Section 4 of "White Supremacy on Its Deathbed"
Let us workshop this section (of a larger essay) that explores how the mainstream antiracist movement, which involves canceling the "problematic" voices even of geniuses, is toxic to black people
To obscure from blacks the uplifting heights of humanity and thereby to ensure that they feed their souls only upon fast-food junk; to alienate blacks from the greatest cultural expressions while encouraging their nourishment on metaphorical honey buns and quarter waters—what might white supremacy do from its deathbed?
It could just sit back and watch our world where many blacks, and even a growing number of whites (almost as if to ensure, so one could say, that the destruction of blacks is thorough), think Beyoncé and Sister Souljah are visionary geniuses on par with Beethoven and Shakespeare—if they even know who Beethoven and Shakespeare are, as an antiblack agenda would hope they do not (lest they be drawn upward if only by osmosis).
It could just sit back and watch our world where, on grounds that any connection to antiblack racism (however tenuous) “severely diminishes an artist’s work,” many people think Beyoncé and Sister Souljah are, in fact, superior to Beethoven and Shakespeare—both Beethoven and Shakespeare writing, after all, mainly for white audiences and Shakespeare, as if using terms like “fair” to describe a good person were not enough, even daring to allow his character Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to voice “a violent statement against black bodies”: “Who would not trade a raven for a dove?”
It could just sit back and watch our world where, even though it entails carrying humanity itself (whites included) down a road to mediocrity, school reading lists are scrubbed clean—to use the dismissive phrase that, through repetition, one-too-many children believe refers to mysterious evil creatures never to be trusted—of “dead white males” and replaced with the latest “antiracist” literature of victim mongers.
It could just sit back and watch our world where, because of a mere “problematic” footnote or one joke in a private letter revealing that the great man was nevertheless a man of his time (and so with specific cultural biases) or because the great man simply was white, pinnacles of artistic and philosophical excellence such as Hume and Goethe are excluded (unless the point is to trash them) from university classrooms, yes, of students and teachers, creatures too of their own guilty time, stinking of factory-farmed farts—excluded, as if the personal and even the biological were always political and even philosophical, despite the expense not simply of obscuring from blacks and whites alike the heights to which all humans can aspire, but of allowing a pessimistic attitude of why bother to sprout at least subliminally in all of us (since, think about it, what is the point of bothering with our “life’s work,” pitiful in comparison anyway, when even Dostoyevsky and Leibniz and Jefferson and Churchill, their awe-inspiring art and deeds included, can be written off with such Kweli-like sanctimoniousness as “complete pieces of Nazi shit” for no more than a trifling flaw or a trifling feature in no sense under their control?).
It could just sit back and watch our world where, because of his being a “dead white male” whose characters sometimes display “imperialist attitudes (like when his most recent white protagonist screams ‘I’ll plant a damn garden on my own f***ing property,’” a “paternalist scream of violence” that can only remind us of the “culture-slaughtering history of forcibly replacing the communal property systems of indigenous peoples with the private property systems of white supremacists”), the international library has restricted access to the great author—offering the following statement to the media:
It is not uncommon for institutions, including universities and libraries, to reevaluate their collections and exhibits in light of changing social and cultural perspectives. That is what we have done in the case of Rydling. The decision in this case was difficult. Unlike other authors more conspicuously problematic, Rydling never steps out of his lane by writing about nonwhite topics and he definitely respects the fact that he is not allowed to write nonwhite characters. He also never includes characters who voice skepticism as to how terribly the West continues to treat black bodies—neither those reminiscent of overt Nazis (like David Duke and Tom Metzger) nor those reminiscent of covert Nazis (like Glenn Loury and John McWhorter). Indeed, Rydling is famous for allowing nonwhite sensitivity editors to adjust his work for the protection of vulnerable groups, and he makes sure to pay them ten percent more for every victim category in the intersectionality matrix to which they belong. In his capacity as an academic, moreover, he has ridiculed (both in articles and in his PhD dissertation) the paternalistic notion that white countries in the West have a duty to civilize or uplift African countries. Most importantly, Rydling—aside from being white, of course—has no direct ties to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade (at least that the committee has yet to uncover, although it continues to dig). Nevertheless, there are subtle problems with his work—and their very subtlety makes them all the more dangerous! First, with exception to just one work, his settings are always in the UK (the radix of imperialism) and yet never—not once—are these towns and cities criticized for doing ultimately what they are best at: harboring whiteness. Second, his characters have been known to voice hurtful sentiments like pride in European culture, a pride eerily suggestive of the superiority of that culture (especially when never—not once—is such celebration accompanied by an acknowledgement of the black suffering behind so much of that culture). Third, his partner has been known to purchase healing stones like citrine and labradorite even though it is no secret where such stones are sourced: Madagascar, where hungry black diggers at best are simply not given fair compensation or, at worst, serve as the modern-day slaves of a neo-colonial West.
