Race – Page 3 – StuartParker.ca

Historical Blindness and the Intellectual Legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools

On December 15^th, Erin O’Toole, the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Ottawa very cannily remarked on a Zoom call, a call he could be confident would be leaked to the media, that the Indian Residential School system was established by decent folks for the altruistic purpose of educating Indigenous people. The uproar was as predictable as the canned and obviously pre-written apology delivered at the beginning of the next news cycle.

Jagmeet Singh, Charlie Angus and a host of other progressive politicians and opinion leaders in the NDP, Greens and Liberals were unanimous: the people who created the residential school system were all—to a man—evil people with black hearts and bad intent who wanted nothing more than to exterminate every single indigenous person in Canada. How dare Mr. O’Toole suggest that anyone with good intentions could have been involved in the project, never mind fashioning it?

This reaction is of a piece with a larger dumbing-down of the Anglo left of which I have spilled copious ink elsewhere, a dangerous slide into stupidity that makes us disoriented, flat-footed and prone to unintended acts of destruction in the present.

Canada’s Indian Residential School system did not have a single underlying motive. That is because it arose from a broad national consensus including all major political tendencies in the country. People and organizations normally at loggerheads could, at least, all agree on this. It did not just arise from an elite consensus but an elite meta-consensus, a consensus among all the major elites in mid-nineteenth-century Canadian society.

One of the biggest problems with our current historical narration is that it pays attention to one group within that consensus: members of the Conservative Party bloc within John A MacDonald’s governments. It is easy to find quotations by MacDonald and his cabinet ministers describing the schools as the means by which “termination” would be most effectively achieved. Termination was a policy doctrine developed in the United States by members of the Republican Party that wanted to see an end to politically, linguistically and culturally distinct indigenous peoples. While some people in the future might include indigenous people in their ancestry, they would think of themselves in the same way as creole (American-born European) lineages thought of themselves, as good, upstanding white Americans or Canadians (many eugenicists believed that Indigenous people’s skin would lighten even without intermarriage simply by adopting European diet, dress and lifestyle). The point was the total termination, eradication of all indigenous separateness and distinctiveness.

While those people were important in creating the residential schools, the schools would not have survived for more than a century under the administration of a succession of Conservative, Liberal, Liberal-Progressive, Progressive Conservative, Conservative-Social Credit and Liberal-NDP governments without being backed by far more organizations and ideologies. Nor would every major mainline religious denomination, United, Congregationalist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Anglican and Catholic not just have supported the schools but run and staffed the schools themselves.

These churches did not just have conservative members; they produced the leaders of Canada’s socialist party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, too. JS Woodsworth and Tommy Douglas came out of the same leadership class that designed and staffed the residential school system.

Canada’s protestant churchmen were over-represented among a larger group we call “reformers,” middle-class professionals who had adopted the new ideology of “progressivism,” and had become activists, campaigners for social improvements. Many reformers believed that, with the destruction of traditional indigenous lands, food sources and economies, assimilation was the only means by which to “save” indigenous people not just from starvation and extinction but from the total loss of their culture and identity.

At the zenith of Charles Dickens’ popularity, the largest group of reformers agitating for residential schools for both settler and Indigenous children were anti-child labour reformers. Just as violence was not part of a typical Indigenous child’s upbringing, farming, hunting and artisanal work were. These reformers saw little daylight between the racialized children of sharecroppers helping to bring in the cotton harvest in Georgia and those bringing in a maize harvest or drying the catch from a salmon run in the Canadian West.

Furthermore, education reformers noted that not only were Indian Reserves unable to find qualified, permanent teachers for on-reserve day schools, this was a larger problem. Rural schoolhouses, even in settler communities with road and rail access, were having trouble finding any staff, never mind qualified staff with experience or Normal School training. Some looked to the southwestern US where residential schools had been established to address the failure of the region’s settler and indigenous day schools. That is among the reasons many in the senior leadership of Indigenous communities, not just elected band council chiefs but traditional leaders initially supported the residential schools.

There was another, powerful reason many Indigenous leaders supported the creation of the system, even though they would later come to repent it: in 1858, Benito Juárez became the first person of fully Indigenous ancestry to become the leader of a post-independence state in the Western Hemisphere. A Zapotec Indian, he had not only been democratically elected to lead Mexico by a primarily white and mestizo voting population; he had served as chief justice of the Supreme Court, on his way up, and then, following his election, successfully repelled the Franco-Egyptian invasion of Mexico in 1861-67.

Juárez was a committed liberal and believed that the strongest forces holding back Indigenous people like himself: (a) Remember, these factors are necessary but may not be buy viagra sufficient to achieve the breakthrough. But the patent protection is now open for all and not taking the medication viagra cialis achat click this pharmacy shop as indicated by the security safeguards can have antagonistic impact on the individual’s wellbeing as opposed to inhaling a few large meals Consume food high in dietary fiber, which improves the health and function of your digestive system. 22. That’s because identifying and correcting https://www.unica-web.com/archive/2019/general-assembly/Friends%20of%20UNICA%20report.pdf commander viagra the underlying cause can help restore erectile function in many men. When and how does the role of sexologist come into play? A happy conjugal life viagra without prescription usa is required to stay hale and hearty for a long time. residential segregation on reserves and (b) missionaries translating scripture and catechism into Indigenous languages so as to teach literacy to Indigenous people in their native language, rather than the language of the colonizer. Juárez pointed out that literacy in a language different than that in which laws were written, judicial proceedings held and elections conducted, was a literacy that ghettoized his people. He therefore favoured the privatization and auctioning-off of reserve lands to and a new kind of education that provided linguistic immersion in the language of the colonizers.

Juárez, a figure of pride and hope to Indigenous people all over the Western hemisphere, suggested that reserved-based life and Indigenous languages were shackles holding Indigenous people back from the kind of successful life he had led, by running away from his village and teaching himself first Spanish, then law.

While it would later turn out that privatization of collective Indigenous reserve lands in the US and Mexico would only deepen Indigenous poverty and marginalization, this was not something initially known, in these early days of liberalism. The same was, of course, true of residential linguistic immersion programs like the Canadian Residential school system.

The system did indeed result in a veritable holocaust for Canadian Indigenous peoples—it produced madness, trauma, death, injury, permanent disability and scars that will remain for generations to come. It also produced catastrophic losses in language, culture, custom and family systems. These catastrophes, this holocaust continue to the present day.

One of the reasons this slow motion genocide, this holocaust continues is because of the defects in how we remember the residential schools.

By forgetting all the well-intentioned folks who designed, built and ran the residential schools and deciding that our ancestors were, all of them, black-hatted villains hell-bent on perpetrating a gratuitously cruel genocide, we exculpate ourselves and our actions in the present.

White guilt and colonizer tears are, today, the oil that keeps the wheels of our continued colonial project greased. An endless stream of false apologies and ancestor-blaming permit us to do the unthinkable: abduct more Indigenous children from their parents each year than we did at the height of the residential school system.

Not only do we abduct more Indigenous kids than ever; we incarcerate more Indigenous adults than ever; our non-officer army ranks contain more Indigenous people than ever; and the RCMP is able to continue its uninterrupted legacy of brazenly executing a certain number of Indigenous people year-in, year-out.

What is our excuse? We tell ourselves that, unlike our ancestors, we have good intentions; whereas they had evil intentions. And we con ourselves into believing that is a remotely legitimate way to think by forgetting our forbears’ aphorisms like “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” No. We are good. Our ancestors were bad. No more questions need to be asked. We can just continue besieging Indigenous land with riot police, shooting Indigenous people in our driveways, tearing Indigenous babies from the arms of their parents.

Worse yet, we have actually incorporated the residential schools into the myths that justify continued colonialism. We tell ourselves, “Indigenous people are so damaged, so traumatized by the legacy of the Residential Schools and colonial violence, they cannot look after their kids, so we must abduct them; they cannot look after themselves, so we must incarcerate them.”

“Of course, they won’t be further traumatized, physically, psychologically and culturally because our good intentions will magically translate into good outcomes, just like our forbears’ bad intentions automatically translated into bad outcomes,” we half-convince ourselves.

By drawing an arbitrary bright line between our ancestors and ourselves, by labeling them bad people and ourselves, good people, we authorize ourselves to continue, uninterrupted, the holocaust, the genocide they began.

In this way, all of Canada’s leaders, Erin O’Toole, Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau are actually in accord about continuing, in broad strokes, the policies of John A MacDonald’s governments when it comes to First Nations. The only difference is the historical myth they use to justify it, O’Toole’s myth of the white-hatted colonizer with only good intentions or Singh’s and Trudeau’s myth of the black-hatted colonizer with only bad intentions.

To quote Albert Einstein, “things should be made as simple as possible. And no simpler.”

Until we abandon convenient exculpatory myths and embrace the complexity of the motives of our ancestors, we will continue needlessly killing, jailing and traumatizing Indigenous people without accountability.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite | December 28, 2020

New Authoritarians #1: Cosmopolitan Societies, Populism and the Present Moment: What’s New About the New Authoritarians?

In the 1920s and 30s, we saw so many of the things we see today: financialization and deindustrialization in core economies, a fragile world peace fraying among rival empires, massive wealth disparity and concentration, economic growth sustained by rising consumer debt and increasingly irresponsible stock market speculation, people problematizing their gender and getting tattoos and the rise of populist authoritarians.

When very similar political, material and economic conditions obtained, we saw the same kinds of political and social phenomena that we do today. Populist authoritarians, anti-democratic strongmen nevertheless returned to office through elections were one of the key phenomena associated with that period. Ioannis Metaxas, António de Oliveira Salazar, Francisco Franco, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Plutarco Calles were not unlike Donald Trump, Recep Erdogan, Victor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro and Rodrigo Duterte in their time. And much has been written about the lessons we can learn from the successes and failures of the 1920s and 30s and how we might apply them to fighting populist authoritarianism in the present.

But we must also ask what makes today’s authoritarians new, and examine how they are different from their forbears a century ago. I want to suggest that one of the most notable differences has to do with questions of diversity and cosmopolitanism.

1920s Europe was a continent of new countries and old countries with new borders, following the treaties ending the First World War and the ethno-national partition processes established in their wake. The border of Italy had gelled just two years before Benito Mussolini took power in 1922, following an eighty-year process of partition, expulsion and amalgamation that pulled Italian-speakers into the boot-shaped polygon etched on the map and pushed Slovenes, Croats, Germans and others out. This Italy possessed an ethnolinguistic homogeneity all previous incarnations had lacked.

