Eratosphere Forums - Metrical Poetry, Free Verse, Fiction, Art, Critique, Discussions Able Muse - a review of poetry, prose and art

Forum Left Top

Notices

Reply
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #41  
Unread 03-19-2021, 07:29 PM
Martin Elster Martin Elster is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Connecticut, USA
Posts: 7,563
Default

Jim, I, too think he has a finger on the root problems. I just saw this article, which just came out. It is totally related to this thread.

Quote:
Translating Amanda Gorman

Is experiencing white supremacy all she is? And if not, why do her translators have to be people just like her?

John McWhorter

Our racial reckoning has put many new ideas afloat. One of them is that a black female poet’s work should only be translated by other black female people. Or at least black people.

And so, a Dutch translator had the assignment of translating new American youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman’s work withdrawn, and now a Catalan translator has had his translation of her Inauguration poem, which he had already completed, denied publication.

The logic is supposed to be that only someone of Gorman’s race, and optimally gender, can effectively translate her expression into another language. But is that true? And are we not denying Gorman and black people basic humanity in – if I may jump the gun – pretending that it is?

After all, we all know that overall, a vast amount of translation is happening all the time, and always has, by people quite unlike the original authors. The Anglophone experiences Tales of Genji as rendered by someone not Japanese. We experience the Bible through the work of people quite thoroughly un-Mesopotamian.

Notice I didn’t mention Shakespeare translated into other languages. According to the Critical Race Theory paradigm that informs this performative take on translating Gorman, Shakespeare being a white man means that white translators of his work are akin to him, while non-white ones, minted in a world where they must always grapple with whiteness “centered,” are perfect bilinguals of a sort.

But Murasaki Shikibu and the authors of the Bible were not “white,” and yet we see no crime in experiencing their work mediated through whites’ translation. And no, it isn’t that those books are from the past but that now we are walking on into a brave new world. When the next white scholarly specialist in China offers a translation of Confucius or even a modern Chinese work of fiction, we will hear not a thing about “appropriation.”

Yet a Dutch or Catalan translator of Amanda Gorman cannot be white. To highlight what a very right-now pose this is, recall that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple has been rendered in 25 languages including Chinese, and no one has batted an eye.

Again, some will try that even this needs to be revisited (i.e. a black spoken-word poet daughter of African immigrants in Berlin should do a new German translation of The Color Purple because it would sound more like what Alice Walker, um … wrote? … felt? … is?) and that Gorman provides us with an opportunity to start doing things the right way.

But the question is this: why is it that being black American renders one especially untranslatable by whites?

The idea is that American blackness is a special case here. The legacy of white racism, and manifestations of white supremacy still present, mean that the rules are different when it comes to who should translate a black person’s artistic statements. Our oppression at the hands of whites is something so unique, something so all-pervasive, something so all-defining of our souls and experience, that no white person could possibly render it in another language.

This is a fair evocation of what our modern paradigm on blackness teaches us. Power differentials, and especially ones based on race, are all and everything, justifying draconian alterations of basic procedure and, if necessary, even common sense.

However, note how much this portrait diminishes, say, Gorman. To her credit, she was not the one who suggested the Dutch translator be canned. After all, are we really to say that this intelligent young human being’s entirety is the degree to which she may experience white “supremacy”?

Watch out for the “Nobody said that” game. No, no one states that experience of white supremacy is all she is, but if we insist that her poetry can only be translated by someone who has experienced it, this means that the experience of white supremacy is paramount in our estimation of her. Example: we presumably don’t care if a white translator might be better at evoking other aspects of her such as her youth, her sense of scansion – what matters most is her oppression.

It goes further. Are black women’s experiences of white supremacy from one nation to another identical? Consult more than one interview with black Nigerian Chimamanda Adichie to find the answer. To assume that a black Dutch daughter of Surinamese immigrants in Amsterdam is “black” in the same way as Amanda Gorman, with the same experiences, background sentiments, assumptions, etc. is dehumanizing of diversity among people of color. Not to mention localist, parochial – although I understand the white publishers’ urge to show that they are doing the “work” by figuring that the “supremacy” their kind exert worldwide occasions the same plain old ache anywhere it lands.

But even more. The Catalan translator, Victor Obiols, has translated to acclaim Oscar Wilde and yes, Shakespeare, and is not just a poet but a lyricist. He has also translated a book about Miles Davis with his non-black self! Suppose he is the better artist than the presumably black and young translator the publisher taps instead? We are to assume that the translator’s blackness trumps all questions as to artistic rank. This is a view willfully numb to the discrimination, the sensitivity, the intelligence inherent to art and its evaluation. That is, the art to which Gorman is devoting a career and a soul. And all for what?

Acknowledging that racism exists.

And finally, exactly what might a white translator get wrong? Where are the demonstrations of where a white translator of a black poet or novelist’s work slipped? And as to those who might dredge some up in response to my asking, what’s important is that in this controversy no one is bringing them up (at least to prominent view) and no commentators have seemed especially likely to have any examples on the tips of their tongues or iPhones. We are dealing in a hypothetical.

