Seems like you are saying that the president, senators, and police are Nazis. That doesn’t seem like ridiculous hyperbole? And people wonder why slanders like “He’s a Nazi!!1!” are met with eye rolls.
American liberalism is hardcore paternalistic, especially toward American Blacks. White Paternalism is a form of white supremacy, so yes, American liberalism is white supremacy. If you asked the BLMers to flesh out why they think liberalism is white supremacy, my guess is they would go off the rails rather quick.
BLM had a point, but the people in control of the movement packaged their good point with a bunch of historical and economic ignorance. They can still make a good point, as seen here, but most likely for the wrong reasons.
BLM does coercive things in their direct interference in folks’ attempts to speak in public when those speakers are not saying what BLM wishes to be said.
I am not intrinsically opposed to a “by any means necessary” attitude towards social change. I also do not need convincing that the modern communications environment is not an egalitarian open microphone in which everyone has equal access to the opportunity to air their viewpoints.
But by and large, in the western world, systemic oppression and disenfranchisement is accomplished by lulling most of the participants into acquiescence; direct use of force as a means of establishing or maintaining the oppressive systems is inconvenient and undercuts the legitimacy of the system, so it tends to be avoided in favor of an unequal and distorted microphone that lets marginalized people speak albeit not on an equal footing; and while that is not by any means the same as an egalitarian open-microphone environment, it is dependent, to a significant extent, on allowing people to voice opinions that are potentially disruptive to the system. The silencing is accomplished by ignoring them, ridiculing them, and by drowning them out in a cascade of voices expressing opinions to the contrary — which isn’t a good state of affairs but it means there is the expectation that people do get to speak their minds, and that does set the stage for revolutionary concepts to be put into words and be heard.
Along comes BLM resorting to coercion, silencing those with whom they disagree. It is tantamount to burning down the printing presses because the printing presses most often print stuff that supports the status quo or entertains it mindlessly, with only a few books rolling out that explain or defend a revolutionary perspective.
They seem to believe that they can do this and successfully convince people it is specifically OK for BLM to shut down imperialistic racist oppressive voices, that their doing what they do does not legitimize the use of coercion to flat-out shut down voices that say things that you don’t like. They seem to believe, in other words, that people do not wish to have universal standards about free speech and hold everyone to those standards as part and parcel of their attempt to move towards a more fair world in which everyone is held to the same universal standards in each and every way – that people will, instead, acquiesce to the notion that there should be different rules for different categories of people, that it OK when they do it because they are historically victims and the people to whom they do this are (to some degree) complicit in maintaining the status quo.
They are wrong, and in going after the ACLU they are specifically, on principle, wrong. It is the right thing to do to support free speech regardless of what speech is being spoken and regardless of who is doing the speaking. Not because it is an egalitarian open-microphone world yet but because it is close enough that embracing coercive restrictions on it is a step backwards. Because what they have done can be done back unto them, with the additional justification that what is being done back to them is after all no different that what they themselves have done. They discard their own moral high ground, giving them no platform from which to argue that they should be allowed to speak even if you (whoever you are) do not agree with them and consider them a social disturbance or a threat to the peace.
Good luck with advancing that argument. Those who try to suppress speech either lack the intellectual capability to understand that argument or they reject it because they hope to be the ones in charge of a despotic system.
I don’t consider the personnel that BLM comprises to be my primary audience for that speech.
If an ideology is inherently violent than the believers will be violent and can be arrested and jailed for that violence. Street violence does not empower anybody, it turns people against their cause. People who are being attacked are naturally more appealing than those who are attacking peaceful people. Attacking “fascists” in the street will only help them.
BLM stops ACLU event: do they have a point?
No. Next question.
The William & Mary BLM made this statement via Facebook yesterday:
I, personally, fail to understand how they can square “the right to free speech is a fundamental human right” with their actions to literally prevent speech, and with admonishing the ACLU for protecting the free speech of others.
The people you mentioned were extremely historically significant, but they did not bring anything new to the table in terms of ideas. What they did do was demand that the ideas previously espoused be applied to people like them, rather than just white males.
