Oak Boat: I want to come back to that line you quoted earlier from the present-day American essayist Wesley Yang: “that our culture feeds off the plight of the poor in spirit in order to create new dependencies.” We might say: Let’s let Wes Yang meet Nicky Mach. And Wes, meet Nicky Mach, etcetera.[i]
Newt Monk: And who might you mean when you say “Nicky Mach?” Him I know not. (At least, I don’t think I do.)
Oak Boat: Well, Nicky Mach … I mean, you do know, it’s simple shorthand for Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). (Yes, yes, that Machiavelli.) Ole Nicky, despite the popular trash of a myth that continues, even in 2024, to ostracize him as one of the meanest, most cynical humans being to have ever walked the earth, not unlike Caine in Kung Fu, Mr. Machiavelli was actually, believe it or not, quite human and even quite humane.
Newt Monk: Yeah, I might just believe it.
Oak Boat: So, in his book of Discourses, ole Nicky Mach expressing a fundamental political maxim where, essentially, for any and all human civilizations, hunger and poverty mark (and always mark) the two fundamental drives behind all laws and politics. In other words, all statutes, precedents, prohibitions, rule-making, and other public policies, along with all the methods and motivations behind their supposéd achievements, remain rooted in the prevention, restraint, treatment, acceptance (as well as denial) of a civilization’s risk against succumbing to either/or (or perhaps, “both/and’) widespread hunger and generational impoverishment.[ii]
Newt Monk: I sort of see what you’re saying Machiavelli once said. (Sort of). I don’t know if things are quite as absolute and formulaic as you and or ole Nicky Mach say they are. But I grant that general threats like widespread hunger, crop blight, disease, famine, and trade embargos, as well as economic depression and/or the decay of affluence across entire classes—yes, these things have been, and will continue to be, at the root of most political (dis)agreements and conflicts.
Oak Boat: Yeah, you’re following me correctly. What you’re saying is like what a pair of recent translators of Machiavelli’s Discourses, Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, have suggested: that in that book Machiavelli “tries to show that to understand political situations correctly, one must not listen to the intent of the words people use but rather look at the necessities they face.”[iii]
Newt Monk: Ah yes, I’m starting to see the point. Just as food prices and retirement funds concern much of today’s day-to-day politics––and by “our” I include fellow followers like myself, who are fellow non-leaders of our communities––so too did the hopes (and despairs) of farmers (which includes ranching and fishing) and the general graft of those farmers’ bankers drive the politics of Nicky Mach’s world way back in the day.
Oak Boat: Yeah.
Newt Monk: And these twin drives that beat the heart of all the politics occurred in all the centuries before Nicky Mach ever dreamed of putting his own pen to paper?
Oak Boat: Yeah, that’s why you see today, writers like Yang observing how the leaders who govern us profit off the “plight of the poor in spirit.” You see how that kind of plight continues to constitute the bare essentials to these oh-so-lovely latter-day politics we fellow glitched-out Americans seem to find ourselves stuck in as we grumble toward the fall of 2024. [iv]
Newt Monk: So, ole Nicky Mach, meanwhile, offers in his Discourses no more thantwo reasons for why humans being, so long as they remain uncorrupted, desire freedom?
Oak Boat: Yeah, but do you understand the rationales for why he limited himself to just those two reasons? Do you see the two groups of humans being Nicky Mach divides, a division obvious to all individuals affected by political life for all situations?
Newt Monk: I would guess that his first reason, or the first group involves and includes only a slender few—a perpetual, numerical minority––a few who, for whatever reason, strongly desire the freedom to command others.
Oak Boat: Yeah, those are the ones who want to be free only to make others unfree!
Newt Monk: On the other hand, for the majority of a civilization’s citizens—which may even include mildly meek and moldy me!––they instead deeply yearn for an authentic freedom simply so that they––and that we!––may find a way to pay our overdue bills, to find a few minutes to prune a few overgrown vines and perhaps water some overlooked patio cacti as an overall reflection of how we have found a way to “live secure.”[v]
Oak Boat: Yeah, but often our leaders fail in their freedom to let us (their followers) freely live our lives securely. It happens all the time in all kinds of places.
Newt Monk: So it seems to go. So it seems.