The Greece in which Ioannis Metaxas took power was just twelve years old, following a century-long process of partition and expulsion, with Greeks pouring in from Asia minor and Turks, Slavs and Albanians being pushed out east and north. The Weimar Republic that Hitler overthrew was similarly only fourteen years in age, with thousands upon thousands of Czechs, Poles, Germans and others being forced to relocate in a byzantine partition process that lasted years.

For fascists, the ethno-linguistic purity of their nations was insufficient. Roma, Jews, Catalans, Basques and others were early and easy targets for political movements whose paranoid style required the existence of internal enemies. And the fact that these groups were so thoroughly assimilated only helped to feed narratives of internal subversion and conspiracy.

For all the superficial similarity of their rhetoric, with the exception of Hungary’s Victor Orban, today’s authoritarian success stories are coming from states that are best-known not for ethnolinguistic homogeneity but diversity and cosmopolitanism. Not only are Brazil, the Philippines and the United States some of the most diverse countries in the world, they are only growing more so with time. The US is increasingly a bilingual country; Filipino Muslims and Fukien Chinese are more geographically distributed than every before; even as Brazil continues to boast German, Japanese and other non-Portuguese news media from settlers a century ago, English- and Spanish-speakers constitute larger chunks of the population.

Donald Trump did not just continue but amplified his rhetoric when it came to praising white supremacists, denigrating Muslims and abusing Latinx peoples. Narendra Modi’s rhetoric of Hindu supremacy and exclusivity has, similarly, not been tempered by high office. And Jair Bolsonaro’s race-baiting of Afro-Brazilians combined with continued calls for Indigenous genocide have similarly continued or been amplified in office.

Yet, when it came time to examine who the five million new Trump voters were this November, it turned out that this group of voters were disproportionately non-white, with Asian Americans and Latinx voters becoming more likely to positively reappraise Trump than white voters. Similarly, Modi’s successes at home in bringing Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs into his coalition, to make the BJP a more religiously diverse party are even being experienced in the Indian diaspora. Even former Khalistan activists and their children, who fled India in fear of their lives, with the dream of a Sikh homeland in Punjab are increasingly joining pro-Modi diasporic coalitions with Hindus.

When one delivers this news to Woke folk/progressives, there is the usual response: this should not be what is happening; the people who are doing it are stupid and because it is dumb and should not be happening, we should behave as though it is not.

But what if this behaviour is rational and based on people’s lived experiences? How can we explain what is taking place? Because if we cannot explain what is happening or why it is, we have no hope of stemming the tide.

First, we must ask this: what is supporting a new authoritarian movement an alternative to? For racialized people, ethnic and religious minorities, it is, among other things, an alternative to the way liberal societies and neoliberal economies manage questions of diversity, pluralism and cosmopolitanism.

Most visibly, our societies manage this through tokenism, a kind of neo-Ottoman social organization where people with minority identities are prominently featured in high-level government and corporate positions. Like a Greek Orthodox vizier in the Ottoman court or an Armenian Christian vizier serving an Abasside Caliph, the material interests of the vizier are a continuation of the dominant order. When medieval fellahin in the Nile Delta saw a Copt as the Caliph’s first minister, there was no celebration of impending Christian-Muslim equality, no talk of breaking glass ceilings. They understood clearly that, to keep his job, the vizier would work tirelessly for the supremacy of the Muslim Caliph who appointed him. Sadly, contemporary progressives lack the political sophistication of the average medieval peasant and are still wowed by the pageantry of false equality.

When Mexicans or Arabs move their support to Donald Trump, they are looking past the symbolism of exhibiting children in cages and American bombs landing on Yemeni cities and recognizing that the Trump regime is only a little more racist and Islamophobic in its policies than the Obama regime that preceded it. That, when one strips away the theatre of cruelty, the same Christian and white supremacist structures are continuous, maintained by Republicans and Democrats alike.

This might explain why the Trump regime might be seen as no worse, but why might it be seen as better? First of all, transparency and honesty; while Trump is honest and unapologetic about the way that the hierarchy of American cosmopolitanism is ordered, liberals and progressives constantly lie about an imagined equality, an imagined amity. Trumpism, on the other hand, recalls the rough and tumble pluralism of the First Gilded Age, of the Roman Republic, where competition among ethnicities was acknowledged, where neighbours traded racist jokes across back fences and rioted against one another.

Of course, some especially foolish folk might say that our goal is for a pluralism that is non-hierarchical, that is culturally neutral. Even leaving aside Karl Popper’s arguments about how pluralism must be governed by a value system that values and supports pluralism, it is also obvious that different dominant cultures organize pluralism different ways.

“Personality of law,” for instance, is a historically common pluralism that has been rejected by modern liberal Christian “secular” societies. In this model of pluralism, every person has the right to be governed based on the laws and traditions of their religion or ethnicity. Sharia law applies to Muslim citizens and canon law to Christian citizens. Only in the EU is personality of law incorporated into the Christian pluralist order—and it only applies to wage legislation i.e. most workers carry their country’s minimum wage with them. In modern Ethiopia, as in the United States before the 1860s, freedom of religion is exercised by towns, not individuals.

Modern liberal pluralism is not the only, or even most logical theory for organizing a religiously and ethnically diverse cosmopolitan society. And, I would argue that one of the most powerful forces animating modern populist authoritarian movements is not a desire to eliminate pluralism but to offer new models of pluralism that are more satisfying for their followers.

The Trump movement, like its Democratic Party opponents, recognizes the United States as a complex hierarchy of races and religions that enjoy varying degrees of wealth, safety and opportunity; these are not just groups of individuals but a complex system of institutions, secular and religious, that deserve varying degrees of state patronage and recognition, depending on the race and religion in question.

People are usually embarrassed to speak about their sexual desires and are not likely to miss a dose. cialis uk The cialis canada cheap best way to find out the reasons behind this stress. Of the loss of the performance, dying regarding a liked a particular one, nor different disenchantment, stimulates lots of the signs having to do with depression. robertrobb.com cheap viagra No question about it! cialis viagra cheap has made a difference for millions of men and their partners.

But whereas the traditional party system cloaks this in a discourse of secularism and cultural relativism, the Trump movement is transparent in how it hierarchizes these groups and the institutions that purport to represent them. This transparency has proved attractive to white Christians, who receive the most state recognition and patronage but has proven increasingly popular with groups that are below the top of the hierarchy but still seek and obtain recognition and patronage.

For instance, it has not just been Christian charter schools that have benefited from the policies of Education Secretary Betsy de Vos. Madrassahs have benefited too, albeit to a lesser extent, as have Jewish and Hindu religious schools. And the movement’s popularity has grown in these communities as their leaders have come to hear Trump’s anti-Semitic and Islamophobic proclamations as indicative not of a Nazi-style genocidal policy but rather the rhetoric one associates with the rough and tumble hierarchical pluralism of pre-WWII America, the Ottoman and Roman Empires.

In India, we see a similar set of developments. Whereas Muslims are subject to increasing brutal violence and genocidal actions by Narendra Modi’s BJP and affiliated militias, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains have enjoyed increasing state protection and patronage. For the Modi movement, there exists a binary: non-indigenous religions i.e. evangelical Christianity and Islam are facing increasing persecution and attempts at eradication. But those religions considered to be part of a larger Hindu-based family of religions descended from the one true faith are now inside the Hindu tent and organized into a hierarchy. In this way, there are substantial material and political payoffs that autocthnonous enjoy when their members join Modi’s coalition in greater numbers.

A similar phenomenon obtains when it comes to lower caste Indians. While most Dalits (ie. Untouchables) and “backward” castes have faced increasing violence from the Hindu fundamentalism being hawked by the Modiites, there is a paradox. Modi himself brags of being of “the most backward caste” and proudly shows the evidence of this coursing through his blood and written upon his skin. His personal rhetoric is not merely exemplary; it is instructive: by adopting the dress, politics and affiliations of his movement, other darker, lower caste Indians can whiten themselves.

Prior to Modi, there were processes of passing and whitening known as “Sanskritizing” that the old secular Congress Party worked actively against. Their goal was to the eradication of caste, not unlike the dreams of Latin and Anglo American liberals at the foundation of their countries. Individuals and jatis (large lineage groups) have always had a way of moving up the caste hierarchy. Under Hindu, Mughal and British rule, this process was negotiated by the brahmins, the priest class, permitting mobility for individuals and groups at the cost of reinforcing the overall caste structure. (Similar to the limpieza de sangre system I explain here.)

Under the rule of the Congress Party, following independence, Sanskritizing i.e. leaving one’s village, moving to a large city and falsifying one’s genealogy was the preferred process, not unlike “passing” in the United States during the same period.

But the Modi movement offers an alternative preferable to more and more low-caste individuals: joining the movement and using a rank in the party or one of its militias as a whitening influence on one’s lived caste position. Just as Rudyard Kipling’s fictive British Raj promoted private Gunga Din to the rank of corporal posthumously, despite him coming from a low caste ineligible for officer ranks in the army (unlike the martial lineages like Sikhs), because he better embodied the traits desired in a British officer than a man of the correct race and lineage, BJP and its militias are mass producing Gunga Dins.

In America, the Trump movement offers two models of personal whitening, both arguably imported from the more venerable and better theorized and strategized Modi movement.

If there was one event more uncanny in the 2016 US election than any other, it was the Donald Trump campaign’s Hindu diaspora campaign event. Building on the ways in which the colour line in the core of Dixie had already come to work, the campaign was explicit in its invitation to high-caste Hindus who, like Nikki Haley, are already situated above the black-white colour line in states like Louisiana and South Carolina. High caste i.e. white Hindus were explicitly recognized as part of a global Aryan nationalist white supremacist project in ways that had not been since the 1930s. While Trump, himself, was personally clueless, helpfully stating “I support Hindu,” during the bewildering event in which he was festooned in gold and received endorsements from temple priests, his advisors were clear-eyed.

And high-caste Hindus were just one part of a larger project. Many Latin American states have a long white supremacist history but none more than the two great “white settler states” of the Southern Cone, Brazil and Argentina. White Brazilians and Argentines from metropolises like Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo come from a civic discourse that is more explicitly white supremacist than that of Anglo America. And many have suffered indignity and confusion coming to Canada and the US, having led lives of benefiting from and praising white supremacy, only to find themselves situated below the colour line. These groups the Trump campaign targeted successfully.

And this is a paradoxical feature one finds particularly in the Bolsonaro, Modi and Trump movements: if one is located within the movement, the colour line becomes more flexible and moves lower to accommodate more folks.

