Sorry-- Some Political Correctness Stuff

When Dickinson Grammar School, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was charted as a college it was a week after the official formation of the United States in 1783. It's founders signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The student newspaper, The Dickinsonian was founded in 1872. Last week the paper published an OpEd by Leda Fisher, Should White Boys Still Be Allowed to Talk? You can probably imagine Breitbart's reaction. But first Fisher's article:

When you ask a question at a lecture, is it secretly just your opinion ending with the phrase “do you agree?” If so, your name is something like Jake, or Chad, or Alex, and you were taught that your voice is the most important in every room. Somewhere along your academic journey, you decided your search for intellectual validation was more important than the actual exchange of information. Now how do you expect to actually learn anything?

American society tells men, but especially white men, that their opinions have merit and that their voice is valuable, but after four years of listening to white boys in college, I am not so convinced. In my time at Dickinson I have listened to probably hundreds of white boys talk. It feels incessant. From classes and lectures, to the news and politics, there is an endless line of white boys waiting to share their opinions on the state of feminism in America, whether the LGBTQ+ population finally has enough rights, the merits of capitalism, etc. The list of what white boys think they are qualified to talk about is endless. Something very few of them seem to understand is that their (ill-informed, uncritical) opinions do not constitute truth. In fact, most often their opinions aren’t even original. White boys spout the narrative of dominant ideologies and pretend they’re hot takes instead of the same misleading garbage shoved down our throats by American institutions from birth.

I am so g****mned tired of listening to white boys. I cannot describe to you how frustrating it is to be forced to listen to a white boy explain his take on the Black experience in the Obama-era. Hey Brian, I’m an actual Black woman alive right now with a brain. In what world would your understanding of my life carry more weight than my understanding? Unfortunately, it is this world, where white men debate the pain of other people for fun and then take away their rights. The second thing most white boys seem not to understand is that they do not exist separate from the rest of the world. You do not speak alone, you speak with the weight of every other white man who has spoken over a woman, erased the contributions of queer people from history, or denigrated “broken English” as unintelligent. You speak with the weight of policies and laws meant to forever define intelligence by how it measures up to the bros of America.

So, should white boys still be allowed to share their “opinions”? Should we be forced to listen? In honor of Black History Month, I’m gonna go with a hell no. Go find someone whose perspective has been buried or ignored and listen to them, raise up their voice. To all the Chrises, Ryans, Olivers, and Seans out there, I encourage you to critically examine where your viewpoints come from, read a text that challenges you without looking for reasons to dismiss it, and maybe try listening from now on.

And before heading over to Breitbart, the first response from a Dickinsonian, Scout Waverly:

It’s not often that racist and sexist thoughts are married so well on the page, so kudos to the writer for creating this perfect storm of hate. Who will get space next on the editorial pages of The Dickinsonian? A Klansman? A gleeful misogynist?

Is it meant to be a discussion piece? It’s not. Is it meant to be social commentary? It’s not. It’s a racially motivated attack, one that should be condemned widely across campus as if it were in fact written by a Klansman. And if we went through and replaced “white boys” with “black girls” and published it, there would be immediate protests on Britton Plaza and statements from the President’s Office condemning intolerance.

The piece is poorly thought out, full of presumptions cast as fact (clearly the writer hasn’t taken any logic classes), and raging with stereotypes. You say of white boys “most often their opinions aren’t even original.” None of your opinions here are original either. Ignorant people have held them forever.

Has the writer heard of the dangers of condemning all members of a group en masse? I’ll make an assumption of my own: She has probably been fighting that kind of thing her whole life. Now here she is embracing it in what can be only read as a racist rant that herds an entire group under an umbrella of hate.

I’m frankly disappointed in Dickinson that a senior would write this.

