Home » “Whiteness” as quasi-religious dogma in the New Anti-Racism Church

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“Whiteness” as quasi-religious dogma in the New Anti-Racism Church — 33 Comments

  1. Wokeness – kompulsory Kool Aid konsumption. Jonestown for an entire country.

    Jim Jones for Justice!

  2. According to the “woke” left, whiteness, however it is defined, represents an original sin which can never be expiated and for which there is never any real redemption; privileged billionaires and “woke” multinationals (as well as ordinary SJWs and comfortably entitled “progressive commissars”) can, nonetheless, purchase indulgences in the hope of appeasing at least some of the “social justice” grifters running the various BLM/CRT/1619 and “diversity consulting” rackets”, while drawing a clear distinction between themselves (“noble and virtuous”) and the kulaks of flyover-land who are, of course, deplorable and completely irredeemable.

  3. IMO, this is not about whiteness and blackness per se. The Marxists have chosen race as a way to divide us into oppressors and the oppressed. When you think of it in those terms you can see what they’re aiming at. Examine the Chinese Cultural Revolution. All the same skin color, but divided by classes – oppressor and oppressed. The goal is for the oppressors to give way to the oppressed and create EQUITY. (A Marxist government) Whenever you hear CRT, racial equity, or Diversity Inclusion and Equity (DIE) know that you are being indoctrinated to accept the revolution. It’s a clever ploy and a lot of people don’t see what’s behind it. It ain’t about race. “The issue is never the issue. The revolution is always the real issue.”

  4. I’ve mentioned before Dennis Prager has a saying that ‘when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing they believe in anything’.

    Humans have a deep need to believe in some higher power or just a purpose for it all. The Judeo-Christian belief system has been the best most productive set of beliefs in human history but it wasn’t the first and won’t be the last.

  5. I read mkent’s comment a few times.

    I was only slightly surprised to discover that the mostly useless COVID statistics for my county included the racial categories “white Hispanic” and “other Hispanic.” That is particularly nifty because people in both groups can be applauded for supporting “my people,” meaning Hispanics; whereas people belonging to the first group can also be pilloried or denigrated because of their whiteness, if they step out of line. Think George Zimmerman.

    I agree with J.J., but would put it this way: Whiteness = Successful. Or better yet, whiteness is the illegitimate route to success.

    One could say that success comes from hard work, but that violates the concept of “You didn’t build that.” Successful whiteness comes from profiteering off of other people’s labors. (See the connection? Insert rhetoric about the white power structure and systemic racism here.) It’s much better to become successful through the benevolence of your quasi-socialistic community. Then you might be free of the original sin of whiteness, as long as you promote socialist dogma and protect and promote BIPOC’s as a privileged class.

  6. It’s a double-edged sword. They really ought not to be swinging it about like a shiny new toy. They think that they are the only ones who are discovering the joys of Forbidden Thoughts. They are not.

    Rule 0 (Always): Do Not Wake People Up. Ever.

    Will. Not. End. Well.

  7. Bear in mind that BLM/CRT is just the latest New Left iteration to take power.

    They tried a more conventional Marxist “Capitalism vs Proles” route with Seattle WTO riots (1999), then with Occupy Wall St (2011) to initial fanfare but little sustainable effect.

    However, they went back to the racist well with BLM and magic happened. They drew in idealistic youth, Hollywood, postmodern academia and big corporations (no longer threatened by straight Marxism). Brilliant!

    Make no mistake, though, all this can be traced back to the 60s New Left. Then further back, of course.

  8. I guess I’m white hispanic. 3/4 Scots-Irish-English, 1/4 Mexican.

    I haven’t seen that option (yet) on the race category questions I encounter and check “Decline to answer.”

  9. Problem is that Race Exists. One can logic chop day and night and exhibit edge cases, but still, Race Exists.

    It exists more so than any other division the Left have tried to sow.

    They’ve worked through a bunch of spurious, artificial, and harder to pin down distinctions over the decades and exhausted all of those options. Class didn’t work, Pedagogies of the Opressed… Ho hum… Orientalism… Yawn…. Intersectionality is to Laugh… but Race. Race Works. Been Proven as well as anything can be proved. So they *will* push that Big Red Button. Frog, Meet Scorpion.