It could just sit back and watch our world where, energized by the viral videos of black men murdered by police officers, blue-haired cretins now vandalize statues of Voltaire in the sleep-tight name of “a big fuck you to our thriving white supremacy” (yes, despite his culture-quaking writings on the immorality of slavery and on the stupidity of racism), refusing to face how much of an unfair horror it would seem if future cretins utterly dismissed a cherished black artist-philosopher of today, tearing down her statues and banning even music and books of hers unrelated to meat, merely because she ate factory-farmed meat—or better yet, to make it more closely parallel our nonsense today (like the blacklist we see from the British Library), merely because she, a level-five vegan whose ethical writings proved integral to factory farming’s abolition, had a relative (distant in both blood and spirit) who happened to inherit stock in a company that had once engaged in factory farming.
It could just sit back and watch our world where elementary students can rattle off the horrors perpetrated by “European culture” (land stolen from Native Americans, Trans-Atlantic slavery, and so forth) while European culture’s many profound gifts to mankind, gifts that could keep giving even to interstellar generations (generations in some sense umbilicaled in its womb), go overlooked or fade from memory (only to be called to mind, of course, to find something “problematic” enough for which to demand apology): its legendary achievements, its unthinkable art, its heroic efforts—yes, even from the very depths of its own addiction to that alchemical practice too irresistible for so many other peoples across the globe across history, stepping up (against all odds) with resources and blood to put a stop to slavery (not only using taxpayer-burdening military might to hunt down particular slaving operations and to free particular slaves and to help transition organizations off their reliance on slavery, not only engaging in war with itself to see to slavery’s abolition, not only paying out reparations in the form of grants and scholarships as well as preferential treatment and special dispensations), but more importantly developing and defending and normalizing and enforcing the very notion of universal human rights that, on the one hand, has prevented the resurgence of slavery and segregation and discrimination in the West and that, on the other hand, has kept (through the osmosis of modeling and through the pressure of sanctions and military intervention) the number of people in unfashionable-to-address nonwestern slavery (which we see in India and China and North Korea and Nigeria and Iran and Indonesia and Congo) at least under the billion mark it stands at today.
It could just sit back and watch our world where, even if it comes at the price of hobbling blacks by way of hobbling us all, celebrating the skills and contributions of plantation-slave x requires gaslighting ourselves—gaslighting ourselves that x surpasses not only Handel (an investor in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which matters when evaluating his art in our twilight-zone times) but even Bach (a deeply religious man of profound wisdom and fertility)—and thereby belittling art.
It could just sit back and watch our world where—in the insidiously feel-good name of “antiracist liberation” from “the hegemony of white-European-western culture” (a culture condemned for “suppressing alternative voices” even though in truth it is one of the few shining examples of a culture not only remarkably open to learning from alternative voices, but also serious about justifying and protecting the rights of alternative voices)—Plato and Kant and Aristotle and Voltaire and various other “dead white men” are (Chinese-Cultural-Revolution style) banned in universities (unless, of course, to poke fun at them) banned by (supposedly well-meaning) poisoners out to “unwhiten education,” by shapeshifting devils in hipster scarves and slouchy beanies out to “dismantle white supremacy”—banned (yes, no matter their gifts to mankind or even how instrumental they remain in the justification of universal human rights) because some of their remarks fail to reflect our current values or because they are quoted by “problematic” people today or because they have relatives, however distant in blood and ideology, who benefited from slavery or so on.
It could just sit back and watch our world where, in the insidiously feel-good name of “decolonizing the curriculum and remaining competitive at a global level among the various antiracist centers of learning,” the so-called Black Mozart (Chevalier de Saint-Georges) replaces the real Mozart in music conservatories (whether on the basis of the fact that he is simply “a dead white man” who makes “white European music from the slave period” or on the basis of the lie either that the Black Mozart is better or, much more nuclear, that hierarchy in matters of music theory is inherently white-centric and thereby racist and thereby to be scotched).
It could just sit back and watch our world where Kanye West and Saweetie replace Coltrane and Dolphy in the culture at large (the more focused on sex and drugs and violence the better, of course), even though that has entailed whites themselves dancing in droves at big-money festivals to blacks singing and rapping about—indeed, despite widespread struggle with poor self-esteem and poor ideas of excellence and poor models of how relationships should look, often glorifying—black degeneracy: the men (“Hit this ho from Memphis, she an oppin' bitch / I hit her with my Glock and shit / and dropped the bitch”) and, yes, the women (“Pass the gun to my bro, he gon' handle that / Shoot at the crib where yo' mammy at, / we fuck around, leave her handicapped”).
It could just sit back and watch our world where, taking in all the “niggative” lyrics bass-bumping the air as if it were their air (whether “Pimpin' ain't easy, make her open up and eat it” or “Walking around with that that tommy gun / Young niggas in the hood love the molly santan / When they pop it, they'll chew it like some bubble gum” or “Sippin' syrup 'til my body numb, I ain't tryna catch no feelings”), whites crave sights and sounds and smells of black degeneracy so much that no bingeing of Maury Povich episodes, or National-Geographic style hood-fight clips, or crack documentaries of hair-hatted whores crooning toothless into the night with the flapjack tits, or so on could ever satisfy them: ignorance and bling, infidelity and gang violence, misogyny and escaping life with drugs and alcohol, crack dealing, homophobia and promiscuity, drugging the drinks of women and prison life, welfare cheese and incest, rapey sex (even of minors).