The second response was from a young woman, Erika Hvolbeck:

his article is inherently and horrifically racist. If I, a young white woman wrote the same article but changed “white” with “black”, I would probably have unmatched consequences. This article is horribly written, sounds appallingly uneducated, and has no merit. You are lumping a group of men together and racially stereotyping them. WHO has the right to judge ANYONE based on the color of their skin? White or black. It’s 2019, and we should respect everyone despite their race, ethnicity, class, or sexuality. To list “white names” like that was terribly racist. Imagine if I said people like Deshawn, Laquisha and Dayvon shouldn’t be listened to because they have “ghetto accents”, or because their opinions were “unoriginal”? Frankly, this article was horrible to read, and I’d feel like that if it was about Latino-Americans, African Americans, or Asian-Americans. No one’s voice can or should be silenced based on their skin color. You argue that these white college boys only want to search for intellectual validation rather than exchanging new information. This claim could not be more false. I must debunk your assertion that is is true, because the main reason why many people go to college in the first place is to have their views and ideas challenged and to expand their knowledge. I doubt a white boy who only wanted to have his belies reaffirmed would go to a liberal arts college. You also touch on the fact that American society tells only white men that their opinions are valid. First off, everyone in America is entitled to their own opinion. What makes America so great is our freedom of speech, whether that speech may go against common morals and values, we are all able to state our opinions in this country without persecution from the law. Overall, your article is absolutely one of the most ignorant, unscholarly, and remarkably racist articles I have ever had the displeasure of reading.

Followed by a little irony from Jonathan Murray, an alum: "This piece succeeded in its desired objective: as a 'white boy', it left me utterly speechless." Hundreds of comments, most negative, but not uniformly so. A couple of days after the OpEd was published comments were still coming in. Yesterday David Smith wrote that he's "an ‘82 Dickinson grad. As I see it, the opinion writer’s basic point is that, in her experience, white males at Dickinson tend not to understand or really listen to the opinions and perspectives of students from different racial backgrounds. Apparently that’s been her experience. Is it racist for her to say that? I don’t think so. Most of the comments here miss her basic point. Yes, she uses in your face language, which is clearly intended to provoke, and it goes overboard in a few places-- the title in particular. But at root she’s simply pointing a finger at white male privilege. You’d be hard pressed to say that doesn’t exist at Dickinson, as at many schools. Which isn’t to say that white male students at Dickinson are bad people or need to feel guilty about who they are. I was one. But there are societal and institutional structures in place that benefit white males. And it is incumbent on us to be conscious of those advantages and to seek to 'spread the wealth.' Not listening to and learning from people of other races/backgrounds/genders/sexual orientations, etc. is ignorant and inconsistent with Dickinson’s purpose. The bottom line is you may disagree with her opinion and the language she used, but you can’t take away her experience. Maybe that’s not your experience, but that’s how she sees it. The statement on this matter by D’son’s president hit the mark perfectly, I thought. She seems great."

Zadie Smith is an award-winning English author from London who currently teaches creative writing at NYU. Her parents are a mixed-race couple. Her younger brothers are rapper and stand up comedian Doc Brown and rapper Luc Skyz. She's a graduate of King's College, Cambridge. This is an interview she did last year:



Last week, at the Hay Cartegena festival in Colombia, Smith addressed the political correctness and identity politics plaguing the literary world. [That's right-- it isn't just fucking up electoral politics, Broadway and cooking shows.] Claire Armistead wrote that "Smith laid into identity politics in a headline session at the 14th Hay Cartagena festival, insisting novelists had not only a right, but a duty to be free.

Asked how she felt about cultural appropriation, she told an audience of nearly 2,000 at the festival in Colombia on Friday: “If someone says to me: ‘A black girl would never say that,’ I’m saying: ‘How can you possibly know?’ The problem with that argument is it assumes the possibility of total knowledge of humans. The only thing that identifies people in their entirety is their name: I’m a Zadie.”

She conceded that the assertion of a collective identity was sometimes necessary “to demand rights,” but cited the dismay of her husband-- the poet and novelist Nick Laird-- at finding himself increasingly categorised. “He turned to me and said: ‘I used to be myself and I’m now white guy, white guy.’ I said: ‘Finally, you understand.’ But the lesson of that is that identity is a huge pain in the arse. The strange thing to me is the assumption [of white people] that their identity is the right to freedom.”

She went on to question the role of social media in policing personal development. “We are being asked to be consistent as humans over great swathes of time. People are searching through social media. But everyone is changing all the time.”

In an essay in her collection, Feel Free, she investigated one such change in herself, when she fell in love with the music of Joni Mitchell, a singer she had despised when she was a mixed-race teenager growing up on a London housing estate. “The reason for hating Joni Mitchell was that I didn’t listen to classical or ‘white’ music,” said Smith. “Then I had an epiphany, and suddenly realised that her voice was beautiful. It’s a responsibility to be as open as you possibly can to the world as an aesthetic object.”