Here’s an illustration of the peril – and emptiness – in hypotheticals like this. Samuel L. Jackson claimed in an interview about about Get Out that Daniel Kaluuya, as a British rather than American black man, was incapable of accurately portraying how a black man actually feels when encountering a police car. This was invaluable in two ways.

First, note that Jackson wants to split hairs even more than our publishers, so that you have to be black American to “translate,” as it were, a black American experience – despite that Brits Idris Elba and Thandie Newton do pitch-perfect renditions of black Americanness to no complaint.

But second, note that we seek for Jackson to show just where Kaluuya fell short – and obviously, he couldn’t. Could those disqualifying the Dutch translator – nonbinary, for the record, and thus likely well-versed in what it is to be “different” and even mistreated – seriously point out just how they were going to go wrong? If Obiols ever shows us his Gorman translation, where in it will anyone be able to say that he chose terms or rhythms or nuances too “white”? We might also keep in mind that he is Catalonian – he has known, in relation to Spain, certain matters having to do with subordination and threatened otherness. But no matter.

This is how we are to process blackness according to the tenets of Critical Race Theory. A fashionable current among its adherents is to claim that their critics are merely misinformed churls seeking Twitter hits. But if CRT adherents cheer this decision about Gorman’s translators, they are showing that misinformation is not the only reason so many are devoting themselves to reigning in CRT’s excesses. The grounds for firing these translators – and we can be sure, others over the next few weeks – are thoroughly contestable by thoroughly unchurlish people including ones who care naught about Twitter.

The grounds for these dismissals are a posture, handy for those with a need to show that they understand what white supremacy is, while turning a blind eye to their reduction of Gorman to a thin, pitiable abstraction. Onward indeed.
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p...KUPhRt3S99_ra4
Reply With Quote
  #42  
Unread 03-20-2021, 01:31 AM
Brian Allgar Brian Allgar is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Paris, France
Posts: 5,391
Default

The logical reductio ad absurdum is that only the author should be allowed to translate his or her own work, since no one else has exactly the same combination of ethnicity and personal experience. Duh! The cretins strike again.
Reply With Quote
  #43  
Unread 03-20-2021, 02:36 AM
Mark McDonnell Mark McDonnell is offline
Member
 
Join Date: May 2016
Location: Staffordshire, England
Posts: 4,420
Default

Hi Julie,

I'm back, ha! Thanks for your kind words and for being so gracious in accepting some of my points. That’s rare. I probably said most of what I had to say about the Anders Carlson-Wee and Michael Dickman poems in threads discussing them at the time. The former is more pertinent to this current debacle because it concerns a poet speaking through rather than about someone from a different racial background so I’ll say a bit more about it. I still think the criticism of Carlson-Wee's poem was unnecessary in the level of its vitriol and more importantly that the apology by The Nation was not only a bad decision but in its wording one of the more stupid and craven things I've heard poetry editors say. The poet's own apology was understandable, if disappointing. He just wanted to get a mob off his back. But the editors words, "As poetry editors, we hold ourselves responsible for the ways in which the work we select is received" still make me rub my eyes in disbelief. I also wonder about this statement: "We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem". Really? Whole communities were affected and caused pain by this little poem? Where is the evidence of that? Roxanne Gay’s criticism that “Framing blackness as monolithic is racist. It is lazy” looks quite ironic in the light of this statement. I think the editors are the ones guilty of this by assuming that if a bunch of people on Twitter (both black and white btw) claim offense then that must mean that all black people (or disabled people – the poem was also accused of “ableism”) would be equally pained and offended. To me, this seems more a case of “framing blackness as monolithic” than anything the poem does. I think to read the poem and conclude, as Gay seems to, that the poet thinks all black people talk like this and/or are homeless is to read it in very bad faith. Here it is (with its now permanently appended apology)

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.the.../how-to/tnamp/

I’m afraid I actually quite liked the poem. I think it’s a pretty effective little persona poem or character sketch that does a lot in a short space. Nothing about the voice seemed inauthentic to me and nothing about the representation of the character felt stereotyped or derogatory. The speaker comes across as intelligent, justifiably cynical and yet compassionate towards the unseen listener of the poem’s dramatic monologue. Most of the criticism seemed to be that the poet had dared to use AAVE at all. Roxanne Gay initially tweeted “Don’t use AAVE. Don’t even try it. Know your lane.” Some, including Gay, also claimed their objection was that the poem used AAVE incorrectly. But I couldn’t find one critic, including Gay, who backed these claims up with actual linguistic evidence. Prominent black linguist John McWhorter, who has since popped up on this thread, seemed to think the poem’s use of AAVE was authentic enough.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...nglish/566867/


I don’t think Carlson-Wee’s poem is amazing, but I think it passes all four of your factors in “determining whether getting out of one's lane is acceptable” and I would be confident in saying why (don't worry, I'm not going to -- unless you ask):

Quote:
1. Goodwill vs. Selfishness. Does the artist's main motive in attempting this representation seem to be that of promoting deeper or broader understanding? Or does the artist seem to be more motivated by a desire to exploit a trendy or exotically novel theme for profit (monetary, political, or notoriety/publicity-wise)?

