The Cultural Offensive
White culture is incompatible with Black empowerment. So if you are serious about Black Lives Mattering, we have to reform White cultural institutions: their families, churches, and schools. Furthermore, I don’t think that framing these efforts as self-defense is an adequate ground the fight for racial justice. We need to be honest about going on offense, not defense, to win freedom.
If we want racial justice, we have to target and revolutionize the characteristically White pre-political institutions that sustain awful politics and social policy. There is no neutral defense. It’s not an accident that there are multiple books on how to set up the Black church for slavery. Here and here are two examples. Or that there is literally a report taking the Black family as a national project.
Both fortunately and unfortunately, training guns on these institutions has a limited effect, yet if you let White families, churches, and schools do what they do, it ends up with Black men suffocating in the street.
There are a few things you have consider.
- Families, churches, and schools are institutions of public concern. They also can be made into legitimate institutions of freedom, so you can’t just ban them. White people are people deserving of institutions of freedom; it’s just that their institutions as they stand groom them into sociopaths. However, this means that my freedom is staked on how they’ve organized their family and faith.
Don’t listen to liberals about this. Conservatives have a better sensibility about how these things fit together. The Left just needs to start thinking of White schools the way folks in those schools are taught to think of madrasas in countries they don’t like.
I usually soft sell the political entanglements of non-political institutions by talking about the worries people had about Kennedy’s Catholicism — whether Kennedy’s religion meant that he was going to take his marching orders from the Pope, not the people — or why, after WWII, the US requested that the Japanese Emperor reaffirm that he was human and not a living god. When I explain this to White students, I use the following illustration:
Let’s say you are a hiring manager, and you have to pick between three candidates. You are in a position of trust and are responsible to either your boss or the shareholders to hire the best person for the firm in your Southern town. Whomever you hire, the firm is going to sink 100k into training them for the job, a job that includes bouts of extensive travel.
You have three candidates for the job: Kimberly, Tiffany, and Chad. They all interview in suits who look like people named Kimberly, Tiffany, and Chad. Since you know your town, you know that there is a bit of White complementarianism in the water. (By now, I’ve had students had them read selections from John Piper, who puts a genial spin onto a kind of horrifying theological Protestantism.) Complementarianism is the notion that G-d is invested in gender and has ordained men to take on primary leadership and responsibility in a household.
This also means that at any time, a woman can come home to her husband who says, “Honey, I’ve prayed on it, and I asked the pastor, and we’ve decided that it was the best for our household for you to quit this job and stay home with the kids.” (I’ll bet a good amount of money that the COVID pandemic has made this conversation not a hypothetical.)
As a hiring manager, you don’t know if Kimberly, Tiffany, or Chad is going to be in that kind of marriage. As it turns out, Kimberly IS going be in that marriage, so you dodged a bullet by not hiring her. Tiffany isn’t going to be in that marriage, but since she is wearing the same Ann Taylor suit as Kimberly, you can’t tell the difference in the interview. So Tiffany pays a price for looking like Kimberly. And Chad isn’t in that kind of relationship; however, he looks like Brad who IS in that kind of relationship, and the firm will gamble on Chad, in a way that is structurally sexist but financially rational. It’s a good gamble for the firms because, from their view, either Chad is baseline employee or Chad is like Brad, who can go home to his spouse say that, for the good of the family, he has to work 60 hours a week.
Kimberly is living this life, Tiffany gets punished for being indistinguishable from Kimberly on paper, and Chad gets a daddy bonus.
All because of the prevalence of a certain kind of family structure.
Tiffany can do all of the kind of work on herself that she wants, but if it doesn’t include attacking how Kimberly and Brad’s life has been normalized, then it’s just a waste.
2) It’s important to remember that all of these institutions, e.g., family, civil society, politics are functionally and legitimately connected, which means that if you want to reshape the White family so that it doesn’t churn out sociopaths the way Iowa grows corn, you can go at it politically, the way the Moynihan Report want after Black families, or through cultural enterprises in civil society. There is a great scene in The Watchman where Roschach, an unhinged vigillante, is arrested and starts wreaking havoc in prison, with the idea that they are put him in a cage with them, but what they didn’t know is that they were were in a cage with HIM.
Listen, UGA’s administration tried to make up an excuse to put me on probation because some donors got upset at my social media presence. I turned their public hearing into a news event and trial on them. Meanwhile, my classes continue to fill up, I’ve radicalized a few hundred students over the last few years, and trained them in a way so that if anything happens to me, they will autonomously organize using any institutional structure and network at their disposal that will extract its price from the institution. And I did that all THROUGH teaching Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel better than most. I don’t know what other philosophers are doing with their lives.
Foucault had this much right: whatever power you wield, in whatever institution you wield it — property owner, moral authority, participant in civil society or politics — use it for the struggle.
3) There is a good set of Americans who want to eat off of the material perks of the White family, church, and school, even though they find the practices to be gauche. However, they are not committed to the messy, contentious project of radicalizing them.
These people are dangerous fence sitters and need to be taken out, too.