It's a concept which has very negative consequences. If solidarity is something that is offered to those who are "othered" in society, then I as a member of the mainstream can extend it to the "other" group, but they by definition cannot extend it to me (since I am not myself "othered"). So liberal solidarity is not mutual or reciprocal - it does not lead to a positive sense of fellow feeling.
Instead, the group being offered the solidarity is reinforced in its belief that it is suffering oppression and hardship from the very people offering the solidarity. That leads to resentment, anger and a sense of grievance. The solidarity-givers then have to adopt an attitude of repentance and seek redemption - they lose moral status relative to the group they want to be in solidarity with. And that then leads to a growing sense of contempt from the "other" group toward the liberal solidarity-givers who now stand in a morally inferior position to them.
That all sounds very abstract, I know, but it has real life consequences. Let me give just a small example. At Oberlin College in America a white student in a soccer team wrote to an Hispanic teammate letting him know that if he (she?) didn't want to go to a talk organised for Latino Heritage month, the team would like him (her?) to play:
Hey that talk looks pretty great, but on the off chance you aren’t going or would rather play futbol instead the club team wants to go!!
Harmless, right? Well, the Hispanic player decided that this was, in fact, an act of "microagression" from his white teammate. It was an act of aggression, first, because the white player used a Spanish word "futbol" which constitutes an act of cultural appropriation:
Who said it was ok for you to say futbol? It’s Latino Heritage Month, your telling people not to come to the talk, but want to use our language? Trick NO! White students appropriating the Spanish language, dropping it in when convenient, never ok.
And he (she?) followed up with this:
I’m not playing intramural once again this semester because you and your cis-dude, non passing the ball, stealing the ball from beginners, spanish-mocking, white cohort has ruined it.
And here's the contempt for liberal solidarity-givers:
And then I get this long ass email (warning it gets full of white guilt and really boring white liberal sh**)
In his email the white soccer player complains that he can't help being white and male:
Clearly you only see me at face value and yes I’m white and male, what do you want me to do about that?
The Hispanic player has a clear answer to the "what do you want me to do" question and it has little to do with solidarity. The Hispanic player's answer is: "Leave the team".
The white player then pleads that although he is of white ancestry he has been virtually raised by a second, Hispanic family. Does this get him a pass? Does this mean that he can now enjoy solidarity and fraternity? You probably know the answer. He is chided by the Hispanic player thusly:
We need to talk about tokenizing brown friends/family and taking them in to identify with people of color (or avoiding accountability for being racist).
So the white player then tries to seek redemption by confessing his sins. I've shortened it, but you'll get the idea:
Growing up as a white male in this society, I have benefited countless times from these advantages that I did not and do not deserve, but growing up I was generally not even aware that I was gaining an advantage - it was the only reality I knew. This is a question I have truly struggled with through my life - I don’t deserve these advantages, but they exist for me, I never sought them out, I didn’t want them and can't give them away, what am I supposed to do? How can I feel like any of my efforts are the product of my own effort and not simply my unequal social status? This made me very depressed for a time.
Solidarity is not supposed to make you depressed. It's not supposed to make you doubt the worth of contributing to society. It's supposed to give you a supportive sense of fellow-feeling.
And what was the response of the Hispanic student to the stupendous act of contrition from the white student? It was to the point. The best way the white student can help out is to get lost:
did you once address how you take up too much space and make this space unsafe? Did you once consider leaving this space?
So what is the lesson to be learnt? Simply this: it is no use whinging about the kind of attitudes expressed by the Hispanic footballer if we at the same time continue to support the concept of solidarity which breeds such attitudes. One thing leads logically to another.
Solidarity cannot be based on gestures of support for the most othered group in society. That is not solidarity, it is not fraternity. We need to recognise wherever and whenever this mistake is made and to patiently but firmly criticise it.
The 'white privilege' argument does have some merit. Our ancestors created peaceful high-trust societies that are more effective at generating wealth. We all benefit from that kind of social environment, regardless of what we personally do.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the undeserving beneficiaries include not only today's white folks but also today's nonwhite immigrants. And many of the latter -- in terms of trustworthiness and peaceful behaviour -- are especially undeserving, i.e., they take out far more social capital than they put in.
