Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Emailed To My Dear Friend Cia

On twitter I see "progressives" using a rhetoric of dissociation from USA: not my president, not my country,  etc.  I am having the opposite impulse: I am American; I am a citizen of this country.  Well before this day, I've known to a great degree I am embodiment of various major social and/or environmental problems; and today is a concrete suggestion I was really onto something!  I mean the idea that you can neatly align Trump and white supremacist dynamics and then have a leftist intellectual antipode is such total bullshit insofar as it encourages the illusion that white supremacist
dynamics are not fractally embedded in every element of society.  I've probably written this to you before, but maybe not: for the past at-least three years, I have failed to come up with an argument that makes me fail to qualify as white supremacist; yes, I can list ways in which I darn near 24/7 resist/challenge this modality, but that is not the same as truly being exempt!  And for the time being I am far more invested in coming to full consciousness regarding my crud zones rather than
self-servingly emphasizing the good actions.  I think it's best to keep on with the good actions, but not highlight it and basically create a convenient brand for myself.  Interestingly, I would not argue I am male supremacist; I think a strong case can be made that I have and continually do
the work of resisting that.  And I think there's a crucial reason for this: my life, to a greater than lesser degree, de-facto aligns with segregation, whereas my life is not sex segregated.  I don't mean to make a one to one equation here, only suggest that it's very likely a major factor.  It's terrible how my reading and social media lives are not segregated, but my in-person one does not follow suit.
Note: I am not counting teaching--too much hierarchy involved for that interaction to be other than its own category.

Note: the "you" of prior email is intended as grammatical placeholder, not an address to your specific person!

No comments:

Post a Comment