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Critical Theory in the American University: A Critical Issue, Part Two

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This material depends on familiarity with  Part One. Please read that before proceeding here.

David Roediger is a White professor of African American studies at the University of Illinois. He is a leading voice in the White abolitionist movement, as it is called: “It is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false,” he asserts, “it’s that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false.”  As does Peter McClaren (see Part One), Roediger proposes that Whites become “race traitors.”13 He is best known for his book, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.14 In it, he draws on Marxist ideology and psychoanalysis to sketch the development of racism in the American White working class during the nineteenth century. The book is arguably legitimate academic scholarship. That said, it comes down to portraying Blacks as victims and painting White working people negatively as racists: that’s who they are. That is not the only defensible way to perceive either labor history or the White working class.

If students only encounter this Roediger book, which is how it works in universities these days, they could well assume that this is the definitive take on White identity—overall, not just among working class Whites—and that what was true, or purported to be true, in the nineteenth century still prevails today. That is to say, that the problem in race relations is White racist animosity and feelings of superiority toward African Americans and desires to suppress or hurt them, which is the basic thrust of the Roediger book. Read more

Critical Theory in the American University: A Critical Issue, Part One

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I teach a university course in education taken by undergraduate liberal arts students—they aren’t education majors—who take the course as an elective. It focuses on contemporary elementary and secondary public schooling and, to a lesser extent, the circumstance in universities.  Among the required readings this semester (Fall, 2013) are sections of a book edited by James Noll, a retired professor of education, entitled Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Educational Issues.1   The Noll book is made up of twenty-three contemporary schooling issues as Noll defines them, each phrased in the form of a question.  For each issue/question, Noll writes an introduction and then includes two articles he has chosen from the professional literature in education to represent Yes and No answers to the question, thus creating a debate format.  Noll ends each issue with a concluding statement, which includes further readings on this concern.

Noll has done a good job with the book, and I find it useful in my course. I want my students to realize that there isn’t just one right answer to the issues we confront in education (or in anything else, for that matter), that depending on their particular outlooks and values, thoughtful and informed people legitimately differ both as to what is going on in schools and what ought to go on in them. Grounded in that realization, students, I hope, feel invited to analyze and assess arguments and explore their differences and implications, contribute their own best thinking to making sense of the issue, and come to their own conclusions rather than remain uncritical note-taking consumers of the ideas and proposals of others, which unfortunately is too often the role students play in university courses.

A Noll issue I used this semester is titled “Does a ‘Deficit Model’ Serve Poor Children Well?”2 It is clear from Noll’s introductory comments and the two opposing arguments that poverty to these writers means African American students in urban public schools. By deficit, Noll is referring to lack of health care, exposure to crime and drugs, negative adult role models, family instability, and limited exposure to culturally uplifting experiences. Read more

Zuerst Interview: The Weapons of the Israel Lobby

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This is an English version of an interview appears in the November issue of Zuerst!, a German magazine.

  1. Prof. MacDonald, the Central Council of Jews in Germany (ZdJ)  is maybe one of the most influential lobby groups in Germany – it is an affiliate of the World Jewish Congress (WJC). Critics say, the influence of the ZdJ is disproportionally big compared to the number of jews living in Germany. Are they right?

I am not familiar with the situation in Germany on the power of the Jewish lobby. I do know that in the countries I am familiar with, the United States in particular, Jews are very well organized and effective in pursuing their interests. They are well-integrated into elites in the media, politics, business, and the academic world, and they have organized very well-funded lobbying organizations, in particular, the Anti-Defamation League. So I would not be surprised to find that a similar situation prevails in Germany.

  1. The ZdJ – as well as the WJC – plays a complex role in Germany – and the West in general. On the one side the organization claims to represent the Jewish communities in Germany and the West, on the other hand they act on behalf of Israel and campaign for Israeli politics. How can this mix?

There is a similar mixture in the US, where the Anti-Defamation League has been a strong supporter of the very right-wing, racialist governments in Israel while at the same time pursuing a wide range of Jewish political interests in the US linked to the political left. Most importantly, Jewish groups have been at the forefront in advancing an agenda of multiculturalism and displacement-level immigration to the US that will make White Americans a minority within 20–30 years.

Prior to the establishment of Israel, large sections of the American Jewish community opposed Zionism because they were concerned that support for a foreign government would bring charges of dual loyalty which has been a persistent feature of anti-Jewish attitudes throughout the centuries. However, these concerns dissipated after 1948, and subsequent decades have seen a huge increase in the power of the Israel Lobby and very overt support by American Jews for Israel. To be sure, American Jews who support Israel are careful to argue that the interests of Israel and the interests of America coincide. At times, this can result in comical assertions, such as recent claims by prominent American neoconservative Jews that America must bomb Syria in order to prevent Syria from attacking America with chemical weapons. Or that Iran is on the verge of being able to destroy the United States or even invade it. Read more

Jobbik’s Unholy Alliance

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It seems that these days hatred, and the right to use it, even in defence of one’s nation, race, and culture, has to be offset by plenty of misplaced love. This is the take home message from Gábor Vona’s recent trip to Turkey, where the president of the Hungarian nationalist party Jobbik has been declaring his “Eurasian love”:

I didn’t come here to talk to you about the transitory subject of diplomatic and economic relations. Others will do that on behalf of me. I came here to meet my brothers and sisters, to offer a fraternal alliance and bring you the good news: Hungarians are awakening. Our common mission and the universal task of Turanism [see also Hungarian Turanism] are to build bridges between East and West, between Muslims and Christians, to be able to fight together for a better world – to show to the world that Christians and Muslims are not enemies, but brothers and sisters. No one can accomplish this mission more effectively than Hungarians and Turks because we are connected by common blood.