Oak Boat: More like suck it seems to go, I’d say. Suck it seems. So it seems. I mean, that happened in the jim crow American South a century ago, where, instead of secure living, the political system offered to its followers through the leadership of its leaders, it instead, to quote Isabel Wilkerson from her study The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010): “mostly fear and dependence—and hatred of that dependence—on both sides,” both the leaders and followers who somehow lived in that South.[vi]
Newt Monk: Yeah, but as American political philosopher Sharon Krause has pointed out––in Liberalism with Honor (2002)––even in our own modern times, a growing number of members of the nation’s non-leadership class feel a certain sense of powerlessness with what the present has decided to present to them. Presently in 2024, the present seeks to present to we non-leaders a subtle sense of powerless confinement. Krause’s examples highlight how––
the special ‘bills of rights’ that have proliferated in recent years (patients’, victims’, parents’, children’s, now even air travelers’) speak more toa feeling of powerlessness and the need for protection from forces beyond one’s control than to new freedoms. [vii]
Oak Boat: Yet it’s not just academic types who’ve lately noticed, and have later written about, the seemingly ticking temporarily behind an apparent, ever-depleting expiration date for American rights and freedoms. And it’s not just me or you. Would you believe that occasional, prominent personalities who (at least momentarily) make up our popular culture media have sometimes spotted this, sometimes even spoken about it as well?
Newt Monk: I would believe you, and I will believe you, because I believe that you are the one who most wants to be believed. (And I even believe that you mostly believe the beliefs I just stated.)
Oak Boat: So you should then believe me when I take some (modestly popular?) media figure, like Stoya, for example. She’s a retired adult film actress who has shifted her endeavors to become quite an impressive essayist and cultural observer––like when she differentiates modern American notions of empowerment from their notions of entitlement. According to Stoya, when these two concepts are set side by side—or, at least when they are set so in twenty-first century America––the idea of being “empowered feels as though that power,” whether it’s political, cultural, or spiritual sort of power, “can be revoked according to someone else’s whim.” But on the other hand, the word “entitled” tends to mean, at least for Stoya, that “it is far easier to believe that that power is actually mine.”[viii]
Newt Monk: To her intriguing differentiation I might add a blunt line once given by the great comedian and thinker George Carlin when he said: “The powerful keep the power. That’s why they’re called the powerful.[ix]
Oak Boat: “So it goes,” said some sad saint from long ago. “So it goes.”[x]
NOTES
[i] Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 25.
[ii] Machiavelli contends: “It is said that hunger and poverty make men industrious, and the laws make them good. Where a thing works well on its own without the law, the law is not necessary; but when some good custom is lacking, at once the law is necessary.” Thus, for Machiavelli: “There is greater virtue to be seen where choice has less authority.” See: Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi Sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio in Discourses on The First Ten Books of Titus Livius, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, (University of Chicago Press, 1996), (I, iii), p. 15 (1st quotation); (I, i), p. 8 (2nd quotation).
[iii] Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, “Introduction” to Machiavelli’s Discourses on The First Ten Books of Titus Livius, trans. Mansfield and Tarcov, (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. xxxiii.
[v] On the point that they want to be free only to make others unfree, see Edmund Burke’s various warnings:
The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do….
But liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power,—and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers. (242)
And:
In all [political] bodies, those who will lead must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition of those whom they wish to conduct: therefore, if an assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very great part of it, nothing … will prevent the men of talents disseminated through it from becoming only the expert instruments of absurd projects….
In this political traffic, the leaders will be obliged to bow to the ignorance of their followers, and the followers to become subservient to the worst designs of their leaders. (284–85)
Burke goes on to say that “To secure any degree of sobriety in the propositions made by the leaders in any public assembly, they,” that is, the leaders “ought to respect, in some degree perhaps to fear, those whom they conduct”: their followers. But, continues Burke, “to be led any otherwise than blindly, the followers must be qualified, if not for actors, at least for judges; they must also be judges of natural weight and authority.” See: Edmund Burke, Reflections of the Revolution in France (1791) in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, (12 vols.; London: John C. Nimmo, 1887), III, pp. 242, 284–85; Machiavelli, Discourses, (I, xvi), p. 46.
[vi] Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 2010), p. 31.
[vii] Sharon Krause, Liberalism with Honor, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002), p. x.