Returning to the issue of political correctness, she reflected on her debut novel White Teeth, which had depicted characters from many backgrounds but, she said, had been given an easy ride by the white critics because “[its characters] were mostly brown. It had all sorts of mistakes I’m sure but if I didn’t take a chance I’d only ever be able to write novels about mixed-race girls growing up in Willesden.”

Speaking in the home city of Gabriel García Márquez, Smith admitted that she was not a great fan of magic realism, preferring to deal in more concrete realities.

She ended by citing Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as an example of the power of the reprobate imagination. “Women have felt very close to these fake, pretend women invented by men. It makes us feel uncomfortable in real life. This is not real life. It’s perverse, but it’s what’s possible in fiction. There’s no excuse for its irresponsibility, but fiction is fundamentally irresponsible.”

The urban dictionary-- I never knew it was so political!

Wikipedia is far more... timid:

Cultural appropriation, at times also phrased cultural misappropriation, is the adoption of elements of one culture by members of another culture. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from disadvantaged minority cultures. Because of the presence of power imbalances that are a byproduct of colonialism and oppression, cultural appropriation is distinct from equal cultural exchange.

Cultural appropriation is often considered harmful, and to be a violation of the collective intellectual property rights of the originating, minority cultures, notably indigenous cultures and those living under colonial rule. Often unavoidable when multiple cultures come together, cultural appropriation can include using other cultures' cultural and religious traditions, fashion, symbols, language, and music.

According to critics of the practice, cultural appropriation differs from acculturation, assimilation, or cultural exchange in that this appropriation is a form of colonialism: cultural elements are copied from a minority culture by members of a dominant culture, and these elements are used outside of their original cultural context-- sometimes even against the expressly stated wishes of members of the originating culture.

Often, the original meaning of these cultural elements is lost or distorted, and such displays are often viewed as disrespectful, or even as a form of desecration, by members of the originating culture. Cultural elements which may have deep meaning to the original culture may be reduced to "exotic" fashion or toys by those from the dominant culture. Kjerstin Johnson has written that, when this is done, the imitator, "who does not experience that oppression is able to 'play', temporarily, an 'exotic' other, without experiencing any of the daily discriminations faced by other cultures." The African-American academic, musician and journalist Greg Tate argues that appropriation and the "fetishizing" of cultures, in fact, alienates those whose culture is being appropriated.

The concept of cultural appropriation has also been widely criticised. Some writers on the topic note that the concept is often misunderstood or misapplied by the general public, and that charges of "cultural appropriation" are at times misapplied to situations such as eating food from a variety of cultures, or learning about different cultures. Commentators who criticize the concept believe that the act of cultural appropriation does not meaningfully constitute a social harm, or that the term lacks conceptual coherence. Some argue that the term sets arbitrary limits on intellectual freedom and artists' self-expression, reinforces group divisions, or itself promotes a feeling of enmity or grievance, rather than liberation.

And, yes, yes... I'll get to more about Virginia later this morning, I promise.

Zadie Smith wonders if the post-Brexit U.K. can remain "united," and if it can honor its old values

Zadie Smith in 2014

"Whether we still know, in Britain, what a better life is, what its necessary conditions are and how to achieve them, is what’s now in doubt."

-- Zadie Smith, in "Fences: A Brexit Diary,"
in the August 18 New York Review of Books

by Ken

Though Zadie Smith is probably better known as a fiction writer (and teacher of fiction writing; she's a tenured professor at NYU), my experience of her is entirely as a nonfiction writer -- such an incisive and insightful one that when I saw that she's written "Fences: A Brexit Diary" for the August 18 New York Review of Books, that was the first thing I turned to when the issue arrived.

I'm sorry that I can't encapsule what makes the piece so absorbing piece, because the power of its perspective depends on the many strands of Zadie's personal history and cuiltural consciousness which are so carefully woven into her responses to the Brexit vote,. Consider just these geographical circumstances:

• that, because of a family illness, she has been living for the last year back in her old North West London neighborhood, which retains a fair amount of its remembered multicultural character but is in the throes of gentrification

• that, at the time of the actual Brexit vote, she was in Northern Ireland, "staying with my in-laws, two kindly, moderately conservative Northern Irish Protestants with whom I found myself, for the first time in our history, on the same side of a political issue," and "together we watched England fence itself off from the rest of Europe, with hardly a thought about what this meant for its Scottish and Irish cousins in the north and the west."