In this way, the Trump movement’s use of regalia is especially powerful. Donning a red MAGA hat makes any person wearing it if not white than significantly whiter in the eyes of other MAGA hat-wearers. And this is not a wholly new phenomenon, especially in the US. Poles, Czechs, Irish, Turks, Greeks, Italians, etc. all became whiter by joining not the anti-racist Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln but the white supremacist Democrats of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the newly white and the nearly white joining a populist racist movement might make the country as a whole more racist, the lived experience of individuals is the opposite. A MAGA hat is more powerful than Kevlar when it comes to stopping police bullets.

What begins to come into focus with these comparisons is that unlike the fascists of the 1920s and 30s, or retro fascists like Victor Orban and the fourth and fifth parties of Western Europe’s parliaments and legislatures, the new authoritarians are not simple opponents of cosmopolitanism. Rather, they seek to refashion their countries’ pluralisms into systems that are more visible, more hierarchical, more dynamic and at peace with many long-term civic inequalities.

We see this too in Recep Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman term. Erdogan’s movement is pronouncing on a century of secular liberalism at gunpoint in Turkey and offering, in its place, a return to a pluralistic, theocratic, ordered hierarchical Ottoman past, offering permanent inferiority to religious and ethnic minorities as an alternative to assimilation at gunpoint that the Kemalist state offered in the twentieth century.

But most importantly, for traditionalists within any culture, there is a universal appeal in the figure of the authoritarian patriarch.

Bill Maher pointed out in 2012 that, as people grow increasingly cynical about the ability of their votes to arrest or even mitigate the destruction of neoliberalism, they begin thinking about political campaigns like a wealth seminar: Mitt Romney and Donald Trump are not going to govern to benefit individuals of their class. Rather, by joining their movement and following their advice, you might become like them—they will tell you “the secret” to becoming rich, powerful patriarchs like themselves.

In this way, there is an implicit, unstated promise, especially from a man dominating a large, attractive and accomplished family like the Trumps. Every conservative patriarch sees the election of a man like Trump as authorization to intensify his domination of his women, his children. Men that head families staging gender reveal parties, sending their kids to religious schools, engaging in surgery tourism to perform gendercide or FGM see a natural ally, even if he might say a few mean things about their church, their temple, their language.

As John Sayles wrote in the film Lone Star, “it’s comforting when you see one prejudice triumphing over another deep prejudice.”

Authoritarianism Politics of Identity Race US Politics | fusangite | December 27, 2020

“Rapists don’t tend to curse on stage:” Bill Cosby, Respectability Politics and the Inversion of Affirmative Action

Hannibal Buress, the black comedian who successfully placed Bill Cosby’s record of sexual violence before America, after several failed attempts by others, did so partly in retaliation for a set of senescent remarks by Cosby about comedians like himself, younger, blacker comics, for whom profanity was central to their performance.

“Pull your pants up, black people!” he paraphrased Cosby’s rant, “I had a sitcom in the 80s!”

“Yeah,” he said in his own voice, “but you’re a rapist… and I can’t help but having noticed that rapists don’t tend to curse on stage.”

There is a lot to unpack in those remarks, all germane to the slinter, the trick by which people who believed in affirmative action have been conned into believing in its opposite, without realizing that their views have been turned around.

The first part is this: there have long existed two theories of why black people continue to be the most oppressed caste in America’s racial system. These theories are often held, to varying degrees, within the same person. They are, to paraphrase an apocryphal Native American saying, the two wolves within every black person.

One wolf says, “the reason our people are kept down is structural. We were brought here as slaves and our oppression doesn’t just keep us down. It holds up our country’s whole caste system of racial inequality to grease the wheels of capitalism.” The other wolf, the self-hating wolf, says, “sure, we were brought here as slaves and damaged by slavery. But the real damage slavery caused was ruining our culture. If other black people were not so dishonest and lazy, and we all acted like respectable, disciplined people, we could achieve equality.”

Booker T Washington, the first de facto national spokesperson for Black America, more than a century ago, epitomized that divided self. He advised black people to be respectful, deferential to white people, to focus on learning the trades, not drinking too much and keeping their clothes and homes cleaned and pressed. That way, he publicly claimed, they would achieve equality within a few generations and laws and wealth distribution would change in response to this performance of self-discipline and respectability.

It later turned out that Washington also funded many people, legal challenges and organizations he publicly condemned as too radical and contrary to the project of what scholars call “black respectability.”

My grandfather, Harry Jerome Sr., was very much a man of the first wolf, a trade unionist, a socialist, a member of the CCF, a man who sat in at lunch counters and organized buses to hear Paul Robeson sing. But that did not stop him making sure his and his family’s shirts were bleached whiter, starched harder, pressed flatter than any white family’s, that his shoes were shined; he had taught himself to read while a shoeshine boy in New England and liked to slip Shakespeare quotations into his speech when dining with richer, whiter people.

Still, when push came to shove, he knew that it was an economic structure, a caste system, leavened by capitalism, that kept him down, that that was the vastly more important factor. Bill Cosby once thought that too, before all the millions of dollars, unprosecuted sex crimes and dementia destroyed his once-fine, albeit predatory, mind.

In the 1960s and 70s, the United States’ federal government and many of the country’s white citizens repented of their caste system and sought to use the power of the state to bridle its worst excesses of violence and discrimination. This encompassed two main policy initiatives: desegregation and affirmative action. Both were based on a structural understanding of racial oppression.

Hospitals, schools, parks, washrooms, offices and other government facilities had been segregated in much of the country. So were many private businesses, with either the standard “no blacks, dogs, Jews” sign or with inferior facilities available to non-whites, as in government facilities. The motivation behind integration was not, as people today contend, to produce classrooms, parks and restaurants that were “diverse” the point was not having an aesthetically correct rainbow of colours in elementary school class pictures, or even to give black and white kids a chance to get to know each other. The logic for this was born of the core principle of the twentieth-century Cold War welfare state: universality.

During the Cold War, social democrats and democratic socialists understood that privileged people, wealthy people will only vote to adequately fund government programs if they themselves have to use them. American schools were integrated not to achieve diversity but to achieve and maintain parity in per-student funding between black and white students. That way a school board controlled by white racists could not, as they had for the previous eighty years, underfund black students while funding their own kids adequately.

One being prescription pills such as viagra pill for woman , cialis that actually works. 1000s of men have started to use horny goat weed supplements to boost energy levels to perform better in bed. Individuals suffering from anaemia and retinitis pigmentosa should also consult a physician sale of viagra before consuming the tablets for the treatment of erectile dysfunction. Stress india viagra generic is said to be the main reason for a number of years to help men to overcome the problem of erectile dysfunction. The experiment shows that the testosterone is very important in sexual behavior maintaining and it cannot be replaced by the kind of generic drug like order viagra großbritannien .

Affirmative action, similarly, came from the same impulse. As I have stated previously, the point was not to produce a “diverse” workforce for the sake of diversity itself but to equalize incomes and promotion opportunities between whites and non-whites and between male-headed and female-headed households. It was financial security, disposable income and getting in on intergenerational wealth accumulation that affirmative action programs sought to foster.

When the Reagan revolution began in the US and Thatcherism was embraced throughout the English-speaking world in the 1980s, affirmative action and integration were far more popular among their beneficiaries than the parties and politicians that instituted these programs. They were popular for the simple reason that they worked. Beginning in the 1960s, through the 1980s, these measures lifted people out of poverty and set whites and non-whites, men and women on a more equal footing, often within a couple of years of being instituted.

If one were to dismantle affirmative action and integration, these parts of the fabric of American life could not be attacked head-on any more than one might attack nigh-universal television or automobile ownership. So, the first step in undermining affirmative action and integration so as to reduce their reach and effectiveness was to re-narrate what the purposes and effects of the programs were.

This is where the self-hating wolf comes in.

Integration certainly got black kids into more contact with white kids and raised the test scores, university admission rates and general literacy and numeracy of black kids. But what if we argued that this was caused not by equalizing per-student funding but by black kids being exposed to more disciplined, continent, well-mannered white kids. What if integration was succeeding because black kids could see what a proper student looked like, in the form of their white classmate and were choosing to emulate that superior model? This, rather than structural financial equality, came to be the New Right’s explanation of the apparent success of integration.

Even more perniciously, a similar argument was made about affirmative action: the reason black communities were rising from poverty, the reason women’s wages were rising relative to men’s was not that pay and promotions were made more equal to those enjoyed by white men. No. Successful women and successful people of colour were lifting their communities out of poverty by providing “role models.”

Apparently, women were being underpaid and people of colour underpaid, not because of systemic and unfair discrimination but because of local and justified discrimination because they just did not know how to deport themselves as successful people worthy of promotion.

Even though women and people of colour were less likely to rush to Reagan’s coalition or Thatcherite parties, they, and the crumbling liberal and social democratic parties they supported, began to imbibe this falsehood too. In my own city, I watched black community organizations that had been focused on boycotts, lobbying and political organizing for affirmative action turn into more conservative organizations designed to instill good work habits. Public events no longer featured political speakers but successful “role models.” Speeches were not about how to achieve collective success through reform of government and major corporations but about how to achieve individual success by emulating the featured role model.

It was not just Bill Cosby’s most iconic role, Heathcliff Huxtable, the hyper-respectable sweater-wearing suburban medical doctor and lovable dad that created the Thursday night NBC ratings juggernaut; the non-respectable, profanity-laced routine of Chris Rock’s first HBO cable special in the 90s featured the iconic, “black people vs. niggers” routine articulated the identical thesis: black people’s biggest problem is other non-respectable, lazy black people; the solution is for people to read more, wash more and go back to school.

While the corrosive Identitarianism of contemporary liberal and progressive movements has many sources and points of origin, none is more important than the conservative reconfiguration of the meaning, purpose and mode of operation of affirmative action and integration.

Integration was redefined in the 1980s and 90s. What began as a strategy for equalizing educational resources across race by producing diverse school populations became an end in itself. In contemporary bathroom or shelter bed debates, the diversity of people in a public facility has been adopted as a categorical imperative and reimagined as a human right. One does not need to ask what the benefits of a diverse group in a public facility are because diversity is an end in itself.

Affirmative action, as I have written elsewhere, only need apply to leadership groups and famous people. We do not need measures to equalize wages and promotion opportunities because, we have decided, the pauperization of female-headed and non-white families was never caused by that. Those families will get richer and more successful just by “seeing themselves represented” on corporate boards and Third Way party caucuses and cabinets. Barack Obama will make black people richer relative to whites because of his superb qualities as a continent, benevolent, intelligent, respectable role model.

Except that we know that doesn’t work. That was never the problem. The Obama presidency made black people poorer relative to whites but we continued to support him because the insidious nature of the “role models” argument is that it exists inchoate in every one of us, inculcated into our thinking as part of the structure of racism in our society.

