Living in the US, and being largely ignorant of national news outside my own country, I'm cringing to think what will happen when all our current unhelpful racial nonsense spills over onto other countries with in-recent-memory systemic racism. This piece made me reflect on the toxic tide we are sending out yet again.
I can't help it. When confronted with the sheer stupidity of these poses, I, as the young people say, "just can't." I dunno about white supremacy, seems like that is, more and more, a label imposed from the outside (by people who DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE WHITE), but I certainly feel I can think better than that.
I don't think that makes me supreme or anything, but as noted above, that's now out of my hands.
If a piece of poetry isn't able to be understood as containing universal truths, then in my humble opinion, it's bad poetry. The power of poetry is to take someone's individual experience - something no one else could have experienced because it is owned by the author - and make it understandable to an audience, whether they have a lot in common with the poet, or not. I keep thinking of the evidence Steven Pinker hammers away at in Better Angels of Our Nature, regarding the power that fiction had over reducing violence, as it allows readers to place themselves in the minds of people not like themselves, and thereby increasing their empathy for others. If we're going to start saying that only people from the same "group" as a writer are allowed to interpret those works, we're really missing the point of art.
"Daniel Kaluuya, as a British rather than American black man, was incapable of accurately portraying how a black man actually feels when encountering a police car."
HE IS AN ACTOR FOR PETE'S SAKE. The whole point of acting is to render a simulacrum of experiences you may never have had yourself. Crap on a crutch, you don't have to have died to do a death scene, either.
The whole idea that a person so "different" from another can never understand that other renders all attempts to communicate pointless. If I can never understand Gorman's poetry, then what the hell is the point of her telling it to me then? Words are bridges, not truncheons. And I resent and reject the idea that I am not allowed to find her words inspiring and insightful but must only listen as an act of penitence.
I will continue to find her poetry inspiring and insightful, and I will continue to read bell hooks and find her stuff brilliant, incisive, and relatable, and anyone who dislikes me for that can go pound sand.
This is horrible white supremacy being awful. I'm a white amputee and her words fed my soul. What a mature, thoughtful wordsmith she is. I offer that she only be translated by reasoned, thoughtful people, of whatever color, nationality, etc. We dwell in the NEO CORTEX WHERE GOD, OUR MAKER DWELLS. Reactionaries dwell in the Medulla Oblongata, lizard brain and could only comprehend her through their lens of sexuality and money. That is their sum and substance. They fail to think and react. Just listen for words they love to repeat that resemble "trouble". That is the lizard gurgling and romancing consumption and extending the species. They crave satisfaction guaranteed. I hope this helps explain the communication breakdown when we talk values and principals and lizards just want to gurgle before, during and after gathering money and having sex.
John, a few other substacks I read have compared The Elect to the intellectual maladies described in the book The Captive Mind. This seems like possible fertile material for you. It would be nice if we could find a well documented comparable historical precedent for what we're going through.
The Bible was written mostly in Hebrew and Greek. Its translation into English (King James Bible) has likely done more to create and build "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" than anything with the exception of Shakespeare's work - something even an atheist like me appreciates.
I just read this book: "American Awakening," by Joshua Mitchell, which I highly recommend to all. It's about the religious underpinnings of identity politics (at least in part) and also gets into how the Alt-Right is in many ways the opposite side of the same coin. To vastly abbreviate and oversimplify a small part of his argument, both have a mythology of transgressors and innocents, they're just reversed. Identity Politics scapegoats the white, heterosexual male; the Alt-right scapegoats immigrants, blacks, and Jews. Note, this is but a small part of the overall book. The larger point is, in part, that this creation of transgressors and innocents creates moral debts that can never be paid -- this is a religion with only condemnation and no concept of forgiveness. Mitchell argues that when the white, heterosexual male has been purged, another scapegoat will be needed, most likely the white, heterosexual female. And after her, the black heterosexual male. And so on until the last people left will be those with enough "moral" power to punish the other remnant.
But my synopsis is so paltry. I urge you to go to Amazon and see for yourself. For a nuts-and-bolts understanding of how we got here, "Cynical Theories" is excellent, but for a larger take on the societal and religious underpinnings of what "here" means, "American Awakenings" is extremely valuable. (I don't know the author and have no relation whatsoever to the book beyond having read it.)
" ... another scapegoat will be needed, most likely the white, heterosexual female." Oh, we're already there. We're all "Karens" now -- middle-aged white women who speak up and draw attention to ourselves for any reason at all. Don't wear a mask in a store? You're a Kanre. Request no matter how politely that someone else put a mask on? Karen. Express a feminist opinion? Stupid Karen. Express an anti-feminist one? Shut up, Karen.
But I think they'll go for Latinos next, since it's not really a "race" anyway. Or Asians, since the effort to shame them into joining the victimization club is only partially successful.
