Cobb

not huff and puff. more like pine and whine.

"This is an argument that obviously has some currency in the annals of 'race relations' but what it is supposed to mean is completely alien to me."

It means that as long as they can observe each others behavior, blacks and whites can and will be forced to deal with the legitimate claims and critiques from the other side.

It means that each side has legitimate concerns where the other is concerned that cannot be resolved by the act of tracing the cause of concern to white racism or black failure. I think Steele wanted to impress upon us the point that solutions to legitimate concerns must fall outside of the jurisdictions of "blame white racism" and "blame black failure." Whites have just as many legitimate concerns about blacks as blacks do about whites.

Also, it seems as if Steele's arguments are virtually unassailable except by means of the ad hominem attack. For you to dismiss his arguments on the basis of his academic career or on the basis of his perceived "authenticity" is nothing more than an informal fallacy as far a logic is concerned. That's pure ad hominem Cobb, and really quite below you.

I dismissed Steele's logic because he postulates that the greatest problem revolves around the question of shame. I took the liberty of rewriting his article and substituting references to shame with references to wealth, life expectancy and safety (contrasted with references to pverty, death and crime). In re-reading the article, it became obvious to me that Steele uses "shame" as a euphemism for the MATERIAL essence of the problem. By positing the problem as an essentially emotional/perceptual problem, he has changed the basis for an historical interpretation based on the material/resource/energy/options/choices/etc. distinctions between the collective "white America" and the collective "black America." And, of course, the international dimension (not unlike batteries) is not included.

Here's the link: http://www.prometheus6.org/node/11417#comment

BUT!

What if the only real difference between black and white is the persistence of perception along the lines Steele describes? What if blackfolk and whitefolk take on these roles uncritically? What if blackness is not an active, dynamic intellectual construct - that it is just an adopted set of attitudes one inherits blindly from their parents and the same for whiteness? Then whites no more stand for white supremacy than blacks stand for black cultural nationalism - they just expect *something* to operate those machines of advantage for them, and they retain the same attitudes as if something were going to change.

In that case all you have is a debtor race and a creditor race, but nothing gets settled.

Your example assumes their is neither cognition nor responsibility - simply reaction. If this were the case, then the motive factors in this recent bit of history are entirely beyond the realm of human influence...that may well be true. In the interim, it would interesting to hear your explanation of how Africans and Europeans reversed roles in terms of wealth, life expectancy and safety since 1400 - without cognition or responsibility.

Folks definitely adopt roles uncritically, but that is beside the point - because when options that are not default options are presented, they're usually rejected. For example, in NYC none of the charter schools teach any history relating to black folk. Not a single one. Is that the operation of "an adopted set of attitudes one inherits blindly"? If it is, then there is little reason for folks who believe themselves "aware" to do much more than IMPOSE their WILL on the sleeping horde. In which case, we have a few conscious actors scripting the set of attitudes that will be adopted. And if that's the case, it could be argued that the most effective individuals have a definite view of "blackness" - and it ain't cultural nationalism for black folk.

Blackness is also [to the architect/practitioner/supporter/beneficiary of white supremacist practice] a tangible, contemptable "other." As such, the MATERIAL resources under the control of such an APSB (architect.practitioner.supporter.beneficiary) are directed in a manner that leads to significant disparities in Wealth, Life Expectancy and Safety. Are you suggesting this is really more the result of accident or uncritical acceptance than active malice? I would suggest it doesn't matter - unless you have distinct operational solutions that work in one case and not in the next.

I am coming to believe that those who truly understand modernism and humanism are the voices who are squashed, and that their voices are saying and have always been saying that civilization is for the civilized. They have always been willing to teach and they have always been willing to accept all comers. Why? Because they fully understood how they have worked to inherit and implement ideas of universal humanism from the Greeks. That in fact, they bothered to learn another language (Latin, Greek) to understand those lessons more clearly.

So what I'm saying is that when people say Shakespeare is good for blacks, they don't do so to insult 'black pride' or diminish blackfolks. They do so because they have learned something of value themselves and have found it transcendent. If it is the metier of blackness to reject all dead, 'white', male literature, then the lockout is all but guaranteed.

America, at its core, recognizes its concepts of democracy comes from the Greeks, and it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the Greeks thought the whole thing out. So should we be fussing about Jefferson's slaves? Maybe we should be studying how Jefferson screwed up in terms of what he failed to learn from the Greeks or the Romans.

My point is that blackness and whiteness are two narrow contexts of human existence. The progress of the African American cannot be bound to that tiny universe.

You've backed yourself into an evolutionary blind alley getting caught up in the triune evils of public obstinacy, middle-class satiety, and apologetic indignity. Having hemmed yourself in on multiple fronts, it's now down to the point of clutching at a shred of political and rhetorical dignity by re-presenting your view as modernist and humanist in the Greek tradition, which is some pure-de-pure bullshit cause you just can't bring yourself to admit that the GOP and its minions whom you've supported have wrought a global and domestic cluster fuck of epic proportions.

My ace boon Noam Avrom wrote most pointedly about what's wrong with your little picture in Hegemony or Survival and as far as I'm concerned, not only does the interpersonal communion of blackness have a cognitive, practical, and aesthetic value uniquely its own, it is historically and presently the instantiated collective unconscious attempt to protect America from itself.

If you participated more fully in it, and felt it for yourself, I believe you might recognize. As for these continuing attempts to defend the indefensible, you're tilting at windmills brah. You really need to stop set tripping on behalf of Mr. Charlie, put down the cockamamy political abstractions and commence to dealing with the real magne.

Please put down the white invented pipe of abstract politics used to defuse
culture/communion-based arguments.., in protecting ourselves from the enemy within, we're attempting to do God's work of

Protecting America from itself, preserving humanity

A diehard rationalist, Chomsky views the American state, a superpower, as an institutionalized irrationality that needs to be prevented from both self-destruction and world destruction - through strategic recourse by all thinking minds to the "second superpower": "world public opinion" (pages 253, 10). He backs up even this philosophical-sounding claim by invoking the massive empirical evidence of global opinion polls that have typically cast a thoroughly negative light on the actions of the US government.

Chomsky deems US polity destructive because its "basic principle is that hegemony is more important than survival" (page 231). As such, he views the peculiar framework of the economic globalization of the 1990s, orchestrated to a great extent by the US ruling elite, as yet another step toward self-destruction - especially because it equates the economic structure of the neoclassical market with the political structure of democracy.

oh you kill me.

So you're suggesting that a trope of insurgent rebellion which is strictly non-violent is going to save the American superpower state from itself. That ultrablackified proles who reject interchangeable modernity are somehow going to undo the power structures of America in the context of global markets.

Hell, these people can't even stay married. How are they going to undo military state capitalism? You really kill me.

Point of information:

The US is not patterned after Greek notions of democracy. It's much closer to the Roman conception of a republic. I'll let you do the legwork to determine if that's important - and even if Jefferson is important. Gotta guess it won't be because in order to get to your positions, you've gotta ignore history. Your choice.