The enforcement of ideological purity: how the topic of black-on-black crime is handled by the left
Probably the most disturbing story involved Intercept writer Lee Fang, one of a fast-shrinking number of young reporters actually skilled in investigative journalism…
Yet Fang found himself denounced online as a racist, then hauled before H.R. His crime? During protests, he tweeted this interview with an African-American man named Maximum Fr, who described having two cousins murdered in the East Oakland neighborhood where he grew up. Saying his aunt is still not over those killings, Max asked:
“I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?… Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.”
That seems pretty straightforward to the rest of us, right? Fang interviews a black man in an inner city neighborhood, a person whose family has suffered from crime at the hands of other black people. No one can deny such violence occurs with unfortunate frequency and causes great harm in the US, and that the primary burden is borne by lower-income black people whose plight and suffering the left claims to care about a great deal.
But the left sees something quite different in this interview, and although the quoted black man escapes criticism, the left makes clear to Fang that Fang has transgressed in one of the worst possible ways. He has discussed a forbidden topic:
Shortly after, a co-worker of Fang’s, Akela Lacy, wrote, “Tired of being made to deal continually with my co-worker @lhfang continuing to push black on black crime narratives after being repeatedly asked not to. This isn’t about me and him, it’s about institutional racism and using free speech to couch anti-blackness. I am so fucking tired.” She followed with, “Stop being racist Lee.”
The tweet received tens of thousands of likes and responses along the lines of, “Lee Fang has been like this for years, but the current moment only makes his anti-Blackness more glaring,” and “Lee Fang spouting racist bullshit it must be a day ending in day.” A significant number of Fang’s co-workers, nearly all white, as well as reporters from other major news organizations like the New York Times and MSNBC and political activists (one former Elizabeth Warren staffer tweeted, “Get him!”), issued likes and messages of support for the notion that Fang was a racist. Though he had support within the organization, no one among his co-workers was willing to say anything in his defense publicly.
Like many reporters, Fang has always viewed it as part of his job to ask questions in all directions. He’s written critically of political figures on the center-left, the left, and “obviously on the right,” and his reporting has inspired serious threats in the past. None of those past experiences were as terrifying as this blitz by would-be colleagues, which he described as “jarring,” “deeply isolating,” and “unique in my professional experience.”
To save his career, Fang had to craft a public apology for “insensitivity to the lived experience of others.” According to one friend of his, it’s been communicated to Fang that his continued employment at The Intercept is contingent upon avoiding comments that may upset colleagues. Lacy to her credit publicly thanked Fang for his statement and expressed willingness to have a conversation; unfortunately, the throng of Intercept co-workers who piled on her initial accusation did not join her in this.
In another article I read about what happened to Fang – which I unfortunately can’t locate at the moment – there was an even fuller explanation of why discussion of black-on-black crime is considered racist by the left. It’s what you’d expect, if you’re familiar with leftist thought on race. First of all, such talk is verboten because it’s an argument that the right sometimes uses, which of course makes it racist by definition because everyone knows that the right is racist. But it’s also racist because it blames black-on-black crimes on black people, as though they are at fault, which of course they’re not because everything seemingly bad that a black person does is a result of systemic racism at the hands of white people. So to mention black-on-black crime without blaming white people for it is to be racist. QED.
Forget about Maximum Fr, whose family is outraged and grieving at what happened to their loved ones. Maximum Fr is not to be blamed, though, because in the mind of the left he doesn’t know any better. He said what he said about black-on-black crime because he’s not educated as to the real causes. He’s not an anti-black racist, he’s just ignorant. His opinion does not count. It’s the young reporter Lee Fang, whose progressive credentials are peerless (ThinkProgress, The Nation) who’s to blame because he should know better.
Even the fact that Fang was quoting another person such as Maximum Fr rather than making the statement himself is no excuse, because such remarks must be censored no matter who utters them. They inflame the tender sensibilities – not of inner city black people such as Maximum Fr – but of Fang’s mostly white leftist colleagues. Fang (who I’m going to assume is most likely an American of predominantly Chinese heritage, which would give him no favored-group status at all) has transgressed and must be made to apologize or become an unperson. One never knows if the apology will be enough, but apparently in this case it was.
For now.