It could just sit back and watch our world where, against a constant backdrop of niggative lyrics drowning out all the rest (“I like a shooter that steady / be trigger happy in the Camry / Now he gon shoot at niggas like they Bambi / Now he gon shoot at niggas 'cause they offend me”), classical music itself, despite its suspected power to boost cognition and reduce hypertension and lower stress (three things that would be especially beneficial to blacks), is sidelined for being “nerdy” and “elite” and “white” and “insensitive” to the more “primitive rhythms” of “the black experience,” for being “inherently racist” and “a chief anchor for white supremacy” and “a white standard of musical aesthetics that abuses especially those blacks who love it (Stockholm style)” and “destructive to black expression in that it, a colonialist force, pulls blacks away from creating music truer to their own communities”—sidelined even to the extent that in universities and musical conservatories harpsicords (and other instruments popular among whites in the long era of Western slavery) are closeted away, if not smashed to pieces, because of how “they cannot but remind us of what daily police brutality already does: the history of whites killing blacks.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where, since “whatever is not antiracist is racist,” music (like poems and paintings and news and essays and science) that is not at least in some fashion antiracist is racist and so should be stopped—stopped perhaps along with music competitions (since competition is a white value at odds with black communitarianism) and the erect postures of orchestra performers (since that is nerdy, uppity, elite, white) and musical notation (since (1) hip hop, the truest music to the black spirit, requires no musical notion and since (2) to expect black musicians to read notation invalidates their intuitive style of knowing while at the same time blocking them out of classical music orchestras and also, if the notation system in question is that of “Europe (and so of oppression),” slapping them in their face, causing their bodies great distress, with reminders of colonialism and slavery).
It could just sit back and watch our world where—interrogated to death by “antiracist questions” (as to whom quarried the stones, and from where the money came to fund the project, and why no blacks appear in the murals inside, and why various African deities are not venerated at least alongside white Jesus and white saints—the great cathedrals of European culture, like its various other crowning achievements (the paintings, the musical compositions, the technologies), are—in spite of their awe-inspiring power to heighten the people to which they have been gifted (namely, all people)—trashed for being irredeemably tainted by antiblack racism and thereby inherently toxic to black people.
This piece is unpublished
Photo: rappolitics.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/sista-souljah-controversy/
Safe Space Report!
This section aims to be a satirical critique of "white supremacy" and how it could continue to exert its influence even from its "deathbed." The author argues that one way white supremacy might do this is by promoting a culture that celebrates and elevates mediocre or even subpar art, literature, and philosophy created by people of color over the works of white artists and thinkers that are truly great. The author sees this as a way of "obscuring" the heights to which humanity can aspire and keeping people of color from being drawn upward by exposure to excellence. The passage also criticizes the "cancel culture" mentality that seeks to exclude works of art and literature created by "dead white males" from university classrooms and libraries, even when these works are acknowledged as being excellent, because of their authors' race or culture. The author sees this as a pessimistic attitude that discourages people from striving for greatness in their own lives. The author is using satire to criticize the way in which some people use anti-racism as a way to silence voices that they disagree with or to push an agenda that they find appealing. The author is suggesting that this kind of thinking is counterproductive and ultimately harmful to everyone.
That all said, this section is too triggering to be assigned in classrooms even if it is accompanied by trigger warnings. There are several reasons why it violates safe space norms.
To begin, the passage makes several problematic assumptions and generalizations about the intelligence and cultural knowledge of black people, implying that they are less knowledgeable and culturally aware than whites. It is an insulting lie that blacks underperform in academic fields such as math and engineering and musicology.
Furthermore, the passage suggests that the promotion of "antiracist" literature in schools and universities is a sign of a declining standard of education. This assumption is problematic because it dismisses the importance of representation in education and ignores the fact that many marginalized communities have been excluded from the Western canon for centuries. By promoting literature that centers on the experiences and struggles of marginalized communities, schools and universities are creating a more inclusive and diverse educational environment.
The passage also dismisses the concerns of those who have been excluded from the Western canon due to their race, gender, sexuality, or other marginalized identities. It suggests that the exclusion of certain "dead white males" is a sign of a pessimistic attitude that discourages people from striving for excellence. However, this assumption ignores the fact that the exclusion of certain voices has been a deliberate and systematic form of oppression. By promoting the works of marginalized voices, schools and universities are challenging this oppression and creating a more equitable and just educational environment.
Finally, the passage dismisses the experiences and struggles of black people. It suggests that concerns about antiblack racism are overblown and that the experiences of black people are not important enough to be taken seriously. This dismissal of the experiences and struggles of black people perpetuates—as do the writings of Glenn Loury and John McWhorter (two “intellectuals” mentioned in the piece)—systemic racism and black-body oppression.