[viii] Stoya, Philosophy, Pussycats, & Porn, (Los Angeles: Not a Cult, 2018), pp. 147–48.
[ix] George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (New York: Hyperion, 2004), p. 106.
[x] Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, (New York: Dell, 1969; 1971).
Newt Monk: Of course, I would prefer no leadership, a civil way to live that involved no coaches, no captains, no jefes…. No bosses, no bullies, no bureaucrats and instead just jacks and jennies grazing green grass aplenty. I suppose it’s just a sentimental nostalgia for the imaginary anarchy of Arcadia and all that. If only a way of life could be found that involved no judges, no jailers … and no jerks!
Oak Boat: If only!
Newt Monk: Indeed. Instead I am stuck being an ass from one of Aesop’s old fables.
Oak Boat: How do you mean:
Newt Monk: Aesop of Egypt, the storyteller whom legend says was once a slave, has a fable that goes like this:
At the unexpected sound of an enemy approaching, an old man was stricken with terror and tried to persuade his donkey to run away so that he wouldn’t be captured. The donkey obstinately asked the old man, ‘tell me, do you suppose the victor will make me carry two pack saddles instead of one?’
The old man said he did not think so.
‘I rest my case,’ concluded the donkey. ‘What difference does it make who my master is, if I always carry one saddle at a time?’ [i]
Newt Monk: What strikes me is that how the worker (the ass) asks worthwhile questions, and even knows some of the correct answers to those questions. But that donkey’s master can only cower amid his own ignorance.
Oak Boat: Pitiful.
Newt Monk: Pretty plenty pitiful indeed. But what really strikes me as a reader-listener of this fable is my own self-awareness.
Oak Boat: How so?
Newt Monk: I am aware (and am aware that I am aware) that I am no master (of any sort) as found in the fable. I’d wager instead that I am akin to something between a man and an ass. Because I don’t sympathize with the old man’s ignorance the way I do with the ass’s indifference, because what drives that indifference is a human-all-too-human cry for freedom. I’d wager that’s why Caesar once observed that “all men naturally long for liberty and despise a state of servitude.” Caesar realized that because he too was once a slave.[ii]
Oak Boat: Still, no team can win all its games without a coach. All politics involves the question of who will rule?
Newt Monk: Yep. I’m afraid something to the effect of what you just said has already been said by every sagacious student of humans being from ancient Plato to the late-twentieth-century political philosopher Karl Popper (1902–1994) to the early-twenty-first-century British hip-hop artist, author, and social critic and advocate: Akala.
Oak Boat: How so?
Newt Monk: Plato’s formulation of all human politics boils down to: “the wise shall lead and rule, and the ignorant shall follow,” and “slaves should be subject to the control of their masters.” As a deep reader, and severe critic, of Plato’s ideas concerning governance, Popper has explained that, back in the days of old Athens, “Plato saw the fundamental problem of politics in the question: Who shall rule the state?” while these days, “modern writers … believe that the main problem is: Who should dictate? The capitalists or the workers?”[iii]
Oak Boat: Well, who do you think should, bucko?
Newt Monk: I said earlier: I’m no one’s master. I. Am. No. Leader. I am, therefore, someone who’s “for the workers,” of course. Thus the “most fundamental problem of all politics” is for Popper, “the control of the controller, of the dangerous accumulation of power represented in the state.”[iv] However….
Oak Boat: However! How about hownever, huh? How many “howevers” do we have to have here, bucko? Don’t you know it’s hot out here in the summertime?
Newt Monk: (ignoring him) And despite this seemingly fundamental question of “Who shall rule the state?” according to Sir Popper, most garden-variety Marxists residing in the free West during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries “never realized the full significance of democracy as the only known means to achieve this control.” But I digress (I guess?) ….[v]
Oak Boat: I do not deny that you indeed did suggest: that you did digress.
Newt Monk: Well, I didn’t mean to, because I’m not really that interested in the Marxism stuff. I’m more interested in how and why Popper omits to mention throughout his magnus opus: The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) ….
Oak Boat: Ulf, that’s a big book! (But I did kind of like it.)
Newt Monk: No doubt. And, it’s not only big, but heavily (and occasionally highhandedly) critical of Plato’s teachings so that Popper essentially blames Plato for encouraging, promoting most of the totalitarian forms of government that have emerged in the West during the last two millennia.
