1. Introducing Hot Air

Kanye West appears on E-News to tell us race and racism is “dated” and “silly,” “it is not an actual thing that means anything.”

Two academics, Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, wrote a bestseller, The Bell Curve (1994), telling us that race and racism is very well alive today, but must be spoken of in more ‘politically correct’ terms: as ethnic groups, not racial groups.

The author Ibram X. Kendi in his recent bestseller, How To Be Anti-Racist, tells us race is a “mirage,” but must be taken seriously since power-relations and racist policy-makers create it.

Of course, in any account of race and racism, the counter-purposes and stakes can be raised.

Students who fail to be good at school mathematics, fail to find a calling in science, or to recognize themselves in Shakespeare, can today denounce an educational program as containing nothing but ‘dead white fathers’ as agents of racism.

The football player Colin Kaepernick can be fired for kneeling during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality.

While the Free-speech movement that started in the ’60’s to effect political change during the Vietnam war, can today impose gag orders in universities over people they disagree with and perceive as racists.

Meanwhile, someone is taking a mindfulness course ‘Getting in Touch With Your Inner Buddha’ to imagine a universal world of racial equality, while her boyfriend plays in a heavy metal band moaning the lyrics “Don’t give them their shit because they want give you yours!!!! ”

Something odd is happening in the U.S. today. An invisible layer of chokepoints is stretched out over the subject of race relations.

Just attempt to read through one Medium article like My White Boss Talked About Race in America and This is What Happened, then read the responses to see if this chokepoint of racial relations doesn’t hit you square in the face.

The chokepoints have always been there, but whereas in the past it was ‘unthinkable’ to address the subject of race, today it is the inverse: everyone has an opinion and can speak from experience, while almost anything can be said in the name of race-relations. (See 2. Experiment/banned from Medium). Yet, people are left gasping from all the hot-air.

I am going to suppose that many like myself suffer from this hot air, turning a community of independent citizens into a society of resentful, competing, self-interested individuals who are always on the verge of transposing their experience of race into dogmatic slogans of cultural pluralism and xenophobic rhetoric.

Blacks are being accused of ‘acting white’, whites are accused of ‘acting black’, whites are being told to ‘wake up’, while blacks are told to ‘go back to sleep’; Afro-Latino-centrism proposes therapeutic readings of Western Civilization, while white supremacists retreat into paranoiac scholarship of the same Western Civilization, etc., etc.

What is this cycle of Hot Air — frustration, aggression, and ignorance — when it comes to accounting for race-relations?

Despite the complicity social media has in adding to this cycle, I want to wager a public format like Medium could be used to write, if not by mere chance, something different and more coherent than the current soup du jour.

2. The Paradox of Race and Racism

In fact, after reading through numerous articles on Medium, I began to suspect that most often, people were writing about the effects of race and racism without ever dealing with the cause¹.

These effects of race and racism, I am calling here race-relations: the experience of race spoken about in ordinary language in scenes of frustration, aggression, and regression (silence and indifference).

But should the cause ever be addressed, should race and racism as such ever be addressed, then the current manner of narrating problems of race in terms of race-relations would grind to a halt. Since to address the cause of racism, something like a paradox occurs:

Modern genetics only wants to say animals, not humans, have a race, but then why are animals not racist?

For example, National Geographic calls race a “made-up label” for humans but admits race exists for animals. Yet, wolves, who have the same species, but different race (subspecies) as domestic dogs, do not come together to segregate and attack them specifically.

What is the cause of human racism if we do not have a race?

What is the cause of animal non-racism if they do have a race?

Does anyone recognize a paradox here? Does anyone, expert or not, know what anyone else is speaking about in using the term ‘race’?

Of course, someone will always try to explain racism by historical or psychological narratives: racism is a ‘mirage’ that comes from people having ‘racists ideas’ (Kendi’s circular definition).

Others might say that racism is when some people think they are superior to others.

Of course, there is the banner, racism, whiteness, in particular, began with capitalism and slavery.

Yet every civilization has its narcissisms whose discontents run deeper than attributing the cause to mere race-relations.

How to confirm this? A couple of different ways:

1. Let someone speak on race and racism for more than ten minutes and listen carefully to how they begin to contradict themselves.
2. Try to discuss race with someone and predictable problems will emerge that cut so deep that it becomes impossible to hold a consistent communication.

One example among many, Kendi claims racism was caused by capitalism, but then turns around and states racists caused capitalism.

The real question is what is the cause of such circular definitions when it comes to defining race and racism.

We might as well admit it, before trying to convince anybody anything with regards to race and racism, we better get clear on how we are speaking and what is being referred to in their name.

Before interrogating the obscene psycho-historical heirlooms of the big picture:

Why is Trump’s whiteness the new racism²?

Why not try to respond first to a more straightforward and banal question –

Why don’t Poodles segregate and attack Bulldogs?