Fang, of course, had a choice. He didn’t have to apologize. If he didn’t apologize, he wasn’t going to be executed or even sent to an actual Gulag – just a social one. He would have become persona non grata at every liberal media outlet in the US, and apparently he was not willing to do that. A conservative outlet might have hired him, but he wasn’t ready to cast his lot with a group he probably still considers The Enemy. So he apologized and kept his job.
But maybe, if he’s a true person of the left, his apology wasn’t just pragmatic. It may have been sincere. Like Winston Smith at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and in Fang’s case without even the need for torture and major re-education, perhaps he was ready to sincerely admit the error of his ways. If that was the case, to me it’s even more frightening than if Fang had just sucked it up in order to keep his job. But if he was sincere, it’s a demonstration of how leftists manage to absorb new information and to integrate it into their pre-existing mental map of what’s acceptable and unacceptable. Depending on how far left Fang is, he might just decide that if all the other leftists say he’s guilty of thoughtcrime here, it must therefore be so.
I know nothing of Fang except this anecdote and his previous credentials, so I haven’t a clue what’s been going on in his head. But in either case, what happened to Fang is an example of what’s been happening all over the nation at the hands of the left: the enforcement of ideological purity. Anyone truly moderate has already been purged from the group or never was part of it in the first place. Now we see the further refinement of what’s acceptable and what is not, a narrowing-down of the list of allowable thoughts and statements, and the continuing shift further and further to a unitary doctrinaire ultra-left point of view.
Conform or be shunned, shamed, and ostracized. Only the most courageous of individuals who think for themselves can defy that – and the left is not loaded with that sort of person to begin with. I’m not sure how common such traits are in general, either, but my guess is they’re rather rare.
Its 1930s Germany all over again…
The yellow badge that Jews were required to wear in parts of Europe during the Middle Ages, and later in Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe, was effectively a badge of shame, as well as identification
During the twelve years of the Third Reich (1933-1945), Nazi officials and organizations perpetrated public humiliations of individuals in Germany and Nazi-occupied countries. The Nazis singled out Jews and other victims who violated racial laws as targets for humiliation.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/public-humiliation
Humiliation is one of the most powerful human emotions, causing feelings of shame and degradation. To humiliate someone means to violate the dignity of a person by disregarding their basic human rights.1 The humiliations the Nazis inflicted on Jews and other victims were not accidental, but rather intrinsic to the Nazi program of racist oppression. The Nazis used humiliation tactics not only to debase their victims, but also to reinforce lessons about racial hierarchy for German citizens and populations under Nazi occupation. Since the humiliation was public, it functioned further as a warning to anyone who transgressed Nazi racial law.
[snip]
Public humiliation under the Nazis had three primary functions. The first function was to exacerbate the suffering of Nazi victims. Second, public humilation served to remind the German public about the risks of opposing the Nazi Party. Lastly, it functioned as a way to visible degrade victims in order to create critical distance between the Nazis and their victims. Differentiating themselves from their victims in this way made it easier for Nazis to perpetrate horrific acts of violence against people who otherwise were just like them. In 1971, the British journalist Gitta Sereny asked Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, about the purpose of humiliating victims: “Why, if they [the Nazis] were going to kill them [the victims] anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?” Stangl replied: “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies. To make it possible for them to do what they did.”
more at the link above…
If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one. Carter G. Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro.
According to Wikipedia, Fang said this, in 2013: “I like hanging out with fully grassroots Tea Party activists because, for the most part, whatever their motivations are, they’re just upset about society and they want to do something about it which, at the core, I respect even though I pretty much disagree with their worldview.” He’s been forced now to retreat from even treating opposing viewpoints with respect.
But I really agree with him, in interviewing Maximum Fr, who has lost relatives to black on black violence. It’s real, and it’s far, far more frequent than white-on-black violence, police or otherwise. I have a black neighbor, a very nice person, who is raising a teenage grandson. I recently had to alert her to what looked to me like the grandson getting surreptitious drug deliveries on the street. I would do the same for the white teenagers around here if I saw it. I’m not sure she quite believed me, but we haven’t seen the cars in the street and the young guy coming out to meet them without his grandmother’s knowledge. We like this young man, and we want the best for him, which definitely does not include contact with the very questionable types we’ve seen on the street. He’s bored to tears by the lockdown, and it’s hard to blame him for that. I would be devastated to have this young man gunned down either here or anywhere else.