2. Enough Respect to Do One's Homework. Has the artist done the proper research to make sure that the depiction does not mis-represent any aspects of the other culture, gender, etc.? Or is the artist simply relying on readymade clichés and unexamined stereotypes?

3. The Fairness of Any Implied Broader Implications. Are the strengths and flaws of these fictional characters--and yes, all fictional characters must be flawed in order to have any verisimilitude or interest--likely to be taken as applying to others with the same cultural or gender traits? And if so, is that a fair implication?

4. Quality of the Resulting Work. Obviously it's much easier to look kindly on a depiction if it is part of something excellent.
Of course, all of these factors are up for debate and the last one is particularly subjective. But the likelihood of someone like an Ishiguro emerging in the future, someone successfully and brilliantly “getting out of their lane”, will be slim if the price for failure is to be public humiliation, forced self-abasement and begging for forgiveness. Why would any well-meaning writer ever bother trying? Autobiography and lived experience will be the only acceptable forms of imaginative fiction. Ok, I’m slippery sloping…am i?

The idea that “people in privileged groups should not try to speak for people who have traditionally not had the experience of speaking for themselves, but who may be perfectly capable of speaking for themselves now” just seems like an unworkable edict to me. Carlson-Wee was largely attempting to speak for, and about the issues facing, homeless people, not black people. He chose to write in a voice suggesting his persona was black, presumably because in the US you are seven times more likely to experience homelessness if you are black. Homeless people are a group who still don’t have much opportunity to speak for themselves, aren't they? How do we know that the poet had not experienced homelessness himself or that someone close to him or in his family had? Did anyone bother to ask? Who, under the edicts of these literary rules, would be more capable and justified to write about black homelessness – a white man who had experienced homelessness or a black writer who had not? Would skin colour still be the deciding factor? What if a white poet had a black close friend who had experienced homelessness but had no aptitude for writing? Would it really be wrong for his poet friend to try to give voice to their experience? The idea of making taboo the poetic instinct of empathising with suffering seems wrong to me on an emotional level and fraught with logical inconsistencies on a practical level. People should be free to write about what they want.

The argument is, I suppose, that if privileged white people are writing about this stuff then marginalised voices don’t get heard. I understand this but it would be more persuasive if the vast majority, or even many, of the poems written by white people were of this type. But as you were saying earlier to conny, they aren’t. You characterise poems addressing race written by white people as just one of many tired tropes:

Quote:
And I am rather tired of hearing certain patterns and tropes presented by White male poets. Just as, presumably, you (and I) are also tired of certain patterns and tropes presented by trying-to-be-woke-and-not-always-succeeding White feminists like me.

It's like any other well-worn theme: The love poem. The cancer poem. The implicitly self-congratulatory poem about the magic of poetry-writing. The immigrant grandmother hagiography poem. The "my mostly-comfortable pandemic experience" poem. The angry feminist poem (which is, alas, the bulk of my poetic output, most of which I will never show to anyone because it so rarely rises above self-therapy and cliché).

So, too, the "I'm a White man, and I have something to say about racism" poem.
I would suggest that of these tropes, the "I'm a White man, and I have something to say about racism" strain is probably the rarest (at least in liberal publications – places like The Society of Classical Poets have their own agendas). It perhaps seems more prevalent than it is because whenever it does happen there is a big old fuss. If a white poet speaks about race with anything other than the blandest show of performative allyship, if they show any sign of wrestling with feelings of ambivalence, or attempts at nuance, they are subject to accusations of racism and demands for apologies (see Dickman, Wee, Hoagland). The culture tells white people, rightly, that they must reckon with race, think deeply about it, but at the same time remain silent or tread very, very carefully and only say the prescribed things or risk public shaming. This is a pretty Kafkaesque trap and anti-art.

Also, the idea that poets of colour are necessarily marginalised seems debatable. I googled “best poetry books of the decade” and the very first hit was the massive, mainstream website “literaryhub”.

https://lithub.com/the-10-best-poetr...of-the-decade/

Their list for 2000 to 2019 comprises books by the following poets:

Ann Carson
Terence Hayes
Tracy K Smith
Natalie Diaz
Natasha Trethewey
Mary Szybist
Claudia Rankine
Robin Coste Lewis
Ocean Vuong
Danez Smith

Of these poets, seven of the ten are poets of colour (and seven are women). And of the list the ones that seem to me to have been the most celebrated (Hayes, Rankine and Vuong) are among these poets of colour. That’s without even mentioning Rupi Kaur, the best-selling poet since Homer, and Amanda Gorman who is no doubt set to overtake her.

Julie, I hope it’s clear that I’m pointing this out with no bitterness. I genuinely think it’s a good thing that these voices are being heard and celebrated and I'm not about to write a Bob Hickock style essay fretting about my whiteness being usurped. I honestly couldn't care less. I just think it’s disingenuous, and oddly defeatist given this evidence, to claim that POC voices aren’t getting heard in the poetry world on issues regarding race to the extent that it’s imperative to prescribe that white poets “don’t get to speak” about them.