By the way, Vanishing American has resumed blogging!
Good to hear that VA is back. I'll amend my weblinks.
DeleteFrom the jargon of the hispanic student you can see they are well-versed in the language of grievance (safe spaces, appropriation). They teach this at schools now, I believe.
ReplyDeleteThere is a distinct political culture emerging, with concepts like appropriation, safe spaces and microagression. We're going to be hearing a lot more about this.
DeleteMark Richardson: "There is a distinct political culture emerging, with concepts like appropriation, safe spaces and microagression. We're going to be hearing a lot more about this."
DeleteI think you're dead on the mark, both about what's coming and the causes. This topic is timely and it's going to be important, unfortunately.
The 'Hispanic student' sounds utterly vile. The reference to 'cis-gender' indicates this is not a normal person, though, not even a normal resentful racial nationalist.
ReplyDeletePersonally I'm not sure 'Liberal Solidarity' is the right term here. Actual Liberalism does give rise to Autonomy theory and should certainly be criticised on its own lights, but the totem pole of victomhood status is a Cultural Marxist innovation, I don't see how it's a natural expression of Liberalism as such.
Simon, I agree that it's likely that there is a Marxist contribution to this, in the sense of there being classes pitted against each other on the basis of exploitation/privilege etc, the difference being that instead of there simply being two hostile classes that there are intersecting class relationships, e.g. between men and women, whites and POC (people of colour), cisgendered and transgendered, heterosexual and homosexual etc. If you want to criticise this phenomenon on that basis of its Marxist influence I have no issue with that.
DeleteHowever, there aren't a lot of Marxist true believers around. If this phenomenon runs deep, as I think it does, it's because it connects with a re-envisioning of solidarity that comes from both secular liberalism and the liberal churches. For instance, one of my local Catholic church parishes is mostly focused on the mission of bringing African Muslims to Australia. Why would they do this? I don't think it's because they have been infiltrated by Marxists, but because they have read the New Testament in a way that makes them think they are showing true solidarity by engaging with the most marginalised other. They believe that what they are doing is an expression of fraternity. Even Pope Francis, when he gave his support to the Africans illegally entering Europe, talked about them as "brothers" and complained that they did not find "solidarity". The historic church did, of course, recognise the concept of charity for the stranger, but at the same time it continued to uphold degrees of solidarity based on relatedness. In many churches today, that distinction between charity and solidarity has collapsed.
As for secular liberals, you have to remember that liberal morality is built upon the idea of non-interference, in which morality consists of being tolerant of difference, accepting of inclusiveness, committed to non-discrimination etc. So how then do you show moral superiority? By being the person who most conspicuously demonstrates these qualities, i.e. by showing your commitment to those who are most different, to the most "other" group.
The fact that these all tie together so well - the liberal Christian world view, the leftist neo-Marxist one, the secular liberal morality - and that they all support a radically different view of solidarity - helps to explain why the new solidarity is making inroads despite its very deep flaws.
We can distinguish ourselves politically by separating ourselves from it and by promoting the alternative, and I think we do this best by focusing on the concept of solidarity.
Mark Richardson: "The fact that these all tie together so well - the liberal Christian world view, the leftist neo-Marxist one, the secular liberal morality - and that they all support a radically different view of solidarity - helps to explain why the new solidarity is making inroads despite its very deep flaws."
DeleteI think that's painfully true.
Mark Richardson: "We can distinguish ourselves politically by separating ourselves from it and by promoting the alternative, and I think we do this best by focusing on the concept of solidarity."
I think that's right as well.
You need to make positive statements about authentic solidarity based on authentic, normative connections such as family. Then having said that these connections are valid, you have to say that families need space, heterosexuals and sexually normal people need space, and that white people need space, culture, associations and other goods that belong only to them, that they are not obliged to share, and that anyone who was not acting aggressively and in a predatory way towards them would not demand that they share. You need to endorse traditional ideas on solidarity.
Fake solidarity must be contrasted with authentic solidarity.
This is an issue where you can't take the easy option of merely criticizing the politically correct for being inconsistent, insincere, Marxist-influenced and so on. It is not enough to say that the ideals of fake, politically correct solidarity are beautiful but often hard to live up to. That misses the point, it's false, and it gives the game away.