Liberalism has been fought for by a diverse group of people. But the minds behind it, much like the minds behind the US’s founding, are pretty much only white males. That’s because it was the 18th century. But even now, in the 21st century, I’m not really seeing much innovation in the realm of philosophy as it applies to government and human rights. Maybe we already know alll we need to know in that regard?
No, modern American rights-based liberalism did not emerge full-blown from the heads of white males in the 18th century. There are a whole bunch of different directions that 18th-century Enlightenment liberalism could have gone in (and did go in, as evidenced by the different approaches to liberalism developed by the various heirs to the Enlightenment). The particular form that today’s American version of it took is in fact partly due to some nonwhite people.
You are arbitrarily placing the definition of liberalism in the 18th century and declaring that all its subsequent development was just people “fighting for” or “applying” liberalism without bringing any “new ideas”. Historically speaking, this is ridiculous. The reason that modern American rights-based liberalism looks different from 18th-century liberalism in many ways is precisely because many people after the 18th century incorporated new ideas into it. And not all of those people were white.
Okay, so then direct me to what an African-American liberalism might look like and how it might differ from white liberalism. Because BLM certainly doesn’t seem to like the white version.
You ought to be careful about conflating the actions and statements of one BLM group with the movement as a whole (just as you might distinguish the actions and statements of an ACLU affiliate from the whole organization). It is not clear to me that the W&M organization’s views are representative.
I’d go even further. For me, this incident demonstrates the perils of movements instead of organizations. Back in the fifties and sixties, you could look at SNCC or CORE or SCLC or Black Panthers or Nation of Islam, and each organization had clear leaders and clear missions and clear beliefs about tactics. You wanna say something about SNCC, you know whom you’re talking about. Same thing with the ACLU: because they’re a national organization, the national organization is responsible for the actions of any affiliate.
Black Lives Matter lacks official membership roles, lacks official leaders, lacks an official charter. The folks who disrupt the ACLU are every bit as much BLM as are folks who engage in peaceful protests against Nazis, or folks who go on talk shows to raise awareness about police violence.
What that means is that you can’t reasonably condemn, or praise, BLM for the actions of anyone adopting the label. You can only criticize or praise the individuals involved.
In this case, I see nothing to condone the actions of the folks who disrupted the ACLU; but that doesn’t reflect on BLM as a whole, since there’s no such thing as BLM as a whole.
Hard to define and amorphous sets are still real.
Calculus was invented by Isaac Newton, a white male. Is Calculus a white supremacist ideology? What about Newton’s laws of gravitation?
We should evaluate ideas on their own merits, and stop obsessing about the identity of the first person to articulate those ideas.
:rolleyes: Modern American liberalism itself is partly African-American as well as partly white in its origins. It does not look identical to the concept of liberalism originally put forth by white 18th-century intellectuals, and part of the reason for that difference is the contributions of African-American thinkers (as well as others outside America, both white and nonwhite).
Just because some BLM student activists have fallen for the silly (and racist) reductionist notion that modern US rights-based liberalism is solely the creation of white people doesn’t mean that you have to do the same.
Especially when it’s so easy to get such identifications wrong. For instance, it’s largely a gross oversimplification to say that Newton “invented” calculus; calculus, like liberalism, is a system of concepts built up from the ideas of many different people over many years, and many of its contributors had very different interpretations of what their ideas meant. (Some fundamental concepts of infinitesimals and infinite series that we now associate with calculus were in fact articulated by nonwhite males in southern India a couple of centuries before Newton.)
Liberalism is not an ideology, like Marxism or the like. Its is a stew, a hodge-podge, there is no founder, there are only leaders, and we tend to wear them out. Not a completed entity, but a work in progress.
Did I miss the point where BLM as an organization/movement/whatever has taken that stance?
Or do I need to go “because a bunch of college students at William and Mary affiliated with BLM certainly do[del]es[/del]n’t seem to like the white version.” and then say “fixed that for ya”?
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