Finally on this, and most subjectively I suppose, there is just something about the current appetite on social media for demands that people apologise for producing and publishing art that gives me a quite viscerally negative reaction. And there is something about the morally superior tone of these demands and the expectation that even the subsequent apology, rather than being individual and thoughtful, must contain no deviation from an approved script (“do better”, “I promise to do the work”, “the hurt and pain I have caused”, “take time to reflect deeply”) that makes me nervous. And it’s never enough. When Carlson-Wee issued his apology on social media he said the criticism had been “eye-opening” and the first reply chastised him for his use of this term, noting that it was a further instance of his “ableism”, presumably because it could be offensive to blind people. There’s no indication that this reply was from a parody account.

Erm…what else. The two writers you quote as evidence that most, or even a lot of, black people do see Gorman’s poem as “sacred”. Well, one of them is white and, as you point out yourself, both are from religious publications so I remain unconvinced.

Here:

Quote:
I don't quite follow your gist about identity politics having zero impact on the lives of the poorest and most disadvantaged in society. Or do you mean that the "anti-art decisions" make no difference to these people's situations?
Yes, I meant what I consider to be "anti-art" decisions make no difference to ordinary people of colour. I just worded it badly and strangled my syntax. "Identity Politics" is a much-maligned term (especially by the right, which is part of the problem liberals have with criticising any aspect of it) but I realise that as a concept it is a broad church and has many positives and does much that is good.

As to John McWhorter’s take, unsurprisingly I agree with a lot of what he says about this. I came across him when I taught (very) basic linguistics to an A Level English class a couple of years ago. I’m no expert and was always just about two pages of the text book ahead of the students. But we had pictures on the wall of McWhorter, Chomsky, Pinker and David Crystal, all of whom were part of the curriculum (the students gave them all nicknames based on their appearance: in order, Smiley, Prof, Hairy and Santa). He seems very smart and a reasonable voice to me. I’m not sure I agree with Jim that he needs to “have the president’s ear”. This is a phenomenon whose trajectory in one way or another is going to be based on people looking into their own hearts with some clear minded honesty. I think it's something politics is best kept out of. After all, Trump claimed to be a big critic of Critical Race Theory (despite probably having no idea what it is) which is poison to anyone reasonably minded who might also express any misgivings about any of its ideas, as popularised by the likes of Robin DiAngelo for example. I also don’t think that this ideology has much to do with “the left” as I understand it and as someone who considers himself to be on the left (if that means things like high-taxation of the very wealthy, public ownership, equality of social opportunity, a strong safety net for the poorest in society) I don’t recognise much of that in the priorities of the people instigating these “cancel culture” spats.

Anyway, thanks again, Julie. It’s always a pleasure. Goodness, white people can talk can’t they?

Last edited by Mark McDonnell; 03-22-2021 at 11:35 AM.
Reply With Quote
  #44  
Unread 03-20-2021, 03:30 AM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: San Diego, CA, USA
Posts: 8,307
Default

Hey there, Mark! Cross-posted. But re your final line, I'll confess that I was a little paranoid when I posted the VIDA Count that someone might analyze my word count in this thread compared with everyone else's....

Good, solid counterarguments again, Mark. This weekend I'll reconsider some of of the points you raised.

Martin and Jim,

Unsurprisingly, since I'm not a fan of John McWhorter anyway, I am less than enthusiastic about his point of view on this subject. He has a very fine mind, but he seems to be missing a heart sometimes.

I often get the impression that McWhorter's number one priority when he speaks on race is to battle what might be the main racial injustice that affects him personally--namely, the intolerable notion that anyone might think that he, as a cultured and intellectual Black man at the peak of his career, has anything in common with the lower-class Black men for whom the Black Lives Matter movement is demanding justice: George Floyd, Philando Castile, et al.

I concede that that assuming some sort of kinship based solely on the fact that he's a Black man, too, is racist. But it's disappointing that he doesn't seem to feel any sort of kinship just based on the fact that they are fellow human beings.

His essays and interviews repeatedly seem to deny these murdered Black men any empathy whatsoever, because he's so busy trying to undermine what he calls the Black Lives Matter movement's portrayal of Black men (and by extension himself) as vulnerable victims in need of protection. McWhorter is wonderfully colorblind in this regard: he doesn't seem to care about the plight of either the Black or the White victims of police violence, except for the purposes of normalizing and trivializing what the police do in lower-class neighborhoods so far from his own that they might as well be hypothetical.

By attempting to demonstrate his lack of racism, McWhorter reveals his classism. It seems he is willing to deny others' victimhood just to avoid being mistaken for a pathetic figure himself. But that's not a good look, either.

In his essay about the Gorman translation debacle, he attacks ridiculous "liberal" arguments that no liberals actually made by applying these to the translation of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, etc., and then he actually has the nerve to say 'Watch out for the “Nobody said that” game' (regarding Gorman's relationship to white supremacy).

