More isolation and alienation?

Just truth, is all. That's not enough for you? 

What do you hope to achieve posting stuff like that cnulan?

explanatory objectivity...,

Your solipsism is showing through again DW. Do you really believe that the associations I'm exploring would alienate the majority of blacks, humans? Or are you only speaking self-referentially as the representative of a specific segment of white Americans who act one way, but explain their actions in an orthogonal other way?

It is my anecdotally, analytically, and liminally stated view that the roots of American racism are unavailable to rational and rhetorical intervention. In the course of this thread, I've outlined an atypical frame of reference that goes to motivations outside the threshold of political correctness.

Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to demonstrate the factual or interpretive error inhering to this assemblage. Perhaps you can outline an alternative motivational framework that will provide a more onto accounting of American racist behaviour, with particular emphasis on the past 30 odd years in which white self-segregation, public school integration (busing wars), the so-called War on Drugs, the ongoing War on Terra, and now recently, the unintended Freudian self-disclosure made by a leading conservative moralist. I could probably spin it up like Samad did as an ideological difference, but I suspect that these ideological blinds conceal an underlying practical motivation having nothing to do with the conventional political just-so-stories.

Bennett clearly believes that black people are born criminals. His statement explains many things about his history. Bennett spent years warning about teenage “super predators” when the juvenile crime rate dropped. He continues to advocate for harsh sentences for drug crimes when rates of drug use have also dropped.

If you care to apply the lens of your ennobling behavioural interpretations to what I have outlined as a series of dots, then by all means, have at it.

I would love to see your interpretation of european seignurial imperatives. I would love to see your interpretation of the peculiar excesses of the Inquisition, Lynchings, and Abu Ghraib. I would love to see how you interpret the Culture War, the War on Drugs, War on Terra, and the media's imagistic War on Blackness - as all of the above emanate from a single ideological nexus.

If you can reconcile the rhetoric with the behaviours in a way that is more elegant and internally consistent, then I am your eager student.

I won't be holding my breath while I wait.

DW, read the article cnulan linked. It's actually pretty mild stuff.

It's actually pretty mild stuff.

You have to understand. DW doesn't want to address any existing problems...pointing out existing problems is seeking isolation because no one wants to hear it.

"My opinion of the histories with which I'm familiar leads me to believe that Moorish Islamic seignurialism has shown itself far and away the most civilized and tolerant of diversity."

While what you say is no doubt true (especially when you compare Moorish Spain to its European neighbors), I think the degree of “tolerance” practiced there is highly overstated. Granted, the Moors in Spain developed an oasis of advanced learning in their Andalusian enclave, and they seemed somewhat accepting of "others" (especially Jewish scholars) in their presence, but the society they created was riven with divisions, secular and religious, and eventually came under the rule of Islamic fundamentalists (the Almoravid and Almohades dynasties) who could and perhaps do serve as models for today's jihadists.

Many black scholars (past and present) have succumbed to the tendency to idealize and romanticize the Moors (this is generally not the case with Van Sertima and “Golden Age of the Moors”). Earlier treatments of the subject by Du Bois, J.A. Rogers, de-Graft Johnson, and John G. Jackson, were produced with a decidedly vindicationist agenda in mind. While their scholarship was by no means faulty or flawed, they were in the unenviable position of having to both define and defend the humanity of black people every time they put words to paper. Their intention of correcting the omissions of Western history and of setting the record straight about African cultural and intellectual achievements, while commendable and necessary, nevertheless, generally failed to situate Moorish culture within the larger context of Arabic hegemony and its promotion and expansion of color prejudice and racial slavery. Those scholars and their groundbreaking studies, however, laid the foundations for Van Sertima’s compilation.

Two recent books by Menocal and Rubenstein continue this theme of tolerance. Menocal’s “Ornament of the World” (2002) and Rubenstein’s “Aristotle’s Children” (2003) both seek to present a more contemporary analysis of how everybody in Moorish Spain “got along” Rodney King style. The sub-title of Menocal’s book--“How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain” (italics added)--stretches the point to the absurd. Tolerance, according to my Random House Dictionary, denotes “a fair, objective, and permissible attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one’s own. Despite the possibility of some confusion on this point, tolerance does not connote or imply acceptance. Underlying the concept of “culture” is the notion that it consists of commonly “accepted” and agreed upon beliefs and behaviors. From this perspective, Menocal really seems to be referring to the pragmatic and expedient manner in which Jews, Muslims and Christians grudgingly cooperated with each other to advance their own cultural causes rather than a common cultural cause or identity. Charles J. Halperin, in an essay titled, The Ideology of Silence: Prejudice and Pragmatism on the Medieval Frontier (1984) contends:

The demands of religious prejudice prevented the formulation or articulation of any medieval theories genuinely equivalent to modern concepts of peaceful coexistence or detent. One might admire, intermarry with, trade with, even borrow intellectual skills from the infidel, but never concede the legitimacy of his religion. To admit the legitimacy of the religion of the enemy would have automatically called into question the insistence upon the exclusive religious superiority of one’s own. Since religion subsumed under it one’s conception of the political and social order—one’s way of life—such ideological tolerance would have undermined the social, political, and cultural foundations of one’s own society and polity. For this reason, exchange at the intellectual level, inextricably tied to religion, became even more difficult to achieve (465-466).

