Your fellow citizen, the oppressor
Hey everyone! Last time I translated an article, it generated all sorts of interesting discussion. so I thought I'd do it again and I think I found an interesting one that gives plenty of good ground for discussion.
Your fellow citizen, the oppressor
A new ideology is spreading in Germany. It divides society artificially in hostile camps. This madness must be stopped.
An essay by Jochen Bittner
Published 2021-03-10, 16:54, edited 2021-03-11, 10:27, DIE ZEIT № 11/2021, 2021-03-11.
They are two seemingly completely divorced events, but they are part of one and the same questionable ideological trend, which is currently spreading at universities, editorials and party headquarters.
In the summer of 2018, a black student at the college of Massachusetts accuses a janitor of racist intimidation. The janitor had asked her, what she was doing there. “Everything I did, was being black.” Said the student. That was enough to question not just her existence at the college, but her entire existence. Outrage broke out at the elite women’s university (yearly fee 78,000 USD). The university president apologized profusely, accused the janitor of racism and suspended him. Only now, a few days ago, the New York Times continued the story: After an investigation by a law firm ended, their report concluded that the space the student was occupying had been reserved and closed off for an event. That is what the janitor was referring to. Signs of racist behaviour were not found.
The second event was a shitstorm centred around the pop radio station Bayern 3 [Bavaria 3] in the last week of February. A moderator known for his polemics had talked himself into a rage including insults about a South Korean boy group; in the end he equated said boy group with a virus, for which we would hopefully soon find a vaccine. In a couple of hours, a global quake of protests arose under the hashtag #BR3Racist, and it did not take long for Bayern 3 to publicly apologize with the words “If a statement is deemed inflammatory and racist by many people, then that statement is.”
300 years of enlightenment, and only the feelings of many angry people are enough to count as truth? So, we burned the witches in medieval times rightly?
Fact is, that what comes out in such events is the result of a powerful academic movement that has found entry in all humanities, social sciences including law. It is a kind of thinking, where categories like skin colour, gender and other bodily characteristics do not play a vanishing, but a very important role, with more weight placed into it every day. Not what someone says, but if they are an “old white man” or a “privileged cis-woman” – cis means shortened: not transsexual1 – says, is significant. And less the intent of the speaker is relevant than the impression of said words. That leads to a form of “Social Justice” where not individual circumstances are important, but alone the perspective of the real or fictive victim. If that sounds dangerous, then because it is.
The origin of this cultural step back is the combination of two models of explaining the world: the “Critical Theory” and “Intersectionality”. Both cannot be avoided in todays university seminars. Who wants to understand the swelling culture fight climate, which is also spreading in Germany, must learn to understand.
Looked at each in isolation, both models of Intersectionality and Critical Theory are useful. The term Intersectionality comes from the American law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. She found an important flaw in anti-discriminatory law in 1989. The car manufacturer General Motors had, in the 1970s, let go a wave of black women because they were part of the employees, who had only been hired recently. The women sued, without success. According to the court, the women were not discriminated as women, because there were still women in the offices of the company, who had not been let go. They had also not been discriminated as black people, because the company employed them in its factories. What the judges were not keeping in mind: black women only recently began to be hired in offices by GM – which was the reason why they were let go first.
The plaintiffs had been exposed to a special form of injustice, their characteristic as women and as black people. Crenshaw compared this to an intersection on which the women were standing and had subsequently been caught in two streams of discriminations at once.
Are injustices nothing else but products of structures?
The answer of classical liberalism to this question would be: Here there were two instances, where the universal right to equality of the individual were violated. It was racist that GM did not hire black women for so long. And it was sexist, that the women were only employed in offices. Every reasonable person must recognize this and want to remove these circumstances.
A different answer comes from Critical Theory, or better, the 21st century reprint of it. According to it, society is full of power structures, which are permanently connected to group characteristics like skin colour, gender and sexual orientation. Depending on which characteristics people fulfil, they belong into a “privileged” group or a “oppressed” group. Men oppress women. White people oppress black people. Heterosexuals oppress homosexuals. Cis people oppress trans people. Fully abled people oppress disabled people. If there are injustices between two such groups, they are nothing but the product of these structures. Herbert Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt school, claimed in the 1960s that because of these power inequalities people that supported these structures (according to Marcuse; the political right) should not be able to talk with the same tolerance as oppressed groups.
In the times of the student revolts postmodernism of the French philosopher Michel Foucault became more popular. Many of his followers understood it that way that there was no objective reality, but that the perception of truth depended on the particular position of power in society. Colonialism and relationship of the genders were examples how power influenced knowledge. Systems are still oppressive, even if the individuals are not aware of oppressive behaviour.
Again liberalism, optimistic to clarify would answer: Correct, as colonialism was based on the thought of superiority of white people against “inferior races”, and the discrimination of women results from the patriarchal misfire that different bodies should result in different social values. But haven’t the western, free societies on the last seven decades not detected theses chauvinisms and have made leaps forward? Racism remains a dangerous problem, but it is socially and juristically despised, women are by law made equal and are partially even supported by quotas. Gay people become heads of state and public officials, and the right to asylum grants oppressed people from the global south protection. Of course, there is more to be done, the liberal society is never finished, but the direction is right.
