A little bit about this phenomenon and why it happens (thread) https://t.co/lFzFlLydek
— David Reaboi (@davereaboi) September 4, 2020
Used to be that if you really admired or were interested in another culture, you were encouraged to explore it. History is full of people who deeply revered and studied cultures different from their own—some would even move to another part of the world.
This was not all that uncommon. And a white guy living in Japan and speaking and living as a Japanese didn’t happen every day—but Japanese understood it as a sign of respect and reverence. He was like an earnest convert.
This happened all the time in the US, of course, as people from elsewhere would come here, learn the language and fall in love with American culture. (That is, when there was a common culture worthy of respect or love.)
A black studies professor didn’t really need to be black, like a German professor could be from Russia. Do they know the subject matter? Can they teach it? Ok, great.
But identity politics radicalized all that, destroying the concept of “culture” and replacing it with “race.”
You can’t demonize and make a political assault on the white/western majority culture (which is the political end-goal) on the basis of their race if you admit that (a) races inc many cultures, and (b) cultures inc many races. Way too complex and messy. (And real.)
So it became such that, as say a white man, you could never “understand” what it means to be black and female (and and and). Shit, you shouldn’t when have the right to talk about it, much less teach a class in it.
So that impulse to learn and immerse yourself in another culture—which, again, used to be considered a really beautiful thing!—was forced into a place where, in order to do it, you had to rewrite and lie (even to yourself) about basic facts of your life.
The woke obsession with race and blood and experience inevitably lead to women like this, who no longer had the intellectual equipment to understand that curiosity about and reverence for The Other is ok.
This is another thing to blame on Edward Said, who launched an attack on “orientalist” scholars of the Islamic world who were not from the Middle East and yet had devoted their lives to its study. He was an intellectual criminal.