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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
People should be allowed to do business with whoever they want.
If someone doesn't want to business because of X, Y and Z; and person B is willing? That's just more money in person B's pocket.
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People are allowed to business with whomever they want within the law.
It is illegal to discriminate based on race, religion, gender and in some places sexual orientation.
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On September 12 2017 04:29 RealityIsKing wrote:
People should be allowed to do business with whoever they want.
If someone doesn't want to business because of X, Y and Z; and person B is willing? That's just more money in person B's pocket.
i mean in theory maybe? even then no. but in practice you just wind up in a place of legalized discrimination and the discriminated class du jour has no means of doing normal person things because everyone's legally discriminating.
or worse(?), person B price gouges them.
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On September 12 2017 04:14 Buckyman wrote:Show nested quote +On September 12 2017 02:53 farvacola wrote:First, you don't even have the issue framed correctly. The farmer outright denied use of his farm for homosexual weddings in the format of a business response to a potential customer inquiry through Facebook and then reaffirmed that commitment to not hosting same sex weddings later on. In other words, Country Mill and its owners have a stated policy whereby they will not entertain same-sex wedding inquiries and they made this repeatedly clear through public means typical to business communication. Further, the farm and farmer are located in Charlotte, not East Lansing, so there isn't even a residency interest at stake relative to East Lansing local government functions. So, you have a local ordinance that prohibits the denial of services due to sexual orientation, a locality that puts on a farmer's market in ostensible compliance with that ordinance, and an outsider farmer with a repeated public denial of services to homosexuals to his name. The idea that the terms of the ordinance's prohibition are too vague is standard 1st amendment scattershot. Look, even the Washington Times gets it more right lol The situation started in August, when someone inquired on Country Mill’s Facebook page whether they hosted gay weddings at the farm. Mr. Tennes said no, explaining that his Catholic family believes marriage should be between one man and one woman, he told Fox News’ Todd Starnes.
City officials found out about the post and reportedly urged Mr. Tennes to comply with its ordinance. After taking a break from hosting weddings at the farm, Mr. Tennes decided to refuse the order and announced on Facebook that the farm would continue to block same-sex weddings, the State Journal reported. Mr. Tennes was later informed that his farm would not be welcome back for the 2017 season.
“It was brought to our attention that The Country Mill’s general business practices do not comply with East Lansing’s Civil Rights ordinances and public policy against discrimination as set forth in Chapter 22 of the City Code and outlined in the 2017 Market Vendor Guidelines, as such, The Country Mill’s presence as a vendor is prohibited by the City’s Farmer’s Market Vendor Guidelines,” the city said in a letter to the family, obtained by Fox News.
The city manager said East Lansing recently updated its civil rights ordinance to include discrimination at “all business practices” for the city’s farmers market.
“When [Country Mill] applied, we decided to exclude them from the market based on that,” Mr. Lahanas told the State Journal.
East Lansing Mayor Mark Meadows said the farm’s exclusion is based on the Tennes family’s “business decision” to exclude same-sex weddings.
“This is about them operating a business that discriminates against LGBT individuals and that’s a whole different issue,” Mr. Meadows said. LinkPersonally, I think EL got sloppy with this but are in the right otherwise. This still doesn't address the retroactivity issue at all. The 2016 version of the rules didn't discriminate based on business that happened outside the city jurisdiction. All the speech and alleged conduct occurred before the 2017 Market Vendor Guidelines were updated. It also doesn't address the religion angle. The ordinance as-applied forbids sincerely holding a specific religious belief, though it allows insincerely holding the belief while acting to the contrary. This is ironic, because the same ordinance also forbids the Farmer's Market to discriminate by religion.
This is what happens when you read impact litigation press as legitimate journalism....
There is no retroactivity issue at all, the Country Mill and its agents continue to prohibit same sex weddings on its premises and has publicly reaffirmed this position through many outlets. The idea that enforcement of this ordinance necessarily relates back to the 2016 post is a deliberate mischaracterization of the gesticulatory attachment that took place when the city was first prompted for a reason behind its ban. East Lansing passed its anti-sexual orientation discrimination ordinances all the way back in 1972, so the idea that the public wasn't on notice as to the city's policy with regards to business treatment of homosexuals is absolute nonsense. The "Market Vendor Guidelines" chronology issue is only relevant in an administrative sense, though steps taken towards making rules more clear following a dispute can be treated differentially by courts.
