This “Think” passage on NBCNews by Daryl Austin does,
to its partial credit, take up the question of what "white people" will be expected to do in their own personal lives about systemic racism.
The question for me is, well, “what do you want me to
do about this, personally?” It’s a
binary question. I either can respond
(effectively) to the race-specific aspect of Black Lives Matter (with intentional “anti-racism”), or I can’t. Note the new meme "silence is violence" (a paradox?)
The article makes a lot of having personal
relationships with people of color. Let me add something else, too, right
now: talking about “black and brown
people” (or worse, “black and brown bodies”) by people who are not
(biologically) part of those groups sounds condescending, as if coming from
pity or condescension. We were taught, in the workplace especially, as far back
as perhaps the late 1980s, not to refer to this at all in speaking of people.
I have to respond to this inside-out. First, we have relationships with people in
the real world (often through family, and then through associations we build as
adults after leaving the nest, which happens later these days). A lot of this gets into areas like “cognitive
empathy” v. “emotional empathy”. We also
have “imaginary friends” that we build online, and that often crosses
generations.
At age 76, the latter has become more important in recent
years. They tend in many cases to be
with younger adults with a rationalist, often libertarian mindset, and they are
often content creators. They are all
“intact”. None are particularly needy or
underprivileged. So they generally don’t
lead to the bonds that we consider to constitute “solidarity” (having each
other’s backs, like when protesting and risking arrests) except in some more
rarified contexts.
These connections are not discriminatory and they include
female, a few non-binary, and a few POC. But some POC are other groups (not
necessarily black or indigenous American).
Some have been raised in relatively challenging circumstances and done
well. Tim Pool is POC, but not the
(chosen) “oppressed minority” in the mind of the far Left; he is part Korean
(Asian) but for him it is a big deal, he says. I have part-Asian friends who run a major
grocery-bar market in Arlington VA. The
father is also a novelist. They talk as if race doesn’t matter.
But we know now that for some people it does. Yet, as you
see with the following video, a lot of activists are “naïve” in their
expectations that most people use social media the same way they do, and would
even run into these opportunistic situations.
I would add that some people even want "me" to be open to deliberately including considering POC as intimate partners (I get challenged this way in bars and discos, or did before COVID). That seems like the ultimate proof of life, or of worthiness, to some people/
Let me jump to another topic that seems
important. In my situation, I am
sometimes able to influence policy outcomes with my content, while remaining
relatively obscure personally and not well known. But I don’t normally take orders from
established non-profits and join up with them.
I work entirely independently (I have more contact with the “free
speech” community than the traditional progressive one.) This
approach has been particularly effective with certain issues, many of them
related to national security. For
example, it worked well with gays in the military two decades ago, as that was
an “unusual” issue that connected to my own personal history in ironic ways
which I could leverage to attract public attention. One of these levers was the
military draft and the history of student deferments which – guess what- now could be seen as connected to structural
racism in the past (black young men were more likely to wind up in combat in
Vietnam). Now the “draft” issue connects
to other areas of state-run constrictions of people, such as now with
quarantines and isolation. These problems might affect “black” people
disproportionately now, so if I work on these, I am helping them. But I am not branding my own work to their
authority (“Black Lives Matter”) so the activists are not satisfied.
So this is a problem, if there are too many people who
work the way I do, conventional activism and solidarity is diluted. I’ve talked about that before (with the video
“Dangerous Thought Experiment” on the home page of my “doaskdotell” site. It also loops back to the still unresolved
issues from campaign finance reform in the early 2000’s (I’ve talked about it a
lot before).
So, when you combine this with all kinds of other
threats to user-generated content (loss of net neutrality, FOSTA, other threats
to Section 230, concerns over radicalization) and also some issues with
trademark (you can compare the use of the marks “Black Lives Matter” and “Do
Ask Do Tell” and make some interesting observations), you can imagine that my
own operation isn’t sustainable forever, if it doesn’t pay its own way
legitimately with public outside support (like a normal business) which I have
never asked for. One issue would occur
if I were kept away from being able to maintain the sites (by illness or
hospitalization, possibly by isolation in some situations, or even by prolonged
jury duty or some other civic obligation) the sites might have to disappear.
I do like functioning as an amateur “journalist” –
really, commentator who aggregates and “connects the dots” and warns
everybody That works because of
globalization and search engines – still, and informal word-of-mouth networks
of the “enlightened”. But that also
implies that I seem “above” shouting in a demonstration like everybody else – I
just film and talk about “them”, which gives their causes attention, but then
undermines them if I don’t join in solidarity.
In our system, we don’t want to “license” journalists (because
Trump-like, or Erdogan-like or Orban-like, politicians would destroy
them). But we could wonder if
journalists need “skin in the game” in the sense of doing it for a legitimate
living, which I don’t (in retirement)/
David Brooks suggestion to use national service
(previous posting, June 11) seems in play here.
It seems like the most effective idea to cause the cross deeper
socialization that some think is necessary to heal the specific ancestral
problem from slavery and segregation and (individually allocated) “reparations”
– apart from the idea that inequality of opportunity, including many other
factors besides race per se . His idea would require that you have some
personal contact in providing service to people (even coming out of Covid, even
if you are more elderly); “raising money” for others for those you have no
contact with would never be more than a quid pro quo for staying online at all.
You wind up with a system where people
mind their own “social credit” and whether, when privileged, they have, on
their own, given back in personalized ways enough. But this is still about a lot more than
race. Can our individualized society
really handle a pandemic (if it hangs around long) or other disruptions from
climate change or even enemy threats (like EMP)? We are indeed terrible when warned of
disasters (April 17).
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