  10. @Huxley:

    “I guess I’m white hispanic. 3/4 Scots-Irish-English, 1/4 Mexican.”

    So you’re tight with money, prone to bouts of poteen-fueled aggro, stand-offish, and disappear for a while after lunch?

    I just want a census category for Mischling Misanthropes. Not much to ask for, really.

  11. I’m 98% Celtic including Breton, and 2% Huron.
    So I lie around awaiting something requiring adrenalin, would steal somebody’s cattle if I knew where to sell it, hire out to fight, try to memorize “Cattle Raid of Cooley”, and liquor really does me in.

  12. Re: Race Exists…

    Zaphod:

    No argument there, at least not until enough intermarriage and we’re all olive-brown. But I suspect by then we’ll also have merged with AI technology or we’ll be pets to our AI overlords if there are enough “Thou Shalt Not Kill Humans” safeguards still in place.

    So race is a great lever, but I still don’t quite understand how so many whites are buying into an effectively anti-white agenda. Do they think they can ride that tiger forever?

    The Nazis were “sensible” enough to pick on a 1% minority.

  13. @Huxley:

    Lubyanka Cellars ran red with the blood of professional Tiger Riders.

    I just don’t think that Humans learn well. The best we seem to be able to manage is to codify things we have learned as Traditions/Culture. And the past Century+ has been a Great Unlearning the likes of which has not been seen in the West since the 500s or 600s.

    So yes, it’s insane for GoodWhites to think they can ride this tiger. But they’re going to do it anyway.

    The Nazis were bonkers to pick on the Jews. Had they stuck to giving it to the Slavs and the Gypsies (find me an honest man who has encountered *them* outside of a brief passage in Smetana’s Moldau and still claims to like them), they’d rule from the Atlantic to the Urals and have a Moon Base with Lasers. Should have had their Jew Exterminating Neurons working overtime on designing and producing Hugo Boss Russian Winter Wear.

    🙂

  14. Re: Great Unlearning…

    Zaphod:

    George Leonard was a senior editor at “Look” magazine and credited as the third founder of Esalen, the Human Potential Movement center at Big Sur.

    In the 70s Leonard gave an address to a convention of the similarly minded. At that time there was a great feeling of optimism, at least in California, which Leonard had succumbed to. He shouted to the crowd, “Fuck history!” Applause.

    Leonard came to regret that moment.

    Some years later he wrote a short book, titled “Mastery,” about how difficult real progress is even at the personal level. It’s still a book I refer to now and then.

  15. @Huxley:

    He really ought to have known better by the age of ~50 in 1970. Still, I guess they were Heady Times, when everything seemed possible, or so I’ve heard. My earliest distinct memories are from that year and mainly concern a large chocolate Easter Egg. Alas no Madeleines and Tea. I come of peasant stock. Much consciousness development was occurring even sans hot tub with a view.

    Unpopular opinion around here, perhaps, but I believe that even petty bigotries and hatreds are evolved prophylactic societal habits and ought to be curated and husbanded. Note, I did not say apply liquid fertilizer and force with grow lamps. We suppress them and then get all surprised when the Bigger Badder Horrors they inoculate against arise. Ask a Bosniak. Chesterton’s Fence isn’t necessarily a White Picket Fence — sometimes it’s a thorny hedge.. or could be Razor Wire and mined.

    Leonard was certainly right that Personal Development is Hard. So much more then Societal Development.

  16. Some people we should welcome into the Whiteness Caucus.

    https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/06/rep-byron-donalds-to-cnn-as-a-black-man-in-america-im-allowed-to-have-my-own-thoughts/

    https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/stand_up_and_cheer_for_mark_robinsons_viral_gop_speech.html

    PS A note to those who are in the active political ranks (thinking of Spartacus particularly): the North Carolina GOP put up what someone or group thought was a nifty logo, but because of the positioning of the center diamond, it “reads” as NO GOP rather than NC GOP.

  17. @Richard Aubrey:

    I’ve got a very annoying ex-colleague who paid mega silly money for a hair transplant. Be much obliged if your 2% could 100% scalp the @#$%er.