Sadly no, says Critical Theory in its newest reprint. Liberalism is not the solution, but part of the problem. It does not recognize the problems in the system, because it itself is an intellectual product of white men, therefore, a power structure. In her in the USA very successful book Critical Race Theory (2012) the lawyer couple Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic write, that liberalism does not offer the correct frame to solve problems of racism: “Different from traditional civil rights conversation, that (…) focus on step-by-step advancements, Critical Race Theory questions the fundaments of the liberal order itself, including the equality theory, the judicial arguments, the enlightened rationalism and the neutral principal of constitutional law.” You have to read that sentence aloud to yourself sometimes.
An in America also recognized author is Robin DiAngelo, who landed a New York Times bestseller with White Fragility – Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism in 2018. The book states that “Individualism” is an “Ideology” and white people had to, to reflect on omnipresent racism, always look at themselves as part of their race. DiAngelo also offers “Antiracism” trainings. In one of them for the employees of Coca-Cola, she demands to appear “less white” which also meant: “Be less oppressive, arrogant and ignorant.” Sounds racist? It is of course, except if one thinks such generalizations are legitimate to remove “White supremacy”.
Political Poison
Exactly here the political poison lies dormant, a concoction of Critical Theory and Intersectionality. It lets society appear as layers of opposing hostile groups – and every injustice is a consequence of those structures. That is the hot core of so-called identity politics. That is why it suddenly is a problem, if a white Dutch woman translates the book of the black US poet Amanda Gorman, even though when Gorman herself thinks that the translator is a good choice. That is why the peak officials of the SPD2 are “extremely ashamed”, when Wolfgang Thierse (a not that young white man) warns, that identity debates could lead to new trench warfare which destroys the public spirit.
Skin colour, age, gender, are the basis of the presumption of guilt – from too little sensibility to racism. The clou, with which this kind of thinking is made waterproof is the mentioned idea of white fragility. It says: If white people fight the accusation of being racist, they are simply denying the reality of racism – and thus keeping it alive.
These already dividing teachings are often directly applied from the USA to Germany, despite the historic, economic and institutional differences. They are taught in seminars, spread in books and shared in editorials. The Critical Race Theory, writes lawyer Cengiz Barskanmaz on the online platform Verfassungsblog [Constitutional blog], can be used to “propagate a racially aware perspective for the German law”. “The interest of law students in Critical Race Theory is definitely high, with rising tendencies.”
Black people can be missing the right racial awareness, mind you. The German-British sociologist Natasha A. Kelly said in a recent discussion round about a black man from Kiel, who called his restaurant “To the Mohr’s head”3 simply hadn’t been through his “political awareness process” yet. The name of the restaurant remains racist, independent of the viewpoint of the man who named it, because: “It is not an individual thing, that you or me can influence, it’s something in the structures.”
The structures. They are everywhere, and they are more powerful than the individual and their arguments. It is a to political theory heightened deeply pessimistic, even in parts paranoid, world view. Of course, racism exists, and it makes murderers out of people. After the NSU terrorism, the murders of Hanau and the success of the AfD4 at the voting booth it is only understandable that the fear of the (luckily growing louder) migrant community in Germany is increasing. But who thinks that crime and extremism arise from the “structures” of this country, even from and especially from their immediate surroundings, accuses and alienates their main ally in the fight against racism. Such a rough interpretation of the truth is wrong in the same ways as the right-wing populist projection, Islamist terror comes from the middle of the Muslim community.
Pauli Murray, a civil rights activist at the side of Martin Luther King, once wrote: “When my brothers draw a circle around me to exclude me, I’ll draw a larger one, to include them. When they talk about the privileges of a weakening group, I’ll talk about the rights of all people.” From this inclusive philosophy this new, dangerous teaching of hostility does not only step back – it draws ever-shrinking circles with thicker and thicker brushes and divides society into more and more groups, which are supposed to oppose each other with more and more hostility. It is time to realize this madness – and stop it.
Footnotes:
1 The term transsexual was used here verbatim. I think the term is outdated, but as I am not a professional translator, I was unsure if I should "update" it, as I think a translation should always be as close to the source as possible.
2 The SPD is the major center-left party in Germany. They have formed the government together with the center right party, the CDU/CSU for decades now, but are fairly unpopular right now.
3 The word Mohr is a German discriminatory term to refer to black people. I would not put it on the same "pedestal" as the n-word as it is missing the historical weight, but nevertheless it should not be used any more. It still remains in use under the population in some historic remnants like a classic dessert called Mohr im Hemd (Mohr in a shirt) which is a chocolate sponge cake in chocolate sauce served with vanilla ice cream.