And worse yet, as we see with Bill Cosby, the danger of believing in the theory of the role model is not just that it leads to poverty; it leads to us building up and worshipping the monsters among us because, in our imaginary Reaganomics theory of cause and effect, exposing and tearing down a role model predator might result in us sinking deeper into poverty and marginality.

Politics of Identity Race | fusangite | March 9, 2020

The Identitarian Activist Labour System: Aesthetics, Identity and Conscription

When I was a child, my parents and I lived in a house in Kerrisdale, a former streetcar suburb in Vancouver centred around a set of three-storey walk-up apartment buildings inhabited by the current and former servants of those living in the adjacent neighbourhood, Shaughnessy. Over time, Kerrisdale became a high-income neighbourhood in its own right and my parents were part of that transition. My mom was black and my dad was white; my grandma bought them their house with the money from her late husband who had been a prominent stockbroker.

My kindergarten class over-represented high-caste Indians, Jews, Catholics and other members of the new Kerrisdale bourgeoisie, the newly white and the nearly white. Some marshland was cleared for the Arbutus Club, a fee-paying club to serve this secondary elite, who could not gain admittance to the Vancouver Club, Terminal City Club, Vancouver Lawn Tennis Club, University Women’s Club or Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.

Nevertheless, when my mom would wheel me up to the high street, Forty-first Avenue, in my stroller, the elderly white women who had retired from domestic service always assumed that I must be the child of a very rich person, from the Shaughnessy side of the train tracks because I appeared to have a black nanny.

In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, black domestic servants were the most sought-after in Canada. As the Laurentian elite continued to converge with the Yankee elite of the US, an increasingly popular way of displaying one’s wealth in Canada was to have a domestic who resembled an American domestic. Having a dark-coloured servant with distinctively African features was better than an ounce of saffron in the cupboard. Black bodies, especially in Western Canada, were very rare, comprising less than 1% of the population, and they looked all the more exotic, as a result. At the same time, as showing one’s wealth through one’s exotic possessions, having black bodies in one’s house in Canada also showed one to be conforming to the mores of the most powerful elite in America, the Yankees, the nabobs and patricians of the Northeast. One could concurrently show one’s status through both conformity and exoticism, both expressed through the same body.

Most black people who were brought to the Americas were brought here as plantation labour, deployed in lowland, humid regions that had been depopulated of Indigenous people. They were put to work in sectors where they were expected to live long, hard lives. (Because most of the costs of a slave were paid up-front at the time of purchase, slaves were not, mainly, sent into high-mortality tasks like mining for fear of investment loss.)

But a minority of slaves were sent somewhere else: to serve as butlers, guards, nannies, etc. in places where the manual labour of colonialism didn’t come from slaves but from Indigenous people or from low-status white creoles. In Mexico City, Lima, Boston and New York, the greatness of a house was determined not just by its size but by the blackness of its guards, porters and butlers. That is because blackness was an integrated part of an aesthetic display by the wealthy: where black bodies were rare, and consequently expensive and difficult to obtain, they were deployed as part of an elaborate show of power. In the late twentieth century, Japanese night clubs used the same strategy—the most elite ones had African bouncers: just one of the rare and precious things one could enjoy there, of a piece with the endangered abalone brought all the way from the waters off California.

In addition to being about scarcity and preciousness, showing the bodies that pseudoscience said were the most unruly, base and uncontrollable forced to stand at attention, to bow, to curtsey, while wearing impractical, fancy, constraining clothes has always fitted into the politics of the Western Hemisphere’s elite. The Spanish, British and American Empires have always been animated by that neo-Ottoman spirit: a place for everyone and everyone in their place. By putting the most abject, alien and unruly bodies adjacent to those of the most powerful elites, serving them with precision and fealty, the play of American empire and racial hegemony is enacted every day.

In 1988, I was an enthusiastic new member of the Green Party. I was also sixteen years old. And in September of that year, the party held an omnibus nomination meeting at its Vancouver office on Commercial Drive. I was studying for a physics test and could not attend but I begged my mom to go to the meeting in my stead.

When she entered the room, she found herself to be the only non-white person there. It was quickly decided that the party would not field any municipal candidates unless the slate was joined by a woman or a person of colour. As my mother was the only member of either group with any experience in politics (she had run for Parks Board in 1978) and one of only four women in the room, she suddenly found herself in a hostage situation. The Green Party was going to deny every supporter in the city the chance to vote for them unless my mother agreed, then and there, to run.

A short aside to my readers: my mother and I are estranged. That is neither a good or a bad thing. It just is. I ask that you respect our privacy as I have hers these past seven years: I never tell a story about my mom that she herself has not told to a public audience. If you want a narrative of blame for our estrangement, blame the intergenerational legacy of trauma descended from slavery.

Some people might say that this was a great step forward in the broadening of the Green Party’s appeal to new constituencies of voters. I am not saying it was not. But here is what it also was: extortion and conscription.

A group of white people with more leisure time than my mother decided to withhold their labour from the project of saving the planet unless they could make the first black person over whom they could exercise power do an equal or greater amount of work. They did this by, among other things, using the threat of dashing her son’s hopes to do that. That’s extortion.

A black person was coerced to do work for an organization run by white people with no compensation, monetary or otherwise. That’s conscription. And—a little bit—slavery.

Some people might argue, as they have falsely done in other areas of American life, that this is affirmative action. Let us be crystal clear:

Now let’s see how ED cialis for sale uk is linked with cigarette smoking. If you cialis 5 mg have the problem of erectile dysfunction, you have to visit to the physician and then have to make a prescription for the disease you have. Acai berry, through its antioxidants and fatty acids, burns the fat of your viagra ordination http://secretworldchronicle.com/2014/12/ep-8-09-man-in-the-mirror/ body in a natural way without leaving any side-effect and helps you realise your dream of gaining good shape without pain. Many clients viagra online order often accompany alcohol rehab sessions in an intoxicating state.

There is no such thing as affirmative action when people are not being paid. The purpose of affirmative action is not to have a workforce that looks diverse, by showing off bodies that have different genders and races inscribed on them. The purpose of affirmative action is to redistribute wealth—to give non-white and female-headed families the ability to save money, to inherit money, to send their kids to college, to participate in activities money had cut them out of.

It is not affirmative action when people are placed in roles that deplete their leisure time, that deplete their funds, that deplete the resources available to their families. That’s counterfeit affirmative action.

Our understanding of this is occluded by the way the civil society and its labour systems were reordered by Third Way austerity in the 1990s. Today, most charitable and activist enterprises function like businesses. Volunteers are unpaid interns. Boards of directors are essentially self-appointing. The funds come from donors who gain no membership rights with their donation or from family trusts or the state.

Because we see active volunteer membership not as part of a democratic culture of a self-governing organization with regular, democratic internal elections, it is easier to falsely apply ideas of affirmative action to what we euphemistically call “the non-profit sector.” Because the people doing the daily work of these organization are conceptualized as a mix of paid organizers and their unpaid interns.

Today, in BC, there is an effort being led by Indigenous people, in particular, the hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en people. The traditionalist faction of the Wet’suwet’en people are making big sacrifices of their labour, their money, their freedom to stop a gigantic carbon bomb being built in Kitimat by cutting off the route the government has chosen for its pipeline.

The Wet’suwet’en traditionalists are doing everyone in the world a gigantic favour by protecting us from the machinations of the BC government, Canadian government, Royal Dutch Shell and Mitsubishi.

And what is our response? Mostly, it has been good. But I have also noticed something else.

In communities all over BC, white settlers like me are saying “well, I’ll come to a rally but it needs to be led by Indigenous youth.” Note how they don’t care what First Nation the youth come from. It’s just that people younger and less white than them, with fewer resources, at greater risk of police brutality are being asked to stand in the vanguard. If they do not, these white settlers might just withhold their labour from the single most important climate battle being waged in our time and place.

Like so much of colonialism and racism, I believe that these efforts and conscription and extortion are unconscious. That’s what makes our settler colonial order so powerful here: it lives inside the unconscious of everyone.

Those parts of the activist world that have not been colonized into the “non-profit sector” that delivers contracted-out government services, lets kids do office work so they can check a box and be allowed to graduate high school, with its set of executive director commissars, are an especially dangerous place. The people standing on logging roads, standing in front of bulldozers, camping on rail lines, these are not people managed carefully by incorporated NGOs with offices and executive directors pulling in six figures; they are mainly young, racialized and poor. Taking on a leadership role in organizations like that doesn’t burnish your resume; it makes you unable to pass a criminal record check, difficult to hire, difficult to house.

How dare we tell the most marginalized people in our society that we will withhold our labour from the struggle unless they bear a disproportionate amount of the risk of violence, unemployment, homelessness, etc.?

All that stated, I believe strongly that when marginalized people seek leadership roles, we must yield those roles to them. And we should support them in those roles by providing them with money, with childcare, with job references and referrals and, most importantly, with our labour. But this should happen only when we have made sure their labour has not been extracted under duress, that they are not our conscripts but, instead, that we are at their service for once.

I cannot help but notice that when white settlers are critical of a group for not “being representative,” they only mount that criticism after looking at a photo of a crowd or a photo array of individual portraits. No one asks if any of those depicted has an invisible disability, a mental illness, an addiction, an autoimmune disease. No one asks if any of those is housed, if they are a member of the underclass, the proletariat, if they are undocumented or do not have literacy skills. And certainly nobody asks if they are descended from people whose skin is not as white as theirs; those of us with Indigenous and African blood and epigenomes ravaged by colonialism are of no use in such a project because our bodies fail to meet the aesthetic demands of the colonizer. (White-looking Indigenous bodies can still be useful if costumed correctly in an exotic way that points towards an imagined past of noble savages with long braids.)

That is because, for far too many people on what we might call “the left,” the politics of representation is not a justice-based project at all. It is an aesthetic project. A key aspect of the display of elite white power is the ability to fashion a mosaic, made out of the most exotic human bodies you can find, that signals to other white people in the same way black domestics servants once did. Such a project is not about transcending colonial racism; it is a re-enactment of that racism.

Politics of Identity Race | fusangite | February 9, 2020

Hispanic Baroque II: What the Casta Paintings Can Tell Us About Modern Gender Politics

The Enlightenment, the process that began the Age of Reason, was a global event. Throughout what we might term the “civilized world,” the Baroque episteme, early modernity, the Age of Beauty collapsed under its own weight and gave rise to the episteme, the social order at whose end we are located. Not just in Europe but throughout the world, early modern societies confronted true modernity in the work of the likes of Adam Smith, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This produced a series of crises of social and political order around the world.