I found an article in Medium by Haidee Kotze, a professor of translation studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, far more insightful that McWhorter's take. Some snippets (bolding mine, in case people want to jump to the bit that particularly struck me):

Quote:
Deul's critique of the [publisher's] choice [to commission Rijneveld, who has never before translated a book] has been subsequently misinterpreted, so it is worth spending a moment on making clear exactly what it is that she said, to begin with. She highlights the mismatch between the shared lived experiences of the black Gorman and the white Rijneveld, and the lack of experience of Rijneveld (in respect of translation), and even questions why the publisher, Meulenhoff, nevertheless describes Rijneveld as the "dream translator" of Gorman. Deul's point, though, is not principally that the mismatch in backgrounds, and Rijneveld's lack of experience, make them unsuitable as translator. Rather it is that the decision for Rijneveld signals trust in Rijneveld's ability to convey this culturally significant work in another language--trust which is not generally afforded to people of color:

     "Whether in fashion, art, work, politics or literature, the merits and
     qualities of black people are only sporadically valued--if they are even
     even noticed, to begin with. And this is particularly so for black women,
     who are systematically marginalised."

Deul's question is why, for this particular text, in this particular context, given its significance, Meulenhoff chose not to opt for a young, black, female, spoken-word artist. Joe Biden's choice of Gorman as reader of her own poem at his inauguration created a particular configuration of cultural value around precisely those qualities. Gorman's visibility, as a young black woman, matters: She is part of the message. The choice of translator, in this case, is similarly part of the message. It's about the opportunity, the space for visibility created by the act of translation, and who gets to occupy that space.

In choosing Rijneveld as translator, the publisher missed an opportunity to carry the importance of this visibility into the Dutch cultural space by giving a black translator the same 'podium' as Gorman represents. In all likelihood, Meulenhoff did not do so purposely. This does not make it any better; perhaps it even makes it worse. The choice may not reflect a conscious, deliberate unwillingness to give voice, space, and visibility to black artists in the Netherlands. But its non-intentionality may perhaps be even more damning: It suggests that the importance of the decision--the possibility, the gravity of what Gorman's poem, and platform, represents--did not even occur to the publisher. Such is the extent of the blindspot. The publisher asked the question: "Is Rijneveld a suitable translator?" rather than "Who would be a suitable (or even the best) translator, for this particular text in this context?"

[...]

The question raised by Deul is not principally about who ‘may’ (who has permission) or even ‘can’ (is able to) write or translate particular experiences. The question is who is, institutionally, given the space to articulate this experience, to participate, to be visible. Who gets to have a seat at the table? A place on the podium? A prize? An interview or column in the newspaper? The exclusions, historically and contemporary, along race and gender lines, among others, are clear. The point is how institutions, like publishers, can work towards more inclusivity.
Amen, amen, amen....

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 03-20-2021 at 09:16 AM. Reason: Misspelled "Rijneveld"
Reply With Quote
  #45  
Unread 03-20-2021, 11:25 AM
Mark McDonnell Mark McDonnell is offline
Member
 
Join Date: May 2016
Location: Staffordshire, England
Posts: 4,420
Default

Quote:
Good, solid counterarguments again, Mark. This weekend I'll reconsider some of of the points you raised.
I'll read whatever you have to say with interest, Julie because you're always thought provoking. But I'm probably done here now. Not because I think I'm right about all this stuff, though. Often, when I make a statement my head says 'on the other hand' but if I expressed all those internal arguments my posts would be twice the length. God forbid. I'm already so far up on my high horse I can't see the ground. It's complex. Life is complex. I do think there are many who engage in the "culture war" as a kind of compulsive game, on both the right and the left.

Take care.

Last edited by Mark McDonnell; 03-22-2021 at 07:33 AM.
Reply With Quote
  #46  
Unread 03-20-2021, 12:46 PM
Martin Elster Martin Elster is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Connecticut, USA
Posts: 7,563
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Julie Steiner View Post
Martin and Jim,

Unsurprisingly, since I'm not a fan of John McWhorter anyway, I am less than enthusiastic about his point of view on this subject. He has a very fine mind, but he seems to be missing a heart sometimes.

I often get the impression that McWhorter's number one priority when he speaks on race is to battle what might be the main racial injustice that affects him personally--namely, the intolerable notion that anyone might think that he, as a cultured and intellectual Black man at the peak of his career, has anything in common with the lower-class Black men for whom the Black Lives Matter movement is demanding justice: George Floyd, Philando Castile, et al.

