Michael, the one moment where I remember you really caught my attention and made me think, "this guy is not in the box", many years ago, was when you said "fuck the white guy who wants me to turn my stereo down". You very aggressively detached that from other politics--it was not a demand for conventionalized civil rights or different accommodational rules, etc.--it was an argument about a radical vision of autonomy and freedom that recognized that white censoriousness towards black life was one of a number of threats to that vision. But in the years since, I feel like you often check yourself when the implications of that position take you outside of your appeal to some form of conservatism and your disdain for anything leftward of that. There's something so unconventional and unregulated inside a lot of what you are thinking but you really yank yourself back a lot, or so it feels to me.
I have an answer for you that I take from another conversation. Maybe this shapes things a bit better. My conservatism, when it was purposefully black, had something to do with a rebellion from the sinecure a certain type of white liberalism offered. When I didn't know the difference between Epictetus and Plato and was looking for cracks in the intellectual edifice of the West, I was never offered Leo Strauss or Chesterton. I was told that everything was fake and pointed towards Frankfurt and France. I had no idea the White Liberal Matrix was nested within yet another White Liberal Matrix. It wasn't until 2000 in Sydney when I watched black sprinters booed that I began to recognize that proud patriotic blacks was not what a certain segment of liberals wanted our integrated destiny to be. I was uncomfortable using the 'white liberal' label pejoratively (I still don't like it) and it wasn't until I was bored with American conservatism (in '08) that I took up my own Martial Education.
So more recently the white liberal problem became more clear after my sojourn on the Right when I experienced its anti- 2nd Amendment sentiment. Aha. A black man cannot have a gun? No such life is worth defending with deadly force? The Founders got that wrong? It cannot be squared with the experience of the Negro experience and role in liberating France, and the subsequent domestic resolve of those men, and of my own family in military service.
I've changed my mind and will publish the rant under different cover. My point is to raise some ghost of Malcolm in the spirit of the level of self-realization that is bold enough to accept a deadly defense of self-actualized 'black' life. Here's an excerpt.
"Everyone knows that in 1960 there were 20 million Negroes living mostly in poverty. Everyone should know that today there are 46 million African Americans living mostly in the middle class. I don’t believe that racism has the economic force to stop that. I do think new racial theories have the same power to confuse people as all taboos and superstitions. Racist people are wrong, stupid and confused. And we don’t have to shoot them, jail them or fear them. It is satisfactory to confront them, and to the extent that we possess common sense, civility and a disdain for wishful thinking, we can do so without much assistance from the top down. I think that ministers and engineers have what it takes, and that the time for militancy has passed."
But as I raised my own black nationalist upbringing higher in that piece, it should be well understood by the reader that I had absolutely no doubt of my ability to shoot them, jail them or fear them, but the lessons learned in that upbringing evolved to understand what obviated such extremes. Consistently in all the time we've known each other was the preface to Invisible Man, a kind of dignity that is actually surprised at the nerve to insult, which resolves to pity. And that is the kind of pity I feel for the so-called white Agent Smiths of the nested White Liberal Matrices who actually believe they have a burden to serve to poor African Americans who are putatively psychologically incapable of anti-fragility to Nazi level racism, or even micro-aggression. I guess all I can say is that my generation didn't have peanut allergies, and if this one doesn't survive, tough shit.
This is why I end on the question of war and what hubris we possess to think that the next war is impossible. The only way we get so insipidly idiotically evil is when we are not recognizing ourselves as Solzhenitsyn did.
Being fair, also I don't have a problem with any defense of liberty, and it is not liberalism I have a gripe with, but with Progressivism, and postmodernism, and I think poststructuralism. But I'd much rather defend the philosophy of science than spit and sputter about those who are confused or charlatans...
The thing is that you have to ask: who was keeping black folks from accessing the 2nd Amendment? I humbly submit that it wasn't White Liberals--that that is a lily-white right-wing fantasy of how Blacks got disarmed. The nonviolent leaders of the civil rights movement all had guns in their homes for self-defense (except Bayard Rustin), and the natural extension of that idea into Black nationalism lasted as long as it took the FBI to kill Hampton etc. It's not wrong to come out of that with some kind of Black libertarian distance from both white liberal sentiment etc. but it's a big empirical mistake to think that the actual work of making Black liberty and Black gun rights something that is strongly derogated has anything to do with white urban liberals. That's all on the people that you have a strange attention and attraction towards.
