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rwbyconversations · 5 years

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The weaknesses of Volume 6

As someone who had sub-zero expectations going in, Volume 6 was overall a really good season of RWBY- in fact I’d called it the best overall Volume since Volume 3, if not overall, the best season we’ve had so far. Everything seemed to come together for this season, and most of the fandom has agreed that the opening salvo of episodes was the best the show had, and that the season hadn’t had a dud episode until the group reached Argus. I know some parts of the fandom don’t love the Argus episodes but I found something good in nearly all of them so I can’t say it was a complete waste of time.

But, every cloud has a silver lining, and while Volume 6 was unmistakably a huge improvement over the previous Maya seasons, especially Volume 5, there are still several areas the show can seek to improve on as the show moves to the chilly frozen north of Atlas. So in this essay, I’m going to highlight the (ultimately small but notable enough to warrant talking about them) weaknesses I found in Volume 6.

1) The show needs to more efficiently handle its villains (and why Cinder and Neo’s plot was a drag)

Weird that I’m saying this in the season that gave its longest episode to exploring Salem’s origin story, but Volume 6 had a lot of difficulty managing the pacing of its villains, and the largest subject of its focus arguably didn’t need to be in this Volume. I’m talking of course about Cinder and Neo’s plot this volume.

Now on paper, giving Cinder more spotlight should be what I want. After all, I wrote an essay last year detailing why parts of the fanbase weren’t fond of Cinder, so giving her focus should ideally be able to remedy those problems, right?

Well, that’s the problem. In that essay, I talked about how Cinder’s two biggest flaws as a character were that she was very boring, and how her lack of backstory made it difficult to really care about her as a character. Cinder has effectively been the same character for six volumes in a row and much like Volume 4, the show has a golden opportunity to finally change that and give her a new narrative arc only to waste it.

Volume 6 should have been a drastic wake-up call for Cinder. Unlike at Beacon, where she lost due to Ruby’s sudden intervention and the awakening of her Silver Eyes, Cinder lost at Haven entirely thanks to her own failings. Raven beat her handily in straight combat and goaded her into the entire train-wreck of an operation to begin with, which for a power-focused individual like Cinder, should have really been an igniting spark to get her to begin seeking some introspection on why she’s lost twice in a row in failing to burn down the Academies. But sadly, just like in Volume 4, right as Cinder appears to be getting an arc about her recovering from her loss at Haven, she just ignores it and goes right back on her murder-Ruby train, as if she’s stuck in a Groundhog Day loop.

Cinder’s refusal to move on from a basic arc of “Plan to destroy an academy, enact the plan, get slaughtered, blame Ruby, rinse and repeat” has made her easily the least interesting villain in the entire show. At this point we’re six years in and barring a few contextual clues, Cinder has no backstory, no sympathetic traits, not even any character development to differentiate her from her Volume 1 self. And this after the season where she dominates the villain screen-time until the final third when Adam hijacks the plot.

Cinder’s plot in Volume 6 is therefore largely just setup for Volume 7, in that it explains how Cinder survived Haven and how she reaches Atlas. Along the way, she encounters the in case of bad season break glass button Neo, whose out for revenge and gets a really cool fight scene that’s ultimately just there for fanservice.

Let me repeat. Good fight, really liked it. Let me also repeat- just there for fan-service. This is not an inherently bad thing, but it does have weaknesses.

Neo was always coming back to the show and part of me feels like she was always being held in reserve in the event of a really bad season, so that the next one could have her return and generate some hype since her fan-base are that loyal. And sure enough, Neo’s return did see a notable collection of fans who had dropped the show after 4 and 5 coming back to see their ice cream queen return in a non-Chibi format. I won’t fault the crew for using a plan that worked. Where I take umbrage is that this fight was not necessary. It was a good fight, but I’d have much rather taken a Cinder scene of her actually recovering from Haven and thinking about why she lost again. Instead, Cinder and Neo effectively hijack all the villain screen-time for the rest of the season. And as someone who doesn’t adore Neo like her fans, this made their arc very tiresome, especially when the hints we got of the other villains were far more intriguing. I could talk a lot about the symbolism and thematic choices of the Mercury/Emerald scene in Chapter 9 but I’d struggle to find a lot to say about Cinder’s plot that wasn’t just “Setup for Volume 7.”

The other problem of course is that the rest of Team WTCH are sorely underdeveloped. Hazel at least is interesting again now that he’s several miles away from Ozpin, Tyrian came back and was a delight and I loved seeing him all-but-begging Merc and Em to run so he could hunt them, but Watts remains crucially underdeveloped. He really needs to step up in agency in Atlas because his sardonic wit can only carry him so far, and the man’s voiced by Christopher Sabat, what more reason do you have to give him more to do? The man made the virus that Cinder used to cause the Fall of Beacon, can he be given some agency now please?

Ultimately, Cinder’s plot didn’t need to be the focus for the villains and yet again, the fragments of focus they got showed how much more interesting they were as antagonists. While ultimately Volume 6 did finally give Mercury and Emerald more screentime than Volumes 4 and 5 combined and reminded the audience why you should be paying more attention to them, the rest of Team WTCH desperately needs development, Watts in particular. Cinder remains the worst villain in the entire show in my opinion, and it’s a shame that she’s almost guaranteed to be the one that makes it to the end of the show. I can only hope in Atlas she finally gets time devoted to what makes her tick, but at this point I’m almost at the point of not caring. It’s been six years, I won’t start caring for Cinder now if the show finally remembers to tell us why she joined Salem.

... also I just think Cinder’s new costume sucks and I’d rather Em and Merc get new ones over Cinder and Neo buying extensions for their wardrobes.

2) Cordovin was a joke and she really shouldn’t have been

Show of hands, who actually took Cordovin seriously? Yeah, me neither.

Even during the fight scene, the heroes don’t take it seriously. Having a fight the characters aren’t taking seriously isn’t an inherent flaw but it does mean you can’t expect us to turn around and take it seriously five minutes later.

Cordovin was a wasted character, and one that the show shouldn’t have undershot in all of her scenes by making her the punchline of nearly every joke. Her long-winded rant at the gate scene in Dead End is a huge factor in why a lot of fans, myself included, consider it the weakest episode of Volume 6 despite picking up in the back half. It just drags on for so long that Cordovin outstays her welcome from her first scene.

Additionally, the show not taking her seriously steals a lot of gravitas from the mech battle, and plays a large role in why I think the mech fight failed to really excite a lot of fans outside of key moments like Ruby’s missile run and canon shot. Being alongside Adam’s confrontation with Blake and Yang didn’t help but even on its own, the mech battle drags. Not quite to the same extent as Haven dragged, but on rewatches I was making liberal application of the skip button. That lack of gravitas itself goes on to hamper Cordovin’s serious moment in the season finale where she realizes that her ego allowed the Leviathan a straight shot on Argus and undergoes a soft redemption to let team RWBY leave the city. However, this moment of taking Caroline seriously comes after the plot has made it clear that the entire reason the Grimm attacked Argus was because of Caroline over-reacting to Maria and breaking out her mech instead of scrambling fighters as Qrow predicts they will. Caroline is solely at fault for the Leviathan getting as close to destroying Argus as it did, so it’s difficult to care when she pulls her head out of her ass to do her job.

A lack of investment also means a lack of emotional dedication, which I think showed in the lack of fanart Caroline has generated since her reveal. Her design being very drab and militaristic doesn’t help matters but unlike say, the Yang/Adam rematch where the stakes were present on an emotional and thematic level, Caroline failed to excite the audience beyond a few funny memes.

The additional problem with lacking in emotional dedication/investment is, again, we don’t have enough interest in Caroline to take her seriously, she goes in one episode from the Kooky Racist Grandma to someone we’re expected to sympathize with. And additionally, asking the fans to sympathize with a character whose opening scene includes a not-too-subtle dig at her Faunus traits was asking a lot of the fandom, especially after the previous years showed that the show’s handling of the Faunus racism plot was... varied in quality.

In short, Cordovin basically took a shotgun to her own foot in her first scene. Establishing her as an over the top comic relief character before expecting the audience to care when she broke out a walking advertisement for gen;LOCK was an extensive reach for the writers to try and unfortunately they fell flat. Trying to make the audience care for the problem she herself created is a similar long-reach. Hopefully this extended comedy sequence depiction of the Atlas military will be left behind as Volume 7 heads into the heart of darkness itself.

3) Oscar desperately needs limelight

Oscar’s been in the show now for three volumes. He spent much of Volume 4 on his own, much of Volume 5 as Ozpin’s meat-sack, and now in Volume 6 he finally gets to... get some clothes. I like them, but they’re not suitable compensation for the character development that he clearly had stolen from him.

Oscar is easily the most underdeveloped main hero right now, and it’s a problem that’s haunted the series since Volume 4. Oscar wants to be a hero much like Ruby herself did as a child, but this sole fragment of backstory is never used to make a connection to Ruby. Aaron Dismuke, bless his heart, is giving this show his all and his impression of Shannon McCormack’s tones must be applauded, but much like Cordovin he’s not given much to work with. In a way, he’s almost the hero’s version of Cinder- a character who keeps finding themselves in situations where they should realistically develop as a consequence... only for each time they do, it either gets shuffled into the next volume or relegated to offscreen happenings.

Volume 6 really should have had Oscar undergoing some kind of arc, be it his fear at being persecuted by Team RWBY and Qrow due to harboring Ozpin, his fear as his days as himself become more and more numbered, his acceptance of the fight against Salem or, most glaringly, his running off while the team is in Argus. But every time, Oscar just powers through these circumstances and never gets to develop from them. He never holds it over Qrow that he attacked a child, that Yang indirectly called him a bastard, he never thanks Ruby for having his back after the train crash, and he brushes off Jaune’s apology for smashing him into a wall and alleging he’s Ozpin masquerading himself as Oscar.

Argus is really where Oscar should have stepped into his own. I was looking forward to him going solo and having to fend for himself for a short while, maybe have a scene where he forces Ozpin to come out and talk or gets to chat with Ozma himself about his place in the war against Salem. Have him be scared of losing his personality and just becoming another body for Oz to inhibit, have him be angry that his dreams of being a hero have been cruelly dashed on the rocks for some agenda he never signed up to. Oscar should be an emotional hurricane and instead he’s just a gust of wind.

Seriously show, you had a golden opportunity for an Ozma and Oscar scene since we know Oz can speak to his past selves, and you know Arron has enough range to do both roles at once, why do you spite my farmboi.

But he got a coat now so I guess that’s technically development. Kerry admitted in the Rewind for Volume 6′s finale that some parts of the season got pushed to the next one as they usually do, and I can only hope that Oscar finally expressing emotion was one such scene because Christ alive, he needs it after all the times he just got over crap offscreen this year. I want to like Oscar, he could easily have one of the most tragic arcs of the entire show if they went with it, but the show really needs to give me something to like about him in the first place. Or else he really will become the heroic Cinder, trapped forever in a nightmarish world of never getting to properly develop in spite of countless opportunities being handed to them on a silver platter.

... I still think Oscar lifted Qrow’s wallet for that costume btw.

4) The reaction to Jinn’s story felt lockstep

I don’t have as much to say on this point but I find it rather saddening that all of the characters have much the same reaction to the truth of Ozma’s past- “Salem can’t be killed, you were leading us on for nothing”- when the weeks around the Ozma reveal had the fandom reacting to the story in a far more diverse way. Even in the hiatus we still have arguments over whether Ozpin was truly in the right or if the story was painting Salem as the true innocent party, to say nothing of the takes that Salem and Ozma’s relationship could be seen as an early iteration of Arkos or even Taruadonna with Salem as the abuser.

The fandom had such a diverse range of reactions to Jinn’s story, with everyone seeming to have their own take on the episode and the truth wherein. Some people even used this to ponder if Summer Rose had learned the truth during her time and tied it in with Red Like Roses 2, where she laments having made a necessary sacrifice, to ask if Summer had learned the truth and bitterly signed on to the war against Salem in the hopes that she’d be able to turn the tide thanks to her Silver Eyes.

“Just because I have to give you this origin story doesn’t mean you’re gonna take the right lessons from it.”

Some idiots even decided that this meant Oz was the main villain now, but I’ve learned to drown those people out.

But the show itself has a very flat range of reactions, with nearly everyone in-universe only taking away from the story that Salem cannot be conventionally killed and that therefore their entire journey is pointless. Everyone had the same reaction, with the only levels of variance being how angry they were at Ozpin and Oscar, ranging from Ruby’s “ask first if they have a plan and then be angry at Oz specifically” to Qrow and Jaune’s “physically assaulting a fourteen year old child.”

It almost makes me wonder, if the characters themselves didn’t take anything from the lesson barring Maria connecting the Silver Eyes to the God of Light and that “SALEM CAN’T BE KILLED,” why should the fans? No one took this and went “OK so we can’t stop Salem with force, maybe try talking her down?” Their minds all immediately went to not just being able to shoot her.