The philosophical issue of agency is of much relevance in the latest outpouring of leftist intolerance for dissenting or contrarian arguments (Glenn Loury and John McWhorter have a certain immunity from criticism, as neither is white or conservative). Many in the academy (neuroscientists, biologists and philosophers, among many others) believe that humans are essentially “meat puppets”, biochemical machines without anything resembling free will as traditionally understood i.e. the ability to make moral choices or decisions. But the strong moralizing and judgmental streak in the left’s accusations against whites rests upon assigning agency, and hence responsibility, to whites (guilty of racism) and withholding agency from blacks, who can only be victims of anti-blackness.
> First of all, such talk is verboten because it’s an argument that the right sometimes uses, which of course makes it racist by definition because everyone knows that the right is racist.
Affirming the consequent.
Then there is the astonishing normalized imbalance of black-on-white vs white-on-black violence.
You really can’t talk about that.
If a Martian looked at those DOJ numbers, xe would likely conclude blacks were committing race war against whites.
You really can’t talk about that.
I don’t think it’s natural. I think it’s decades of race hustlers indoctrinating America with black grievances and white guilt.
For ideological purity they are now going after the Lincoln statue in Boston. When will we stand up and say No!?
Maximum Fr says: “if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.”
He just wants it in the mix, wants it recognized, as surely does his aunt, who’s lost two sons to B-on-B murder. And dealt with.
What a lot of Blacks are surely thinking.
Therein lies a major problem for the totalitarian anti-white, BLM Antifa Left. Sorry, I meant the Democratic Party.
j e mentions Glenn Loury and John McWhorter above. There are a bunch of hour long conversations they have that are riveting. Some predate covid-19 and BLM, others current.
I highly recommend them.
He just wants it in the mix, wants it recognized, as surely does his aunt, who’s lost two sons to B-on-B murder. And dealt with.
What a lot of Blacks are surely thinking.
Cicero: I wish I knew. It certainly seems possible.
I once read an article which said that American blacks today don’t really believe all the white racism stuff, but they are afraid to let up lest things backslide to the past.
I can understand that. That seems possible too.
This is so tiresome. But, it also worrisome, of course; because there is no way to predict how far it will go. Will comments I made in private emails to various people, or on various forums, get me up against a bullet scarred wall some day? These days none of us really know to what data base our every public utterance gets archived for future use.
One thing certain. It will get worse until a sufficient number stand up to the bullying. Call it what it is. At the moment, there is no indication of that level of courage in any public or semi-public figure. Well, save one. Otherwise, every single politician, police official or media flack has caved in the most craven fashion.
(I was raised a Southern Baptist; we used to snicker at the Primitive Baptists, or as we called them “foot washing Baptists”. Not nice I know, and little did we know they were the cultural vanguard in America. Of course, neither Biblical figures, nor Fundamentalist Baptists, washed their guest’s feet as a token of abject submission.)
Oldflyer: Foot washing has become pretty hip in progressive Episcopalian churches on Holy Thursday!
From what I’ve read in the current George Floyd excitement, whites footwashing blacks is cool too.
Your point about emails and blog comments is well-taken.
More and more I’ve come to think that racism in America is really about class, not race – but race is what the argument is cloaked in, to make the upper classes more comfortable in arguing their cases from a safely obscured basis.
Victor Hanson wrote a good piece about this today.
This is a very interesting podcast by Sam Harris. I recommend skipping the Trump bashing. But after that it’s a very interesting discussion on race. https://samharris.org/podcasts/207-can-pull-back-brink/
I wonder how much of the resistance (“it’s racist”) to talking about B on B or B on W crime is actually believed by those making a fuss about it and how much is a control mechanism to keep others from discussing it. In the latter case, the perps know about the issue but think it’s far less important than W on B.
Philando Castille was a black man killed by police. But the cop who killed him was Hispanic. No progress to be made there.
Need the Great White Defendant.
I see the city settled $20 mill on the Damond family. She’s dead three years next month. i suspect the Floyd family will get that plus a racism multiplier. The Damond settlement was supposed to have used up most of the city’s rainy day fund. The recent unpleasantness….
white people should starting demanding justice whenever there is a black on white crime.
Strange times. I can’t predict anything. Glenn Loury and John McWhorter are pretty good together on YouTube, Lowry in particular — that’s the only phenomenon that’s remotely hopeful in the current situation.
