I think Cobb can speak for himself he doesn't need grown men to cape for him.
Uhm yeah I spend zero time talking about...thinking about....worrying about the race police. Whoever they are matter because you make them matter. Stop making them matter by addressing them. Who is enslaved and chained?
The fact I don't even know who these people are more care should I from you they have zero relevance. They don't matter. I walked about all last week and gave whoever these boogey men are no thought. Sounds like a new way to be a culture warrior while denying being a culture warrior.
"I talk about the world all day but me I'm above it all...but watch me constantly talk about it some more"... 😂
It's like...Any man who brays his wife is a scum bag...I would never do that...now watch me tell you why a man is justified in beating his wife again. 😆
I also wonder who is the intended audience if there is one. Most people have multiple identities in life. Some are fluid and situational...many fleeting. Race, ethnicity, religion usually are not after a certain age. Those are some of the most as one if the most unmalliable things...not just in the U.S., but clearly in the globe. I guess the average reader here is like 40+ as o most already agree or they likey wouldn't be here. I would think to have been a social impact or to really dialogue you would h as be to engage people who are not crystalized yet...who are still fluid....young adults.
Also even within identities there are varying degrees of adherence. Some of the most militant pro Black talking race men I've seen are married to nonblack women. I identify as black but I have never let someone black tell me what I should be doing, should like, etc. I never had to have black role models or mentors. I never go out looking for black friends, although I've moved a lot. I've lived in places where I would not see a black man for a week at a time and work in an industry that is clearly not common for blacks. I do t believe all unequal outcomes are a result of racism.
That being said there are certain black people I will call coons and bedwenches with no remorse. I have moral boundaries.
Life is complicated. However I stopped caring about certain black people trying to tell me how to be black when I was in high school. I define me not peer pressure. I don't know any grown as educated black professionals who are different but if I did I probably wouldn't associate with them.
Yes, for me, it's analogous (not the same but analogous) to free blacks during slavery. The free blacks today have emancipated themselves from the "mental slavery" of race essentialism, i.e. mentally limiting one's choices in life by the fact of one's race.
Bro, for someone who talks a lot about "race is not important" you have written A LOT of posts about race and blackness and black people. A LOT. I would think if someone was "beyond race" they would focus on "more important things" and not that other people are black or care about being black. I do know black intellectuals who almost never speak about being black or their race, because they are interested in specific topics that have nothing to do with their race. However 75% of your posts are about being black, and "not caring about being black".
When you know the Earth is round and you are in the presence of people who insist it is flat, it is very uncomfortable. But let me ask you the same question. How would you characterize the intelligence and intelligibility of race talk that you hear? What about that of China talk, which I know you know more than the average bear? Doesn't it get under your skin that people don't understand what is obvious to you?
It truly annoys me that I talk about this. It's work. And in fact I have been thinking about other things to talk about. Then again, it has only been a year since the emergence of CRT in popular debate. When I have run out of things to say on this subject, I will talk about other things. Things that are even less popular. Like the philosophy of science and
Interesting as you have asked I have basically run out of things to talk about over at Quora where I have about 7 million views. The level of conversation has dropped to the point at which questions are mostly spam or unintelligible. So I'm very likely to let that go soon.
The overall reason why I do write these days has to do with the failure of rationality in public debate. The sustainability of race blather as a billion dollar DEI industry and all that is associated with it crowds out civilization. I saw this trainwreck coming and I will stand off the tracks, but not without having done all the requisite and reasonable handwaving. I hate that smart folks are getting crowded out, but I also hate the idea of giving in to snobbery, because I know that people like the kid who wrote this question suffer in ignorance when the right answers should be right at hand. I know how political propaganda smothers the right answers and I know how the process of discovery gets lost in a culture of political cheat codes. I'm fighting market leaders. I haven't figured out a way to enjoy my life even more by ignoring the entire circus.
Consider my stuff over at Goodreads, where I write reviews for books that are interesting to me. In that part of my life that is purely joyful, I am left with the constant dilemma of knowing that very very few people are interested in reading those reviews. It leaves the writer in me unsatisfied. Perhaps you have read Cixin Liu's Dark Forest. If you have, then you understand the dangerous dilemma of searching for intelligence in the universe. Perhaps as you suggest, being a Wallfacer is the best long term strategy. Shut up about race less they come for you. Maybe I'm just not that smart, but my Jewish friends keep encouraging me not to shutup.