Oak Boat: That’s a long stretch time there, bucko. Especially for blaming somebody for something, even if that somebody is Plato, and that something is totalitarianism.
Newt Monk: Yeah, a mighty long stretch of time, spanning not only within breathe of Plato’s own Ancient Athens, but extending down through the ages—all the way down to the fall of the final Reich; down to the slow decay of all-things-Soviet; then down to Balkans in 1990s; alongside the Bath Party of Iraq; down through the ages to twenty-first-century America and her domestic infestation of spliner faction militia movements all infected by messianic “identity” ideologies—they’re all totally totalitarian, dude!––though only partially the conceptual progeny sired by Old Man Plato (whom they will never call their “daddy”).
Oak Boat: Totally.
Newt Monk; But while Popper is busy pointing his finger at Plato, blaming the Athenian philosopher for much of the mess that various totalitarian ambitions of the past two thousand years of history have polluted and pock-marked across large portions of the Occidental side to Gaia’s bosom….
Oak Boat: The Occidental side of Gaia’s bosom? Oh, you mean the geopolitical teat we affectionally call “the West?”
Newt Monk: Yeah sure. But I say Sir Popper might also have had the courtesy to have reminded his readers that, amid all that critiquing of Plato as the prime source of totalitarianism, Plato had himself once been a slave—yes, a slave––not unlike Caesar, and not unlike Aesop.[vi]
Oak Boat: You’re saying that if we readers would consider (and dig into) Plato’s past enslavement a little more closely, it might well aid us in our attempt to better understand why the prescription an elderly Plato later dispenses at Laws (690B)––there where he formulates who should (and should not) be leaders as well as who should (and should not) be their followers in his (the author’s!) hypothetical city––seems so severe?
Newt Monk: Yeah, or at least, seems so “severe” to us so-called “moderns,” yeah.
Newt Monk: Basically.
Oak Boat: You’ve reminded me of a passage from a little book by an American philologist Alexander Welsh (1933–2018). It’s called What is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives (2008), and in it Welsh discusses the work of Jamaican-American sociologist Orlando Patterson, particularly Patterson’s studies into the historical origins of the concept of the Western idea of “freedom.” Summing up some of Patterson’s theories, Welsh writes:
Both Athenian democracy and the Roman republic derived their notion of free independent citizens from the condition of their opposites, the slaves who lived in their midst. The presence of slaves makes it all the more attractive to identify with a group of the citizens.[vii]
Newt Monk: Right, and if you’ve been a slave before, like Plato supposedly was––we’ll never really know for sure––you might sincerely find (as well as strongly feel) that being a citizen is rather “more attractive” than subservience.
Oak Boat: Certainly (I suppose).
Newt Monk: And while slavery remains, with the exception of our nation’s incarceration industrial complex, abolished throughout these United States of 2024, one of our country’s contemporary essayists, Wesley Yang, has I think, quite aptly articulated how our present political situations contain close parallels to the greater Greco-Roman slave situation(s) of the ancient past. Indeed, our present political situations may even project a distinct set of shadows to crawl across the general surface of history.
Oak Boat: How so?
Newt Monk: Because, at least from Yang’s perspective as a Gen X (or Y) American, “You could … say that our culture feeds off the plight of the poor in spirit in order to create new dependencies.”[viii]
Oak Boat: Ouch! If that’s the truth, it certainly does hurt.
Newt Monk: I’m sorry if it does. Along the same lines of the way ancient slaves were sorted from ancient citizens is the way we moderns partition all of our leaders away from us (their own followers) in day-to-day life! It is along these lines that British author, intellectual, and hip-hop artist Akala, in his book Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire (2018), questions how much “self-segregation is caused by the seemingly natural human appetite for tribalism, and how much is due to the social processes that shape a shared identity?”[ix]
Oak Boat: Hmm. While it’s, admittedly, quite a ways to stretch oneself across the Atlantic, I feel Akala’s point in regard to Great Britain partially overlaps with some of what Pulitzer Prize winner (and, for us, fellow Austinite) Lawrence Wright was getting at in his cultural survey God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State (2018). I particularly sense some overlap when Wright notes how “Texas enjoys the singular blessing that every distinct culture must have: a sense of its own apartness. “[x]
[i] Aesop, Fables, trans. Laura Gibbs, (New York, Oxford UP, 2002, 2008), no. 11, (Phaedrus 1.15 = Perry 476), p. 9.
