Michael Lumish
The United States, if not the West more generally, has lost its fucking mind.
In an article for a newspaper associated with Ole Miss by Slade Rand and Rachel Ishee we read:
This weekend, leaders from Ole Miss Greek life convened upon Camp Hopewell in Lafayette County for a three-day retreat designed to build leaders and bring campus closer together. The retreat was cut short Saturday night, however, after three black students found a banana peel in a tree in front of one of the camp’s cabins.This is what we have come to.
The students shared what they found with National Pan-Hellenic Council leaders, sparking a day’s worth of camp-wide conversation surrounding symbolism, intended or not. In the midst of the open and sometimes heated discussion, senior accounting major Ryan Swanson said he put the banana peel in the tree when he could not find a trashcan nearby.
Some student puts a banana peel on a tree somewhere on campus and all hell breaks loose.
It is perfectly fine to put up a tremendous mural of a genocidal Jew murderer - who somehow became an American feminist leader - at a cafe next to a major Oakland transportation hub, but a banana peel in a tree at the University of Mississippi is just too much.
The stupidity seems to go on and on and on with no end in sight.
Alexa Lee Arndt, interim director of Fraternity and Sorority Life, referring to a community discussion of the meaning of the banana peel wrote:
To be clear, many members of our community were hurt, frightened, and upset by what occurred at IMPACT … Because of the underlying reality many students of color endure on a daily basis, the conversation manifested into a larger conversation about race relations today at the University of Mississippi.Well, good god, we would not want to slip on that one, now would we?
People are acting as if this is either 1963 and we need marches with Martin Luther King, Jr. or it is 1968 and we need Stokely and Eldridge and the fellahs to put on the black berets and show the cops what's what.
Makala McNeil, president of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, one of the nine historically African-American sororities and fraternities, said she saw the banana peel after leaving a group discussion that addressed race relations.So, let me get this straight. Ms. McNeil, after leaving a discussion on "race relations" saw a banana peel hanging from a tree?
And this made the local news?
I understand, obviously, about the cultural significance of bananas and monkeys to racist conceptions of black people. What I fail to understand, however, is why something like this should even be an issue in 2017 given how much progress the United States has made in ethnic relations since the bad old days.
In truth, the fact that anyone, anywhere actually gives a shit about the racial significance of a banana peel dangling from a tree at the University of Mississippi should put to bed any notions that Americans are careless on racial inequalities. Actually, Americans are among the most racially neurotic people on the planet.
We are obsessed with "race."
A major part of the reason for the current "race scare" is because following the New Left of the 1960s questions of race, gender, and class were (rightly) interwoven into political analyses throughout the academe. This should be obvious. Indeed, one cannot so easily separate political theories of race, gender, and economic class because each strand pulls on every other.
But, now, largely due to the influence of cultural Marxism and identity politics, the progressive-left seems to actually want the existence of American racism so that they can use it as a political club or as a badge of social purity.
What is worse, however, is that they are racializing young people. That is, they are encouraging college students, if not high school students - if not babies - to see the world through racialized lenses and through the progressive-left hierarchy of victimhood.
I see this as the turning back of fifty years of progress in favor of blood and war.
The American left has had a supply-and-demand problem with racists since the 1970s.
There was plenty of demand for open racists to target but they were in short supply.
Thus they have simply expanded the meaning of "racist" to include pretty much all white people and examples of racism to include a banana peel sitting in a tree.
Well, if the left wants a fight over racism I am certain that they will find enough hell-bent-for-fury right-wing dingbats to give them one.
Please read the recently upgraded
ReplyDeleteversion of my blog post:
Why Muslims Hate Jews:
https://shilohmusings.blogspot.com/2016/12/guest-post-why-muslims-hate-jews.html
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Babylonian Talmud, tractate Shabbat, page 33A:
Obscene language causes calamities to increase and new harsh decrees against Jews and the men of Israel die young, and [even] orphans and widows cry out and are not answered.
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Orchot Chaim of the Rosh for day 4, paragraph 61:
Do not allow perverse language or vulgar language to exit your mouth, because for all your words, you will come to judgment.
CHRONOLOGY: Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel lived from year 1250 CE to year 1328 CE.
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Maharal, Chidushei Agadot, volume I, amud 25, tractate Shabbat, last paragraph:
Foul words [nibul peh] do damage to our very humanity, because speech is one of the things that elevates us above all other creatures.
CHRONOLOGY: Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague lived from 1525 CE to 1609 CE.
