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March 15, 2005
ACHTUNG! This blog is "diversity certified®"
In his inimitable way, Jeff Jarvis takes issue with the notion that white is bad: OK, OK. I'm white. Very white. Pale white. Pasty white. Wonder-Bread white. Gray-haired, white-bearded white. Never-in-the-sun white. Just white. That picture up in the corner is color-corrected to give me the appearance of a healthy tone. It's a Photoshop lie. Actually, I'm vampirish. Bloodless. Practically transparent. Colorless. Odorless. Tasteless (just ask the FCC). White.This outburst of transparency was prompted by a ridiculous remark by another paleface named Steven Levy who asks, Does the blogosphere have a diversity problem?And later, [I]s there a way to promote diversity online, given the built-in decentralization of the blog world?Well, I can't speak for other bloggers, but I try to do my part to promote diversity: And I don't appreciate Steven Levy's lame attempt at cultural shame. By way of illustrating the lameness of Levy's, um, argument, I thought I'd share this fascinating analysis of identity politics: The definition of group identity is at once the crux of identity politics and its fatal flaw. It is necessarily a process of exclusion. To mention two real-life examples, when Koreans decided to be Korean, they decided not to be Chinese, and when Lithuanians rather recently decided to be Lithuanian, they decided they were not Polish or Russian. But what if what one group excludes, the group they are excluding continues to include? Some Russian nationalists consider Ukrainians to be Russian; most Ukrainians disagree. If every group’s membership is determined by the group, than groups can arrive at contradictory determinations about the same people. Identity politics provides no principle for resolving these jurisdictional disputes.Well, I'll say this for Levy: skillful though he may be at the politics of shame, unlike Ward Churchill at least he isn't pretending to be other than white. I think he'll end up doing little more than scolding his own choir. Once scolded into submission, his choir may demand some sort of affirmative action linking (possibly even a "diversity certification" seal of approval) and denounce bloggers who don't comply with their demands. Might be worth another laugh or two. MORE: Levy's attempt at shame brings to mind the question of innate human guilt -- which practitioners of shame sometimes attempt to harness for political ends. Wretchard at the Belmont Club offers his personal speculation that guilt may be a universal human trait: A long time ago I personally came to the conclusion that there was no way to live on earth without the stain of guilt, maybe the concept of Original Sin was a rueful recognition of this condition.While I disagree in general with the general concept of Original Sin, it's more fair than race-based ad hominem attacks. posted by Eric on 03.15.05 at 10:05 AM
Comments
Well, the Levy thing you posted above is wrong on at least one count: The national "identities" he cites are not arbitrary constructs that people just decided to adopt one day. Lithuanians are distinguished by one very great human group differentiator -- language -- from both Poles and Russians, for example. And there is a huge difference, from the psychology on up, between possessing a cultural "identity" and identifying yourself as a citizen of a state. For example, Red Staters tend to view themselves as "People of Humongous Rapturing Jesus" as a cultural identity, but they tolerate inclusion in the American state in the same way that Lithuanians tolerated being part of the U.S.S.R. It didn't make them Russians, though. bink · March 15, 2005 10:34 AM Well, I don't know quite what to make of blink's post. At first I was offended by the description of red staters as "People of Humongous Rapturing Jesus", but then had to laugh at his equating the blue states with the Soviet Union. Overall, I have to give it a thumbs up. byrd · March 15, 2005 10:43 AM I know ... I'm amazing myself this morning with my snarky triple and quadruple-entendres. The U.S.S.R. remark has been quite an event for me today. I guess I'm a bit dull. bink · March 15, 2005 10:57 AM You don't get positive results from diversity by arbitrarily bringing people in, you get them by not excluding. Diversity for its own sake is foolish. We don't necessarily need a short, left-handed lady Eskimo on every committee, and in every blog. What we do need, though, is when that short, left-handed lady Eskimo with talent does show up, we don't show her the door just because she's short. Mike · March 15, 2005 12:12 PM Honey, you're going to have to start warnings before posting that photograph. Sean Kinsell · March 15, 2005 01:18 PM The colliding bullets made me think of having a duel with myself, and I just got carried away. Eric Scheie · March 15, 2005 02:35 PM I was thinking about a tie-in to Melville's Whiteness of the Whale chapter, but you distracted me with that Original Sin bit. Stephen · March 15, 2005 06:19 PM I was about to launch into a rant about how pathetic Whitey Race Monitors are, when I thought I'd find out who this Levy guy was. So I hit the link and discovered he was writing for Newsweek... Never mind. EssEm · March 16, 2005 12:25 AM I believe that t-shirt is totally outrageous, anti-diverse, and exclusionary - where are the rifles?? -keith in mtn. view · March 21, 2005 12:12 PM |
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