  18. Still, I guess they were Heady Times, when everything seemed possible, or so I’ve heard.

    Zaphod:

    They were indeed. I still say psychedelics played a larger part than they are credited.

    The Mad Acid Chemists weren’t entirely wrong in their strategy to change the world by dosing as many millions as possible. (“The Sunshine Makers” is an excellent doco on two of these chemists.)

    The Jordan Peterson / Roland Griffiths interview I mentioned yesterday about current psychedelic research was remarkable in the way Peterson became more excited than I’ve ever seen him.

    Usually, he is fighting the very necessary rearguard battle in the current culture wars and rather grim. In this interview he was seeing a path forward to creating experiences of lasting transformation via psychedelics in Griffiths’ psilocybin resarch at Johns Hopkins, and quite excited.

    Of course, Peterson and Griffiths wish to avoid the mistakes of the 60s psychedelic movement. Though it’s hard to miss a similar optimism.

    Whether psychedelics can deliver on such promises remains to be seen. My point is that they do raise such hopes that “this time it’s different.”

    Fuck history, the man said.

  19. @Huxley:

    It’s been argued that recreational drugs and increasingly nootropics have played a much larger role in Hedge Funds and Big Tech than is generally acknowledged, too:

    https://www.newser.com/story/165490/meet-the-drug-thats-powering-wall-street.html

    The most successful man I ever worked for was big on MDMA plus occasional other recreational drugs and spent a good deal of his time juggling uppers and downers and generally self-medicating. Unbeliever would say he got into a vicious circle. A more positive view would be that he was constantly monitoring self-state and this is more than can be said of most of us.

    As for the Psychedelic Question. Sure lets run the experiment, but can I watch from Mars Base?

    Jordan Peterson is smart enough to be worried by what he’s become and what people are projecting onto him. A transcendent Stranger in a Strange Land ending might work well (just not for him).

  20. Zaphod:

    I’m sure the next Voyeur probe can drop you at Mars Base…

    I hadn’t heard of Modfanil, though I love the film, “Limitless.”

    From what I hear microdosing LSD is big in Silicon Valley. Or at least was a couple years ago. Hot/Not?

    I read a fun book on microdosing by a lawyer-turned-journalist who testified that her family much preferred Microdosing Mom over Psycho Mom.

    Paul Erdos was one of the most prolific mathematicians of his time. He was also a very disciplined user of amphetamines.

  21. Zaphod:

    Jordan Peterson is in some dangerous crosshairs and he does know it. I wouldn’t say he’s at an MLK level. Still, he’s a brave man.

  22. Wow! Elevated to the front page on the best thinking-man’s blog on the internet. I’m truly honored.

  23. One problem for the “religion of woke and/or the left” is that it is a religion where “heaven” is to be achieved on Earth and there is no afterlife. That means you have to get heaven going before you die. And that is why they often get “in a hurry” and and come out boldly too soon.

  24. So…I was reading about the cancellation of Queen Elizabeth II as democratically decided by a Common Room of the Magdalen College of Oxford, which was (surprise) initiated by a Woke American and carried by the vote of the many international students, and that seemed like a good example of Quasi Religious Dogma.

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15217727/amercian-student-led-motion-remove-portrait-queen-oxford-2/

    THIS is the portrait of the Queen which has been dumped in a store cupboard by woke Oxford students.

    A committee of students in Magdalen college agreed the painting of Queen Elizabeth would be taken down because she “represents colonialism.”

    A majority of 10 to 2 members of the Middle Common Room (MCR) – a committee for post-grads – passed the motion, tabled by Katzman.

    He told the committee: “The queen represents an institution responsible for much of colonialism throughout history and the modern era, and these depictions cause some students discomfort.”

    It was passed despite opponents pointing out The Queen oversaw decolonisation and was “a force for good”.

    Magdalen law undergraduate Oliver Clement, 19, said: “This was just a very vocal minority and it’s not reflective of the prevailing attitude of most Oxford students.”

    PM Boris Johnson last night backed education minister Gavin Williamson’s comments calling the decision “absurd”.

    One Oxford alumnus, who opposes the move, told The Sun: “When did it become such a problem for Oxford to be British?

    “Surely these people knew where it was before they moved here?