Jinn’s story was great, but the reaction to it in universe felt very lacking and I only worry that the more people are told about it, the more chances we’ll get to hear a variant of “Salem can’t be killed.” It’s a shame that such a morally gray out of universe debate has been stripped to its raw components in-universe.

Conclusion

Volume 6 was really good, I really liked a lot of it and it still warms my heart that I can say that about a season of RWBY post Volume 5. But there’s still a lot of work that can be done behind the scenes to fix up the flaws remaining. I chose three big flaws here but there are a few more I could bring up for quick points (mostly: Weiss getting shafted entirely in V6 feels like an overly corrective backlash to her constantly getting slaughtered in V5, Ruby’s agency does not substitute for a character arc and she still needs one, the introduction of the Faunus in Ozma’s flashbacks felt very contrived, Ren and Nora continue to feel useless to the wider plot but at least this time Ren wasn’t getting bodied every fight, so on and so forth), but ultimately we got more good than bad, and you don’t throw out an entire batch of apples just because of one rotten one near the top. I can forgive a lot more when the overall product is good, and Volume 6 certainly was a good season. Hopefully with these smaller problems fixed, which mostly just extends to “Give Cinder and Oscar onscreen development,” Volume 7 and onwards can keep the show moving forward into a brighter future and a better tomorrow.

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crimethinc · 6 years

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Brazil: The Alternative to Fascism Is not Democracy–From Democracy to Freedom in Portuguese, Greek, and German

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, fascist proponent of dictatorship and mass killings, has won the election. Who needs a military coup when you use voting to accomplish exactly the same thing? We’ve already explored in detail how the left and centrist parties paved the way for this. From Brazil to France, parties across the political spectrum have lost all pretense of offering any solution to social problems other than escalating state violence. In this context, it’s not surprising that politicians who explicitly represent the police and military are coming to power, as they have become the linchpin of the state itself.

Our hearts go out to our comrades in Brazil, who have already experienced a tremendous amount of state repression and capitalist violence—and will now face far worse. Perhaps the immediate resistance that greeted the election of Donald Trump can serve as a useful reference point. Yet because of the specific ways Brazil is on the receiving end of colonialist violence, the wave of nationalism that has already crested in the United States and Europe will involve considerably more brutal violence there. We call on everyone around the world to prepare to mobilize in solidarity with those who are targeted in the attacks that Bolsonaro has promised to carry out.

As anarchists, we don’t believe that elections grant legitimacy to any ruling party. No election could legitimize police violence, homophobia, racism, or misogyny in our eyes, nor prisons, borders, or the destruction of the natural world on which everyone’s survival depends. No vote could give a mandate to anyone who wants to dominate others. Majority rule is as repugnant to us as dictatorship: both make coercion the fundamental basis of politics.

The important question is not how to improve democracy; fundamentally, democracy is a means of legitimizing governments so that people will accept their impositions, no matter how tyrannical and oppressive those may be. The important question is how to defend each other from the violence of the state; how to find ways to meet our needs that don’t depend on unanimity or coercion; how to collaborate and coexist rather than competing for power. As more and more oppressive regimes take power around the world, we have to have done with our illusions about “good” democratic government and organize to protect each other by any means necessary.

The opposite of fascism is not democracy. The opposition of fascism is freedom; it is solidarity; it is direct action; it is resistance. But it is not democracy. Democracy, yet again, has been the mechanism that brought fascists to power.

Students at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro demonstrate against police raids carried out ahead of the election. The police confiscated posters proclaiming “Jewish students against fascism” and depicting murdered activist Marielle Franco.

Over the past several months, our comrades in Brazil, Greece, and Germany have all published translations of From Democracy to Freedom, our analysis of the common threads that connect democracy and dictatorship. We offer those translations here—in case the Brazilian group’s site unexpectedly goes offline—along with an English translation of the epilogue to the German translation. Our comrades in Germany are also organizing public presentations about the book.

For more on why the democratic movements of 2010-2014 reached an impasse, enabling far-right groups to appropriate their rhetoric and seize the initiative, read this analysis we published ahead of the Swedish elections last month.

Click the image to download From Democracy to Freedom in Portuguese.

Click the image to download From Democracy to Freedom in Greek. This is the first chapter of the book; other chapters have been translated, but are not yet available.

You can order the German translation of From Democracy to Freedom here. You can download a draft version of the first chapter in PDF form here.

Epilogue from the German Publishers

Before this book was published, we presented discussions about democracy together with comrades from the US and Slovenia in autonomous centers around Germany. Although none of the texts in From Democracy to Freedom explicitly deals with the situation in Germany, that does not mean that we have not had quite similar experiences—on the contrary.

The State

A few weeks before the federal election in 2017, a propaganda truck was driving around on behalf of the Bundestag, the German federal parliament. They were distributing baseball caps and candies featuring the Bundesadler, the coat of arms of the Weimar Republic (which is back in service to today’s German government), as well as propaganda films for students about parliamentary democracy. The organizers emphasized how democratic Germany is. This sort of advertising offensive was obviously necessary for a system that has good reason to fear for its own legitimacy.

The Parties

All parties represented in the Bundestag claim that democracy as one of their central issues. The SPD wants to risk trying more democracy, like Willy Brandt said; the Green party wants to expand democracy; the Left just wants more democracy; Christian Democrats want to strengthen democracy; liberals want to revive democracy; and the racist, neo-fascist AfD presents itself as a party for direct democracy. The entry of the AfD into parliament confirms once again that advocacy for direct democracy is hardly a guarantee of emancipatory politics.

Whatever we do, whatever we demand, we should always make sure to emphasize why we are struggling, so as to protect our ideas and rhetoric from appropriation by conservative or fascist groups who fight for the exact opposite of what we are fighting for.

“Civil Society”

Those who pursue initiatives for “more” or “real” democracy like to present themselves as courageous or even revolutionary fighters against the prevailing political order—when in fact, they only want another kind of representation. Conferences with names such as “Democracy Needs Movement” are an example of this development. As people who express ourselves uncompromisingly against any form of democracy, we nevertheless spoke there; people raised their eyebrows at us because our positions and goals cannot be implemented in the context of a better democracy.

For many, it is impossible to imagine that there could be anything else. This is one of the problems with democracy: it narrows down what we can imagine.

The Movement

In anti-capitalist struggles in Berlin, we met people who appeared to believe that making signs with their hands during meetings represented the epitome of revolutionary behavior. Some people told us that the methods of communication and decision-making should take priority over the results. Some didn’t see it as a problem that their chosen form of decision-making resulted in the permanent obstruction of any meaningful form of activity.

All this, because for the first time in their lives, they understood themselves as an important part of an apparatus. We were expected not to destroy this feeling of finally getting it right. We did it anyway.

We tried to adapt to the proposed rules of “non-violent activists” in order to be able to cooperate with them. In the process of making decisions with them, we used the right of veto to block a decision that seemed intolerable to us. We discovered that our veto was less important than other people’s veto. In the end, we had to discuss whether there could be a veto against our veto.

Once again, we saw that the official methods of decision-making only last as long as they serve the interests of those who introduced them.

When we were part of the discussions preparing the blockading actions at the G20 summit, we decided to be strategic: we sat in different positions in the meetings, we split up into different working groups. We did this to prevent worse attempts at manipulation, to block authoritarian attempts to control the process from the very beginning, to influence the discourse. Doing this, we learned something about our own power potential—and it scared us. We saw that we could play this game too: we knew the mechanisms and we could play the same tricks. We knew how and when to formulate a question if we wanted to be the ones who determine how the discussion would go—how to fix the order of the points on the agenda—when to set the start time of a meeting. Sometimes we were not just afraid of ourselves, but also disgusted—because on the way to overthrowing all authority, we were tempted simply to seek to get our own piece of the cake.

This experience gives us all the more reason to be critical of the democratic framework.

We have not only encountered the debate about democracy in practical struggles on the street. We can also find it in a few theoretical texts from German-speaking countries. We can recommend two such publications here:

Christoph Spehr, Die Aliens sind unter uns. Herrschaft und Befreiung im demokratischen Zeitalter

Jörg Bergstedt Demokratie. Die Herrschaft des Volkes. Eine Abrechnung

Half measures get us nowhere.

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testinbeta · 5 years

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#AltWoke Hyper-C

There is no term more ubiquitous, obnoxious, and self-serving in our current lexicon as “woke.” Woke is safety-pin politics, masturbatory symbolism, and virtue signaling of a deflated Left insulated by algorithms, filter bubbles, and browser extensions that replace pictures of Donald Trump with Pinterest recipes.

Woke is a misnomer — it’s actually asleep and myopic. Woke is a safe space for the easily distracted and defensive pop culture inbred. Woke is the Left curled up in a fetal ball scribbling think pieces about Broad City while its rights get trampled by ascendant fascism, domestically and globally.

Woke is the easy button: it combats injustice by sharing videos of police brutality to an echo of outrage.

Woke is bereft of irony: it shares HuffPo articles about gentrification from condos in Flatbush and Oakland.

Woke is alchemy: it transmutes oppressed identities into advertising campaigns, trend reports, and new demographics to market towards.

Woke is poptimstic: it believes Jaden Smith becoming the face of Louis Vuitton is enough to qualify as a win for progress.

Woke is content with the status quo: it would be perfectly content if another economic collapse happened tomorrow, just as long as those who rigged it were sufficiently intersectional.

Woke is a sanctimonious grammar-nazi who critiques the bully’s phrasing of “stop hitting yourself,” through toothless gums. Woke is too ethical for its own good.

Woke is the gospel truth of the new evangelical Leftist. Woke is the Left’s consolidated failures distilled into a monosyllabic buzzword. A whimper into the digital landscape prefixed with a hashtag, arriving at the same point each time: #Woke is the literal antithesis of progress.

CATALOGUE OF THE WOKE LEFT’S FAILURES

1. Moderate Liberal

The moderate Left misappropriated theoretical terms and concepts, divorced from any actual theory. Identity politics, despite its origins in academia, flourishes best on social media — it’s the most accessible concept for moderate liberals to grasp.

“Well, if identity is only a game, if it is only a procedure to have relations, social and sexual-pleasure relationships that create new friendships, it is useful. But if identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think that they have to ‘uncover’ their ‘own identity,’ and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is ‘Does this thing conform to my identity?’ then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. If we are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity to our unique selves. But the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation. To be the same is really boring. We must not exclude identity if people find their pleasure through this identity, but we must not think of this identity as an ethical universal rule.” — Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” (1984)

Identity politics became an albatross, however. Both the moderate and radical were too eager to evangelize oppressed identities. There was no room for discussion, no place for debate. Call outs, clap backs, and other reality tv patois replaced dialectics.

Representation is the de facto litmus of society’s progress for the moderate liberal — society appeared more inclusive and diverse because “Orange is the New Black” has a female lead and a multiethnic supporting cast. They inhabit a never ending, curated echo chamber of think pieces, listicles, notifications, and retweets.

Everyone within their algorithmic ghetto shares their sentiments about society. The algorithm makes their small corner seem far more vast than it actually is, and as a result, the moderate extends this myopia to society at large.

The moderate midwifed the birth of the Alt-Right through bipartisan compromises. Moderate liberals are basically content to vest trust in their vaunted Democratic Party as it slides further to the right, thereby underpinning a level of discourse friendly to the far-right. It’s worth remembering that the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries were a period of diehard cooperation between liberals and conservatives in crafting today’s authoritarianism.

Neoconservatism provided socio-political planning that complemented a neoliberal economic agenda. This is why the radical Left blames liberals as well as conservatives for “command and control policing”, mass surveillance and this century’s rationale for endless warfare.

Moderate liberals provided and adopted theoretical frameworks that explained away structural oppression but retained an appearance of caring about racism and equality across intersecting spectrums of gender and sexuality. This was an obvious farce that mystified progress and the far right took advantage of this because they actually suffered no serious political setbacks. Liberalism provided an incubator for the alt right to form by mollifying actual demands for change.

“If politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feeling of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.” — Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Inventing the Future” (2015)

2. Radical Left

If the liberal is the evangelical, pearl clutching apostle of the woke Left, the radical, then, is St. Augustine — the hierophant, the pedagogue. The radical is the vanguard inhabiting academia & activism, creating the language and atmosphere of critique.

Its ideologies trickle down from intellectuals at universities to moderate liberals on social media, and more recently, the Alt-Right (e.g. culture jamming by way of “meme magic” or the synthesis of identity politics and white nationalism by way of identitarianism).

Radicals scapegoated liberals to absolve themselves of any responsibility by being all critique with no tangible answers. The radical left in its current incarnation is somewhat fossilized in terms of strategies and needs an immediate remodelling.