I’ve had a great deal of interaction with black people in my life, whenever I think about it, from attending a high school with a 20% black student body, to later on working for 7 years on nights in an innercity ER.
We’ll see. I guess I’m waiting for a body count. Then we will what comes next.
[censored]
You can ask the guys over at powerlineblog about Lee fang. I recall years ago they were the subjects of his ‘reporting’
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/03/028507.php
Considering the state of affairs in black communities in Democrat controlled cities, one must conclude that there is no Democrat empathy for the plight of those communities. Education, social services, and jobs are what they need. Instead they get failing schools, food deserts, no mental health services, no childcare, few youth programs, and a welfare culture of single mothers and absent fathers. Things could change, but the Democrats who run things seem to like it the way it is – a modern day plantation.
Then there are the race hustlers. They like it that way as well. How could they extort the white corporate community if things changed?
Lastly there are the communists. George Floyd’s death has been internationalized. Who did that? The worldwide communist movement, that’s who. Their goal, even back in the days of the UISSR and Red China, was to stir up racial resentment and trouble to destabilize our society. They haven’t given up on that. As GVDL has so aptly said, “….there are some lies that lodge so deep in the hopes of man that they can never be killed no matter how many are executed to make the lie true.” The Reds just keep on keepin’ on and we can’t seem to drive a stake through the heart of the lie that they pursue.
These three components are driving the mass hysteria we are seeing. Only W on B violence matters. All else is statistics of no note because it doesn’t fit the desired narrative.
I too recommend the Sam Harris podcast, #207—see website cited by Eva Marie. It’s aimed at his fellows on the left but getting attention also from conservatives. He’s precise with his words, cites and interprets crime statistics, makes his reasonable positions clear although he’s sure to generate rage from the left.
I would say as old white liberal that I long ago noticed my inner tendency to ‘be understanding’ of my fellow Americans who happened to be black concealed something else. Not holding them to the same standards as I did myself and other white people. Or to be fair Asian people. Being understanding – a good trait – morphs over into seeing people as less than fully responsible, more like children, and before you know it – inferior. And I believe this bit of self delusional human behavior accounts for a great majority of the racism that is at play in the current situation. The structural racism that Larry Elder argues no longer exists is largely a projection of this unconscious white liberal hypocrisy currently manifesting itself as a pandemic or even orgy of self indulgent virtue signalling right across the Western world.
“one must conclude that there is no Democrat empathy for the plight of those communities.”
The *only* thing Democrats have “empathy” for is their own lust for power. All the “identity politics” claims of solidarity, justice etc. are nothing but a beard for that.
J.J. is right. The communists have been trying to start a race war in this country for 60 years. And the race hustlers have used that to aggrandize themselves.
Lorenz Gude is right too, when he points out the hypocrisy and projection of liberals.
But there is no amount of quoting statistics or facts that can restore sanity to this issue and our politics. Only black Americans can do this. If enough of them will live in truth and speak it, we might stand a chance.
It’s going to take more than a couple of college profs.
But then, that’s why they shut down Lee Fang, isn’t it?
Progressivism is a religious cult. It’s not truly a political ideology, nor a cultural mindset. It is an overarching worldview which requires obedience to its doctrine. And it is evangelistic, pressing forward to bring everyone into its embrace. (Though, like Islam, it is content with dhimmitude. After all, as long as there are outsiders, there is conflict which can be exploited for its purposes.)
Molly Brown on June 16, 2020 at 4:43 am said:
But there is no amount of quoting statistics or facts that can restore sanity to this issue and our politics.
Remember that you can’t reason someone out of a position into which they did not reason themselves.
(And the rest of your comment is spot on, too.)
Humiliation is one of the most powerful human emotions, causing feelings of shame and degradation. To humiliate someone means to violate the dignity of a person by disregarding their basic human rights.
Except the blacks are doing this to themselves at the instigation of their leftist white “allies.” They are children who cannot survive with the white left.
Wait until they they stop your car, pull you out, and demand you kiss their ass.
Suppose some old man is videoed while being stopped on the street. Removed from his car by a group, he is forced to his knees by the mini mob of street activists as they jeer and denounce his privilege. His hair is grabbed from behind, the proposed ass to be kissed is bared and presented for his penitent homage and humiliation, when the old man pulls out his Ruger LCP .380 and drops two or three of the “unarmed” activists who have surrounded him in order to exact justice and destroy privilege.
