Allahpundit did his usual bang-up job exposing director Spike Lee’s attacks on the Clintons and their black supporters as “merely an unusually grotesque example of a standard form of leftist identity-politics demagoguery.” However, I would take issue with the word “merely.”
As Protein Wisdom’s esteemed host Jeff Goldstein has argued:
[T]he social construction argument for race  based as it is on dubious claims to history, memory, and heritage that collapse under the weight of logical analysis  is, at its heart, no different from the blood argument for race, in that both rely on an identical first cause, namely, an a priori belief in what one is.
However, the Spike Lee story demonstrates one way in which the “social construction” argument is potentially more dangerous to a free society than the blood argument.
The “social construction” theory used to be invoked to support Bill Clinton. He donned the title of “first black president” at the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Awards Dinner in 2001. The notion can be traced back nearly a decade, most famously when — in the midst of the Lewinsky scandal – Toni Morrison wrote in the New Yorker:
African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and bodysearched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear “No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and–who knows?–maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.”
For a large segment of the population who are not African-Americans or members of other minorities, the elusive story left visible tracks: from target sighted to attack, to criminalization, to lynching, and now, in some quarters, to crucifixion…
Today, with the blacker (according to the “blood” argument) Barack Obama looking like he has a reasonable chance at the presidency within her lifetime, Morrison has left Hillary Clinton for Obama. She stresses that she does not care about Obama’s race; she merely has an extra bridge to the 21st century to sell and the real estate market has gone sour.
Spike Lee is far more blunt:
What do you think of Obama?
I’m riding my man Obama. I think he’s a visionary. Actually, Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, “Thank God I made it. Otherwise you would have taken her to Soul Man. Michelle would have been like, ‘What’s wrong with this brother?’ â€ÂDoes this mean you’re down on the Clintons?
The Clintons, man, they would lie on a stack of Bibles. Snipers? That’s not misspeaking; that’s some pure bulls***. I voted for Clinton twice, but that’s over with. These old black politicians say, “Ooh, Massuh Clinton was good to us, massuh hired a lot of us, massuh was good!†Hoo! Charlie Rangel, David Dinkinsâ€â€they have to understand this is a new day. People ain’t feelin’ that stuff. It’s like a tide, and the people who get in the way are just gonna get swept out into the ocean.
Thus are black Democrats like Rangel and Dinkins dumped into the same “house slave” or “Uncle Tom” dustbin that Lee once reserved for more conservative blacks like Justice Clarence Thomas or Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. The lines being drawn by Lee are not based on blood — Thomas would seemingly beat Obama by that criteria –  but on social construction and cultural grounds.
Allahpundit quotes Mark Steyn, who (in the context of Randi Rhodes’s gender-based attack on Hillary Clinton) found it “heartening” that the Left will attack its own in the same way they do the Right: “Apparently, there really is nothing personal about it.”
While it is tempting to note that the “nothing personal” notion tends to echo gangster dramas like The Godfather and The Sopranos, it would also be to buy into the mistake Steyn and Allahpundit make.ÂÂ
It can be argued that the exact opposite is true, that the Left’s racial attacks are now entirely personal, or at the least entirely subjective. Blood is no longer the issue. Nor is party, or general ideological sympathy. Rather, the race card is being played on the personal, subjective whim of the attacker.
In the early days of the Soviet Union, “kulaks” had their real and personal property seized, their families split up, and were sent to forced labor camps. However, there was no firm definition of a “kulak.” They were generally freed serfs turned capitalist peasants. Lives were destroyed — and re-enslaved — based on the subjective judgments of the local soviet officials. As Dean Esmay put it, “At one point, all it took was being an inconvenience to the regime to be labeled a ‘filthy blood-sucking Kulak.'”
Here, the Leftist identity politics has jumped from the “blood” argument to the “social construction” argument — but Leftists like Lee reserve to themselves the right to redraw the lines of that social construct at will. Bill Clinton was “black” – now he’s a lying, pasty cracker. Dinkins and Rangel are no longer “black” — they are Uncle Toms to be swept away with the revolutionary tide. They can be thankful Lee lacks the brute force those soviet officials enjoyed.
The “blood” argument — as vile as it is – put a theoretical limit of “one drop” (today I suppose it would be DNA testing) on the sick demands of those who played racial politics. The “social construct,” in contrast, contains no such limit and — if accepted — allows a self-selected elite to attack any rival or opponents with some the most divisive charges that can be made in American politics as fashion takes them. Perhaps the only thing more divisive would be to make socially constructed notions of “blackness” the central tenet of a religion.
“Rather, the race card is being played on the personal, subjective whim of the attacker.”
Ayn Rand was right.
Thanks for digging up that Toni Morrison quote. I’d forgotten “in our children’s lifetimes.”
Also, I remember the Kulaks.
Even more popcorn please.
These fools don’t really think they’re talking to Middle America,, do they?
can you be a Cossack and a Kulak?
and wear braces!?
Pablo…dat place is in Lord of the Rings, ain’t it?
The tactic or mechanism involved in Politically Correct thought definition logically leads to virtual homocide, then suicide – at best. Progressivism, Communism, and Islamofascism are really all the same – also in being antithetical to, and purely bigoted in regard to, the rational, free-thought capacity of individuals.
j.ped…did you know liberal leftists invented the term “political correctness” to mock their own over-zealous practitioners of it..circa 1970 grad students? PC could go both ways can’t it?…like the Night of the Long Knives? in German history. Or PC specialist David Horowitz having it both ways: editor of Ramparts and then official Purger of Academia. ‘Free thought’: what an idea?