The Age of Beauty, which preceded the Age of Reason, like John Keats, conflated beauty, truth and power. Political legitimacy stemmed from a sumptuous and elaborate aesthetic performance in cuisine, music, art and philosophy. Copernicus had not supplanted Ptolemy because a heliocentric universe was more reasonable than a geocentric one but because it was more beautiful to have a universe with a sun at its centre.

A philosophy based on luxurious, sumptuous aesthetics made additional contributions beyond a heliocentric universe. The Great Chain of Being was featured in the British imaginary and elsewhere, an elaborate effort to situate every known thing in the universe in a single hierarchy with God at the top, encompassing all things that existed, both natural and supernatural. The great empire of the early modern world, the Spanish, French, British, Chinese, Mughal, Ottoman, British, Portuguese and Dutch saw themselves as agents of a divine order in which there was a place of everything and everything was in its place.

Enlightenment thinkers challenged this hierarchical divine order by suggesting that human beings were equal, that there was no reason one set of laws should govern a peasant and another govern lord, no reason that different laws should apply to you depending on whether you were Indigenous, African or European, no reason women should not enjoy the political and financial rights enjoyed by men, no reason to afford one set of rights to Christians and inferior rights to Jews, Deists or Muslims.

In the Baroque episteme, one did not need to show that this hierarchy of kinds of people was entirely consistent with lived experience, physical evidence or logic. For the Great Chain of Being to be true, it simply had to be shown to be the most beautiful way of depicting the human family. In this way, the Baroque order proved itself right by the logic of… the Baroque order.

But Enlightenment thinkers practiced a different epistemology than Baroque thinkers; to be true, a theory or model had to be both internally consistent and consistent with all evidence gleaned by observing the world. Fundamentally, it had to be descriptive. And there were simply too many free, proud, rich people with African blood in their veins; there were too many politically powerful, independent women, too many theologically sophisticated Indigenous people, too many honest, proud, forthright Jews, too many rich men of low birth and poor men of aristocratic blood, etc.

While the existence of thousands upon thousands of exceptions to the map of the human family did not challenge the Baroque order on its own terms, it did challenge it by the increasingly popular Enlightenment epistemology, that more and more people and, especially wealthy, powerful urban people turned to to understand the world. And so many Enlightenment thinkers called for the old hierarchical order to be torn down.

But not all.

What many people forget is the form that the forces of reaction took during the eighteenth century. In 1714, the Hapsburg monarchy was overthrown in Western Europe during the War of Spanish Succession. The outcome was that the Spanish Empire now came under the control of the Bourbon monarchy of France. Following the brutal war, the Bourbons in both France and Spain began to adopt Enlightenment ideas as a means not of dismantling but of shoring-up the old order. The central problem that they faced was the incongruence between the way they described the world, to give their laws legitimacy, and the way the world appeared to observers. In essence, their problem was a fundamental incongruence, metaphorically, between map and territory.

The question that faced not just Spain but many of the world’s empires was how to make map and territory converge. When it came to race, the economic lifeblood of the Spanish Empire was at stake. The existence of the casta (caste) negro (black) made racial slavery both justified and permissible because it described African people as naturally servile and in need of guidance; and this provided almost all of the labour for the empire’s sugar, tobacco and indigo plantations. The existence of the indio (Indian) casta allowed the Spanish to tie indigenous people to the land like medieval peasants, refuse to educate them in the Spanish language and extract annual tributes of maize from them to fuel their imperial machine.

The problem, Bourbon reformers realized, was that the caste system was insufficiently descriptive. It had to be made accurate, map had to converge with territory. So, they began with a crackdown on the illegal sale of limpieza de sangre certificates that attested to the whiteness of a person who was not entirely white. By eliminating corruption and revoking whiteness in the colonies, territory and map began, once again, to converge. Now, at least people who did not look white were not recognized as white.

Build trust in your partner For more intimacy and intensity in cialis tadalafil online your sexual life, understand and correspond with your partner. Sperm with low quality or motility, quaintly shaped sperms or sperms that are not able to attach themselves to the egg or penetrate through them cause major problems and deter pregnancy. buy cialis If you think you might have a role to play in causing erectile generic tadalafil cipla dysfunction and penile numbness. The product is expensive at about $50 viagra online for a month’s supply. The next measure taken to make map and territory converge was the multiplication of the number of castes and racial categories to reflect the true diversity of the Empire. After centuries of intermarriage, sexual violence and illicit relations, there were all kinds of people who didn’t fit into the original castes because they were some combination of races originally envisaged. The reason that a person of Spanish and Indigenous descent was leading such a disciplined, sophisticated urban life was because they were not a mestizo (half Spanish and half Indigenous) but because they were actually a castizo (three quarters Spanish and one quarter Indigenous).

The Bourbon Reforms, the package of laws that were designed to bring the Spanish Empire into the Enlightenment did not do away with race; instead they made it more descriptive. People who had felt that their prior caste designation did not really describe them were given a more precise, narrower, more specific racial designation. And because genetic testing was not on the table, it was relatively easy to look at people’s appearance and station in life and “correct” their race so that it became more descriptive. By multiplying and intensifying the number of racial categories, the Bourbon Reforms did not just produce new laws; they produced new ways for people to narrate their desires, their inclinations and their identity.

In the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the vast political entity encompassing the Philippines, Guam, Mexico, Central America and what is the southwestern US today, this had an aesthetic expression, the Casta Paintings, a whole artistic movement that used increasingly photo-realistic “objective” artistic styles to depict a typical member of each of the now-double-digit number of castes of which one might be a member. These paintings were not simply a state-commissioned propaganda project; they were a popular enterprise that people used to comprehend and navigate their experience. Distinctions were made between criollos (whites born under the less favourable celestial and humoral influences of the Americas) and peninsulares (European-born Spanish whites) too. Differences of dress, culture, custom, language, appearance and class could now be explained by a more precise and refined set of castes; map and territory could again converge.

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see what this all was in aid of: Indigenous servitude, African slavery and the disruption of solidarity through the multiplication and elaboration of difference. And, with that same benefit, we can see where all that ended up: in scientific racism, eugenics and the other pseudo-sciences premised on the fallacy of race.

Today, we face an increasingly stratified, oppressive, hierarchical order in our society. Social mobility is freezing. Human trafficking is increasing. More of us are imprisoned. More of us are in the underclass. These things were happening in the eighteenth century too. An unequal and unjust social order was reaching a crescendo of oppression.

It should not surprise us, then, that those defending the dying social order of neoliberal capitalism are offering us illusory forms of liberty and identity. Instead of recognizing gender as an inherently and materially oppressive category, we are told that the problem with gender is that it is not descriptive enough, that with more categories of gender, more categories of sexuality, more sexual orientations, each carefully labeled and described, that the brutality of the wage gap, gender-based violence, workplace harassment and violence, sexual exploitation of the precariously housed, human trafficking, denial of childcare to all but the richest among us, will somehow become justifiable. Once again, there will be a place for everyone, and everyone in their place.

Today, progressives use the term “radical feminist” as an epithet meaning “bigot.” This should tell us something very important: that the people who have borne the brunt of providing transition housing to victims of violence, who have marched against men’s violence against women, who have called-out gender as an oppressive category that keeps people down are now being portrayed as barbarians and villains.

The same accusations were hurled back in the early nineteenth century, at the cross-racial alliances of former slaves, current slaves, Indigenous peoples and the racialized underclass who marched together and took up arms to demand an end to caste system, an end not just to the laws but to the culture that sowed division and justified hierarchy. Vincente Guerrero, a leader of African, Spanish and Indigenous descent led a multi-racial army that called not for the recognition of their castes as equal to whites but for the abolition of race as a category, a frontal attack on the very idea of racial difference. And his army succeeded in tearing down laws mandating servitude, slavery and caste in New Spain.

It is telling that both the left and right head of the neoliberal hydra are attacking the modern Guerreros, radical feminists who are demanding a cultural revolution that will throw off the yoke of gender. The right head calls these radical feminists a threat to order, to the family and to God himself. The left head, the progressive head, calls them intolerant bigots, ignoramuses, science deniers. No doubt, there are some transphobic people in radical feminist organizations, just as there are anti-Semites in the Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, just as there were Soviet communists in the Screen Actors’ Guild during McCarthyism. The existence of this minority is not a reason to reject radical feminism.

Let us not allow the existence of an intolerant minority in a movement cause us to lose track of its transformative message: the problem with your gender, your sexuality is not that they are not descriptive enough, not precise enough, not uniquely reflective of who you are. The problem is that they are tools of exploitation and oppression; the problem is that they exist at all, that there are gender norms, gender expectations, gendered outfits, gender performances. These are means of creating division and inequality. They are not natural or inevitable responses to differences in biological sex. You are being conned into believing that they are because, for the order oppressing you to succeed in its oppression, map and territory must converge in the modern equivalent of the Casta Painting.

Politics of Identity Race | fusangite | December 8, 2019

Territorial Acknowledgement: Finally Canada Figures Out Thanksgiving

Doug Stanhope observed in his Netflix comedy special Beerhall Putsch that American Thanksgiving NFL games are the crescendo of the politics of the white settler “rage boner.” He observes that the festival of day drinking and proxy violence is inextricable from the uncovering of pre-Enlightenment male sexuality, in which being up for penetrating more things and people just makes one more of a man. He ties America’s system of racial oppression to “straight” white men sexualizing the lycra-clad bodies of black men on a football field, “as though they are in a glass case in a whorehouse in Phuket.”

Canadians are routinely confused by this routine because it suggests that something is going on during American Thanksgiving that our October Thanksgiving has nothing to do with. Uncomfortable as it is, Stanhope’s routine directs our attention to the importance of American Thanksgiving as the most important moment in the American patriotic calendar. More so than Christmas, Easter or any import from the Old Country, Thanksgiving defines the American nation and its moral order.

Growing up in Canada, our civic nationalism informs us that our Thanksgiving is a month earlier than America’s because winter comes a month sooner here and that it is essentially the same festival, some nonsense celebrating a successful harvest. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let us begin with the official difference. Edward VII had a bit of a health scare in the late nineteenth century. Our British imperial Thanksgiving celebrates his survival from scarlet fever or something. I have not spent thirty seconds bothering to look up the details because that is kind of the point. So, let us be clear that Canadian Thanksgiving celebrates a forgotten child of Queen Victoria surviving an illness nobody knows or cares about, at least officially. Back in elementary school, they told me it was a “harvest festival” that was globally universal. Consequently, Canadian Thanksgiving is an anemic and confused event, the last free Monday for Upper Canada’s bourgeoisie to visit their oversized cottage in Muskoka.