Well...your friends might be concerned you will get canceled Cobb. :-) I guess you are not that concerned.
You make good points as usual. I am not even arguing that you are wrong. I think you are probably 80-85% correct.
I'm pretty pragmatic. So I think this is more an issue of approach to a solve, not what we want the end result to be.
I think if you really want to encourage debate or counter the usual narrative, then maybe, and this is a kind suggestion, not a vague or nasty criticism...maybe talk more about the alternative.
I've been an atheist since I was like 10 years old. To my mothers horror I used to argue about the validity of the bible by the time I was 13 with my two minister elder cousins. Now that I have nearly half a century of reflection and experience under my belt I have come to realize that religion serves an important human function, at least in the the Middle East and European traditions - Abrahamic religions. I won't go into that here, but lets just say that I have found that burning down the narrative and stating "I have no need of your religion" because of X, Y, Z...is not helpful. The most helpful approach to any conversation is to talk about the alternative - the mechanics, how it works, how I actually live it, the benefits.
I am not sure saying that I'm the Stoic Watcher, that I've moved beyond, that it's all kind of ridiculous, and talking about some things in the past, enlightenment values, etc...not sure that will get you where you want. Why? It doesn't replace the power of group identity, which is fundamental to human beings, even in the U.S., which is way to the tail of the Bell Curve in terms of 'individualism' when compared to just about every other nation in the world, even other Western nations.
I also don't think race is the fundamental issue. Let me be clear. I don't think talking to black people about the problems with "modern black identity" is going to do much of anything but get you called names. Why? Because there is a reason that that identity exists and persists. It does not matter if you think it is valid. You have to talk to people where they are, not from where you are - down.
Black people did not create "black identity". It was created for them and imposed on them...a long time ago. When a culture is created, it is nearly impossible to change in the short term. My belief is black culture exist now in "opposition to" because the long desired "integration with" did not work for most people, and they became quite bitter and to some degree have given up. However black identity is not the only identity in America where this is true. Many of these current trends came out of the shifts in the 1960s.
I think talking about "race" is talking about a symptom of a larger problem. Race may impact you the most looking the way you look living in America, growing up and existing in your generation, but I would argue 3rd wave feminism for a certain percentage of women (mainly white identified sis women in urban areas, who are fairly educated) is not very different. It plays out different, but the reason for it existing is not that different.
So to me the issue is more why are certain Americans quite happy to maintain the "old identity" of Flag, God, Country, assimilation, and others believe that opposition to that, destruction of that, constant reform of that is an existential issue. Since their common language to communicate with each other in a public way fell apart by the 1970s - with little to replace it.
I do not believe at all you will solve for "blackness" without solving for the bigger issue, because blackness does not exist in a bubble, it is a reaction to a perceived problem. You may argue the problem is not really a problem, until you solve for civil identity/nationalism, and for that, you need to start with "the nonblack folks"...
Interesting. We'll have to sit down and clear a lot of this up. It would be an interesting discussion. But let me say a few things. 1. This post is directly pulled from Quora and I think it serves as a good example of how to talk to young people about putting too much weight on ethnicity. It got several thousand upvotes over there, and I thought it might be useful for folks here who have some questions about the entire "CRT taught in schools" thing. In many ways it doesn't have to be because people who take their racial identity so seriously that they have to 'leave something at home' are already brainwashed.
You also have identified something important which has had me stewing all morning. The fact is that my work for the Foundation for Free Black Thought has, in effect, hijacked Stoic Observations. The simple solution is that I should write more of this racial stuff in that Journal. That's a logistics problem. But I have not wanted to disturb the flow of solicitations from other writers we have gotten over there. So that's a new problem to work out - scheduling etc.
So similarly, I think politics has hijacked a serious portion of American intellectual discussion. So the general darkness I am talking about needs the Stoic view. What I learned during the runup to 2008 was that black politics, which wasn't always identity politics, clearly made that hard turn when presented with Obama. This betrayal of intellectual and ethical integrity sucked all of the oxygen out of everything. Basically the integrity of pre-2008 anti-racism was destroyed by Obama's presidency because he hollowed out black grass roots politics, and black politics in general. I suppose I have to write about that more extensively. My point is that something as morally serious as a genuine anti-racist praxis demonstrably cannot survive America's politics. Not because America is itself fundamentally or purposefully racist, but because American politics is hostile to intellectual consistency and integrity it its current populist form. So there is a vicious circle of political and identity investment that has destroyed sense around race, around patriotism, around nationalism and around energy & the environment. So these are things that intelligent individuals will have a very hard time discussing in public without begging the question of whether they 'are' a Republican or a Democrat.