The "as-applied" religion angle is just that, a legal angle taken by lawyers that conflicts with thousands of anti-discrimination statements/policies enacted by both public and private entities throughout the US. Localities throughout the US have enacted anti-sexual orientation discrimination ordinances just like ELs, though whether they'll survive remains to be seen.
Again, just so we're clear, you are parroting the talking points laid out in an article that could be used as evidence of malpractice if ADF did or said anything averse to its case. The people writing that are literally required to give you only half the story.
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On September 12 2017 02:28 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On September 12 2017 01:55 Nyxisto wrote:On September 12 2017 01:19 Danglars wrote:On September 12 2017 00:58 Nyxisto wrote:
policing by consent and all of this community stuff is only possible if the population is disarmed, because there'll never be mutual trust between police and citizens if the former don't hold the monopoly on force. So in a sense the statement that "police is built through brutal force" is correct, it just happens to be that this should have happened in the abstract.
That's why it's possible for the police in the UK to never shoot a bullet or approach anybody without automatically threatening them. I'd prefer the population to be armed rather than only the criminals in the population to be armed. It's simply rubbish to assume citizens that exercise their 2nd amendment rights erode mutual trust. It's no excuse for police training for SWAT style home breaches or the Castile cop. Most people aren't criminals and most interactions involving the police probably also do not involve dangerous criminals. But if you're in a place where everybody could be armed and has the means to kill you, your first thought as a police officer will not be to "serve and protect" and engage people like citizens, they'll engage them like they're dangerous. The fact that you immediately draw the attention to "armed criminals" shows how deep this goes instinctively. The permanent threat thinking is so baked in that everything involving police matters automatically involves 'criminals' and danger and the need to protect yourself. And of course a widespread presence of guns indicates a lack of trust. That's why guns exist, they're tools to kill and nothing else. Carrying them around at all times doesn't exactly scream trust. And the trust issue extends into the other direction as well. To be wiling to give up the right to use force citizens need to be able to trust the government with it. Hardly. You presume both that police must be dolts and that citizens do not know how the fuck to lawfully carry a gun. Well, with your ridiculous presuppositions, I can see how you'd arrive at your conclusion. Secondly, nope for why I "immediately draw the attention to." You said "if the population is disarmed." You cannot actually mean that, because criminals that already don't legally own a gun will also not be disarmed when you disarm the law-abiding. Thirdly, the "widespread presence of guns" indicates a responsible attitude towards self defense and the deterrence of crime. The "lack of trust" bit is nothing more than a propaganda line. Talk to some actual gun owners. Don't let the internet or politically opposed groups rule your understanding of the issue. Police aren't somehow doomed to antagonistic relationships simply because of the second amendment.
I do not presume that the police are dolts at all. In fact I said the opposite. It's the lack of trust that provokes a generally hostile attitude between citizens and the police. If this was not the case and nobody was armed but cops would still be acting in paranoid and punitive fashion, only then I would have to assume that the police are dolts.
And sure, if the general population is not armed, criminals might still have guns. Although it's probably significantly harder to obtain them. But again, criminality is not everywhere. There are not criminals behind every corner. It's not an automatic justification for self-defence or even a proportionate response. I assume most Americans do not regular encounter criminals at all.
And lack of trust is not just a propaganda line. The right to own guns ties into the attitude that one needs to "protect their own family and their property", in other words society ends behind the garden fence. The state and the neighbours are not to be trusted, at least not without having a gun. Don't tell me that is not a feature of Conservative politics in the US. Society as such tends to end with the nuclear family. That's even held up as a virtue by quite a lot of people.
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United States41688 Posts
On September 12 2017 04:29 RealityIsKing wrote:
People should be allowed to do business with whoever they want.
If someone doesn't want to business because of X, Y and Z; and person B is willing? That's just more money in person B's pocket.
Assume a frictionless vacuum...
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On September 11 2017 15:13 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On September 10 2017 21:09 farvacola wrote:
Haha, GH the incrementalist Coates fan, that's a nice title. I don't see a problem with symbolic reparations and think that his article on reparations is mostly unobjectionable. What is your problem with it? @ xDaunt and LL I don't really see very much that's objectionable in his essay on Trump as first White President. These seem to be his main actionable items, and might form a "platform" for his "black identity politics" but I just don't see anything positively articulated here that is objectionable: Show nested quote +Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.
[...]
