Are there any good books that can explain:

It's not worth it

All this shit happened because people decided narratives are more important than analysis. Now we have an environment where assertions are just as important as actual arguments because reasons

You don't need narratives and "dialectics" to get that racism is bad. I wish leftists would realize that they're fucking around with fire and that it will destroy them eventually.

Yeah after growing up in a climate ripe with that form of identity based call-out dialectic it was super eye-opening to read Foucault and realize where most of that sort of language came from. At the same time, however, I would not write off Foucault. I do agree with you that the couching of relations in the terms of Foucault does blow major ass.

post-modernism is inherently a right-wing ideology and the dismantling of objective forms of truth does make way for culture war arguments and the like, this, however, does not make the entire dialectic useless for fighting certain forms of oppression imo

didn't Foucault btfo identity politics?

leftist discourse has forsaken the dialectic for uncontestable statements of radical alterity. It's all about fixed identity-categories and according said categories the 'proper' recognition.

In certain ways, yes, but still his terms of systems of power etc are weirdly still the main way that the centrist sort of idpol warrior argues

>thinking this garbage isn't spreading everywhere into every facet of life

>the concept of white privilege
it is simply this. privilege is an intersectional social dynamic (meaning it is possible to be privileged in one area and disadvantaged in another, it is little more than a social science term for what in RPG logic is called "Stats"). White skin privilege provides (even in mixed race individuals) a observable, phenomenal political advantage while also providing observable, phenomenal biological disadvantage (sun burn more easily, skin cancer more readily). White skin privilege is independent of European heritage and does not extend to include genetic abnormalities which result in pale skin, such as albinism, which often sets one up for persecution.

>why race is more important than class in the fight for social justice.
I wouldn't say it is, though some leftists do. Race is tied up with class, but the overlap isn't 100%. it is not a matter of consensus on the left any more than anything is a matter of consensus on the right. Some leftists say idpol gets in the way of economic reforms (in America, for instance, repealing citizens united and ending the seven military interventions has taken a back seat to idpol so ridiculous that it is easily satired by the reactionary factions).

>why its okay for POC to hurl abuse at me
it isn't. This is an evident strawman. I'm sorry if some leftists got uppity or violent with you, but it is evident this question is rhetorical, emotional, and not driven by a real desire for more understanding of leftist thought.

> for being white
If that's really the reason they're doing it to you, I'm sorry. That's bigotry on their part.

>(and why I should side with these good people instead of white identity groups)

I've never found anything special about identifying with a race. Then again, I'm a mixed race individual so the nature of my circumstance makes concrete identification else important to me than others. There's nothing wrong with identifying as white, but I would say there's something wrong with arbitrary pride in being white, and claiming the historical amalgamations of "white accomplishments" as one's own. I extend this argument to gay and trans pride groups, though many of them are not understanding where I'm coming from due to the euphoria of finally not being total pariahs overriding thier cognitive patience for nuanced argument. That's life.

American identity politics takes up a lot after french post structuralism, although in a bizarre, mangled secondhand way. Many Derridan terms ended up in the social justice lexicon as well. My guess is these ideas found their way to America in the 80s, were they merged with native calvinist traditions, post 1960s social movements, the rituals of maoist groupuscles, ESALEN and Werner Erhardt's EST. Eventually they coalesced into some sort of 'self evident' dogma that bears little relation to its left bank Nietzsche wannabe forebears .

If only it got caught up in the ethics of the Yeshuists.

>And why do you check the privilege of thy brother,
>but considerest not thine own privlege

how about YOU leave your house and see for yourself that this shit is everywhere, not just online

Then it is ultimately the capitalists that are seeding it into society. This probably doesn't apply to me because I'm not American and idpol is limited to upper class inner city kids.

>meaning it is possible to be privileged in one area and disadvantaged in another
People keep saying this, but leftists don't apply it consistently. They talk about being white like it's an automatic win card in life (it's not).

Also white privilege isn't privilege, it's should be the standard. I shouldn't feel guilty about any of it. Yes it's an advantage in some sense, but society isn't a zero-sum game. Another issue is that they make it out like it's transcendent, when in reality it's just a term for a family resemblance of very different trends that don't all coincide. Yeah it sucks to be black, but there's no conspiracy or "invisible knapsack" responsible - it's just the way things worked out with slavery and reconstruction and so on. Societies as a whole don't have intentionality.