I concede that that assuming some sort of kinship based solely on the fact that he's a Black man, too, is racist. But it's disappointing that he doesn't seem to feel any sort of kinship just based on the fact that they are fellow human beings.
You are a brilliant person, Julie, and I am always intrigued by what you have to say. I am just as eager to read your thoughts as Mark is. So, just because my opinions don’t always mesh with yours doesn’t mean I don’t respect your opinions, which I definitely do. I’ve been following John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, and Coleman Hughes for almost a year now. I find their ideas quite interesting and cogent. I suppose they can, at first, seem as though they are “missing a heart.” But I think that isn’t really true. Here is what McWhorter says about that:

Quote:
Third Wave Antiracism is losing innocent people jobs. It is coloring, detouring and sometimes strangling academic inquiry. It forces us to render a great deal of our public discussion of urgent issues in doubletalk any 10-year-old can see through. It forces us to start teaching our actual 10-year-olds, in order to hold them off from spoiling the show in that way, to believe in sophistry in the name of enlightenment. On that, Third Wave Antiracism guru Ibram X. Kendi has written a book on how to raise antiracist children called Antiracist Baby. You couldn’t imagine it better: Are we in a Christopher Guest movie? This and so much else is a sign that Third Wave Antiracism forces us to pretend that performance art is politics. It forces us to spend endless amounts of time listening to nonsense presented as wisdom, and pretend to like it.

A white version of this would be blithely dismissed as racist. I will be dismissed instead as self-hating by a certain crowd. But frankly, they won’t really mean it, and anyone who gets through my new book on this subject, which I am now publishing in serial, will see that whatever traits I harbor, hating myself or being ashamed of being black is not one of them. And we shall move on. As in, to realizing that what I am documenting matters, and matters deeply. Namely, that America’s sense of what it is to be intellectual, moral, or artistic; what it is to educate a child; what it is to foster justice; what is to express oneself properly; what it is to be a nation—all is being refounded upon a religion.

This is directly antithetical to the very foundations of the American experiment. Religion has no place in the classroom, in the halls of ivy, in our codes of ethics, or in deciding how we express ourselves, and almost all of us spontaneously understand that and see any misunderstanding of the premise as backward. Yet since about 2015, a peculiar contingent has been slowly headlocking us into making an exception, supposing that this new religion is so incontestably good, so gorgeously surpassing millennia of brilliant philosophers’ attempts to identify the ultimate morality, that we can only bow down in humble acquiescence.

But a new religion in the guise of world progress is not an advance; it is a detour. It is not altruism; it is self-help. It is not sunlight; it is fungus. It’s time it became ordinary to call it for what it is and stop cowering before it, letting it make people so much less than they—black and everything else—could be.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/j...the-neoracists

Last edited by Martin Elster; 03-20-2021 at 02:28 PM.
Reply With Quote
  #47  
Unread 03-20-2021, 05:20 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: San Diego, CA, USA
Posts: 8,307
Default

Martin, I do agree with McWhorter that there is a religious-seeming fervor to social media "defenestrations," as he puts them (in your two earlier links). The evangelical/crusading nature of fervor even in supposedly non-religious areas isn't a new observation, and McWhorter doesn't pretend it is, since he refers to onetime Eratospherean Jody Bottum's 2014 book on the same phenomenon, and for centuries theists have accused atheists of behaving like zealots whose church is Science and Reason.

The auto-da-fe phenomenon is repeated in various ways throughout human history because it appeals to several common, though unsavory, parts of human nature--the power dynamics of sadism, plus the thirst for social "belonging" and validation, plus the entertainment of a public spectacle, plus individuals' sincere desire to see themselves as good. No political persuasion is immune from that phenomenon. Better to caution everyone against getting swept up in that sort of destructive fervor, rather than singling out either liberals or conservatives.

But I'm not convinced that the religious metaphor is apt in this case, as McWhorter's essay claims. As far I know, the critics of the translator choice were not calling for defenestrations and resignations and firings. They issued no threats or demands. They just publicly complained about the missed opportunity. If we are unhappy with Rijneveld's and the various publishers' responses to the controversy, I don't think that their choices can be blamed on the critics. Just as when the critics of a poem workshopped here express unhappiness with the first stanza, and the poet changes it for the worse. That's on the poet who chose an unfortunate response to the criticism, not on the critics themselves.

I do very much appreciate what McWhorter has said on some other topics, though. For example, I was happily surprised to see him defend recent trends to adjust English pronouns to accommodate non-binary gender identities--a change which conservatives have spent a lot of energy resisting and ridiculing:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...w-they/568993/

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 03-21-2021 at 10:19 AM. Reason: Misspelled "defenestrations"
Reply With Quote
  #48  
Unread 03-20-2021, 11:47 PM
Martin Elster Martin Elster is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Connecticut, USA
Posts: 7,563
Default

Julie, thanks for linking to that article about the singular they. I, too, appreciated what he said about it and enjoyed it.

I wonder what his thoughts are, or if he has written anything about another strange usage. I have noticed lately that more and more people say: “There’s many kinds of vegetables in the produce aisle” instead of “there are many kinds of vegetables in the produce aisle.” I find it lazy, yet it seems almost everybody does it now — in person, on TV, and on the radio. I wonder where that came from. It’s not as socially significant as the singular they.