Resistance to the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to deport parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches “no excuses” to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives “too big to jail.” Coates goes in on everyone, Hillary included. I don't think it's necessarily any more Anti-Bernie than it is Anti-Clinton(s). He even criticizes Bill for playing at "white identity" politics in Arkansas. The main objections I have are negative ones. He is of course right that blacks have been excluded by a racist regime from what Jameson would call "guaranteed life" provided by the Welfare State. But there is perhaps an overall failure to see that white supremacy as code (in the Deleuzian sense, as the unconscious investment of a social field) serves the purposes of capital by dissecting and resecting a laboring class, ensuring a reserve army of laborers, and a permanent underclass. And simply resecting it is not enough. In other words, it seems that he doesn't seem to recognize that racial equality amongst inequality is simply not enough. That replacing some blacks in the ghetto with whites and some whites in the suburbs with blacks, to effect penguinized ghettos and gated communites, is not enough. But that is only a problem if you present the situation as either this or that, rather than this and this and …
I think you have it backwards -- the real question is what is not objectionable about Coates' article. I think you are ill-advised to focus on the "action items." That's not the purpose of this article, which is why there really aren't any in the article. Instead, Coates is very clearly attacking whiteness through a radical and hyperbolic racial polarization of politics, which he makes explicit in the opening paragraph of the article:
IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.
And in case there's any doubt as to his intentions in the article, Coates makes it explicitly clear later on in the article when he discusses the arguments of liberals such as Mark Lilla and Bernie Sanders as to why Hillary lost to Trump:
The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.
To put it bluntly, Coates' article is an exercise in identity politics at its worst. When it comes to his deconstructing any political or societal issue, all roads lead to racism. I've already talked at length about why I have a problem with using "institutional racism" as a term to apply to incidents of disparate impact, so I'm not going to repeat myself here. But what Coates does in this article is far worse. He essentially is arguing that race is the primary driver of conflict as opposed to economics, class, or other potential dividers. In this way, his arguments are indistinguishable from the Alt Right. That alone should give pause to everyone on the Left who purports to like his racial arguments. And if you think Coates' motives are more benign than those on the Alt Right, take another look at the quote above where Coates posits that "whiteness is an existential danger to the country and the world."
Coates is a racist piece of shit. End of story.
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On September 12 2017 03:23 IgnE wrote:www.nytimes.comShow nested quote +“Gradually, I lost interest or exhausted my interest,” he said. “So for the last 10 or 15 years, I’ve just been focused on the court.”
He called his approach to judging pragmatic. His critics called it lawless.
“I pay very little attention to legal rules, statutes, constitutional provisions,” Judge Posner said. “A case is just a dispute. The first thing you do is ask yourself — forget about the law — what is a sensible resolution of this dispute?”
...
The next thing, he said, was to see if a recent Supreme Court precedent or some other legal obstacle stood in the way of ruling in favor of that sensible resolution. “And the answer is that’s actually rarely the case,” he said. “When you have a Supreme Court case or something similar, they’re often extremely easy to get around.”
The rest of that article is actually the far more interesting part, that he is retiring because of how poorly the system treats those without lawyers.
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Coates has data to back his point about class issues being secondary to race issues. Biases and one liners are no substitute for data.
That is likely because any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be something more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how various groups in this income bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites in this “working class” supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than $100,000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic candidate. So when Packer laments the fact that “Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people—not white ones, anyway,” he commits a kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren’t the party of white people—working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/
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On September 12 2017 06:09 Wulfey_LA wrote:Coates has data to back his point about class issues being secondary to race issues. Biases and one liners are no substitute for data. Show nested quote +That is likely because any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be something more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how various groups in this income bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites in this “working class” supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than $100,000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic candidate. So when Packer laments the fact that “Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people—not white ones, anyway,” he commits a kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren’t the party of white people—working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/
If you are going to accept that race trumps other considerations, then you are on your way to becoming a member of the Alt Right.
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On September 12 2017 06:14 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On September 12 2017 06:09 Wulfey_LA wrote:Coates has data to back his point about class issues being secondary to race issues. Biases and one liners are no substitute for data. That is likely because any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be something more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how various groups in this income bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites in this “working class” supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than $100,000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic candidate. So when Packer laments the fact that “Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people—not white ones, anyway,” he commits a kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren’t the party of white people—working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/ If you are going to accept that race trumps other considerations, then you are on your way to becoming a member of the Alt Right.
It doesn't necessarily lead to the same conclusions.
