We dont need any more brown faces that dont want to be a brown voice. We dont need any more black faces that dont want to be a black voice.Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley
Ah, what a quote. But what does it mean, exactly? What are the assumptions about belief and identity implicit in Congresswoman Pressleys words?
First, she assumes that politicians, activists, writersreally anybody, for that mattermust bear two expressions of their identity: an outward, physical expression (the color of their skin, their gender, their socioeconomic statustheir face) and an inward, psychological expression (their values and normstheir voice).
Second, she asserts that these two things are related but disconnected, in that certain outward expressions have values and norms that are typical of them and which they would default to under normal conditions (i.e. the natural-state rich person would be fiscally conservative, the natural-state sexual minority would be socially liberal, the natural-state immigrant would be pro-multicultural, etc.), but these default conditions can be lost via outside interference.
And third, she asserts that in these unnatural instances in which a person (in this case, a brown person or a black person) believes in values and norms that do not belong to their set of default conditions, the person in question has chosen to betray their natural essence (i.e. brownness or blackness), and therefore can no longer serve as an effective and authentic representative for constituents of that identity group.
These are all tenets of a belief system based on Critical Theory, a philosophy of social analysis which is not unique to Congresswoman Pressley but shared by many people across the political spectrum today, and increasingly on the left. This belief system is thoroughly complex, bolstered by the work of many different highly intellectual people, and yet, I believe, both wrong and threatening to the very foundation of modernity.
Lets reexamine our reading of Pressleys statement: first of all, what is this implied interfering force that might corrupt someone to betray their natural essence? What is this impetus that might lead black and brown faces to open their mouths and speak with un-black and un-brown voices? Under the Critical Theory paradigm, this interfering force is whiteness.
See, whiteness in Critical Theory is not simply an identity that one is born into (a face), but rather a social property imbued with certain political, economic, and social privileges. Whiteness and the privileges that it holds are tightly coupled, and social power structures have been built-up to create and sustain both this condition of privilege as well as the white identity itself. Whiteness in this case, does have a face which people can be born with, but it also has a particularly powerful voice, one which all white people have access to, but which is not exclusive to white people and is indeed transmissible across boundaries of identity. See, if someone whose identity is marginalized wants to experience some of those political, economic, and social privileges which come with whiteness, they can obtain some semblance of those privileges by adopting certain values and norms which uphold the status quo, as the status quo systematically advantages white people. In this way, the marginalized individual in question sacrifices their conscience on an altar of social power, further bolstering white social hegemony by allowing whites to proclaim that the status quo is universally beneficial and that everyone can take part in it, when in reality both of these proclamations are lies that simply legitimize oppression. They are able to become less marginalized by co-opting whiteness, and in exchange, the white power structure is able to suppress dissent by co-opting their voice. The individual is now participating in a symbiotic relationship with whiteness, and is said to have taken on the condition of false consciousness.
What are some telltale signs that someone has taken this Faustian bargain of false consciousness and avowed themselves to whiteness? Well, it all comes down to narratives. White power structures are, after all, only maintained because people buy into certain narrative myths that legitimize white hegemony and keep the wheels turning. For example, the narrative that American society is meritocratic (or at least close to meritocratic) is one such myth that advantages white power by invalidating the possibility of systemic racism as a cause for the political, economic, and social disadvantages presented to people of color. Those people of color therefore, who do not believe in systematic forces of racial oppression which pervade multiple levels of society, are quite un-POC in their voices, and have been co-opted by the power structure.
Another telltale sign that someone has assumed false consciousness is that they participate in discourse using the so-called masters tools. Critical Theory lecturers have occasionally passed around this term, referencing a quote from a famous speech given by Audre Lorde at a feminist conference in 1979: [T]he masters tools will never dismantle the masters house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. These masters tools include empiricism, positivism, science, and anything else that seeks to perpetuate epistemic injustice by excluding other ways of knowing (such as the lived experience of marginalized people) from discourse. As Robin DiAngelo states in her book Is Everyone Really Equal?, [The] scientific method (sometimes referred to as positivism) was the dominant contribution of the 18th-century Enlightenment period in Europe. Positivism rested on the importance of reason, principles of rational thought, the infallibility of close observation, and the discovery of natural laws and principles governing life and society. Critical Theory developed in part as a response to this presumed superiority and infallibility of the scientific method, and raised questions about whose rationality and whose presumed objectivity underlies scientific methods. In this conception of science, the rationality and objectivity of the scientific method is undergirded by white masculinist definitions of what it even means to be rational and objective at all. In this way, someone who might reject that the lived experiences of some black and brown folk can be used as evidence to support the existence of a larger system of racial oppression, instead citing data which contradict said lived experiences, is engaging in epistemic violence by denying them their voice, excluding them from the conversation based upon inherently white standards of truth, and thereby perpetuating this very system of oppression. If the dissenter in question is themselves a person of color, then they have taken on the condition of false consciousness for certain. Their voice surely is not a voice of color.