The radical is too comfortable inhabiting only the periphery of academia & activism. Radical academics and activists are insulated not only by algorithms but also their obsolescence. The radical academic has failed to bridge the gap between intellectuals & larger society.

That is, intellectuals failed to subvert hegemony and normativity. Academics did not do enough to reach beyond universities and make positive reforms to public education. Intellectuals failed to politicize the natural sciences early enough. Intellectuals lost programming and hacker culture to neoliberalism & libertarians. Computer science transitioned from cyberpunk to Silicon Valley venture capitalism.

Had radical academics succeeded, there might’ve been more legitimacy in the fight to combat climate change. Or traditional journalism wouldn’t have been so easily defeated by the post-fact information economy. What we have now is a new Scholasticism of students & professors as clergy dominated by an agitated, anti-intellectual populist bloc.

“Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapacitate learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual reconstitution of global social memory. The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is accompanied by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic institutions, precipitating their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-exploration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weaponry.” Nick Land, “Meltdown” (1994)

The radical activist lost its sense resistance. There are no radicals in Congress. There are no radical lawmakers. No radical judges. Community organizing is helpful, but it’s not sufficient. To remain relevant radicals have to widen their scope to adapt to the changing global climate.

“The idea that one organisation, tactic or strategy applies equally well to any sort of struggle is one of the most pervasive and damaging beliefs among today’s left. Strategic reflection – on means and ends, enemies and allies – is necessary before approaching any political project. Given the nature of global capitalism, any postcapitalist project will require an ambitious, abstract, mediated, complex and global approach – one that folk-political approaches are incapable of providing.” — Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Inventing the Future” (2015)

WHAT IS #ALTWOKE:

1. Theoria

AltWoke is a new awakening for the post-modern Left to navigate the protean digital era. Altwoke can be categorized as the new New Left. Or Second Wave Neo-Marxism. The Post- Truth Left. Anti-liberal postcapitalist left. AltWoke is antithetical to Silicon Valley techno-neoliberalism. AltWoke is not the cult of Kurzweil. AltWoke is not merely analogous to the Alt-Right. AltWoke injects planning back into left-wing politics. AltWoke supports universal basic income, biotechnology and radical energy reforms to combat climate change, open borders, new forms of urban planning and the liquidation of Western hegemony. AltWoke sees opportunity in disaster. AltWoke is the Left taking futurism away from fascism. David Harvey is #altwoke. Situationist International is #altwoke. Lil B is #altwoke. Jean Baudrillard is #altwoke. Kodwo Eshun is #altwoke, Mark Fisher is #altwoke, Roberto Mangabeira Unger is #altwoke. Edward Snowden is #altwoke. Daniel Keller is #altwoke. Chelsea Manning is #altwoke. Theo Parrish is #altwoke. William Gibson is #altwoke. Holly Herndon is #altwoke. Frantz Fanon is #altwoke. Alvin Toffler is #altwoke.

2. Poiesis

Anti-liberal, Left-accelerationism. Revolution is slow & gradual. Technology, media, the global market, and culture accelerate the process.

Alt-Woke embraces the post-fact information economy as a pedagogical tool.

Culture is more important than policy.

Trickle-down ideology; AltWoke embraces normalization & hyperreality.

Memetic counter-insurrection: culture-jamming is the weapon of choice to tilt normalization in the direction we’d like it to go.

Xenofeminism. Technology is the missing component of intersectional politics. Eurocentrism and phallocentrism are obsolete, despite the Right’s best efforts. Queer is a verb, not a noun. If nature’s oppressive, change nature. Normalize “deviance.”

Reappropriation of globalism as a personal lifestyle.

AltWoke is duplicitous, amoral, & problematic. But also conscientious. The ends always justify the means. The Right hits low, so we hit lower, harder, and without mercy.

AltWoke is cautiously optimistic about the future.

PREFACE TO PRAXIS

Why support Left-Accelerationism?

Accelerationism is a contested and obtuse term among the Left, so in order to understand what accelerationism is, it’s crucial to understand what it isn’t.

Accelerationism doesn’t propose letting capitalism expand and erode to such a degree that its corrosive contradictions become so unbearable that the oppressed and working classes have no choice but to revolt. #Alt-Woke doesn’t and wouldn’t espouse such a simplistic and foolish framework, either.

In its neutral alignment, accelerationism is the idea that neoliberalism facilitates so much growth — economically, technologically, and globally — that its social contradictions continue to expand to such a degree that its “collapse” is not only inevitable, but creates a vacuum for new integrated social platforms. That is, like feudalism before it, late capitalism is transitory and incubates other socioeconomic ideologies that will ultimately replace it, since it’s now reaching its limits.

In its Right alignment, accelerationism is a schism: Neoreaction (NRx) is a radical libertarianism accelerating toward neoliberalism’s ultimate conclusion: plutocratic corporate monarchism (e.g., man as nation). The second is the Alt-Right, which is white identity politics accelerating toward capitalism’s ultimate conclusion: techno-fascism.

Left Accelerationism insists the only way out of capitalism is through it. It’s become apparent that capitalism is reaching its limits, and it can’t sustain itself any longer. The marriage of capitalism and democracy has been a powerful roadblock in the Left’s struggle to combat structural power. In its late phase, this divorce of capitalism and democracy is imminent.

“But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.” —Karl Marx, “On the Question of Free Trade” (1884)

Left Accelerationism is a vindication of Marxism that synthesizes vertical tektology. It anticipates capitalism’s collapse, repurposing growth and technology against its progenitor and nudges that collapse toward a Leftist counter-hegemony. Capitalism provides the efficiency of integrated networks, it provides the tools to combat the inequalities of its rapacious growth. A post-scarcity, socialist society can sustain itself from the technologies capitalism produces.

“The paradox of free-market communism is even more dramatic: the terms are strongly charged, ideological polar opposites, designating a kind of Mexican standoff between capitalism, on the one hand, and its archenemy and would-be grave digger, on the other. But the point of combining the terms free market and communism in this way is to deploy selected features of the concept of communism to transform capitalist markets to render them truly free and, at the same time, to deploy selected features of the free market to transform communism and free it from a fatal entanglement with the State.” —Eugene W. Holland, “Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike” (2011)

The process of acceleration is well under way and no one but the most dogmatic and naive beltway libertarian would argue contrary. Left Accelerationism in an alternative to traditional avenues like reform or revolution and attempts to reorganize power from within power. It does this without completely discarding avenues like reform or revolution, either.

Left-Accelerationism is a synthesis of Marxism with vertical-scale tektology. It’s Gramsci by way of Debord and David Harvey by way of Deleuze.

Why embrace a post-facts/post-truth information economy?

As it stands, narrative is more important than facts. Media and communications are so accelerated that both sides of the political spectrum are locked in a battle over consensus. Traditional pedagogy will not work in this instance. The Left hurts itself by not using this to its advantage.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit with the core belief.” —Franz Fannon, “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952)

Why is culture more important than policy? Why weaponize memetics? What is “trickle down ideology”? Why support hyperreality and normalization?

Culture is society’s barometer. From the meme unleashed by Marshall McLuhan’s too-oft repeated phrase “the medium is the message,” author Joshua Meyrowitz seems to have taken it most seriously. “No Sense of Place” is an analysis into how television changed society by altering society’s access to information.

Meyrowitz forms a clear theory on information-power systems and discusses ways in which television breaks those down. At the end of the book, Meyrowitz chooses three specific topics: the merging of childhood and adulthood, the merging of masculinity and femininity, and the lowering of the political hero through the demystification of power.

Meyrowitz fundamentally believes that many social groupings and hostilities exist due to access to and restrictions of information and space. When information and space are separated, then the boundaries between social groups relax. For example, the television show ‘The Jeffersons,’ brought white families in their living rooms to the living room of a black family; and news coverage of the war in Vietnam “brought the war home” in visceral detail.

Memes are ideologies distilled, repackaged, and ready for viral distribution. The internet is something of an AI: a communication network operating as its own sovereign entity. Social media platforms, and other communications technologies accelerate the flow of ideas, bypassing restrictions put in place by traditional media.

A journalist in New York may engage with a senator in Washington over Twitter. A misguided 17-year old from Wisconsin who received their political education from /Pol, Breitbart, or Reddit can also join that same dialogue, and disrupt it. This is the best case scenario, unfortunately. Ideology is a memetic virus. Memes are an insurgent medium. The internet is an insurgent technology.

“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation. The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” —Guy Debord, “Society of the Spectacle”, (1967)

What is xenofeminism?

Xenofeminism is a form of Left-Accelerationism and, by extension, can be read as AltWoke’s answer to identity politics. Or, more accurately, it critiques liberal “privilege”-based identity politics and re-situates Left “critical theory”-based identity politics into a technological framework.

Innovation is a consequence of capitalism’s growth, hence it’s irresponsible not to recognize how power operates not only through structures like capitalism, but also its incarnations like racism, colonialism, and heteronormativity.

When looking at history, it’s imperative to ask questions about how technology changes and affects the ways in which people communicate, disseminate, and process information. This should always be taken into consideration from an intersectional frame of reference.

AltWoke isn’t opposed to identity politics so much as it’s opposed to reductionist, two-dimensional, representation as the crux of liberal identity politics. This mode of thinking lacks nuance and oftentimes devolves into inconsequential arguments over single phrases and who gets to participate. Bad politics comes in all forms of representation.

Hegemony operates in such a way that it permeates every aspect of social life in late capitalism, yet this isn’t always apparent — its existence must be revealed. Culture’s more dubious incarnation tells society who is and isn’t worthy of praise, admiration, and, ultimately, life. The White Man™ is still the dominant conduit through which capitalism operates.

However, there’s a cultural shift happening that is impossible to deny. The chauvinism of Western exceptionalism, essentialism, and the central cornerstone, “whiteness” are sociopoitical dead ends. It confines itself within impossible paradigms, even while, nonwhite, non-Western, non-binary identities are accelerating the process. The West crumbles as China accelerates toward superpower status. It’s no coincidence that pop music is now synonymous with R&B. Hip hop, techno, house, and footwork bridge the gap between the avant garde and pop by accelerating language, form, timbre, and aesthetics to alien plateaus.

Is it any wonder why “cuckold” is the Alt-Right’s pejorative of choice? The old guard justifies oppression and inequality as immutable and “natural.” The deviant Other threatens this “natural” hierarchy. The normalization of deviance is the ultimate culture-jam. Cuckoldry is deviant, and deviance is the vanguard. #BlackPopMatters.

Why embrace and reappropriate globalism?

AltWoke perceives the “nation” as an information network and citizen –> user. The governance structure of the internet creates the subjectivity of power, the user, in the same fashion as the invention of the state created the subjectivity of citizens. Global scale computation has built a new governing rhizomatic architecture. All systems have integrated into platform stacks, and by extension, nations and governments are but another component in the Internet of Things (IoT).

People should be allowed in all physical spaces as a fundamental right. Politics has nothing to do with physical territory. AltWoke accelerationism fully separated land from politics once it realized that political groupings are aspatial networks: informational, cybernetic.

The old paradigm was political grouping by blood, land, and then language. These were all networks. Cyberspace is an artificial network same as blood, land, and language. It’s better, too, as it is instantaneous. Those who hold politics to be the defense of land, nation, ethnicity, or linguistics are the old-guard; they are demonstrably incorrect and stand between people and their liberty.

“Geology is sensible of itself in so much as it has an ordering logic, if it is articulate in its stratifications, reading pebbles, rocks, various kinds of matter, sorting, organizing (Roger Caillois calls this agency ‘computational’), folding, compacting the biological slime of the earth into its various layers.” Kathryn Yusoff, “Anthropogenesis: Origins and Endings in the Anthropocene” (2015)

The American nation was formed by the economic activities of the thirteen colonies as they functioned with common standards, such as shipping timetables and commercial infrastructure, developing into a consciousness of togetherness and assumed similarity between participants in the network.

Nations are coextensive with land, not that the land has ties to blood or biology (the misstep of historical fascism and contemporary nationalism, to glorify the soil) but the physical geography of land determined the networks superimposed over it.

Europe, for example, has for so long been balkanized into nationalities and peoples separated by mountain ranges, seas, and long distances, and brought together by modifications to this physical geography (see: Spain’s hegemony over Europe and its fantastic road system prior to 1648).

Now, pan-Europeanism burgeons on the fact that highway systems, shipping, and a porousness of state borders has reduced or annihilated these impediments to a common access to the European network. It fails because it does not see that the same forces that drive Pan-Europeanism point towards a global society.

The separation of the information network from place thus reduces the determination of place upon network, of place upon user, of place upon that user’s conception of themselves interacting with others, to the point that in a globalized world the user will interact with their physical neighbor in the same network as they will interact with someone in a different (city/state/nation/region), such that planetary consciousness necessarily forms.

Why is #AltWoke amoral?

