Culture Wars/Current Controversies

A Glimpse at the Intersectional Left’s Political Endgame

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Sometimes a movement’s entire ethos can be summarized in a single paragraph. Have you taken Social Justice as your lord and savior, brother?
To be anticlerical in today’s world is not to be a critic of traditional organized religion in the vein of Bertrand Russell or Richard Dawkins. Traditional religion is largely counter-cultural at this point, except on the periphery. A true modern anticlerical outlook would necessarily have to include moral skepticism and antihumanism.
“Near the beginning of Ibram X. Kendi’s celebrated best-seller, How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi writes something that strikes me as the key to his struggle: “I cannot disconnect my parents’ religious strivings to be Christian from my secular strivings to be anti-racist.” Kendi’s parents were “saved into Black liberation theology and joined the churchless church of the Black Power movement.”
The real reason to criticize these “social justice” lunatics is not that they have a snowball’s chance of achieving their goals in the way they envision them (such as Kendi’s Council of the Guardians of Anti-Racism). The real issue is the way in which the ruling class is able to utilize these ideas as a political weapon.  What will typically happen is that some ruling class faction will introduce some kind of extremist idea they have co-opted from the supposed “far-left” but incorporate it into the wider neoliberal state-capitalist paradigm (for example, Kamala Harris’ embrace of reparations while actually functioning as a Wall Street, police state, and imperialist stooge), and then right on cue the Faux News ‘tards will pretend to take this seriously and say to their trailer park/nursing home coalition “Look what ‘dem commies are doing!” in preparation for the next big steel cage match.
By Andrew Sullivan, Intelligencer

Near the beginning of Ibram X. Kendi’s celebrated best-seller, How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi writes something that strikes me as the key to his struggle: “I cannot disconnect my parents’ religious strivings to be Christian from my secular strivings to be anti-racist.” Kendi’s parents were “saved into Black liberation theology and joined the churchless church of the Black Power movement.” That was their response — at times a beautiful one — to the unique challenges of being black in America.

And when Kendi’s book becomes a memoir of his own life and comes to terms with his own racism, and then his own cancer, it’s vivid and complicated and nuanced, if a little unfinished. He is alert to ambiguities, paradoxes, and the humanness of it all: “When Black people recoil from White racism and concentrate their hatred on everyday White people, as I did freshman year in college, they are not fighting racist power or racist policymakers.” He sees the complexity of racist views: “West Indian immigrants tend to categorize African-Americans as ‘lazy, unambitious, uneducated, unfriendly, welfare dependent, and lacking in family values.’” He describes these painful moments of self-recognition in what becomes a kind of secular apology: a life of a sinner striving for sainthood, who, having been saved, wants to save everyone else.

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Categories: Culture Wars/Current Controversies

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