BulletMagnet wrote:BIL wrote:It's a layup Harriot doesn't squander, with his apologia for the violence they reckon "white people" will make inevitable.
Is this segment found only in the full video? I haven't had a chance to watch it through yet. Off the cuff it sounds at odds with Cooper's insistence that no matter how wronged Blacks may feel they need to refrain from channeling it through violence; if such an end is actually "inevitable", why would she bother saying that?
Believe me, contradiction is this conversation's lifeblood.
Again, assuming your summation is accurate, for this to parse you need to get into reverse-reverse-reverse psychology-type "layering" of what she must "actually" be saying.
I assure you, I am as bone-dry a textualist as you will ever find. I also have to say, it's a bit of an ironic charge you level, given...
It's probably worth stepping back a second here to remember that "race" and "ethnicity" are two different things, and as such "white" and "Caucasian" are as well, though they are, unfortunately, frequently conflated, particularly by the "race hustlers" you decry; while ethnicity doesn't change, race is actively created by society and is constantly being tweaked - almost always to the deliberate advantage of those who would most profit from its ongoing prominence in daily life. Again, I can't read Cooper's mind, but especially seeing as she's coming at this from an academic's perspective, I would imagine that by "white" she doesn't intend to venture into the "lacking melanin decreases empathy" zone, but rather refers specifically to those who effectively transmute ethnicity into race (in their own favor, of course), insisting that an innate, unchangeable part of us can be used to determine superiority at a glance, with no additional thought or effort needed.
...you're ascribing this conversation a level of sophistication, consistency, and compassion it simply does not have. Your optimism re: melanin supremacist rhetoric is especially unrequited; the exchange is marinated in its pseudo-scientific bigotry.
Another notable thing both shared, with very few exceptions, was a from-birth, constantly-reinforced assurance that they were indeed innately, genetically superior to any and all minorities. Not to mention the females of your own kind, if you happened to be male. Hell, their preachers interpreted the Bible to assure them of both (and some still do). The main difference between most rich and poor whites in terms of attitudes towards minorities throughout much of U.S. history, at least, was that the former possessed much greater means to ensure that their dominance continued.
The constellation of powerless, impoverished white people who were shat upon brutally by rich, connected, equally white people in America alone is so vast, it would demand its own post.
As you rightly note, the full story goes far beyond whites' desires for cheap labor and social (and/or literal) punching bags, but I'm having a hard time seeing how you can call Cooper's note that only a small handful of whites broke the mold for a very long time as something she pulled out of thin air. The thornier question is how we deal with this history now, when in a great many respects race relations are infinitely better but should arguably have gone much further still than they actually have, and as I've said I'm very doubtful that she's even passively advocating any manner of race war, especially seeing as that's precisely and openly what the folks most eager to "put people like her back in their place" are doing.
I'm sorry old friend, this is getting tiring. 3; Again you are essentially writing apologias for a video that doesn't exist, while I am referring to the genuine article, so naturally we are going to talk past one another.
I think you are loath on some level to accept Cooper and Harriot's exchange really is the extreme right wet dream I have described, lest you find yourself on some common ground, however remote, with said reactionary bigots (I think "broken clock" is an apt label for them, here). You have always seemed a compassionate sort, certainly not given to making disadvantaged people's lives even more difficult, and I can't imagine you find my castigations of these sorts at all comfortable. I don't, myself.
I would only ask you to consider black critique on these race hustlers; my use of that term seems to have made an impression on you, but I can't claim it as my own. That's what black Americans dismayed at Al Sharpton's antics back in the day called that since-deflated chancer, re: the Tawana Brawley fiasco (recently given infamous reincarnation via one Juicy Smouliet, the gay French TV star).
These people aren't helpful to anyone; not the marginalised, nor the majority. They not only foster interracial enmity, they actively promote and profit from it. You don't have to tolerate them, and in fact, doing so might be more harmful to society in the long run.
