A frank discussion about feminist, marxist and racist *ahem* race ideology etc.

[Pickman's model]

You're really quite a judgemental person aren't you? I won't respond any further to what you've just posted as it's really not worth the effort.

you won't respond further to what Rutita1's posted because you don't have the intellectual wherewithal to do so. and if i were you i would be cautious about responding to what other people have posted too because you may find your lack telling.

 

[Treacle Toes]

You're really quite a judgemental person aren't you? I won't respond any further to what you've just posted as it's really not worth the effort.

Yes I have an opinion. You seem to have a problem with that.

 

[winifred]

you've got your tenses mixed up. perhaps if you didn't misrepresent yourself so other people might not do so too.

How have I gotten my tenses mixed up? The subsequent race science pretty much came after the advent of transatlantic slave trade, so why wouldn't it be considered as such? Stop being such a pedant! I've already explained myself and won't be responding to this ridiculous charge.

 

[winifred]

Yes I have an opinion. You seem to have a problem with that.

No. What I have a problem with, is that you're making baseless accusations about me, whilst also going off-topic within this thread.

 

[Treacle Toes]

No. What I have a problem with, is that you're making baseless accusations about me, whilst also going off-topic within this thread.

They are not baseless accusatons about you. They are observations based on what you wrote in your OP, more specifically they directly address your misrepresentations and redactions. That is completely on-topic. Not only is honesty a starting point for discussion, so is defining and agreeing terms.

 

[winifred]

She was not being 'villified' she was being held accountable for her actions and disceptions.

Says the self appointed judge, jury and executioner.

The discussion went into detail about the implications of those actions and what the real life consequences are for people. Just because you didn't want to engage with those facts and still don't, proven by your redacted repesentation of that thread and what she has done doesn't make you an optimistic martyr.

I have consistently posted that I didn't condone her actions, and that I understood why people were disparaging of her decision to lie about her 'race'. Just because I chose to examine the possible reasons as to why she did what she did, doesn't mean to say that I was seeking to justify her actions.

There you go again, misrepresenting the discussion, silencing the real life experiences that people shared and the wider implications that were being discussed.

Oh please, stop it with playing the victim role will you? I was doing no such thing. If anything, I'm all for people sharing their real life experiences - I did as much myself for fuck's sake.

IMO it's you who is doing the protracting by not representing or acknowledging the truth in terms of the discussion that has been had. Honesty is a starting point.

I am being completely honest in my approach within this thread. What you're seeking to do is to silence me by continuing whatever beef you had with me in the other thread. I didn't want to get into a protracted/pointless discussion within that thread, and I refuse to do so within this one.

 

[Pickman's model]

How have I gotten my tenses mixed up? The subsequent race science pretty much came after the advent of transatlantic slave trade, so why wouldn't it be considered as such? Stop being such a pedant! I've already explained myself and won't be responding to this ridiculous charge.

i hope you'll be saying sorry for all the bollocks you've spouted tho

 

[Treacle Toes]

Says the self appointed judge, jury and executioner.

I have an opinion. You have a problem with that.

I have consistently posted that I didn't condone her actions, and that I understood why people were disparaging of her decision to lie about her 'race'. Just because I chose to examine the possible reasons as to why she did what she did, doesn't mean to say that I was seeking to justify her actions.

You were not alone in speculating about the possible reasons.

Oh please, stop it with playing the victim role will you?

Eh? Your definition of 'victim' seems to be completely different to mine. Do victims in your world speak up for themselves and challenge others? Seriously, don't even dream me your 'victim'.

I am being completely honest in my approach within this thread. What you're seeking to do is to silence me by continuing whatever beef you had with me in the other thread. I didn't want to get into a protracted/pointless discussion within that thread, and I refuse to do so within this one.

I do not wish to silence you. What I am asking for is honesty. My 'beef' is with the dishonest way you have characterised that thread, the discussion and the voices within it. Why should I ignore the fact you have misrepresented it? Surely if I did and didn't feel like I could speak up I would be a 'victim'?

 

[winifred]

i hope you'll be saying sorry for all the bollocks you've spouted tho

I'm only sorry I didn't refer to wikipedia to substantiate my posts, otherwise you might've had more sympathy with what I had to say.

Now please could you stay on topic within this thread?

 

[Pickman's model]

I'm only sorry I didn't refer to wikipedia to substantiate my posts, otherwise you might've had more sympathy with what I had to say.