What is Woke America’s reaction?
Someone ought to ask Joe Biden if he thought that death would be the proper penalty for a man who analy raped him. Kind of the “Dukakis question” on steroids.
This because of the left’s completely incoherent moral anthropology. They shrilly, if not hysterically police relatively trivial behaviors, while engaging in a program of physically assaulting others as a matter of course, and seeking to rip down traditional political coercion limiting boundaries which were premised on the intrinsic inviolability of man and his conscience. All, so they can have their way with the individual, in their no limits and by any means necessary, style.
As “je” notes, the ” intellectual vanguard” knowingly smirk at the traditionalists as they characterize human beings as meat puppets, or fleshy robots, for whom intentionality is an illusion;, yet somehow themselves act as though their own plans, judgments, and evaluations are more than the inexorable result of meanimgless physical processes aiming at nothing, going nowhere, and beyond the actor’s control (if the object of our focus can even be said to be acting in any meaningful sense as opposed to merely being propelled along).
So while they deconstruct the human person, and insist that all action is meaningless, they simultaneously demand ever more respect, inclusion, esteem, and deference for themselves, whatever it is that they supposedly are, and for their opinions and aims, even though their wills are on their own account an illusion, and not really their own.
How can one hope to reason with beings like that?
What is the big deal about black on black murder??It is just planned parenthood’s extension into post partum abortion . a gun instead of a currette.
Ms. Neo is right up there with George Orwell with her fuller explanation why “discussion of black-on-black crime is considered racist by the left.”
Unfortunately, the American public is less likely to credit her arguments as widely as they did Orwell’s. After two generations of fully-brainwashed schoolchildren in the diktats of the left, black now really is considered white in public consciousness as soon as their Great Leaders declare it so.
H/t Mollie Hemingway for the link to . . .
A thread by Zero HP Lovecraft, on ChiCom Korean war American prisoner manipulations (citing Cialdini “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” [1984]). Relevant here, I suppose, in terms of method — which is to assert effectual method, to be more precise. It’s a long but reasonable length thread in threadreaderapp format, for those who care about such stuff.
About humiliation….
The Rosary consists of 20 mysteries divided into 4 sets of 5, each of which commemorate a significant event in the life of Christ. The Sorrowful Mysteries, start with the agony in the garden, where Christ sweated blood. The next was scourging, a truly horrible suffering. But the 3rd one the crowning of thorns. Christ is humiliated and mocked for claiming to be who he said he was. Men would rather suffer physical abuse than humiliation and mocking.
The last two are carrying the cross and crucifixion, more suffering. So yes, humiliation is a big deal, sandwiched in between immense physical abuse.
Humiliation is one of the purposes of the Jizya Tax on non-mohammadeans. It is to constantly remind them that they are inferior.
The “Generation of Idiots” predicted so accurately by Dr.Einstein is upon us. Idiocy is massively encouraged while critical thinking is bullied, fired, demoted, humiliated and metaphorically LYNCHED.
Stalin & Mao are watching with great satisfaction from their spits in Hell.
So, Lefties: Truth is Out. Lies are Truth. Liberty is Racist.
My God.
Black Woman SHOCKS White Liberal, Defends Trump and Says Democrats Are the Real Racists
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q_oKLts10I
They made sure to show she preaches Jesus as well…
so that the two are connected and she isn’t paid much attention to
Raz is handing out AR-15s from the back of his Tesla.
In WA, to own an “assault rifle”, a person must be 21+ if outside their own home or business.
They can charge Raz with a gross misdemeanor for the first transfer to anyone under 21, then a felony for every one after.
https://twitter.com/SomeBitchIKnow/status/1272616532875583489
Black on White crime… [she must have oppressed him… ]
WANTED for ASSAULT: Do you know him? On 6/12 at 3:23 PM, on 3rd Avenue between 15th Street & 16th Street in Manhattan, he pushed a 92-year-old female to the ground causing her to strike her head on a fire hydrant.
https://twitter.com/NYPDnews/status/1272869065929961472
Leave it to NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/09/873375416/there-is-no-neutral-nice-white-people-can-still-be-complicit-in-a-racist-society
“Racism is the foundation of the society we are in. And to simply carry on with absolutely no active interruption of that system is to be complicit with it. And in that way, we can say that nice, white people who really aren’t doing anything other than being nice people are racist. We are complicit with that system. There is no neutral place.”
when the old man pulls out his Ruger LCP .380 and drops two or three of the “unarmed” activists who have surrounded him in order to exact justice and destroy privilege.