4 The populist rightwing party of Germany. Have gotten enough votes due to the refugee crisis to enter some local state governments and the German federal, but no other party cooperates with them as they are very obviously racist, islamophobic and have in some cases, ties to actual neo nazis.
Original article: https://www.zeit.de/2021/11/identitaetspolitik-rassismus-soziale-gerechtigkeit-intersektionalitaet/komplettansicht (paywalled, and in German, if we have German people here who'd like to verify my translation, I can give you a copy).
That marks the end! I hope you liked it and I hope we can have a good discussion about it. I've spend some time translating this so I'll take a break, go shopping and come back to this a bit later to form my own opinion in a separate comment. Be kind to each other!
Pieces like this are very common American discourse right now, and I worry that my country’s cultural supremacy on the world stage is allowing for and encouraging their export. It’s very weird to see this translated from German and presumably focused on Germany, as the first example they use is from a US college (not a critique of you, @Grzmot — thanks for your translation efforts!). So many of the beats of the article are identical to stuff I’ve seen on right-wing American news sites, for example.
Articles like this find singular bad takes, attach them to larger concepts as a way of anchoring them in the negative, and then warn about the looming specter of those bad takes becoming normalized. It’s very effective and persuasive, but I don’t know how well it reflects reality at all, because I believe that It’s only able to do so by being fundamentally dishonest about the weight those bad takes should carry in the first place. The opening story, about the girl questioned for her location and which she interpreted as being about her race, is an example of a misreading of structural issues being applied at an individual level (which is something that genuinely does happen frequently), but the author pretty much uses this to imply that all instances involving that sort of thing are therefore also equally misaligned.
In the US, it isn’t uncommon for black people to be stopped or scrutinized during an everyday activity, just for being black. It’s hard to even convey how common it is because so many instances of it happen and are largely invisible to everyone except those they affect, which is why we have to take a structural look at it in the first place. If this is something that is omnipresent in our country (and it is), then its roots lie in something besides just individual judgment.
Articles like this don’t really account for the times where structural examinations of injustice get it right or are valuable, and those are way more common than the singular and often genuinely noteworthy ways in which they fail. They instead pick out those failing instances and then try to tear down the whole thing.
Black people have been telling us for a long time now that they are treated with unfair and undue suspicions in everyday circumstances, but articles like this try to give the rest of us ammunition to say that they’re overreacting or mistaken. It is true that in certain circumstances certain individuals are, but I think it’s very dishonest to imply that that’s the dominant way this issue manifests itself. There are far more people who are treated with a discriminatory suspicion that never make the news than there are those who were treated with appropriate suspicion and misidentified it.
I think we have a moral imperative to consider that, identify it, and understand how it plays out within our society, but articles like this encourage us to turn off our ears and our empathy and discard those problems as solved and their complainants as entitled. It is a lot more comforting to think that everyone is already equal and society is already doing right by minority groups, but that comfort is only enabled by a false sense of understanding.
The article frames white fragility as merely white people defending themselves from being racist, and that itself is either a misidentification of a racial issue or a dishonest characterization of the concept. The framework is much more than just that, and one of the ways white fragility is enabled is through articles like this. This type of writing allows white people to feel confident and reassured in their skepticism and distrust of minority voices. This is one of the building blocks of cultural supremacy.
I do think there are valid critiques to be made of the concepts and frameworks in this article. As someone with both feet firmly in those camps, I actually think critiquing the places they fail is vitally important, but I think doing that is hard because it can make it look like I’m supporting pieces like this one, which isn’t a critique but a wholesale dismissal of any of their value or efficacy in the first place.
But do consider that your country is exporting both: The original narrative of critical race theory, the counter narrative you can see above, but also all the stupid applications of both. I would argue that what gets exported is predominantly that which is newsworthy. And that is sadly all the stupid shit. So germans see mostly the stupid outgrowths of this fight, and on both sides. And when germans replicate that, I think it is quite often stupid shit. I don't mean to insult every german anti-racist activist as being merely a parrot of the narrative in the US, quite the contrary. I think the majority of german anti-[racism, ...] is sane and productive activism; but the parts that are copied from the US, those tend to be misapplied because our countries are quite different.
For example, BLM protests happened in germany. Fair enough, international support for BLM is important. But these were also intermingled with protests against german police. Fair, german police has problems, I get it. But don't combine the two: Don't apply the BLM narrative directly to german police because that's not how this works. German police kill very few people and I am not aware of a noticable racial bias there. At least change it up a bit so it's not obvious you copied your homework. Maybe that comparison is not completely fair because german police has a racism problem, but it illustrates the point: Activists abroad seem to mirror US activists, sometimes without too much reflection.
Yeah, this is honestly my biggest concern. America is, at this point, addicted to division, and I think we now produce and spew it far and wide. Being righteously angry can be addictive and vindicating, but it’s also something that’s very easy to get wrong, because it’s not a good place in which understanding is fostered. There is little listening or empathy that can occur from that place.
There are certainly times for righteous anger, but I think we’ve been encouraged for a long time to activate it for lower and lower thresholds and fly off the handle for even tiny things. I hate how it has manifested in my country, and I hate to think that we’re spreading it to others.