Then build a public discourse step by step from first principles (banned from Medium)

For surely, if we can’t respond to the cause of the latter question on non-racism, the former question of racism, as important as it may be, is complex enough to always be on the verge of hot air.

3. From Historical-Political Narrative to Semio-logical Structure

I realized to begin to treat the cause of racism my language had to become a lot more precise than the natural language I was used to hearing address race-relations both in the academic-journalistic accounts and through personal narratives.

Indeed, if my black friends constantly reminded me that their personal experience trumps my white opinion, my response had always been to ask why one needs to remain at the level of opinion or personal experience.

Is not this revolving door of opinion and personal experience part of the problem?

I do not mean to deny anyone’s opinion or personal experience, but if I want to take the Washington Bridge from Manhattan to the Bronx, I don’t want to appeal to opinion or personal experience to convince me that it is not going to fall. I want a theory of bridges that can examine the cracks and demonstrate the integrity of the structure.

Why don’t we demand the same precision for problems of race and racism?

In the current day talk of race and racism, events are almost always described in opinion and personal experience, then explained in socio-historical and psychological rather than structural or semiological terms.

This is, in itself, curious, since the psychological and socio-historical cause of racism is by no means an a priori established fact.

Journalists and academics seem to avoid a structural analysis of the cause of racism and feel safer with descriptions in psychology, politics, history, and biology.

The reasons for this bypass are complex and go far in revealing the avoidance of some very deep-seated problems of race and racism.

They explain how bypassing any questions on the language of race and racism with referential models — historical, political, biological, sociology, etc. — is one way, among others, of shying away from the urgent questions. For example, why all the violence?

When white supremacists burn down a black church, what is actually being attacked?

Black people or the symbol of black people?

Can a referential model — psychology, biology, history, etc. — begin to respond to such a question without first asking what is so terrible about a symbol?

Of course, someone will inevitably say, there are good people then there are bad people, and it is the bad people who commit such racist acts. Surely these type of boy scout responses are part of the problem.

The real question is what is so unbearable about a symbol that humans will put to death other humans to try to stop it.

What is this refusal to read the symbol of racism?

4. Race And Language

This article was written with a desire to return to a cause of racism that is being avoided today in what I call hot air: a cycle of frustration, aggression, and regression (ignorance, silence, resignation) that automatically occurs in any public discourse reducing the cause of race and racism to psycho-socio-historical narratives of effects qua race-relations.

Such narratives on race-relations, often recounted in the first person and out of personal experience, can be endearing, suggestive, informative, and fascinating, but when a serious analysis of the cause of race and racism is approached, they quickly become insulting, paranoiac, and highly invested demands that become part of the problem they are trying to resolve.

Here is a first jab at a more neutral and structural response: there is not merely an experience of race and racism, i.e., race-relations, but something a lot more banal, a text.

The question remains as to whether there is anyone to READ this text.

If animals are not racist and do not have the same relation to language as humans, we may well suspect the text of race-racism is crucial and not a mere tool for describing people or communicating ideas about referential models.

First Principle:

The cause of racism is language: each language user must not only be able to become the subject of his/her language but recognize the Other, who does not speak it.

The ancient Greeks, for example, called the Barbarian — the chirper — someone who did not have an articulated language such as their own.

If someone does not know how to read this language, then s/he is being spoken by it in an accumulation of segregative and discriminatory narratives.

To actually speak the language of race and racism, there is a minimal reading and writing of it. For when it comes to race and racism, language is not only the cause, but its primary weapon.

While to get out of the cyclic hot air of frustrated, aggressive, and ignorant race-relations, is to get into a different way of reading and writing race.

At least, this is what I aim to show in Part II — How To Read Race And Racism . (article banned from Medium)

Notes

[1] For example, read through the following trending article under the Racism tag, On “Woke” White People Advertising their Shock that Racism just won a Presidency, by Courtney Parker West and neither race nor racism is ever addressed directly, only race relations; the cause is never situated, but only the effects, what is pulling strings is never brought into the picture, rather race and racism is reduced to an indefinite cycle of frustration, aggression, and ignorance of daily life.

[2]For example, in the Atlantic Ta-Neishi, Coates attempts to explain Donald Trump’s becoming president as being caused by one thing — whiteness, a primitive tribalism of white power. This may well be true, but there is quite an argument to make to show how a universal class, whiteness, — the class of all white things — could also be white, without falling into contradiction. To be fair to Coates, he does remark in passing that the foundation of such a universal whiteness can only be established negatively: on the not- white, which is then denied by the racist in stating “I am not a nigger (not-white).” Of course, these subtleties of language and logic do not seem to be worth mentioning any further as themselves relevant to the race problem since for Coates it is a question of politics and race-relations, not science and a logical non-relation. (To Appear — Part II — 2.1 Cantor’s Paradox: The Set Of All Sets Is Not A Set)

Sept. 6, 2019

Los Angeles, CA