    “It’s really worrying arrogance when people think they can move to any part of the world and edit its history because it doesn’t suit them.”

    It’s also very worrying when the people born in that part of the world are enabling and colluding with them, as we’ve seen in America.

  25. Somehow my reading today led to this post by Heather Mac Donald.

    https://www.city-journal.org/tulsa-opera-daniel-bernard-roumain

    Tulsa Opera planned a concert called Greenwood Overcomes as part of the city’s riot centennial events. Eight black opera singers, accompanied on the piano by Metropolitan Opera assistant conductor Howard Watkins, would perform the works of 23 living black composers, as well as traditional songs and spirituals. Tulsa Opera commissioned four new works for the concert, the first commissions in its history.

    Roumain received one of those commissions, and it was a peach: writing a short aria for mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. Graves’s Metropolitan Opera debut as Carmen in 1995 received rousing acclaim, drawing international attention to her full-bodied vocal tone and smoldering stage presence. She would be the biggest star of the Tulsa concert; any composer would jump to have her perform his work.

    Roumain titled his aria for Graves: “They Still Want to Kill Us,” referring, he explained, to “the murder of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd,” deaths that provide evidence of the “bloodlust sown deep within the American psyche.” Roumain’s titles are his calling card, into which he puts his greatest effort, he says—arguably an unusual emphasis for a composer; once he comes up with the name of a piece, the musical writing comes easily.

    Roumain also wrote the aria’s lyrics, which begin with brief phrases about the rampage and end with:

    They still want to kill us.
    God Bless America
    God Damn America.

    Before Roumain composed the piece, Graves had sent him possible texts as an example of what might appeal to her. This was not it. Graves baulked at the aria as written. “I don’t have trouble with strong lyrics,” she explained in a written statement. “As a Black woman I am a huge supporter of all Black Lives, Black expression, and creativity.” But the aria’s concluding words did not “line up with my personal values,” she wrote. She could not “find an honest place to express the lyrics as they were presented.”

    Tulsa Opera’s artistic director, composer Tobias Picker, suggested that Roumain rewrite the final line, perhaps to “God Help America.” According to Howard Watkins, Roumain showed no “evidence of being more flexible to the person he was creating the work for.” Roumain refused to make any changes and Graves declined further involvement with the piece. Picker reached out to other singers on the program; they were also reluctant to sing the work, Picker says. Tulsa Opera cancelled the Roumain piece and paid him his fee.

    The relevance is how the story became part of this Woke Composer’s litany of oppression, and how the Woke Hierarchy of Victimhood allows in-fighting among the Woke – because of Whiteness.

    It was Graves who refused the final line and Roumain who “insist[ed] on his words and his way.” But in his racial monomania, Roumain effaces Graves’s agency and transfers it to a white man, even though Picker was just a go-between.

    The concert organizers were astonished by Roumain’s racial gloss. The “desire to change the text was not a race issue,” Watkins told Opera Wire. It was “reverse racist, and a bit offensive actually” for Roumain to denounce Picker, he said, given that Picker’s opera company was seeking to uplift black composers.

    Picker, moreover, is a far cry from the white reactionary of Roumain’s nightmares. Tulsa Opera hosted the American debut of a transgender Heldenbaritone—formerly male, now “female”—who in 2019 sang the title role in Tulsa’s Don Giovanni, creating a sexual hall of mirrors that would delight the most cutting-edge gender studies professor. Picker’s own opera about one of the first recipients of sex-reassignment surgery will be premiered in 2023.

    As with many other instances of “oppression” that have hit the news, the actual incident would draw zero notice if it hadn’t occurred to some Official Victim.

    Roumain equates being asked to rewrite a line of text with having one’s home burned down by a mob. The comparison is not only hyperbolic but also unhistorical. For centuries, composers chafed under the operatic star system. Sopranos, castrati, and tenors often insisted on replacing arias that the harried composer had written expressly for their voice with an aria from an unrelated opera, likely by a different composer, that they believed would better showcase their talents. Broadway and film composers have likewise had to watch impotently as their favorite music ends up on the cutting room floor.