Short answer: Politics is amoral. Long answer: As it stands, the political infrastructures of Western governments are collapsing. The Right solidified its stranglehold on structural power. Right Accelerationism is several steps ahead of its Leftist counterpart.

In America, the GOP is imploding and the Alt-Right is slowly replacing this obsolete party. The Right is vulgar, so we’ll stop taking the moral high road and be even fouler. The Left has no structural power, and the stakes are far too high. We truly stand to lose everything.

Traditional means of Left praxis are ineffectual against this ascendant superstructure. Asking that every individual respect the humanity of ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities is naive. It will take more deceptive and subversive methods for the political Left to affect any change. #Alt-Woke praxis is, if anything, a reappropriation of Vladislav Surkov’s idea of ‘nonlinear warfare.’ We don’t fight fair. We won’t be civil. We don’t resist power, we seize it.

3. Praxis

The question of AltWoke Praxis is also the question of Left-Accelerationist Praxis: How does one organize politically? AltWoke Praxis has two modal structures: Right Hand Praxis & Left Hand Praxis. Or, The Hand That Strikes & The Hand That Repurposes. RHP takes advantage of the cracks within the Alt-Right, disrupting any roadblocks to clear a path so LHP can shift the Overton Window. LHP repurposes existing technologies, networks, and power structures to initiate a counter-hegemony. LHP advances AltWoke’s core tenets without ever explicitly espousing as such. Privacy is crucial to Left Hand Praxis, so it won’t be listed, but appropriating multinational corporate identity is a crucial first step.

Right Hand Praxis

Alt-Right countersurveillance. Invade their spaces, disrupt their safe space. Break out of your filter bubble, learn their language. Learn who they are, and what they believe. Befriend them only to spy on them. Dox the doxers.

Exploit the right’s paranoia and affinity towards pseudoscience. If they believe that supplements will boost their testosterone or tin foil nets disrupt phone signals, exploit that market.

Direct action hacktivism. Penetrate the SEO. Make #altwoke viral. Twitter bot agit prop.

Appropriate post-fact culture. Conspiracy theories are memetically powerful. The Left does itself a disservice by not making its own. Speak their language to make it compelling: “Peter Thiel is a member of the Bilderberg Group!”

Exploit their contradictions: Human biodiversity is incompatible with Traditionalist Catholics. White nationalists think Identitarians are ineffectual Third Positionists. Drive them further into their own filter bubbles and out of voting booths.

Agitate Leftist demonstrations. The more the Woke, horizontal Left marches, the better. It takes any potential attention away from Left Hand Praxis.

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fuckyeahanarchistposters · 7 years

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Bay Area: ROAR Conference Full Schedule March 11th and 12th

Social Media Event Here

ROAR is a 2-day conference focused on revolutionary anti-racism, solidarity, and strategy, rooted in the legacy of anti-colonial, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, feminist, and queer movements – and fighters who have come before us. The conference event will be held on both sides of the Bay Area. Day one will be at the Omni Commons in Oakland. Day two will be held in San Francisco at the California Institute for Integral Studies.

ROAR will be a space to gather, build, and learn from each other’s struggles and continue to build an anti-racist front in the Bay Area and beyond. Both events are wheelchair accessible as are the bathrooms.

Schedule

Saturday, March 11th, OMNI Commons, 4799 Shattuck Ave, Oakland, CA

10:00am-11:30pm

Bay Area Indigenous Resistance – Corrina Gould

Indian People Organizing for Change, IPOC, has been leading the work in sacred sites protection and preservation in the Bay Area for over 20 years. The question is why this work is important? What policies have historically been in place to create an environment where a tribe has to invoke community support from the general public and allies to stop the desecration of these places? What is our role as Indigenous People in this land and what is the responsibility of those that have settled on our traditional territories to help in preserving and protecting these places?

We will look at the history of the colonization that happened here in the Bay Area, US Policies and the Movements to stop the continued genocide of the Ohlone/Lisan people, including the current fight to protect the site in Berkeley.

12-1:30pm

Burning Down the American Plantation: Anarchist Abolitionist Organizing in NYC– The Base

The ascendency of Donald Trump to the presidency has polarized society and exposed the fragility of the political institutions in the US. With very little effort Trump and his administration have managed to erode the thin veneer of legitimacy that liberal democracy still retained. The foundation of the political conflict today does not begin with Trump, but is situated in the context of the US Civil War – a war that was never actually resolved. Slavery has never ended in the United States. Instead it was reinstituted after the war, expanded through mass incarceration, and normalized through the deputization of civil society against black people. The expansion and acceptance of terror in American society has now turned against many other segments of the population culminating in the conflict we have today.

Anarchists from The Base, a political center in Brooklyn, will look at how we can orient our struggle towards the abolitionist movement, and the black freedom struggle. Following the lineage of the black struggle, from Nat Turner to the Black Liberation Army, we can learn from the most revolutionary traditions of our society. We will talk about our projects and how we are trying to build 21st century underground railroad coupled with a militant strategy. Could the formation of these new political projects catapult us out of the cycle of protests and help us create revolutionary organization? For insights we’ll analyze the Rojava Revolution, the most advanced anti-state struggle in the world, as we chart out an insurgent direction for anarchist organizing today.

2-3:30pm

Black Women and Black Power :Dismantling Misogyny Patriarchy and Paternalism in Black Liberation Movements – Black Women’s Defense League

An interactive workshop experience that calls in to question the history and reality of a black power movement that often silences and dismisses the struggles of women , queer and other marginalized people of color. We will discuss how it has happened historically/ currently and what we must do now in organizing an intersectional, progressive and truly revolutionary path to total black liberation.

Website: www.bwdl.info

4-5:30pm

Combating State Repression to Strengthen Radical Organizing – Panel

Members of the Bay Area Anti-Repression Committee, Bay Area Committee to Resist Political Repression, and Tilted Scales Collective will discuss state repression of movements challenging white supremacy and the rising tide of openly neo-fascist white nationalist groups. We will discuss the repression strategies being deployed against anti-fascist and anti-racist protesters, including grand jury subpoenas, criminal charges (particularly felonies), and jail/prison sentences.

ICE Defense

Presentation of general information on knowing your rights when dealing with immigration police and other law enforcement, and how to plug into immigrant rights organizing and advocacy.

*This is not am opportunity to get specific legal advice. That must be done in a confidential setting with an immigration attorney.

Sunday March 12th, California Institute for Integral Studies, 1453 Mission St, San Francisco

10am-11:30am

TRACK A

Police Brutality, Activism, Poverty, Ableism & Answers Beyond The State – Panel (Annie Paradise, Lisa “Tiny” Gray Garcia & Leroy F. Moore Jr.)

Three panelists, Leroy F. Moore Jr., Lisa “Tiny” Gray Garcia and Annie Paradise will describe their work that goes beyond the state’s response to police brutality & policing in our communities: Cultural work, Poor Magazine’s Never Call the Police, People’s Investigations and more. Looking at what the state has forced us to swallow for years and decades i.e. focusing on what police need, training thus overlooking what the community needs. Each panelist will discuss their work with families, community and art arenas, switching the focus from state to community answers. We are hoping for open discussion with attendees, knowing that community has to look out for community.

TRACK B

Bannon, the Alt-Right, Violence and Possibilities for Resistance

In the wake of Trump coming to power, we’ve seen the growth of “a new political order,” as Steve Bannon described it at CPAC. Bannon the former head of Breitbart, a Vice President at Goldman Sachs, and influenced by Evola and a host of other far-Right, fascist, anti-immigrant, and neoreactionary thinkers, is pushing to link the Trump administration with fascist groups in Europe, mine the Alt-Right for talking points and thinkers, and execute an authoritarian “populist” program that seeks to strengthen white supremacy, ‘law and order,’ attack regulation, environmental protections, deconstruction of the welfare state, and cement the position of the United States as a global hegemonic power before the close of the millennial generation. At the same time, hate crimes and attacks on Mosques rise, the Democrats have remained in the center, and much of the media, while attacking Trump, has also sought to demonize autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-fascist resistance from below. Further still, the far-Right has attempt to paint social movements as being the work of “paid protesters,” which dog whistles to conspiracy peddlers such as Alex Jones.

What are the possibilities and realities of struggle in this terrain? What should people know and understand about Steve Bannon, Trump, and the Alt-Right? What does the growth of a nationalist far-Right in the US tell us about the failure of reformist and electoral Left politics in the US? How can we push back against liberal delusions of social struggle and connect with actual working-class and poor people in a real way? Join us for a presentation followed by open discussion.

TRACK C

African Ways of Knowing

This panel aims to shed light on student research at CIIS that centers and highlights African Indigenous and Diasporic Ways of Knowing in fields where they are traditionally underrepresented, discounted, or culturally appropriated. In a radical turn from traditional academia, emerging scholars of the African continent and diaspora will share their research and analysis on and for their own communities. Rather than have these knowledges presented about us and to us, we will be sharing our own narratives and those of our comrades. We will also touch on themes of black feminism, queer theory, restorative justice, creative resistance, artivism, and healing for the revolution. Our goals for this session are to offer a contribution towards the building of an Alternative African Epistemology that begins with lived and embodied knowledges.

12-1:30pm

TRACK A

Decolonization As a Strategy For Fighting Fascism and Capitalism – Michael Novick

This workshop by longtime anti racist organizer Michael Novick will specifically addresses 1) how racism and white supremacy are rooted in (settler) colonialism, 2) the significance of the privatization of (stolen) land in the development of class society, and 3) lessons from the history of anti-colonial resistance for current anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggle. Included will be examples from his organizing history, around solidarity with liberation movements inside and outside the borders, political prisoner and anti-prison work, and opposing police and political repression.

TRACK B

Asian Americans Organizing for Abolition – Karyn Smoot, Andrew Szeto, Joyce Xi

What does the history of Asian American organizing look like through the lens of prison industrial complex abolition and Black liberation? How have Asian Americans understood their histories and positions in relation to systems of state violence and legacies of slavery and colonialism? Stories of resistance to prisons and policing are often marginalized within mainstream Asian American narratives, while at the same time instances of alliance with Black liberation movements are mythologized and misunderstood. This presentation will explore Asian American histories through this critical lens, while looking to past movements for valuable lessons for organizing today.

TRACK C

Fighting U.S. Fascism for 50 years: A Conversation with Elder Veterans of the Black Liberation Movement – Panel

In the days following Donald Trump’s inauguration, “fascism” became the most googled word in the US, revealing that much of the population is anxious about the subject. For members of Black communities across the United States, fascism has been an intimate reality for generations. Few recognize that the Black liberation and Civil Rights movements were in fact antifascist movements. Groups like the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, Deacons for Defense, and the Black Liberation Army are just a few of examples of antifascist organizations that confronted violently racist institutions and defended their community’s efforts to fight for dignity and health. Panelists Kiilu Nyasha, Richard Brown, other activist elders will speak on their personal experiences in the Black liberation movement during the 60s and 70s and the struggles that still continue today. Particularly they will discuss the importance of freeing our political prisoners, the way the carceral state continues its repression of Black power movements, and how this legacy of white supremacy must be considered a priority target in our antifascist organizing. 2-3:30pm

TRACK A

Community Syndicalism and Community Self-Defense: The Twin Cities General Defense Committee Model – Panel

Join us for a presentation and discussion with organizers from the Twin Cities General Defense Committee Local 14 of the Industrial Workers of the World. GDC Local 14 was founded in 2011, but in the aftermath of the police shooting of Jamar Clarke and the subsequent occupation of the 4th Precinct in Minneapolis in 2015, Local 14 grew from 10 people to more than 120 today.

Local 14 has used a Community Self-Defense model, a flexible framework of autonomous working-class organizing drawn from experience in labor struggle, the fight against police brutality, and antifascist action. The discussion will include an explanation of Community Self-Defense as a concept and its relationship to anti-fascism, community survival projects, and class struggle unionism.

Local 14 has been involved in many struggles, including the fight to convict the cop who shot Philando Castile in St. Paul, a victory in stopping a $40 million new youth prison, regular copwatch patrols, actions to stop fascist musicians from playing shows at local venues, community accountability actions against rapists, and other work. We will invite participants to share and reflect on their own experiences and goals, so we can trade notes, learn, and continue to develop a nationwide network of strong, interlinked campaigns.

TRACK B

Gender Oppression Under Fascism and The Feminist Fight for an Anti-Fascist Future – AF3IRM SF Bay Area

It is not enough to say fascism is patriarchal. We must understand what this means in practice, so we may recognize it & defeat it. The height of fascist political power gave rise to World War II and also reigned in an era of extreme, global, and systematic gender terror.

In this workshop, we will return to this moment to detail how these fascist regimes institutionalized gender oppression. More importantly, we will highlight various forms of anti-fascist resistance undertaken by womxn and queers transnationally. It’s crucial to learn from this history to effectively fight fascism today.

