[lbo-talk] Michaels, Against Diversity

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Mon Oct 5 15:35:13 PDT 2009


At 04:39 PM 10/5/2009, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>At 12:55 PM 10/5/2009, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
>
>>please, tell me, does Michaels
>>really think THEY are his audience... if they are, he's going about it all
>>wrong, if they're not, who's he writing for?
>
>
>NLR readers and people like those of us who read this list? He's caused a
>stir here no?

You know, there's a certain category of feminist blogger I've encountered. They are white, and they're smarting from some of the critiques that have made about whiteness, white supremacy, white privilege, and their own participation maintaining white supremacy.

They are certain that they have always been good little anti-racists and they are horrified when people point out that sometimes, no matter how anti-racist they've been, no matter how much anti-racist activism they've done, no matter what their record, sometimes they've, whoops, done or said or supported something racist.

Smarting from this and wanting to lash back at their critics, they've sometimes embraced critiques of class. They may even have a white working class background and set of experiences that incline them to want to understand "class". Next thing you know, they are big advocates of "class analysis" (in its weak, superficial, social strata way) and they then use this as a bludgeon to attack people who advocate an anti-racist politics. They spend an exceptional amount of time complaining about how everyone leaves class out of the analysis, yadda yadda yadda. and, whenever possible, they try to catch people of color out on "classism" and "class privilege".

In other words, they embrace an approach to social analysis precisely because it enables them to get away with saying things they couldn't get away with otherwise. Like the man who all of a sudden gets feminism, if it'll score him some points in a debate with another man. The most prominent example of this was the embrace of feminist ideas in order to legitimate the war in Afghanistan.

We could easily see how manipulative it was when conseratives did it. Denunciations were quick for those hosers. But when it came to our fellow leftists? it was a lot harder to accuse them of using the issue disingenuously. Their response would often be, "HOw could you! I'm a leftist! I'm not like those conservatives. I've always been on the side of social justice issues. Did you ever see me act in a way that was anti-feminist?"

That dynamic? That's what it smells like here. It's a version of a liberal who got mugged. Only in this case, the mugging came from some asshole like Tim Wise.



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