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On September 12 2017 06:14 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On September 12 2017 06:09 Wulfey_LA wrote:Coates has data to back his point about class issues being secondary to race issues. Biases and one liners are no substitute for data. That is likely because any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be something more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how various groups in this income bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites in this “working class” supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than $100,000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic candidate. So when Packer laments the fact that “Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people—not white ones, anyway,” he commits a kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren’t the party of white people—working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/ If you are going to accept that race trumps other considerations, then you are on your way to becoming a member of the Alt Right.
A phony argument from consequences still doesn't beat data.
EDIT: reading past the one lines, I can hear your ridiculous underlying argument. If you talk about race, that makes you just as bad as the alt-right because they talk about race too. No. This is not the case. Talking about the corrosive effects of white nationalism throughout American history does not make you the same as an advocate for white nationalism. These are not the same things. Yes, Coates does say that Race drives politics to some degree, and has good data to back up his point that you have not challenged. No, that is in no way similar to advocating for a white ethnostate. Fighting back against the push for a white ethnostate is not morally equivalent to advocating for one. For your ridiculous 'talking about race is as bad as being racist' argument to hold, Coates would have to be pushing for a black ethnostate. Yes, radical black panthers in the 70s and the long tradition of white ethnostate advocates actually do have some things in common.
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Surely the difference is in how the argument is framed. Its reasonable to say that right now, race seems to be the most important consideration. Its completely unreasonable to say that race is intrinsically the most important consideration.
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On September 12 2017 06:22 Jockmcplop wrote:
Surely the difference is in how the argument is framed. Its reasonable to say that right now, race seems to be the most important consideration. Its completely unreasonable to say that race is intrinsically the most important consideration.
I wouldn’t even say that it is the most important consideration, but it is neck and neck with economics.
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On September 12 2017 06:17 Wulfey_LA wrote:Show nested quote +On September 12 2017 06:14 xDaunt wrote:On September 12 2017 06:09 Wulfey_LA wrote:Coates has data to back his point about class issues being secondary to race issues. Biases and one liners are no substitute for data. That is likely because any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be something more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how various groups in this income bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites in this “working class” supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than $100,000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic candidate. So when Packer laments the fact that “Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people—not white ones, anyway,” he commits a kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren’t the party of white people—working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/ If you are going to accept that race trumps other considerations, then you are on your way to becoming a member of the Alt Right. A phony argument from consequences still doesn't beat data. EDIT: reading past the one lines, I can hear your ridiculous underlying argument. If you talk about race, that makes you just as bad as the alt-right because they talk about race too. No. This is not the case. Talking about the corrosive effects of white nationalism throughout American history does not make you the same as an advocate for white nationalism. These are not the same things. Yes, Coates does say that Race drives politics to some degree, and has good data to back up his point that you have not challenged. No, that is in no way similar to advocating for a white ethnostate. Fighting back against the push for a white ethnostate is not morally equivalent to advocating for one. For your ridiculous 'talking about race is as bad as being racist' argument to hold, Coates would have to be pushing for a black ethnostate. Yes, radical black panthers in the 70s and the long tradition of white ethnostate advocates actually do have some things in common.
If that's what you think that I'm arguing, then you don't understand Coates' article and the nature of his politics (or Alt Right politics, for that matter).
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My bet is on Xdaunt not understanding a Coates article. I think the odds makers would be with me on this one.
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On September 12 2017 06:43 Plansix wrote:
My bet is on Xdaunt not understanding a Coates article. I think the odds makers would be with me on this one.
Feel free to spell out where my post above is all wet. I think I nailed it pretty well.
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On September 12 2017 05:52 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On September 11 2017 15:13 IgnE wrote:On September 10 2017 21:09 farvacola wrote:
Haha, GH the incrementalist Coates fan, that's a nice title. I don't see a problem with symbolic reparations and think that his article on reparations is mostly unobjectionable. What is your problem with it? @ xDaunt and LL I don't really see very much that's objectionable in his essay on Trump as first White President. These seem to be his main actionable items, and might form a "platform" for his "black identity politics" but I just don't see anything positively articulated here that is objectionable: Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.
[...]