If it isnt clear by now why this framework is ridiculous, then allow me to explain. Forgive me if this is suggesting too much, but the whole idea of false consciousness looks a lot like a convenient way to immediately dismiss anyone who disagrees with you as brainwashed. And lets be mildly charitable to Pressley and DiAngelo herelets say some black and brown voices who support the status quo are brainwashed and self-hatingeven so, not every black person who doesnt believe in Critical Theory is Jesse Lee Peterson. Some, indeed, many conscious objectors to Critical Theory exist among POC intellectuals on both the left and the right, and to dismiss them as all traitors to their communities for simply believing in universality, progress, and rationalism is unfounded, presumptuous, and frankly laughable.
Furthermore, it can be dangerous. The Enlightenment project of liberalism was not a white projectit was a universal project founded upon the notion that through our mutually operable senses of reason and our singular objective reality we could come to peacefully agree upon the values by which a prosperous society should be structured. It is jeopardizing the whole foundation of modernity to suggest that those valuesincluding democracy, human rights, and the rule of laware instead products of a self-sustaining hegemonic social order.
Historically speaking, most successful movements towards further racial equality have explained how the emancipation of racial minorities actually fits the logic of liberalism, and policies of racial exclusion are simply failures to live up to the right ideals. When Frederick Douglass wrote What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July, he explained how slavery was in contradiction with the fundamental principles of natural rights present in the American Constitution. When Ida B. Wells spoke out against the vigilantist lynching of black men in the Jim Crow South, she argued for anti-lynching legislation on the basis that black Americans deserved the same right to fair trial, and that the rule of law is foundational to just democratic governance. When Martin Luther King Jr. marched on the Washington Monument, he proclaimed that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. These great intellectuals of black American history believed that more liberalism and more universality was the solution to an unequal and broken system. None of them argued that liberal epistemology itself was the problemno successful movement for racial equality throughout history ever has. To put it mildly, it is an insult to the legacy of these great peopleand to black intellectual history as a wholeto say that these men and women were using the so-called masters tools or were somehow otherwise guilty of submitting to white power structures.
Finally, I wonder if Critical Theorists are even aware that their claimthat science and rationality are rooted in white conceptions of realityis exactly what white nationalists want people to believe. Its absurdly ironic, in an incredibly dark and slightly humorous sort of way. Both Critical Theorists and white nationalists share in this view that the natural state of black discourse is anti-positivist, except that while Critical Theorists use the terms counterstories, lived experiences, and ways of knowing, white nationalists describe our discourse as relying on myth, ignorance, and superstition. In both cases, the more rigorous form of discourse is relegated to whites and thought inaccessible to someone well-socialized to a black way of life. Legitimizing this way of thinking is deeply perilous. In an interview with Thomas Chatterton Williams, Richard Spencer, an avowed white supremacist and neo-Nazi, said the following with regards to some statements by a critical race theorist, This is the photographic negative of a white supremacist...This is why Im actually very confident, because maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip. The main reason why white nationalists love this narrative is because it renders any possibility of multiracial liberal democracy as essentially doomed to fail. If white and black epistemologies are fundamentally incompatible, then where is the hope that intercultural dialogue will ever be capable of bringing about harmony between them? Why should they even belong to the same state at all? Now more than ever, we must reaffirm the notion that we are absolutely epistemically equivalent. For despite the disharmony, the suffering, and the racial violence, it is only between groups of people who agree on what reality is that change can ever occur.
Black and brown voices are ultimately diverse, and whether positivist or anti-positivist, pro-status quo or anti-status quo, Republican or Democratic, they all merit consideration on the basis of their real intellectual content. So maybe instead of creating a new POC anti-liberal orthodoxy, we should celebrate a wide diversity of black and brown political thought, and welcome well-founded dissent against Critical Theory. After all, when Max Horkheimer wrote Traditional and Critical Theory in 1937, he famously defined the goal of Critical Theory as being, to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them. So if genuine freedom is the goal, then ferociously pigeonholing POC thinkers into expectations of what they ought to believe based upon their identity might actually render us more unfree than we began.