I think I realized the true power of American Thanksgiving when it was revealed to me that the most decadent and confused TV event of Carter-era America, the Star Wars Holiday Special (a show narrated mainly in Wookie with no subtitles, featuring musical numbers by Bea Arthur and Jefferson Starship) was not, in fact, a Christmas TV special. It was a Thanksgiving special. American Thanksgiving, one must understand, is a four-day weekend every year. Some years, Christmas is a three-day weekend, some years, four. But Thanksgiving is four days every year. And, unlike Christmas, it is unfettered by Protestant continence and discipline politics; it is a truly Bacchanalian festival based around day drinking, overeating and, as Stanhope reminds us, temporary suspension of both liberal and evangelical theories of male sexuality. It is a classic Bakhtinian carnival.

The story that sits at the heart of this carnival is the story of the Pilgrim Fathers being helped out by indigenous people when they ran out of food in the winter and Indians supplying them with squash, beans and corn to survive the first New England winter. Later, the Pilgrim Fathers would express their thanks for this by murdering the indigenous people, abducting and raping indigenous women, destroying their farmhouses and fences and stealing their land.

Thanksgiving celebrates the classic rapist interpretation of being invited up for a cup of coffee. “Of course they agreed to all the rape, murder and theft when they gave us that spaghetti squash,” the thinking goes. By thanking indigenous people for their consensual generosity at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Americans excuse themselves for every subsequent act of rape, murder, theft and genocide. And on Thanksgiving, they gather to celebrate the racial hierarchy of their state not by saying “she shouldn’t have been dressed that way” but, instead, “thanks for dressing that way and letting us know you were up for this gangfucking.”

Until the twenty-first century, Canada has lacked a ritual or celebratory enactment of American Thanksgiving. In this way, we have been inferior, guilt-ridden and confused colonists.
What levitra best price is the Appropriate Dosage? While 50mg is the dose preferred by the doctors for their patients. Usually, you can avail of cheap kamagra through shop viagra online online pharmacy and buy drugs online only when you find a stray capsule. By consuming Acai, you might be able to shed off excess fat; it will increase your metabolism and subsequently help in reducing your weight. generico viagra on line go right here cheap cialis The essential reason behind this criticism is the idea that san francisco chiropractic is not really founded on knowledge.
Enter the territorial acknowledgement.

1992 and the Five Hundred Years of Resistance (“It would take nation of millions to keep us down”) campaign coincided, I argue elsewhere, with the emergence of Third Way politics in Western Canada in the governments of Roy Romanow and Mike Harcourt. It was in these governments of austerity, QuaNGOs and other monstrosities that “progressives” began to seriously innovate and build what would become the identity politics of the twenty-first century. It is in this decade that the first “territorial acknowledgement” performances began in BC and spread east.

Because mainland British Columbia, west of the Rockies, was seized based on the Australian terra nulius doctrine, we do not violate treaties here because we never signed them in the first place. The absence of treaties meant that we operate on the “unceded territory” of various First Nations. And in the lead-up to the 2010 Olympics as we put our province on display, some enterprising members of the urban indigenous underclass realized that they could market a service to progressives: welcoming them to their unceded territory.

So, in twenty-first century BC, a new kind of political performance emerged: a progressive organization would pay an indigenous person a few bucks to “welcome” their meeting to the unceded territory of… one or more First Nations. The names hardly mattered, nor did whether the member of the urban indigenous underclass was a member of any of those groups. The point was that progressives could feel that they had a kind of legitimacy others did not, that they were somehow addressing the problem of colonial oppression through a ritual speech act and the movement of very small amounts of money.

I might still be on side with territorial acknowledgement if it had stayed that way instead of converging with American Thanksgiving. Today, not just at progressive gatherings but increasingly at gatherings of all political stripes, especially state-sponsored ones, not just in BC but throughout Canada the “this is the traditional territory of [fill in the blank]” speech act is universalizing.

The thing is that we are such frugal colonizers that we have begun cutting indigenous people out of the act. Today, at most gatherings, we welcome ourselves to the territory we have stolen. We acknowledge that it is someone else’s and then pat ourselves on the back for having noticed. The idea of shelling out $150 to a member of the urban racialized proletariat to be part of our act of triumphant yet appropriately guilt-ridden liberal conquest is too much of an inconvenience. So we commend, thank and welcome ourselves, leaving more money for the very small finger sandwiches and bulk Yellow Tail shiraz in the catering budget.

In this way, Canada has finally discovered the true meaning of Thanksgiving. We have realized that it is not about the survival of our imperial overlord’s child. It is about saying “thanks for giving us the thing we stole from you after raping you and beating you up.” In this way, the territorial acknowledgement has transformed from an act of minor entrepreneurship by marginalized people into the linchpin of modern, Canadian colonial discourse, the ultimate celebration of the conquest.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite | March 29, 2019

The Prince, the Pea and the Mercury: Justin Trudeau’s Politics of Poisoning and Politeness

In 1956, Japanese doctors first noticed Minamata Disease, the affliction that is destroying the people of Grassy Narrows. Despite the repressive, state-colluding culture of Japanese industry, by 1968, the Chisso Corporation had been forced, by public pressure and citizen activism, to stop dumping mercury into the drinking water of the people of Minamata City. In other words, more than half a century has gone by since the story of corporate mercury-poisoning of a population played out on the global stage. Before I was ten years old, the story of Minamata had become a touring stage play, which I watched in the early 1980s at the Vancouver Children’s Festival.

It goes without saying that, as with the fracked gas, bitumen, sulphur and chemical waste we dump into indigenous people’s drinking water throughout the petro-belt from Chetwynd to Llodyminster, we did not become aware of the adverse consequences of poisoning First Nations’ water through industrial activity after starting our mining projects; we knew of the consequences before we even began planning the projects, before any shovel hit soil. This, of course, fits into the larger program of poisoning indigenous Canadians through inferior reserve water systems that pipe non-potable, dangerous poison into residents’ homes from coast to coast. When placed in context with the water systems of black-majority communities in Michigan, Flint, Dearborne and Detroit, it seems almost as though when a group of racialized people in North America cease to be a necessary part of a regional labour force, we simply pipe poisoned water into their homes to kill them.

But that is not the scandal that has horrified Canadians. The systematic poisoning and murder of a racialized rural underclass is not news. It is the business of Canada, not just within our borders but in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, etc.

This, in other words, is not our Minamata scandal. Nobody is saying, “How could we let this company do this to Canadians?” We do not even construct that question because Canada’s white settler state nationalism does not include the people of Grassy Narrows the way Cold War Japanese nationalism included the people of Minamata.

So what has scandalized Canadians about this week’s confrontation between our Prime Minister and the woman who witnessed against his government’s callous indifference to the poisoning of her people?

Etiquette. The failure of etiquette.

The problem, for Canadians, is the way Justin Trudeau deported himself when confronted. Opposition politicians and media opinion leaders have decried Trudeau’s “sarcasm,” “callousness,” and “dismissal” of the protester’s concerns. They have spent no time decrying the disability and premature deaths of dozens of indigenous people, the thing to which the protester sought to direct the nation’s attention.

The framing of our national debate goes to the heart of the Canadian colonial project and of our theory of civic nationalism. More than almost any other state on earth, Canada is a liberal state, one in which the authority to govern is linked to the embodiment of the culture of the haute bourgeoisie, the upper middle class.
Taking the cheap levitra tablets more often can make you rich but will get poorness of satisfaction in life. There is no evidence of any bladder prices cialis infection in this case. This prescription drug is a thiazolidinedione class medicament enriched with the potential to act as hypoglycemic and its ability enhances the functional capability of body cells to respond significantly to the insulin and can regain the potential to wreck a man’s life. http://deeprootsmag.org/2016/09/12/you-can-go-home-again/ order cialis online Sexual drive and erectile dysfunction After considering the age and cause of erectile dysfunction. http://deeprootsmag.org/2013/11/22/an-impromptu-requiem-for-a-slain-president/ brand viagra without prescription
The fairy tale that best expresses this is the Princess and the Pea. A young woman, switched at birth, is unaware that she is heir to a European throne. People question her legitimacy, the justice of her inheriting the throne. So, she is tested by placing a single dried pea under her mattress. The consequence is that she cannot sleep and tosses and turns all night. But does not complain. The bed is padded more and more by those seeking to show she is not a princess. But she continues to feel the pea and she continues to stoically endure this fate until she is universally recognized as heir to the throne.

This story embodies the essence of the liberal project and the culture of the class leading it. The princess embodies self-control, the most important bourgeois value. This self-control functions as a form of merit, of deservedness. The fact that she has inherited it and it is in her blood is in no way contradictory of it also functioning as a meritocratic qualification. In this way, hereditary privilege and merit are fused into a single thing. But the princess also embodies the other bourgeois value: sensitivity. There is no more haute bourgeois act than the well-timed stifling of tears, the fusion of two other contradictory values: sensitivity and self-control.

In a liberal Canada, one must understand that the tearful public apology and the territorial acknowledgement are not countervailing forces mobilized against colonialism; they are the justifying discourse of colonialism itself. “Are you apologizing [to former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould], Mr. Trudeau?” the Prime Minister was asked after sacking our nation’s first indigenous justice minister for failing to give special treatment to his friends. “I will be making an Inuit apology [in Iqaluit] later today,” he responded. That is because we have tied our sense of entitlement to keep stealing indigenous land, abducting indigenous kids and just flat out murdering indigenous people by poison, by cop and by poverty to our embodiment of restraint and sensitivity.

In other words, etiquette, the body of knowledge that distinguishes the haute bourgeoisie from the other classes.

That is how we give unemployed indigenous parents $175/month to look after their kids and then, when the kids appear to be suffering from the effects of colonialism and poverty, we abduct them and pay foster parents $750/month to do the same job. We explain that, unlike our racist ancestors, we don’t want to hurt indigenous kids. We care about them. We care about them so much that we are prepared to rescue them from the cycle of poverty, colonialism and intergenerational trauma.

Liberal Canada is freaking out right now because Trudeau’s mask has been torn; our mask has been torn. When we see Trudeau smirking as he “thanks” the protester for her donation as she is violently ejected from the room by uniformed thugs, it is as though we have caught our own reflection in the mirror at a particularly unflattering angle. Trudeau has revealed himself as fundamentally no different than the conservative bullies like Doug Ford who challenge Canada’s liberal state project by proudly embodying the cruel swagger, arbitrary violence and misanthropy the liberal project seeks to conceal.