It’s obvious there are those among us who don’t want free will — who want, rather, to be slaves to their externally perceived identity, to internalize it so that they are truly only skin-deep.
That way, they can be beautiful through and through.
Missed it by that much. There’s little link between what Lee is saying and what a “social construction” argument would have him say.
Me saying that Obama’s not black (as in American-black black) because his life hasn’t been a black man’s life and his pulling the mask on for personal benefit and political power doesn’t change that is a “social construction” point — how you really live is who you really are. Morrison was closer to it, however dishonestly so. Lee’s only saying “I’ll tell you who’s in charge — me.”
Yes, that’s what most who argue from “social construction” are actually doing, because it’s an argument used by “a self-selected elite to” etc. But that’s not what they say they’re doing. It’s an obfuscating song-and-dance. Lee’s not doing that dance. He’s perfectly clear:
The man knows his audience. And that sounds like something I’d say, but with the opposite purpose — to dissuade people from falling with this “tide.” What Lee’s doing is pulling rank — as much on Obama as on his doubters.
Your “kulak” point is on. “Social construct”-wise, not so much. There’s nothing wrong with the concept; divorced from the leftism that’s stolen it, it’s a potentially liberatory idea (though, like Marxism-without-kulaks, it seems impossible because it seems too late). There is something wrong with the use of “social construction” as a veil for (usually elite white) racial power-plays (and again, Obama’s not Whitey’s favorite candidate for no reason).
But Lee is all power-play, no veil.
Great take-down, Karl! As it used to be defined, blood-based “race” is too empirical a tool for the globe’s neo-tribalists.
In order to supplant the non-winner issue of “class” with their stew of abstracted patronage-groups (or tribes), the Progressive movement knows it must redefine the term “race” to mean any group-signifier or uniform. Hew else could anti-Muslim sentiment be recast as “racism?”
Basically, the signifier, or label, that they assign to their tribes must be unassailable, hence the Prog’s tendency to hue to subjective, un-testable constructs when naming their tribes.
This unassailability means that an approved Prog ‘group’ (designed, presumably to afford protection to the neo-tribe) must conform to the Prog’s format: first, the subject patronage-group must align its advocacy with the Prog’s global policy-goals (ie. vote Democrat(ic), support “Global Warming”), and, two, the subject group must be willing to wear, or organize around, their assigned team-tag.
For instance, it’s not enough for a group like, say, urban, leftist Gays, to embrace the Prog’s anti-Christian, anti-Republican program to be assigned a tribal-identity in Prog-land. No, this patronage must adopt and flaunt an inflammatory tag to advertise their disgruntlement in society, such as the divisive “Queer” label, too.
Only through this type of bilateral affirmation, can both the “makers” and the “maked” arrogate to their lowly political grievance-group the prioritized status of “oppressed race.”
In the end, it seems as if some folks simply don’t want Americans to be ‘free-agents’ anymore. They don’t want us to freely choose which beneficiary-benefactor patronage-groups we join or leave as individuals. These people believe, I guess, that our citizens’ free-wills should be subordinated, slave-like, to a raft of select “Neo-Sheiks” (like a Spike Lee or an Obama).
OT, kind of: my guess is Spike Lee wouldn’t have liked Obama’s Grandmother much, either. In fact, I know there is a green-helmeted dude in Lebanon who’d gladly pose Gramma-Obama’s dead body in front of a crushed tricycle – if it would highlight one of the Prog’s ‘teachable moments’ about “Race.”
Crazy, huh?
“…one final question? Is it true, as Spike Lee claimed, that you intend to (quote) make these honkey muthafuckas back off a brothah?…”
Where’s the white wimmin at?
I hear what psycho is saying here. But I’m not sure we can have “social construct” theory without the Leftism that animates and enables it. The personal being the political and all. It is, at its core, a means of asserting control, because whoever controls its parameters at any given time — whomever is “allowed” to define who’s in and who’s out — is able to gerrymander the world to his or her liking.
There’s a reason some of us who understand and appreciate the linguistic turn continue to remind people that “things as they are” is empirical and not open to debate, even if “truth,” its man-made linguistic daughter, is too often these days treated as some sort of concubine by house guests who realize daddy is either too busy or hoary to notice — and that the neighbors, rather than stepping in and putting a stop to the abuse, just might want a piece of that ass their own selves!
Via Instapundit, another example of a fellow traveler getting kicked off the bus.
Ultimately, of course, there can be only one. One guy gets to say what reality is, and everyone else has to follow his lead. That doesn’t absolve the followers for having willed him into power in the first place though.
Note the description of the charge:
Ramirez-Sliwinski’s $75 ticket was for “disorderly conduct,” which Kilbourne defined as, “when a person does something that alarms or disturbs another.”
I think that every time a politician gives a speech, he should be fined $75 for disorderly conduct. We could balance the budget in short order like that.
Maybe so, data, but so what? The practice of PC has been around for as long as there has been groupism and groupthink – initially perhaps not even contrasted or opposed by the existence of very many people with the capacity for individual rational free-thought to begin with.
Also, check out a book called “1984” for a practical description of PC and its implications – one which predates that of your “liberal leftists” – to whom I would conceed some insight, whoever they might be. However, one question would be, what did these insightful LL’s then do with this insight? David Horowitz shows and tells what he did.
But perhaps some became – or at least resemble – the cynical controllist meme-generators who now provide the purely manipulative ad hoc “think” which our current Faux Liberal Cultists now perseverate on command and ad nauseum – given their underlying subrational capacities, which amount to no more than thought chaos.
Yes, I speak of those very groupists such as yourself, data, with your incessant blather, mostly about nothing=yourself.
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You guys are way to too together this early in the morning.