If you don't make positive claims, effectively you concede that married couples shouldn't have any space, that heterosexuals shouldn't have any space, that white people shouldn't have any space, culture or anything else that belongs to them and only them. And you concede that they shouldn't have their own associations, that belong to them.
Once you do that, you've given everything away. First, nothing can be effectively defended by individuals denied the power of association. Second, once people are deprived of natural associations they will take unnatural ones, and insist on them. Man is a social species, this is a need that must be met, in a good way or a bad one. And third, once you let everything be turned into contested space, into "no man's land", people will find that intolerable, and you will object in vain as they go along with politically correct demands for destructive "safe spaces".
Thanks Mark, I'll have a think about this. I guess my feeling is that Left Liberalism has absorbed a cultural Marxist propagated worldview; that c-M was designed to undermine Liberal society from within and succeeded, and that consequently many 'Liberal' people who do not regard themselves as Marxists now accept cultural Marxist dialectic. Apparently 80% of the UK population supported the highly cultural Marxist 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. The few Tories who saw it for what is was were slapped down even by other 'Conservatives'.
DeleteSimon, my perspective is a bit different. I agree that cultural Marxism is a real thing which has affected Western society negatively over the past 40 years. But it seems to me that the big problems had set in prior to this. The traditional Australian identity, for instance, began to be dismantled in the early 1940s and the process was complete by the late 1960s. In the 1940s it wasn't cultural Marxism that had influence on the left but the original variety of Marxism, though the men who initiated the changes were Labor Party leaders. And the men who completed the job and decisively opened the way for open borders in the late 1960s, men like John Gorton, were very much traditional style Liberal Party types (men like my father - I know the type). These men had grown up and formed their politics in the 1930s and 40s, before cultural Marxism had begun to have influence in Australia.
DeleteHaving said all that, I think it's true that cultural Marxism has had a significant influence on the contemporary left - and therefore over left-liberals and possibly even on some leftists within the churches.
Mark Richardson: "I agree that cultural Marxism is a real thing which has affected Western society negatively over the past 40 years. But it seems to me that the big problems had set in prior to this."
DeleteI see it like the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. First, war discredited and destabilized the old order. Then there were two revolutions: the first removed the Tsar, the second was the Bolshevik Revolution, which was vastly more significant and devastating.
Many people see only one "political correctness" regime change, in the 1960s. I used to see it that way too. You convinced me that there was a mass immigration revolution against the ethnic Australian nation before then.
But you also see one revolution, the older one, with the big problems all being in place before the antiwhite takeover, and a minor change of direction after that in the 1960s and 1970s.
I don't think that's right. Because Australia at Federation was emphatically, with mass support and the support of every party, White Australia. Not Anglo Australia, Scottish Australia, Irish Australia etc.. Whiteness was the key and the common ground, so even after the anti-ethnic-Australian revolution by mass immigration, the key thing that everyone had agreed on was still in place.
After that, there was a second, antiwhite, quiet revolution, or really more of a coup. That's by far the more significant one.
And it's not just a coincidence that this occurred everywhere in the Western world. The new revolutionary order is internationalist, spread through internationalist institutions like academia and the mass media, and driven by people who don't identify with either the traditional nations of the West or even the race that underpinned them all; rather by people who see themselves as having grievances against whites and Christians. I don't want to focus on the ethnic and other biases of the ruling order now, but I think that's what happened.
War has to be a major factor in our downfall. It destroyed the legitimacy of Tsarist Russia. Two world wars represent a colossal failure for Western civilization, and went a long way to discredit old-style nationalism for whites. And the Vietnam War was absolutely shattering for the old white establishment in America, which once it was revolutionized became a source of antiwhite influence throughout the Western (read: white) world.
An ethnically cohesive nation, which we no longer have, is much more able to resist a radically hostile social coup, compared to a nation that is undergoing ethnic destabilization anyway due to mass immigration from a variety of countries even if they are all white.
So you have these causes, these essential antecedents of the international antiwhite radical regime change. Obviously everything was not perfect till it suddenly went all wrong.