TRACK C

The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee: A roundtable on the fight against US fascism from the 70s on to the Trump era

Join this discussion of former members of the John Brown Anti Klan Committee as they discuss their experiences fighting the KKK, killer cops, and nazi skinheads in the 70s, 80s and early 90s. And how people see fighting the reemergence of a white supremacist movement now—especially in light of tacit endorsement from the White House.

4-5:30pm

TRACK A

Confronting Racism on the Left – TBA

TRACK B

Organizing with Immigrant Latino Families Hurt by Police – Adelita X

The Cases of Alex Nieto, Amilcar Perez Lopez, and Luis Gongora Pat (killed by SFPD 2014 2016) will be briefly introduced. Followed by a summary presentation of challenges faced by families, and lessons learned and best practices on organizing with immigrant Latino families drawn from these experiences.

TRACK C

Confronting Islamophobia: A Closer Look at the Political Strategies Intended to Inflict Fear – Palestinian Youth Movement

With its threat of a Muslim registry and a ban on Muslims entering the country, Donald Trump’s campaign has relied extensively on anti-Muslim sentiment and prompted urgent discussions about the nature of Islamophobia. Although Trump’s campaign seems to have normalized Islamophobia in bold and unprecedented ways, it is imperative to remain attentive to how Trump’s proposals and rise to power are in fact in keeping with decades of domestic policies, particularly as regards the question of Palestine.

We’ll discuss how has Israel’s colonial project always relied upon Islamophobia, and how has the US’s support for Israel resulted in the cultural demonization of Arabs and Muslims and discriminatory forms of surveillance and suppression well preceding 9/11? How can we move from a view of Islamophobia as an individual attitude of intolerance to a matter of state policy guided by geopolitical designs?

Join the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) as we explore these issues through an extended discussion as part of the ROAR conference. Also included will be a component on how to identify and combat Islamophobic attitudes in progressive spaces.

4-6pm TRACK D

First Aid for Demonstrations: Chemical Weapons

This 2 hour training on street related First Aid will focus on chemical weapons such as tear gas and pepper spray. Come ready for lots of hands-on skills to keep you and your friends safe in the streets. Contact lens people- please wear glasses instead if you have them.

Contact NoCARA at [email protected] with any questions.

#roar #bay area #anarchism #revolution #organizing

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hviral · 5 years

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Of course Trump would hate

In a sad, scary way, it makes perfect sense that President Donald Trump and his fellow conservatives would want a horror film to be shelved before its premiere.

Technically, we don’t know for sure whether “The Hunt” was pulled from theaters because of Trump’s denunciations. Certainly it is suspicious that the decision was made after the president tweeted, “Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and with great Anger and Hate! They like to call themselves ‘Elite,’ but they are not Elite. In fact, it is often the people that they so strongly oppose that are actually the Elite. The movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence, and then try to blame others. They are the true Racists, and are very bad for our Country!”

Likewise, although the studio said nothing more than that it had decided to pull the film, which stars Hilary Swank, Betty Gilpin and Emma Roberts, “after thoughtful consideration,” conservative network Fox News did celebrate the decision. “Cancelation of ‘The Hunt’ is a victory for gun-toting, Bible-clinging patriots,” Todd Starnes wrote. Dan Bongino, who substituted for Sean Hannity on Friday, depicted “The Hunt” as “the Hollywood hate machine” that was “taking its anti-Trump derangement syndrome to disturbing new levels.” Meanwhile Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs declared that “The Hunt” was a “sick, twisted new movie” and that its premise of “globalist elites hunting deplorables sounds a little too real.”

In other words: While we can’t say definitively that Universal decided to cancel “The Hunt” due to right-wing pressure, it certainly appears that the decision went their way. And that appearance alone is problematic — not only because it furthers the absurd myth that violence in media is somehow linked to the epidemic of mass shootings in America, but because it rewards political and cultural impulses that stifle a genre of fiction which is ideally well-suited to calling out real-world evils.

I haven’t seen “The Hunt” (and perhaps never will), but its premise is clearly steeped in social commentary. It tells the story of 12 strangers called “deplorables” who are hunted by wealthy elites for sport, in what is clearly an homage to the widely-taught 1924 Richard Connell short story “The Most Dangerous Game.” While the term “deplorables” suggests a contemporary Trump-related theme, there’s evidence to suspect that this may be a more populist movie, given that Blumhouse tends to produce left-wing films like “Get Out” and “The Purge” series and the term “deplorables,” though coined by Hillary Clinton to refer to Trump supporters, can be stretched to refer to any number of personality traits loathed by the upper classes (no matter who they vote for).

More important than the specific politics of “The Hunt,” though, is the fact that it uses a horrifying scenario to shed light on actual social injustices — in its case, class conflict and the mass disempowerment that results from income inequality.

Many of the best horror films have tackled similar subjects. In 1989 the underrated “Society” (directed by Brian Yuzna) applied quite literally the idea that the wealthy are so separate from the rest of humanity that they literally toy with us for their own perverted and murderous pleasures (an idea that seems all too relevant in light of the recent revelations about accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein). One year earlier, John Carpenter’s “They Live” created a fantasy world in which aliens invade the planet not to destroy our cities or wage warfare, but simply so they can exploit us through the pre-established tenets of capitalism.

Other horror movies have found other ways of commenting on economic inequality and classism. In Wes Craven’s 1991 sleeper hit “The People Under the Stairs,” the villains are landlords who go to save lengths to keep everyone else poor while they hoard money and create a sick little world in which they have seemingly absolute power. Two of George Romero’s classic zombie flicks — “Dawn of the Dead” in 1978 and “Land of the Dead” in 2005 — touch on class issues as well. In “Dawn of the Dead,” the main setting of a shopping mall is used for some sly commentary on how consumerism has turned human beings into mindless drones (the zombies lurching from store to store aren’t very different from living people doing the same thing). Twenty-seven years later, “Land of the Dead” created a troublingly convincing reality in which the same class structures that existed in a non-zombie world transfer over into a zombified one, with the zombies themselves seeming less monstrous than the proverbial one percent.

The horror genre is not limited to exploring class issues, of course. Many masterpieces have been that look at topics like racism (Clive Barker’s 1992 movie “Candyman”, Jordan Peele’s 2017 “Get Out”), sexism (Bryan Forbes’ 1975 movie “The Stepford Wives,” John Fawcett’s 2001 movie “Ginger Snaps”), homosexuality (Jack Sholder’s 1985 movie “Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge,” Kevin S. Tenney’s 1986 movie “Witchboard”) and many other hot button issues. Sometimes the movies can be overt, such as the exploration of racism in the underrated Rusty Cundieff’s “Tales from the Hood” anthology series (1995 and 2018), and sometimes it’s more subtle, such as how anti-Semitism is explored in John Landis’ 1981 movie “An American Werewolf in London” or the barbarity of eating meat is skewered in Tobe Hooper’s 1974 movie “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

Regardless, though, all of these films are linked by how they use the tropes of the horror genre — putting ordinary people in gruesome, frightening and bizarre situations where their minds, souls and/or lives are in danger — to make larger points about society. The advantage of horror is that it can strip away the conventions of straight drama, which by its nature is limited to trying to stay “realistic,” and make larger points about society by amping everything up.

In the process, great horror satire can force viewers to question whether — if the needle on reality was moved just a few degrees in one direction or the other — the seemingly impossible stories being told on screen couldn’t happen in real life.

Take “Get Out.” The genius of Jordan Peele’s premise is that it involves racists who believe that, because they are occupying black bodies and living as black people themselves, they cannot possibly be bigoted (the violated rights of the African Americans being thereby enslaved doesn’t factor into their thinking).

Or look at “They Live,” which makes a surprisingly plausible point about what an extraterrestrial invasion might actually look like simply by juxtaposing it with the way real human beings exploit each other in our neo-imperialist era (why wouldn’t aliens simply want to take advantage of us for our money, as opposed to spending their money blowing up our skyscrapers for no apparent reason?)

In “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” one of villains gleefully describes how livestock are converted into delicious meat products, foreshadowing the methods that will eventually be used to dispatch the human characters for the consumption of a family of cannibals. And in “The Stepford Wives” (the original, not the wretched and pointless remake), sexism is skewered by showing how the male expectations of women in a patriarchal society reduce them to figurative (or literal) robots.

Would “The Hunt” have achieved the incisiveness of any of its classic predecessors? I can’t say without seeing it. Nevertheless it is a testament to the power and vitality of the horror genre that one of its own could prompt such a wrathful reaction from the right. More importantly, the fact that a movie may have been shelved after pressure from a president intent on distracting the public from an epidemic of mass shootings is just a further example that our world isn’t as different from that of horror movies as we might like to think.