The next logical act in this theater of the absurd would be to assert that interlocutors of differing races and ethnicities are simply incapable of communicating. White waiter to black customer: "With regret, as a white person I could never presume to understand your present culinary whim. Let me locate a black waiter. That is, excusing my potentially errant presumption that dining is your intent, which I only inferred from my dominant culture's interpretation of your posture at a table whilst examining a menu."
If a White translator cannot comprehend the poem well enough to translate it, then we can suppose that Gorman's poem was intended for a Black audience. It will be a perfect union once entirely Black, we can suppose. As is being made clear vis-a-vis twitter and the like, "white supremacy is a virus" and must be eradicated. In other words, in Joe Biden's America, the plan is to vanquish the white race so that the Black race can flourish. That is the ugliness that underpins this disturbing ideology.
On the other hand, Black actors can play historical European roles in TV series such as Bridgerton, and fully comprehend what it means to be an early 19th-century aristocrat. This must be a sign of their inherent superiority to the poor, dumb, White race, which cannot, due to some inherited deficiency, put themselves in someone else's place.
Now, now. It's only ugly if you're honest. Proper indoctrination will help with that. Isn't that how we find the Truth? By being told which things can be allowed to be True?
So if only a black woman can translate a black woman’s work, due to their common “lived experience” then it follows that only black students can learn from black teachers (separate black schools to follow), and only black artists can be appreciated by black viewers (thus we need separate museums, with black curators, open only to blacks), and so on and so forth. The KKK must be loving this.
We always try to find a logic in this, which can explain the deep twists of the ideology. But the explanation is much more simple. The people who bully a non-black translator are simply the people who hold the power. And they hold the power by the very effective claim not to hold the power but to be victims of white supremacy instead.
There is no logic behind this and people in power are not obliged to accept the consequences, only people who are submitted to this power are.
With regards to the KKK comment, I have been thinking the same thing. As McWhorter and others have before asserted that the anti-racism movement has in ways hurt black people, I can't help but wonder if white-supremacist are seeing the anti-racism movement described by the likes of Kendi, etc as a positive. We are in strange territory.
Living in the US, and being largely ignorant of national news outside my own country, I'm cringing to think what will happen when all our current unhelpful racial nonsense spills over onto other countries with in-recent-memory systemic racism. This piece made me reflect on the toxic tide we are sending out yet again.
I can't help it. When confronted with the sheer stupidity of these poses, I, as the young people say, "just can't." I dunno about white supremacy, seems like that is, more and more, a label imposed from the outside (by people who DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE WHITE), but I certainly feel I can think better than that.
I don't think that makes me supreme or anything, but as noted above, that's now out of my hands.
If a piece of poetry isn't able to be understood as containing universal truths, then in my humble opinion, it's bad poetry. The power of poetry is to take someone's individual experience - something no one else could have experienced because it is owned by the author - and make it understandable to an audience, whether they have a lot in common with the poet, or not. I keep thinking of the evidence Steven Pinker hammers away at in Better Angels of Our Nature, regarding the power that fiction had over reducing violence, as it allows readers to place themselves in the minds of people not like themselves, and thereby increasing their empathy for others. If we're going to start saying that only people from the same "group" as a writer are allowed to interpret those works, we're really missing the point of art.
"Daniel Kaluuya, as a British rather than American black man, was incapable of accurately portraying how a black man actually feels when encountering a police car."
HE IS AN ACTOR FOR PETE'S SAKE. The whole point of acting is to render a simulacrum of experiences you may never have had yourself. Crap on a crutch, you don't have to have died to do a death scene, either.
The whole idea that a person so "different" from another can never understand that other renders all attempts to communicate pointless. If I can never understand Gorman's poetry, then what the hell is the point of her telling it to me then? Words are bridges, not truncheons. And I resent and reject the idea that I am not allowed to find her words inspiring and insightful but must only listen as an act of penitence.
I will continue to find her poetry inspiring and insightful, and I will continue to read bell hooks and find her stuff brilliant, incisive, and relatable, and anyone who dislikes me for that can go pound sand.
This is horrible white supremacy being awful. I'm a white amputee and her words fed my soul. What a mature, thoughtful wordsmith she is. I offer that she only be translated by reasoned, thoughtful people, of whatever color, nationality, etc. We dwell in the NEO CORTEX WHERE GOD, OUR MAKER DWELLS. Reactionaries dwell in the Medulla Oblongata, lizard brain and could only comprehend her through their lens of sexuality and money. That is their sum and substance. They fail to think and react. Just listen for words they love to repeat that resemble "trouble". That is the lizard gurgling and romancing consumption and extending the species. They crave satisfaction guaranteed. I hope this helps explain the communication breakdown when we talk values and principals and lizards just want to gurgle before, during and after gathering money and having sex.
