MESOPOTAMIA NEWS : ONLY COLOR & IDENTITY COUNTS / THE NEW RASCISM vice versa

The problem with Black Lives Matter

Radicals once challenged racial thinking — now they embrace it.  – Brendan O’Neill 2016

Brendan O’Neill 2016: >> The return of the racial imagination ultimately speaks to the withering of the radical social imagination. As radicals, leftists and liberals have turned away from the politics of real, meaningful social change in favour of the politics of identity, in favour of managing society and its inhabitants rather than transforming society, so group thinking has returned and divisions have intensified. We are no longer individuals with common interests we might fight for together; rather, we’re unbridgeable racial creatures who must always acknowledge the ‘gulfs’ that divide us. If we’re black we must agree that we’ve been damaged by history, and if we’re white we must always check our privilege — that is, self-flagellate for the crimes of history. The rise of BLM really speaks to how the politics of identity violently forces us all back into the racial boxes that men and women struggled so hard to escape; how it has replaced the old racist idea that biology determines our fate with the new, nasty idea that it is history that shapes our characters and outlooks. The old racists made mankind prisoners of biology; the new racialists make us slaves to history.

Worse, this new politics rehabilitates paternalistic views of black people. Just look at how many white thinkers and writers self-consciously refuse to criticise or even question BLM, because this would apparently be ‘whitesplaining’. They think they’re being progressive, but really they’re infantilising black activists by refusing to subject their ideas and behaviour to the critical scrutiny that white radicals could expect.

onah Gold “The great irony of Black Lives Matter is that it proves the global dominance of American culture. BLM is a worldview born in the US, promoted by American celebrities on social media, backed by the whole of corporate America, feverishly supported by Hollywood, and cheered by the American sports industry. And now it has colonised the world. Its language and slogans and symbols are omnipresent. They spread through social networks. They’re now central to fashion, advertising and corporate signalling. BLM is a global steamroller. It has subsumed local issues in countries across the globe, so that everything from the troubles facing Aboriginal people in Australia to the controversies over university curricula in the UK are now talked about in the language of BLM. It has erased national nuances, annexed entire movements, and absorbed local concerns into a broader empire of virtue. Nothing and no one has any real legitimacy now unless they bow (“take the knee”) to BLM.”

(Brendan O’Neill)

Read full text https://www.spiked-online.com/2016/08/11/the-problem-with-black-lives-matter/