Thanks for your comment!
I agree with your points, which is why I said that I only agree with those points partially. But I think the point about this kind of discourse being particularily divisive holds true. Additionally, class is not something that people like to talk about, and this shows in the university harassment case. because the black student definitely outprivileges the janitor in this case, but everyone involved refused to acknowledge that.
That being said, I do see your argument about how often this happens vs. the more "classical racism" where black person is discriminated against, because it happens every day. I'm sorry I didn't know how to phrase that better I hope that makes sense.
At the end I feel like I've ended even harder in the center of this debate which probably feels like some enlightened centrism to everyone else, because I just feel like bOtH sIdEs have good arguments. :(
I agree that people don't take class into account as much as they should, but I find it weird that the article attacked intersectionality when that's the exact type of thinking that could help explain how race and class compound on each other.
There was a recent thread about a different article which made similar points. I won't repeat everything I wrote in replies there.
I'll just add a couple of thoughts... Foremost, I believe systemic bigotry and intolerance are real and acute problems that need to be solved even if the solutions are, for a while, extreme or unbalanced.
That being said, I think it's so important that we don't lose the nuance. We're going to keep seeing the kinds of viewpoints expressed in this article and they're going to resonate with a lot of people.
It's a mistake to dismiss them. Even if we disagree, we can still learn from them. Social progress is a dynamic process and there are no absolute sides. We should resist the urge to draw the sorts of lines that create an us versus them narrative. That's what got us here in the first place!
It's tempting to cast ourselves as righteous, humans love that shit. It's also a direct path to becoming the enemy.
How do we steer society down an extreme and unbalanced path, albeit with good intentions, and then right the course afterwards?
I think we should focus on steering at the moment, figure out how to handle the results later :)
I like that your comment calls forth the larger picture. It's a remarkable period in history to be living through.
I agree. Every further incident of outrage that can be portrayed as "anti-[racist, ..] gone too far" is a problem, as long as the counter-narrative is not strong enough. If racists want to complain about an incident, they have to look racist doing it. If anti-racist activism produces an incident where a clearly-not-racist event is taken so far out of context that the person doing the thing is cancelled in leftist circles, or that there is media outcry over a big old nothing-burger; All of that is driving forward racist agendas in the minds of not-so-racist-but-conservative people. Because it is all to easy to look at incidents like some mentioned above and concoct a narrative that paints the "so-called-privileved" as oppressed by anti-racists.
In short: Irrational, unjustified anti-racist activism drives anti-anti-racist activism and therefore racist activism. I think this might be what Thierse (briefly mentioned in the article) was referring to when he said "The indispensable respect for diversity and otherness is not everything. Rather, it must be embedded in the recognition of rules and obligations, incidentally also in the acceptance of majority decisions."
I agree with this in part and am definitely someone who believes in the value of critiquing leftist movements from within, but I also think that, even if those movements act with actual perfection and no overreach, it won’t matter that much. In the absence of actual overreach, people will just fabricate their own examples of it and point to those anyway as justification for their beliefs.
This is already unbelievably common, both at interpersonal and national levels. Look at what’s happening with Dr. Seuss right now in America, for example. Many of the times we see accusations of something like “cancel culture has gone too far” it’s wound care in response to a punch that was never actually thrown.
Part of the lie of anti-antiracist leanings in general is that they’re rooted in a rationality that they purport is lacking on the left. They point to senselessness and then appeal to common sense, but it’s very frequent that the senselessness they’ve identified is completely divorced from what actually happened. The position is bolstered either by outright fabrication or, even when rooted in truth, an incredibly strategic cherry picking of data points that willfully ignores the forest of cherry trees right in front of them.
TW: Transphobia-ish. Maybe. Not sure. You have been warned.
Good point. But I still think there's a segment of the population that is accessible to both sides: People who have had e.g. very little experience with trans people, who hold no animosity towards them, but who are not allies either. If we continue on the path we have for decades - slow shift towards inclusiveness and anti-discrimination - these people will be on board. Why? Because it worked/is working for e.g racism and homophobia. Get them used to new concepts, new kinds of people, new ways of living your life at a pace that they can manage.
[I count myself to this group partly. 6-7 years ago, my knowledge about trans people would be summarized with "ladies with dick". I have learned a lot since, of course, to the point where e.g. I accept ContraPoints without even questioning it. But I'll probably take a while before I reach that point of indifference with Abigail Thorne. I'm confident I will get there, but this is the first time someone transitions "before my eyes". PhilosophyTube is still a dude to me, for now, in some ways. Had you presented me with this 6-7 years ago, I might have had a different reaction.]
At the same time, this gradual process is vulnerable to two things: Going too fast and expecting them to follow along; and misinformation from the right. And I agree that misinformation will happen whether we give them ammo or not, but at least we can have a strong counter-narrative ready if it is completely fabricated.