>it isn't. This is an evident strawman.
But leftist still argue that it's "not that bad compared to X problem minorities face" - which may be true, but you're calling into question the validity of EVERY SINGLE PROBLEM you're out to solve in society since there's always going to be someone else that has it much worse than you.

>That's bigotry on their part.
This is the crux of the "woke left". It's just racial essentialism all over again, but with "social constructs" instead of "genes." There's no practical difference there in the scheme of things.

>I've never found anything special about identifying with a race.
Yeah, but these people SHOEHORN their identity into everything like it's the most important thing about them, and then just bring up historical atrocities that they had no part in to justify it.

If the most important thing about your identity is your gender, race, or sexual orientation, you are a boring fucking person.

>though many of them are not understanding where I'm coming from due to the euphoria of finally not being total pariahs overriding thier cognitive patience for nuanced argument
Because they've been trained to think that historical oppression is a trump card in all situations, because that's apparently the only way to solve inequality, or something like that.

But the people who don't leave the house and don't consume the media are at the forefront of the non-indoctrinated population.
Why would you want them to leave the house?

maybe I can finally get some kind of answer here: what have white people ever done for me? I'm white and I see no reason to value other white people more than other people of other kinds, because they never really did anything for my family or myself as far as I can tell

I have never seen this in real life
granted I mostly go to work and appointments, but some of my coworkers are very opinionated, and none of them have acted like that, or even very political at all

>People keep saying this, but leftists don't apply it consistently.
No political group applies their ideology consistently. Realpolitik has almost nothing to do with ideological purity, and most people are pawns driven by icons and slogans, not ideological consistency. Most people don't even know the word ideology. I'm not trying to be edgy, this is in my experience of social discourse among the proletariat, left, right center, authoritarian, libertarian. Doesn't matter. Abstract understanding is rare, and most people treat politics like a drunken night at a ball game. Only they give the ball game more passion.

>Also white privilege isn't privilege, it's should be the standard.

Don't have a short rebuttal for this. I don't want to assume what your understanding of white privilege entails.

>I shouldn't feel guilty about any of it.
No. You shouldn't. Nor should you be realistically expected to deconstruct it. Nor should rich people be expected to not seek out legal loopholes to exploit. Nor should capitalists be expected not to outsource jobs. Nor should leftists be expected not to resist all of these phenomena, and attempt to reconstruct them for the sake a more egalitarian social order. Leftist reformists should be viewed as game devs who try to balance the classes, and by doing so, piss off each and every player equally, thus proving that they did it correctly.

>Yes it's an advantage in some sense, but society isn't a zero-sum game.
My understanding is that the designation of a "zero sum game" is meant to be applied to nuanced situations and not large societies. But I'm not entirely sure. Feel free to correct me here.

>Another issue is that '''they''' make it
Sorry to interrupt halfway through a thought, but I'm noticing a pattern in your discourse. hear that? "Your" discourse. Not "their" discourse. You seem to be talking to the popular image of the leftist fed to you through a combination of personal experience, anecdotes of others, the media filters and college campuses, and not the individual leftist you find yourself presently engaging in conversation with. I cannot in good faith speak for these other leftists you keep bringing up, nor can I defend their misguided actions. I identify as a leftist for reasons not typical to most leftists. My goal is to naturally create more people like me. Not more clintonites, sandernists, and SJW stereotypes. Like you, I despise the state of popular political rhetoric.

>make it out like it's transcendent, when in reality it's just a term for a family resemblance of very different trends that don't all coincide.
This is why a true understanding of privilege is understanding it as an INTERSECTIONAL dynamic. You are invoking the proper intersectional understanding of privilege, here and now.

>Yeah it sucks to be black
Congratulations, you are reasonable.

Cont...

Weird, isn't it?

>Also white privilege isn't privilege, it's should be the standard
this is actually my biggest and most autistic problem with the whole thing
when you talk about it in terms of privilege you make it sound like you want to drag people down to your level, not that you want everyone to be doing as well as the people that are doing great
elevating humanity should be the goal of every human being, I think

>but there's no conspiracy or "invisible knapsack" responsible - it's just the way things worked out with slavery and reconstruction and so on. Societies as a whole don't have intentionality.

