#racialism

Daniel Day-Lewis as Johnny and Gordon Warnecke as Omar in 'My Beautiful Laundrette '(1985)... I love this film.

« Le racialisme se présente comme supérieur au nationalisme, parce que le fait de se sentir de la même race — même lorsque cette expression doit être comprise davantage comme un mythe que comme une réalité — est plus profond que le fait de se sentir de la même nation. En tant que mythe politique, la race est la nation vivante, qui ne se trouve pas enfermée dans des limites abstraites, juridiques ou territoriales, ni épuisée dans une simple unité de civilisation, de langue ou d’histoire. Le concept de race va plus loin que cela : il remonte aux origines, inséparable d’un sentiment de continuité, et touche les cordes les plus profondes de l’être humain. »

By: Thomas Chatterton Williams

Published: May 19, 2024

We’d gathered that day at the cafeteria’s “Black” table, cracking jokes and philosophizing during the free period that was our perk as upperclassmen. We came in different shades: bone white, tan and brownish, dark as a silhouette. One of my classmates, who fancied himself a lyricist, was insisting that Redman, a witty emcee from nearby Newark, New Jersey, was the greatest rapper ever. This was the late ’90s, and for my money, no one could compete with Jay-Z. I said so, and the debate, good-natured at first, soon escalated in intensity, touching on feelings and resentments that ran far deeper than diverging claims about artistic merit.

“How can you even weigh in?” I still remember the kid fuming. “You ain’t even the pure breed!”

With that, there was nothing left to say. Friends separated us, the bell rang, and I headed home. A short time later, I went off to college, where I would meet a wider assortment of Americans than I had realized existed. But over the years, I have been reminded of that boy’s slicing racism, the lazy habit of mind that required no white people to be present but would nonetheless please the most virulent white supremacist.

Recently, two public controversies spirited me back to the suspicion and confusion of my high-school cafeteria. All spring long, an unusually nasty feud between the rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar has been captivating audiences, both for the quality of the music it has engendered and for the personal and malicious dimensions of the attacks it has countenanced. Much has been written about the fight, in particular about the two men’s treatment of women, which I won’t rehash here except to point out that it’s a little funny that they both portray themselves as enlightened allies while also acting as if the ultimate disparagement is to call another man feminine. Less has been said about the potency of the racial dimension, which feels like a throwback to a time before Drake’s pop-culture dominance—indeed, to a time before the historic hybridity of the Obama era—and like a distillation of the skin-deep racialism of the current social-justice movement.

Drake, who grew up in Toronto, is the son of a white Jewish mother from Canada and a Black father from Memphis. Since the release of his 2009 mixtape, So Far Gone, he has been not only the most successful visibly mixed-race rapper—and arguably pop star—but also the most visible Black male musician for some time now. Anyone at the top will attract criticism. But not even a white rapper like Eminem has been subject to the kind of racial derogation that has been hurled at Drake.

Back in 2018, the rapper Pusha T released a diss track about him for which the cover art was an old photograph of Drake performing in a cartoonish blackface. The image makes you cringe, but—as Drake explained—that was the point. Drake began his career as an actor, and he wrote that the photograph was part of a “project that was about young black actors struggling to get roles, being stereotyped and typecast … The photos represented how African Americans were once wrongfully portrayed in entertainment.” But presented without context, it appeared to be a self-evident statement of inauthenticity.

Another rapper, Rick Ross, calls Drake “white boy” again and again in his song “Champagne Moments,” released in April. In an op-ed for The Grio, the music journalist Touré explains why the insult is so effective: “We know Drake is biracial. He’s never hidden that, but many of us think of him as Black or at least as a part of the culture … On this record, Ross is out to change that.” Touré calls this “hyperproblematic,” but his tone is approving—he admires the track. “We shouldn’t be excluding biracial people from the Black community, but in a rap beef where all is fair as a way of attacking someone and undermining their credibility and their identity, it’s a powerful message.”

In a series of more high-profile records, Lamar has built on Ross’s theme, both implying and stating directly that racial categories are real, that behaviors and circumstances (like Drake’s suburban upbringing) correlate with race, and that the very mixedness of Drake’s background renders him suspect. It is an anachronistic line of ad hominem attack that is depressing to encounter a quarter of the way into the 21st century.

Lamar’s most recent Drake diss is called “Not Like Us,” and reached No. 1 on Billboard Hot 100. It goes after Drake’s cultural affiliations with the American South. “No, you not a colleague,” Lamar taunts. “You a fucking colonizer!”

It’s hard to hear that and not remember that Drake’s mother is Jewish, and that this is the same invective used to undermine Jews’ sense of belonging in Israel. Such racist habits of thought have become potent rhetorical weapons in the progressive arsenal.

The second (if smaller) controversy followed an essay on language and protest published in The New Yorker earlier this month. The novelist Zadie Smith, who is of European and African descent, argued—carefully—that it is too simplistic to regard the world as sortable into categories of oppressor and oppressed. “Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them,” she writes, “a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands.” This was an attempt to take seriously the tangible fate of Hamas’s victims on October 7, the broader implications of anti-Semitism that can at times be found in criticism of Israel’s response, and the ongoing tragic loss of Palestinian life.