I'm someone who has very much benefitted from the "slow shift" away from homophobia, so I definitely think that there is value in that approach, but I think one of the things that gets missed from a wider perspective is the immediacy of how oppression is felt. When someone is experiencing discrimination or hatred or any other viscerally negative force in their life, the promise of a potentially better future somewhere down the line doesn't really resolve the immediate need. It's like being acutely hungry and learning that, months from now, you'll have a ready supply of food. That's undoubtedly a good thing, but it doesn't resolve the feeling of being hungry right now. I think when a lot of people speak in support of cultural change, they're speaking from that right now.
Furthermore, while I fully acknowledge that cultural change does take time, I also think that petitions against "moving too fast" are often a way of just stalling or shutting down progress. Black people in America have been told, across multiple generations, that their liberation and equality is right around the corner. We've undoubtedly made progress on that front, but we are still so far from where we need to be. I think the people advocating for rapid change are doing so with the impression of leading with where we should be and forcing others to catch up, rather than proceeding at the slowest pace, dictated by those who dig in their heels and refuse to move in the first place.
I think we see this with trans liberation, as you brought up. Knowing someone who transitions can genuinely require a mental process of changing over who you knew the person to be into who they are now. I've experienced it myself, but I think there's a big difference between someone who wants to do well at this versus someone who doesn't even make an attempt. "I need a bit of time to get used to this new information" is very different from "I refuse to acknowledge or accommodate your identity". Only you can answer how you genuinely feel about Abigail, but I encourage you to be someone who makes the effort -- for her sake and for yours.
The position of refusal is one that highlights the callousness, selfishness and even at times spite embedded in a lot of anti-minority standpoints, and I think a lot of effort is made to activate that and have it feel justified. The counternarrative is empathy -- of listening to and feeling the pain of affected people and wanting relief for them, even if it doesn't materially impact you yourself. Unfortunately, there are limits on empathy, and people naturally tend to prioritize their own feelings over others. We can counteract this deliberately, or we can dive into it feet first, and I think "overreach" stories encourage us to do the latter. They validate people's focus inward, on themselves, rather than outward, on others. A lot of conservative rhetoric is about creating grievance and then weaponizing it. We see this on the left too, but I don't think the two are directly comparable in opposition because the legitimacy of grievance generated by racism is far greater than the legitimacy of grievance created by antiracism, for example.
I know that my posts here have seemed pretty "one-sided" so far, and one of the things I don't like about this larger conversation in general is that it seems to be aimed at dividing people into teams and lumping discourse into camps, complete with tons of baggage. I am someone who genuinely believes that there are very legitimate problems with "cancel culture", but I feel like we can't identify those because the issue itself is partitioned into camps rather than being seen for what it actually is. I also think there are genuine instances of leftist overreach, and I myself have issues with a lot of abusive rhetoric hiding under the specter of social justice (I actually go into this a bit in the previous translated article (with follow-up)) in case you're interested in reading more about where I stand). These are hard to talk about though because it's hard to cut through the divisive partisanship and bad faith that pervade these discussions.
I've also shifted my thinking over time, as I used to be very focused about critiquing the behavior of those I agreed with and supported in places I felt they were wrong, but I think doing so takes away from more effective condemnations of people doing greater wrongs. I feel that antiracist overreach, even in places where it legitimately exists, is doing far less damage than ongoing racism, for example, so when I weigh those two in the mind I'm much more willing to permit the former than the latter, and I feel that directly addressing the latter is a better use of my time and energy. This is, I think, the root of the distortion that these kinds of stories get at. People who genuinely believe that antiracism is the greater harm than racism, for example, are looking at society through a distorted lens, and they have had to ignore a lot of legitimate harm in order to arrive at that viewpoint.
Let me add here real quick that if we combine the Bayern3 incident and the issues from the previous article you mentioned, we get a bit of a fucked up mess. "Hating all men isn't bad because if you listened to the author, you'd know it isn't actually a blanket statement. Listen to the author, they're the authority". But also: "The words of that host were racist because I felt othered by them. Doesn't matter what the author meant, the effects are what matter."
These two methods of interpretation are so fundamentally at odds, they couldn't be farther from one another. The unifying feature, perhaps, maybe, possibly, could be that they're both "punching up". Or: the person with the lowest privilege gets to decide the truth. I'm enough of an anti-authoritarian to appreciate the beauty in that, but I don't like it as a way of assessing guilt or truth.
Realistically, it's people making and using the rules however they see fit. But maybe that's important too: Other people will make the rules to suit them, so maybe don't let them. Of course, don't dictate the rules yourself, but try to pick a ruleset that addresses every situation fairly and then stick to it.
Whoops. I realized I actually mislinked my comment for that thread. What I linked you to was a further follow-up downthread, but my original comment was here. I very much disagree with the idea that "hating all men isn't bad".
Oh, I never got that impression. I read around a bit in that thread, and I was invoking the topic in general.