Now please could you stay on topic within this thread?

you've achieved what was previously thought impossible. by contrast with you Diamond appears a fount of wisdom and eloquence

 

[Pickman's model]

Again, I have to say you're misrepresenting me. Seems to be a continual theme with you. Let me put my point across through another source other than using 'wikipedia', (as you previously did), to argue the toss:

"Any movement for social justice would be doing itself no favours if it deliberately excluded its own supporters from the ranks, but while many feminists welcome men's championship of the cause, there's still a great deal of debate over their entitlement to call themselves feminists. The argument rages even amongst pro-feminist men, with some arguing that gender should be no barrier to full and active participation, and others arguing that as feminism is rooted in the women's liberation movement, a movement founded by women for the advancement of women, men have no right to lay claim to the tag." source

if you're going to argue the toss make sure in future your posts don't make you look like a tosser

 

[winifred]

I have an opinion. You have a problem with that.

No, you're entitled to your own opinion, just as I'm entitled to disagree with your opinions about myself and my motives.

Eh? Your definition of 'victim' seems to be completely different to mine. Do victims in your world speak up for themselves and challenge others? Seriously, don't even dream me your 'victim'.

It sure seems that way when you come out with a ridiculous allegation that I was trying to silence others. In fact, I challenge you to give examples of my seeking to silence the real life experiences of other posters. The fact that you gave your own real life experience leads me to believe that you include yourself within the list of people I'm meant to have silenced, (in your opinion). If that doesn't smack of some kind of 'victim' mentality, then I don't know what does.

I do not wish to silence you. What I am asking for is honesty. My 'beef' is with the dishonest way you have characterised that thread, the discussion and the voices within it. Why should I ignore the fact you have misrepresented it? Surely if I did and didn't feel like I could speak up I would be a 'victim'?

Rachel Dolezal was pretty much vilified within that thread. Do I really need to post up the countless number of posts which indicate that fact? You're more than welcome to speak up, but please don't paint me out to be the villian in this piece. I try to post with honesty and integrity, especially when it comes to emotive topics like this.

 

[Pickman's model]

winifred you should try harder to post with honesty and integrity as you've fallen beneath that standard time and again on this thread. you might also wish to include an argument which makes sense and can be supported in future.

 

[Treacle Toes]

No, you're entitled to your own opinion, just as I'm entitled to disagree with your opinions about myself and my motives.

Just as I am entitled to disagree with you and I have.

It sure seems that way when you come out with a ridiculous allegation that I was trying to silence others. In fact, I challenge you to give examples of my seeking to silence the real life experiences of other posters. The fact that you gave your own real life experience leads me to believe that you include yourself within the list of people I'm meant to have silenced, (in your opinion). If that doesn't smack of some kind of 'victim' mentality, then I don't know what does.

That happened here with your misrepresentation of the thread and what was being posted there. Pointing that out to you doesn't make me a victim by any stretch and it is disingenuous and ridiculous of you to suggest it does.

Rachel Dolezal was pretty much vilified within that thread. Do I really need to post up the countless number of posts which indicate that fact? You're more than welcome to speak up, but please don't paint me out to be the villian in this piece. I try to post with honesty and integrity, especially when it comes to emotive topics like this.

I have pointed out where you haven't been honest and have redacted that thread into a summary in your OP here that is misrepresentative of it and the majority of the people on it. You can go over there and copy/paste as many comments as you like. Also, we clearly don't agree on the meaning of certain words like victim, villified and villian.

 

[ViolentPanda]

From what I posted previously, I'm obviously not an expert on Marxist ideology, but I do have a basic understanding. In any case, my main point re: marxist philosophy is that a capitalist system typically creates great amounts of wealth for a minority of people at the expense of the vast majority of people. I would also argue that race and racism has it's roots in the development of capitalism within Western societies re: the slave trade, where black people were effectively regarded as 'commodities'. The subsequent development of a race 'science' gave credence to and legitimised the wholesale abuse and exploitation of African peoples' who were forced into slavery.

Race, racism and slavery all pre-date any form of organised capitalism. All of them have existed for at least 3,000 years. What they have in common isn't capitalism, but the machinations of a ruling class desiring and exercising power over others, and searching for and finding excuses (not reasons) for doing so.

 

[MochaSoul]

I am being completely honest in my approach within this thread.

No, you are not... Misrepresenting is how I view your starting a thread based on some other thread while distorting its thrust as well as variety of opinion on the original thread. You kept serving chips whilst every one else was talking rice and even the chips you served were of the kind I refuse to enter McDonalds for. The fact you post this without putting as much as a courtesy note on the original thread that you'd opened a follow up adds duplicity to an already dishonest endeavour.

you've achieved what was previously thought impossible. by contrast with you Diamond appears a fount of wisdom and eloquence

I refused to engage with Diamond on rich thread precisely for the intellectually disingenuous dishonesty. I don't debate for kicks. I debate to get feedback and learn to think and express myself clearly. I won't be wasting my time here for the same reasons.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I don't believe I did get into any 'trouble' within that thread. The fact that mine was one of a few dissenting voices doesn't mean say that I was wrong to post up what I did.