Anyway, in the absence of a full transcript, and also to do a little self-interrogation, I decided to sit down and rewatch the video. I've taken notes, inevitably coloured by my own perspective, with timestamps for objective perusal. NB: my
bolding of the terms
"white/black people" (folks, humans, etc) indicates a direct quotation from
Cooper/Harriot.
Thesis: The interview (presented in full) haphazardly conflates white-favouring structures with humans of white ethnicity, becoming useless as anything but casually vicious racial denigration/triumphalism.
Additionally, Cooper and Harriot repeatedly flirt with long-recognised pretexts for violent ethnic retribution, allowing them to cross-contaminate peaceful means of social reform - giving this conversation an ironic, worrying potential to spark dismay if not outright anti-black sentiment amongst would-be charitable observers.
I: White People Are Terrifed And Enraged By The Truth
The first ten minutes are spent constructing a strawman, to explain away criticisms of CRT as
"white people's" knowing terror; both of suppressed historical truths being revealed, and of "racism being dismantled." Notably, the first white people implicated by Cooper are those of her own political leanings:
"[Crenshaw et al] come along with this critique and they say, 'Look, yall gotta be able to specifically talk about race.' Because isn't it just like the white left to wanna have a broad critique of structures, social inequality, class problems... and then not to wanna talk about the major elephant in the room, which is race?"
Having implicated white leftists, Cooper continues eroding notions of white individuality; the possibility that not all Caucasians are so troubled:
"Barack Obama continues to be the ghost, the spectre, the haunting that white folks are running away from, particularly on the right."
Harriot asks Cooper whether the embrace of CRT, and therefore the ugly truths of America's past, can occur without upsetting
"white people;" and rhetorically, whether
"white people" have ever allowed racial progress in America, without ardent pushback. She responds:
"I think white people are committed to being villains in the aggregate."
Aggregate. Late Middle English: from Latin aggregat- ‘herded together’, from the verb aggregare, from ad- ‘towards’ + grex, greg- ‘a flock’. This definition permeates the interview to its core.
Cooper immediately qualifies her statement by citing "Two legacies of whiteness," divided between the Union and Confederacy. She herself admits this is cartoonishly simplistic. She proceeds to poison notions of altruism even amongst "the good ones;" casting aspersions of their condemning slavery, while approving of racism, or being motivated by a craven fear of divine retribution.
Having acknowledged the simplicity of her reading, she nevertheless continues:
"I tell white people, 'Why don't you think about being in the legacy of folks who were not Confederates,' being in the legacy of abolitionists, being in the legacy of people who said, 'We cannot build a country and hope to sustain it by keeping an entire class and race of people subjugated.'" Figures such as John Brown are mooted as a treat for
"white people," who will ostensibly embrace CRT on the promise of claiming more "good ones." Cooper entreats "them" to "start there;" the implication being that the white flock's default state is one alien to that of Brown, Wilberforce, et al.
Cooper then swerves back into the universal villainy narrative:
"The real issue here is... I think that white people viscerally fear. It's not that white people don't know what they have done. They know. They fear that there is no other way to be human, but the way that they are human."
II: White People Are A Menace To All Other Humanity
Cooper expands her cartoon narrative, beyond the relative cul-de-sac of the American Civil War, to encompass seemingly all recorded history.
"You talk to white people, you know, whenever you wanna have a reckoning about [racism], they say, 'It's just human nature! If yall had all of this power, you would have done the same thing!'"
"And it's like, no! That's what white humans did. White human beings thought 'There's a world here, and we own it.' Prior to them, black and brown people had been..." The rest is standard-issue black utopian pseudo-history, ala Hotep: a world untainted by whites, and therefore, free of slavery, colonialism, and racism. It concludes with Cooper's doubly ominous insistence that
"[white people] think black people are gonna get them back. And I wouldn't be mad at the black people who want to get them back."