The latter circumstance gives rise to this perspective:

Much has been written since about the shockingly irresponsible behavior of both David Cameron and Boris Johnson, but I don’t think I would have been so entirely focused upon Boris and Dave if I had woken up in my own bed, in London. No, then my first thoughts would have been essentially hermeneutic. What does this vote mean? What was it really about? Immigration? Inequality? Historic xenophobia? Sovereignty? EU bureaucracy? Anti-neoliberal revolution? Class war?

But in Northern Ireland it was clear that one thing it certainly wasn’t about, not even slightly, was Northern Ireland, and this focused the mind on what an extraordinary act of solipsism has allowed this long-brutalized little country to become the collateral damage of an internal rift within the Conservative Party. And Scotland! It’s hard to credit. That two supposedly well-educated men, who have presumably read their British history, could with such utter recklessness throw into hazard a hard-won union of three hundred years’ standing—in order to satisfy their own professional ambitions—appeared that morning a larger crime, to me, than the severing of the decades-long European pact that actually prompted it all.

NEOLIBERALISM MAKES YOU FEEL "LIKE
YOU CAN DO NOTHING TO CHANGE IT"

"When Google records large numbers of Britons Googling 'What is the EU?' in the hours after the vote," Zadie writes, "it becomes very difficult to deny that a significant proportion of our people were shamefully negligent in their democratic duty on June 23."

Zadie has a lot to say about the often-twisted reasoning, confusion, and rank ignorance of many voters on both the Leave and Remain sides, and to the extent that the result can be taken as evidence of "a working-class populist revolution, she's sympathetic:

Doing something, anything, was in some inchoate way the aim: the notable feature of neoliberalism is that it feels like you can do nothing to change it, but this vote offered up the rare prize of causing a chaotic rupture in a system that more usually steamrolls all in its path.

At the same time, she takes note of "the casual racism that seems to have been unleashed alongside [this "violent, more or less considered reaction to austerity and the neoliberal economic meltdown that preceded it"], both by the campaign and by the vote itself, and adds two anecdotes from her Jamaican-born mother:

A week before the vote a skinhead ran up to her in Willesden and shouted “Über Alles Deutschland!” in her face, like a memory of the late 1970s. The day after the vote, a lady shopping for linens and towels on the Kilburn High Road stood near my mother and the half-dozen other people originally from other places and announced to no one in particular: “Well, you’ll all have to go home now!”

Most interestingly, though, "the profound shock" Zadie felt at the referendum result causes her to focus on "our own Londoncentric solipsism." That shock, also experienced by many other Londoners, "suggests at the very least that we must have been living behind a kind of veil, unable to see our own country for what it has become."

I kept reading pieces by proud Londoners speaking proudly of their multicultural, outward-looking city, so different from these narrow xenophobic places up north. It sounded right, and I wanted it to be true, but the evidence of my own eyes offered a counternarrative. For the people who truly live a multicultural life in this city are those whose children are educated in mixed environments, or who live in genuinely mixed environments, in public housing or in a handful of historically mixed neighborhoods, and there are no longer as many of those as we like to believe.

For many people in London right now the supposedly multicultural and cross-class aspects of their lives are actually represented by their staff—nannies, cleaners—by the people who pour their coffees and drive their cabs, or else the handful of ubiquitous Nigerian princes you meet in the private schools. The painful truth is that fences are being raised everywhere in London. Around school districts, around neighborhoods, around lives. One useful consequence of Brexit is to finally and openly reveal a deep fracture in British society that has been thirty years in the making. The gaps between north and south, between the social classes, between Londoners and everyone else, between rich Londoners and poor Londoners, and between white and brown and black are real and need to be confronted by all of us, not only those who voted Leave.

"EXTREME INEQUALITY FRACTURES COMMUNITIES"

Who wouldn't pay £5,000 for the Savoy's Sazerac cocktail?

Not just does inequality fracture communities, Zadie writes, but "after a while the cracks gape so wide the whole edifice comes tumbling down."