For Menocal, tolerance means these hostile religious groups were able to find, through a process of “unconscious acceptance,” some “positive” or “productive” mechanism for dealing with internal and external contradictions to their belief systems and behaviors. But such “positive” outcomes, as Menocal describes them, again point to a kind of pragmatism based on “self” rather than “mutual” interest. Here is how Menocal iterates the function and products of this Andalusian “culture of tolerance:

It was there that the profoundly Arabized Jews rediscovered and reinvented Hebrew; there that Christians embraced nearly every aspect of Arabic style—from the intellectual style of philosophy to the architectural styles of mosques—not only while living in Islamic dominions but especially after wresting political control from them; there that men of unshakable faith, like Abelard and Maimonides and Averroes, saw no contradiction in pursuing the truth, whether philosophical or scientific or religious, across confessional lines. This vision of a culture of tolerance recognized that the incongruity in the shaping of individuals as well as their cultures was enriching and productive. It was an approach to life and its artistic and intellectual and even religious pursuits that was contested by many—as it is today—and violently so at times—as it is today—and yet powerful and shaping nevertheless, for hundreds of years (2002:11-12). 

Ironically, Maimonides’ pursuit of “the truth” led to his conclusion that genocide was an acceptable means to prevent the spread of false doctrines advocated by Muslims. Maimonides and his fellow Iberian intellectuals may have pursued and found truth “across confessional lines,” as Menocal claims, but such truths only became valid within the strictures and dogmas of their own religious ideologies.

Lastly, I should point out that slavery and color prejudice were tolerated in Moorish Spain. Brunson and Rashidi also make this point in their essay published in the “Golden Age of the Moors.”

Since this post has gone on long enough, I will use the next one to float a few dots of my own...

Concubinage and intermarriage clearly were factors in the assimilation of "others" into the Arab populations. While Arabs were castrating black males to make them house servants and harem guards, they were having children with black females.

now I'm not saying that this is an exact description of the broad American seignurial modus operandi, and I'm not saying that the American MO is completely impermeable - the generative impulse can reverse override cultural permission settings from time to time in outlier areas. however...., even there, these permissions are still set exceedingly tight.

The kernal of American haplotypic power (kinship) - on the other hand - is completely locked down and black men are completely denied access at that level of the system.

Muslim colonization of Europe and Europe’s exposure to Islamic culture created the conditions for the acquisition and development of the ideology and technology that made European global conquest possible after the fifteenth century. The wars with Islam, religious and military, functioned as a catalyst in fostering a kind of European social consciousness and solidarity specifically organized around Manichaeanistic notions of “self” and “other.” Enrique Dussel, in his analysis of the formation of modernity, makes the following useful observation:

The Iberian Reconquest, with the extreme sectarian violence it unleashed in its final stages (broken treaties, elimination of local elites, endless massacres and tortures, the demand that the conquered betray their religion and culture under pain of death or expulsion, the confiscation and repatriation in feudal form of lands, towns and their inhabitants to the officers of the conquering army), was, in turn, the model for the colonization of the New World.

The European “self” in its confrontation with the non-European “other” conceived and constructed its concept of difference from the monotheistic dichotomy of believer/non-believer and the binary terms of Manichaean oppositions. The “black” presence in Iberia as Muslim conquerors and non-Muslim slaves inspired and influenced the transfer of the color code of the Manichaean allegory from the theological realm of the symbolic and abstract to the existential identity of certain human groups. The “black” color-coding of infidels and pagans and their “demonization” furnished a basis for later European scholars to speculate and conclude that the differences between Europeans and “others” were not merely ideological but innately and immutably biological.

Moses Maimonides, the influential medieval Jewish scholar—who was born in Cordova in 1135 and who later fled to Cairo to avoid persecution—wrote an important text that merged Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish theology in presenting his analysis and interpretation of Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures. The Guide for the Perplexed, a major philosophical treatise of the twelfth century, included an argument for endogamy as a barrier against idolatry (in Maimonides’ view intermarriage with non-Jews posed a threat to the strict observation of Jewish laws and traditions). In constructing his argument for “good lineage” Maimonides defended the legitimacy of Hebrew genealogy in the Torah and demonstrated how it served to establish and preserve Jewish identity and integrity. The following passages taken from an allegory he devised to demonstrate the relationship between faith and reason illustrates how the essential intellectual components of racial ideology assumed a prototypic form in the late Middle Ages. Maimonides argues that: “the extreme Turks that wander about the north, the Kushites who live in the south, and those who are like these” exemplify groups who are without religion altogether and therefore without reason. He goes on to make this critical observation: “I consider these as irrational beings, and not as human beings; they are below mankind, but above the monkeys, since they have the form and shape of man, a mental faculty above that of the monkey.” With this preamble Maimonides makes the following assertions concerning Muslims and the descendants of Ham, whom he believes hold false doctrines: “They are worse than the first class [Turks and Kushites], and under certain circumstances it may be necessary to slay them, and to extirpate their doctrines, in order that others should not be misled” The late Ivan Hannaford believed that Maimonides statement marked “the first time in Western thought people are described as beyond the bounds of rationality; they are not human. Others, rational but lacking in faith, are perceived as so dangerous to the position of the rational that their extirpation from the face of the earth is justified.”

