninterested in the racial aspects of the relationship, as opposed to the class aspects (high born Venetian woman and a foreign mercenary).
I find this very odd, because the Irish are whiter than white. They're almost translucent.
ReplyDeleteAnd Dumas (French also white). Pushkin was very proud of his great grandfather.
ReplyDeleteda Vinci would identify as Italian
ReplyDeleteMaybe as Florentine. Was there much of a sense in his day of pan-Italian identity?
Maybe what conservatives mean when they deny they're racist is that they're willing to bestow whiteness upon African-Americans. With conditions, of course.
ReplyDeleteI don't know when the black/white distinction was born, but us/them has been around forever. You can argue that Shakespeare wasn't white -- and even that Othello wasn't black! -- but Shakespeare made plenty of dramatic use of the us/them distinction -- Moors, Jews, etc.
ReplyDeleteAnd I know I have no desire to live in the harmonious, pre-racial utopia of 1680.
You know, I've heard that before somewhere...
ReplyDeleteWhile you're here, Interrobang -- best wishes for the health of your cat (LiveJournal does not allow me to comment directly on your account).
ReplyDeleteI gotta Giger illustration of this, if you want it!
ReplyDeleteThere's a book Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World by David Brion Davis that's excellent on this, as well as Slavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson.
ReplyDeletePlus Moors, Ethiops, and so forth are represented in a range of skin color tones, and sometimes indigenous Americans are similar, and sometimes not. Tawny, sable, terra cotta, etc. But then again English is shit for color terminology anyway, considering how they call everything orange "red" and a lot of brown things "red" too.
ReplyDeleteMy wife's uncle, who is of Polish and English descent, the English part of which goes back to actual Puritans, was beaten up at school in the 1960s in New Hampshire... for being a negro. How did this happen? Because he and his Polish father had dark complexions--vaguely Turkic in appearance, guessed a friend of hers from Istanbul. If you're looking to be a racist with no black people around, you find the darkest skinned guy and make him into one.
ReplyDeleteRead Mann's "1491". He makes the case that North America was absolutely packed with advanced civilizations (like the Mississippi mound builders) and that they were mostly wiped out by the diseases spread by the early 16th century explorers, so that by the time the early 17th century colonists started arriving, they were encountering a land that had been terraformed over millennia to support millions of people (there's a reason the early settlers were so amazed at the fecundity of the land they moved into and considered it a sign from Providence that he wanted the land to be theirs) and was currently occupied by the primitive equivalent of low-tech Mad Max biker gangs (which is why the land was so empty and the locals had such primitive equipment and weapons and didn't put up much of a fight). Really fascinating read with solid evidence and it utterly changed the way I thought about American pre- and post-Columbus (and it also confirmed what I had always suspected about the correctness of the traditional settlement narrative I had been taught in school).
ReplyDeleteSo was everyone else.
ReplyDeleteI've always thought of 'em as "jive-ass wingnuts", but "hive-ass" will do nicely...
ReplyDeleteLotus pods photoshopped onto buttocks... no thank you.
ReplyDeleteI've found that I can't even talk to friends or relatives who are conservative about anything political. I can show them factual evidence that their position is incorrect but they will never admit to being wrong about anything. It got to be wearying as I would admit if I thought they had a good point (or at least a point worth thinking on). I no longer talk to my father-in-law at all because he has insisted for the last 5 years that the federal government is bankrupt - yet continues to cash Social Security checks and have his medical paid for.
ReplyDeleteI do not think there are intellectually honest conservatives. I don't think anyone can think and be a conservative in America today.
"I find myself tuning out and assuming they're full of shit from the get-go."
ReplyDeleteWell, yes, that would be the parsimonious approach.
For the record, if it's a question of whether Williams is ill-informed or whether he's actively being dishonest, I bet on the latter. He knows his audience, that's for sure.
ReplyDeleteHa. No one will admit to reading it for the centerfolds.
ReplyDeleteCervantes is weird, because you would think that about him from reading Don Quixote--and yet, one of the stories in Novelas Ejemplares talks about Moors in really, really horrifyingly racist terms (indistinguishable from common anti-Semitic tropes, really). Disillusioned me, it really did.
ReplyDeleteI think this ties in with what we were talking about before, regarding what is Postmodernism and why is the right saying such terrible things about it. As I see it the story goes something like this:
ReplyDeleteIn the days before Postmodernism, most everybody thought it was self evident that there were white people and black people, and male and female, and these were natural and unambiguous categories; liberals and conservatives argued about whether these differences did or didn't entitle whites and males to superior status, but they didn't really argue about the categories.
Then there arose in academia a set of movements variously called New Historicism and Deconstruction and Postmodernism, which assembled a great deal of evidence that these categories were not now, and never were, so self-evidently unambiguous, so natural and essential; that they were, in a phrase, "socially constructed." And they really did collectively put together a very persuasive case.
These being humans, however, there were inevitably some within the movement who took this hammer and looked everywhere for nails. And so it was argued that the multiplication table was socially constructed, that virology was socially constructed, etc. And this was memorably parodied in the hoax article Alan Sokal famously got an academic journal to publish.
Once this happened, any conservative who saw anything anywhere which relied explicitly or implicitly on the idea that anything was "socially constructed" -- like "whiteness," in this instance --
[iPad conked out, couldn't finish the post]
ReplyDelete...like "whiteness" in this instance -- made a meal of it. What, "socially constructed" again? Haven't you learned your lesson from the Sokal hoax, that only left-wing fools try to deny the eternal, essential natural order of things?
If it's Beck, you can assume that the answer is always Woodrow Wilson. Or maybe Theodore Roosevelt.