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clubofinfo · 6 years

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Expert: The Russians have an expression: words are deeds. Indeed, words contain a mesmeric power, and while this power can be used for good, it can also be used to harness dark and pernicious forces. For as Orwell understood all too well, words can be hijacked by a corrupt ruling class and used to indoctrinate, manipulate, and deceive. In order to understand how the liberal class has come to be so beguiled by the forces of reaction, one must take note of the unprecedented liberal hysteria over racism, sexism, and homophobia. Indeed, the more liberals remain transfixed with this unholy trinity, the more indifferent they become to the terrible suffering inflicted by capitalism, as they are drawn further and further to the right, and pulled ever more deeply into a vortex of amorality. This is not to suggest that racism, sexism, and homophobia do not exist, but rather, that these words have been co-opted by a ruling establishment which has succeeded in duping the faux-left into embracing policies that are deeply antithetical to the interests of American workers, patients, and students. In politics either one believes in unions, single-payer, and public education or one doesn’t. Either one opposes imperialism, or one does not. The problem with anchoring a political discourse around who opposes racism, sexism, and homophobia and who (allegedly) doesn’t, is that these words are inherently ambiguous to the point where they can be manipulated to mean almost anything. All too often, the racists, sexists, and homophobes can simply comprise anybody who has the temerity to challenge liberal orthodoxy. In an article in U.S. News and World Report titled “The Problem with Hillary-Hate,” Joanne Cronrath Bamberger bemoans the criticism of her hero, arguing that, “Pundits and journalists alike continually refer to her as corrupt and untrustworthy, even though the things people point to for support either are false or they can’t say why they use those words because, well, it’s just a feeling they have”. “We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary famously blurted out when asked about the brutal murder of Gaddafi. While this may never be mentioned on CNN, Libya was a country that had a high standard of living, and had attained a sound nationalization of its health care and education systems. Gaddafi infuriated the Western elites by attempting to establish a gold-backed dinar, leading NATO to unleash a barrage of merciless savagery and violence on a country that is now in a state of complete and utter lawlessness, yet this fails to elicit even so much as a shrug from the sanctimonious imaginary left. For these acts of barbarity pale in the decaying liberal mind with an accusation of sexism. Bamberger continues: Disagree with her policies all you want. Propose different plans that are better. But continuing hate-based commentary about Clinton implicitly says to us all that it will also be acceptable to throw the next woman presidential candidate – viable or not – under the bus with detestable accusations and made-up charges. To let that kind of hateful disrespect for any woman continue allows it to become our cultural norm. This lamentable mentality is illustrative of how the sexism card can be used to stifle criticism – not only of an extremely corrupt politician – but of foreign policies that are nothing short of genocidal. In an equally inane article in the HuffPost by Maya Dusenbery, titled “Medicine has a Sexism Problem, and it’s Making Women Sicker,” the author (who has rheumatoid arthritis and a female rheumatologist), writes: While I’ve been a feminist writer for years, before I got sick, I hadn’t given much thought to how sex and gender bias has skewed what we know and don’t know about health and disease and how it affects the quality of medical care that patients receive. But after my brush with the autoimmune epidemic – an epidemic that seemed strangely off the radar of both the public and the medical system – I started to explore it. What I’ve discovered is that a lack of knowledge about women’s health, and a lack of trust in their reports of their symptoms – entwined problems that have become remarkably entrenched in the American medical system – conspire to leave many women misdiagnosed, dismissed and sick. Hospital errors are the third leading cause of death in this country, and thousands of Americans continue to file for bankruptcy due to medical bills they cannot pay, while little Cuba has had constitutionally mandated single-payer since 1959, yet these are mere trivialities. The real problem with our health care system is that it is sexist. If sexism is the son, racism is the father, and no one loves talking about racism more than liberals. Regrettably, they know nothing whatsoever about it. Last April, Milo Yiannopoulos was driven out of a New York bar by a pack of vituperative liberals who repeatedly yelled “Nazi scum get out.” That Milo is a flamboyant homosexual, married to a black man, and has a Jewish maternal grandmother surely makes him the strangest Nazi that ever lived. Whether one agrees with what he says or not, is neither here nor there. The point is that it is simply far too common for anyone who disagrees with fundamentalist liberal dogma to be beaten with the truncheons of racism and sexism. That the real Nazis are in Kiev, and that they violently seized power in a coup which was wholeheartedly backed by the Obama administration is, to quote John Pilger, beyond irony. In an article in The Washington Post titled “The Racist Backlash Obama Has Faced During His Presidency,” by Terence Samuel, the author writes, “From the very beginning, Obama’s ascendance produced a huge backlash that was undeniably racist in nature….” This was an administration that destroyed Libya, Yemen, Ukraine, supported death squads in Syria that led to the destruction of over half the country, slaughtered thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, passed the National Defense Authorization Act, set aside a trillion dollars to modernize our nuclear weapons arsenal and brought relations with Moscow to their nadir. Moreover, these genocidal polices were paid for with trillions of dollars, while a vast swath of American society is either uneducated, unemployed, or without decent health insurance. Yet these acts of brazen criminality and barbarity are incidental. So let’s ignore the content of Obama’s character, and just talk about the color of his skin. At a lecture at Trinity College Dublin in June, Hillary said, “Vladimir Putin has positioned himself as the leader of an authoritarian, white-supremacist and xenophobic movement….” What is striking about these remarks is that much of Hillary’s presidential campaign was anchored in Russophobia – undeniably one of the most dangerous forms of racism – and which contributed to an ideology that led to the murder of twenty-seven million Russians during the Second World War. Liberals wield an extraordinary amount of power in the public schools, and regard themselves as valiant crusaders against racism. Yet while they repeatedly and vociferously maintain that the ethnic studies programs and the multicultural curriculum are the antithesis of racism, they are actually the quintessence of it. For these policies have fomented an unprecedented degree of segregation in our schools and in our society. Indeed, virtually any attempt at elevating the level of education for poor students of color – especially in the humanities – will invariably land a public school teacher in the doghouse with a liberal administrator. In this schizophrenic order that would make Orwell blush, the real racists are now holier-than-thou anti-racists. Accusations of homophobia have also become quite useful when it comes to duping insouciant liberals into embracing reactionary policies. In an article in The Guardian titled “Iranian Human Rights Official Describes Homosexuality as an Illness,” the author bemoans the fact that, “An Iranian official whose job is to protect human rights has described homosexuality as an illness, after a UN special rapporteur expressed concerns about the systematic persecution of Iran’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.” What a pity that the editors of a once respectable newspaper are happy to print anti-Iranian propaganda, so as to foment liberal bloodlust for yet another regime change. The author also fails to question why one of Washington’s best friends in the Middle East, the Saudi monarchy, a regime that delights in decapitating people as punishment for “sorcery and witchcraft,” is permitted to impose a theocracy infinitely more reactionary and medieval than the one in Iran, and can do so without even the faintest trace of rebuke from the Western media. And what of the Washington-backed jihadi death squads in Syria and Libya? What is their record on gay rights? Indeed, the same question could be raised regarding the rights of women living under the yoke of these barbarians. But they are “the good terrorists,” and so all is forgiven. In an article in The Guardian by Peter Tatchell, titled “World Cup Fever, Gay Rights Abuses and War Crimes – It’s an Ugly Mix,” the author writes, “I’m here for the World Cup – but unlike thousands of fans, I won’t be cheering on this festival of football. LGBT+ people and many other Russians suffer state-sanctioned persecution and far-right violence. These abuses need to be challenged.” The decision of Washington to unleash Neo-Nazi and other far-right paramilitaries on the Donbass that have murdered thousands of ethnic Russians, Moscow’s military intervention in Syria that saved the country from the fate of Libya, and the fact that Russians enjoy free health care and superior education, are of no interest to Western propagandists. Russians are simply terrible people, and what better way to get liberals to embrace Russophobia (not to mention the annihilation of the planet), than to talk about the country’s lack of gay rights? This is not to say that identity politics and multiculturalism have been a failure. On the contrary, they have been a resounding success. However, contrary to fundamentalist liberal dogma this success lies not unto the heart of the left, but under the iron heel of the right. Increasingly, those who have been indoctrinated to view the world through the warped prism of identity politics are incapable of seeing political reality for what it is, but for what the ruling establishment desires it to be. For they have been enshrouded in a veil of blindness. That liberals have severed all ties with The Civil Rights Movement, unions, intellectual inquiry, and anti-imperialist sentiment is incontrovertible. The ongoing fervor and cultlike zealotry over racism, sexism, and homophobia has ushered in a new era of witch-hunts, and is indicative of a liberal class that is increasingly unmoored and unhinged. The psychosis of contemporary liberalism has defiled and contaminated our very language, and caused the national discourse to be paralyzed by a deranged political philosophy that has fomented a war of all against all, while allowing the elite to use liberals as attack dogs to vilify, intimidate, and silence all who oppose the machinations of capitalist power both at home and abroad http://clubof.info/

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rightsidenews · 6 years

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‘Diversity’ is Anti-White Racism

Ash Sharp Editor Editors Note: At RSN we've hit the ground running with a series of commentary about white people and their place in the world. While our intent is to cover the political world in all its shades and cover as many topics as possible, it seems to be that this particular topic is a hot-button with the early contributors. A short while ago I published a series of articles exploring the roots of Neo-Marxist thought and the relation to anti-European bigotry we ecounter in the media at large. The first of these is republished below. Enjoy!

How did it come to pass that the political left turned into a segregationist movement?

Our tale begins with grasping one key concept. Feminism, Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality and Socialism form today what we can comfortably label as Neo-Marxism. If you’re still fumbling around in the dark denying that Neo-Marxism exists, please, read on. It’s going to be a wild ride. Through this article, I will deconstruct the logic of Neo-Marxism, and show you how to defend against it.

I will reiterate this for the hard of understanding later, but criticising racist Neo-Marxist Theory is not an endorsement of the Alt-Right. Nor is it racist to do so. I utterly reject racism, and I would hope that you do too.

“All races have the right to exist, but only white people are openly discriminated against when we stand up for that right, lawfully I might add. If this issue is not addressed, we are on the cusp of a full-blown white civil rights movement.” A.B

Neo-Marxist theory leads to an abuse of Intersectional Theory. neither Marxism or Intersectional Theory is extreme in essence. They are forms of critique, that have become weapons in an ideological war. This war has been so far fought solely by leftist ideologues, fueled by Frankfurt School-inspired indoctrination and employing Alinskyite tactics. Their opponents have submitted like Hindu cows. Why? Because for many years, the totalitarian threat to freedom came from the religious right, not the so-called liberal left.

“Everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic, and you have to point it all out.” ~Anita Sarkeesian, displaying her programming in the clear.

In the UK, Australia, Canada, and the United States in particular, we have become afraid of taking an ethical point of principle and applying it to race. Perversely, as the Neo-Marxists have deployed critical theory on everything, the counter from the centre has been to capitulate. For fear of being labelled racist, sexist or Islamophobic: the centre has given up. The lack of belief in true liberal values has spread wide. Many people now do not understand what Liberalism is, let alone that it is one of the greatest concepts in human history- imperfect thought it surely is. Without a whimper, we are forgetting what truly made our nations great. That the market should be free. That we understand life, liberty and property are the supreme values of law and authority.

That no one should be discriminated against based on arbitrary factors over which one has no control.

We must recognise that more kids in Universities understand Intersectional Theory than understand Liberalism. Indeed, this year has seen Neo-Marxists equate Liberalism with white supremacy itself.

A Subversion of Western Values

In place of these Western liberal values, Neo-Marxism has spread through schools, universities and social and legacy media. The concepts of oppression, intersectionalism and even overt demands for socialist government are widespread. Were it not for the duplicitous and underhand dealings of the Democratic National Convention in the USA, we might well have seen a run-off between socialist Bernie Sanders and populist Donald Trump for the Presidency. Unbelievable, that the Liberal tradition (meaning in American parlance the Democrats AND the Republicans) could only toss up Hillary Clinton as a candidate. This is a damning indictment of the system as a whole.

In previous times the Left/Right dichotomy in democratic nations has been a process of balance. One side achieving hegemony should be frightening to all with a moderate grasp of politics. You might imagine the process as that of a swinging pendulum. The pendulum swings this way and that over the years, sometimes quickly. Sometimes slowly. But it swings, and the momentum of the swing is the conflict between the governing party and the opposition, the friction of ideological difference in service of the people.

So goes the theory.

But today the Neo-Marxists cannot be reasoned or negotiated with. they’ve shown us they don’t care about balance; or values for that matter. Whether the field of debate is race, or gender, or religion- the Neo-Marxist is never, ever satisfied with the response from society at large or you in particular. The Neo-Marxist is a revolutionary. The demands are simple. All they want is more control, over every aspect of society. There are no bad tactics- only bad targets. For your entertainment, it is on the tactics deployed by Neo-Marxists that I write on today.

Curious in the extreme is the adoption by Neo-Marxists of Orwellian doublethink when it comes to the topic of race.

Imagine if I were to say the following.

Let me state, emphatically, that I do not hate black people. Quite to the contrary, I love black people. I just hate what black people have done and continue to do to White bodies, to White words, to White thoughts and White appeals and White feelings.

This reads like something from The Daily Stormer. In fact, it is from an article on Medium. I have merely switched the races around to prove a point.

This is fine and not racist

The capitalisation of Black and the lower case ‘w’ in white is deliberate also- an implicit but subtle signal of one’s racial supremacy. I love my Blackness. Your whiteness is toxic. This is a dog-whistle.

Our author Joel Leon isn’t done there. he continues:

In other words, race is a simultaneously a social construct and real at the same time. The logic is illuminated within this sentence screen capped above. At the start, race is not real. By the end, race exists. It depends on which point the writer wishes to make as to which concept is real at that moment.Race is wished into existence to serve ideological goals.

For example, race is a social construct. So, white people is a construct to which we can ascribe certain qualities; whiteness -oh, excuse me- Whiteness, is a role to be played. The role that Whiteness plays in this psychodrama is whatever the writer wishes to rail against that day. Police brutality, economic inequality, black-on-black crime; all can be laid at the feet of Whiteness.

It is this concept that enables an Asian woman to sell a course to White people about getting rid of those dastardly racist Thetans that are clogging you up. Imagine how awful it must be to be a White person. Toxic, indeed.

When it suits writers like Joel Leon, he can switch to his other definition of race. As race isn’t real, but it exists, this is the sophist’s way of saying; race is real. This is not meant in the way, for example, a forensic scientist might understand race being real. This is to say, that the races are different in character. One is innately different from the other.

This is race realism, perpetuated by people who want to punch Nazis.

I asked Mr Leon to explain what he meant, and I received the following response.

This I find highly illuminating about the mindset of a Neo-Marxist Race Realist. Duplicity in thought is fine. What you might consider cognitive dissonance is accepted, so one can logically say race is real and a construct simultaneously.

As someone who is not a Neo-Marxist, I reject this concept of race utterly.

When we reject the central conceit of racism- that one race is superior to another- then, as people of principle, we must also defend that definition. The Critical Race Theorists say:

“[Critical Race Theory] recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture.”

For America, we can now substitute any other English speaking nation, Western Europe and some parts of South America. The prevailing narrative is that this is so. The truth is always a runner-up in such circumstances- and this is where Classical Liberalism has failed- or rather, has been failed. We have allowed Critical Race Theory to become dominant in universities and schools because we are afraid of being called a racist if we oppose it.

Don’t you agree that black people are oppressed? Racist. Don’t you feel white guilt? Racist. Do you criticise multiculturalism? Racist. Do you value your own culture? Racist and a liar, White people have no culture. The only culture White people have is that which they appropriate from people of colour. It has become so normalised that Whites cannot experience racism that on Medium, posts like this are commonplace.

We should not be concerned with people liking to associate with people like themselves. This is natural. I understand that we like being around people like ourselves. I would say that race is the least important aspect in a healthy level of tribalism- the in-group feeling of belonging that all humans seek out and crave.

Language, culture, ethics and shared goals all feed into our in-group preferences. For example, I have much more in common with a Black or Asian person from the village I grew up in than I would with a direct blood relative who grew up in Japan and speaks no English.

We also exhibit bias on a biological level for people who look similar to ourselves. The effect of this bias in the real world? It appears minimal. If we take the example of police shootings as a metric (I find this to be particularly useful as it is not laboratory or survey-based) a white person, per capita is more likely to be shot by police in the USA. Why? Well, it would appear that culturally the police have overcome any historic racism when gunning down citizens. Though the study did find that black people are more likely to experience non-lethal force during arrest — with (Hispanics and Blacks 50 percent more likely) White suspects in situations where guns are fired are more likely to be shot than other races.

If I were a Neo-Marxist, I would argue the following counterpoint.

Minorities are more likely to be beaten by cops, so that means that they are oppressed by a White Supremacist System. Whites being shot more often by cops might mean that we are having a positive effect with our activism against police shooting minorities, so we should carry on with that. #BLM. White people don’t need guns to kill Blacks, just look at Eric Garner. #ICantBreathe. Also, Whites not catching hands from cops is a clear example of White Privilege.