In what will become her SOP, when pondering racial retribution, Cooper's latter statement is dusted with her sugary "belief" and "hope" that things will be different, "when
we have some power." She is sparing, however; even this sweetening caveated by an acknowledgement that mistakes will certainly be made. Amusingly, having spent this first third of the interview establishing a dichotomy of white villainy and black victimhood, Cooper stresses that a system which determines superior and lesser humans just isn't how black people do things.
We return to Cooper's thesis: white people's terror of retribution at their liberated black victims' hands. Of the latter's faintly hoped-for, inevitably imperfect mercy upon their former oppressors, Cooper says:
"That's the thing that white people don't trust us to do. Because they are so corrupt, their thinking is so morally and spiritually bankrupt, about power, that they fear, viscerally, existentially, letting go of power, because they cannot imagine there is another way to be. It is either that you dominate, or you are dominated. And isn't it sad, that is spiritually who they are, they can't imagine a more expansive notion of the world?"
Again, it's great dark comedy that Cooper, having just finished conjuring a Saturday morning cartoon of the world, proceeds to immediately decry a lack of greater nuance.
III: White People Richly Deserve Violence
Harriot's question - can "white people" ever be coaxed into peacefully accepting an honest reading of American history? - having been answered, he seems resigned:
"If you think about it, right, then what are the options? One one side: they come around to the majority of human beings' on the planet's way of thinking, and say 'Hey, there is another way to think about power, and sharing it, and the way we exist in the world, and relate to each other.'
"But! That automatically means you gotta give up some of the shit that you got... and if the basis of white thinking is that hoarding of power, and that is essentially how they define humanity, and the human existence... and they say 'Fuck that, we gonna keep all of this, I might as well resort to whiteness and hold on to this little corner of what we have' - if you look at those two choices, what should we expect? Because the only other alternative is a radical change of consciousness..."
We now arrive at Cooper's answer, what The Huffington Post and other mainstream US publications describe as a cruelly out-of-context soundbite; poached from a nuanced conversation on societal structures, one not concerned with any population in particular. With her well-fed face positively beaming in good cheer, she responds:
"What kind of question is that? There is no answer that is sufficient! What I wanna say to you is, we gotta take these motherfuckers out! But we can't say that, right?!"
A visibly urgent shift of gear sees Cooper apply another dusting of "belief" and "hope," that "a project of violence" will not come to pass, lest it corrupt black people's spirits. Presumably the same corruption she mentioned white people being, in aggregate, thralls to?
Fortunately, Cooper can take her mind off of white people's aggregate villainy, by thinking of indigenous people instead.
"Here is where I land on white people, most days... [tn: most days?] See, part of the challenge around whiteness is that it skews our view of everything. The world didn't start when white people arrived in America, and tried to tell all the rest of us how things were going to go. There were people out here making worlds; Africans, and indigenous people, being brilliant..." - we trail off into more Hotep -
"...long before white people showed up, being raggedy and violent and terrible, and trying to take everything from everybody."
Happily, there is no need for ethnic cleansing - which would hurt the executioners' souls - as Cooper regales us with her belief that this sheer weight of history will inevitably claim the latecoming universal villain:
"White folks are not infinite and eternal. They ain't gonna go on for infinity, and that's super important to remember - that white colonialism and imperialism has a beginning, and that means it has an end... part of what we are trying to do, is to imagine, what are the steps we must take to get to the other side of this very inconvenient, epochal interruption of black and indigenous world-making."
Unfortunately, this world yet to come will not save us from white depredations in the here and now.
"Does that give people comfort on the day-to-day, when you're having to deal with white folks, and the travesties that they create, and the sense that they wanna destroy the planet? Nahhh!"
IV: Hitler Appears
As some escape from the tormentors, Cooper again turns to the nobler members of humanity; specifically, 19th century black Americans, who had the patently un-white mindset of desiring a better world for their children. And better yet, the universe again intercedes:
"Despite what white people think of themselves, they do not defy the laws of eternity. Their projects are not so sophisticated that the natural laws of physics change for them. When we humble them..."