[ii] Though Caesar was once a slave, his translator Carolyn Hammond reminds readers that “Caesar figures in the historical record as both destroyer of the Republic and founder of the Empire,” (“Introduction,” p. xii). The founders of the Roman Republic, Romulus and Remus, are said to have also suffered as slaves in their younger days. See: Gaius Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (The Gallic War), trans. Carolyn Hammond, (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), (III, x), p. 59 (quotation); Livy, Ab Urbe Condita Libri (Books from the Foundation of the City) in The Rise of Rome, Books 1–5, trans. T. J. Luce, (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), (I, v–vii), pp. 9–12; Plutarch, Βίοι Παράλληλοι (Parallel Lives), trans. Bernadotte Perrin, (11 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP; London, William Heinemann Ltd, 1919), Vol. I, “Theseus and Romulus,” (IV, i–ii), Vol. VII, “Julius Caesar,” (I, iv–II, iv).
[iii] Plato, Νόμοι (Laws), trans. Trevor J. Saunders, (New York: Penguin, 1970, 2004), (690B), p. 95; Karl Popper, “The Paradoxes of Sovereignty,” (1945) in Popper Selections, ed. David Miller, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985), pp, 319, 320.
[iv] Popper, “Marx’s Theory of the State,” (1945) in Popper Selections, p. 335.
[v] Popper, “Marx’s Theory of the State,” (1945) in Popper Selections, p. 335.
[vi] Sonja Anderson, “This Newly Deciphered Papyrus Scroll Reveals the Location of Plato’s Grave,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 1, 2024; Diogenes Laertius, Βίοι καὶ γνῶμαι τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων (Lives of Eminent Philosophers), trans. R.D. Hicks, (2 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1925, 1972), Vol. I, “Plato,” (III, xviii–xix).
[vii] Alexander Welsh, What is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives, (New Haven, CN: Yale UP, 2008), pp. 23–24.
[viii] Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 25.
[ix] Akala, Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire, (London: Two Roads, 2018), p. 194; Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 17–18, 42–43, 135.
[x] Likewise, former Secretary of Defense (as well as former Director of CIA), Robert Gates was informed upon his arrival to be the 22nd President of Texas A&M University, in Aggieland (and elsewhere): “If you’re on the outside looking in, you can’t understand it. If you’re on the inside looking out, you can’t explain it.” See: Robert Gates, A Passion for Leadership: Lessons on Change and Reform from Fifty Years of Public Service, (New York: Knopf, 2015), p. 17; Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas; A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State, (New York: Knopf, 2018), p. 89.
I’m very excited to have The Fortnightly Review publish my essay review of Chris Arnade’s Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America (2019).
It covers not only Arnade but has plenty of Thoreau, Frederick Law Olmsted, James Agee and Walker Evans, William Least Heat-Moon, Samuel Johnson, Wesley Yang, Yuval Levin, Martin Buber, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
How to Lose Friends & Influence Over People:
Write about Race (Part III of III)
Toward Some Solutions to the Political Problem of Writing about Race while Being Aware of One’s Own Race
Part III.
In Part I, I brought up the four questions of Al-farabi (872–950 AD) to ask for any political situation: What, How, What from, What for? And in Part II, I applied those questions to four recent articles discussing and/or involving the problem of writing about race. If Al-farabi’s fourth question, What for?, were properly applied, it would seek to find the end and final purpose for why each writer wrote what they did. “The real question in this debate,†answers Jess Row, “couldn’t be more fundamental: What are novels for, and what are novelists for?†Row insists that writers (particularly white fiction writers) write in ways and on topics that are politically relevant, because the denial that one’s art is politically relevant exposes the ignorance of the artist’s privileged place in culture, an ignorance that further represses others from partaking in that privilege.