Oh, I will. I have only this week learned of her transition, and while accepting her new identity when it's presented to me comes easy, I think I'll take a few weeks to let it sink in before I catch up on the videos I seem to have missed. Mostly because I can't seem to divorce Ollie from Philosophy Tube, and I don't even really equate Abigail and Ollie?
I have little to add to most of your post, because I think you summed up the issue well. I'll take those links to your comments and read them sometime.
What I can say is this: I believe that there's a period of time where you ought to be permissive after a transition. E.g. gays existing publicly, on a societal level. People will have to adapt, and most of them did. After that period of time is over, I think it's fair game to push back, progressively harder so, against anyone who still digs in their heels, particularly because the promise of "soonTM" will ring hollow in the age of BLM, when MLK was 50 years ago. What that window is? I dunno. But in the case of Thierse I outlined somewhere here, some compassion with "old habits die hard" is warranted.
On the topic of cancel culture, I've found myself on the receiving end of animosity over things such as (a) trying to understand some viewpoints* - ostensibly for not already being on board and (b) objecting to the use of anti-majority "slurs" - not sure if slurs is the right word, but imagine objecting to the use of the word "cracker" regarding white people - I found that to be quite an uncontroversial stance, but apparently, because there's no adverse power dynamic, it's all fair game and not racist at all. I mean, depending on your definition of racism, but that doesn't mean you're not being a dick.
*don't remember what viewpoint this was about. I remember how I felt though. Fuck that.
Definitely. I said earlier that we need to root ourselves in empathy, and that absolutely extends to giving people time and not pouncing on them should they make mistakes in the process. I think this is one of the things that often gets lost on the internet, as in real life I feel like people are a lot more accommodating and understanding, but online platforms tends to amplify the loudest and most aggressive voices.
Agreed. I'm very much against slurs and personal attacks no matter the target. I've also complained about the use of "Karen" multiple times here before, for example (I won't toss another link your way as I've already inundated you enough!). I think that this is something that often does get taken "too far", and there's a lot of internet bullying that hides behind a veneer of justice.
Alright, I'll get the ball rolling before all the Americans wake up :)
So on the topic of the essay, I sort of agree with the author in some parts, but I also think it's a very delicate issue to navigate. Especially the story that happened on the university campus, it feels like the student overreacted, but I can understand why. The fact that she then went on to publicly shame everyone involved on Facebook which lead to continued harassment and death threats does not make it ok anymore. That everyone just went along with the fact and assumed the student being the wronged party as things went on makes it even worse.
The problem with the essay is that it steers to far in the everything is an individual problem direction, because structures in society that systematically oppress people are definitely a thing. The fact that people then get paid to point out these problems complicates things further. The discussion round where it was said that the man owning the restaurant in Kiel is still racist, got paid for saying that, and she probably was placed on that panel specifically because of her opinion. I do not want to accuse her of making money out of this, but if a person's livelihood is based on the continued crying out of supposed injustices, where do we draw the line? I don't think that a black man using an insult against his own race is doing a bad thing and I think it can be compared to black people reclaiming the n-word if they want to.
At the same time, I think the essay touches really well on how doing things this way poisons the discussion around delicate and how it blocks systematic changes.
From a translation perspective, I'd be curious how right I got the quotes from the books, because they were originally written in English, translated to German and then back to English by me. I'd be interesting to see how much the meaning changed.
Just to call out BS when I think it is important:
Yeah, that was not it. He was critizesed, in part, for using the term identity politics, in part for calling out some aspects of identity politics as too radical, and for e.g. saying that a college prof having to ask his student's pronouns is a step too far. Part of the subsequenet outrage is also about how the SPD leadership dealt with this, but also about the fact that Thierse was accused of using new-right language - an accusation that I just can't find to be made in good faith. The criticisms don't seem to want to commit to deal with either Thierse as a person or his arguments; rather, the fact that he used the wrong words seems to be enough to discredit both.
The bayern3 incident is different, but same. The radio host ranted about a korean boyband, not because they're korean, but because they're a boyband, as far as I can tell. He used the fact they're korean against them in a clearly satirical and artificial rant. He was not actually that angry, he was clearly playing an act. And I get a part of the criticism: He compared them to a recent virus. I think that was not made maliciously, rather it was made because there's a certain virus going round, and the popularity of said boyband is spreading like one. But this was (rightfully) criticized as potentially encouraging racism against asians. OK, stupid choice of words, apologize, correct, push the counter narrative, move on. Would've been easy. But before that could've happened, a literal ARMY as they call themselves, and similarly militant they are, of said boyband's followers was so outraged that productive discussion was no longer possible. I to this day do not know how koreans felt about said rant; I only know how fans of the band felt. The subsequent shitstorm was quite something to behold, and it was not at all rational or productive. The man is not a racist, in fact he seems to be an antiracist activist. His rant was clearly not meant as a vilification against koreans or asians, and while it required correction, a productive discussion, it seems, was completely impossible.
The takeaway from these two incidents for me seems to be that it is neither your person nor your argument that is the target of criticisms, but the delivery - and that is then used to discredit both you and your argument. And that is driving a giant and needless divide in the left.
