There is one group allowed to be post-racial
There’s a subtle, powerful advantage to getting “woke” which—contrary to official goals—accrues to a particular white demographic.
It became news last month when a pair of famous streamers were handed week-long suspensions from the content platform Twitch.
These streamers had committed an “offense.” But that offense was the use of a rather unusual slur.
After the streamers’ bans were announced, even The Washington Post chimed in to ask whether a crime had taken place at all. A small crowd of liberals wondered:
Is the term “cracker” a racial slur? Is it racist?
And predictably, the chorus of left-liberals known as The Woke Mob answered “NO!” (With a small group adding, “maybe, but who gives a shit?”)
For them, the reasoning here was obvious. Possibly, it was even self-evident. But that simplicity is deceptive.
What I want to point out is that this feeling of “duh!” does not stem from any objective aspect of our current situation.
It comes from a form of post-racial identity.
This argument is not hyperbole. It might sound overblown, but that’s because the feeling of being post-racial, as I want to describe it, is not an outwardly displayed identity; it is more like an unconscious reward for being “woke.”
We can start to understand this by questioning why so many of us think consequences for saying “cracker” are absurd.
It bears mentioning that this view has almost no relation to institutional perspectives on hate speech.
The U.S. has no legal definition of the concept, leaving it subject to the whims of corporations and NGOs. But if a legal form of hate speech were to exist, it would likely fall along the lines drawn by large institutions like the American Library Association, which says,
Generally … hate speech is any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, religion, skin color, sexual identity, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, or national origin.
Okay! Well, in such a definition, the term “cracker” would definitely be included.
If we want to penalize people for vilifying groups on the basis of race, then terms that vilify the white race would qualify, right?
The thing is, many of us don’t want “cracker” to qualify. And that’s because the people in this group don’t want whiteness to have the normal characteristics of a racial identity.
The left wish to un-cancel “cracker” stands as the most overtly political form of a broader cultural practice.
If you want to be “woke,” there are rules. And one of the most important rules is that whiteness is not good.
It is therefore almost obligatory in woke circles to disparage or insult whiteness. But most people think that this phenomenon represents a form of guilt, whereas I think it represents a form of identity itself.
Notice, for instance, how a lot of insults against whiteness follow the exact pattern of bullying an out-group — but the people who most encourage the bullying behavior technically belong to the out-group.
The suspended streamers Vaush and Hasan Piker, who believed so adamantly that “cracker” should be exempt from policies covering racial slurs, identify as white. There is also, at this point, an archetypical kind of think piece — such as “Rest In Power White Ladies,” about the death of Joan Didion — in which white-identifying authors sarcastically write lines such as “[Tonight], I am holding space for my white sisters.”
Writing about the Didion piece, Freddie deBoer notes correctly that “millions of white people … appropriate [the term ‘white’] to insult members of their own race every day.”
The practice is so common that it renders the insults “toothless.”
But what if this process whereby white insults come to mean basically nothing isn’t an unfortunate byproduct of this social phenomenon but the whole point of it?
To appreciate this fully, we have to remember there is a stringent rule of wokeness, that whiteness is not good. So terms such as “white” (meaning bad), “cracker,” “Karen,” etc. haven’t been reclaimed in some sort of subversive move. Rather, they have been disclaimed. People who insult whiteness using these terms simply act the same as nonwhite people who insult white people.
The whole white-on-white insult genre provides a place to act out a performance of nonwhite identity. But it goes deeper than that.
Repeatedly, we find that the same people who tell us outwardly that “white” is a serious and bad thing to be have this inveterate tendency, in their actions, to treat whiteness as something very distant from themselves, as something which doesn’t actually describe them (or as a meaningless joke).
For example, here are the remarks from Hasan Piker that got him a one-week ban from the Twitch platform:
“… White boys love fucking saying, ‘Cracker is the same as the n-word.’ It’s really stupid.”
Hasan, who outwardly identifies as “white,” cycles between describing things white people like to do (but he doesn’t) and telling others, presumably white others, that the whole argument around the racial insult “cracker” is “stupid.”
This is an incredibly common attitude.
Hence comes a culture that believes paradoxically in white people, eg, fighting against “white fragility,” and in which people who identify as white constantly construct “white” things they are not a part of.
Author Ned Resnikoff identifies a scary type of leftist that belongs to the “white left,” specifically so he can suggest he is not a part of the white left (even as he appears to be white and on the left).
In fact, there are a lot of white-identifying people who claim “all politics is identity politics,” but they also say there is a particular identity politics called “white” identity politics that they do not engage in. Their own identity politics, vis-à-vis race, must implicitly belong to some raceless, universal category.
This is the group allowed to be post-racial. And they will never admit it, but the rest of their politics strengthens that reality. Much of it is based on a premise that there are all sorts of White Things they are not a part of (hence, their actions somehow weaken white supremacy). But jokes and insults also give people an ironic distance from whiteness.
For instance, there is a contrast between how self-identified white “progressives,” like Hasan and Vaush, treat certain words and how those words are regarded officially.
When Hasan signs off a tweet with “from a fellow crack*r,” and when Vaush muses “Is ‘Karen’ a slur? Yes. […] And I will use it,” these actions strangely contradict the fact that, when asked whether there are some people who find such jokes about whiteness offensive, their official answer is “yes, white people get offended by it.”
So at bottom, this ironic attitude, which has the joke dimension of white people calling themselves “cracker” and the serious dimension of white people condoning, even encouraging its use online to the point where they petition corporations to exempt it from rules around slurs, accomplishes a disidentification from whiteness.
And that’s why it’s so important, just as the highbrow pursuit of believing in, but not practicing, “white fragility” and “white identity politics” feels important.
All of it falls into the same bucket as trashing Joan Didion, as agreeing with Ta-Nehisi Coates that Kanye West seeks “white freedom” (while implying that you don’t seek it, and saying also that “white people” get offended at the concept of white freedom, but you appreciate it).
All of it means outwardly that you get to look enlightened, and inwardly that you get to feel post-racial.
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