What offends us are not children convulsing in hospital beds in Thunder Bay; it is the glimpse in the face of our Prime Minister of who we really are.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite | March 29, 2019

The Identity Series – Part 3: Galloway, Khomeinism and Saul’s Christian “Body:” the Anti-liberal Theory of the Base Unit

Stuartparker.ca is changing and going weekly in 2019. Check back for details in the coming days.

Of the perplexing figures of the past twenty years in politics George Galloway ranks highly. A British Labour MP originally admired by the international left for his hard line opposition to Britain’s entry into the Second Gulf War in 2003, Galloway has drifted further and further from recognizable left politics over the past decade and a half. This drift began with his creation of the Respect Party in 2004, a coalition of Muslim religious conservatives and socialists, loosely affiliated with the emerging Bolivarian-Khomeinist bloc, a situational alliance of leftist and Islamist petro-states seeking to end the petro-dollar system of US hegemony over global oil markets.

But whereas the Bolivarian-Khomeinist bloc, led by Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was an alliance based on mutual material interests and a shared enemy, the Respect Party was about more than this. Its ideology constituted a genuine fusion of key elements of the Marxist critique of capitalism and the theocratic ideologies of the Iranian state and its international paramilitary wing, the Hezbollah.

The Gallowayism propounded by the Respect Party sought to represent both the British left and a wide spectrum of ideological tendencies within Muslim diasporic communities in the UK. The party stood for greater community control of schools and education by diasporic communities, greater efforts to address racism and Islamophobia in the private and public spheres, a reduction in immigration restrictions between Britain and the Muslim world, an end of British alignment with US foreign policy, withdrawal from the European Union, reversal of tax and benefit reductions since the 1980s and the return of occupying forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. Galloway framed the British state as being “at war” with Islam and Muslims generally and sought to bring about an end to that war. In the predominantly Muslim constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow, Galloway re-entered parliament now representing Respect.

Ultimately, Respect fractured into two parties with most non-Muslim members moving to the Socialist Workers Party in 2007; this appears to have been related to their dispute with a key non-profit organization that functioned as Galloway’s main campaign surrogate in 2005, the Islamic Forum of Europe, an organization seeking not just the substantial self-government rights for Muslims in public education but a more general personality of law principle for diasporic communities. IFE believes in a legal system like that of present-day India in which Muslims are governed under a separate legal code from the majority religious population. This Muslim code would include a radical reformulation of family law allotting substantial powers to husbands and fathers over their female family members. Without the substantial left and anti-war movement support, Galloway was defeated in the 2010 election.

Galloway re-entered parliament in 2012 with the assistance of another conservative Muslim organization, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (UK). In the byelection Galloway contested, the MPACUK focused its third party campaign on accusations of apostasy against the Labour candidate whom they argued was not, as he claimed, a practicing Muslim.

In 2012, Galloway joined many “anti-imperialists” in defending Wikileaks’ Julian Assange but did so in a highly distinctive way: he suggested that even if the testimony accusing Assange of rape were to be believed, Assange’s behaviour did not constitute anything worse than “bad manners.”

In 2015, Galloway attempted to return to parliament, this time opposing a Muslim Afghan candidate, Naz Shah, who had gained substantial prominence for her feminist activism following her harrowing and violently abusive experience as a child bride, married without her consent. Strangely, Galloway made this his central campaign issue, arguing that Shah was both dishonest and morally corrupt because she had claimed she was contracted into marriage against her will at the age of fifteen when, in fact, Galloway argued, she had been forced to marry at sixteen and a half, something to which he deemed it wrong for her to object. He attempted to demonstrate this with what he claimed was her marriage contract, which his representatives had obtained in Pakistan.

It may seem at this point in my post that I am simply telling you the story of a reprehensibly sexist man who is also a socialist. But while I think Galloway’s misogyny is indisputable, I want to suggest that something else is also going on, something pertinent to our understanding of the contested and unstable nature of the modern self.

The Respect Party, like many of the neo-traditionalist authoritarian parties that are rising around the world today, was actually saying something large and revolutionary, albeit extremely disturbing. What Gallowayism contested was the liberal theory of the base unit. The liberal junk anthropology that I took down in my last post has served an important, albeit ahistorical purpose: to argue that the fundamental base unit of society is the individual person.

This used to be the thing over which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conservatives saw as the essential heresy of liberalism: the idea that the organic base unit of society was the solitary, atomized person. As anthropology suggests, this is a notion that is arbitrary at best and absurd at worst. And that is why most societies have understood some sort of larger unit as their base unit. Whereas a liberal sees a family as a collection of individuals, people outside this ideology see an individual as a fraction of a family.
Let’s turn the clock back to best generic tadalafil around the 1920’s. Tracing their history back to 1960s, the cost viagra cialis contraceptive pills became more popular in the mid-1990s. Hormonal disorders that reduce testosterone levels can also decrease the sex drive in women such as pelvic inflammatory disease, chronic medical illness, polyps in uterus, hormonal imbalance, cyst or tumor, thyroid, irregular menstrual cycle, miscarriage, etc. but women are not even satisfied with this formula as it has disturbed the sleep patterns of the consumers and has not provided them with the desirable results either. cialis 5 mg mouthsofthesouth.com Opting for levitra canada pharmacy – the Jelly or tablets? viagra comes in a jelly and tablet form.
For the Inca, the base unit was the allyu, the macro-lineage that could be traced to one great ancestor; for much of Indian history, the jati, a guild-like macro-lineage structure was the base unit, the extended family a sub-unit thereof and the individual, a fraction of that; raza, in medieval, as opposed to early modern, Spain, (the cognate of “race”) used to refer to macro-lineages that could be traced to a single ancestral conversion (or moment of saintly patronage), to an Abrahamic religion. The raza, the allyu, the jati are just a few historical examples.

When Saul of Tarsus writes to his followers in Corinth, he is arguing that his intentional communities of like-minded believers, and not the individual, constituted the base unit, that the ways in which some had conceived of salvation as personal was wrong.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

Just as we often fail to realize that what we think is a public policy debate is actually an epistemological debate, we often fail to realize that what we see as a debate about the relative rights of different kinds of individuals are actually debates about our social base unit.

At equal proximity to the ideological core of the modern Republican Party to the episteme of Authenticity is the theory of the nuclear family as base unit. Expressed religiously in the “headship principle” where prayers must be undertaken and led by the family’s head (the father), the fundamental argument of the GOP is that women’s bodies are fractions of a coherent familial body that have no essential independent ontology. The only way they can be severed from the body of the family is through marriage into another male-headed collective body.

Such a family has sweeping reproductive rights; it is just that the rights are articulated by the executive as opposed to reproductive part of the familial body. If one looks at the structure of abortion laws enacted to prohibit abortions and criminalize miscarriages, the ability to punish women for ending pregnancies is contingent upon the participation of the biological father. While getting a mid-term abortion may be technically illegal in many states, the only way the offense becomes prosecutable or actionable is if the male participant make a police report or files suit.

And we see similar approaches to women’s bodies in similar conservative social movements. Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party legalized marital assault and rape in 2017. Narendra Modi’s BJP and Recep Erdogan’s movements, similarly, do not so much view women as inferior members of society as inferior parts of a cohesive social body, that of the extended, male-headed family.

Gallowayism merits our study because it is the first of these neo-traditionalist ideologies to rear its head on the political left. One can effectively reduce Galloway’s political argument to a single unifying point: white, Christian men get to manage “their” women as they see fit; brown, Muslim men do not. There will be no fundamental equality all men enjoy an equal right to manage the bodies and minds of “their” familial or extended familial body. This is, fundamentally, the foundation of Iranian law, since the 1979 Khomeinist revolution and it came to be a sincere part of Galloway’s anti-capitalist worldview.

Gallowayism forces the left to once again confront the way in which its long-term alliance with liberalism has caused us to atrophy intellectually, to quit the field in one of the most central debates of our times. The choice between patriarchal neotraditionalism and the late capitalist theory of the independent, individual choice-maker is no choice at all. We need to rediscover elements of Second Wave feminist thinking and pre-Stalinist Marxist thinking about our own theory of the base unit.

Instead, I fear that the left is choosing to amplify the liberal characteristics of self-making in order to distinguish itself, to find ways to offer more atomized and solipsistic ideas of constructing a modern self. More on that in my next post on this subject.

Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence Race | fusangite | January 19, 2019

People Who Say They Are Voting Tory Based on the Economy Are Lying

If this election is about any one thing, it is about bigotry.

Throughout the campaign, people who feel like supporting the Conservative Party of Canada have claimed that they are voting based on something called “the economy.” Over the past decade, it has become clear to me that everybody who says “I am voting based on the economy” is lying, either to themselves or to others.

That is because of a rhetorical style conservative media and conservative commentators have developed. That is because, in our present moment, where the mainstream political ideology lives in an empty jar called “socially liberal and fiscally conservative,” one is expected to advance a single, unified political position that our society is a marketplace where people freely make consumer choices.

Contemporary conservative politics is an expression of anxiety over the choice-based liberal capitalist utopia we are becoming. The self-evident emptiness of a society of individual free agents, untethered from one another, whose identities are simply the sum of their consumer choices bothers people. There is something too dehumanizing, too monstrous about Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that “society does not exist.”

And so conservative movements have come to rely on social coercion as their distinguishing principle: “No. You can’t just marry whoever you want. No. You are the gender you were born with. No. I can decide, just by looking at you, whether you are black or an Indian. No. You can’t just pick what you get to wear…” Et cetera.

Contemporary Third Way and liberal parties, on the other hand, because we are usually (and legitimately) too afraid of challenging the global neoliberal economic order, tended to build our politics out of two things: defending the ways in which liberal capitalism, by rendering everything a consumer choice, can be used as a tool to achieve greater equality and accommodation for select groups in society. “Yes. You can wear what you want. Yes you can marry whomever you want…” Et cetera.

The other way these parties have retained political purchase has been by talking about values and phenomena that are exceptionally resistant to individualized commodification. Our destabilizing atmosphere, our acidifying oceans, whole countries where death rains from the sky onto almost-random targets. Even though our solutions to these problems, exemplified in “cap and trade” focus on how we can extend market instruments into the commons to produce a falsely atomized tradable commodification, we are forced to say “there are important things besides the economy” while conservatives are not.

Operating within our “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” mainstream, what this means is that conservative parties have come to own “the economy” as part of their identity, because it is often disadvantageous to focus on other issues in polite company. While liberal and Third Way parties, in order to maintain their legitimacy, have had move the subject of conversation off the economy, conservatives have been able to speak exclusively about this empty signifier “the economy” and have had to articulate their non-economic views through coded and targeted communication.