Correct. Once again your understanding seems to align with mine. I'm beginning to wonder if our differences here are more than semantic. Racism is also learned through all sorts of different forms of experience and indoctrination. Just because it is a social ill doesn't mean perpetrators of it aren't also in their own ways victims of it. To me, a correct leftist understanding understands the phenomena of racism as a systemic institution that exists deliberately to divide and conquer lower classes for political purposes less overt. As LBJ said "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

This is true of any class that gets significantly manipulated by divide-and-conquer propaganda, which serves the interests of a mostly white, mostly male, but ultimately multicultural and multinational financial elite.

>But leftist still argue that it's "not that bad compared to X problem minorities face" -
Speak to those leftists then, or at least wait for me to actually say these things.

> which may be true, but you're calling into question the validity of EVERY SINGLE PROBLEM you're out to solve in society since there's always going to be someone else that has it much worse than you.

Just as software is continually updated with patches and bug fixes, while also having new bugs introduced, so too is society. Society is more like software and less like a permanent stasis. Conservatism has never won even in one era of history because things always change. They don't always change for the better, but they never stop changing. Progressive ideology merely seeks to consolidate political power around positive change which results in more egalitarianism, real or imagined.

>This is the crux of the "woke left"
This is why I argue with fellow leftists. But mostly I argue with myself. We should all as political factions be attempting to get more nuanced in our strategies and consolidations of power, not more buffoonish and taken in by sensationalism. Like the right, I blame a bloated corporate media. Only, I view it as serving the interests of conservative elites while appearing to throw bones to idpol factions.

>It's just racial essentialism all over again, but with "social constructs" instead of "genes."
I find it highly depressing that racial essentialism is gripping both the right and the left. White nationalism and SJW race essentialism have a lot of creepy things in common the longer you stare at either of them.

Cont...

Cont...

>Yeah, but these people SHOEHORN their identity into everything like it's the most important thing about them, and then just bring up historical atrocities that they had no part in to justify it.

A result of systematic miseducation. For me leftism is about anti-imperialism, economic reform, and autodidacticism by citizens. Rush Limbaugh Rightists and John Oliver leftists can only help themselves. Neither of us can help them.

>If the most important thing about your identity is your gender, race, or sexual orientation, you are a boring fucking person.

This is my line to the white nationalists.

>Because they've been trained to think that historical oppression is a trump card in all situations, because that's apparently the only way to solve inequality, or something like that.

Correct. Too many leftists function as parodies of leftism. Again. A failure of autodidacticism in an era where anyone can teach themselves.

asians make way more than whites in america.
by that logic asians should be 'oppressing whites' to abuse the system and whites should band up against asians because they're 'victims of oppression'

and culturally, black people made a lot of contributions to western culture (hip hop, rap, etc)

people just dont like black people for some reason lmfao

First things first, I'm not necessarily arguing against you, I'm just discussing the current state of the idpol left.

>No political group applies their ideology consistently. Realpolitik has almost nothing to do with ideological purity, and most people are pawns driven by icons and slogans, not ideological consistency.
Yeah I never said that this wasn't a problem on all sides. The issue is that, when discussing specific topics like race, the idea that white people can be dis-privileged, or even very dis-privileged, is only paid lip service at best.

>Don't have a short rebuttal for this. I don't want to assume what your understanding of white privilege entails.
I just did a quick scan of "white privilege" by McIntosh. I'll focus on the first 20. Let me classify them:

>Irrelevant to someone who doesn't strongly identify with their race: 1,5,6,7,9,18,20
>Not an advantage or a privilege, but something everyone should have: 2,4,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,19
>Dubious: 3,8,17
All of these statements are incredibly different and don't point to a single irreducible phenomenon. None of them are actual advantages above what should be expected for all people independent of race, which is what the notion of white privilege implies

cont'd..

