Guest post: It is the discursive systems that racialize
Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on All our fault.
Fun things here:
1) Wokeness/CRT views people as “racialized” rather than being of a particular race. This is neither typo nor poor word choice on her part. Rather, it is exactly the way the woke understand the world: as interacting systems of discourse that impose “race” (among other things) on groups of (not individual) people. It is the discursive systems that racialize. There is nothing, literally nothing, outside of the discourse.
2) White women’s fears drive policing, the economy, and politics. White women are apparently the most powerful force in the nation. Why did the DJIA jump? White women. Why did Trump win? White women. Why did Obama win twice before him? White women. Why did the Civil Rights movement succeed? White women. Why are our taxes what they are? White women. Damn. Being a white woman is fucking awesome!
3) White women’s fears are society’s fears. But if S is one of a society’s fears, then we should expect S to be a fear of most, if not all, people in the society. So S is reasonably a black woman’s fear, a brown woman’s fear, and a white man’s fear.
4) White women’s fears are not real issues. It’s clear that white women are either very stupid or very evil. If they’re afraid of things that aren’t real, then they’re stupid. If they’re not actually afraid of those things but pretend to be while wielding the power mentioned in (2) and (3), then they’re evil.
5) White women’s fears are not the fears we should have. If a white woman is afraid of something, that’s a dead certain indicator that it’s not something to fear. So the next time a white woman expresses fear, know that you’ve just learned something about the world: whatever it is she’s afraid of is perfectly safe.
Well, that’s cleared that up then.
Well written analysis.
Women as a class do very poorly under patriarchy. Some women, it is true, do much more poorly than others. And a very few women – admittedly, mostly white – do very nicely indeed, comparatively, by siding with the oppressor class. But a few white women getting wealthy by complying with the restrictions placed upon women as a class do not make the entire sub-class of white women responsible for patriarchy, any more than black house slaves were responsible for the enslavement of black people. The fact is that even those at the top of the oppressed classes are still worse off than their oppressors.
The failure of individuals to fight against an oppressive regime, instead finding a comfortable niche for themselves within it, does not make the class to which they belong responsible for the oppression. And in a patriarchy, that is men as a class; even if individual men are doing a lot worse than individual women, they are still doing better than they personally would have been doing, had they been born female (with all else being equal).
It seems that there has been a failure to teach class analysis for far too long.
Tigger, that analysis puts it about as well as I have heard. I’ve been trying to explain that to people for a long time, and I deal every day with a job where they have some women nearly at the top (but have never had a woman president), and those women are very complicit in oppressing other women, and themselves appear to be extremely sexist.
The fact that our faculty is dominated by women also does not indicate women as an oppressor class; our college is a community college, and they pick up a lot of people that struggle to get jobs at universities. The Ph.D.s on our faculty are almost all women, because they have not been able to get the sorts of jobs male Ph.Ds can get. When I look at faculties of major universities, men dominate. When I look at small colleges, I see more women, and even in a few, more women than men. This does not mean that women have taken over academia, though one of my young male colleagues is convinced this is the case; it means we cannot break that glass ceiling very easily, and in some cases not at all.
That must be tough, iknklast, trying to explain that just because all the top fish in your small pool are female, that doesn’t mean that the females are winning. It means that the males have moved up to bigger and better pools, and are keeping the females out. It’s a failure to see the bigger picture.
I dunno. I have a hard time with a lot of class analysis, myself. Anything bearing the mark of Marx makes my brainskin crawl.
So, one of the things that bothers me is when there is nothing inherent to the classes chosen that necessitates a dichotomous oppressor:oppressed relation. (I’ll use x$y to mean x oppresses y.) A lot of the “intersectional” and critical studies literature/rhetoric does this. That is, for classes C and D, they assume that C could oppress D implies that C does oppress D.
[ ◇(C$D)→(C$D) ]Further, they assume that the oppression relation holds for every subset of C and D.[ ∀c⊆C,d⊆D : C$D→c$d ]Neither of these assumptions is always true. Each one is plausibly defeasible by counterexample. For instance, it is plausible that there are some members of D who are either not oppressed or not oppressed in all situations. The trivial case, of course, is where D is oppressed in a particular nation/region but not in another.
I don’t accept these assumptions, so it’s hard for me to go along with many common claims. For example: (1) “the best-off members of D are worse off than any member of C,” and (2) “all members of D are oppressed by C, whether they seem to be or not.”
If C$D is defined as
C$D if-and-only-if all members of C are better off than all members of D, then (1) obtains. However, this makes $ restrictive and vulnerable to counterexample: a member of D that is better off than a member of C. This already appears to be the situation, as (2) is generally used to deny a counterexample to (1). My problem with (2) is that it makes individual oppression unfalsifiable, along the same lines as asserting that God is omnipresent. If individual oppression is unfalsifiable, then group oppression is also unfalsifiable.Another puzzling rhetorical response to potential counterexamples is to discount a metric’s significance. For instance, P asserts that C$D. Q points to a metric S by which D is better off than C. P responds by claiming that S doesn’t matter. P’s response looks like moving goalposts. Charitably, P’s move amounts to a further restriction on $ such that
C$D if-and-only-if all members of C are better off than all members of D by particular metrics.Look at how the woke have neutered “racism” and “racist” by redefining the terms to point to something other than that from which the terms’ moral value derives. I can accept it when woke people call me “racist”, because they aren’t calling me racist. To be racist is bad, but I don’t even know how to feel about being “racist”. Does P’s “oppression” have the same moral import as oppression, normally construed?
Anyway, I’m just rambling at this point.
A point I tried to make at one point, and got labeled as a nasty racist for my trouble. There are situations where a black man has an advantage over a white woman; I have worked in more than one such place, where women don’t get a nod for promotions (or even non-temp jobs), but black men are moved up and given every opportunity (and permanent jobs) without question.
That is not to say these black men in this setting don’t experience racism; they often do. It is just that in this setting, the sexism is a much larger problem. Black women, I have noticed, are usually non-existent in these settings. In one job I had, they hired lots of women temps and interns to make their affirmative action numbers look good, but never converted them to permanent. Every male, including black males, would have a permanent job if they wanted one, would get raises, and would get promotions. The thing is, every woman they hired as temp or intern was white, so adding black on top of woman made it a total non-starter.