My car gun is a Browning 1911 .380. Otherwise pretty close.
Ari Shapiro is actually an employee of NPR, not just some blowhard they have on retainer to do topical commentary. Your tax dollars at work.
The witless effrontery of these people never ceases to amaze.
The quotation is not from Shapiro but from the person he’s interviewing, Robin di Angelo, who has made an “academic” career out of this sort of thing.
Typing the preceding sentence was a small epiphany for me: I realized that in so many instances now I can’t use the word “academic” seriously.
The (Unforgivably) black conservative radio host of a national broadcast, Larry Elder, has been telling his audience about the 7,000+ Black on Black deaths last year and the comparatively tiny White on Black death count.
Hope he’s wearing Kevlar.
A dishonest conversation about race in America is preventing us from having an honest conversation about race in America
I have some progressive friends and relations Their thing is racism. I once had a lengthy discussion with one of them who was trying to get me to “understand” blacks–he is not one himself.
w
We had a review of America’s sins–could have been 1619 but a couple of years early. Over and over. And he asked, now do you see why they might get annoyed and act out? IOW, he was excusing various counterproductive activities in the past and to come.
It occurred to me not to tell him that better understanding would lead to better predicting and do we really want to go there?
Besides, he’s making blacks into one, amorphous blob.
Not sure that kind of sympathy does blacks a lot of good.
But it makes the guy feel virtuous. To, in effect, tell me that if I want to start a liquor store, building it in a lower class black neighborhood is a bad idea. He has no idea what he’s saying and Lorenz Gude’s observation is spot-on-nailed-it.
This should be rather interesting:
https://pjmedia.com/election/stacey-lennox/2020/06/15/black-lives-matter-calls-joe-biden-insane-for-considering-val-demings-for-vice-president-n533303
Key graf:
“When black people become police officers, they are no longer black. They are blue.”
(From MLK Jr’s “I have a Nightmare” speech….)
On June 11, 2020, after abjectly apologizing, Lee Fang tweeted this (emphasis added):
See,https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1271166899666079744
Coda:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-response-george-floyd-protests
Ira:
That’s interesting, and it indicates to me that Fang apologized in order to keep his job rather than sincerely.
Take a look at the crime statistics pointed out in the article linked below at https://www.takimag.com/article/because-white-people-are-bad/
You might find this document interesting. It’s a little out of date.
https://www.amren.com/the-color-of-crime/
I think this black woman would agree with Maximum Fr. Strong language:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfFBkCWfZS8
Is Fang bi-racial? If so, it’s ironic a bunch of white journalists is calling him racist. If we play by their rules on who is racist (those who hold power can only be racist) part of his genes makes him not racist. If he’s thoroughbred, well, the jokes on those who called for his re-education and/or apology.
>lived experience of others
I have been in numerous discussions concerning the degree of racism in America and in the UK. When it came to questioning the personal experiences, or lived experiences, I was met with backlash. “Don’t start this” one Brit said. I was accused of minimizing the “lived experiences” of minorities. Odd, because if lived experiences are held to be an accurate telling if a particular situation, and in these cases experiences of racism, then why can’t we take as seriously lived experiences that weren’t racist by minorities as well. For this I was met with deflection and also accused of “stirring up racial animosity.”
I am sensing a pattern here: lived experiences of minorities who experiences racism cannot be questioned. Listeners must always believe them.
Essayist James Lindsay also brought these “lived experiences” up very briefly on a Youtube podcast. Lindsay has been critical of the current protests, BLM and one of many narratives that is “white fragility.” Do note Lindsay identifies as a liberal who holds several progressive views, so it is good, very good actually, to have a liberal who is seeing the intellectual nonsense and dishonesty that has been laid out for all to see (or ignore) in the past three weeks or so. He recently went to the source of what drove “white fragility” into the mainstream – Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, which has been used as the go-to guidebook for the Woke, if not well-meaning whites, to understand the (faux) outrage of the protests. I’m not sure if “lived experiences” were a subject matter in DiAngelo’s book, but I will take Lindsay’s mentioning of “lived experiences” being used as a silver bullet to shutdown any dissenters where DiAngelo probably heavily emphasized it as a strategy.