On a deeper level, you'd really have to tell me what you see in Strauss etc.--you don't need Strauss to have a philosophy that says "don't trust whitey" and "keep shit esoteric". That's the thing: that's a political idea that is everywhere in history that people think they're being done down by the powers that be AND it's everywhere in history that the people WITH power want to be shifty motherfuckers. You gotta decide if you're at all interested in the road in between where people try to be transparent enough to one another, and if that's it? Leo Strauss is goddamn poison. So is a lot of the stuff you're trying to process. There's a lot of humanism out there, but guess what? A decent amount of it sounds like the stuff nice white liberals are trying to talk up.
You make it sound like at the end of the day there are political gains to be negotiated by sensing and corralling what must be the inevitable fate of some black collective destiny. I don't have any more faith in Strauss than I have in Rustin or anyone you might dream of. Nor is the approval or disapproval of whitefolks some end game. It's nothing more or less than the presumption that there is some historically appropriate method and means that *should* of necessity point to the mountaintop the Negro is supposed to climb. The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed and to accept that there is an inherent agency in everyone is the hump to get over.
Humanism is fine. Again, I'm interested in preserving the philosophy of science & rationality, and you might call that libertarian. I have no use for the future of race. I see skulls that either possess or are yet to possess the necessary tools for civil self-determination in the built-up world.
You’re talking here about something that I’ve long seen as a problem: what you and your family chose was, essentially, forgiveness. Many people today would argue that it’s an unfair requirement placed on Black people to forgive historic traumas. Yeah, I think it is unfair. But that burden cannot be fulfilled by anyone else. It’s up to the African-Americans of today to decide how to move forward, whether that will be integration or not. And integration does not been subsumption! It simply means shared purpose, in my view.
Michael, the one moment where I remember you really caught my attention and made me think, "this guy is not in the box", many years ago, was when you said "fuck the white guy who wants me to turn my stereo down". You very aggressively detached that from other politics--it was not a demand for conventionalized civil rights or different accommodational rules, etc.--it was an argument about a radical vision of autonomy and freedom that recognized that white censoriousness towards black life was one of a number of threats to that vision. But in the years since, I feel like you often check yourself when the implications of that position take you outside of your appeal to some form of conservatism and your disdain for anything leftward of that. There's something so unconventional and unregulated inside a lot of what you are thinking but you really yank yourself back a lot, or so it feels to me.
I have an answer for you that I take from another conversation. Maybe this shapes things a bit better. My conservatism, when it was purposefully black, had something to do with a rebellion from the sinecure a certain type of white liberalism offered. When I didn't know the difference between Epictetus and Plato and was looking for cracks in the intellectual edifice of the West, I was never offered Leo Strauss or Chesterton. I was told that everything was fake and pointed towards Frankfurt and France. I had no idea the White Liberal Matrix was nested within yet another White Liberal Matrix. It wasn't until 2000 in Sydney when I watched black sprinters booed that I began to recognize that proud patriotic blacks was not what a certain segment of liberals wanted our integrated destiny to be. I was uncomfortable using the 'white liberal' label pejoratively (I still don't like it) and it wasn't until I was bored with American conservatism (in '08) that I took up my own Martial Education.
So more recently the white liberal problem became more clear after my sojourn on the Right when I experienced its anti- 2nd Amendment sentiment. Aha. A black man cannot have a gun? No such life is worth defending with deadly force? The Founders got that wrong? It cannot be squared with the experience of the Negro experience and role in liberating France, and the subsequent domestic resolve of those men, and of my own family in military service.
I've changed my mind and will publish the rant under different cover. My point is to raise some ghost of Malcolm in the spirit of the level of self-realization that is bold enough to accept a deadly defense of self-actualized 'black' life. Here's an excerpt.
