So I started reading this column by Paul Craig Roberts explaining why “white privilege and white racism are hoaxes” and I began to feel a little woozy. Roberts’ leaps of logic were so strange and vertiginous I began to halfway wonder if someone had put something in my drink. Or in his.
More likely in his. The other inhabitants of my apartment don’t have opposable thumbs (they’re cats), so I don’t think they slipped me a mickey. No, the discombobulation I’m feeling right now must be coming from Robert’s article.
Let’s just go through it line by line and see if it affects you in the same way it affected me. Like so many far-right figures before him, he begins with a reference to The Matrix:
As part of the false reality that The Matrix has created for us, white people are privileged because of their skin. Allegedly, this privilege creates in white people the impression that they are superior to all others, and this makes them racists.
Not so much “allegedly”; that’s how it actually happens.
This dogma has become immune to all evidence. For example, when Americans elected Obama, who regards himself as black, President of the United States and then re-elected him, it passed unnoticed that these events disproved that the white majority is racist.
How does Obama’s election prove whites aren’t racist? Most white voters voted against Obama. And more than a few spread the rumor that he wasn’t even born in the US. Then there was the Tea Party and well, I think you’ve probably got the idea.
And what’s that bit about Obama “regarding” himself as black?
I have often wondered why Obama, who is half white and half black, chose to be regarded as a black person. This decision cost him “white privilege.”
What “decision?” What “choice?” The way race has historically worked in the US is that mixed black and white people are considered black. This isn’t something that Obama could have just overturned by declaring himself white. Had he done so, people wouldn’t have started recognizing him as white; they’d have dismissed him as a crank.
Obviously, Obama, a politician accustomed to considering what most improved his chances, decided that the advantage was in being black, not in being white.
Gosh, I guess it was lucky for him that he was black, according to America’s unwritten laws of race.
Now do you see why Roberts’ argument made me feel like I was taking crazy pills?
Obama is not the only mixed race person of note who decided being black was advantageous to being white. Lewis Hamilton is also half white, half black, and he also has chosen to be black rather than white.
Lewis Hamilton — in case, like me, you never heard of him before — is a Formula One racecar driver. This is what he looks like:
In our racial regime, people who look like this are considered black; they do not have the choice to identify as white.
Roberts points out that the black Hamilton makes more money from racing than his white team partner does. Of course, that might just be because, as Roberts acknowledges, he’s the better driver of the two. Then Roberts hedges this a little bit by noting that he’s also got the best car.
Why does Hamilton, who is 50% white and 50% black, identify as a black if there is white privilege?
If white people were racists, why do the white British Formula One fans cheer Hamilton so sincerely and delight in his wins?
Maybe because the racists in Formula One fandom are a little shy about being overtly racist in real life and would prefer to send Hamilton racist messages anonymsously online?
In other words, all this white racism stuff is poppycock. Go watch a deep South football or basketball game. 85-90% of the players are black, and the white fans cheer them wildly. How does this reconcile with white racism?
I don’t know, dude, how do you reconcile your argument with what happened to Colin Kaepernick after he took a knee during the national anthem?
Dear readers, if you’re already feeling a bit seasick because of Roberts’ weird lurches from topic to topic, brace yourselves because he’s about to make a big swerve.
You are not allowed to say so, but the same holds for National Socialist Germany according to documented facts presented in his histories by David Irving. The national socialists went through extensive debates as to how much of a Jew one had to be to be a Jew. Whatever the decision, Irving reports that there were 150,000 half or quarter Jews serving as officers in the Wehrmacht.
How do we reconcile this fact with the holocaust? We can’t, because no one is allowed to investigate or offer an opinion. The holocaust is unchallengeable. Europeans and Canadians who challenge it go to prison.
First off, David Irving is a holocaust denier who’s been found in court to have lied about history (in a libel case he brought against a critic and lost). Nothing he writes can be assumed to be true.
Second off, fuck you.
But it doesn’t really matter because Roberts quickly moves on to what he sees as the upcoming END OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION.
The situation in which the Western world lives is one in which reality is based on suppositions and ideological assertions, not on facts.
I’m not sure it’s your ideological opponents who are the ones light on facts.
Facts have become irrelevant in the Western world. Having rejected facts, Western civilization, which is based on facts, has repudiated itself.
It is this self-repudiation that signals the dissolution of Western civilization.
Well, it was fun while it lasted, huh?
Having already suggested that the Holocaust was a myth, Roberts might as well finish off his article with a reference to one of the top five most racist books of the 20th century. So he does.
As Jean Raspail made clear in 1973 in The Camp of the Saints, European Civilization only exists in its monuments.
What on earth does this even mean? What does it have to do with anything else you’ve been writing about? Are you really and literally high?
In the United States, allegedly a Christian country, no Christian symbols are permitted on public display at Easter and Christmas.