Thank you! It is refreshing to read a different way of writing.
One suggestion: it would be easier for me to read if the nested phrases were marked with parentheses or dashes instead of commas. Like so:
Thanks! German can sometimes be rambly and have lots of nested sentences and it is difficult to decide if you want to mirror the original structure more or change the words more to shorten the sentences.
My recommendation is to prioritize the intelligibility of the ideas rather than reproduce phrase structure. Let the text gain life in the music of the destination language.
Quick addition while we're on the topic of your translation and added context: I would add that Mohrenkopf is a term for a few desserts like this. As in "Mohrenkopf" specifically is a term for food, albeit a deprecated one, due to the racist connotations.
Also, props to the guy for opening a restaurant by that name. Way to tap into controversy to further your business.
Just me or are these kind of sentences soo much easier to keep track of in your head in german? Must be the additional structure given by conjugated verbs, I think. Makes it easier to resolve references and remember which word points where.
Thank you for translating!
This article does a good job of identifying the ideas it's arguing against, but then lazily refutes them by going "this idea is ridiculous to me and therefore wrong". Some examples:
But why would a statement not be racist and inflammatory if it is considered to be by many people?
Aside from the addition of "alone" and "fictive" to victim, this is essentially a description of restorative justice, where we first and foremost seek to address the harm done before diving into individual motivations. In what way is this dangerous? The author does not explain.
Here the author asks "haven't we basically solved racism?", describes why critical race theory says "no, we have not", and proceeds to dismiss it out of hand without bothering to explain why they think critical race theory's conclusion is incorrect.
Well... Yes? How is this incorrect?
Again, the author accurately describes why structures are important, but then dismisses it by saying "lol, who actually thinks this?". I mean, if I answered that yes, crime actually arises directly from a person's immediate surroundings (one might even say their material circumstances), doesn't this argument fall apart? How does this explain why that analysis of society is incorrect?
Once more, the author describes the apparent problem (though I do not think their addition of "supposed to oppose each other" is accurate) and simply calls it madness.
This article feels like it was written for an audience who already agrees with the author and are looking for validation of their views. To someone who holds a systemic view of society and the world, it's not remotely convincing.
I can't help but think that yours is a bit of a superficial reading at times. In some other parts I can offer context that germans might have.
Because these people were neither the ethnic group in question, nor reasonably objective. This was a shitstorm by fans of a boyband. I have written more on this here. Nevermind that by accepting that "If a statement is deemed inflammatory and racist by many people, then that statement is.”, we are completely surrendering the right to interpret our words to the people who yell the loudest. If I find 1000 useful idiots who agree that a random sentence picked from your post is racist, that doesn't make it racist. This is what the author is saying, I think. Of course, if enough people independently take offense to a statement, we should probably take a close look, but that is not always the case and was not the case here.
It is dangerous because just because I believed I was harmed, does not mean I was harmed. Simple as that. We need some kind of objective-ish metric for that.
A black guy opens a restaurant with a name that is a pun about food and makes a reference to the guy's ethnicity. It is specificly directed at him, by him. I fail to see how that even can be racist. Surely you don't think that it is impossible to be "politically aware" and make such a joke?
Maybe I'm missing a crucial bit of detail here, but to me your response here doesn't fit. What exactly do you consider structures?(Genuinely interested, not a rhetorical question) What does the author consider structures? What do the people he responds to consider to be structures? I fear this might be the crux of the matter. Because:
this might be where the author took his definition of structures from. And me too, from reading his piece. I don't know about you, but I think this is launching a bit too broad an attack. If we blame this mess on our constitution, rationalism and the rule of law, because those were created by white people and are therefore racist, then I'm out. If on the other hand you and the people the author responds to take issue with e.g. more tangible issues related to these, e.g. the demographic distribution of judges or DAs, sure I'm with you. But in this case this entire clusterfuck seems to be more misunderstanding than fundamental disagreement.
Thanks for the reply and additional context. I'm going to avoid going through each of your points individually since I feel that will end up as a back-and-forth wall of text that will be irritating to read and not very productive.
No, I think it is fundamental disagreement. When I think of structures, I usually relate it back to my understanding of systems taken from Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows:
A state, a constitution, the rule of law -- these are all systems created and designed by people for a particular purpose based on how those people understand the world and think is important to prioritize. I think that a system developed by someone who thinks a certain way (for example, a white European man who thinks that other races are inferior) is likely to continue to reflect those worldviews and priorities.
It's from this understanding that
seems totally unobjectionable to me, as these systems were created by people who were, among other things, deeply racist. It's simply questioning the structures and systems that surround us. Why should we expect them to have shed that original way of thinking? How, if those systems still contain that way of thinking, can we expect them to be able to remove it from themselves?
Hmmm. So I understand that the systems aren't definitely or inherently racist (both of which just on the basis that they were a product of racist times seems a bit much) but rather that they could be, hence the questioning.