Wesley Yang says the reason for writing about race is because: “Part of responding to the coalition of white resentment from which the [alt-right] posters emerged in ways that stanches rather than feeds its growth, then, means taking stock of the way our own thinking has been affected by polarizing memes.â€
Aaron Mak wrote about race because he wants to solidify “the cooperation necessary between people of color to overcome systemic racism†without “contorting†one’s “identity†to new bureaucratic systems that establish new categories of racism. For as the Freedom Rider founder James Farmer (1920–1999) once pointed out, racism is inevitably bureaucratic. [1]
Andy Ngo wrote about race because “The lack of any ideological counterpoise has created a vacuum where ideas have no mechanism or incentive for moderation.†For Ngo, such a vacuum needs to be (ideally) eliminated, but at the very least, penetrated by asking hard questions (such as asking When is racism disguised as antiracism?). These hard questions penetrate because they modulate the discussion rather than amplify its intensity.
I have no original ideas to add to their proposed solutions. I can only thumb through my notes, find some seemingly relevant quotations—some sidelights that might shine toward some solutions to the political problem of writing about race and being aware of one’s own race while writing:
For Susan Sontag (1933–2004), translation helps the writer understand the race that the writer is not:
Literary translation, I think, is preeminently an ethical task, and one that mirrors and duplicates the role of literature itself, which is to extend our sympathies; to educate the heart and mind; to create inwardness; to secure and deepen the awareness (with all its consequences) that other people, people different from us, really do exist. [2]
For Wendell Berry (1934–), imagination helps the writer understand the race that the writer is not:
By imagination I do not mean the ability to make things up or to make a realistic copy. I mean the ability to make real to oneself the life of one’s place or the life of an enemy—and therein, I believe, is implied, imagination in the highest sense.[3]
For Harry Crews (1935–2012), creativity (artifice) helps the writer understand the race that the writer is not:
The only way to deal with the real world was [and is] to challenge it with one of your own making.[4]
Curiously, by a quirk of New York state laws, my first daughter’s birth certificate lists her as a Negro and the same one is classified as white. When Tami was born, a child of mixed marriage was Negro, and when Abbey was born, a child took its race from the mother. (Lay Bare the Heart: an Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement, (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1985) 214)
[2] Sontag, At the Same Time, edited by Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump. (New York, NY: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007) “The Word of India†177. Yet, as Benedict Anderson (1936–2015) once observed:
Proverbially, a writer loses his/her book at the moment that it is published and enters the public sphere. But to feel the full melancholy force of the adage, there is nothing like facing a translation of a book into a language the author does not understand. (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London: Verso, 1983), (Revised edition 2006) 228)
[3] Berry, “American Imagination and the Civil War,†The Sewanee Review, 115 (Fall 2007): 587–602 at 596–97.
[4] Harry Crews, A Childhood: the Biography of a Place, (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1978) 126.
How to Lose Friends & Influence Over People: Write about Race (Part II of III)
Toward Some Solutions to the Political Problem of Writing about Race while Being Aware of One’s Own Race
Part II.
In Part I, I brought up the four questions of Al-farabi (872–950 AD) to ask for any political situation: What, How, What from, What for? Now it’s time to ask those questions with regard to a current political situation: writing about race while being aware of one’s race as told by four writers:
(1) What is Jess Row’s “What are White Writers For?†New Republic, September 30, 2016about? This piece struck a nerve when I first read it, so I bookmarked it for the past year and returned to it this past week. Still, a little over a year later, I’m not sure what to think. Row is a novelist and essayist. The focus of his piece is fiction and the problem of white writers writing about race in fiction, not essays. He suggests a scenario where: “It would be easy for a white writer—say, a young white writer, in an MFA program, working on his or her first novel—to … feel caught in an imaginative bind†of being torn from writing about non-white characters in fiction and being accused of appropriation or writing about exclusively white characters and being accused of tribal fascism. “The subtext to these arguments,†writes Row, “is that white writers should just stop writing [fiction],†and he doesn’t believe that to be an adequate answer for a free society.
How so? Row discusses his own efforts at fiction and its various misreadings is conveyed in his observation that it is utter fiction for white writers to suggest white writers aren’t “allowed†to write about certain topics, when the publishing-media complex remains dominated by gatekeepers who identify primarily as white, and who identify that way by a large majority compared to any runners up. Tarantino may choose to use the n-word and Eminem may choose not to, but there are no white hands tied behind anyone’s back. They write what they please.