What are you talking about? You can publicly display all the Christmas or Easter crap you want to, just not on government property (and even there you can get away with it lot of the time.)
Also, the US is not “allegedly a Christian country.” It’s allegedly a country with separation between church amd state. Have you ever looked at the Constitution?
There is no such thing as a living civilization whose roots are dug up and cast away.
Whatever the fuck that means.
This was truly the worst LSD trip I’ve ever been on, minus the LSD.
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I got to see some of that case. It was very educational from an advocacy point of view. Irving was a very clever, confident, and articulate man. But it was almost classic hubris to seem him crumble under what I can only describe as a forensic dissection.
The full judgment in the case is here. Well worth a read.
https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2000/115.html
There’s a simple explanation: he is consciously and knowingly lying, lying, lying.
It what these.. THINGS posing as human beings… do. Probably, that’s the only thing at all that they do.
They know that it’s all lies, but they’re only addressing twisted, sick un-humans like themselves, who being absolute liars as well instantly and fervently confirm the lies as the truth-of-the-moment (subject to revision into its own opposite literally instantly.
When I go to my racist, dumb-ass, lazy and corrupt Republican congressman’s FB page, there are huge numbers there with FB pages lauding American flags and guns and fat, ugly, embarrassed losers who know only one thing; they are “white”.
It’s all they think they have, they are dumb enough to pretend (not one of them actually believes it, quite obviously). Though they are clearly as human as myself, they’d rather pretend to be something special, chosen by White Republican Jesus to live lives where they are betrayed and belittled at every turn.
If they weren’t so absolutely dangerous, to others as well as themselves, I’d only feel pity for them.
I’d still help them in a pinch, as I would any human being, but they might as well be described as completely feral now, interested only in seeing all others harmed, before them and more than they are.
Fuck “America” today. It has to be allowed to fucking die. These people have no hope as long as they live this conscious lie.
Paul Craig Roberts’ main problem is that… he isn’t very bright.
Roberts’ argument about “choosing” to be white or black in this culture can be found as an illustration for the word “disingenuous” in the dictionary.
Also? He can go fuck himself.
Never heard of him. He known for anything other than being a weasel and a fool?
fat, ugly, embarrassed losers
Er, is this a site that does fatphobia?
@LouCPurr
Depending on what you mean by “fatphobia” the term is lipophobia, cacomorphobia, or fat shaming. Just saying.
And unless the character of the site has changed in the past few years and I somehow failed to notice, the answer is no. But apparently the attitude of “they are all irredeemably evil” is tolerated here, an attitude which I am not comfortable with. Much of my volunteer advocacy is helping those who have fallen into evil to redeem themselves. Maybe some form of selection bias/effect colors my views, but I don’t believe everyone is hopeless, and we shouldn’t casually write off entire groups of people.
Fat activists tend to use the term fatphobia, fyi. If you’re going to police language, at least look up the words you’re correcting people for using.
And no, fatphobia doesn’t fly here but you’ll get a lot of pushback from certain people when you call it out, so it’s not exactly safe here, either. Just like most progressive spaces, really.
There is no good reason for judging people as people by their bodies. Vile ideas and vile behaviors come in all kinds of people and it’s the vileness that should be called out. I pay a LOT of attention to bodies (my own, my partners’ and prospective partners) but that has to do with attraction and sexual desire and my art but not who people are as humans. Entitled Gross Creep in the other thread is what he is because of his not seeing this. (And if he sees this comment remembers that only tall, ripped men are in my stable and is unhappy about that I’m glad).
The main thing is to confront awfulness as awfulness where it is. Body-shaming doesn’t strengthen your case and will end helping not confronting injustice and awfulness.
@Kupo:
Really? I thought that they mostly used the term “fat shaming”. I admit that I don’t usually intersect with those circles, so I might have experienced an atypical sample. Regardless, checking seems to show that this term does see some genuine use and not “casting about for a term” use, so I withdraw that bit of pedantry.
That was a lot of words to say “I’m not a racist but…”
Would someone care to give a TL;DR of the article about The Camp of the Saints? NYT’s got it paywalled and I’m on mobile so I don’t know if I can work around it.
Lipophobia would be the term if one want a correct ancient greek term. Whether it’s the most used isn’t a question I can answer tho. Lipophobia would be preferred in french mostly because we have institution that try to drill us in correct ancien greek terms and not hybrid, but english have no such institutions.
And for the original point that sparked the discussion : 1Q84 is indeed saying vile shit here. Wrong shit too, because outside of the [insert your term of choice about body shaming], it also show that 1Q84 have wrong assumptions about white nationalists.
The stereotype of white nationalist as a 50something out of shape guy is born out of the fact it’s a very easy target to mock. But it’s not quite accurate, and plenty of them are young, well in shape, or both. A number of them are in the police or army, which have minimum standard of general muscles. Some are handsome too, and a lot of them are married because turn out that being vile isn’t quite the same as not being charismatic.
