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The return of the son of the topic that threatened to eat the blog</b><br /><br />or, Properwinston returns.

Submitted by Prometheus 6 on June 21, 2003 - 4:10am.
on Race and Identity
Friends,

The rather interesting blogger Prometheus 6 (Earl) responded to my rejoinder today. To please myself, Earl's readers and hopefully you (Properwinston's readers) I want provide a quick response to his latest comments. Although Earl did graciously provide a link to Properwinston, so that his readers could find my comments in their entirety, the statements on his blog, Prometheus 6, thoroughly de-contextualized my comments. Even after reading Earl's latest comments, I still doubt that he fully understands the intended connotation of the "white people in black skin" comment. Earl finds irony in the combination of my reference to the source of this statement (an African-American professor) and the following sentence in which I express my distaste for subtle forms of the ad-hominem. Not to take away from Earl's discovery of irony, but I found this combination ironic as well. In fact, I intended the juxtaposition of these two sentences to produce irony.

A society that forces authors to "cover their backs" by referring to another person's identity cannot help but produce unexpected actions. As the omniscient Earl stands from his alter of "being oppressed," I'm forced to grovel for snippets of help from other "oppressed people." I must give credit, however, to Earl for being honest. He states in Prometheus 6 that in his dealings with "whites" (isn't it ironic that the deconstructionists of identity posit universals for "whiteness") the blade of racism is always present. In other words, Earl does not mind labeling another person's thoughts racist. He may use a handle to enter a conversation, but in the end, Earl's goal is not to be changed by the Other but to change it with the knife (only a metaphor of course). Does not this sound eerily similar to the assimilation model, a model that desires not a dialectic but a one way flow of ideas from the anointed to the ignorant. To help Earl out, I must let him know that I preempted the racism accusation not out of a repressed desire to see African-Americans remain in inferior social and economic conditions. Instead, the need to preempt comes from people like Earl, people who like to point the proverbial finger at others as opposed to looking within.

Hopefully not a racist (we have to wait for Earl's decision),

Grant.

Seems I picked a live one. I suppose decontextualizing and misrepresenting my statements in the process of complaining about my doing so to him is also intentional irony.

A wise man once said, "What-EVA!"

You know, after reading the email Grant sent the other day, wherein he asked for an aggressive response ("And please, don't bother using the handle, I can deal with the blade") it was obvious to me the gentleman is spoiling for a genteel fight. Unfortunately, I don't do ad hominem because it doesn't support an argument, and I don't do strawmen because they don't address one.

Actual discussion of issues raised, as opposed to accusatory speculation on what I might one day write, is welcome. Disagreements, suggestions, questions and big-ups are all grist for the mill. However, going forward, if anyone wants to carry on as Grant has they should email me with a link to their response. I'll post it here as a followup so anyone who wishes to can read it—it would be good if your permalinks work because I'll not be abstracting a single word to post here.

And yes, Grant, you have to wait for the next full article. Worse than that, I've changed my mind about emailing you when it's ready (pout-pout); you'll just have to check in periodically.

Fred at Rantavation comments on the fact of our anthropoid nature:
We are, by design, "tribal" (or small groupists, or...), and we have a biologically hardwired need still running wild in that deep part of our brains that makes us want to line everyone up into "us's and them's." It's our vestigial tail, we have to compete for scarcity of resources, even when there isn't any scarcity around. The "healthy (?)"
side to this leftover tribalism is "rooting for the home team," or "being true to your school." I wonder how, or if, we can rid ourselves of that tendency. As long as there are "easy targets" to separate people into 'us' and 'them,' (i.e. something as mundane as skin color or religious belief or geographic location) you're going to have people that are going to use that as a dividing factor. Personally, I think we'll all be a lot better off if everyone had brown babies...by that I don't mean "white folks in brown skins," but an elimination of a easy differentiator. But I don't have any good answers--and I wonder (ok, I fear--in the deep, dark night when I hear gunshots down the street over who looked at whom the "wrong" way) if our "evolved" brains can overcome our evolutionary instincts.

In my opinion, the short answer to whether we can get rid of this tendancy is no. Clumping up into tribes and such isn't a tendancy, it's a repercussion of our physical structure. All anthropoids are social. That aspect of our nature is older than humanity.

The long answer is that it's not a structural problem. It's a semantic problem. Talking to my daughter about this yesterday (yes, we talk like this on the regular, poor child…) she pointed out that being socio-hierarchical doesn't seem to present a problem to all the other land based-social animals. Humans have a problem because "we're intelligent enough to be bitter about being on the bottom."

Historically, skin color was roughly as significant as hair color in defining group membership… "race" as popularly understood didn't even exist as a concept until the 1800s. The concept is so perniciously persistant because it was both useful and fundamental in defining our social structure. And the success of the American social system, due in no small part to the economic advantages the implementation of race provided, means the concept has metastacized. It has become an overlay on the purely economic technique of colonialization and the premier method of defining group membership.

Since race is semantic, the answer isn't to overcome our original nature. We need what Confucians would call a "rectification of names." We need to redefine what group membership means and how it is attained. This isn't something I originally intended to address in this series but it's a worthy tangent and since I haven't hard-coded the topic I'll likely give some thought to it.

Now I have to get at a couple of the comments, and maybe do some normal-type blogging.

posted by Prometheus 6 at 6/21/2003 09:10:08 AM |

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