You say in a much more academic manner what I have been thinking for quite some time now. Namely, that many, perhaps most, Black people in the US suffer from Stockholm Syndrome (yes, I know it’s not recognized by the medical establishment, but I think you understand what I’m getting at). I think too many non-white people operate under the delusion that they can “become white” like the “ethnic whites,” which ignores the fact that the Irish and the Italians were always white, just not the right kind. To be let into the political whiteness club requires one to at least be European in appearance and culture. Certain “model minorities” may be elevated at different times for different political reasons, but that’s still not the same thing as being considered unambiguously white.
I suppose it’s an outdated concept, but I wish we had race men/women again, rather than these useless, deracinated members of the Black mis-leadership class who give us crumbs from up on high and act like we should be thankful for it. We need something, because we are not organized to endure whatever is coming for us. We don’t have the resources that allowed us to survive Jim Crow, the Black newspapers, businesses, insurance companies, fraternal organizations, etc. Maybe we have all just collectively given up and are just waiting for the “final solution” to America’s “negro problem.” Whenever that occurs, I suppose house Negroes like Coleman Hughes will assure us that we deserve it for being so disgusting that our MAGA overlords had no choice but to do what they will do.
Hey, LM! Thanks for stopping by & reflecting on the piece.
I accept the concept of Stockholm syndrome, even if it's not in the DSM or what have you; indeed, I accept both Anna Freud's definition as well as Sándor Ferenzci's, and in fact I prefer the latter. Ferenzci thought that the captive, who is put under abuse and strain by their captor, becomes enamored of the power displayed by the captor and so seeks to emulate him or her.
I think something of that sort might be taking place; but also I think it has to do with an amnesia of place. Excepting indigenous peoples, just about everyone else in what we call the United States has an origin story that features intentional immigration to these shores. African-Americans are, in a deep sense, shipwrecked. The vast majority have no history to trace, other than bills of lading. This fact can tend to leave a person fundamentally disoriented, fumbling about for some anchor.
I don't know if what I describe is universal, but I think back to many of the familial stories told on shows like Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s "Finding Your Roots" and it seems this sense is not uncommon. With that type of blankness of place, I feel it's no wonder that -- what, 20? -- generations after being stranded, Africa's descendents are culture-locked, because American culture is the only culture that's flooded over and immersed them.
So it's not surprising, especially in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, that so many do not feel that race touches them. I was in that position for many years. It took a particularly traumatic encounter with a private employer for me to be slapped in the face, as it were, which radicalized me (along with some 19th-century material I'd been reading around that time), but I still retain that distance of lived experience where race was not a vital category for me. American culture, instead, was what I looked toward, specifically middle-class American culture. I see now that that's an untethered category, so now I'm able to step outside of that as well as continue to view race as an imposition, something that originates from outside of a person proper. Race is totally cultural and has nothing to do with genetics, other than what we collectively impose as what our rods and cones tell us must have meaning.
In terms of who qualifies as 'White', again, it's rather arbitrary. What if vision had been organized differently? Would humans still have invented racial categories? If our sight had been limited to red and black, as reptiles are speculated as having as a limitation (as I recall), would people have been able to even conceive of sorting people by color? The riddle is such that I feel I must go back and really delve into the study of the Middle Ages, because it seems to me that something cracked open when Catholicism broke into the shards of Protestantism. Something happened to cultural consciousness that translated into economics, and this shift seems to have manifested in the imposition of external categorization, beginning in Spain with the idea of limpieza de sangre and right on down the line to today's supposed white genocide.
As for model minorities, I think back to a clip by Hasan Piker, who is not everyone's cup of tea (I even set him aside for several years), who in a particular segment of his show was instructing his audience about the construction of race. He explained how the various "off-white" folks came to be blended into whiteness (you list a couple, Irish and Italian) and how the only people who can never be folded in, *by definition*, are Black folks. There must be a color line in order for whiteness -- which, in the final analysis, is a category of social power -- to have meaning. That was at least five years ago when he spoke in that segment, but I've never forgotten it. Partly he was demonstrating his cynicism, but also it's almost impossible to argue against what he said.
At any rate, this is why I think it's instructive to consider how institutional discrimination against Jewish people in America came to a halt, in the middle of the 20th century, when Jewishness was folded culturally into whiteness. It's not a topic of explicit conversation; it's rather taboo. To examine that process is to invite questions as to why one is even interested. But looking at how that came to be can give insight as to how this (for lack of a better word) adoption process occurs. The inclusion of Irish and Italian people into American whiteness is beyond living memory, but the '40s, '50s and '60s are still accessible. If we can deconstruct this process, we can understand racialization and deracination better.
You bring up the far-off notion of a "solution" to a (made-up) problem. I think that's Turner Diaries stuff, rather fantastical (though I'd say we're as close to that being turned into reality than we've ever been). Absent some cataclysm, I don't think that will happen as a one-and-done event, though some far-right extremists will turn the idea over in their minds like a jewel that keeps slicing their fingertips raw. They need that bloody spectacle to maintain their radicalism. Violence is a lure, but again I return to the Spanish idea of purity of blood. It's that same idea in a different form. For an idea that is utterly arbitrary, it amazes me that, collectively, we have yet to get past it.