Follow this link:
Ayanna Pressley And The (Un)Logic of Critical Theory - The Claremont Independent
- 'She was impressed by the rationalism of Judaism': Celebrities with surprising religious backgrounds - Yahoo Lifestyle UK - April 2nd, 2024 [April 2nd, 2024]
- "I think, Therefore I Am", What Does This Descartes Quote Mean? - Exploring your Mind - January 7th, 2024 [January 7th, 2024]
- Jacek Tabisz on Humanism and Rationalism in Polish Society - The Good Men Project - January 4th, 2024 [January 4th, 2024]
- Labor icon Bill Hayden to be honoured at state funeral - Yahoo News Australia - November 2nd, 2023 [November 2nd, 2023]
- Thom Workman explores the roots of the war on science - NB Media Co-op - November 2nd, 2023 [November 2nd, 2023]
- Did the Enlightenment lead to the climate crisis? | Aviva Chomsky - IAI - November 2nd, 2023 [November 2nd, 2023]
- Exeter University to Offer Degree in Magic - Redbrick - November 2nd, 2023 [November 2nd, 2023]
- How Apple TV's 'Lessons in Chemistry' compares to the novel - The Spokesman Review - November 2nd, 2023 [November 2nd, 2023]
- Rupture and Reconstruction: A Koan About Zen Itself Berggruen ... - Berggruen Institute - November 2nd, 2023 [November 2nd, 2023]
- Adamu Fika and persona of the old-school remarkable bureaucrat - Tribune Online - November 2nd, 2023 [November 2nd, 2023]
- Craig Newmark Retired from Craigslist. Now He Wants to Save ... - Observer - November 2nd, 2023 [November 2nd, 2023]
- Is the US turning into a Christofascist state? - The Real News Network - November 2nd, 2023 [November 2nd, 2023]
- Designer John Heffernan reinvented Aston Martin and Bentley with ... - Classic Driver - November 2nd, 2023 [November 2nd, 2023]
- Empiricism and Rationalism: How Immanuel Kant Changed History - January 6th, 2023 [January 6th, 2023]
- What Is Surrealism? | Artsy - December 28th, 2022 [December 28th, 2022]
- Rationalism vs. Empiricism | Concepts, Differences & Examples - Video ... - November 23rd, 2022 [November 23rd, 2022]
- Rationalist Judaism: Anti-Rationalism and the Charedi Vote - November 23rd, 2022 [November 23rd, 2022]
- Age of Enlightenment - Wikipedia - November 23rd, 2022 [November 23rd, 2022]
- Nizari Isma'ilism - Wikipedia - October 21st, 2022 [October 21st, 2022]
- Jewish philosophy - Wikipedia - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Humanism - Wikipedia - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Word of God and Work of God - Kashmir Observer - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- [Renaissance, Science and God: Paradox of Modern Western EducationVII] Individualism and Decline of the West - Greater Kashmir - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Exciting Puranic and Siddhantic Cosmology Conference | ISKCON News - ISKCON News - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- How red voracity will be used and thrown in West: The Communism of errors - MyVoice - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Words Mean Things: 'Decolonization' - The Swaddle - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- When Lancashire was rocked by a 2.9 magnitude earthquake the last time fracking came to town - Lancs Live - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- On the brink: How yesterday's fears can help us move through today's war - OnlySky - October 17th, 2022 [October 17th, 2022]
- Rationalism: What Is It and How to Apply It To Everyday Life? - October 8th, 2022 [October 8th, 2022]
- Rationalism - The Decision Lab - October 8th, 2022 [October 8th, 2022]
- Rationalism - Teachmint Explanation and Meaning| - October 8th, 2022 [October 8th, 2022]
- Martin Scorsese: rinse and repeat self-indulgence | Sean Egan - The Critic - October 8th, 2022 [October 8th, 2022]
- The Origin Review - LFF 2022 - HeyUGuys - October 8th, 2022 [October 8th, 2022]
- No, Critical Race Theory Isn't About Teaching That 'Slavery Is Real' - The Federalist - October 8th, 2022 [October 8th, 2022]
- The Journey of the Holy Shroud of Turin - National Catholic Register - October 8th, 2022 [October 8th, 2022]
- Bengal's Tryst With Alternative Readings Of The Ramayana - Outlook India - October 2nd, 2022 [October 2nd, 2022]
- Warm and minimal: Riverview Courtyard House - Architecture AU - October 2nd, 2022 [October 2nd, 2022]
- Philosophy of social science - Wikipedia - September 29th, 2022 [September 29th, 2022]
- Expanding open access to scientific knowledge and discussion - EurekAlert - September 29th, 2022 [September 29th, 2022]
- Rome & the World: Italys elections and the Church Etienne Gilson 40 years after his death - Aleteia - September 29th, 2022 [September 29th, 2022]
- Liz Truss and the rise of the libertarian right - The New Statesman - September 29th, 2022 [September 29th, 2022]
