ok evidently that last was a horrendous post and i've gotten some pretty severe reactions in various forms. rather than, say, yank it down in the hopes that people won't regard me as a racist moster, i'm going to try to explain it, which i realize will be of doubtful efficacy. you can't even throw out all the categories i did in some sensible way: some disabled people are white men, some gay people are white men, etc. the categories are always in a state of having already collapsed. but they maintain a social currency we might say. "white men" might just be the oppressor; and it is not without a touch of irony that i call myself white: no one is pure anything.

my basic joke was that if you portray suspicion of state power as an artifact of white privilege, then i guess that puts all the other people on the other side: enthusiasts for state power. of course sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. but sometimes they are.

let me first state that my basic rhetorical stance is often hyperbole and provocation, and also that i delight in certain forms of transgression. "white guys rock!" is in itself a littlebitty transgression: we are the only people who shouldn't be proud of our identity. well, for very good reasons, as i indicated in the post.

at any rate, i actually do think that weisberg in that piece, as people have been doing for a year now - kind of as a sideswipe on his way to deploying the unquestionable nostrum that"anti-government" and "insane" are synonyms - was attempting to discredit the tea movement on the ground of the racial and gender composition of its participants. (of course he's wrong about the gender etc.) well, in an atmosphere where there is no argument, only insult from our beautifully-educated champions of reason, this is relatively minor, though of course it's implying that the movement is racist.

i take standpoint epistemology seriously. there are things that you can or must know from one social position that you can't and mustn't know from another. one time i spent a book arguing that black folks know stuff about white folks that white folks do not know, for example. but in my view, it would not be enough to discredit a political movement that its leaders or idea people or celebrities or activists were white men. so in the post below i was playing with the notion that oppressors can see something oppressed people cannot: that all the power is just chumps like us, soup to nuts. i don't put that forward in any serious way.

but i do put forward in a serious way  as a critique of the movements for women's rights, gay rights, and racial equality that they are far, far too impressed by and focused on state power. and i might add, cb, that malcolm made precisely the same criticism. i think part of this has been a strategic necessity: if you are fighting jim crow laws in the south, that is a state issue. as a practical matter, when you are in a condition wherein you are being oppressed or broken, you seek what help you can find, and if you can turn government bodies against each other or whatever or use them to redress injuries, that is excellent. 

but of course i would say that all these groups have experienced precisely the state as a ferocious oppressing force, the armed wing of the reactionary regime that stunts or ends their lives. hence i would be very wary of a liberation movement whose every word is a larger more powerful state. if you petition for affirmative action, and the response is an office keeping records of everybody's racial identities, you don't have to think too hard about how that's going to be used in a white supremacist administration. or a black supremacist admin. if you build a welfare state - make everyone's livelihood, housing, healthcare, dependent on the state - you'd better think about what the power you're constructing actually is. malcolm was beautiful also on the dehumanization by surveillance and institutionalization.

i think if you claim some universal vision of human liberation, you had better be suspicious of all power hierarchies. there has never been an assymmetry of power in any human realm matching the state in scope, or measuring the most against the least powerful: the man controling the world-bestriding military and the average schmoe. surely, surely, your history of being oppressed should make you worry about this, worry about it at every turn, with every issue: you want break down, not beef -up and systematize, the power of the powerful.

now if a suspicion of state power is a tradition of white men - i don't know, william godwin, thomas jefferson, henry david thoreau - i say it's the best of the things we! gave the world. if a position of privilege was necessary to generate this view (which i've often heard asserted but do deny), then a fundamentally important insight was available from that standpoint. you know there's universalism in individualism, and self-reliance is a vision of freedom, as is legal equality. see, like booker t. thought that as much as emerson or palin. malcolm preached it every day. 

so because the left wants to reject individualism, e.g., they reject the concept of individual rights to which their own movements have so profoundly appealed. i actually think that power arouses resentment wherever it appears and that rejection of political power has arisen in every society in which political power has arisen. white dudes weren't the first, even if we are the last. anyway, i'd say don't lose sight of the liberatory potential of such things and the real good they have actually done. as to white guys, i'm much more worried about our tendency to subordinate others than our preaching of the autonomous value of individual persons. that ideology was turned against slavery, against racial dehumanization, against wife as property. to the extent it emerges in whitish cultures, it is our critique of ourselves.