modern identity politics is not something that can be understood in isolation, we have to look at the society that produces it. Everything is connected. 'idpol' is inseparable from what Deleuze and Foucault referred to as the society of control. Postfordian forms of management and digital media demand total involvement. every aspect of your being is now opened up to regulation. Communicative capitalism relies on the production of identity, on pavlovian emotionally charged patterns of engagement. Despite the superficial resemblances, 'idpol' owes more to for-profit diversity consultants such as Peggy McIntosh, than to Marx or Foucault. It is a fundamentally managerial, depoliticising ideology. All potentially disruptive elements are internalised by the system. Programs such as 'women in tech' are not made for the benefit of subjects, they are designed to produce objects that better serve the needs of machine society. You get pride(tm) parades sponsored by aerospace conglomerates. 'Progress' is an illusion, there is no one at the wheel, no shady cabal pulling the strings, just the blind impersonal force of machine society, lurching towards total annihilation (edgy af i know bro)

Peggy McIntosh
youtube.com/watch?v=a4mjw2cVaDY

youtube.com/watch?v=e-BY9UEewHw

Adam Curtis-pill
bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/843165bf-1e69-3dec-873e-973fc8e604a5

>My understanding is that the designation of a "zero sum game" is meant to be applied to nuanced situations and not large societies. But I'm not entirely sure. Feel free to correct me here.
I've read articles that imply black dis-privilege automatically equals white privilege, with nothing else to support this notion. This is a questionable argument in my opinion.

>You seem to be talking to the popular image of the leftist fed to you through a combination of personal experience, anecdotes of others, the media filters and college campuses, and not the individual leftist you find yourself presently engaging in conversation with.
As stated earlier, I'm not going against your personal views at all. The things you listed are the only possible ways I could develop an image of leftists (leftists meaning idpol leftists, not leftists in general. I actually lean left on a lot of issues).

>This is why a true understanding of privilege is understanding it as an INTERSECTIONAL dynamic. You are invoking the proper intersectional understanding of privilege, here and now.
I have nothing really against intersectionality in theory. The main issue is that I don't see a lot of nuance in general when people bring it up, especially for a concept that demands nuance by definition. It seems like "they" (idpol leftists as I understand them) have the notion that being white equals 2 privileges, being male entails 1 privilege, being straight entails 1 more. Therefore straight white males have 5 privilege, straight white women and gay white men have 2 privilege (2+1-1=2), when this isn't how it works at all.

>I'm beginning to wonder if our differences here are more than semantic.
For the most part, they are. The problem is that semantics matter in this sense, and the notion that I carry my white privilege around with me WHEREVER I GO and that it works in my favor IN EVERY SITUATION is ludicrous. I doubt a lot of serious academics believe this, but the a lot of the members of the public seem to.

>Speak to those leftists then, or at least wait for me to actually say these things.
Again, I'm not arguing against your beliefs, but this is a common rhetorical tactic that I've faced.

>I find it highly depressing that racial essentialism is gripping both the right and the left. White nationalism and SJW race essentialism have a lot of creepy things in common the longer you stare at either of them.
yeah

I've actually told this to leftists. I've said "it's not white privilege, it's not about white people. It's about minority disadvantage. You're making it about the wrong people, and by doing so, are digging your own grave by creating a hostile rhetoric. It doesn't matter if they are more hostile. What matters is, if you are correct, their battle is downhill and yours is uphill."

Look at videos by contra points particularly the videos on white nationalism.

youtube.com/user/ContraPoints/videos

>I've read articles that imply black dis-privilege automatically equals white privilege, with nothing else to support this notion. This is a questionable argument in my opinion.

Not speaking for or against what you've read, in my opinion the biggest advantage whites have over blacks in Amreica at least comes less from the residual effects of slavery, jim crow, etc. (though those exist) but rather comes from the American Republican form of governance itself, which was by design meant to disempower an 18th century agrarian proletariat in favor of educated representatives. Which makes sense at the time, from a strategic and military standpoint of fighting off an empire for independence and setting up a nation among thirteen colonies. A simple majority in the population makes a dissenting consensus held mostly by minorities impossible to implement within the power structure. That is privilege at work. Furthermore, the antiquated system of district-based voting allows this simple population majority to be exploited in countless subtle ways. The incidence of overt racism and violence are down, but the media takes such a lens to them that the systemic incidences don't get covered. For every highly-covered Kapernick kneel and cop shooting there are a thousand tiny manipulations of local political power.