When I think of her, it's her age more than her skin color.
Does this mean I have to stop listening to Miles Davis?
No more Mary Lou Williams, either. And don't go near Nina Simone.
And Charlie Parker, too.
Great points spelled out smartly and concisely. Thanks John.
John, a few other substacks I read have compared The Elect to the intellectual maladies described in the book The Captive Mind. This seems like possible fertile material for you. It would be nice if we could find a well documented comparable historical precedent for what we're going through.
The Bible was written mostly in Hebrew and Greek. Its translation into English (King James Bible) has likely done more to create and build "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" than anything with the exception of Shakespeare's work - something even an atheist like me appreciates.
Perhaps tgis might have been a factor? https://safetypropaganda.substack.com/p/amanda-gorman-and-the-rise-of-the
Good link. Lehrer is quite a Gorman fan.
Thanks for the link.
I just read this book: "American Awakening," by Joshua Mitchell, which I highly recommend to all. It's about the religious underpinnings of identity politics (at least in part) and also gets into how the Alt-Right is in many ways the opposite side of the same coin. To vastly abbreviate and oversimplify a small part of his argument, both have a mythology of transgressors and innocents, they're just reversed. Identity Politics scapegoats the white, heterosexual male; the Alt-right scapegoats immigrants, blacks, and Jews. Note, this is but a small part of the overall book. The larger point is, in part, that this creation of transgressors and innocents creates moral debts that can never be paid -- this is a religion with only condemnation and no concept of forgiveness. Mitchell argues that when the white, heterosexual male has been purged, another scapegoat will be needed, most likely the white, heterosexual female. And after her, the black heterosexual male. And so on until the last people left will be those with enough "moral" power to punish the other remnant.
But my synopsis is so paltry. I urge you to go to Amazon and see for yourself. For a nuts-and-bolts understanding of how we got here, "Cynical Theories" is excellent, but for a larger take on the societal and religious underpinnings of what "here" means, "American Awakenings" is extremely valuable. (I don't know the author and have no relation whatsoever to the book beyond having read it.)
" ... another scapegoat will be needed, most likely the white, heterosexual female." Oh, we're already there. We're all "Karens" now -- middle-aged white women who speak up and draw attention to ourselves for any reason at all. Don't wear a mask in a store? You're a Kanre. Request no matter how politely that someone else put a mask on? Karen. Express a feminist opinion? Stupid Karen. Express an anti-feminist one? Shut up, Karen.
It is kind of all-purpose, isn't it?
But I think they'll go for Latinos next, since it's not really a "race" anyway. Or Asians, since the effort to shame them into joining the victimization club is only partially successful.
The next logical act in this theater of the absurd would be to assert that interlocutors of differing races and ethnicities are simply incapable of communicating. White waiter to black customer: "With regret, as a white person I could never presume to understand your present culinary whim. Let me locate a black waiter. That is, excusing my potentially errant presumption that dining is your intent, which I only inferred from my dominant culture's interpretation of your posture at a table whilst examining a menu."
If I were a poet, I would want to be translated by the most prominent translator I could.
If a White translator cannot comprehend the poem well enough to translate it, then we can suppose that Gorman's poem was intended for a Black audience. It will be a perfect union once entirely Black, we can suppose. As is being made clear vis-a-vis twitter and the like, "white supremacy is a virus" and must be eradicated. In other words, in Joe Biden's America, the plan is to vanquish the white race so that the Black race can flourish. That is the ugliness that underpins this disturbing ideology.
On the other hand, Black actors can play historical European roles in TV series such as Bridgerton, and fully comprehend what it means to be an early 19th-century aristocrat. This must be a sign of their inherent superiority to the poor, dumb, White race, which cannot, due to some inherited deficiency, put themselves in someone else's place.
Now, now. It's only ugly if you're honest. Proper indoctrination will help with that. Isn't that how we find the Truth? By being told which things can be allowed to be True?
So if only a black woman can translate a black woman’s work, due to their common “lived experience” then it follows that only black students can learn from black teachers (separate black schools to follow), and only black artists can be appreciated by black viewers (thus we need separate museums, with black curators, open only to blacks), and so on and so forth. The KKK must be loving this.
We always try to find a logic in this, which can explain the deep twists of the ideology. But the explanation is much more simple. The people who bully a non-black translator are simply the people who hold the power. And they hold the power by the very effective claim not to hold the power but to be victims of white supremacy instead.
There is no logic behind this and people in power are not obliged to accept the consequences, only people who are submitted to this power are.
With regards to the KKK comment, I have been thinking the same thing. As McWhorter and others have before asserted that the anti-racism movement has in ways hurt black people, I can't help but wonder if white-supremacist are seeing the anti-racism movement described by the likes of Kendi, etc as a positive. We are in strange territory.