    In this case, Denyce Graves was not even behaving like the prototypical diva; her reluctance to sing “They are Still Killing Us” grew out of a philosophical difference. She was asking for just one line of revision rather than for the sacking of the entire work.

    That’s the background. Heather details Roumain’s career as a Woke Composer, and points to some criticism of the piece itself as being not quite top caliber.

    The video suggests an additional reason why Graves may have balked: “They Still Want to Kill Us” is lousy music. The piano accompaniment consists of insipid, New Age-y broken triads and cliché-ridden chord progressions. The melodic line is negligible; Roumain struggles to fit words to music, awkwardly cramming lines of text, such as: “In that elevator everything changed,” into inadequate musical space. A composer speculates that had the score risen to “some purpose that could dramatically support” the “God damn America” exhortation, there may not have been a problem. “Graves is canny enough to understand that she cannot say publicly that this just sucks,” the composer observes. “Although I do believe that she was not in sympathy with the tone and thrust of the text, she also knows well what good music is. This ain’t it.”

    But the Woke Composer had never been told “no” before.
    So it’s all the fault of Whiteness in the Opera.

  26. The commentary on Mac Donald’s post included exchanges with their resident Marxist (what has happened to Manju and Montage??) and ended with him linking a post at New Republic (where else?), which I include as an example of the genre long noted by Neo, where the choice of emphasis and “alternative facts” creates a narrative that is very convincing on the surface, if you don’t need a lot of convincing to have your biases confirmed (yes, we can cite examples on the Right, but this one is germane to the topic).

    https://newrepublic.com/article/162472/white-men-wanted-victims-culture-wars-joseph-darda-review

    The White Men Who Wanted to Be Victims
    From the Vietnam War to the present, how aggrieved men cast themselves as a discriminated-against minority – Chris Lehmann/May 21, 2021

    The title of Joseph Darda’s new book, How White Men Won the Culture Wars, may land awkwardly for weary followers of recursive debates over cancel culture, wokeness, and the like. The loudest and most visible partisans in these battles are aggrieved white men, insisting that they’re scapegoats in unhinged identity-driven witch hunts and eagerly putting themselves forward as martyrs in ugly confrontations over free speech. How is it, then, that this demographic emerged as the victors of the modern American culture wars and managed to leverage that success into ongoing, ever-renewable plaints of grievance?

    The answer, Darda argues in this original and persuasive revisionist study, lies in the overlap between the post-1960s culture wars and the legacy of an actual war: the American debacle in Vietnam. The United States withdrew in defeat from Vietnam in 1975—a fraught moment as well for the American political economy, coinciding with the landmark civil rights and feminist uprisings that convulsed the country as many American soldiers served overseas. Returning Vietnam vets mimicked the rhetoric and strategies of the era’s homegrown protest movements while developing a powerful narrative of abandonment and trauma to convey their own sense of disaffection. And in spite of the heavily nonwhite and working-class makeup of the conscript army in Vietnam, the dominant image of the Vietnam vet became a white, middle-class one.

    That would be due to the grandstanding of Brave Sir Kerry and his ilk, a charge which may have some merit.

    This curious work of cultural alchemy came about thanks to the convergence of several other post–civil rights reckonings in 1970s America. As white Vietnam vets struggled with the challenges of adapting to an American social order transformed by the politics of anti-discrimination and cultural representation, they were not simply echoing the well-worn refrains of white reaction. Rather, as Darda shows in this wide-ranging and provocative tour through the post-Vietnam cultural and political scene, they fashioned their own new brand of therapeutically inflected grievance politics, poised to capitalize in a host of ways on America’s emerging postliberal backlash.

    That is, PTSD was just a way of “effacing difficult questions of accountability and guilt in “a dehistoricized trauma culture in which all could claim the status of survivor,” Darda said.”

    Let me just say, I can’t even.

  27. “Woke American”

    Katzman Kills it with the Kulture of Kritique.

    Tsk Tsk.

    Please stop doing itttttttt. Pretty Please!

  28. Race seems a red herring to me, because I recognise Whiteness as synomynous with the old term Bourgeois. The supposed faults found in Whiteness (punctuality, fidelity to spouses, settling debts etc.) are exactly what used to be called, contemptously, Bourgeois. This is Cultural Marxism: the claim that the dominant Class impose their values on the rest of us, and these values are alien to us.
    True there are plenty of cultural nuances to Race in America to be drawn on, but this is, at core, a switching of labels. They haven’t bothered to update the brand in any other way.