Last edited by Martin Elster; 03-20-2021 at 11:52 PM.
Reply With Quote
  #49  
Unread 03-21-2021, 10:34 PM
Martin Elster Martin Elster is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Connecticut, USA
Posts: 7,563
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Julie Steiner View Post
Martin,

Suggesting that race doesn't or shouldn't matter, or wouldn't if racial, ethnic, and gender minorities weren't making such a big deal about it, overlooks the fact that these identities usually ARE noticeable and DO matter, a lot, both to others and to ourselves. They are central to our first impressions of others and to our sense of belonging within a wider community, through bonds sometimes strengthened by cultural factors like religion, language, music, dance, food, etc.

Claiming that people are somehow doing something wrong when others choose to identify them as Other and choose to treat them differently because of that, rather than judging them by the content of their character, seems unrealistic at best, and victim-blaming at worst, if that treatment is negative.
I wrote something in response to this and thought I may post it, but then I found this talk on YouTube, which I think answers what you wrote better than me.

Coleman Hughes on The Case for Color-blindness S2 [Bonus Episode]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq6xJ2vFlaA
Reply With Quote
  #50  
Unread 03-22-2021, 03:00 AM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: San Diego, CA, USA
Posts: 8,307
Default

Martin, I agree with most of the substance of what Coleman Hughes says in this video, but the way in which he says it drives me bonkers. Statements like "We are all the same under the skin" and "Skin color is irrelevant" are maddeningly simplistic, to the point of being very unhelpful for any discussion of racism.

Racism, like race, is more than just skin deep.

Racial identities--which everyone has, both of ourselves and of everyone else we meet--are based on many things, including but not limited to visible things like skin color, eye shape, lip size, hair texture, etc. There are cultural differences, too. So I really wish that if Hughes MEANS "race and ethnicity" rather than "skin color," he would stop using unhelpful terms like "skin color" and "colorblindness" that suggest that he's only talking about melanin.

Yes, Martin Luther King, Jr., did indeed say in 1963, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” However, this is NOT necessarily evidence that Martin Luther King, Jr., would have endorsed the notion of "colorblind" public policy, as defined by people like Coleman Hughes in the 2020s.

Martin Luther King, Jr., also said the following in 1968 about reparations for slavery, which to me strongly suggests that he felt race was NOT irrelevant and should NOT be ignored in public policy decisions:

Quote:
America freed the slaves in 1863 through the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, but gave the slaves no land, nothing in reality to get started on. At the same time, America was giving away millions of acres of land in the west and the Midwest, which meant that there was a willingness to give the white peasants from Europe an economic base and yet it refused to give its black peasants from Africa who came here involuntarily, in chains, and had worked for free for 244 years, any kind of economic base. So Emancipation for the Negro was really freedom to hunger. It was freedom to the winds and rains of heaven. It was freedom without food to eat or land to cultivate and therefore it was freedom and famine at the same time. And when white Americans tell the negro to lift himself by his own bootstraps they don’t look over the legacy of slavery and segregation. I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps but it’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And many negroes by the thousands and millions have been left bootless as a result of all of these years of oppression and as a result of a society that has deliberately made his color a stigma and something worthless and degrading.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Remarks Delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., (March 31, 1968)
That is not the statement of someone who was colorblind or raceblind. It's an acknowledgment that the socioeconomic damage suffered by "the Negro" has been so severe and multigenerational that financial compensation should be considered.

If Coleman Hughes wants to argue that most policies to address inequity should be based on socioeconomic factors, rather than race, that's great. I actually agree with him about that, for the most part (and also about the important exceptions he identifies, such as recognizing the value of making sure various racial and ethnic communities are represented in police forces, rather than making those hiring decisions without regard to race).

But "colorblindness" is a horribly unhelpful term.

I was very glad to hear Hughes acknowledge that equality and equity are different things, in his answer to this question. And he even went further to discuss removing the sorts of systemic barriers to equality that make equity programs necessary in order for things to be fair.

However, this view is widely shared by people concerned with all sorts of diversity, including disability.

Consider this:



And this:



Maybe "colorblindness" would say it doesn't matter that no People of Color are represented in the above graphics. But people Hughes would identity with Critical Race Theory still share the above images, to illustrate that both equality and equity are just treating the symptoms of a larger societal disease.

Both of these sets of images are focused on eventually finding solutions that address the systemic sources the problem. Hughes himself agrees (see bolding below) that the best solution is to fix an unfair system, rather than to fix the people disadvantaged by an unfair system. And I agree with him that addressing the economic results of racism is more equitable than focusing only on race.

But so do most people who are anti-racists, including those he characterizes as CRT proponents. These are pretty standard graphics in diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops.

Two sections from the video that I transcribed. Apologies for any typos:

Quote:
"Would colorblindness, then, be dismissive of media representation, and existing diversity programs in areas such as STEM? Would it implicate a really staunch defense of meritocratic systems?"

Hughes: I would say in general, yes. The answer to that is yes. I think there are exceptions to that rule. I think, for example, if you run a police department, the value of racial diversity in having a police department that reflects the community being policed is so great that it outweighs the importance of a strict, race-blind meritocracy. However, in most cases, that's not true.

