I have taken my dog out of the racism pit owing to my dissatisfaction with the politics of anti-racism in the US, but my sentiments and pity remain on the side of good in this. Over at P6, a momentary meeting of minds between Shelby Steele and Earl Dunovant is an interesting insight into one of the things I think is wrong with the whole defensive position. Steele, as you may know, is the champion liberator of the guity white American mind. He has thus become an interesting sort of accomodationist of the black agenda while at the same time decrying just about every black agenda there is.
I wasn't going to comment on White Guilt and the Western Past because you weren't messing with Black folks' head for a change.
But I must say, I am impressed.
You started like a true fan of Prometheus 6.
It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.
This idea of the West is a Western interpretation. I can't imagine for a moment that the idea of white supremacy as a world historical force likewise permeates Asian, Arab or Muslim historical narratives.
Wedme
Recent Comments