22 Comments
User's avatar
Poorch Finwich's avatar

Whenever I heard "That's not racist, there's no power differential. It's just prejudice and/or bigotry", I wondered when prejudice and bigotry became no harm, no foul.

Expand full comment
David Dennison's avatar

We could rename diarrhea ‘rainbow sprinkles’ but it would still be gross. Words are important but they aren’t literal magic.

Expand full comment
Filk's avatar

The incessant need to re-racialize everything and every interaction is and will forever be a terrible no good awful idea.

Expand full comment
Martin Blank's avatar

"Lets just move beyond this" to "Lets make everything about race but you need to agree 100% with all my radical views on it".

Expand full comment
C. L. H. Daniels's avatar

Yeah, a lot of us saw this coming a mile away. The massive effort to suppress white race consciousness in America and Western nationalism in Europe after World War 2 was an incredible success. One I’m pretty sure the left just arrogantly pissed away for the (temporary) joy of being able to completely dominate their political opponents for a time in the cultural arena.

But then yes, they woke up the Balrog (great reference by the way). They went too far, cried racist too many times, and in general made everyone so sick of them that now when someone says some actually racist stuff, even people who aren’t racist and don’t really approve of racism are half-inclined to cheer them on just to spite the sanctimonious twats who spent the last decade grinding their boots in our faces. Just to really piss in their Cheerios.

I know that’s kind of where I’m at. I approved of Vance’s line on Elez because of the message it sent: That all of the little would-be commissars who’ve tried to manipulate our standards of polite discourse in bad faith ways would no longer be allowed to do so. That the days of the left controlling what can be said and by whom are over. That they cannot cancel people for the crime of disagreeing with them anymore. And that if they try, it will backfire on them.

Expand full comment
David Dennison's avatar

The “cancel culture isn’t real” people are so weird to me. Trying to understand this political moment without understanding that piece of it is like trying to understand Game of Thrones after starting halfway through season 5.

Expand full comment
Martin Blank's avatar

I mean no one was literally murdered*! How can you say they were "cancelled?".

*Even this is probably not strictly true.

Expand full comment
Nina Bloch's avatar

The corollary of this was that there was literally no difference between being a virulent racist, and bland shit like not capitalizing Black or mentioning the movie “The Help”. Any of this meant you were a violent bigot, and you needed to grovel to get back in the good books. So suddenly actual racism didn’t seem so remote or unthinkable. After all, you had just committed a hate crime without even trying! So why not have some fun while you were being hanged

Expand full comment
David Dennison's avatar

That’s really it. If you make it a point to set the bar so low that everyone is clearing it, the bar doesn’t mean anything anymore. So the person clearing it by a mile doesn’t stand out as meaningfully different from the person who accidentally said ‘all lives matter’ once in 2014.

Expand full comment
Brenton Baker's avatar

Scott Alexander cites the example of the Chinese general who, realizing he was going to be late in arriving with his army, asked his advisor the punishment for tardiness.

"Death"

"And the punishment for rebellion?"

And so started a few hundred years of misery.

Expand full comment
Michelle Perez's avatar

Maybe I'm a little salty based on my ethnicity...and having a very brown skinned, spanish speaking father who grew up in Southern California in the 1930s, 40s..etc....(which was NOT fun..ask me about going across the border to visit family some time..or being pulled over in America in the 70s because my dad had brown skin)........Today's sour milk, which to be fair, actually hasn't aged yet..But, it tastes a bit sour to me, reads so much like..."me, the white guy, told you to play by rules the white guys set to achieve the uneasy peace........So...white men get to make the rules for the, well, the entirety of this country. Got it..but, they didn't just set the rules, Dave...they went out of their way to make sure anyone WHO wasn't a white man actually fucking suffered.....My own mother couldn't get birth control or a bank account without my father...So, lets circle back to this Southern California/Brown skinned racism......My father had more rights than my mother.......I really do understand what you are saying. Brian once tried to tell me and my queer child HOW we should behave to get the desired results. I cannot tell you how insufferable it is to hear..."look, white men are open to giving you what you want, but you need to behave a certain way"..... We didn't start this..THEY did...and it is THEIR continued irrational need to keep a death grip on our civil liberties that keeps us here......I really do understand what you are saying...but, maybe America can fix the gender pay gap before we tackle the HUGE MISTAKES the marginalized groups have made in their fight for equality and equity..... (sorry, I'm not a writer..you'll have forgive my horrible writing)...