Cooper instantly backtracks there, mid-sentence, with the same visible urgency as before. She recovers with a fundamentally reworked proposal:
"...when we humble our own understandings of whiteness, it seems like the biggest giant we face, but you know...black folks were out here for centuries, and centuries, and millenia..." - a third helping of Hotep ensues -
"...whiteness is largely an inconvenient interruption. So we then ask ourselves, 'Why am I here in this moment?! Damn!' I think we showed up to help figure out an end, and a way to the other side of this gargantuan historical tragedy that is white supremacy."
At last, we see the first mention of White Supremacy, a political ideology; as opposed to the wholesale condemning of millions of disparate persons.
As much as I'd love to twist myself into a broken pretzel of agony here, I'm afraid that given the preceding twenty minutes, I must conclude Cooper means (what she perceives to be)
the literal supreme power of "white people" - as opposed to the racially supremacist doctrine espoused by a minority of whites; violently resisted and overthrown by other whites; widely despised and shunned in the aggregate.
Harriot seems to have come to terms with his earlier, troubling realisation, resigning himself to pure racial conflict.
"They ain't gonna give up any of this stuff." (Cooper: "Right.")
"So what we have to do is, keep nudging them out, to the Left, and then, one day, we'll realise 'Oh! We got a bigger piece of this thing than them!'" Sadly, Harriot doesn't foresee the losers taking this well.
"The worst part about it is, they don't understand, because of their understanding of the human condition and humanity, they don't understand that... people would share that shit!" (Cooper: "That's right.")
It's Hotep time once more. Harriot seems positively ecstatic, regaling us with the history of Wakanda, and even
"white people's" genocidal despoiling of - fuel for the fires of just retribution, perhaps. Harriot is now visibly squirming in his chair, as he reveals the true, bounteous gift of CRT:
"To see the world through the eyes of someone else, absent whiteness. To me, it's more important for white people to see through that lens, than black people." Of course - remember who is corrupt, here. More choice bits of backhanded charity follow:
"And if they do, they will fear the changing world, and the changing demographics of America, less." The villain of all human history, white people, is offered a way out of the destructive paranoia they have dwelled in for so long.
V: White People Cannot Handle The Truth™
Sadly, whites will be whites, and in their corruption, they will refuse their teachers - a fate shared by the prophets of Biblical times. So, we again return to square one: dealing with the inevitable
"backlash" from the villain, in his deposed rages. Harriot, long accustomed to regarding white people with the grudging admiration one grants rats infesting a house, is particularly troubled to note that the buggers are good at planning; always ten steps ahead.
"They're demonising it, before we even get a chance to teach it, to push people towards this truth."
Cooper has some heartening news:
CRT can save white children from inheriting their parents' racism! Again, sadly,
"white folks" are doing their damndest to suppress The Truth. Yet there may be a bargaining chip:
whiteness is killing white people too. Much like Cooper's earlier invocation, of the inevitable tides of history - why flirt with ethnic cleansing, when white people face death at their own "imperial machinations?" Historically, nothing incentivises like the looming threat of death.
VI: White People Cannot Escape Their Destruction
Alas, it's damned hard work to keep a hog away from the trough, and so, we return to evocations of just taking those motherfuckers out.
"We might have to entertain the notion that A: all lives are priceless in value, but B: if we think economically and structurally, white lives actually are structurally overvalued, to the extent that they undervalue other groups of people."
Happily, Cooper notes that declining white birth rates are handily explained by this iniquity; and what's more, not only are
"they losing," they also "deserve it." In perhaps the conversation's most fragrant evocation of existential race war yet, Cooper paints a summer blockbuster picture, in which
"[White people] are hitting us with everything they have, we are catching hell, we are living through this white supremacist vortex that is the stuff of the horror shows I read about from the 19th century... but we're living through the last gasp of a dying..."