Rules for Radicals, meet White Fragility by DiAngelo.
John on June 16, 2020 at 3:51 pm said:
A dishonest conversation about race in America is preventing us from having an honest conversation about race in America.
* * *
A very apt summary of the entire situation.
Racism is the foundation of the society we are in. And to simply carry on with absolutely no active interruption of that system is to be complicit with it. And in that way, we can say that nice, white people who really aren’t doing anything other than being nice people are racist. We are complicit with that system. There is no neutral place. –Robin DiAngelo
Mac & GRA: I forget where, but one commenter responded to that DiAngelo quote with “Ok. We’re enemies. I don’t have a problem with that.”
Me neither. I’m not fragile; I’m just annoyed.
huxley – good point —
Pulling down statues is one of the adjuncts of the current wilding that contributes to the “now we are all enemies” goal of the left, but I only just tonight realized why including the monuments to abolitionists and black soldiers is not an accident.
If there are no statues, then there were no enemies.
If there were no enemies, then there was no War.
If there was no War, then there was no abolition.
If there was no abolition, then American blacks are still slaves.
If blacks are still slaves, then America is still run by Evil White Supremacists.
Only the Left can save you from the EWS who want to put y’all back in chains.
If you are rational and educated, then this whole sequence is nonsense.
Neutral places, however, are apt to foster thought and reason, which are dangerous to the leftist enterprise, and would derail their use of the black community as a shield for the real agenda — which is completing their acquisition of power and eliminating all opposition.
It’s rather frightening how all of Neo’s posts today (6/16) play together.
As usual, the Bee is ahead of me.
https://babylonbee.com/news/man-heroically-prevents-history-from-repeating-itself-by-removing-all-references-to-history
So, a non-White has to grovel because he accurately wrote what a BLACK man said?
Akela needs to explain why she thinks she is entitled to CENSOR a BLACK man. Why she sees fit to MUZZLE a Black man.
huxley on June 17, 2020 at 2:23 am said:
I’m not fragile; I’m just annoyed.
Amen to that.
Anyone who doesn’t recognize this recent spate of bad black behavior is going to create even more anti-black racists is deluding themselves. The riots and destruction did nothing to create sympathy for blacks. It destroyed a lot of it, and just made the fact that the face of crime in America is black even more pronounced.
Incidentally, don’t be surprised when Derek Chauvin is exonerated of George Floyd’s killing. He explicitly followed Minneapolis Police Department protocol for that situation. Minnesota AG Keith X. Ellison knows that, too. He has stated that the Chauvin case is going to be an extremely difficult case for the State to win.
“…in Fang’s case without even the need for torture and major re-education…”
Being socially flogged on a global network, shunned by your peers and tribe, and threatened to recant your beliefs in public in order to save your livelihood.
This is the Social Inquisition, and that sequence is The Rack. Few can withstand it. It’s more than censorship, in fact it is a public trial and summary judgment, sanctioned and employed by the Ideological Left. They extract the confession against your will, without a jury, and with no defense.
No need to chain someone to a wall, hidden in a deep dungeon. These tools are used and embraced and highly effective in broad daylight.
In 2020, if that doesn’t count as torture and major re-education, what does?
Dog bites man or man bites dog?
Inside every Progressive is a Stalinist just waiting to burst forth.
Travis in Texas:
What counts as torture and re-education? Torture and re-education.
As I wrote in the post: “Conform or be shunned, shamed, and ostracized. Only the most courageous of individuals who think for themselves can defy that…” That’s what has happened to Fang, and it’s very serious, so serious that few people can defy it. But torture and re-education camps (Pol Pot, Gulag) are orders of magnitude worse.
The Italians of South Philly have mustered to defend a statue of Christopher Columbus. Naturally, the communist mayor and DA are threatening them, not the “protestors” who want to tear it down.
https://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2020/06/15/mayor-kenney-public-process-city-says-it-reserves-right-to-remove-christopher-columbus-statue-in-south-philly-if-it-continues-to-threaten-public-safety/
We’re going to have to find spaces in the New United States for people on the coasts who don’t want to live in the People’s Republic of Amerikka. I wonder if we can move Gino’s, Pat’s, the Steel Pier, and salt water taffy to Florida or the Gulf Coast?