But the one who are a bit older and/or a bit less good looking are simultaneously easier to spot, easier to mock, and less of an apparent threat. And that’s how we have post like 1Q84 one.
The best anti-drug PSA ever.
Not even once.
@Ohlmann, in case you wondered, the french word for fatphobia is “grossophobie” (source: am french), I have never heard nor read the word “lipophobie” yet.
@1Q84
Hi.
Maybe don’t.
Trying to use someone’s body as an insult just tells me it’s a shorthand for you, especially when there’s so much to insult them for that’s both more obvious and more caustic.
@StaceySmartyPantsTwiceRemoved
Exactly so!
It’s kinda like Blair White – (In my opinion) she pretends to hold values incompatible with her own survival for the purpose of making money regardless of the damage this does to other trans people. That is what makes her bad – not the fact that she’s trans, and a woman she remains no matter what she does.
This sentence is glorious. I could try to interpret its meaning in context, but as David pointed out the context is so inconsistent and wild that I can’t rely on it to provide even a best-faith guess.
On the one hand this is comparing civilization to a giant plant or tree but on the other hand the terms are undefined so there’s no way to tell what the “roots” are in this metaphor or what the trunk is, the leaves, etc. Civilization as a term is also rather nebulous itself.
And all of this is completely ignoring that the comparison is, even under the best-case interpretation, simply wrong. Trees are unlike “civilizations” in many ways but one of the most crucial is this: Trees are singular entities with a birth & a death no matter how old they become. When a tree dies, all elements of it die.
“Civilizations” are not so. Society, “civilization”, group chats, are not living entities in their own right – they’re organizations of convenience constructed by the people within them, people who can easily and in many cases happily move on if that organization stops being considered valid by the people within it. This is a historical fact, proven in and of itself beyond any possible doubt.
Because societies are systems of organization, they are also remarkably flexible. “Bedrock principles” of a society can be thrown out and changed within the week if a sufficient number of folks in that society agree that they should be. If there is a civilization “whose roots are dug up and cast away” this has happened because the people for whom that civilization is a system of organization have agreed as a whole, explicitly or implicitly, that these roots are unneeded and new ones have been put in their place.
Because this agreement has been made, they are right – the society will carry on with new bedrock and everything may be different but it will still make sense for the people within that society.
I bet he also scratches his head over why LGBT+ people choose their “lifestyle”, and concludes that they’re only doing it for the free toasters and woke cookies. Therefore homophobia and racism don’t exist, which allows people like him to have terrible opinions and do appalling things without the slightest twinge of guilt.
It’s not an LSD trip so much as right-wing Calvinball. If you play by their rules you will never, ever win.
@jsrtheta: “Not very bright” is an understatement. Roberts makes Ernest P. Worrell look like a Nobel Prize candidate.
Not LSD, methamphetamine … dude’s a tweaker
Seriously, and speakin’ from experience, no acidhead ever came up with something that convoluted. That’s way too complicated for anyone who doesn’t sit up all night grinding their teeth.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
It’s not an LSD trip so much as right-wing Calvinball. If you play by their rules you will never, ever win.
That’s not quite fair to Calvin, who finally conceded defeat to his no-nonsense babysitter Rosalyn:
http://i.redd.it/kls1ut7b3wi21.jpg
I was pretty active in the fat-o-sphere (yes, that’s what we called ourselves) back in the day and “fat phobia” was the preferred reference there. I really miss it; it was positive and very intertwined with feminism.
@Hambeast
Me, too! I wonder if we met back then. Bo odea what ‘nym I used back then lol.
@Snowberry
Just to clarify, fatphobia and fat shaming aren’t the same thing. Fat shaming is only part of fatphobia. There’s a lot more to it and it’s a very complex topic. But I’m not really going to get into it here because, as I mentioned before, this space isn’t very safe and my mental health isn’t great right now so I don’t need someone coming in here to “but health!” at me.
Obama gave a whole speech about how he is just as much a white man as he is a black man, but when the world see’s him they only see the black man part.
From what I can tell, Mr. Roberts is attempting to argue that unless every single white person is racist, racism doesn’t exist. And that, likewise, if white folks ever falter in their racism by rooting for a POC in any endeavor, racism does nit exist. Of course, this argument is so weak as to be completely invalid, so he uses a lot of confusing language to obfuscate what he is doing. It likely would have been a better read if he had just dropped acid and wrote about something.
I’m so glad other people took up the flag for me with 1Q84 and I didn’t have to. Not been feeling well, so I just let the troll go in the other thread, didn’t really want to have to say something here either. Thanks Lou, kupo, et al. I can’t muster arguments right now but I can muster appreciation!