  29. Whiteness is Americanness is because pickup trucks with flags.

    https://notthebee.com/article/new-york-times-columnist-really-disturbed-to-see-pickup-trucks-and-american-flags-on-long-island-and-im-starting-to-think-she-doesnt-get-out-of-the-city-much

    Put yourself in Mara Gay’s shoes. She’s possibly never seen a pickup truck in real life.

    Perhaps she always thought they were mythical creations that existed only in beer commercials and episodes of Duck Dynasty.

    Maybe she feared they represented an advanced race of alien beings traveling the galaxy subjugating the local populations with their dizzying array of tools and otherworldly ability to repair HVAC systems.

    Nevertheless, I suspect she won’t be traveling to the vast forbidden lands of Nassau and Suffolk counties again any time soon.

    Unlike Gay, who was huddled in her apartment nervously scanning the empty streets of New York for Silverados, I was actually at the rally on January 6 among tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters. If the sentiment to not “share democracy with others,” were as truly widespread as she contends, there were enough people assembled there that day to dismantle that building brick by brick.

    That didn’t happen, of course because that is not, regardless of what Gay wants us to believe, “the reality here.”

    I think as long as they see Americanness as the same as one with whiteness this is going to continue.

    It’s starting to sound like this member of The New York Times Editorial Board who is opining on the motivations of Trump supporters on a national news program has never actually had a conversation with one.

    This “reality” of Gay’s has been fabricated in the halls of academia and other elite institutions based on absurd one-dimensional caricatures of people with whom they have political disagreements.

    While people like Gay might think about race 24/7, most people don’t. I know a lot of Trump supporters, a lot of conservatives, and a lot of Republicans and I’ve never once heard them even say the word “whiteness” never mind talk about it.

    I don’t even know what it means, other than a slur to attack bedrock principles of America which are both timeless and wholly independent of race.

    She is the one who does not want to “share democracy.”

    Oh, she’s willing to share it with people of different races, as long as they agree with her (which of course she assumes they will because that’s what people who think in terms of race all day believe). But she has no interest in sharing democracy with people who have different political opinions, which is the only reason to have a democracy in the first place.

    She wants the country to accept the “reality,” her reality, that Trump supporters are essentially beyond the pale and should be marginalized, investigated, and cast from the public square.

    It’s not their whiteness she has a problem with. It’s their Americanness.

    Make no mistake about it. That’s the real target. That is what they‘re really afraid of.

    Don’t miss the rest of the fisking.

  30. I agree that woke dogma is religious in nature. What I found interesting is your conjecture that it is filling a hole left by Atheism.

    After some consideration, I fear that you may be right. I think that there may be two sorts of atheist. One is the conscious person that actually went through the thought process before rejecting religion. The other is the unconscious type that simply was not exposed to religion or is atheist because their family or friends are.

    But, unfortunately, most people are sheep and to not think for themselves. And, right now, a lot of people are being herded into wokism.

  31. The Katzman creep is begging to be stuffed into a locker somewhere.

    The whole story is another indicator that the younger generation among the professional-managerial types (and aspirants in the universities) is unworthy of the benefits of living in the country that others have built and maintained.

  32. Roy Nathanson on June 12, 2021 at 7:13 am: “[1] One is the conscious person that actually went through the thought process before rejecting religion. [2] The other is the unconscious type that simply was not exposed to religion or is atheist because their family or friends are.”
    It is certainly possible that both apply. To both liberal (or Leftist) and conservative non-believers alike.

    Larry Arnhart postulates that humans have at last 20 evolved natural desires, one of which is for transcendence. I can’t prove it, but I suspect this desire exists on a spectrum of psychological force such that some people can face the reality of a cold dark cosmos with greater equanimity than others. The latter seek solace in a variety of belief systems; and as you suggest, wokeness could well be one of them.

    And we might note that Heather MacDonald used to blog at http://secularright.org. She is still listed as a contributor but I believe she has moved on to other venues. The site is no longer what it was initially.

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