Resistance to the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to deport parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches “no excuses” to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives “too big to jail.” Coates goes in on everyone, Hillary included. I don't think it's necessarily any more Anti-Bernie than it is Anti-Clinton(s). He even criticizes Bill for playing at "white identity" politics in Arkansas. The main objections I have are negative ones. He is of course right that blacks have been excluded by a racist regime from what Jameson would call "guaranteed life" provided by the Welfare State. But there is perhaps an overall failure to see that white supremacy as code (in the Deleuzian sense, as the unconscious investment of a social field) serves the purposes of capital by dissecting and resecting a laboring class, ensuring a reserve army of laborers, and a permanent underclass. And simply resecting it is not enough. In other words, it seems that he doesn't seem to recognize that racial equality amongst inequality is simply not enough. That replacing some blacks in the ghetto with whites and some whites in the suburbs with blacks, to effect penguinized ghettos and gated communites, is not enough. But that is only a problem if you present the situation as either this or that, rather than this and this and … I think you have it backwards -- the real question is what is not objectionable about Coates' article. I think you are ill-advised to focus on the "action items." That's not the purpose of this article, which is why there really aren't any in the article. Instead, Coates is very clearly attacking whiteness through a radical and hyperbolic racial polarization of politics, which he makes explicit in the opening paragraph of the article: Show nested quote +IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit. And in case there's any doubt as to his intentions in the article, Coates makes it explicitly clear later on in the article when he discusses the arguments of liberals such as Mark Lilla and Bernie Sanders as to why Hillary lost to Trump: Show nested quote +The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required. To put it bluntly, Coates' article is an exercise in identity politics at its worst. When it comes to his deconstructing any political or societal issue, all roads lead to racism. I've already talked at length about why I have a problem with using "institutional racism" as a term to apply to incidents of disparate impact, so I'm not going to repeat myself here. But what Coates does in this article is far worse. He essentially is arguing that race is the primary driver of conflict as opposed to economics, class, or other potential dividers. In this way, his arguments are indistinguishable from the Alt Right. That alone should give pause to everyone on the Left who purports to like his racial arguments. And if you think Coates' motives are more benign than those on the Alt Right, take another look at the quote above where Coates posits that "whiteness is an existential danger to the country and the world." Coates is a racist piece of shit. End of story.
maybe you are misreading "whiteness." it doesn't seem like coates is advocating for "blackness" so much as "black people"
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I know this seems counter-intuitive, but there's nothing wrong with attacking "whiteness". It's literally a racist construct designed to dehumanize others and distract from the underlying economic issues.
EDIT: rofl, didn't see the conclusion that Coats is a "racist piece of shit" that's especially hilarious coming from xDaunt.
EDIT2: Also, I know people will hate me for this, but I need to understand under what definition of "racism" is this claim founded?
EDIT:3 On September 12 2017 06:56 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On September 12 2017 06:51 IgnE wrote:On September 12 2017 05:52 xDaunt wrote:On September 11 2017 15:13 IgnE wrote:On September 10 2017 21:09 farvacola wrote:
Haha, GH the incrementalist Coates fan, that's a nice title. I don't see a problem with symbolic reparations and think that his article on reparations is mostly unobjectionable. What is your problem with it? @ xDaunt and LL I don't really see very much that's objectionable in his essay on Trump as first White President. These seem to be his main actionable items, and might form a "platform" for his "black identity politics" but I just don't see anything positively articulated here that is objectionable: Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.
[...]
Resistance to the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to deport parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches “no excuses” to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives “too big to jail.” Coates goes in on everyone, Hillary included. I don't think it's necessarily any more Anti-Bernie than it is Anti-Clinton(s). He even criticizes Bill for playing at "white identity" politics in Arkansas. The main objections I have are negative ones. He is of course right that blacks have been excluded by a racist regime from what Jameson would call "guaranteed life" provided by the Welfare State. But there is perhaps an overall failure to see that white supremacy as code (in the Deleuzian sense, as the unconscious investment of a social field) serves the purposes of capital by dissecting and resecting a laboring class, ensuring a reserve army of laborers, and a permanent underclass. And simply resecting it is not enough. In other words, it seems that he doesn't seem to recognize that racial equality amongst inequality is simply not enough. That replacing some blacks in the ghetto with whites and some whites in the suburbs with blacks, to effect penguinized ghettos and gated communites, is not enough. But that is only a problem if you present the situation as either this or that, rather than this and this and … I think you have it backwards -- the real question is what is not objectionable about Coates' article. I think you are ill-advised to focus on the "action items." That's not the purpose of this article, which is why there really aren't any in the article. Instead, Coates is very clearly attacking whiteness through a radical and hyperbolic racial polarization of politics, which he makes explicit in the opening paragraph of the article: IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit. And in case there's any doubt as to his intentions in the article, Coates makes it explicitly clear later on in the article when he discusses the arguments of liberals such as Mark Lilla and Bernie Sanders as to why Hillary lost to Trump: The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required. To put it bluntly, Coates' article is an exercise in identity politics at its worst. When it comes to his deconstructing any political or societal issue, all roads lead to racism. I've already talked at length about why I have a problem with using "institutional racism" as a term to apply to incidents of disparate impact, so I'm not going to repeat myself here. But what Coates does in this article is far worse. He essentially is arguing that race is the primary driver of conflict as opposed to economics, class, or other potential dividers. In this way, his arguments are indistinguishable from the Alt Right. That alone should give pause to everyone on the Left who purports to like his racial arguments. And if you think Coates' motives are more benign than those on the Alt Right, take another look at the quote above where Coates posits that "whiteness is an existential danger to the country and the world." Coates is a racist piece of shit. End of story. maybe you are misreading "whiteness." it doesn't seem like coates is advocating for "blackness" so much as "black people" What do you think the response would be if someone wrote an article in National Review in 2009 that contained the statement that "Barack Obama's blackness poses an existential threat to the country and to the world."? How do you think that statement would be construed?