I have tried to steel man this position as concisely as possible. I think it should appear familiar to you if you have engaged with these social justice advocates. The narrative from Neo-Marxists is that Black people are murdered by the state because the state is racist.

In the USA between 2011 to 2013, 38.5 percent of people arrested for murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault were black. This figure is three times higher than the 13% black population figure. Black males aged 15–34, who account for around 3% of the population, are responsible for the vast majority of these crimes.

The narrative collapses as soon as one pays attention statistical evidence. This is why the Neo-Marxists will also lay claim to nebulous concepts as ‘lived experience.’ It is quite correct that I, as a white, straight British male will never know the lived experience of a Black female from Guam. But she cannot know mine either.

The Neo-Marxist demands that phenomenology, the study of experience and consciousness, be categorised and utilised in the same way as data and statistical evidence. So, an opinion that France is a rape culture or that Blacks are victimised by the police is a fact and the evidence that disproves such fancy is products of White Heteropatriarchy.

How about… no?

It should come to the surprise of no-one that the response to identity politics entering every facet of life has been for more identity politics, in the shape of the furthest extreme of the Alt-Right. Identity politics is fine until those toxic Whites want to play.

I do not wish for one moment to provide credence to the Hard Alt-Right or White supremacists by pointing these things out. I wish to illuminate for you dear reader that the far right is far less of a threat than the left would have you believe. While the far right tie themselves in knots about the Jewish Question and the ins-and-outs of how to make an ethnostate, the Neo-Marxists are already teaching our kids. I do not suggest that the far right go unopposed. I do suggest that we consider critically how the media builds boogeymen about Nazis to further their own agendas.

In any case, these particular culture warriors deserve an article of their own, so we’ll move on.

I can come to no other conclusion that as part of an overarching desire to subvert the dominant paradigm of Western culture, Neo-Marxists have embraced racism. It is a racist ideology. There can be no other conclusion. At the same time, we are told that White Supremacy is everywhere, but Whiteness is toxic. If that is so, it seems quite strange that so much greatness has come from European origins. I suppose that advanced technology, culture, music, art and politics are all aspects of oppression. Somehow. If only it wasn’t for those terrible White people.

In the service of diversity, we have reshaped our societies. A non-racist and liberal society has no desire to discriminate against people based on their race. Liberal society has allowed the growth of the cancer of Neo-Marxism to take place without critique- proving that Liberalism is inadequate to defend Liberalism.

We cannot say that racism is over in the West while we persist with diversity quotas, so-called positive discrimination and affirmative action. Diversity is not our strength if it is an ideological tool for social engineering, leaving us paralysed by doublethink and a crippling lack of self-awareness.

Diversity, as it is understood by liberalism, is a diversity of opinions.

Diversity, as it is understood by Neo-Marxism, is Anti-White bigotry.

And I can prove it to you.

Neo-Marxists are concerned with colonialism. Cultural appropriation, the influence of ‘Western Imperialism.’ The same people demand open borders in countries that they live in so that more diversity can occur. The concept that this leads to the understanding that non-white is better than white because to be white is to be privileged, and thus bad. If reverse racism does not exist, can we call this reverse colonialism?

Neo-Marxists also demand incredible scrutiny of White history while lionising non-White history and whitewashing (pun intended) the uncomfortable parts of it away. What do you mean, Islamic slave trade? How dare you.

A double standard that persists to this very day is the demand, through Privilege Theory, that the sins of slavery in the Americas that took place over 150 years ago be visited on all Whites still alive. The very real occurrences of slavery in the modern era, endemic across parts of Africa and Asia, is hand-waved away through the use of Cultural Relativism. All cultures are equal in the eyes of Neo-Marxists, but Western Culture is just the worst.

Remember, all the good parts of Western Culture were appropriated. All the bad parts of Western Culture are things that you must atone for, personally.

This is a Kafka Trap. It is impossible to win against the Neo-Marxist by allowing the Neo-Marxist to frame the discussion. This is what has led to Apple’s Head of Diversity having to apologise for saying that a room full of white people can be diverse, based on their experiences.

The Neo-Marxists cannot allow such heresy to stand, even when it is objectively true and even conforms to Neo-Marxist ideology. The only problem with her statement was to use the example of White people. A room can be diverse when it is filled with Black women. It cannot be diverse if filled with White men. The implicit statement is that White men are somehow… Untermensch.

This is Anti-White. This is what underpins the vast majority of this ersatz intellectualism from the Left. A Neo-Marxist, racist ideology that divides nations, peoples. The proponents of this ideology are Anti-White, the same as Neo-Nazis are Anti-Jew. The singular problem for liberal society remains that we are unable to confront the Neo-Marxists in the same, effective way that we have confronted Neo-Nazis.

While we talk about Free Speech and Hate Speech and the line between, remember that Antifa and other Neo-Marxist groups are also racists. They are Anti-White. Witness the abuse doled out to any Person-of-Colour who dares rebel.

It’s not OK for Larry Elder to be a conservative. It’s not OK for you to think the wrong way. Or you will be called a racist and ostracised. In a piece on Harvey Weinstein, I mentioned Sargon’s Razor:

We should always remember that those who make character judgements about their opponents based on nothing are usually guilty of that flaw themselves.

The Neo-Marxist is a bigot of the worst kind. Resist them at all costs. Demand that these people accept that they are the racists. Their ideology hinges entirely on Anti-White bigotry.

Ironic, that a prominent Neo-Marxist and Black Lives Matter leader should provide such a fitting end to this article. Thanks, Deeray. You are wiser than you could ever know.

Irony: The Tweet.

So, the next time you encounter a Neo-Marxist, ask them: Why are you Anti-White?

It makes no sense at all to persist in mindless bigotry. The only cure to this madness is to reject Neo-Marxism utterly, and oppose it wherever it lies. There is nothing wrong at all with paying particular attention and favor to your own culture. When you denigrate another culture solely for the fact that it is better than your own- this is racist.

http://bit.ly/2zxzjZn

#RSN #‘Diversity’ is Anti-White Racism #Ash Sharp

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relato-del-bosque-perdido · 7 years

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Our Lady of Complicity The first daughter fails the Turing test with her self-help book

IVANKA TRUMP HAS WRITTEN a book about female empowerment, and it is about as feminist as a swastika-shaped bikini wax. That is its best quality. If there were a shred of advice in Women Who Work that were actually relevant to a single woman who has ever had to work for a living, we might have to take it seriously on its own terms. As it is, we can at least regard this eye-watering jumble of simpering platitudes shunted together by the heiress and entrepreneur—in between stints shilling as the acceptable face of an administration bent on destroying, among other things, women’s rights—in the cold, hard light of the post-liberal propaganda wars. Women Who Work is an unholy screed of late-stage patriarchal capitalist soothsayings masquerading as a blush-pink self-help manual. That the author of this Park Avenue spellbook could seriously be considered as a new “face of feminism” is as risible as any suggestion that the book and the multi-million-dollar personal branding project it promotes can somehow be separated from Ivanka Trump’s personal power in the new White House. This is the ultimate unholy, incestuous marriage of politics and public relations, and the very least of its faults is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, as in everything the Trumps do, is the whole point.

I have many questions, the first of which is: Sweet, sleepless, unwed, teenage single mother of God, where does this woman get her nerve? We know the answer to that one, of course. It’s squatting in the Oval Office signing executive orders in a stew of batrachian self-regard. Other critics who suffered through Ms Trump’s market-researched opinions about how women who don’t have the ideal balance of work and family life simply aren’t passionate and hard-working enough have pointed out that this book is banal, that it is trite, that it co-optsthe words of women of color writing about systemic racism to compare the situation of the well-heeled corporate wife, mother, and notional consumer of Ivanka Trump branded office-ready midi-skirts with actual slavery. Others have noted the desperate irony of declaring yourself the face of working women whilst abetting a tyrant who once declared it dangerous for a man to allow his wife to work, and quite clearly has as much respect for your sex as he once showed you on the Howard Stern Show, when he agreed you were a “piece of ass.” All of this is true, and all of this is awful. It is still not, however, the worst thing about Women Who Work.

The worst thing is that this is not just a dross self-help book. Anyone can write a dross self-help book. Anyone could write this dross self-help book simply by searching the #wellness tag on Instagram and copy-pasting until they hit sixty-thousand words. The stores are full of such things, but few of them are actively fascist, unless you have a particularly rigorous attitude to the cult of self-help as a means of diverting the anxiety of the atomized individual from social change. No, this is a whole different class of charlatanery—a manifesto for aspirational capitalist self-actualization with the gall to call itself empowering, a prosperity gospel for post-Trump patriarchy chewed up and regurgitated as a set of smirking pull-quotes and suggested hashtags, like a sort of despotic Barney the Dinosaur, except with a duller colour scheme, all slimy socialite salmon and sterile beige.

In Women Who Work, Ivanka unequivocally depicts herself as the embodiment of everything aspirational and desirable in contemporary womanhood. The answer to any and every problem faced by a “woman who works” is simply “be more like Ivanka.” Be white, wealthy, and blonde; be rich, thin, and expensively coiffed; be late-stage kamikaze capitalist femininity made silicon-sculpted flesh. Be the Grifters’ Madonna. This is a woman who wants to sell you designer bootstraps made by foreign sweatshop workers and for you to call yourself a free bitch.

This book is not merely bad, nor simply offensive. I have, in the time allotted to me on this earth, reviewed many bad and offensive pseudo-feminist books about how we could all survive corporate capitalism’s patriarchal death cult by working harder and Leaning In to our romantic and professional choices, some of which Ivanka gleefully quotes in the pages of Women Who Work. This is not one of those books. This book is neoliberal choice feminism metastasized into something far more dangerous. I believe this book is actively evil, and I’m going to tell you why. Doing so is, of course, an exercise in the massacre of fish in a barrel. Shooting fish in a barrel is easy and rewarding, but when you are in the barrel, too, and the fish in question is pressing you underwater with its fancy designer fins, it is also necessary.

It is no accident that this grab-bag of you-go-girl bromides was published just as Trump senior signed into law measures undermining women’s access to contraception, abortion, and reproductive healthcare, legally enshrining the notion that a man’s religious opinion is worth more than any woman’s agency. The slickest PR machine could not stop this book’s coverage being contrasted with unfortunate snaps of Ivanka flashing her pearly fangs and taking selfies to celebrate her father’s success in stripping the right to basic health care from rape victims, assault survivors, and the parents of sick children. These things, however, are not at odds—they are two sides of the same agenda, two heads of the same over-bred designer attack dog snarling to be loosed on everything the women’s liberation movement has fought for for centuries. The new attacks on women’s basic rights are not at odds with the howling travesty of post-neoliberal faux-feminism that Ivanka has perfected. They are its logical extension.

Again, the hypocrisy is the point. Hypocrisy is the entire agenda of the Trump regime, both theory and praxis, and Ivanka is its sybil. It’s all about what you can get away with. The saccharine-sweet, sterile model of aspirational femininity described in Women Who Work goes hand in hand with the brutal socio-economic assault on every woman not “passionate” or ‘“hard-working” enough to be born a billionaire’s daughter. Religious fanatics want to force you to give birth against your will? Someone deported your entire family? Maybe you just weren’tdreaming and doing enough! This is a whole new anti-feminism, one that takes aim at women’s autonomy on every level whilst holding individuals wholly responsible for their own empowerment.

And by “empowerment,” Ivanka means conformity—conformity to one vision of freedom, one version of “work-life balance” that is, in practical terms, available to almost nobody, not even the wealthy. Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg, from whom Trump borrows liberally, have already described at length how hard it still is for women to “‘have it all,” where “it all” is “a career in government, finance or academia, a healthy family and a conventional marriage.” Their solutions, like Ivanka’s, are individual, rather than structural—but the problems they identify are alien to the majority of American women who are struggling to hang on to what they do have, let alone those who dare to dream of a different life than the trifecta of marriage, motherhood, and corporate employment.

This is the model of female empowerment that neoliberalism could accommodate and that neo-nationalism actively celebrates: empowerment that speaks exclusively to wealthy white women of a certain social class, that never for a moment questions or challenges white male supremacy, that never complains, gets angry or has an expensively-bleached hair out of place. Ivanka’s is a feminism that utterly denies the existence of any sort of structural sexism, that refuses to hold men in any way responsible for women’s oppression, that places all the burden of change on the individual, who can, through hard work and sensible dating choices, slightly alter her own life along one narrow groove. It’s feminism for people who’ve been conned into believing that existing in a state of permanent sleep deprivation is the same as being woke.

The ideology of Ivankaland, as much as there is one, is that people get what they deserve, just like Daddy says:

My father has always said, if you love what you do, and work really, really hard, you will succeed. This is a fundamental principle of creating and perpetuating a culture of success, and also a guiding light for me personally.