Race has very little to do with the way I look at America. I look at people and see skeletons. Dead men walking. And I know that whenever they dance to a tune that's not philosophically and intellectually sound, they're heading right off a cliff. The racial thing is just a slam dunk to criticize because it's so clearly run off the rails of reason. And yet Kaepernek, Coates et al still persist in their Woke stupor.
Again, blackness is owned by Hollywood which took possession of it as soon as Obama left the building. Sucks to try to be black - McWhorter makes the same analogy as you do about 3rd wave feminism and woke racism. Same impractical derivative mumbo jumbo. I used to think black politics was important. I no longer think so.
The 'old identity' is not identity. It's philosophical affinity. Confusing the two is like confusing Han identity with Confucianism.
I suspect that you are making errors in your consideration of the reason groups of people cohere. I only say so because I am convince by the Tajfel studies about the psychology of groupthink. It can be *anything* and people will glom onto it. So he who controls communication in the present controls the past. Right now we have ceded that to the political oversight of social media. That is the center of the firestorm that's baking our brains. Well not mine.
Anyway FWIW we've got some Socratics going on here. That's always good.
Many of us who reject the social concept of race talk about it because the race police exist in all racial communities. When they stop trying to keep us in lanes, we can stop talking about race.
Well duh.. If you are even going to address a topic such as moving "beyond race" you have to talk about race, and talk about it at length. That should be rather obvious. And as long as either blacks being overly sensitive in some situations, or whites like the assortment of "Karens" who take it upon themselves to criminalize ordinary blacks going about their daily business, then the issue will not expire anytime soon. Duh indeed. What other blinding insights you got?
I think Cobb can speak for himself he doesn't need grown men to cape for him.
Uhm yeah I spend zero time talking about...thinking about....worrying about the race police. Whoever they are matter because you make them matter. Stop making them matter by addressing them. Who is enslaved and chained?
The fact I don't even know who these people are more care should I from you they have zero relevance. They don't matter. I walked about all last week and gave whoever these boogey men are no thought. Sounds like a new way to be a culture warrior while denying being a culture warrior.
"I talk about the world all day but me I'm above it all...but watch me constantly talk about it some more"... 😂
It's like...Any man who brays his wife is a scum bag...I would never do that...now watch me tell you why a man is justified in beating his wife again. 😆
I also wonder who is the intended audience if there is one. Most people have multiple identities in life. Some are fluid and situational...many fleeting. Race, ethnicity, religion usually are not after a certain age. Those are some of the most as one if the most unmalliable things...not just in the U.S., but clearly in the globe. I guess the average reader here is like 40+ as o most already agree or they likey wouldn't be here. I would think to have been a social impact or to really dialogue you would h as be to engage people who are not crystalized yet...who are still fluid....young adults.
Also even within identities there are varying degrees of adherence. Some of the most militant pro Black talking race men I've seen are married to nonblack women. I identify as black but I have never let someone black tell me what I should be doing, should like, etc. I never had to have black role models or mentors. I never go out looking for black friends, although I've moved a lot. I've lived in places where I would not see a black man for a week at a time and work in an industry that is clearly not common for blacks. I do t believe all unequal outcomes are a result of racism.
That being said there are certain black people I will call coons and bedwenches with no remorse. I have moral boundaries.
Life is complicated. However I stopped caring about certain black people trying to tell me how to be black when I was in high school. I define me not peer pressure. I don't know any grown as educated black professionals who are different but if I did I probably wouldn't associate with them.
Yes, for me, it's analogous (not the same but analogous) to free blacks during slavery. The free blacks today have emancipated themselves from the "mental slavery" of race essentialism, i.e. mentally limiting one's choices in life by the fact of one's race.