So, how is it that e.g. the rule of law can even be questioned? I'll just look briefly at it's core principles, see that those sound about right, and can easily say that the principle is sound. That's what I think the author takes offense at: Why would you question fundamental and simple ideas, that are easily examined to be sound? Or rather, if they are not sound, at least say what it is that you find objectionable.
I find that definition of "system" to be unproductively vague. Maybe that book fills it with more context though. However, in discussions like the one in OP, I think the term "structure" is indeed a bit overused, in the sense that it seems more like a cop-out than an actual explanation. "Oh, it's the structures", kind of like buzzwordy tech companies say they use "algorithms". (Well, duh, I didn't think you'd run your computers on magic and wishful thinking.)
Why do we question anything? How can you make the conclusion that the principles of the rule of law are sound by looking at it briefly? I think that it is when we question our most fundamental assumptions that the greatest progress and discoveries are made.
Also, I think the proponents of critical race theory and intersectionality have been quite clear about what they find objectionable: that racism is still widespread and that harm is ongoing. It seems like the author thinks otherwise. I thought @kfwyre did a good job of explaining the problems with that in their comment here.
It's a broad definition because systems are a broad concept. From the book I cited earlier:
I highly recommend this book. It's written well, uses memorable examples, and is very easy to read. Here's a link: https://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf
I'm glad you brought up "algorithms", because those are a fantastic example of elements of complex systems where the biases, assumptions, and worldview of the people who develop them become inherent to the resulting system in ways that cause harm.
Think about machine learning, where the choice to train a facial recognition model on a dataset of mostly white people leads to inaccuracies and false positives for non-white people when police start using it to identify suspects. Or think about social media platforms, where the algorithms that determine what posts or articles you see use engagement as a primary metric, resulting in only the most inflammatory or low effort content being shown.
What if engagement is not actually a good metric to base those algorithms on? Isn't that what brings most of us here to Tildes?
What if "the rule of law" is not actually a good basis for how we run society?
And this is the part where you lost me again. I don't think the author thinks otherwise. We can't know because he doesn't say. Wait, actually, we can. I know, I'm cheating because I know the language. ;) ("Racism is a problem. But to fight it, one should take care not to leap to unjust generalizations.")
And I don't see how this is related to foundational concepts such as rule of law, rationalism, etc., except where these systems are implemented in flawed ways. In which case, fix the implementation. To equate a concept with its implementation is about as valid as claiming that communism can't exist because all attempts ended in disaster. Let me rephrase the point I've been trying to make: If a concept such as the rule of law is fundamentally flawed, then that's important news, so everyone will want to hear it. The concept in and of itself is sufficiently simple that this shouldn't be such a complex discussion that veiling this in abstractions is necessary. Or: We're talking about the implementation. In which case it gets a lot more interesting, because while it is readily apparent that implementations might be flawed, addressing these flaws is not simple at all, and we're possibly dealing with flaws in a lot of different places. Here is where abstractions might become useful, i.e. it is imo legitimate to think about systems/structures. But Bittner doesn't to talk about this. He makes it clear that people are questioning the fundamentals, but then doesn't talk about concrete alternative proposals. Either he's being coy, or the authors of Critical Race Theory are being coy when they "question the fundaments of the liberal order itself" without making concrete suggestions.
Ahh, I dunno. Maybe I'm not deep enough into these matters to think in sufficient abstractions. But this whole talk of structures seems quite hollow to me. Maybe part of the problem is also that I can only use the context Bittner puts in. In other news, twitter is a shit show.
In any case, thanks for the pdf. I'll see if I can find the time to take a look.
I should clarify that point! I'm referring to the following paragraph, specifically the bolded line:
I would argue that it is not true at all that racism is socially and juristically (I have to assume this means something like judicially or legally - maybe you can clarify that translation?) despised. I get the impression this is from a European context, so I'll use that. Look at anti-burqa laws, most recently in the news in Switzerland. Or widespread racism against Romani peoples. Or the treatment of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean. Or the rise of far-right parties all across Europe. The author makes the claim that the direction of liberalism is "right", while the theory he is arguing against claims the direction is wrong. That is what I meant by "thinks otherwise".
Well, that's my point, that those foundational concepts are not necessarily without flaws themselves by virtue of being foundational concepts. They should be regularly examined to see if they still make sense; if the current implementations have exposed weaknesses in the concept. That is what critical race theory is doing when it questions the fundamental concepts of liberalism.
To use rule of law as an example: American police frequently murder unarmed civilians for breaking minor laws. I often see people say that rule of law means that the deaths of those civilians is justified -- they should not have broken the law, because nobody is above the law. But is that actually just? Does any law carry the death penalty if you break it? What if it was a racist or otherwise unjust law? Does resisting a police officer forfeit your right to things like a trial? What happens if a police officer breaks the law? They should be held to the same standard as civilians, but in practice, are they?
That's what I was complaining about in my original comment -- I can only guess at what his actual argument is for why critical race theory is incorrect, because he does not provide it in the article.