>I have nothing really against intersectionality in theory. The main issue is that I don't see a lot of nuance in general when people bring it up, especially for a concept that demands nuance by definition. It seems like "they" (idpol leftists as I understand them) have the notion that being white equals 2 privileges, being male entails 1 privilege, being straight entails 1 more. Therefore straight white males have 5 privilege, straight white women and gay white men have 2 privilege (2+1-1=2), when this isn't how it works at all.

There foolishness "on all sides" to borrow a phrase from Lord Trump, lies in thinking privilege is quantitatively measurable at the individual level, non-intersectional, and can be used to refute an opponent's argument. Someone being more privileged does not make their arguments automatically wrong.

Just read Ta Nehisi Coates. He's not the best author, but he's the best of the bunch for the viewpoints you're describing right now. And he's hot rn, so you can find plenty of discussion online.

For a more throwback rec, try The Sounds of Black Folk by du Bois.

> Sounds of Black Folk
Should be Souls of Black Folk, obvsly.

The liberal left has no concept of human liberation beyond raising everyone to petty bourgeois post war respectability somehow and 'diversifying' the pool of CEOs and top executives. Which makes increasingly less sense as the whole postwar socioeconomic order is liquidated by changing economic conditions. The first world is becoming a hellscape inhabited by neurotic and atomised consumer/labor units. Identity politics is a symptom of a generalised loss of identity.

Talk about things like representation at the oscars, "the X ceiling" and so on is bizarrely daft in my opinion. None of these things matter to the vast majority of the population, and nothing would change for them if these pseudo-problems got fixed.

Celebrity leftism reads like a reactionary satire of marxist thought.

It is by design that it is the form of leftism which receives the most press and dissemination in America.

Nobody would have an excuse to care about the oscars if they weren't 'too white'. Award shows are pseudo events, their main task: to assert their own significance. This isn't new, Hollywood has always loved self congratulatory liberal pandering (remember Philadelphia? That movie were Tom Hanks plays a gay lawyer with AIDS?) . Recently, however, Hollywood has been showing signs of desperation. Box office showings have been dissapointing, specially when it comes to self consciously 'woke' content.

No, because they aren't systemically disadvantaging whites and there isn't a legacy of Asians discriminating against whites in America which has lead to social and capital stratification in contemporary society.

intersectionality is a fucking stupid and useless theory, limited to talking about vague 'handicaps' while the game itself remains unquestioned. In the end, it is just another way to keep the inane fantasy of a 'fair', 'meritocratic' capitalism under life support.

/ourjew/ indeed
>After graduating from Yale, Gottfried began his work as an academic and embarked on a prolific writing career, which he maintains. Over the course of 13 books and countless speeches and articles, he developed his major themes: the nature and force of history; the meaning and forms of conservatism; and in his “Marxism Trilogy,” an account of liberal democracy and the therapeutic managerial state as the hegemons of the modern world. While admiring aspects of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, Gottfried argues that Marxism was discredited by socialism’s economic failure. In the wake of this failure, Marx’s economic critique metastasized from an analysis of material conditions into a morality play. For the new post-Marxists, leftist politics were repurposed as a never-ending struggle to defeat fascism. Acting out this universalist crusade, Gottfried argues, the left became the afterlife of Christianity. “A Christian civilization created the moral and eschatological framework that leftist anti-Christians have taken over and adapted,” he wrote. “It is the fascists, not the Communists or multiculturalists, who were the sideshow in modern Western history.”

tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/218712/spencer-gottfried-alt-right

I have no obligation to surrender my own self interest for the benefit of the screeching victim class tho

Read Nietzsche and realise political correctness is a secular theocracy based on slave morality and victim worship

>sincerely engaging with any of these ideas

...

