why can’t i have me summa that brother stuff
By shag carpet bomb • Oct 8th, 2009 • Category: Books & Book Reviews, Culture Wars, Fuckstainery, Identity Politics, Shitheads, Trouble with Diversityoh good god. i have been on a rant, criticizing Walter Benn MIchaels work in The Trouble With Diversity over at LBO. So, I’m about wrapped up with it all, have made my case, and I happen across a video of him. So, bored at work, I’m listening away only to learn that Michaels pulls a classic that makes me really do wonder if he’s just not another one of those folks who’s resentful.
He tells the story of walking down a street with a friend. A poor black man asks for money and Michaels’ friend gives the guy money. The friend says something typical and calls the poor black man “brother.” Michaels says that he wondered, “Gee, why don’t I get called brother.”
Earlier, I’d compared Michaels to people I’ve felt have used the langauge of class, without really understanding it, mostly because they wanted to use it as a cover for getting away with saying racist stuff.
Meanwhile, it feels like, with this bit of leakage, Michaels is just another white liberal who wonders why he’s excluded from the club and doesn’t like it much.
I mean, that’s not where his analysis ends. Rather, it’s where his analysis begins: out of a resentment. Which probably explains his explanation that, these days, black people are nostalgic for the community solidarity evident during Jim Crow and so are nostalgic for Jim Crow. Without a lick of evidence for such views as dominant among black intellectuals, he makes the claim. But you have to wonder, now, if the explanation isn’t compelling to him because what occured to him when a black friend gave another poor black man money, he referred to him as “brother”. Michaels felt excluded, much as I’ve sometimes read white feminists complaining about the solidaristic cultures among black women, latinas, and even sometimes among women of color. White people will complain they feel excluded, how they don’t understand how any of them have a shared culture anyway, and then escalate the critique as a critic of the fact that there is no such thing as black culture, latin@ culture, and so forth.
The prompt was the feeling of exclusion, the conclusion was to try to insist that the very thing that is making them feel excluded — a culture of identitarian solidarity — doesn’t really exist at all.
it’s effin brill if it weren’t so pathetic.
anyway, i’m sure this is opaque to non-lbo readers. If I get a chance, I’ll wrap up my criticism of WBM and post it here. It’s not likely soon though since I’m moving and have my hands full.
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I suppose the reason they don’t call him ‘brother’ is because they don’t like him that much.
Now smoothly changing the subject, today Angry Arab linked a report on the meeting of the Arab Feminisms Conference. After a call to include lesbians in the feminist agenda, one conservatice argued against that inclusion, “Kaltham Al Ghanim from Qatar University … reprimanding women who want to act like men (by wanting to sleep with other women).” Let the rad fem’s chew on that one.
I’ll spare you the recent article I perused on bestiality.
lol
good one.
He could also have wondered “Gee, why don’t I get to beg for money ?”. Strange he didn’t.
ilestre! nice to see you around again! i know, i know. i haven’t blogged on anything interesting lately.
to be fair to Michaels, what he’s trying to illustrate is that a well-to-do black man calling a poor black man brother is insignificant. It doesn’t challenge economic quality to maintain that, in spite of our economic differences, we are brothers. it’s another illustration, for him, that there is nothing biological about race that should make them brothers anyway. and if you want to talk about culture, as in black culture, that’s just stupid says michaels. there is no such thing as a shared black culture.
he also argues — apparently a long standing arguments in his literary criticism — that history is bunk. This is at the heart of his critique of Toni Morrison and Phillip Roth. Both of them reconstruct history in order to constantly resurrect the centrality of racism and anti-semitism, respectively.
“As much as we like being proud of our culture, we also like being proud of our history and being proud of the way our people (whoever we think our people are) have triumphed, or at least survived. And, conversely, we like being outraged by the bad things somebody else’s people did to ours, and we like thinking that justice requires they make up — or last least apologize — for them. But if the first three chapters give us reasons to be skeptical of the category “our people” and of the links we can have to people in the past, chapter 4 gives us reasons to doubt the relevance of the past itself. the question it asks is why we should care about the past, and the answer it gives is that we shouldn’t, and that our current near obsessions with the importance of history is profoundly misplaced. Like the idea of diversity itself, history functions at best as a distraction from present injustices and at worst as a way of perpetuating them. Henry Ford said a long time ago, “History is bunk”; the purpose of this chapter will be to show that he was right.”
Why is he saying all that? Because Toni Morrison and Phillip Roth make use of history, either by constantly reminding us of the way history is working itself out in the present, by trying to reconstruct some historical narrative of racism reaching in to today, or by making it up whole cloth by writing a novel. Toni Morrison does it, he thinks, to keep our attention focused on race and racism, so we refuse to let it go, convinced that the weight of history means that blacks continue to suffer from slavery and Jim Crow.
And he wants the left to stop saying, “But the effects of slavery and Jim Crow are still around!”