Here is a U.S. Department of Justice report on the incidence of crime (as attested by victims) for 2012 – 2015:
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rhovo1215.pdf
From Table 1 in that report, you can easily conclude:
– About 85% of ~630,000 interracial violent crimes between blacks and whites over that period were perpetrated by blacks.
– Blacks are victimized by blacks at 5.8 times the rate they’re victimized by whites, even though whites are five times as numerous as blacks.
– The average black is 29 times as dangerous to whites as the average white is to blacks.
(These statistics don’t include murders [since those murdered generally don’t survive long enough to describe the perp or perps], but the figures for those are similarly horrendous in the same sense.)
Why was there so much black-on-black crime in South Bend, Indiana when Mayor Pete was mayor? South Bend was in the top 10 for all crimes on a percentage basis. A tiny college town! Why didn’t Mayor Pete fix it? Why does he call anyone who brings up the issue a racist?
We will NEVER be able to talk about race or black crime in this country. The incentive and narrative is just too strong the other way. The Fake News and the Dems profit by keeping the issue alive. Once Biden wins, we’ll experience racial harmony and much lower black crime rates. Just like when Obama was president.
What the left is saying without saying it is that black Americans have no moral agency, you know what else has no moral agency? Animals, so they believe and say in an oblique way that black Americans are animals. This is what the Democrats, marxists and socialists have always believed, why do you think they push abortion especially in minority communities? Just google Margaret Sanger, read her writings.
We are complicit with that system.
Considering that the people who want to Smash Everything have seized on a long series of “reasons” to Smash Everything, if they were using “systemic racism” as their latest excuse out of a desire to Smash Everything as opposed to Solve Racism, how could we tell the difference?
Difficult, no… impossible! To get through an article filled with ideas and beliefs of the politically correct extreme Leftists.
No logic, ignore facts about violent crimes…the Left has a habit of ignoring truth, because it’s politically-incorrect.
That’s a derangement, and it’s not their only derangement!
The current demonstrations are about policemen. Could we keep to topic? Let’s try to make some progress on this problem. Bringing in other groups of killings at this moment reads as a distraction and an attempt to move the focus away from bad behavior by white men in power. If one tries to get white men out of the spotlight by putting black men in , this is a form of racism and an example of white fragility.
Could we keep to topic? Let’s try to make some progress on this problem.
It isn’t a problem. The whole protest display is based on social fictions and concealed agendas.
Ann:
The current demonstrations are about moving the Marxist project forward, hope you aren’t fragile when that project comes to you. You will experience the privilege of giving back for “justice.”
If one tries to get white men out of the spotlight by putting black men in , this is a form of racism and an example of white fragility.
I guess your employers fancy you’re earning your per diems. I wouldn’t.
MBITRW, we have over 600,000 police officers in this country who have scores of disagreeable encounters with people every week. A three digit population of these encounters go badly sideways. The number which do so for reasons which make the officer properly culpable as a matter of law or administrative regulation are so few than you can list a year’s worth on one page. There is no systematic problem with this. It’s just that you live in a populous country with a comparatively large set of impulsive lumpenproletarians. Telling the truth does not mean one is fragile. It means one as a soupcon of insight and integrity. Which you do not.
Ann:
Tell me another one.
Atlanta – white men in power? Don’t make me laugh. The entire government leadership of Atlanta and the police is overwhelmingly black. Same for a great many blue cities.
But hey, let’s not distract ourselves from the idea that the only black lives that matter are the tiny percentage killed by white people. The others don’t matter, apparently, according to the left, who are the true racists.
But if you insist on talking about the statistics on whether there is a disproportionate percentage of black people killed by white cops, then by all means, talk about them.
Here, I’ll help you out: From Heather McDonald:
Or Coleman Huges, who writes:
Go to Hughes’ article to find the many links in it.
Some support for Neo’s point about black leadership in cities alleged to be suffering from systemic racism against blacks —
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/06/19/exclusive-bernard-kerik-and-ken-blackwell-democrats-have-failed-the-black-community-for-too-long/#
For the record: look at the authors’s bios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Blackwell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Kerik
Some experts that we can support, for a change.