Of ugly truths, oppression, privilege, and doctrine – 2

So now, where were we?
Collective Blood guilt. It exists, to a degree. Of course it is nuanced. After all, whose grandfather hasn’t oppressed another’ grandfather, whose great-granduncle hasn’t cuckolded another’s, whose great-great-grandmother hasn’t stolen from another’s, and so on.

How many Armenian civilians were killed by Turks? But so too, how many thousands of Turks were killed by Armenian partisans shortly before? How many Serbs or Bulgarians were oppressed by Ottomans, and how many Ottoman civilians were harried, slaughtered en masse, and forcibly expelled from Bulgaria? How many Irish have killed an Englishman? And how many Irish have been starved and oppressed by the English? How many Saxons oppressed a Britton, and how many Anglo-Saxons were oppressed and slaughtered by Normans?

Ancient hatreds often dissolve, blood lies on the hands of every family, lineage, and race when you go far enough back.

Some black thinkers argue (using an academic definition of the word that’s rather recent) that White privilege makes it impossible for them to be racist, by definition. Why ? They argue that as an oppressed race and class it is impossible for them to be racist since they lack power, whilst power and agency are components of racism.

I thoroughly disagree. In fact, I find the opinion to be incoherent and self-serving. There is a grain of truth buried in it, somewhere, but this is irrelevant to my purposes here.

There is a strict academic usage of a word, and its general colloquial usage. Bigotry is bigotry, that “racism” may carry a greater semantic .. tang, a palpable frisson caressing the ears of those hearing the word is the reason for this narrow academic re-definition. Frankly, “reverse-Racism” is not the word for the very real Racialist, and Racist, attitudes that many Blacks, just as Whites, carry in our country.

Granted our attitudes may be molded by real experiences of oppression and discrimination, some so nuanced and routine that a non-Black would simply scoff and chalk up to over-sensitivity. I’ve personally experienced real Racism in my life. Someone who has not experienced it may chalk it up to a thin sensitive skin. My general attitude depends on whether or not something comes from simple ignorance and sincerity, or from bad past experiences, or from deliberate malice.

In general, other than a dismissal with slight disdain, I hold no grudges. And I refuse to judge every White person I meet, simply based on occasional bad experiences with one of their own. In the same light I hope that they will refuse to judge me simply based on bad experiences they have had with one of my own. I know that some will, and frankly their inner reality and perception is not my responsibility. I am, what, and who, I am. I struggle with myself to approach the world from a higher position, if in my efforts towards virtue I meet with flung dung-balls, well the flinging makes base the thrower, and my plodding through it in peace is an exercise in endurance.

A type of acesis. A cultivation of detachment from vissitudes. I have nothing to prove about my self, or my blood.

I do, however, refuse to excuse Black Racial Bigotry or Racism. Because even if it comes from a place of past horrendous experience, it acquires a petty fragility, as in a defense mechanism, based in resentments. The same sort you find in poorer Whites towards their upper classes. Or in people with less education towards many people with more education.

It is based often in unresolved bitterness touched with envy. It consumes the carrier more than the object of spleen venting. Holding the attitude lessens the person holding it.

For many radical feminists, since male privilege and patriarchy exists for her as overarching social institutions by definition all females are members of an oppressed class, though ranked in varying degrees of privilege (white upper class women at the top, poor women and children of color at the bottom). Of course Feminism encompasses many opinions, sentiments, theories, and positions, so this isn’t necessarily indicative of every Feminist. But it does match the opinions of many Radical Feminists I’ve read or have met.

As in the case of a Black Racialist dismissing the accusation of racism, all of this is highly disingenuous. I could use stronger words, but there is real resentment and psychological pain often involved in such rationalizations.

For example a White prep-school educated female Grad Student of protestant or Jewish background in an Ivy League university at a woman’s studies or Humanities department may have very subtle arguments regarding institutional Male Privilege. This same woman will tend to be more privileged by the fact of her race, and class, than the black male Janitor who cleans the classrooms she lectures. Not only would she have had opportunities that he lacked, but there will always be certain social doors open to her that she benefits from in a way that is very subtle.