"Everyone knows that in 1960 there were 20 million Negroes living mostly in poverty. Everyone should know that today there are 46 million African Americans living mostly in the middle class. I don’t believe that racism has the economic force to stop that. I do think new racial theories have the same power to confuse people as all taboos and superstitions. Racist people are wrong, stupid and confused. And we don’t have to shoot them, jail them or fear them. It is satisfactory to confront them, and to the extent that we possess common sense, civility and a disdain for wishful thinking, we can do so without much assistance from the top down. I think that ministers and engineers have what it takes, and that the time for militancy has passed."
But as I raised my own black nationalist upbringing higher in that piece, it should be well understood by the reader that I had absolutely no doubt of my ability to shoot them, jail them or fear them, but the lessons learned in that upbringing evolved to understand what obviated such extremes. Consistently in all the time we've known each other was the preface to Invisible Man, a kind of dignity that is actually surprised at the nerve to insult, which resolves to pity. And that is the kind of pity I feel for the so-called white Agent Smiths of the nested White Liberal Matrices who actually believe they have a burden to serve to poor African Americans who are putatively psychologically incapable of anti-fragility to Nazi level racism, or even micro-aggression. I guess all I can say is that my generation didn't have peanut allergies, and if this one doesn't survive, tough shit.
This is why I end on the question of war and what hubris we possess to think that the next war is impossible. The only way we get so insipidly idiotically evil is when we are not recognizing ourselves as Solzhenitsyn did.
Being fair, also I don't have a problem with any defense of liberty, and it is not liberalism I have a gripe with, but with Progressivism, and postmodernism, and I think poststructuralism. But I'd much rather defend the philosophy of science than spit and sputter about those who are confused or charlatans...
The thing is that you have to ask: who was keeping black folks from accessing the 2nd Amendment? I humbly submit that it wasn't White Liberals--that that is a lily-white right-wing fantasy of how Blacks got disarmed. The nonviolent leaders of the civil rights movement all had guns in their homes for self-defense (except Bayard Rustin), and the natural extension of that idea into Black nationalism lasted as long as it took the FBI to kill Hampton etc. It's not wrong to come out of that with some kind of Black libertarian distance from both white liberal sentiment etc. but it's a big empirical mistake to think that the actual work of making Black liberty and Black gun rights something that is strongly derogated has anything to do with white urban liberals. That's all on the people that you have a strange attention and attraction towards.
On a deeper level, you'd really have to tell me what you see in Strauss etc.--you don't need Strauss to have a philosophy that says "don't trust whitey" and "keep shit esoteric". That's the thing: that's a political idea that is everywhere in history that people think they're being done down by the powers that be AND it's everywhere in history that the people WITH power want to be shifty motherfuckers. You gotta decide if you're at all interested in the road in between where people try to be transparent enough to one another, and if that's it? Leo Strauss is goddamn poison. So is a lot of the stuff you're trying to process. There's a lot of humanism out there, but guess what? A decent amount of it sounds like the stuff nice white liberals are trying to talk up.
You make it sound like at the end of the day there are political gains to be negotiated by sensing and corralling what must be the inevitable fate of some black collective destiny. I don't have any more faith in Strauss than I have in Rustin or anyone you might dream of. Nor is the approval or disapproval of whitefolks some end game. It's nothing more or less than the presumption that there is some historically appropriate method and means that *should* of necessity point to the mountaintop the Negro is supposed to climb. The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed and to accept that there is an inherent agency in everyone is the hump to get over.
Humanism is fine. Again, I'm interested in preserving the philosophy of science & rationality, and you might call that libertarian. I have no use for the future of race. I see skulls that either possess or are yet to possess the necessary tools for civil self-determination in the built-up world.
You’re talking here about something that I’ve long seen as a problem: what you and your family chose was, essentially, forgiveness. Many people today would argue that it’s an unfair requirement placed on Black people to forgive historic traumas. Yeah, I think it is unfair. But that burden cannot be fulfilled by anyone else. It’s up to the African-Americans of today to decide how to move forward, whether that will be integration or not. And integration does not been subsumption! It simply means shared purpose, in my view.