Good rec anons

WE

You should read Foucault, as some anons have pointed out. The truly horrifying consequence of this line of thinking has less to do with supposed impending leftist authoritarian state that imposes its radical egalitarianism to the disadvantage of all but the perceived societal victims, but rather the more immediate and already ongoing process of codifying within social custom and all spheres of discourse notions of power dynamics and "oppressive" hierarchies that exist regardless of circumstances. The idea that power is intransient and not bound my temporal and circumstantial considerations is fucking retarded. For example, to claim I am placed in a position of power on the virtue of my whiteness is one thing, but it must be demonstrated how this power is exercised to prove it even exists, and, more axiomatically, in what circumstances my power is actualized.

this post is a hot load of white nonsense
>boo hoo, I'm so persecuted as a WHITE MALE
yikes

Lol what? I'm pretty sure he's criticizing the whole "omg leftist dystopia is here, they're rounding up the white males!" narrative in the second sentence kemosabe, maybe read it again, only this time don't be retarded. And he's not saying white people are persecuted, just that it's ridiculous to assume all white people have privilege because they are white. Jesus Christ, for a literature board there's a marked lack of reading comprehension here.

>"omg leftist dystopia is here, they're rounding up the white males!" narrative in the second sentence kemosabe

I fantasise about apocalyptic race war scenarios all the fucking time honestly. my fascism is post ideological. pure aesthetics, pure intensity. Avenge McVeigh and the martyrs of Waco and Ruby Ridge, uphold Jim Jones thought, drink the koolaid bottoms up. I want to stop being human and become a wolf. I want to tear bloody, still warm and throbbing flesh from the bone. Awoooo! and that means war to the death against ZOG. helter skelter. sieg fucking heil! death to the pigs!

youtube.com/watch?v=UWleIQexoT0

Based

>dude social darwinism lmao

Skip the book. Let me explain it.

>the concept of "white privilege"
A conspiracy theory made up by social scientists to explain why POCs are less successful than whites. Basically "society is constructed to benefit whiteness which is also a social construct". It's post-structural crap designed to be purely anti-society. Which is why it is so amenable to anarchist ideology, because you basically have to be against the entirety of society.

Tbh, a cognitive bias towards white people probably does exist in western society (as a cognitive bias towards Han people definitely exists in China), but it isn't nearly as influential on society as these theorists think. Plus they also want to deny the existence of race as a serious biological category, so racial differences in themselves are completely off the cards for these people.

>why race is more important than class in the fight for social justice

Simply because nearly all these people are bourgeois idiots who think "racism" is far more objectionable than classism. (Most of these people are in actuality fairly class bigoted themselves, as working class people generally don't care for their idpol bs).

>why its okay for POC to hurl abuse at me for being white (and why I should side with these good people instead of white identity groups)

Because ultimately whites are born evil and POC are born oppressed. It's also just simple tribal revenge.

If you live in the West it should be pretty obvious what they've done for your, white people have made most of everything in the West. Making the leap from that to valuing them more is tenuous, because value should be based on current capability rather than historical actions that are in different environments. They also typically have higher IQs than nonwhites, though the causes are unclear, and the methodology in modern studies is usually pretty shit. I think SES is the dominant factor, personally
But east Asians have even higher IQs so you should value them the most and try to breed with one of them or, even better, a qt ashkenazi jewess.
So, you should value white people as a whole more because if judging people based on individual merits is too hard, then simpleminded collectivism that allows for the inclusion of the lowest simply because they're whites won't hurt your brain as much.
If you describe the world as a fictionalised caricature of itself, where everybody else wants to get you and is only looking out for their own group, then you'll feel very motivated to value wypipo more than other people

>>the concept of "white privilege"
Typically white people get better opportunities, so this can conveniently, but fallaciously, be reduced to all white people instantly get better starts for their lives, which people who have white privilege will assume is being said to them, and some lefties actually will say that. But most will accurately say that if you're white, you are significantly more statistically likely to have a better start in life, and that's just an observation of correlations, as being white correlates positively with good stuff like better education, living in better communities, etc.

>>why race is more important than class in the fight for social justice
Race is easy to see. Class is not. Until people walk around with their bank statements, identity politics based around race requires less thinking and is easier to conceptualise

>>why its okay for POC to hurl abuse at me for being white (and why I should side with these good people instead of white identity groups)
>dude fringe groups are representative of the whole lmao

white privilege is basically the idea that white people have it easy because they totally dominated the world. personally i think it's defeatist and don't respect people who care about it because of that.

I don't give a single fuck about 'the white race' nor about the degenerated remnants of what was once known as 'western civilization'. It's time to hit the reset button. Year 0. Only the strongest make it out alive. You could have prevented this, if only you'd let a man enjoy his videogames in peace. #gamergate