- Debate: Theres Anger at AMU Dropping Maududi, Qutb. But Why is Sir Syeds Islam Not Taught? - The Wire - September 6th, 2022 [September 6th, 2022]
- My Say: Allowing corruption is a greater danger than corruption itself - The Edge Markets MY - September 6th, 2022 [September 6th, 2022]
- 'Date Me' Google Docs and the Hyper-Optimized Quest for Love - WIRED - September 6th, 2022 [September 6th, 2022]
- Advaita: Beyond monotheism and polytheism - Times of India - September 6th, 2022 [September 6th, 2022]
- Looming threats to Pakistans integrity - Global Village space - September 6th, 2022 [September 6th, 2022]
- Florence Pugh and Sebastin Lelio on the Battle Between Religion and Science in The Wonder - IndieWire - September 6th, 2022 [September 6th, 2022]
- How Affirmative Action Was Derailed by Diversity - The Chronicle of Higher Education - September 6th, 2022 [September 6th, 2022]
- What's the Issue with Classical Liberalism and Religion? - Independent Institute - September 6th, 2022 [September 6th, 2022]
- Evidently, Biden Does Not Know About the False Positive Risk ... - Substack - August 29th, 2022 [August 29th, 2022]
- The Jewish and Intellectual Origins of this Famously Non-Jewish Jew - Jewish Journal - August 29th, 2022 [August 29th, 2022]
- Culture, progress and the future: Can the West survive its own myths? - Salon - August 29th, 2022 [August 29th, 2022]
- William Brooks: From Western Traditions to Political Indoctrination: A Cultural History of Education - The Epoch Times - August 29th, 2022 [August 29th, 2022]
- Attack On Salman Rushdie Manifests Barbarism In The Name Of Religion: Taslima Nasrin - Outlook India - August 29th, 2022 [August 29th, 2022]
- Britain doesnt need a public holiday to remember the slave trade - The Spectator - August 29th, 2022 [August 29th, 2022]
- Manny Montes: Origins of critical theory - The Union - July 29th, 2022 [July 29th, 2022]
- Overcoming the Aryan-Dravidian divide - The Hindu - July 29th, 2022 [July 29th, 2022]
- Kid Stuff: Why Have Artists Been So Drawn to Childrens Books? - ARTnews - July 29th, 2022 [July 29th, 2022]
- The Surprising Religious Diversity of America's 13 Colonies - History - July 29th, 2022 [July 29th, 2022]
- 'It destroys your soul' - the human toll of war - New Zealand Herald - July 29th, 2022 [July 29th, 2022]
- Edinburgh University is learning the hard way that there's a price to pay for going woke - The Telegraph - July 29th, 2022 [July 29th, 2022]
- Aquinas and the State - The American Conservative - July 13th, 2022 [July 13th, 2022]
- Jordan Peterson is wrong about the postmodernists - Spiked - July 13th, 2022 [July 13th, 2022]
- Had been staying in India since 2015 with a fake passport, voter ID and driving license: Bangladeshi Faisal Ahmed arrested for the murder of Hindu... - July 13th, 2022 [July 13th, 2022]
- The Liberation of the Arabs From the Global Left - Tablet Magazine - July 13th, 2022 [July 13th, 2022]
- Roe v. Wade in the dustbin of history - The Spectator Australia - June 30th, 2022 [June 30th, 2022]
- What is Rationalism? | Rationalism Philosophy & Examples - Video ... - June 29th, 2022 [June 29th, 2022]
- Hume's Fork Explained - Fact / Myth - June 29th, 2022 [June 29th, 2022]
- Is it time for the dream of North Sydney Bears' long-awaited return to finally become a reality? | Sam Perry - The Guardian - June 29th, 2022 [June 29th, 2022]
- It's the economy, stupid - The Spectator Australia - June 1st, 2022 [June 1st, 2022]
- Jon Ronson: In 2008 Graham Linehan told me 'Join Twitter, the place where no one fights' - The Irish Times - June 1st, 2022 [June 1st, 2022]
- The 50 Most Important People of the Middle Ages - Medievalists.net - June 1st, 2022 [June 1st, 2022]
- New Aussie rules: Conservative values have fallen out of fashion - The Spectator - May 15th, 2022 [May 15th, 2022]
- The week in TV: The Essex Serpent; the Baftas; Fergal Keane: Living With PTSD; Clark - The Guardian - May 15th, 2022 [May 15th, 2022]
- These Iconic Scenes From The X-Files Ask if We Are Alone in the Universe - 25YearsLaterSite.com - May 15th, 2022 [May 15th, 2022]
- Rationalism, Pluralism, and Fear in the Speech Debate - Liberal Currents - April 20th, 2022 [April 20th, 2022]
- After School Satan Club rejected by Northern York School Board vote - PennLive - April 20th, 2022 [April 20th, 2022]
- 12 Reader Views on Where America Is Going Wrong - The Atlantic - April 20th, 2022 [April 20th, 2022]
- Bicentenary Year of Mirat-ul-Akhbar: Indias Pioneering Persian Newspaper that Embodied Resistance - NewsClick - April 20th, 2022 [April 20th, 2022]
- The illusion of evidence based medicine - The BMJ - March 18th, 2022 [March 18th, 2022]