From what event did Row decide to write about writing about race? A non-Mexicana writer named Lionel Shriver wore a sombrero in Brisbane and caught flack for it. Another writer named Jonathan Franzen confessed in an interview that he didn’t put black characters in his fiction because he lacked substantial real life experience with people identified as black. This queued Row to write about race. What is Row writing about race for? He answers: “The real question in this debate couldn’t be more fundamental: What are novels for, and what are novelists for?†Row calls for writers (particularly white fiction writers) to write something politically relevant. To deny that one’s art is political is a distasteful display of privilege and ignorance. Art is part of the public sphere says Row, “part of one ongoing conversation.â€[1] Some novelists, Row points out, write about the present and critique it in their fiction. Others are simply “chroniclers.†But both critique and chronicle are political acts, for to write is to act (scribere est agere) says Judge William Blackstone (1723–1780).[2] Or, in Alan Jacobs’ words, “It seems clear that to publish a book is to invite a response.†[3]
(2) What is Wesley Yang’s “Is It OK to be White?†in Tablet Magazine, November 27, 2017about? Yang’s point is that these days rhetoric—that is, political writing, particularly about race––is about achieving reaction. Writers who write about race are generally no longer interested in clarity or understanding. Their writings are now about obliterating the ability to share ideas (and ontologies), because, in Yang’s words, such rhetoric “invites dissenters to overreact.†How so? Contemporary rhetoric aims for “confounding instead of confronting†one’s “enemies†via “a self-enclosed system of reference immunized against critique and optimized for virality.†From what did this discussion start? Some alt-right groups posed provocative flyers at “universities and high schools in the United States and Canada†that said, “It’s OK to be white.†What is Yang writing about race for? In his words: “Part of responding to the coalition of white resentment from which the posters emerged in ways that stanches rather than feeds its growth, then, means taking stock of the way our own thinking has been affected by polarizing memes.â€
(3) What is Aaron Mak’s “The Price of College Admission for Asian Americans,†Slate, December 5, 2017about? Mak’s focus is on Asian Americans who hide aspects of their “Asian-ness†from college admissions applications. How so? Applicants sometimes change their names, or list feats and talents not traditionally seen as stereotypically “Asian†(that is, East Asian). This is because “the American mainstream likes to assign minorities to a certain mold. There’s a systemic perception that we Asians are all alike, but what about, say, white applicants who play lacrosse? Are they all cookie-cutter too?†From what did this discussion start? The Justice Department has recently announced (in August) that it was investigating admissions policies that were discriminating against Asians, particularly at Harvard. What is Mak writing about race for? To render “the cooperation necessary between people of color to overcome systemic racism†without “contorting†one’s “identity.â€
(4) What is Andy Ngo’s “When Racism is Disguised as Anti-Racism,†Quillette, December 5, 2017about? Ngo attended an anti-racism event on a college campus: “Until that day,†Ngo writes, “I’d never seen people overtly dehumanized and treated as racialized objects—amplified through the use of words like ‘bodies’ to refer to people of color.†How so? “The lack of any ideological counterpoise has created a vacuum where ideas have no mechanism or incentive for moderation.†From what did this discussion start? A student at Texas State University in San Marcos recently published an op-ed calling for the genocide of white people. Ngo then felt the need to respond. What is Andy Ngo writing about race for? Ngo believes that such a vacuum needs to be eliminated, that ideological counterpoises should be cultivated to moderate contemporary rhetoric involving race.
So by answering Al-farabi’s questions—which meant I had to reread each article and carefully think it through––I now have a slightly clearer understanding of the political problem of writing about race while being aware of one’s own race. In Part III I will try to look toward some solutions to this problem.
This space is a public sphere in the sense I’m using it here. That a conclusion “counts as†public opinion reflects the fact that a public sphere can exist only if it is imagined as such. Unless all the dispersed discussions are seen by their participants as linked in one great exchange, there can be no sense of their upshot as public opinion. This doesn’t mean that imagination is all-powerful. There are objective conditions: internal, for instance, that the fragmentary local discussions interrefer [sic]; and external, that is, there must be printed materials, circulating from a plurality of independent sources, for there to be bases of what can be seen as a common discussion. Modern Social Imaginaries, (Durham, SC: Duke University Press, 2004) 85)