(Though I don't think it was all bad either. Our downfall was not inevitable. I think World War I might possibly have been avoided. Or had Hitler sincerely accepted Neville Chamberlain's offer of "peace for our time" I think we could be living in a much better world.)
But after the after the decline of the old elite and the rise of the new, radically hostile antiwhite elite, the character of the new regime and the demographic changes it imposes are what matters. A hostile ruling class and mass immigration are such fundamental causes of subsequent events that they turn everything else into prologue.
"But it seems to me that the big problems had set in prior to this."
DeleteI have to agree with Lawrence Auster that Liberalism itself contained the seeds of destruction, including opening the door to the cultural Marxist revolution as Titus says. I used to agree with William S Lind that we should turn back the clock to a time before cultural Marxist hegemony. He said the 1950s, before the '60s revolution. I could even point to the 1980s, before the crushing weight of Political Correctness descended in the late '80s.
But I can see now that Liberalism itself, the worship of Autonomy, is a major wellspring of destruction. Cultural Marxism is the source of Western self-loathing, but probably the Death of the West through sub-replacement fertility and non-Western immigration could take place even without C-M, purely through the operation of Liberalism.
Amazing some American latinos don't think Castilian is a white language. How would they respond to a blue eyed blonde Spaniard speaking "their" language? With more of this incoherent racially charge aggression?
ReplyDeleteGood point. In fact, the whole "cultural appropriation" argument is a foolish one to level against whites, since most cultural appropriation runs the other way. Do the Hispanics not dress in Western clothes, use Western technology, eat Western foods?
DeleteI suspect most groups would explain that away as a result of imperialism.
DeleteFurther, I heard about this big 'safe-space' south of the border...
DeleteJimmyFriday: "Further, I heard about this big 'safe-space' south of the border..."
ReplyDeleteMexico for Mexicans, Asia for the Asians, white countries for everybody.
Indian culture for the Indians, Mexican culture for the Mexicans, white culture for everybody.
ReplyDeleteJews have the right to abject to intermarriage, in order to preserve the Jewish people. Whites have no such right.
ReplyDeleteBlack women have the right to resent and object to black men consorting with white women. White women have no right to object to white men consorting with Asians.
And so on. It's always whites that don't have the right to anything: not their lands, their culture or even their genes.
In everything from land to money to educational and job opportunities to culture to the simple ability to continue one's own families, everything that whites have is communal property that can and should be redistributed for more fairness, while what persons of color have belongs to them.
One-sided solidarity cashes out as one-sided sharing. One-sided sharing cashes out like this:
What's yours is ours. What's mine's my own!
""Safe spaces" work out like this. First, your land (if you are white) is not your land. John Lee Hooker expresses it beautifully: This Land Is Nobody's Land. God made this land, so how can you own it? God didn't make this land for one man, he made it for everyone. Why are you fighting over this land, which you don't own? This land is your burying ground. So stop resisting your dispossession.
ReplyDeleteThen when it's not your land (if you're white), it's open space, that is contested space, that is unsafe space. It needs to be made safe space.
When the land was white, its ownership had to be opened. ("What's yours is ours!") Now that it's not white, its ownership has to be closed. ("What's mine's my own.")
What that comes down to is this:
"Safe spaces" are spaces made unsafe for whites and persons who belong to traditional white cultures.
(It works out the same with women versus men, trans versus cis (hiss!) and so on.)
Martin Luther King Boulevard is safe space. You're not going to be oppressed by crackas there. You may get mugged. Or in wom*n's "safe space" a white woman doing one-sided pseudo-solidarity may be treated viciously by a woman of color. But that's not the kind of "safety" that "safe space" is about.
"Safe spaces" are about making it unsafe for whites to go there due to various sorts of dangers, including social and legal consequences.
If you would feel safer in space with your boyfriend to look after you: tough. That kind of safety is not allowed.
That means that real safety, the kind people often want, the kind that is founded on real solidarity, not fake politically correct solidarity, is intentionally made unavailable in "safe space".
"Solidarity" that means persons of color and feminists demand "safe spaces" and that means whites and other people who lack standing under antiwhite political correctness have to agree to such demands is predatory and aggressive.
Real safe space has to be safe for authentic solidarity, which is the foundation of the connections that protect people. For example, safe space for children is space where their parents have the right to be present and observe that everything is in order.