Now that lower-class Black Male Janitor may be more privileged by his de-facto maleness than the Black Female janitor cleaning on the floor beneath him, he’s physically stronger, and as Feminist theory goes his maleness privileges him in his participation in the system of Patriarchy. But this is not necessarily the case, for she could hold greater social sway in their community and neighborhood, due to her family and family connections. Her cousins may be more respected in that neighborhood or community, she could have a more forceful personality which enables her to wield and exercise more agency and power than him. She could be his brother’s baby mama, and could routinely verbally and at times physically abuse the guy, due to his generally affable and unassuming nature. And so on, and so forth.

The Mexican cook working in a Restaurant in the Campus Quad may be under all three of these people, in his privilege and social status. A certifiable subaltern, he could be an illegal alien, thus outside most of the law’s protection, poorer by far than both the Black Janitors, with a physical phenotype seen as unattractive by the white feminist professor and the Black female Janitor, and his community may have very few Mexican immigrant women, so he is without sexual or romantic companionship.

Around the Mexicans in his community he may be more gentle, and smaller of frame, so he may get bullied, and generally be at the bottom of the barrel, but he may have an Uncle back home who is a rich industrialist and if he ever gets too far down and out he may be able to ask his Uncle to Western Union some Pesos up north to help him out. That uncle may be a millionaire, well connected to the Mexican government, and may have saved his nephew from certain scrapes in the past.

A white, New England Puritan family born and bred, Harvard graduate tenured professor may, at superficial glance, seem to have more privilege than the lot of the above folks combined.

Superficiality is the bane of understanding.
This man may be a cripple, confined to a Wheel Chair, and more to the point, of such a nice and genteel personality that he was routinely passed by his peers, his first two marriages may have ended in harsh divorces, with both of his wives flagrantly cheating on him, the last one taking the $500k house he had half paid off, and his car, and their child, and then filed false abuse charges against him, putting him into difficult legal straits, almost costing him his tenured position.

Let’s say that due to mis-prescribed anti-depressants he went, proverbially, “ape-shit” and shot himself in the chest with a revolver in a dark bout of suicidal depression, survived but nicked his spinal cord resulting in his current crippled condition.

The doctrinaire Women’s Studies professor mentioned above may loathe him and his stodgy Waspish male privilege and routinely express no sympathy whatsoever for his past when it comes up in faculty gossip. After all, she is a member of an oppressed class by definition, and he is by definition an oppressor.

Whose definitions?
Words can be subtly redefined with great facility to serve narrow interests mostly invisible to the people using the words.

Look, in case you are wondering, none of these scenarios are far fetched.
They are composites of people I’ve met in real life, I have taken liberty here and there to make a point, but in the broad soup of human life I’ve personally witnessed in my ever so youthful life, I have observed many times similar situations. A few scenarios woven from my own family’s history, or that of friends.

It helps for a person to pull his or her head out of the sand and be more observant as to what is really going on around him or her.

Why? Well because real life is more nuanced, complex, and seemingly messy than neat ideological and pseudo-intellectual explanations given by Hard-Corps doctrinaires and their fellow travelers, in their ever so reified and well thought out bodies of theory.

Theory that tends to support political and social radicalism tends to take a body of truth, and through logical and oratorical sophistry blow matters entirely out of proportion.

This is NOT a general indictment of general theory, one can find many timely, appropriate, and damning critiques of society in much radical theory – both Left and Right, Feminist or anti-Feminist, Racialist or Civil Rightist, Secularist or Evangelical or Islamist, Pagan new-Rightist or Liberal Democrat.

I say this because I tend to read, well, all of this stuff and relate what I read in theory to what I see manifesting in front of my own eyes.

A good perusal of history from many sources, both primary and secondary, from as many perspectives as possible, with a ruthless disdain towards lies and disingenuous whitewashing and a commitment to the truth, even when, no especially when it hurts one’s own position, helps.

Intellectual honesty is a precious thing.