Expand full comment
David Dennison's avatar

I expand a bit on this point in an upcoming piece (that you will fucking HATE by the way lol) but we tend to do politics on a kind of time delay. The conditions we're responding to are often much changed by the time we actually get around to responding to them. What you're saying about the recent past is absolutely true, so is what you're saying about who set the rules initially. But the rules have relaxed, and they've changed a lot. In 2015, when this rhetoric accelerated, and when racism came to mean something more specific than what we thought it meant, I do not really believe that the racial dynamics present then warranted such a strong shift. But that's beside the point anyway now, because the cat's out of the bag. Powerful, privileged people now feel they have license to lash out racially, and they think it's defense, not offense, that they're playing. That is really, really bad. There has never been anything more dangerous in this world than a powerful person who thinks they're a victim. That was true when social justice ideology dominated, and it's going to be true in an even worse way now that the backlash is here.

Expand full comment
Martin Blank's avatar

There is no gender pay gap.

Expand full comment
Michelle Perez's avatar

There is one significant difference here.... People of color who hate white people, do so, by and large, because of how they were and are treated by white people. White racists hate people of color because they are people of color.

Expand full comment
David Dennison's avatar

I think your first half is wrong. I think it was spot on a generation or two ago, but this just does not describe present conditions. People of color who hate white people, unless they're quite old people of color, hate them because of what they've been told white people *used to* do. Or because they've been told that systems built by white people, and that still benefit white people, are what's wrong with their lives. Like, sorry, but you and I are old as fuck. The young'uns taking over did not grow up in the 1960s. Nobody within 20 years of my age ever ordered anyone to the back of a bus or refused service at a lunch counter. Hating white people for that *today* is not more morally justifiable than white people hating black people just because. But again, even if I agreed with you, I would still think it was a bad idea to withdraw the taboo against racial shit-talking, since it was so obviously going to backfire.

Expand full comment
Michelle Perez's avatar

Interesting..I'll have to think on this a bit...I mean, you aren't totally wrong here. However, my 17 and 19 year old only need look about to see how groups of brown skinned people are, at this point, the ONLY ones being rounded up off the streets, or anywhere, for that matter...brown people are the ONLY ones being actively targeted by ICE at this point. Not to mention the continued legistlative attacks on transgender people. These are driven by the white, male, christian conservatives..and kids know this. People of color, the LGBTQTIA Plus community, women, indegenous peoples do not need to borrow from 20 years ago to be mad at white men...We only need to look around. I haven't seen a group of white skinned Eastern Europeans being flown to El Salvador. Before I go any further......let me just say...I agree, in part, with what you are saying, and said, in the original post. I will often yell into the void "OH GOD, PLEASE DON'T FUCKING SPEAK FOR ME". I also don't agree with any racial shit-talking..but, that certainly isn't the sum total of what "woke" is......I find so many things so cringeworthy I could just pack in my lib card and burn it...And yet, I may just be one of the those people who, damn the torpedos, I'm going in...and fuck that, they don't get to tell me how to fight this fight when they fucking started it. The saying, "they are lucky we only want equality and not revenge" comes to mind..... Love everything you write..I love being made to think.......

Expand full comment
David Dennison's avatar

The point I was trying for was: to be angry at *white men* over Trump (or whatever else) is to tacitly accept the premise that people can be considered guilty of a sin just because they look like the sinner. Which I think is not a premise you want accepted by people who think white men aren't the "real problem," and that some other group is. By this standard, all they need to do then is point to an infraction - any infraction - committed by a member of their target group, and they're justified in holding that group responsible for it. That's actually racist Twitter distilled to a single sentence. You may think your case is valid and theirs isn't - and you've offered a strong argument for that - but then the standard necessarily becomes a *double standard* Those are very tricky to defend. A lot of people call bullshit. Which is what I'm seeing tons of right now, and it's getting ugly.

Expand full comment
Martin Blank's avatar

A good post, though perhaps a bit overly long.

I especially liked

"Woke people are correct that post-racism is fundamentally dishonest, and replete with history-by-victor. They are wrong in thinking that that invalidates it, or makes it a naive ideal. It may be all we have to save us."

Expand full comment
Jake Gless's avatar

This is middleschool-level midwittery. Just admit you’re more comfortable with the redhats than you are with the pinkhairs, David.

Expand full comment
JosephJoffre's avatar

Thanks for proving his point.

Expand full comment
David Dennison's avatar

"Jake" is, actually, a bot.

Expand full comment
Jake Gless's avatar

Prove you’re not a bot. You’ve got no credibility.

Expand full comment