How To Game The Race Game

Without being gamed.

If I were Marc Andreesen, this is the proposal I would cast among the cadre of intelligent folks I know with spare time. How would one game the transparently colorstruck racial manipulations in human relations without becoming a witless pawn? Or to put it in conventional historical terms, what should the conscientious German have done to undermine the democracy which elected Hitler?

In my most well-distributed essay, my strategy was something I called ‘personal deracination’ which basically requires one to sabotage one’s own racial incentives such that others’ become transparently manipulative. The difficulty with this strategy is that while it may give you superior vision, you’re left with the kind of comfort that only tends towards self-satisfaction. “If people were more like me, the world would be a better place.” Considering the fact that I am Stoic, it is often only the interruption of domestic or professional turmoil that distracts me from my anticipated consequences of our racial social dysfunction. Maybe if I got back into circuit training I could relearn how to hate myself more than cultural pollution. After all, everyone can see that flat abs make you superior.

So I declare that my self-satisfaction is not actually satisfactory. I will see a counselor about that, but in the meantime, I do wish I could create or get someone to create a complete game matrix for the scenarios of social reward and punishment in the appropriate number of dimensions.

For example. I think it has been proven that, with regard to acceptability to the targeted groups, mushy marketing works. Remember the internet meme that deconstructed the marketing trick of video showing a pretty girl walking with a bag of groceries with two baguettes poking out the top? OK well, I remember crap like that. Anyway, mushy marketing is anything showing people with happy smiles supposedly enjoying carefree times.

Consider the first scenario I tried. California is doing a lot of bluster about its proposed real-estate reparations. With the qualifications as I understand them, I could stand to win a quarter million dollar credit in our ridiculous housing market. That ain’t hay. Would I exploit my racial identity for that amount of cat chow? Even though less chance than beautiful downtown Burbank freezing over, I enjoyed the fantasy for a moment. First, I was angry about the idea of a $500 billion race-based payday. This is something the California legislature is uniquely bonkers enough to propose. But if it did happen, would I do it? How about I take the cash and spend it in Texas? That would punish California’s fiscal profligacy in a way they would quickly see. How about I use it to fund my anti-racial absolutism? That would use the race devil’s momentum against him with some philosophical jiu-jitsu. That’s all I could think of and dropped the daydream. It’s not going to happen. If it happens I’ll deal with it then.

I just finished reading Ivanhoe and few things impress me more than the virtue of that book’s character of Rebecca. It was that she was true to herself and all of the cultural virtue she had by fulfilling her family’s expectations and being true to her religion could not poison her against those who sought to possess, exploit or destroy her. She, like I, was racialized - abstracted into something beyond her will. But she understood the difference between that abstraction and the real and willful self-discipline of her virtue. In the end she remained resolute, not simply as ‘the Jewess’ but as herself, as Rebecca. In that way she was a hero of the story, which might have been written any other way with her as the protagonist.

So I must be the protagonist of my own story, regardless of how I am abstracted into the story of others. This is no postmodern matter of structuralism in narrative. My human essentials are not bound by language, I am not a narrated character. I am something other and more even if my story is never told or heeded. I am accountable to the god within, and isn’t this self-evidently the aim of all free minds? To be self-determined, with all moral certainty and to weave the ethics appropriate to his times.

This is a new look. It’s the look towards deracination that I didn’t think I would ever face. It is a mutual struggle, not only as a black American against anti-black racism, which has the moral hazard of being racially self-dealing. There are now the leftists who have been racialized by the Wokies by the delusion that White Supremacy is the singular most evil conspiracy of human history. So it’s not OK to be white. It’s not OK to be black. People are starting to understand in a new way that this is not a vector of charity and virtue signaling. It’s a necessary tonic for the toxic racialism everywhere. It bridges the gap between liberals and classic liberals, ie conservatives of the Enlightenment.

Let me repeat it another way because I want this to stick. It’s not fighting fire with fire. Fighting the errors and misrepresentations of the new Woke anti-racism is not an exercise in defending the dignity of any race. It is the removal of fuel. It is is not about bulldozing anyone’s cultural property, it’s about removing all of the oxygen from all of the arguments about race by denying that race explains anything. That is work. It requires that we not be lazy but that we accept that there are millions of factors determining our world and our position in it.

So that’s almost it for this week’s race bucket. Here’s a short video in which you can see how hopping mad and bent out of shape I am about something Scott Adams said:

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Homework
Now would be an interesting time to read some of the old literature closely and then show up. The first thing that comes to mind is the book Black Like Me, and consequently Watermelon Man. I do this blindly without having read or watched those since I was a kid, but I think what priorities we had on race and what we took seriously about race would transparently appear out of joint.

Comments Made Elsewhere

Apropos this article in Aero:
Race is a superstition that doesn’t map anywhere but human imagination. Most folks are sadly misinformed the small data side of social science analysis that demonstrably has a replication problem.

I disagree with Malik in his assertion that a political movement is necessary for society to gain any benefits of individual deracination. It’s something we engineers understand. Either you’re thinking about the problem correctly or you are not. Today’s populist politics, think-tankery, influencers and wishful thinking are insufficiently integral to support any sort of enlightened movement. Hell, we don’t even properly defend our own Constitutional rights.

Hitchens’ logic is simple clear and direct to the heart of the problem. There is no spoon.

As for disambiguating the social construction of race from the social construction of culture, that maybe complex, but the manifestation of racialization can be outwitted through colorblindness. Ward Connorly has one formula. Most conservatives are determined ignore the pronouns and implied sexuality of political argumentation. So there are lots of efforts that can be made in the direction of colorblindness, as double blind experimental processes in actual scientific discipline show. Don’t forget how DEI seeks to color-inform. Simply seek to color-disinform.

Bring back blind auditions. Ditch tracking by race. The honest confession that you need to know racial identity is your first step in identifying your weakness. The clarity of post-racial thought makes all of this obvious.

OK race bucket is full.