ReplyDeleteWhat an absurd idea! I don't think there has ever been a time when humans were not acutely aware of what group they belonged to. Since the dawn of time people have divided themselves into kinship groups. And ever since technology advanced to the point where people from far corners of the earth came in contact they have been aware of racial differences.
ReplyDeleteThis bit about "The Maryland law of 1681" is a perfect example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. Some poorly educated race-baiter tried to apply the techniques of scholarly research but immediately got in way over his head and drew laughable conclusions. How pathetic.
The Donald Rumsfeld issue was their all-time best-seller.
ReplyDeleteWhat's pathetic is how the whole thing sailed right over your head.
ReplyDeleteThe point isn't that people were not always able to identify with kinship groups or identify others based on differences in physical appearance. The point is that "white" did not exist as a category; people didn't refer to or think of themselves as "white;" they defined themselves on the basis of nationality, religion, or ethnic group (and no, "black" is not an ethnic group, nor is white).
If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, a complete lack of understanding is a more dangerous one.
"conservatives are so obviously just making propaganda out of whatever sticks and mud they find lying around"
ReplyDeleteWell yes, that's been their SOP for some time now. You only have to read comments threads ... no matter what a post is about, some conservative will quickly use it as an opportunity to make a "gosh that Obama, talk about hopeless" comment. To give them credit, they are endlessly inventive in their ability to link virtually any story to the perceived inadequacies of the president, no matter how neurotically obsessed it makes them look to normal people. As you suggest, their sole concern is to make propaganda by writing the same crap day after day, using whatever material is at hand.
One wonders of course why they bother, but I expect they don't even pause any more to consider whether they are actually achieving anything. The activity itself has become a substitute for goal-directed behaviour.
One so seldom has the opportunity to drop the word "fomites" into a conversation.
ReplyDeleteSeconding Aimai. Thanks for this. (Between you and Mr. Coates I learned some things I didn't know about a city I was born and raised in.)
ReplyDeleteIt's a corollary to the "you know he's lying because his lips are moving" fact about pretty much any conservative/libertarian/Tea Party politician who stands at a podium or grunts away on TV. They don't care about evidence and they don't care about facts or truth, to say nothing about effective governance or generalized social betterment.
ReplyDeleteWell, Cervantes was a slave in Algiers for 4 or 5 years. That may have influenced his feelings.
ReplyDeleteI just read the new book about Dumas' father: The Black Count. It is fascinating--of course some of Dumas' contemporaries and competitors always hated him for his Hatian/slave background. I highly recommend the book. It is riveting.
ReplyDeleteThe foldout was at least two wars long.
ReplyDeleteWhat is with you people and the ramming things down the throat imagery?
ReplyDeleteI tried to remember some of the crazier "cause wingnuttia" over the last 20 or 30 years and I can't. But certainly starting under Clinton there was a ramp up of accusations that the government was paying for "crazy stuff" like "studying cow farts." Under Gingerich there was a focus on pulling anti science, anti academy, and anti art and education stuff out of context and holding it up for mockery. When you drilled down into it, or if you knew anything about the subject, it was always perfectly reasonable. One of the things that they played on was the problem of scale in such a large country. Something which sounded kooky or of little importance if it applied to only 20 people, or a small region, often turns out to have massive importance when multiplied by the actual number of people or animals being affected. The "cow fart" study was, of course, about methane and global warming and quite important.
ReplyDeleteI thought that was Krugman on Newt Gingrich, but it's been used describe a number of people.
ReplyDeleteI read Walter Williams for years and I sometimes thought he really ought to be a Poe: how better to prove his complaints about dumbed-down college education than play the role of an idiot who teaches economics! But he's for real.
ReplyDeletePast deep thoughts include that the real issue with Timothy McVeigh was the evil government policies that drive white men to kill; rape is really no different from losing your wallet and having someone take it; black people should realize stop and frisk and white fear are the fault of the Evil Black People who make it justifiable to be afraid of dark skin; apartheid South Africa was a perfectly good government but post-apartheid South Africa was tyranny because it had affirmative action. And more.
Thanks, I will look at that (only read DQ by Cervantes).
ReplyDeleteI'm now thinking of a recent comic-book flap because Helena Bertinelli (the Huntress prior to DC's recent reboot) is being drawn very dark-skinned. And of course, if she's not white, a lot of people assume she can't possibly still be Italian.
ReplyDeleteWalt Williams, Tom Sowell, Ben Carson, it's a particular wingnut welfare scheme and they're good at telling racist, bloated morons exactly what they want to hear.
ReplyDeleteIt's sad. Wingnut welfare for a Jonah Goldberg works like: Jonah sits on his ass, gets paid. Wingnut welfare for a Tom Sowell works like: Tom works hard to please Jonah Goldberg, gets paid.
Nell Irvin Painter on how "white" became "Caucasian" - a German social scientist, a very pretty skull, and where Noah's ark never was: http://www.yale.edu/glc/events/race/Painter.pdf
ReplyDeleteTake a look at his faux-naive confusion about the War on Women (http://tinyurl.com/lqkrqco) for another taste of his deliberate obtuseness
ReplyDeleteIIRC, in Parzival, there is a character who has one parent who is white and one who is black. The author (Wolfram von Eschenbach) makes him have checked skin, probably because Wolfram had never seen a person of mixed heritage, so he imagined what that would look like. (Going from memory of having read the Penguin edition of this poem.)
ReplyDeleteNo, I think we have Da Vinci to thank for that.
ReplyDeleteThere is absolutely no evidence that this is true, beyond extremely vague characteristics of certain portraits of Beethoven. In fact, his parentage is well known, and there is no evidence that his parents were black or part black.
ReplyDeleteMan, if you want a black musician, stick with Buddy Guy.
Italy as a country didn't exist until the 1860's.
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/ua0pR06pevU
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