Maimonides’ views are echoed five centuries later when Enlightenment-era European scholars, reifying the abstract notion of “rationality” as one of the distinctive traits of European character and civilization, set about the peculiar business of establishing the tenets of scientific racism. One need only consult the works of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) John Locke (1632-1704), Voltaire (1694-1778), and Montesquieu (1689-1765), among others, for salient examples of how such ideas developed and were expressed during the height of Europe’s global conquest. The following illustrative passage from the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) appeared in his essay: Of National Characters (1753):

I am apt to suspect the Negroes and in general all the other species of man (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent in either action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences…. In Jamaica indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ‘tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.

Hume’s sentiments were grounded in ideas about “black” people that developed from medieval precursors and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In exercises in sophistry perhaps unparalleled in history, Europeans subjugated and degraded “blacks” through their systems of forced servitude and then pointed to their degradation as justification for their enslavement. Frederick Douglass, in a typically eloquent passage, exposes this discursive tactic of white supremacists that is known in today’s parlance as “blaming the victim:”

The evils most fostered by slavery and oppression, are precisely those which slaveholders and oppressors would transfer from their system to the inherent character of their victims. Thus the very crimes of slavery become slavery’s best defense. By making the slave a character fit only for slavery, they excuse themselves for making the slave a free man. A wholesale method of accomplishing this result is to overthrow the instinctive consciousness of the common brotherhood of man.

Despite its social and religious turmoil, the Iberian Peninsula was perhaps the greatest intellectual center of the late medieval world. Within its complex intellectual systems it also comprised a think tank and training ground for the invention of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the European colonial systems that administered it, and the religious and proto-racist ideology that justified and sustained it. However, as Enrique Dussel points out, the Americas involuntarily served as the geo-social laboratory where such theories took the form of practical experiments in genocide, forced migration, and forced servitude based on color. War-torn Iberia also played a decisive role in the social construction of “black” and “white” identity. James H. Sweet notes: “In Iberia, once the traits of the infidel and the slave became associated with blackness, race became the driving force in the formation of Spanish and Portuguese attitudes toward sub-Saharan Africans.”

These are a few of my dots for this discussion. They also connect back to earlier dots of yours that addressed inter-marriage. Had to cut it short. Gotta run.

One more dot ...

"The kernal of American haplotypic power (kinship) - on the other hand - is completely locked down and black men are completely denied access at that level of the system."

Is the kernal the seed or sperm, the ultimate seignurial sign, reified and codified in the one drop rule?

Looking for more dots later.

Is the kernal the seed or sperm, the ultimate seignurial sign, reified and codified in the one drop rule?

Is our social ecology the product of evolution or intelligent design?

IMOHO - the one drop rule is one among myriad others brah..., reading the maimonides post - and feeling the cumulative effect of one megaton dot after another cause the hair to stand up on the back of my neck to an ambient mixture of x-clan samples playing in my head - I am certain that I have no ambitions predicated on the goodwill or wellbeing of either of the seignurial regimes squaring off on one another for the final go round in their centuries long battle...,

that peacock/peahen spectacle has almost nothing to do with us. I believe this leaves us free to busy ourselves with the serious Work of black cognitive activism defined strictly on our own terms.

"Is our social ecology the product of evolution or intelligent design?"

Evolution, no doubt. Nothing like the blind leading the blind.

But it's also ill-telligent designer fabulous. That double helix looks like the must have cosmic accessory for the big bang generation.

I did not follow this thread during its formation but I have just gone through it and read with great interest the notes and comments posted by Ourstorian. I learned a great deal about an area where my knowledge and reading has been fairly limited. Thank you. I will have to print out your comments and make an effort to get my hands on some of the books and monographs you mentioned.

DW, read the article cnulan linked. It's actually pretty mild stuff.

I thought so myself until I saw the drawing of Bennett with a noose around the neck of a black baby captioned with parallels to the holocaust.

But even then...to go further and suggest that non-black America dreams of an America where all black people have been killed, a Nazi outcome, ...

It's not that I'm particularly offended, it sounds more nutty than a sincere accusation, but I wonder why someone would suggest such things...unless they were advocating a future of isolation and alientation from "ordinary" America.