- Nov 3, 2011
- 26,542
- 29,770
Anti-cancel culture backlash in general tends to quickly reveal itself as hypocritical and unprincipled.
It ultimately boils down to, "I don't like your negative opinions about my negative opinions about you," promoting censorship of the censorious.
Look at Elon Musk threatening a "nuclear name and shame" of companies who reduce ad spending on Twitter, ongoing efforts to ban historically accurate textbooks, and conservatives passing anti-BDS laws. So much for the free market.
Then you have people claiming that there is some obligation to defend anything Ye or Kyrie says for the sake of "unity." Evidently, this same unconditional loyalty does not extend to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Malika Andrews, or Drake - so it appears that only selected outrage constitutes "selective outrage."
It's yet another reminder that the "free speech" crowd is primarily committed to the consequence-free assertion of their own favored biases - and nothing else.
This is what I find especially baffling about these sorts of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
White Americans comprise nearly 40% of the US population - and many of them will be voting tomorrow to try and cement minority rule on this country for generations to come. White Christian Nationalists have engaged in an unceasing campaign of terrorist violence since the time of colonial settlement to maintain sociopolitical dominance.
Why, rather than focus on them, actively ally with this group in scapegoating the roughly 2% of the US population who identifies as Jewish - including those who are not White? It makes no sense.
We need to acknowledge the role of ethnic queuing and White skin privilege in bestowing relative privilege upon White Jewish people without denying or minimizing the persistence/perniciousness of anti-Semitism and its effects on Jewish people as a whole. Racism is bad because racism is bad; not because some tiny subgroup of White people also derives some benefit from it.
It is frustrating to encounter disparities and double standards - and these most frequently occur when people only care or care more about something that happens to a group with which they personally identify.
I cannot find any utility in "opposing" such hypocrisy by practicing it.
Those defending Kyrie and Ye right now are finding common cause with the very people who howled in protest when Disney was placing content warnings on its own racist movies or casting a Black woman as "The Little Mermaid."
If you expect them to repay the favor, you're in for a long wait.
In the context of the film/book, it tends to mean "I can't be anti-Semitic because the people I don't like aren't the real Semites,” which is a bit like the Jordan Peterson claiming that Michael Eric Dyson is “actually not black - he was sort of brown.”
By that standard, the Tree of Life synagogue shooting couldn't have been an anti-Semitic hate crime if the victims were White.
It's an especially odd belief to hold if you think that the whole of humanity originates from Adam and Eve.
This actually has less in common with Old Testament beliefs than with Enlightenment-era "scientific racism." I'm the furthest thing from a religious scholar, so I'll excerpt George Frederickson's Racism: A Short History:
"The theory of polygenesis, or multiple human origins, challenged the orthodox doctrine of a single creation and “one blood” for all of humanity and could be applied in an extremely racist fashion. If Adam and Eve were to be thought of as simply white rather than specifically Jewish, and if the pre-Adamites were considered black and inferior (somewhere between the descendants of Adam and the beasts of the field created earlier), Africans could be even more effectively dehumanized than through the invocation of the Hamitic curse. Such doctrines might find some oblique support in Scripture (whence, for example, came the people in the Land of Nod among whom Cain found a wife?), but they remained difficult to reconcile with the orthodox reading of the book of Genesis. The theory of polygenesis would thrive only when the power of biblical literalism declined.
The modern concept of races as basic human types classified by physical characteristics (primarily skin color) was not invented until the eighteenth century. The term for “race” in Western European languages did have relevant antecedent meanings associated with animal husbandry and aristocratic lineages.”
I'll respond later when I find some more time.