>>> "K" <d-m-c at worldnet.att.net> 11/16 12:32 PM >>>
I'd call this 'feeling good' about Blackness stuff bordering on exoticization of the Other.
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Charles: If you are Black, wouldn't it be exoticization of the Self ? If I am Black, then feeling good about being Black is an important thing to do. It is affirmative self-creation of myself as an individual.
It is Black self-love. Black is beautiful.
Since we are all being Black in this scenario wouldn't it be making the Self an Other ? They is we typa and we is they typa thang.
A white person who can feel Black self-love has made a revolutionary breakthrough in this culture.
But as Max says, there are times when a white person would look foolish trying this. I don't recommend is without a lot of study of Black history and culture and living with Black people,living in Detroit for decades or the like.
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I'd call it fertile soil for further commodification. (as if the culture industries need any help in this regard) _______
Charles: Commodity fetishism is reversal of subject and object. Things become subjects and people become objects. Here we have people turning into a different type of people ( the thread on which you are commenting involves white people becoming Black people)
That is not commodity fetishism.
How does your theory of commodification relate to Marx's commodity fetishism ? __________
I'd also call it completely blind to any sort of critical examination of where this 'blackness' comes from which is rancourous, acrimonious debate to be sure. __________
Charles: The blackness comes from history , the social tradition which is centered around the struggle for freedom within and from slavery and racism , and some carryovers from African culture.
The critical examination is practical-critical, that is revolutionary, after Marx in the First Thesis on Feuerbach and the last, in that we seek to change the world by action in it. We want to criticise by action guided by theory, criticise the world by practical-critical activity and struggle. As Fredrick Douglass taught, there is no progress without struggle.
This struggle for freedom is Black history and a source of Blackness. There is more than rancourous and acrimounious debate, but struggle by force of arms as by John Brown and the Civil War. As Douglass said there must be a struggle whether moral or physical or both.
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I'd also call it dangerous. What of Mexicano Chicano Puerto Rican Fillipino Chinese Aleutian Korean Panamanian Samoan Brazilian Etc. Dot dot dot. You get the picture. __________
Charles: No, I don't get the picture. Please reiterate.
I would say anybody who calls me dangerous I kind of consider a right winger per se. I am the safest person I know.
My position are all proletarian internationalist and in solidarity with the national liberation and freedom movements and interests of all the groups you list above. To call what I am saying dangerous is so opposite the truth that I wonder what's up with you.
Charles Brown
Workers and Oppressed Peoples of the Earth , Unite.
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