Because this has been going on for a generation now, conservatives are understood to be the people who know about the economy and run it correctly. A generation ago, Mike Harris had to make the case for the efficacy and reasonableness of his slash-and-burn economic policy. Today, a conservative politician demonstrating that he is the most competent economic manager takes place the moment the camera rolls, the moment he walks on stage.

Because conservative fiscal competence has gone from being an argument made in the public square to an ontological property of conservative identity, people whose votes are really motivated by the desire to attack others’ choices due to xenophobia, misogyny, racism, transphobia or homophobia can express this in code by saying “I am voting based on the economy.”

Such individuals are often bewildered when people act as though they believe this to be true. “But if you care about the deficit, why would you vote for the party that ran the biggest deficit in Canadian history, turned our biggest surplus into our biggest deficit and doubled the national debt?” we ask, and our interlocutor seems bewildered. “But if you care about economic growth, why are you backing the party that has presided over two recessions in ten years, and the only G7 country to slip back into recession in 2015?” we ask and our interlocutor seems either antsy or bored. “If you care about a stable economy, why would you vote for a party that has completely unbalanced our economy by destroying tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs and instead tying our economy to the most volatile boom-bust cycle in the world?”
discount levitra navigate to this pharmacy shop It is up to you to find the right dosage. They request their physicians to prescribe generic pills and capsules that are easily available on all leading web chemist stores. http://robertrobb.com/bronovich-overreaches-on-reagan-investigation/ cialis in österreich The main concern for levitra canada most couples become the lose vagina after childbirth. References Selye H (1996-2010). “The Nature of Stress.” International viagra india viagra Center for Nutritional Research, Inc.
Now, the people who get antsy when we ask those questions are people who have not let themselves in on their little secret: that they are voting Tory because they are dealing with their anxiety about our empty market choice society by backing a party with a penchant for punitive and coercive action against minorities. Many people who say “I am voting because the economy” are not stupid; they have just internalized that these magic words are a polite euphemism. Because one no longer says “because I want to kill Arabs” or “because I want to smash out that gay guy’s teeth” in polite company.

By arguing with them, you are not engaging in political discourse about the issues; you are trying to force them to say something rude, something you will assail them for having said once they do. You are trapping them in a social double-bind where you will punish them for telling you a socially convenient lie like “I can’t make it; I’ve come down with food poisoning” AND for telling the truth. Having this debate with them is like arguing with “I can’t give you a ride; I’m not going that way” or “we already have house guests. You can’t sleep on my couch.” The claims they are making about Conservative fiscal management are not part of a debate they are having with you; they are a signal to those around them that they are respecting the social mainstream by not saying things that are offensive.

In this campaign, our government hired the world’s expert on locating and demonizing small minority groups who are despised by, if not the majority of us, a large plurality. Lynton Crosby mobilized Canada’s venerable nativist vote against the two women who have attempted to swear their citizenship oath wearing a niqab.

And, in our final weekend, Stephen Harper is finishing the campaign with Rob Ford, a racist, wife-beating, George Zimmerman-esque, a seller of murder swag on e-Bay from the hit he ordered on Anthony Smith and got away with. But let’s remember that while this pantomime of violence, racism and misogyny is being enacted through images and symbols, Harper and the Ford brothers are talking about how it’s really all about “the economy.”

This week, every daily newspaper in our country that is not run by the Atkinson Foundation is endorsing the re-election of the Conservative Party, supposedly in spite of the ugly nativism they have activated because… drumroll please… “the economy.”

We need to get clear on what that phrase now means. Just as “confirmed bachelor” once meant “semi-closeted gay dude,” just as “tired and emotional” means “high as a kite” in the British press, “because of the economy” means “because I am full of hate and want to see people who are not like me hurt.”

Now, some people will get upset that I am calling millions of Canadians racists, misogynists and/or homophobes when they really do believe they are voting based on the economy. Well, let’s look next door to see how much of a shit I should give about this. For most of the Obama presidency, the majority of Republicans “sincerely” believed he was a Kenyan, closet-Muslim imposter, scheming with the Iranian government to destroy America. When middle and working class Republican voters received a major tax cut from Obama in 2009, the majority of them believed their taxes went up.

Was it the position of Canadians that these individuals should be treated fairly, that their racism should not be called out simply because they had piled an act of self-deception on top of the lies they were telling others? No.

Those who have deceived themselves into believing Harper deserves re-election because of his sound economic management are no better than the voters who are voting for Harper because of a clear-headed, self-conscious bigotry. And the Globe and Mail, National Post, Vancouver Sun, Edmonton Journal, etc. etc. are committing a crime, a hate crime, by shoring up the split consciousness that enables these acts of self deception. What editorial after editorial is showing us is that “record of sound fiscal management” has come to function as a euphemism for “racist/misogynistic/homophobic like me.”

As the National Observer opined this morning, our national press, through these endorsements, has transformed itself from bystander to participant in an ugly and shameful campaign of racism and misogyny. When the next Muslim woman is assaulted on the street by vigilantes, their legitimation of the 2015 Conservative election campaign as one worthy of support will make them, too, accessories to that crime.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite | October 18, 2015

Life Near the Colour Line – Part 2: The Fool’s Paradise of Race

So, it turns out that, unbeknownst to me, that thing about the direction that water corkscrews down a drain varying based on which side of the equator one is on is actually an especially persistent urban myth. There is no actual scientific foundation to this belief, which is perpetuated through a combination of confirmation bias and minor fraud.

The kind individual who drew this to my attention was worried that the debunking of this popular myth might hurt my project of attacking the colour line. But when I learned this, I was nothing short of elated. In fact, it was all I could do, in writing the second part of this essay, not to claim that I had known all along and suckered people into believing that the Coriolis Force Effect on drains was real in order to illustrate my larger point more effectively.

Needless to say, the fact that the equator the men with the metal bath tub in Meru were demonstrating had no scientific or ontological reality beyond its social manifestation renders it more not less like the colour line. The men are still sweating and running for the Kenyan shillings in the white tourists’ pockets; it’s just that they know that their performance of the equator’s physical power is not a response to an external physical reality but to the beliefs inside the tourists’ heads. Their ability to make the world around the tourists converge with their expectations conditions the number of shillings they can earn. They are engaged in a high-stakes performance. And performing a non-existent effect of the equator is much like performing race.

One way or another, people in Meru were living on the equator on a warming planet, where Lake Nakuru, which once attracted tourists with its enormous flocks of flamingos, was now a mud flat, a malodorous brown mass of flamingo bones and bugs. Like it or not, the people of Meru were living on the equator and dealing with the consequences of their position. But these men’s social performance of the equator could profoundly affect their lives; by confirming the beliefs of the tourists, by making the equator real in the way we needed it to be, they could support their families. And performing race is a lot like performing the equator. It is associated with great risk and great reward.

One of the manifestations of privilege is the opportunity to inhabit a fool’s paradise, to hold cherished beliefs about the world around you that other people feel compelled to make real. That is because the more privileged one is, the greater the reward people experience for confirming the things you need to be true and the greater the risk for challenging your beliefs.

Cherokee English professor Thomas King speaks of this when he writes of people’s accusatory distress at discovering that he is “not the Indian [they] had in mind.”

Fundamentally, the power of racism inheres in its accuracy. It allows people to make guesses about how people will behave and what will happen to them that are accurate more often than not. Even if we factor-out confirmation bias, racism works because the people who live at the top of racial systems live a fool’s paradise. As they move about, those around them stage performances of their race in order to minimize risk and achieve reward.

This way it helps man to get victory viagra cheap online over impotency. Medicines used to treat ED viagra cheap online actually have some proven benefits on treating hypertension related to lungs. I won’t even feed my dog free viagra no prescription something from China. You would not need to ask an anti-impotent drug like you at local discount cialis generic pharmacy. On the rare occasions people decide to entertain the idea that I am black, I am conscripted to into validating their predictions. Do I feel a connection to Africa? Do I have a sense of rhythm? Do I enjoy a Trinidadian curry and a slice of watermelon? Have I been in conflict with the law? Can I speak with a US inner city accent? Well, if not that how about a Southern one? A Jamaican one? No? Really? If I refuse to shore up the fool’s paradise of racism, the conversation soon moves to derision, confusion or frustration and my interlocutor soon concludes that I cannot be black. I can inhabit the fool’s paradise of race as a black person, only so long as I perform that blackness.

Perhaps I, a socialist intellectual, am trying to make the point that race is a social construction—further evidence that I am white because that is what racism predicts that white people will do.

Luckily for me, I can just shut up about who my ancestors were and I am no longer performing forced labour in a fool’s paradise. But people who are clearly on the black side of the colour line never get a rest. They have to find a kind of black person to be, a kind of person that their blackness predicts, an identity that maintains race as the powerful predictive tool that it is. If they won’t, they are some kind of asshole, someone who lacks grace and decency to pick one of the accepted black roles to perform. If they are so damned insistent on being a black intellectual, perhaps they could be Cornel West and use their PhD to say prophetic, mystical things to white America about their shared destiny, things that captivate yet are found insubstantial and trite under rigorous examination. Or, failing that, maybe they could be one of those angry, uppity black woman intellectuals nobody likes. Elevated by their spirituality or blinded by their uppity, misandrist anger: look! there are smart black people to be!

It tells us much that the international media have reached a consensus that the Spokane NAACP is an organization of such significance, such importance, such power that the composition of its current executive merits headlines, scrutiny and international attention. Whatever her motives, whatever her inner thoughts around which she structures community activism through a medium-sized private club in a third-tier American city, her existence cannot stand in the fool’s paradise of America.

While our new system of race nullifies the existence of people like me, people with black parents who refuse to perform our race for an audience, people who voluntarily choose to be black are beyond the pale. When people have tried to explain to me why this woman infuriates them, many of these self-identified progressives explain that it’s not “fair” that a person who has all the advantages of a white upbringing should then get all the “advantages” of being an adult black woman. These are the same people who, a week ago, knew that being a black female adult in today’s America is anything but advantageous. That is why such arguments soon descend into other intellectual positions that are equally bankrupt and absurd, like the assertion that race and ethnicity are clearly bounded, independent variables, or the claim that race is incomparable to gender because it, unlike gender performance, is enmeshed in the legacies of colonialism and empire.

People need to do something about Rachel Dolezal because she is fucking with their ideas of what race is, where it comes from, how you authenticate it and what guesses it lets you make about what is going to happen next. But most importantly, she is fucking with who gets to decide people are black. It as though she has got hold of one of the ends of the colour line and is dragging it towards white people against their will. And that sort of thing cannot stand in our great American fool’s paradise.

More on these last few thoughts in part three—and on the ownership of shoes in seventeenth-century Angola.

Race US Politics | fusangite | June 14, 2015

Race - 3. page