I hung out a little over at Dean Esmay's joint and said..
I'm talking about a formal movement started by Tim Wise. The basic motto was 'Treason to race is loyalty to humanity', but something of the ugly presumption was that whites had more to lose and more to gain by becoming traitors to their race. The multicultural angle bought into the idea of the term 'African American' = cultural whereas 'black American' = racial. And the intended target of this sort of multiculturalism was the undifferentiated white person who has unconsciously subjugated their ethnic roots to become white. 'How The Irish Became White' being the seminal text in this matter. So the Race Traitors and Tim Wise rode this angle on the premise that if you *ever* identified yourself as white instead of 'German American' then you were part and parcel of a racist conspiracy to demonize every white ethnicity in the Klan era. In other words, in order to become a 'real' American, someone in your family had to pass Klan muster around that time in the 20s, and nothing essentially has changed since then except that you are now unconsciously white. All of your frustrations with what America has become stem from your inability to rescue any authentic cultural value from the ethnicity you have disabused. So if you, mr whiteboy, were authentically multicultural, then you'd be just 'un-American' enough to understand where all the other 'un-Americans' are coming from. Thus your duty to a post-racial world is...blah blah culture.. blah blah. recognize other culture.. blah.
The problem with all of this is that it runs afoul of the premises of modernism and equality *without* regard to race and culture - some fundamental tenets of the idea of nationalism. But this problem gets ignored from the Race Traitor POV because American nationalism has contained so much racism. IE that 'true' nation has yet to be born..etc the melting pot melted white and boiled all the authentic flavor away.
This makes for a moral component to cultural identity which is precisely the goop on the bottom of every multiculturalist shoe. It requires a very tight parsing between race, identity, culture, morality and citizenship - a mix that two decades of American Studies *still* hasn't worked out. In the end their fundamental contradiction is with the Constitutional implication and legal explicits of Civil Rights Law. To wit, we are supposed to be equal *without regard* to all the identity parameters. Multiculturalists must say we are equal *with special regard* to all the identity parameters. And so they are stuck with the obvious flaws, like it's ok to say that you hate women if you are a gay man.
Recent Comments