Bro, for someone who talks a lot about "race is not important" you have written A LOT of posts about race and blackness and black people. A LOT. I would think if someone was "beyond race" they would focus on "more important things" and not that other people are black or care about being black. I do know black intellectuals who almost never speak about being black or their race, because they are interested in specific topics that have nothing to do with their race. However 75% of your posts are about being black, and "not caring about being black".
Why is that? hahah
This is why: https://mdcbowen.substack.com/p/the-existential-dilemma-of-black
When you know the Earth is round and you are in the presence of people who insist it is flat, it is very uncomfortable. But let me ask you the same question. How would you characterize the intelligence and intelligibility of race talk that you hear? What about that of China talk, which I know you know more than the average bear? Doesn't it get under your skin that people don't understand what is obvious to you?
It truly annoys me that I talk about this. It's work. And in fact I have been thinking about other things to talk about. Then again, it has only been a year since the emergence of CRT in popular debate. When I have run out of things to say on this subject, I will talk about other things. Things that are even less popular. Like the philosophy of science and
Interesting as you have asked I have basically run out of things to talk about over at Quora where I have about 7 million views. The level of conversation has dropped to the point at which questions are mostly spam or unintelligible. So I'm very likely to let that go soon.
The overall reason why I do write these days has to do with the failure of rationality in public debate. The sustainability of race blather as a billion dollar DEI industry and all that is associated with it crowds out civilization. I saw this trainwreck coming and I will stand off the tracks, but not without having done all the requisite and reasonable handwaving. I hate that smart folks are getting crowded out, but I also hate the idea of giving in to snobbery, because I know that people like the kid who wrote this question suffer in ignorance when the right answers should be right at hand. I know how political propaganda smothers the right answers and I know how the process of discovery gets lost in a culture of political cheat codes. I'm fighting market leaders. I haven't figured out a way to enjoy my life even more by ignoring the entire circus.
Consider my stuff over at Goodreads, where I write reviews for books that are interesting to me. In that part of my life that is purely joyful, I am left with the constant dilemma of knowing that very very few people are interested in reading those reviews. It leaves the writer in me unsatisfied. Perhaps you have read Cixin Liu's Dark Forest. If you have, then you understand the dangerous dilemma of searching for intelligence in the universe. Perhaps as you suggest, being a Wallfacer is the best long term strategy. Shut up about race less they come for you. Maybe I'm just not that smart, but my Jewish friends keep encouraging me not to shutup.
Well...your friends might be concerned you will get canceled Cobb. :-) I guess you are not that concerned.
You make good points as usual. I am not even arguing that you are wrong. I think you are probably 80-85% correct.
I'm pretty pragmatic. So I think this is more an issue of approach to a solve, not what we want the end result to be.
I think if you really want to encourage debate or counter the usual narrative, then maybe, and this is a kind suggestion, not a vague or nasty criticism...maybe talk more about the alternative.
I've been an atheist since I was like 10 years old. To my mothers horror I used to argue about the validity of the bible by the time I was 13 with my two minister elder cousins. Now that I have nearly half a century of reflection and experience under my belt I have come to realize that religion serves an important human function, at least in the the Middle East and European traditions - Abrahamic religions. I won't go into that here, but lets just say that I have found that burning down the narrative and stating "I have no need of your religion" because of X, Y, Z...is not helpful. The most helpful approach to any conversation is to talk about the alternative - the mechanics, how it works, how I actually live it, the benefits.
I am not sure saying that I'm the Stoic Watcher, that I've moved beyond, that it's all kind of ridiculous, and talking about some things in the past, enlightenment values, etc...not sure that will get you where you want. Why? It doesn't replace the power of group identity, which is fundamental to human beings, even in the U.S., which is way to the tail of the Bell Curve in terms of 'individualism' when compared to just about every other nation in the world, even other Western nations.
I also don't think race is the fundamental issue. Let me be clear. I don't think talking to black people about the problems with "modern black identity" is going to do much of anything but get you called names. Why? Because there is a reason that that identity exists and persists. It does not matter if you think it is valid. You have to talk to people where they are, not from where you are - down.
Black people did not create "black identity". It was created for them and imposed on them...a long time ago. When a culture is created, it is nearly impossible to change in the short term. My belief is black culture exist now in "opposition to" because the long desired "integration with" did not work for most people, and they became quite bitter and to some degree have given up. However black identity is not the only identity in America where this is true. Many of these current trends came out of the shifts in the 1960s.