You say in a much more academic manner what I have been thinking for quite some time now. Namely, that many, perhaps most, Black people in the US suffer from Stockholm Syndrome (yes, I know it’s not recognized by the medical establishment, but I think you understand what I’m getting at). I think too many non-white people operate under the delusion that they can “become white” like the “ethnic whites,” which ignores the fact that the Irish and the Italians were always white, just not the right kind. To be let into the political whiteness club requires one to at least be European in appearance and culture. Certain “model minorities” may be elevated at different times for different political reasons, but that’s still not the same thing as being considered unambiguously white.
I suppose it’s an outdated concept, but I wish we had race men/women again, rather than these useless, deracinated members of the Black mis-leadership class who give us crumbs from up on high and act like we should be thankful for it. We need something, because we are not organized to endure whatever is coming for us. We don’t have the resources that allowed us to survive Jim Crow, the Black newspapers, businesses, insurance companies, fraternal organizations, etc. Maybe we have all just collectively given up and are just waiting for the “final solution” to America’s “negro problem.” Whenever that occurs, I suppose house Negroes like Coleman Hughes will assure us that we deserve it for being so disgusting that our MAGA overlords had no choice but to do what they will do.
Hey, LM! Thanks for stopping by & reflecting on the piece.
I accept the concept of Stockholm syndrome, even if it's not in the DSM or what have you; indeed, I accept both Anna Freud's definition as well as Sándor Ferenzci's, and in fact I prefer the latter. Ferenzci thought that the captive, who is put under abuse and strain by their captor, becomes enamored of the power displayed by the captor and so seeks to emulate him or her.
I think something of that sort might be taking place; but also I think it has to do with an amnesia of place. Excepting indigenous peoples, just about everyone else in what we call the United States has an origin story that features intentional immigration to these shores. African-Americans are, in a deep sense, shipwrecked. The vast majority have no history to trace, other than bills of lading. This fact can tend to leave a person fundamentally disoriented, fumbling about for some anchor.
I don't know if what I describe is universal, but I think back to many of the familial stories told on shows like Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s "Finding Your Roots" and it seems this sense is not uncommon. With that type of blankness of place, I feel it's no wonder that -- what, 20? -- generations after being stranded, Africa's descendents are culture-locked, because American culture is the only culture that's flooded over and immersed them.
So it's not surprising, especially in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, that so many do not feel that race touches them. I was in that position for many years. It took a particularly traumatic encounter with a private employer for me to be slapped in the face, as it were, which radicalized me (along with some 19th-century material I'd been reading around that time), but I still retain that distance of lived experience where race was not a vital category for me. American culture, instead, was what I looked toward, specifically middle-class American culture. I see now that that's an untethered category, so now I'm able to step outside of that as well as continue to view race as an imposition, something that originates from outside of a person proper. Race is totally cultural and has nothing to do with genetics, other than what we collectively impose as what our rods and cones tell us must have meaning.
In terms of who qualifies as 'White', again, it's rather arbitrary. What if vision had been organized differently? Would humans still have invented racial categories? If our sight had been limited to red and black, as reptiles are speculated as having as a limitation (as I recall), would people have been able to even conceive of sorting people by color? The riddle is such that I feel I must go back and really delve into the study of the Middle Ages, because it seems to me that something cracked open when Catholicism broke into the shards of Protestantism. Something happened to cultural consciousness that translated into economics, and this shift seems to have manifested in the imposition of external categorization, beginning in Spain with the idea of limpieza de sangre and right on down the line to today's supposed white genocide.
As for model minorities, I think back to a clip by Hasan Piker, who is not everyone's cup of tea (I even set him aside for several years), who in a particular segment of his show was instructing his audience about the construction of race. He explained how the various "off-white" folks came to be blended into whiteness (you list a couple, Irish and Italian) and how the only people who can never be folded in, *by definition*, are Black folks. There must be a color line in order for whiteness -- which, in the final analysis, is a category of social power -- to have meaning. That was at least five years ago when he spoke in that segment, but I've never forgotten it. Partly he was demonstrating his cynicism, but also it's almost impossible to argue against what he said.
At any rate, this is why I think it's instructive to consider how institutional discrimination against Jewish people in America came to a halt, in the middle of the 20th century, when Jewishness was folded culturally into whiteness. It's not a topic of explicit conversation; it's rather taboo. To examine that process is to invite questions as to why one is even interested. But looking at how that came to be can give insight as to how this (for lack of a better word) adoption process occurs. The inclusion of Irish and Italian people into American whiteness is beyond living memory, but the '40s, '50s and '60s are still accessible. If we can deconstruct this process, we can understand racialization and deracination better.
You bring up the far-off notion of a "solution" to a (made-up) problem. I think that's Turner Diaries stuff, rather fantastical (though I'd say we're as close to that being turned into reality than we've ever been). Absent some cataclysm, I don't think that will happen as a one-and-done event, though some far-right extremists will turn the idea over in their minds like a jewel that keeps slicing their fingertips raw. They need that bloody spectacle to maintain their radicalism. Violence is a lure, but again I return to the Spanish idea of purity of blood. It's that same idea in a different form. For an idea that is utterly arbitrary, it amazes me that, collectively, we have yet to get past it.