Great article. Solid points and beautifully penned. I want to buy Matt’s book coming out. I love Hitchens. Especially “Letters to a Young Contrarian,” which I have a marked-up, dog-eared copy of on my bookshelf. Hitchens was one of the world’s most acerbic polemicists, contrarian thinkers, eminent authors.
Great article. Solid points and beautifully penned. I want to buy Matt’s book coming out. I love Hitchens. Especially “Letters to a Young Contrarian,” which I have a marked-up, dog-eared copy of on my bookshelf. Hitchens was one of the world’s most acerbic polemicists, contrarian thinkers, eminent authors.
It seems beyond obvious at this point that identity politics is played on both sides of the political spectrum, and it fails miserably in each case. I loved Freud’s “narcissism of the small difference.” You know what I think it is? I think we live in such a privileged, wealthy, soft nation at this point that we’ve mostly (but not entirely) run out of serious problems; ergo, we have to create fictitious problems. Enter Wokeism and ID politics. MLK and Bayard Rustin were fighting for serious, real freedom. (Read “Bearing the Cross” by David J. Garrow.) They were battling deep Southern cultural racism as well as acute legal racism around the nation. The truth is things have never been better for most Americans than right now, Black Americans included.
Is there a history of anti-black racism in America? Of course. Does racism still exist today? Of course. But we have drastically improved. One of the major issues here is social media and the blatant biases of legacy media (on both sides) which alter people’s perceptions making it seem like racism is absolutely rampant, like racist white cops are trying to hunt down young unarmed black men by the thousands. (Check the Washington Post Police Database: About 15-20 unarmed Black Americans are actually killed each year, a tiny fraction of the 13m Black citizens.)
Two wrongs don’t make a right. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. You can’t counter right-wing racism by embracing and embedding race essentialism into the leftist psyche. It just doesn’t work. Like Matt discussed: The only way to rationally proceed is to acknowledge that A. Yes, of course ALL human beings notice and are aware of race; B. All human beings have much, much more in common than different; C. The solution is two-way empathy (as Dave Chappell commented on stage in “The Closer”) and an embrace of individuality.
When we’re too privileged as a nation and most major problems have already been solved (again, not all problems), this is when a society reverts to “the narcissism of the small difference” because we’ve run out of other methods or complaints. When you shove a person into a group (white straight male; black man; lesbian LatinX; etc) you immediately drain that person of their inherent individuality and basic humanity. I am not a white straight male: I am Michael Mohr. I don’t view, say, Coleman Hughes or Glen Loury or Kmele Foster as “black thinkers”; they’re just thinkers. Of course I notice their race! But I don’t define them BY their race; that’s the crucial difference.
One thing to remember is that BLM is NOT a continuation of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. MLK, as mentioned in Matt’s peace, understood the struggle as one of race, yes, but also one fundamentally of class, which very much included white people. I think white “progressives” have always had good intentions but often been problematic in the racial discourse of America. Thomas Sowell brilliantly and astutely writes about this in “Black Rednecks and White Liberals.”
If we keep each other in these tiny, fractured boxes and binary labels such as man vs woman; trans vs biological woman; straight vs gay; black versus white; ad infinitum: Where does that genuinely lead us? Where does that path end? In my estimation it leads to more bigotry, more racism, more perception of constant tribal danger, the expansion of our tiny differences, the lack of empathy, unity, understanding, love.
Harper’s recently tried to take down Hitchens in a piece entitled, “The Enemy of Promise: What Time Did to Christopher Hitchens.” (https://harpers.org/archive/2022/08/the-enemy-of-promise-christopher-hitchens/.) The main thrust is that Hitchens’s views are “out of date” and no longer compatible with liberal progressive values. In other words: Hitch isn’t “woke” enough. A polemicist, a thinker from a bygone era of White Men. I think this take is dead wrong. Hitch is more on-point now than ever before. Same for George Orwell, for that matter. (“Animal Farm” anyone?) Hitchens’s views are solid as ever; it’s the culture that has shifted under his (and our) feet, and very rapidly. This brings us full circle back to social and legacy media the control of narrative perception. Ezra Klein has moved a little more to the center but up until a year or so ago he was pretty radical. (I mean VOX, c’mon.) His book is an interesting read and there’s much to admire in it. But he’s wrong about the left/right divide. I think the irony is that the fringe right and the fringe left have much more in common with each other than they’d ever care to admit. They are both extreme versions of the same type of nasty, grotesque tribalism which is tugging us all further and further apart from each other.
If we want real, honest dialogue, art, speech, and inclusion, we need to rise above identity politics and tribalism and see each other as individual human beings. King did it. Rustan did it. Malcom X eventually did it. This is our calling as a nation. Not to fall into the trap of using hatred to supposedly fix other hatred. Bigotry can’t fix bigotry. Racism can’t fix racism. The losers of this ideology are all of us.
