Thursday, April 27, 2023

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: A Black Professor Trapped in an Anti-Racist Hell

Moses:

Change anti-racism to anti-tribalism to anti-religious dogmas; your statements apply.

All binary analysis, as good as it is, becomes flawed when applied to all situations.

BUT

Hegemonic retentions are grounded in those labels and cleavages. If you are following politics in Texas, you want to throw up. A bill passed the first reading that jobs and admissions must not be based on race, which is the other way to reinforce the age-old superstructure of race.

AND

How do we cope with inequities that will never end? The most depressing is that religious fundamentalists have already thrown me into hell, even before I die!

TF

 

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 6:08 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: A Black Professor Trapped in an Anti-Racist Hell

I'm afraid that, as the author of the piece says, we're creating a self-devouring, stiflingly incestous cult of anti-racist Leftist dogma that demands and enforces largely performative conformity to certain anti-racist buzzwords and talking points. These extreme, puritanical anti-racist rhetorical scripts are barely substantive. They're virtue-signalling rhetorical techniques employed and consumed by people who increasingly and atomistically take a puritan approach to anti-racism. They strain to find fault and are never satisfied with other people's anti-racism unless it mirrors their own or is all-encompassing and proceeds from the premise that racism is omnipresent and is inexorably fundamental to all relational and structural phenomena in society. 

 

Virtue-signalling anti-racist dogmatic communities of the type described in the piece tend to take an absolutist, Manichean view that infinitely divides those who share the same broad progressive and liberal goals of inclusion and anti-racism into antagonistic silos. The result is the kind of suffocating thought conformity and showy ideological policing described in the piece, an environment that undermines thought diversity, self-critique, and the refinement of our own ideological positions in response to new information, changes in society, the ethos of coexistence, and new logics.

 

As the author says, this over-the-top anti-racist ideology is a trap, an ideological straightjacket from which there is no escape. It does not offer a way out. In fact, it discounts and disavows the search for anti-racist solutions, since the assumption that underpins it is that racism is so ubiquitous and, in a Foucauldian sense, so consciously and subconsciously deterministic, that it cannot be overcome or mitigated. 

 

This anti-racist extreme needs to constantly invent and reproduce an irredeemably racist world in order for it to retain its logic. In this combatively fratricidal thought space, even the standard liberal Left anti-racist consensus is interpreted as part of the racist superstructure of society. This is, quite simply, a recipe for a depressing sojourn in what the author calls "anti-racist hell." It's not a good place to be or to operate in, and many progressive spaces in and outside academia are taking on the characteristics the author graphically and depressingly describes for the summer seminar.

 

On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 5:47 PM Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

Ken:

Different clusters of activists are now managing universities: if you escape from one cluster, you enter into the jaws of another. More attorneys are being hired on campuses. Academy is no longer what it used to be when I joined in 1977. And members of the younger generation are so rude at conferences. We were trained to criticize most politely, and there was no way I would ever say to my elders, "You have not read this book or that book!"

 

TF

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu>
Date: Wednesday, April 26, 2023 at 5:37 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: A Black Professor Trapped in an Anti-Racist Hell

You are right michael. There is a kind of historical irony that coming on the heels of the struggle to overcome redlining and discrimination, the fight for integration, is then succeeded by black students choosing to create a black dorm. 

I could easily understand our chinese students here at msu choosing a dorm with chinese students—there is the communality of language and customs, that many people would naturally want. The exceptional student would want to live with others, not with sameness, and there is that to be found here as well.

The interesting point lies in how we are to respond to that piece moses posted. It speaks to another time and day for people like me. I retired just before this new age with its adamancy emerged, and would not fit in at all. 

My close friend reports to me now that the rising tide of decolonialist theorizing is demonizing postcolonialism for having failed to free itself of the jackets of racism. The currents of antagonism we see in the article moses circulated embodies that struggle, and it looks, from the distance of my retirement chair, to be a painful internecine struggle. 

Ken

From: 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2023 5:30:20 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: A Black Professor Trapped in an Anti-Racist Hell

 

Ken -

 

What you do because you want to do it is different from what you do because you have to do it. Those same students who chose to live together as black students on their own volition would probably raise hell if they were forced to do so by some human authority. I guess it's a part of the natural human quest for freedom and unabated confraternity.

 

MOA

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Wednesday, April 26, 2023, 09:02:33 AM CDT, Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

 

 

Freedom cuts both ways. When i came to east lansing, for a job in michigan state university, in 1966, black people could not buy a house within city limits. That ended the year after i arrived. Dormitories were not segregated on campus. But when black students were given the option of choosing their own dorm, a black dormitory was formed which they opted for. Many said they were more comfortable living in a black student environment rather than with whites. 

Ken

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2023 7:18:20 AM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: A Black Professor Trapped in an Anti-Racist Hell

 

Briefly

 

Re- "In 2022, however, I was told that the "Critical Black Studies" students would live and learn separately, creating a fully "black space." My "Anti-Oppressive Studies" students were separated from them. Instead of participating in a summer community of 32 high-school students, my group was to be a community of 12 (that would dwindle to nine by the time of the mutiny)."

 

An expert on group psychology would probably say that this was surely the dangerous moment of separation, departure unto an apartheid-type segregation during which the other group's identity must have festered, probably nurtured  - unopposed by the Black Power group…

 

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