A few things:

One, I think what most people actually want, as demonstrated by the pupils I've cited, is a system that is fair. A system that, whatever outcome it yields, was arrived at through a fair process. It think we misidentify the problem as inequality in itself, rather than unfairness and poverty.

So, for example, nobody actually laments the fact that great athletes are extremely well-paid, because it's so obvious that athletics is a completely meritocratic domain. It's obvious to anyone who watches soccer or the NBA or the MLB.

Now in these other domains, there are legitimate questions. In admissions to colleges, if your parent is a professor (which obviously skews white), if your parent is a donor (which also skews white), you're not getting a meritocracy in the door, either. You're getting a leg up. And people understandably feel, "Well if many kids get a leg up in these things, and those kids are disproportionately white, then why not have affirmative action to balance that out?" And I think that's actually a legitimate argument.

At the end of the day, meritocracy is such a good idea that we should always have it in our sights as our North Star--to progressively make progress toward a society where all these arbitrary, unearned privileges are equalized. I do believe in that.

But what many diversity programs end up being are soft quotas. Quotas in practice, right? Where we need this many people who look this way in order to insulate ourselves from the critique that our process is racist.

What it does is...it certainly puts the idea that any black person hired is a diversity hire. Even if nobody says it out loud, people think it. And it may not be true.

It also masks the actual problems of the pipeline issues of under-preparedness in the Black community that could in principle be addressed, and that should probably be Item Number One on the agenda of any anti-racist. Item Number One, in other words, should be "How do we create an education system and a culture and community of entrepreneurship and success, that in the long run gets rid of the need for programs that give us a leg up?"

Because there is only one way of achieving long-term prosperity and success as a people. And that is to cultivate the skills and values that reliably lead to success in what we now have, which is an information economy. That's the one way. All of the other ways are stop-gap solutions. It's duct tape on a sinking ship.
There is one long-term solution to that problem, and that's where many charter schools have been doing a good job of pointing a path towards that, and there are nonprofits doing good work. But that's what I would say to that.
Quote:
"My question goes back more towards the affirmative action in college admissions. I was wondering...Given the correlation pattern we currently see between race and ethnicity and education achievement, and the fact that (as you said) the general public shows support for colorblindness in college admissions, do you think that more socioeconomically based affirmative action programs would do a better job at addressing inequality while while maintaining colorblindness, or do you think that that solution would also fall short, due to the fact that we do not currently live in a colorblind world, and it would fail to address the unique experiences that minority students faced when compared to their White peers?"

Good question. One thing I would say just to frame it is....

Often it's portrayed in the media and in the public as if it's race conscious policy, like affirmative action--it's a choice between that, and [...] doing nothing to help Black people. And given those two options, it kind of seems like a no-brainer to go with the first.

But it's a false choice. The real choice is between policy based on skin color and policy based on socioeconomics. And then, the key question to ask is, which one of those is a better indication of privation and lack of privilege? Is it skin color, or is it socioeconomics?

I would certainly argue it's the latter. And insofar as we have the best proxy for disadvantage in our hands, we shouldn't go to the second- or third-best proxy. So yes, I would be...If it makes sense to correct for anything, socioeconomics makes much more sense for a college to care about than skin color.

And you see, you know, the product, the result of caring exclusively about, or largely about, skin color, at elite universities especially, like Harvard, is that probably half of the Black students on campus (and there are a few studies from the mid-2000s on this) are children of Black immigrants, recent Black immigrants to the country, not Black Americans descended from slavery. And many of them are, you know, middle-class Black immigrant kids. It's not...

Which just goes to show it's not...skin color is not a great proxy for disadvantage in these kinds of cases. So the extent that affirmative action is justified in terms of helping people who have less advantage, that's actually an argument for basing it on socioeconomics rather than race.
Again, I am mostly in agreement with Hughes' points, but I disagree that "skin color" and "race" are synonyms. And since, as he says near the beginning of his talk, the self-congratulatory expression "I don't see color" by privileged people unwilling to recognize inequity exists is not what he means by being "colorblind," why on earth does he keep using a term that he knows is widely misunderstood and misused?

As for to the Amanda Gorman translation situation, I think this is clearly one of the exceptional cases like police hiring, in which racial identity matters for reasons of representation. After all, the fact that she is a young, Black, female poet is a large part of why she was chosen by Biden as his Inaugural Poet in the first place. I agree with the Dutch essayist I referred to in an earlier post, who said that Gorman's identity as a young, Black female at this moment of history is part of the message, and that the matter of representation would ideally have been considered in the choice of translator.

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 03-22-2021 at 03:31 AM.
Reply With Quote
Reply

Bookmarks

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump



Forum Right Top
Forum Left Bottom Forum Right Bottom
 
Right Left
Member Login
Forgot password?
Forum LeftForum Right


Forum Statistics:
Forum Members: 8,399
Total Threads: 21,841
Total Posts: 270,805
There are 1572 users
currently browsing forums.
Forum LeftForum Right


Forum Sponsor:
Donate & Support Able Muse / Eratosphere
Forum LeftForum Right
Right Right
Right Bottom Left Right Bottom Right

Hosted by ApplauZ Online