I prefer to be more optimistic about things. You can always try to find some positives from a seemingly bad situation - even if it's to bring various issues to the fore so as to learn from each other, and to potentially educate others (as in the 'White civil rights leader has pretended to be black for years' thread).

Wouldn't you agree that your personal optimism has little place in analysing issues that require critical thinking? Always searching for positives risks loading values - your personal values - onto your analysis of an issue.

 

[ViolentPanda]

oot = out of touch. how can you do a soc sci degree w/out gaining some familiarity with marx's social thought?

Depends when and where they did the degree, I suspect. For a period in the '80s and '90s some unis' soc-sci syllabi did their best to forget that Marx (as opposed to his "interpreters") existed.

 

[MochaSoul]

I prefer to be more optimistic about things. You can always try to find some positives from a seemingly bad situation - even if it's to bring various issues to the fore so as to learn from each other, and to potentially educate others (as in the 'White civil rights leader has pretended to be black for years' thread).

Oh and optimism is to look at things as they are and look for ways to change them. It's not not put the rosy glasses on before looking at them.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Gender and racial identity determined by the ruling classes? Don't think so - anyone can or cannot determine this - for themselves - rightly or wrongly.

The structure and institutions of power determine the forms through which that power is exerted. A simple query as to who has historically controlled the structure and institutions of power, and who have historically controlled the discourse around "gender and racial identity" and many other important discourses leads us to the same culprits over and over again - the ruling classes. Given the control they still exercise over education - from nursery to academe - and the media, how could you arrive at any other conclusion?

 

[ViolentPanda]

You're really quite a judgemental person aren't you? I won't respond any further to what you've just posted as it's really not worth the effort.

It's hardly the "frank discussion" of the thread title if you're going to fall back on being offended to get out of answering perfectly justified criticisms, is it?

 

[DotCommunist]

I would liken being 'Black' with a political movement/struggle, especially as it's pretty much useless as a descriptor. I've tended to use 'black' (lower case) in previous discussions around race, because of its historical basis as a racist 'science' re: categorising people on the basis of their outward appearance.

Well as far as I understand it, in the context of the politics of that time, to call oneself politically black was as much solidarity as about any notion of culture or skin colour or whatever. So you'd have brit indian people saying, 'i'm indian and I'm black'

thats at least my understanding of it anyway, I might be wrong. But to be politically black, that was a statement of intent and solidarity rather than some other meaning.

I may have this wrong though, so don't take it as gospel

 

[Casually Red]

I like beer

Yum yum

 

[winifred]

I will respond to the most recent posts when I have some time today, but what I'd really like to know is what Rutita1 and MochaSoul's opinion is on men having the right to label themselves as feminists. Would either of you agree with this?

 

[butchersapron]

I would strongly urge winifred - or anyone else who wants a clear historical materialist view (and it is only one view, most from this tradition tend not to be so heretical) on the issues in the OP - to read this brilliant article by the always excellent Adolph Reed, Jr. which covers pretty much everything. I know most people won't read it so i'm going to pull out the key parts:

Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism

A historical materialist perspective should stress that “race”—which includes “racism,” as one is unthinkable without the other—is a historically specific ideology that emerged, took shape, and has evolved as a constitutive element within a definite set of social relations anchored to a particular system of production.

Of course, patterns of inequality persist in which disadvantage is distributed asymmetrically along racial and gender lines, but practically no one—even among apologists for those patterned inequalities—openly admits to espousing racism or sexism. It is telling in this regard that Glenn Beck stretches to appropriate Martin Luther King, Jr., and denounces Barack Obama as racist, and that Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Ann Coulter accuse Democrats of sexism. Indeed, just as race has been and continues to be unthinkable without racism, today it is also unthinkable without antiracism

This extensive history illustrates that, as Marxist theorist Harry Chang observed in the 1970s, racial formation has always been an aspect of class formation, as a “social condition of production.” Race has been a constitutive element in a capitalist social dynamic in which “social types (instead of persons) figure as basic units of economic and political management.”

Later, racial essentialism helped reify the struggles against southern segregation, racial discrimination, inequality, and poverty during the 1960s by separating discussions of injustice from capitalism’s logic of reproduction. Poverty was reinvented as a cultural dilemma, and “white racism” singled out as the root of racial inequality.