There's yet another of those quick shifts into reverse that Cooper seems prone to, whenever the subject of white extinction flutters into the conversation -
"...a dying way of being; and that's super hard to hear..." And here's the usual doling out of a grace sorely undeserved; she really has this down to a process. Concession deployed, now we're back in gear, and ready for more.
"White life expectancy has gone down for the first time in a hundred years! How is it they won the 20th century, they dominate everything, they got more money than God, and yet somehow, they ain't winning in the clear metrics, we're not winning around the world, Afghanistan is a shitshow... all these markers of American Whiteness around the world, they're losing!"
Attrition will carry the day,
Cooper assures, characterising "black people's" role in "white people's" downfall as that of a relentless tide slowly wearing away a great rock. "The waves win!" she declares, with a visible pleasure many a donut has seen in its last moments.
VII: Black Grace Is A Great Comfort Against White People's Schemes And Tricks
Harriot, despite his earlier wariness of the enemy's fiendish ability to plan ahead, and even refuse bait, is very pleased with battle preparations on his side - despite ongoing harassment from
"white women!" Black people have, after all, been dealing with white people's shit for centuries, and know their playbook front-to-back.
If anyone's going to win this fight, it's them.
Hotep looms, in the nagging question of how dumbass ol' whitey and his lame-ass playbook managed to demolish his way to the vicious racial superiority we have spent the last half-hour learning about; almost suggesting neither Harriot, nor Cooper, have really thought any of this through, or even attempted to accurately model historical fact. It almost seems like our duo are superior to their more outre comrades only in presentation, not substance. Regardless, the important thing is, as Cooper said: whitey is losing, and dying.
Fortunately for white people, CRT is a generous faith,
teaching them how to be more like Cooper and Harriot, and not think so much about race.
VIII: White On White Murder Is Rampant In America
Impending white extinction from multiple vectors having been established, Harriot now seals the CRT deal with a dynamite sweetener: rejecting CRT, and creating "a whole nation of
people like you," will see whites not just fade into obscurity, but outright massacred by their own kind. This, with white Americans already infamously prone to staggering rates of intra-racial murder! And as if things aren't bad enough,
the spectre of ethnic cleansing looms large once more.
Harriot's zeal is understandable; he himself being in no position to relax. Like all black American men,
he knows that if he does not stop his peers from becoming more like white people, he may eventually find himself at the once-unthinkable risk of being
killed by another black man.
IX: White People Suck LMAO
The final ten minutes nose-dives into an aggressive session of mutually race-supremacist analingus. Even by the abysmal standards of the preceding video, it's too tawdry to make this post even longer by dissecting. Suffice to say, it continues the unbroken trend of lazily, at times malevolently blurring the distinction between "whiteness," "systems of whiteness," and "white supremacy" with many millions of people who are white - collapsing what pretends to be academic discourse into inane revanchist fantasy, built atop a foundation of Hotep-brand alternate history.
Highlights include:
-CRT is a mind contagion that instantly rewrites brain matter on contact; resistance is futile (Harriot has another seizure)
-white people are even better than black people at tricking everybody
-white people appeared out of nowhere and ruined everything
-white people made Baltimore illiterate
-black people built America for white people at gunpoint, this taught them the value of hard work
-BLACK PEOPLE ARE RLY GUD, RLY RLY SUPER SUPER GOOD *flapping hands vigorously*
-black people give life to those unworthy of life, that is why
"white people" are afraid of
"us."
Conclusion: If you are in the market for sneering racist vitriol, steeped in classic ethno-hostile pretexts, and certain to drive neutral onlookers straight into the arms of the extreme right, but you need something a little more superficially respectable than the typical rabid Hotep/New Black Panther/Black Hebrew Israelite, this race-supremacist revanchist fantasy masquerading as reasoned academic discourse is just the ticket.
Those who wish to see
less enmity and polarisation in our societies would do well to eschew the politically-correct ball gag, and condemn this hateful, arrogant, hopelessly myopic celebration of triumphalist bigotry.