Since the revolution of the 1960s, right liberalism has been betting against nature's abhorrence of a vacuum. Right liberals have been betting that they could safely help the left destroy natural and traditional solidarity, on every topic from racial and ethnic cohesiveness to security against divorce, and that they could help reduce social space to a "no man's land" of individual competition, and that the hard left, with academic and mass media monopolies, would not be able to fill that vacuum as it pleased.
ReplyDeleteThey've been losing.
The right liberal picture of how much solidarity people need, how much association they need, and what kind of social space they need, is dead wrong.
Man is a social animal. When people are bluffed or coerced out of defending real, adaptive and traditional associations, they will accept fake, un-adaptive or mal-adaptive associations rather than nothing.
People must have hierarchies. When they are denied adaptive and traditional ones, they will accept un-adaptive or mal-adaptive ones, like the hierarchy of politically correct victim-hood.
That's a really interesting comment.
DeleteAdaptive and traditional associations, structured spaces and hierarchies feel good and they produce great results. Fake ones don't.
ReplyDeleteReal solidarity lifts people above themselves in a way that fake solidarity doesn't.
The 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae have gone into our culture as exemplifications of real solidarity. Their loyalty to each other and their state was heroic, natural and adaptive. They all had children back in Sparta, and they were all assuring their own genetic futures. In this way they were able to live their final days and die in a manner that made them more than just tough guys. In imitating them, many soldiers since then have become the best they could have been.
Politically correct fake solidarity doesn't enlarge people, it shrinks them. In politically correct relationships of fake-solidarity, both sides, the white, cis-gendered non-gay losers giving away everything they have including their moral and social standing, and the victim-as-hero winners taking away everything the losers have and demanding more with scorn, are interested parties with identities that are manufactured for petty gain or a false expectation of gratitude. They shrink to the size of the goods they are fighting over, like the right of A to hiss "cis-gendered!" at B. Nobody gains stature (other than within their own sick games) by imitating them.
"Solidarity cannot be based on gestures of support for the most othered group in society. That is not solidarity, it is not fraternity. We need to recognise wherever and whenever this mistake is made and to patiently but firmly criticise it."
ReplyDeleteI agree with that...
But...
You have adopted the language of the antiwhite left, and with that comes its beliefs, in this case beliefs about "the other" and "othering".
I think you should talk about this label, since you are now using it, and say where you really stand.
In the context of current leftist practice, "othering" is something done by the left, and defined as a moral crime by the right, which passively accepts that language, neither offering its own nor even effectively criticizing it and unmasking the antiwhite, anti-Christians and anti-family agendas behind it.
In other words, the right is a patsy.
The "Other" is that which is not that which is initially under consideration. For example, when cis-gendered identity is the subject initially under consideration, the trans-gendered are being "othered".
But this dichotomy was created by the left, which created the terminology, with malice aforethought as usual.
Nobody like you, Mark, was thinking about creating an unfairly privileged cis-gender identity for yourself, and defining the transgendered as an "other" to make you and your fellow cis-genders a "same" and in that way give yourself legal and social privileges.
Rather, the left invents, labels, defines and manufactures divisions of identity, with the prior agenda of demonizing anything that sustains white communities. The so-called "other" was slated for legal privilege before it was created; it was invented to be privileged, in order to disprivilege the target.
The real prior "us" of the antiwhite establishment (which I think is more a coalition of hatred than one ethnic group) is never to be spoken of, rather the (covert) focus is on white, Christian, heteronormative populations as a "them" to be decontructed to death, first in a theoretical and moral sense and then practically.
The antiwhite establishment is protecting its real subject, itself, with silence upheld by fear of the social, professional and legal consequences of talking about it, while setting up a false "dominant identity", and it projects on that disfavored white identity the "othering" and division-creating and bigotry that it itself really practices.
And the useless right, the "conservatives" that never conserve anything, buy it, hook, line and sinker every time. It's very frustrating to watch this deceitful language and the assumptions behind it being accepted and adopted.
Titus, I've tried to be careful using the terms "other" or "othered" - putting them in scare quotes or making it clear that I'm summarising a leftist position. In the sentence you've quoted it's true that I haven't been careful enough - it reads as if I think there is a group that has been othered.