Chang’s perspective can be helpful in sorting out several important limitations in discussions of race and class characteristic of today’s left. It can also help to make sense of the striking convergence between the relative success of identitarian understandings of social justice and the steady, intensifying advance of neoliberalism. It suggests a kinship where many on the left assume an enmity. The rise of neoliberalism in particular suggests a serious problem with arguments that represent race and class as dichotomous or alternative frameworks of political critique and action, as well as those arguments that posit the dichotomy while attempting to reconcile its elements with formalistic gestures, for example, the common “race and class” construction.

From the historical materialist standpoint, the view of racial inequality as a sui generis injustice and dichotomous formulations of the relation of race and class as systems of hierarchy in the United States are not only miscast but also fundamentally counterproductive. It is particularly important at this moment to recognize that the familiar taxonomy of racial difference is but one historically specific instance of a genus of ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy that stabilize capitalist social reproduction. I have argued previously that entirely new race-like taxonomies could come to displace the familiar ones.

Finally, the adamant commitment to a race-first perspective on inequalities that show up as statistical disparities has a material foundation. The victories of the civil rights movement carried with them a more benign and unavoidable political imperative. Legal remedies can be sought for injustices understood as discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or other familiar categories of invidious ascription; no such recourse exists for injustices generated through capitalism’s logic of production and reproduction without mediation through one of those ascriptive categories.

All politics in capitalist society is class, or at least a class-inflected, politics. That is also true of the political perspective that condenses in programs such as reparations, antiracism, and insistence on the sui generis character of racial injustice. I submit that those tendencies come together around a politics that is “entirely consistent with the neoliberal redefinition of equality and democracy along disparitarian lines.”

That politics reflects the social position of those positioned to benefit from the view that the market is, or can be, a just, effective, or even acceptable, system for rewarding talent and virtue and punishing their opposites and that, therefore, removal of “artificial” impediments to functioning like race and gender will make it even more efficient and just. This is the politics of actual or would-be race relations administrators, and it is completely embedded within American capitalism and its structures of elite brokerage. It is fundamentally antagonistic to working-class politics, notwithstanding left identitarians’ gestural claims to the contrary

 

[Sea Star]

*looks, thinks about posting, thinks better of it and walks away quickly*

 

[Pickman's model]

*looks, thinks about posting, thinks better of it and walks away quickly*

discretion as so often the better part of valour

 

[Treacle Toes]

I will respond to the most recent posts when I have some time today, but what I'd really like to know is what Rutita1 and MochaSoul's opinion is on men having the right to label themselves as feminists. Would either of you agree with this?

Just noticed this...Wow, I have gone from being told that I am a 'victim' to now getting special interest treatment.

/sniffs air

I'll get to this when I have time.

 

[Pickman's model]

Just noticed this...Wow, I have gone from being told that I am a 'victim' to now getting special interest treatment.

/sniffs air

I'll get to this when I have time.

= if i can be bothered?

 

[winifred]

i hope you'll be saying sorry for all the bollocks you've spouted tho

I've got nothing to be sorry about. And on the subject of spouting bollocks, here's just some of the bollocks that Pickman’s model has come out with so far, (and believe me there’s much more besides that):

from wikipedia:

Feminism is a range of movements and ideologies that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve equal political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights for women. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment.

which part of that says 'a man can't be a feminist'?

The part where there remains a feminist belief that men cannot truly be considered ‘feminsists’, due to the movement being founded by women and for the advancement of women. Pickman’s model spent a considerable amount of time trying to discredit my own recollection of this fact, whilst also trying to bolster his argument by referencing Wikipedia. Lol!

*snip* 3) i don't think you can say that any society in which every medium or large employer has a human resources department regards anyone as not a commodity. *snip*

Only a moron of the highest order would liken the forced commodification of black peoples into wholesale slavery as comparable to a HR recruitment drive.

[Edit: Doube post]
On the subject of colour, I noticed a flippant poster relating a person with jaundice as having the right to refer to themselves as 'yellow'. And again, this is an example of the illogical terminology that is based on race.

You wouldn't call a Chinese person 'yellow' or an Indian or Pakistani person 'brown', because it would be identified as racist. So why are we so comfortable in referring to people as either 'white' or 'black'?

perhaps you should reread the board faq which state that taking an argument across threads is a bad idea.

Yet another example of Pickman’s model dodging the question by bringing in a spurious claim re: my post being a continuation of a previous argument. Prior to my post, I hadn’t even addressed/discussed his stupid comment of comparing a jaundiced person as legitimately labelling themselves ‘yellow’, so how was I going against his much loved faq’s?

In fact, the more I examine his posts (as outlined above and within other threads), the more I can actually identify them as relating to ‘faq’s’ = fucking arsehole quotes.