Michael Mohr
Substack writer, “Michael Mohr’s Liberal (But Not Woke) Writing Newsletter
Great article. Solid points and beautifully penned. I want to buy Matt’s book coming out. I love Hitchens. Especially “Letters to a Young Contrarian,” which I have a marked-up, dog-eared copy of on my bookshelf. Hitchens was one of the world’s most acerbic polemicists, contrarian thinkers, eminent authors.
It seems beyond obvious at this point that identity politics is played on both sides of the political spectrum, and it fails miserably in each case. I loved Freud’s “narcissism of the small difference.” You know what I think it is? I think we live in such a privileged, wealthy, soft nation at this point that we’ve mostly (but not entirely) run out of serious problems; ergo, we have to create fictitious problems. Enter Wokeism and ID politics. MLK and Bayard Rustin were fighting for serious, real freedom. (Read “Bearing the Cross” by David J. Garrow.) They were battling deep Southern cultural racism as well as acute legal racism around the nation. The truth is things have never been better for most Americans than right now, Black Americans included.
Is there a history of anti-black racism in America? Of course. Does racism still exist today? Of course. But we have drastically improved. One of the major issues here is social media and the blatant biases of legacy media (on both sides) which alter people’s perceptions making it seem like racism is absolutely rampant, like racist white cops are trying to hunt down young unarmed black men by the thousands. (Check the Washington Post Police Database: About 15-20 unarmed Black Americans are actually killed each year, a tiny fraction of the 13m Black citizens.)
Two wrongs don’t make a right. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. You can’t counter right-wing racism by embracing and embedding race essentialism into the leftist psyche. It just doesn’t work. Like Matt discussed: The only way to rationally proceed is to acknowledge that A. Yes, of course ALL human beings notice and are aware of race; B. All human beings have much, much more in common than different; C. The solution is two-way empathy (as Dave Chappell commented on stage in “The Closer”) and an embrace of individuality.
When we’re too privileged as a nation and most major problems have already been solved (again, not all problems), this is when a society reverts to “the narcissism of the small difference” because we’ve run out of other methods or complaints. When you shove a person into a group (white straight male; black man; lesbian LatinX; etc) you immediately drain that person of their inherent individuality and basic humanity. I am not a white straight male: I am Michael Mohr. I don’t view, say, Coleman Hughes or Glen Loury or Kmele Foster as “black thinkers”; they’re just thinkers. Of course I notice their race! But I don’t define them BY their race; that’s the crucial difference.
One thing to remember is that BLM is NOT a continuation of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. MLK, as mentioned in Matt’s peace, understood the struggle as one of race, yes, but also one fundamentally of class, which very much included white people. I think white “progressives” have always had good intentions but often been problematic in the racial discourse of America. Thomas Sowell brilliantly and astutely writes about this in “Black Rednecks and White Liberals.”
If we keep each other in these tiny, fractured boxes and binary labels such as man vs woman; trans vs biological woman; straight vs gay; black versus white; ad infinitum: Where does that genuinely lead us? Where does that path end? In my estimation it leads to more bigotry, more racism, more perception of constant tribal danger, the expansion of our tiny differences, the lack of empathy, unity, understanding, love.
Harper’s recently tried to take down Hitchens in a piece entitled, “The Enemy of Promise: What Time Did to Christopher Hitchens.” (https://harpers.org/archive/2022/08/the-enemy-of-promise-christopher-hitchens/.) The main thrust is that Hitchens’s views are “out of date” and no longer compatible with liberal progressive values. In other words: Hitch isn’t “woke” enough. A polemicist, a thinker from a bygone era of White Men. I think this take is dead wrong. Hitch is more on-point now than ever before. Same for George Orwell, for that matter. (“Animal Farm” anyone?) Hitchens’s views are solid as ever; it’s the culture that has shifted under his (and our) feet, and very rapidly. This brings us full circle back to social and legacy media the control of narrative perception. Ezra Klein has moved a little more to the center but up until a year or so ago he was pretty radical. (I mean VOX, c’mon.) His book is an interesting read and there’s much to admire in it. But he’s wrong about the left/right divide. I think the irony is that the fringe right and the fringe left have much more in common with each other than they’d ever care to admit. They are both extreme versions of the same type of nasty, grotesque tribalism which is tugging us all further and further apart from each other.
If we want real, honest dialogue, art, speech, and inclusion, we need to rise above identity politics and tribalism and see each other as individual human beings. King did it. Rustan did it. Malcom X eventually did it. This is our calling as a nation. Not to fall into the trap of using hatred to supposedly fix other hatred. Bigotry can’t fix bigotry. Racism can’t fix racism. The losers of this ideology are all of us.
Michael Mohr
Substack writer, “Michael Mohr’s Liberal (But Not Woke) Writing Newsletter
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/