In this process everybody has been losing for some time, but perhaps no one quite as much as the white working classes who really have nothing, not even the perceived moral elevation that comes with acknowledged trauma or recognized victimhood. The left is thoroughly ashamed of them. The right sees them only as a useful tool for its own personal ambitions. This inconvenient working-class revolution we are now witnessing has been accused of stupidity—I cursed it myself the day it happened—but the longer you look at it, you realize that in another sense it has the touch of genius, for it intuited the weaknesses of its enemies and effectively exploited them. The middle-class left so delights in being right! And so much of the disenfranchised working class has chosen to be flagrantly, shamelessly wrong.

She has some trenchant observations about the way "the neoliberal middle and upper-middle class" has "shafted itself" as surely as the poor, who are regularly ridiculed for "voting against their interests."

[G]o up to Notting Hill and watch the private security vehicles, paid for by private residents, slowly patrolling up and down the streets, in front of all those £20 million residences, nervous perhaps of the council house residents still clinging on, the other side of the Portobello Road. Or go up to the Savoy and have a gander at the vintage cocktail list on which the cheapest drink on offer goes for £100 (the most pricey is something called the Sazerac—which claims to be the most expensive cocktail in the world—coming in at £5,000). Strange times.

Of course that cocktail list is only another stupid symbol, but it is of its time and place. There has been a kind of money madness in London for some time and for the rest of us looking on it’s hard to find in such symbols any sign of a beautiful, harmonious, or even happy life (what kind of happy person needs to be seen ordering a £5,000 cocktail?), though at least when you are this rich you can comfortably fool yourself that you are happy, utilizing what the old North London Marxists used to call your “false consciousness.” That crusty standby won’t work anymore for describing the economically and socially disenfranchised of this nation: they are struggling, deeply unhappy, and they know it.

In "wealthy London," Zadie observes, where it's great sport to "lecture the rest of the country on its narrow-mindedness": " 'Them' and 'us' never actually meet except in symbol."

We may walk past “them” very often in the street and get into their cabs and eat their food in their ethnic restaurants, but the truth is that more often than not they are not in our schools, or in our social circles, and they very rarely enter our houses—unless they’ve come to work on our endlessly remodeled kitchens.

Elsewhere in Britain people really do live cheek-by-jowl with the recently migrated, and experience the undercutting of their wages by newcomers. They really do have to fight for resources under an austerity government that makes it all too easy to blame your unavailable hospital bed on the migrant family next door, or on an oblique bureaucracy across the Channel, which the nitwit demagogues on the TV keep telling you is the reason there’s not enough money in the NHS. In this atmosphere of hypocrisy and outright deceit, should the working-class poor have shown themselves to be the “better man” when all around them is corruption and venality? When everyone’s building a fence, isn’t it a true fool who lives out in the open?

"IN BRITAIN NIGELS COME AND
GO, BUT RUPERTS ARE FOREVER"


NYRB caption: "Nigel Farage canvassing for ‘Leave’ votes during the Brexit campaign, London, May 2016. He resigned as leader of the UK Independence Party on July 4, shortly after the referendum."

Zadie takes pointed note of the influence of the mega-rich right-wing media barons.

My life and the lives of my fellow Britons are at all times at least partially governed by a permanent, unelected billionaire class, who own the newspapers and much of the TV, and through which absurd figures like Farage are easily puffed up, thus swinging elections and shaping policy.

And she notes the lesson from Brexit that "the postwar British compact between government and people is not guaranteed,"

and it can be collectively unraveled, or trampled over by a few malign actors. Therefore the civilizing liberal arguments that established a universal health care system, state education, and public housing out of the ruins of war now need a party willing to make those arguments afresh in a new age of global capitalism, though whether that party will still even bear the name “Labour” remains to be seen.

It's "this patrimony," she argues, that has drawn "the recently migrated," and she allows that "some have come merely to exploit it."

But the great majority have come to participate: they enroll their kids in our state schools, they pay their British taxes, they try to make their way. It is certainly not a crime or a sin to seek a better life abroad, or to flee from countries riven by wars, many of which we ourselves had a hand in. Whether we still know, in Britain, what a better life is, what its necessary conditions are and how to achieve them, is what’s now in doubt.

OF COURSE THIS IS ALL FROM A U.K. PERSPECTIVE

But I don't think it's that hard to translate it to a U.S. one.

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