I think talking about "race" is talking about a symptom of a larger problem. Race may impact you the most looking the way you look living in America, growing up and existing in your generation, but I would argue 3rd wave feminism for a certain percentage of women (mainly white identified sis women in urban areas, who are fairly educated) is not very different. It plays out different, but the reason for it existing is not that different.
So to me the issue is more why are certain Americans quite happy to maintain the "old identity" of Flag, God, Country, assimilation, and others believe that opposition to that, destruction of that, constant reform of that is an existential issue. Since their common language to communicate with each other in a public way fell apart by the 1970s - with little to replace it.
I do not believe at all you will solve for "blackness" without solving for the bigger issue, because blackness does not exist in a bubble, it is a reaction to a perceived problem. You may argue the problem is not really a problem, until you solve for civil identity/nationalism, and for that, you need to start with "the nonblack folks"...
Interesting. We'll have to sit down and clear a lot of this up. It would be an interesting discussion. But let me say a few things. 1. This post is directly pulled from Quora and I think it serves as a good example of how to talk to young people about putting too much weight on ethnicity. It got several thousand upvotes over there, and I thought it might be useful for folks here who have some questions about the entire "CRT taught in schools" thing. In many ways it doesn't have to be because people who take their racial identity so seriously that they have to 'leave something at home' are already brainwashed.
You also have identified something important which has had me stewing all morning. The fact is that my work for the Foundation for Free Black Thought has, in effect, hijacked Stoic Observations. The simple solution is that I should write more of this racial stuff in that Journal. That's a logistics problem. But I have not wanted to disturb the flow of solicitations from other writers we have gotten over there. So that's a new problem to work out - scheduling etc.
So similarly, I think politics has hijacked a serious portion of American intellectual discussion. So the general darkness I am talking about needs the Stoic view. What I learned during the runup to 2008 was that black politics, which wasn't always identity politics, clearly made that hard turn when presented with Obama. This betrayal of intellectual and ethical integrity sucked all of the oxygen out of everything. Basically the integrity of pre-2008 anti-racism was destroyed by Obama's presidency because he hollowed out black grass roots politics, and black politics in general. I suppose I have to write about that more extensively. My point is that something as morally serious as a genuine anti-racist praxis demonstrably cannot survive America's politics. Not because America is itself fundamentally or purposefully racist, but because American politics is hostile to intellectual consistency and integrity it its current populist form. So there is a vicious circle of political and identity investment that has destroyed sense around race, around patriotism, around nationalism and around energy & the environment. So these are things that intelligent individuals will have a very hard time discussing in public without begging the question of whether they 'are' a Republican or a Democrat.
Race has very little to do with the way I look at America. I look at people and see skeletons. Dead men walking. And I know that whenever they dance to a tune that's not philosophically and intellectually sound, they're heading right off a cliff. The racial thing is just a slam dunk to criticize because it's so clearly run off the rails of reason. And yet Kaepernek, Coates et al still persist in their Woke stupor.
Again, blackness is owned by Hollywood which took possession of it as soon as Obama left the building. Sucks to try to be black - McWhorter makes the same analogy as you do about 3rd wave feminism and woke racism. Same impractical derivative mumbo jumbo. I used to think black politics was important. I no longer think so.
The 'old identity' is not identity. It's philosophical affinity. Confusing the two is like confusing Han identity with Confucianism.
I suspect that you are making errors in your consideration of the reason groups of people cohere. I only say so because I am convince by the Tajfel studies about the psychology of groupthink. It can be *anything* and people will glom onto it. So he who controls communication in the present controls the past. Right now we have ceded that to the political oversight of social media. That is the center of the firestorm that's baking our brains. Well not mine.
Anyway FWIW we've got some Socratics going on here. That's always good.
Many of us who reject the social concept of race talk about it because the race police exist in all racial communities. When they stop trying to keep us in lanes, we can stop talking about race.
Well duh.. If you are even going to address a topic such as moving "beyond race" you have to talk about race, and talk about it at length. That should be rather obvious. And as long as either blacks being overly sensitive in some situations, or whites like the assortment of "Karens" who take it upon themselves to criminalize ordinary blacks going about their daily business, then the issue will not expire anytime soon. Duh indeed. What other blinding insights you got?