What would that even mean?
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On September 12 2017 06:51 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On September 12 2017 05:52 xDaunt wrote:On September 11 2017 15:13 IgnE wrote:On September 10 2017 21:09 farvacola wrote:
Haha, GH the incrementalist Coates fan, that's a nice title. I don't see a problem with symbolic reparations and think that his article on reparations is mostly unobjectionable. What is your problem with it? @ xDaunt and LL I don't really see very much that's objectionable in his essay on Trump as first White President. These seem to be his main actionable items, and might form a "platform" for his "black identity politics" but I just don't see anything positively articulated here that is objectionable: Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.
[...]
Resistance to the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to deport parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches “no excuses” to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives “too big to jail.” Coates goes in on everyone, Hillary included. I don't think it's necessarily any more Anti-Bernie than it is Anti-Clinton(s). He even criticizes Bill for playing at "white identity" politics in Arkansas. The main objections I have are negative ones. He is of course right that blacks have been excluded by a racist regime from what Jameson would call "guaranteed life" provided by the Welfare State. But there is perhaps an overall failure to see that white supremacy as code (in the Deleuzian sense, as the unconscious investment of a social field) serves the purposes of capital by dissecting and resecting a laboring class, ensuring a reserve army of laborers, and a permanent underclass. And simply resecting it is not enough. In other words, it seems that he doesn't seem to recognize that racial equality amongst inequality is simply not enough. That replacing some blacks in the ghetto with whites and some whites in the suburbs with blacks, to effect penguinized ghettos and gated communites, is not enough. But that is only a problem if you present the situation as either this or that, rather than this and this and … I think you have it backwards -- the real question is what is not objectionable about Coates' article. I think you are ill-advised to focus on the "action items." That's not the purpose of this article, which is why there really aren't any in the article. Instead, Coates is very clearly attacking whiteness through a radical and hyperbolic racial polarization of politics, which he makes explicit in the opening paragraph of the article: IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit. And in case there's any doubt as to his intentions in the article, Coates makes it explicitly clear later on in the article when he discusses the arguments of liberals such as Mark Lilla and Bernie Sanders as to why Hillary lost to Trump: The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required. To put it bluntly, Coates' article is an exercise in identity politics at its worst. When it comes to his deconstructing any political or societal issue, all roads lead to racism. I've already talked at length about why I have a problem with using "institutional racism" as a term to apply to incidents of disparate impact, so I'm not going to repeat myself here. But what Coates does in this article is far worse. He essentially is arguing that race is the primary driver of conflict as opposed to economics, class, or other potential dividers. In this way, his arguments are indistinguishable from the Alt Right. That alone should give pause to everyone on the Left who purports to like his racial arguments. And if you think Coates' motives are more benign than those on the Alt Right, take another look at the quote above where Coates posits that "whiteness is an existential danger to the country and the world." Coates is a racist piece of shit. End of story. maybe you are misreading "whiteness." it doesn't seem like coates is advocating for "blackness" so much as "black people"
What do you think the response would be if someone wrote an article in National Review in 2009 that contained the statement that "Barack Obama's blackness poses an existential threat to the country and to the world."? How do you think that statement would be construed?
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EPT