That’s all we need, European nationalist parties endorsing the very people most bent on colonizing and destroying Europe. Turkey, let us remember, is hostile to Greece and Golden Dawn, supports the Islamic jihad in Syria (along with Israel and the USA), harbours Chechen terrorists, and is seeking to extend neo-Ottoman influence in the Balkans through supporting ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. And this is the country that Jobbik wants to French kiss and take home to meet its mother!

Of course, “Love” is not a word usually associated with Jobbik. Thanks to the antinationalist bias of the mass media, Jobbik is better known for its hatreds of Jews, Gypsies, and the various nationalities that surround the ill-drawn borders of the Hungarian nation. Read more

The Ruling Stones: The Ethnic Activism of Richard Stone

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Martyrs and Mothers

Who is England’s patron saint? If you think it’s St George, you’re behind the times. In fact, it’s the martyr St Stephen. But not the Stephen stoned to death in Palestine 2,000 years ago. No, the Stephen stabbed to death by Whites at a bus-stop in London in 1993. He was a young Black male, but that didn’t make his death unusual or worthy of special attention.

Black power: St Stephen Lawrence

Black power: St Stephen Lawrence

It wasn’t until 2012, after huge expense by the London Metropolitan police and the abolition of the centuries-old principle of double jeopardy, that two White men were found guilty of the murder and given long jail sentences. Cries of joy greeted the conviction in all sections of the media, particularly at The Guardian and BBC. But further suspects are still free and Doreen Lawrence, mother of the murder victim, wants to see more millions spent on pursuing and convicting them.

Doreen has become a familiar and highly respected figure in the UK. She has recently been elevated to the House of Lords, where she will sit as Baroness Lawrence and continue to promote the martyr cult. She was prominent at the twentieth-year commemoration of her son’s murder, which was attended by the leaders of all three main political parties. And you may have seen her helping to carry the flag at the 2012 London Olympics. It was a further honour in recognition of her long campaign for justice, equality and tolerance in the UK.

The image of an aspiring young Black architect slaughtered by thuggish White racists continues to be reinforced through every medium of news, art and commentary. Doreen has often appeared in the media to criticize Britain for failing to live up to the high standards she demands of it as a British Jamaican. And the government listens. Here she is in the closing days of 2012 with fellow activist Dr Richard Stone, who will be the main focus of this essay: Read more

Multiculturalism and the Racialization of Politics in the United States

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This is a recent talk which was intended as a  general overview and designed to appeal to the unconverted.

My background is in evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists study how the human mind has been shaped by the needs of survival and reproduction over long expanses of evolutionary time. When we look at how the human mind actually evolved, there are troubling implications for multiculturalism.

Social Identity Processes

There are several systems that are relevant for how people respond to others from different groups, but I think the most important one stems from social identity theory. An early form of social identity theory was stated by 19th-century anthropologist William Graham Sumner, who concluded:

Loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it, hatred and contempt for outsiders, brotherhood within, warlikeness without—all grow together, common products of the same situation. It is sanctified by connection with religion. Men of an others-group are outsiders with whose ancestors the ancestors of the we-group waged war. . . . Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders. Each group thinks its own folkways the only right ones, and if it observes that other groups have other folkways, these excite its scorn.

This essentially states that for humans, identifying as a member of an ingroup is a source of conflict with other groups. We are all aware that around the world there are many countries that are engulfed in conflict stemming from religious and ethnic differences—from different social identities. Right now the civil war in Syria is a good example, pitting Sunnis against Shiites, and within these larger groupings there are particular ethnic groups, such as Alewites, Arabs, Kurds, Druze, and Assyrians. Azerbaijan is no stranger to ethnic conflict, as in the war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. Read more

On Identity

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The following is a speech by Alain de Benoist at the NPI conference at The Ronald Reagan Building, Washington DC, October 26, 2013, translated from the French by Tom Sunic

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Before I start off with my speech, I would like to apologize for having an obligation to inflict some pain on you! Listening to a speech in the English language with a French accent, as awful as mine, may indeed turn out to be a kind of torture for you. But rest assured:  I’m much better in French!

As you can guess, the subject of my speech is the notion of identity.

In a famous passage from his Confessions, Saint Augustine writes: “What is time? If nobody asks me about this, well, then I know its meaning, but if somebody asks me about it and if I try to explain it, I do not know it any longer.”

Saint Augustine’s remarks about time could also be used regarding identity: identity poses no problems as long as nobody asks questions about it.  Identity is then taken for granted; it comes as something natural. Yet a totally different situation arises the minute we ask ourselves: “Who am I?” or “Who are we?” Or better yet: “What does that mean to be an American? “, “Qui est Français”?, or ” Was ist deutsch? “

It is not at all easy to talk about identity, because contrary to what many people believe (starting with those who want to defend identity), identity is not a simple concept.  It is rather a very complex issue.

Identity is a complex subject because it emerges as a problem precisely at a moment when it is no longer taken as something given. In this sense identity is a typically modern subject.  In traditional societies no one ever questions his identity the reason being that it is taken for granted by all, as something self-evident. Hence our first remark: it is at a moment when identity —  be it individual or collective identity — is under threat, or has already disappeared, that one begins  asking questions as to what identity is all about. This is the case today and this is the reason why identity has become such a burning issue, both on the political and the ideological level. Identity has become a problematic issue in the modern and the postmodern age in view of the fact that its reference points are fading away and in view if the fact that no one really knows any longer what makes the meaning of life. Read more