DeleteThe first step is to get to a clear criticism of leftist notions of solidarity; then we need to pose as an alternative a more traditional one - and with this comes a different vocabulary, including concepts of loyalty, of fellowship and fellow feeling, of kinship, of unity and so on. What we should do is to try to develop this vocabulary, along the lines that fit in with our own concept of solidarity.
Great! :)
Delete"White students appropriating the Spanish language, dropping it in when convenient, never ok."
ReplyDeleteThe obvious reply would be: "Non-white students appropriating the English language, dropping it in when convenient, never ok."
Whites in "solidarity" with their non-white "sisters", "brothers" and (insert non-gender-specific, non kinship-based term here) can never do it quite right, because their "solidarity" is appeasement and the burden of the anti-white complaint is ultimately not that we are "doing it wrong" but that we exist.
ReplyDeleteHow "Gravity" Failed In The Diversity of Sci-Fi Movies:
"Part of my indifference to "Gravity" is the total lack of vision in diversity. The whole time I was watching the film, I thought of at least four or five different actresses of color who could have rocked that role as well or better than Bullock. Same for George Clooney (I totally saw Don Cheadle in that role). I really do not understand why we are being presented with these archaic, lily-white type of sci-fi movies. It is not an accurate reflection of the world today, especially since experts have predicted the U.S. will be decidedly "browner" by 2050."
This is quite normal in modern politically correct thought. (And if you read the whole thing it's got "othering", communities "of color, LGBTQ and the differently-abled" and the whole liberal meal.)
How do you live so as to appease people whose grievance is that you live - that you are not gone, finished, replaced by more of them, where "them" means not merely "more of the same type of non-whites" but "more of anyone but whites" - the maximum hostile position?
You can do it for a while, partly, by acting in a way that is individually self-serving but collectively self-destructive, culturally and politically undermining your own kind. But this self-betrayal is ultimately inadequate, as long as you are still there.
And even if it could somehow be adequate, it would still be self-betrayal. Self-betrayal isn't solidarity.
I think whites have to demand: "for me to love you, you have to love me too. And love me, love my race. For you to make the price for your solidarity with me that I must hate myself and my own genes and act destructively toward other people with the same genes as me is to set the price of 'solidarity' with you too high. And if that's what you want, I don't think what you want is real solidarity anyway."
Terrific comment, Titus. Your first paragraph sums it up very well.
DeleteReplyDelete
I think the dynamic Titus describes here is what is going on between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians - the Palestinians' objection (in which they are supported by most of the rest of the world) is to the Israeli Jews' existing at all in that part of the world. So the conflict will continue as long as the State of Israel continues to exist, regardless of any concessions Israel might make.
DeleteVia Instapundit, White vaginas banned for Ivy League production of Vagina Monologues:
ReplyDelete“Barnard-Columbia V-Day is excited to announce that our annual production of The Vagina Monologues will feature an all self-identified women of color cast this year,” trumpets a Facebook page entitled Barnard/Columbia Vagina Monologues ’14 Auditions.
“The Vagina Monologues has historically overlooked the empowerment of women of color, queer women, and trans* folk, among others—often replicating and perpetuating the same systems of power and privilege that prompted the playwright, Eve Ensler, to write The Vagina Monologues in the first place,” the Facebook page explains.
The page goes on to excoriate “mainstream Western feminism” for “the marginalization and erasure of these groups” and the “failure to consider the effects of power structures outside gender within the feminist community.”
This story is more evidence that "diversity" is a codeword for less whites.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the alleged problem? Not enough "empowerment of women of color, queer women, and trans* folk, among others".
What is the university's solution: the elimination of all whites, and only whites.
Do you think that the authorities at these elite universities don't have enough IQ to figure out that the solution doesn't match the alleged problem? They know. They don't care. The point is to eliminate whites. The rest is just a bucket of assorted grievances, which in a general way delegitimizes whatever group is targeted, and rationalizes "doing something".