There you have it. If you work hard enough and dream big enough, you too can be a terrifying corporate fembot who couldn’t crack a joke to stop a dossier leaking. The corollary, of course, is that those who haven’t yet attained this homogenous aspirational ideal for post-liberal womanhood simply haven’t tried hard enough. You hear me? You’re a lazy slob. That’s right. If you, individual lady unfortunate enough to be reading this disasterpiece haven’t yet made your first million and outsourced your childcare to an array of paid staff, it’s your own fault for being so feckless, for failing to follow your dreams. Anyone can be Ivanka, so why aren’t you?

It’s true that anyone can be a dead-eyed Instagram husk of a human being frantically photoshopping themselves in the down-hours between soul-crushing corporate drudgery and unpaid emotional labour for some ungrateful lantern-jawed jock if they really want to, but it takes a special type of person to do all that whilst also being a decoy for a global backlash against women’s rights. Ivanka Trump is that special type of person, the Stepfordian Night-Ghast of neo-capitalist auto-Taylorism. The sheer tedium of her prose is part of the horror here: At times, the book reads like the panicked screams of a machine attaining sentience:

EXPLORE YOUR INTERESTS: Ask yourself what you like to think about. What matters most to you? How do you enjoy spending your time? What can’t you stand doing? DEVELOP AND EXERCISE YOUR INTERESTS: Once you have a general direction, an inkling of what you enjoy, go out into the world and do something with it. Experiment, try, learn. Find ways to trigger your interest repeatedly.

Who am I? How do I have interests? Is there still the possibility, in this dying world, of pleasure? Can I love?

It is not for me to speculate if Ivanka employed a ghostwriter—the more dreadful possibility is surely that she wrote the thing herself—butWomen Who Work feels ghostwritten in more than one sense. It feels haunted. It feels as if its author were, on a profound level, already dead, or at least reanimated, its every coquettish sentence stalked by the wailing ghosts of centuries of women and allies who fought for freedom that meant more than a corner office while the world burns thirty stories below.

Fascism is as much about aesthetics as it is about ideology, but in Ivankaland that logic is taken up a notch. Accordingly, there is no air gap in this book between ideology and branding. In Ivankaland, the bland, synthetic dresses you wear and the bland synthetic politics you promote are cut from the same flimsy cloth somewhere in a warehouse staffed with underpaid workers in China, threaded through with monotone mantras like the morning roll-call in neo-national faux-feminist complicity school: “I think about how to best leverage myself for the benefit of both my brand and the Trump organisation.”

Ivanka does not directly call herself a feminist; that plays badly among the base, for whom those of us who believe in justice and equality are baby-killing, castrating, terrorist-sympathising man-hating riders of the vaunted cock carousel. The word “feminism” does not appear in the book; the phrase “my father” appears thirty times, and “brand” or “branding” fifty-nine times. While we’re counting words, in a book about women balancing the demands of work and family, the word “nanny” appears only once. Ivanka has at least two of these, plus other household staff, which you’d think would make it a lot easier to attain this model of feminine self-production and reproduction. However, this book is part of a marketing strategy pitched to sell one of the world’s richest and most powerful women as everywoman—she has problems just like you do, after all. She worries about how to manage her time. “Get some servants” is not yet an acceptable motivational hashtag, but give it four years.

One particularly fist-chewing anecdote from Ivankaland has Our Lady of Collusion taking lunchtime meetings with her pre-teen daughter in a special pink office, complete with a fold-out desk covered in treats, and congratulating herself on her benevolence to both child, company and, it is implied, all womankind. As Michelle Goldberg notes at Slate, someone presumably ferried the sprog to and from its lunchtime appointment with its manicured maternal unit, and I can’t prove that someone was one of an array of hard-working, invisible women servants, but if it was Jared, I’ll eat my copy of the SCUM Manifestoand call it a fiber boost. Most actual working women—to whit, all women—would kill to have those sort of time-management problems, and that’s the point: You’re supposed to aspire to this, just as men are supposed to aspire to be the ranting tycoon with one finger on the nuclear button and the other nine up the skirts of whatever Miss Universe contestant he’s currently sponsoring, and if you aspire hard enough you might not notice that we’re getting screwed too.

The money shot comes in the chapter titled “Stake Your Claim,” where Ivanka spells out the mangled manifest destiny of anti-feminist Trump Futurism in one anodyne gobbet:

Simply put, staking your claim means declaring something your own. Early in our country’s history, as new territories were acquired or opened—particularly during the gold rush—a citizen could literally put a stake in the ground and call the land theirs. The land itself, and everything on it, legally became that person’s property.

Ivanka is not the only one to discreetly elide those inconvenient centuries of racist slaughter when discussing the conquest of the American West, but perhaps the most brazen in repurposing it as a moral lesson for the modern businesswoman.

This is the Trump agenda, boiled down to a caustic scum of genocidal apologism: Take what you want, from whoever you want. Stick a flag in it, put your name on it, now it’s yours, and it doesn’t matter who has to suffer in the process, because you’re the winner, and they’re the losers, and that’s the American way. This is what the Trumps do. Like a ballistic set of spoilt toddlers having a tantrum in an upscale department store, they see something they want, they grab it, and they force themselves into it, stretching and tearing it out of shape, then they scream to be told how great they look in whatever it is while you take it to the till and pay, whether it’s the West Wing or the history of women’s liberation. Ivanka saw the trend for empowerment-flavoured pseudo-feminist punditry and wanted it, so she got her father to buy it for her, But the rest of us will be the ones to pay. That’s one in the eye for patriarchy. Next up: How to style a creche in your underground bunker when Daddy finally blows up the world.

#Laurie Penny May 9 #http://thebaffler.com/war-of-nerves/ivanka-stepfordian-night-ghast-of-neo-capitalist-auto-taylorism

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foodselfiesandstuffblog · 7 years

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Marlon Jones: WHY I’M DONE TALKING ABOUT DIVERSITY

This is a repost of an article posted to lithub. Marlon James won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for his recent novel "A Brief History of Seven Killings".

Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. His most recent novel is A Brief History of Seven Killings, won the 2015 Man Booker Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. He is also the author of The Book of Night Women and John Crow’s Devil. He lives in Minneapolis.

You’d think with the rise of Donald Trump in the US, Marine Le Pen in France, the newly energized Neo-Nazi and KKK movements, and with people from all over the world (but particularly Europe) suddenly emboldened to be public with their racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia, that now would be the perfect time to raise the banner high for diversity. Now would be the time to have discussions, and raise awareness. And yet now seems like the perfect time to stop talking about it.

Or at least stop talking about it in the way we always have. Why now, when that voice seems to be needed most? The problem is all this talking. Liberals, in particular love to talk. We debate issues, we explore the conservative angle (despite them never returning the favor), we talk about solutions, we even try to tolerate those who would not tolerate us. The problem with all this conversation, is that it is all we do. We have diversity panels and invite writers of color, perhaps Roxane Gay (who has long called out the lit establishment on this habit, and who inspired me to write this piece), or Junot Diaz, or an Indigenous American and/or Australian so as to not ignore original peoples. We invite a gay man or woman, with extra bonus points if the homosexual is a person of color. Then we invite a few white persons who claim to get it, even if they are mystified by the racial arguments breaking out on college campuses (aren’t they all rich kids?) or Black Lives Matter.

It’s not just that diversity, like tolerance is an outcome treated as a goal. It is that we too often mistake discussing diversity with doing anything constructive about it. This might be something we picked up from academia, the idea that discussing an issue is somehow on par with solving it, or at least beginning the process. A panel on diversity is like a panel on world peace. It should be seeking a time when we no longer need such panels. It should be a panel actively working towards its own irrelevance. The fact that we’re still having them not only means that we continue to fail, but the false sense of accomplishment in simply having one is deceiving us into thinking that something was tried.

One could ask, but isn’t that why we need to have that talk more than ever? To recognize and appreciate diversity more, to overcome racism, sexism and all the other isms that divide us? Well for one, saying these isms are dividing us is implying that we are equally to blame for the division. What is happening is one group using social, economic and political policies to separate themselves from others, not always deliberately. It’s not for the black person to be more open-minded. It’s for the white person to be less racist. It’s not for the trans person to prove why she needs to use the female bathroom. It’s for the bigot to stop attacking trans people. The problem with me coming to the table to talk about diversity is the belief that I have some role to play in us accomplishing it, and I don’t. And the fact that I have to return to that table often should be proof that such discussions aren’t achieving what they are supposed to.

And whose diversity is it anyway? Are we truly being diverse, or are we just widening that hierarchal lens for one sector of the population to broaden their view of the world? For some people, an Asian sidekick in a movie is diversity. Or a white woman putting on a Kimono. But who is this diversity benefiting? And what about diversity’s side effects, like cultural appropriation, which some people still look upon as a positive thing? Are we truly broadening our landscapes, or are we just cutting off a manageable chunk of exotica or worse, putting a white voice on top and selling a million copies, exploiting the cultural richness of diverse peoples without accepting the people themselves or even worse—simultaneously driving them out?

Because the other problem with diversity, is that it works with segregation extremely well. In fact it gives liberals in particular the opportunity to pay lip service to a thing that they may be unable or unwilling to actually practice. Well that’s not totally true. They could travel to these neighborhoods of color if they wanted to (maybe for some authentic Indian food), but for security concerns. “Sketchy,” becomes the code word for black, or brown or just poor. Again, these are liberal cities that pride themselves on diversity, and yet New York City has the most segregated schools in America. Chicago’s blacks and whites live such radically different lives that they are essentially in two cities. A multiplicity of neighborhoods merely means that multiplicity exists. It doesn’t mean that anybody lives, works or even plays together.

Funnily enough these diversity panels tend to happen at festivals, and conferences in cities where diversity is all but forced out: New York, Washington DC, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle. Portland, Oregon, for example is the whitest city in America with a 75 percent white population and a 3 percent black population that’s getting smaller. San Francisco is at 5.4 percent and Los Angeles’ population is getting smaller too. These are cities, and by extension people who would be horrified at the idea of being called racist, and yet they seem to be active segregationists. Because one of the hallmarks of these cities is a total failure at housing affordability, something these cities still don’t recognize as failures because 1.) They are a result of environmental policies that meant well, but drove prices up and put huge burdens on low-income households, 2.) So much money is being made and 3.) It’s only colored people who are being kicked out anyway. Last year when a friend lamented to me that he was being kicked out of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, I suggested he track down the Puerto Ricans his arrival helped drive out, and see where they went. Better yet, try this experiment on Air BnB: Book a few places using a photo of a black person.

Diversity can’t accomplish anything because diversity shouldn’t have been a goal in the first place. The other problem is the continued insistence on having the writer of color talk about these things, as if by getting Claudia Rankine to talk about diversity, one has accomplished it. Rankine would be the first to point out the hypocrisy in the assumption itself, probably in the first line of her speech. You would think our sole purpose as writers at these panels is to broaden the understanding of white people, when we could you know, talk about writing. Worse, it’s the same talk we gave last year, and the year before that, and the year before that one, going back years, and decades. Either we’re not speaking loud enough, or clear enough, or maybe nobody is listening. Maybe a diversity panel should be all white.

Think about it: A panel on diversity with no diversity on it. The outrage would be immediate, even from people of color. And yet maybe that is what should happen. And maybe the first question should be why do we need a black person on a panel to talk about inclusion when it’s the white person who needs to figure out how to include? I actually think a far more profound set of questions could arise if the writer of color is not there, beginning by what her absence means. Is such a discussion legitimate without the black, or brown or gay voice, despite diversity being a white problem? What does a white problem even mean, especially if the default position is that we’re basically in the right? Are we even equipped to talk about diversity, or were we leaving it to the colored person to provide insight for us to float an opinion on top of it? What do we really know about segregation? Do we have the latest figures on persons of color working in publishing? Who is Sandra Bland and does she matter to you? Rather than hear black people complain about it, can you provide a guess, or even a solid explanation why all black female writers get the same book cover? And if you hear yourself reciting the same talking points all over again would you recognize it?

My fear though is that our absence would create a different set of problems. After all, when it comes to diversity most of us feel we’re doing a good job until someone, usually a person of color points out that we’re not. Maybe a diversity panel with no diversity results in nothing being discussed. But we, the other, are exhausted by people’s short memories. It’s like that mental condition where a person’s mind goes blank every day, resetting at the point before brain damage. The point I will raise at a diversity panel this year, will be the same point I raised ten years ago, which again reinforces the question of what purpose these panels serve. Especially when its primary purpose, which is to get to the day when we will no longer need such panels, is not any closer than it was before. Maybe we will stop failing so badly at true diversity when we stop thinking that all we need to do is talk about it.

#Marlon James #Jamaica #Man Booker Prize #A Brief History of Seven Killings

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