Despite praising the protests that have engulfed college campuses and describing a cease-fire in Gaza as “an ethical necessity,” Smith was derided on more than intellectual grounds. One widely shared tweet, accompanied by a photo of Smith, stated the criticism plainly: “I feel like Zadie Smith uses black aesthetics to conceal her deeply pedestrian white middle-class politics. People see the head wrap and the earrings made of kente cloth and confuse that for something more substantive.”

This was not the first time Smith had been regarded as a racial interloper. The author Morgan Jerkins once wrote of the emotional “hurt” she felt reading another thoughtful essay Smith published in Harper’s asking “Who owns black pain?” Smith’s transgression here, according to Jerkins, was “intellectualizing blackness” from a distance instead of feeling it. “Do not be surprised,” Jerkins warned, “if a chunk of that essay is used in discussions as to why biracial people need to take a backseat in the movement.”

The retrograde notion that thought and action necessarily flow from racial identities whose borders are definable and whose authority is heritable is both fictitious and counterproductive. “Something is afoot that is the business of every citizen who thought that the racist concepts of a century ago were gone­—and good riddance!” Barbara and Karen Fields write in their 2012 masterpiece, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. “The continued vitality of those concepts stands as a reminder that, however important a historical watershed the election of an African-American president may be, America’s post-racial era has not been born.”

Of course, the first African American president was, like our nation and culture, himself both Black and white. One of the most disappointing—and, I have come to realize—enduring reasons the “post-racial era” continues to elude us is that it is not only the avowed racists who would hold that biographical fact against him.

==

Like they do this thing where they blob people together basing on some arbitrary characteristics and then create some delusional worldview from it.

And often for example expecting this blob to make some kind of decision.

For example the Charlestone church shooter (diagnosed with schizophrenia) considering all people with dark skin colour responsible for violence committed by violent criminals with dark skin colour and expecting people with dark skin colour to somehow stop these crimes from happening - including somehow stopping being victims of these crimes I guess?

That's not just prejudice or anything like that, it's absolute insanity.

Or femi-nazis saying stuff like "men doing conscription to themselves". Yeah one person enslaving another person is somehow that person doing it to themselves. Complete insane.

The worst thing about this kind of views being propagated is that they are basically spreading insanity.

Yeah there's just a very *fundamental* kind of moral reasoning that's just so deeply ingrained into people in every culture despite being, in of itself, complete nonsense; where Identity Groups are first-class entities that carry moral weight.

It's the same logic that says that a decline in white birthrates and an increase in mixed-race marriages is a kind of genocide, a harm inflicted against The White Race. And the logic is completely unchallenged; nobody actually has any issue with the logic, they just think that in this particular case they deserve it (and therefore that it isn't happening, the same way people doubt any genocide that they think is justified).

Which is really fucking annoying, because the logic is completely bananas! Like there really -isn't- a genocide, because the definition being used is pure identarian nonsense.

It feels like there are some really important baseline... liberal values, that everyone has flown right past. Shit that I thought we already figured out and was drilled into people as kids. Y'know, 'Just because they're different to us doesn't mean you should be mean to them', 'Just because they share x trait with someone who was mean to you don't mean you should be mean to people with x trait". Really really basic shit, that it turns out nobody actually believed when they were being taught it, and the people teaching it never believed it in the first place either. None of the people telling me that racism was bad *actually* though racism was bad. They were just saying that because it scored them points.

Which sucks! Because racism really IS bad! Everyone around me was lying through their teeth by saying something completely true that they didn't believe for a second.

you know I didn’t feel mixed up as a kid

it wasn’t until much later in life, and it isn’t my parents or their different heritage that does it; it’s not even my diverse tastes or identification with forms of art that other people feel should be denied to me based on this or that (racial or cultural) reason - though that does seem to be an across-the-board thing now 

it’s having learned how much other people really do choose a thing to be, and pretend they are nothing else - and it cuts down to why I dislike all the terms people try to advance:

I don’t like “mixed”, or “multiracial” or “mixed racial” or “blended” - I don’t like any of the terms involved, and though I understand (oh believe me I do) that there is no getting away from the real origins of these words in this lifetime, I find myself feeling simultaneously increasingly aware of the canard of race and ornery that, throughout life, I have never and will never relate at that level.

my ultra-lefty upbringing in the 70s simply did not prepare me for the mindsets that would evolve into today; 

your parents’ color is of less interest to me than the personal history and cultural history that created you - that’s not some show I put on, it’s the reality: my internal world’s experience of the world-entire. 

~ in fact I’m becoming annoyed with being more aware of it ~ I’m getting tired of feeling like I have to explain any of it to people who started out angry at me, people who act like I have to prove my worth and my lack of it at the same time ~

I don’t think oppressed people “should” bear the obligation of education, but they do (we do) - 

- all too often lately I find myself wishing I had been born with a slight change in genetics to resemble some of my father’s people, so that I could be included in the world in the way that I want to be now (revolution) - 

I hate myself, on the heels of that, for stealth-hating my mother’s genes, because let me tell you: I love my mom. So much! 

and at least partly because of that I can’t help anger that’s provoked when revolutionaries use racially charged language to express their concerns and feelings about oppression - oh I sure understand the people they’re mad at! Oh I sure do

I suppose I’ll have to write more about it

I doubt anyone will read this and I doubt even more that anyone will take the time to understand what I’m trying to discover, myself, here, by typing this, but