If political correctness demanded solutions that matched the alleged problems, it would be self-limiting. If the alleged oppression of women of color meant all whites were out, and the alleged oppression of queer women meant that all but queer women were out, and the alleged oppression of trans* folk meant that all but trans* folk were out, and so on, politically correct groups would have to decide which complaints justified eliminating people, or live with short staffing.
And if they made it clear that the real complaint, the one to be acted on, was the continued presence of whites, that would make their agenda obvious. It would reveal that their claim to stand genuinely for a lot of different people with a lot of different grievances is hollow. And it would reveal that it isn't a case of white societies and only white societies creating alleged "wrongs". (As though black societies, Asians societies and so on were consistently pro-queer, trans*-friendly and so on.) It's not a matter of arrows of oppression stabbing out from whiteness and only whiteness; rather it's a matter of every and any alleged grievance being used to rationalize the antiwhites' arrows of accusation, delegitimization, demonization, and social, professional and genetic elimination being fired at whites.
Is that a possible basis for mutual solidarity, which is the only real kind of solidarity? It is not.
OK, another view: here (assuming we believe the story is unbiased and true, and let's trust it) is what you can do every single day (assuming that random whites behave in blatantly punishable and potentially career-ending ways every day), to turn your white privilege to good. Is that real solidarity? Yes to some extent it is.
ReplyDeleteBut notice the qualifications it takes for this to work. She has to be the sister-in-law of the black woman she sides with against the mean, racist white, and she has to be half-black herself, though looking white. On those terms, sister-in-law and sister-in-law and both at least half-black "sisters" lined up together against the unrelated white woman, they have solidarity.
This is not exactly "nice white person" idealistic, un-self-interested and unilateral solidarity as envisaged by the politically correct and naive.
Also, this cozying up to Persons of Color (POCs) and extending your white, un-reciprocated solidarity to them works better if you are female. (Even though, as examples already provided show, it is not really functional even if you are female, unless exceptional circumstances apply.)
ReplyDeleteThe problem is: for the rest of the world that hasn't been brainwashed as whites have, and particularly for Muslims, the old rules are still in force: you (as males) keep your own women for yourselves, driving off and excluding males of other races and tribes, while you access the woman of other tribes as much as the weakness of their men allows. The tribe that plays this game less fiercely and effectively loses out, genetically and in every other way.
Obviously indoctrinated white boys are wimps and losers in this game, and despised as such. But they are also still "outside" males, meaning they should be humiliated, driven off and denied access to women.
Is that a formula for solidarity? No I don't think so.
Nothing about the world in which overly-teachable, too-trusting white people act corresponds to politically correct theory. The tribal and racial games that go on, and that influence how things are interpreted and how people react to them, are totally not what "liberal" education says.
There's another problem with politically correct solidarity. It's the problem of us knowing each other's cultural identities.
ReplyDeleteMutual discovery is part of the process of developing authentic solidarity. If I know you and you know me, and I know that you are trustworthy and you know that I am trustworthy, things are good. This process is never complete because people evolve and you never have all their secrets. But it can keep going well for a lifetime, particularly on a basis of a common understanding of identities. (Which means a monolithic culture is good.)
While the anti-white left accuse whites, straights, Christians etc. of manufacturing identities for gain, that is really what the antiwhite left does. Often, antiwhite identities are got up to benefit from mass media and government favoritism, rather than being organic. "Hispanic" identity is one example, "Asian" identity is another. There is no shared "Asian" language, "Asian" religion and so on, nor is there a "Hispanic" culture as opposed to Mexican culture, Cuban culture and so on.
While antiwhites try to empower and elevate the new identities of the non-white immigrants into white countries, they destroy and invalidate the identities of native whites, and criticize, reprimand or outright punish people who enforce such an identity and argue for its superiority.
That means on once side you have empowered but fake identities that must not be unmasked. ("Respect my proud Hispanic identity! And don't get to know me too well, lest you realize that that's bogus.") On the other hand, you have white identities that may be very deep, authentic and rooted, but are invalidated and may be suppressed or even vanishing, like Anglo-Saxon identity. And it's not in the interests of the non-whites or to the liking of the antiwhites to change that, and recognize and respect white culture, values and interests.
How on this basis are people going to develop the understanding of each other that fosters authentic solidarity? They aren't.
Some more good points, Titus, thanks.
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