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None of this has much to do with racism. That's simply a name given to mob hysteria. This is about power and violence. This is about the confluence of
ReplyDelete-social media and the lust to be noticed
-the easy exercise of power through the tools of the media
-the ease though which stupid people are lead
-a desire for violence, for any reason
-hatred and envy driven by the anonymity of the mob
-encouragement by 'elite' puppeteers
-a steady diet of 'anything you scream about is precious' by universities
I see it as an opportunity. An opportunity for us, not them. Millions of angry people who would ordinarily find a landing zone somewhere in the middle class or lower middle class are taking themselves out of the equation by either 'educating' themselves in the utterly useless, or, by their own temper tantrums refuse to join in the social contract of America. Houston is a good metaphor. 'We sent some boats and you started shooting at us. You're on your own, good luck.'
The country doesn't need 5,000 liberal arts colleges. The country doesn't need 10 million people with no skills except rioting and tweeting. Let the colleges close and put all those people at the back of the line for social welfare.
The 7th observation on your list, "-a steady diet of 'anything you scream about is precious' by universities," is to me the most surprising, because it doesn't seem to hang together with the others naturally. The first six I could put at any time in history, i.e., homo sapiens will be homo sapiens. It's that last one that tells me the glue has worn off, the emergency brake is broken, etc., for they are the people who are supposed to be the gate keepers and educators, i.e., they are supposed to be in charge of the asylum, and this, to me, is the most worrisome part.
DeleteOutside of the STEM fields the universities are shedding Enlightenment liberalism as their operating code. The problem with this is that the values of Enlightenment liberalism are precisely those that are supposed to animate the universities. That is, within the Humanities ideals of objectivity and freedom of speech and open inquiry are giving way to the ideals of cultural Marxism, finger painting, and political hatred.
DeleteAlthough, I would argue that among the fields that straddle the humanities and social sciences, such as History, the corruption has not dug nearly as deep. This is because historians, as a group, tend to be conservative in their methods, if not their politics.
"What I fail to understand, however, is why something like this should even be an issue in 2017 given how much progress the United States has made in ethnic relations since the bad old days." ... "But, now, largely due to the influence of cultural Marxism and identity politics, the progressive-left seems to actually want the existence of American racism so that they can use it as a political club."
ReplyDeleteI mean, I might as well have quoted your entire post. This is exactly the question I've been struggling with for years now. It's like out of the blue, people started talking (more like shrieking) about racism as though it has suddenly become a HUGE problem after decades of improvement.
Yesterday, Marc Lamont Hill (dumb-as-a-shoelace CNN commentator) ditched his usual suit jacket and white shirt, and opted for a t-shirt that read, "Black and Alive". I don't know what message this was supposed to express, but it came off like a big "fVck you" to ... the other panelists? White American viewers? It seems he's "fighting" against something, but what? What is America not giving Marc Lamont Hill that he needs to declare his Blackness and Aliveness as though someone wants to take those things away from him.
The manufactured crisis and its resulting hysteria is complete madness to me. And the craziest thing is that normal everyday ordinary people that I speak to each day have fallen for it. When I say that all this sudden "racism" hysteria is artificial, they tell me I'm out of touch with reality.
Thank G-d for blog posts like this one. Knowing that even one other person sees things like I do, I feel a lot less crazy.
The current "race scare" began with the Hillary campaign. It was right around the time - in the months leading up to the election - when Hillary noticed the "alt-right" and some allegedly fascistic version of Kermit that suddenly we were told that Nazis were crawling out of the woodwork.
DeleteOn the one hand, it was a crass political tactic to bury Trump by gluing him to racists. On the other hand, it created a quick build up of mass hysteria that provoked a backlash among the very few actual white nationalists in the US.
And that gave the hysterics a hook.
What I don't really understand is just what the hard-left wants the government to do in order to bring about justice for black people?
It seems pretty clear to me that what they want is not so much equality of opportunity as equity, i.e., equality of result.
Reference your second last paragraph. For my money, the left do not want the US Government to do anything. They have a drum to beat....it makes a noise. Even allowing for the minimum of truth and fact, they will keep belting the hell out of it. They are happy!
DeleteI'd say it began before Hillary 2016; it began with Obamacare opposition being racist, and idea Jimmy Carter floated as far back as 2009. It ballooned into Biden's "back in chains" and then Obama took it to the next level with Trayvon. The whole "Obama coalition" in which Obama won zero deep south states yet won the POTUSy, hinged on bringing out the campus mentality. That's why Hillary had no choice but to go with it; by the time she wanted to run again, winning states like KY, AR, WV, TN, LA, and other states Bill won was gone (and the Perot-myth is just a myth used by both the GOP but also the far-left to discredit Bill's centrism)
Delete"Because of the underlying reality many students of color endure on a daily basis,"
ReplyDeleteAnd what exactly is that?
Professors shunning them on account of their skin color? Beatings by other students? Whisper campaigns? Or is it just more empty rhetoric about a race crisis from SJWs?
When I got to work this morning there was a Volkswagen parked in my usual spot. I think the message is clear.