Ayo Panic...can you break this shit down for me? It's from one of the comments at the last M&G opinion piece I posted. Shit's way too higher grade for me (either that or it's the whole Friday afternoon Itis thing), but it seems hella interesting. Please don't Colin me...
It's important when evaluating both the argument and the counter-argument to focus on the texts themselves, not on emotion or name-calling. A good way to do this is to a**ume this were an argument that "Michael Jordan’s recent disagreement with the Washington mayor is a product of tall people’s supremacy complex" and apply your own tests to the logic. To the counter-argument first – I would not necessarily agree that “These judgments are also not connected to Cliff as a person, but rather to his being a white person and this is what makes Mngxitama a racist”. There is insufficient evidence to draw this final conclusion. Rather, the key elements of the ‘post colonial literary theory’ used in Mngxitama’s argument are (1) The use of words and generalisations that cannot be specifically defined and can’t be tied down in time and space (a good French legal test of whether a definition is meaningful or not) – look carefully at the words ‘the whole reality’ in this sentence “A basic mistake is the misreading of white supremacy as the preserve of neo-Nazi lunatic elements and not part of the whole reality that naturalises white privilege at the expense of blacks.” What is the exact semantic meaning of “the whole reality”? (2) Determinism – the removal of agency. This is an ingredient common to Marxist theory (and some racist theory – Mein Kampf, or Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Myth of the 20th Century for instance). Racism is not a conscious act by sentient, sapient beings, with agents and recipients. It is a mysterious ether, with none of the before, that all of one group or another are guilty of. There are no individual distinctions between people. No member of any group has any choices as an individual, and individual decisions are all subsumed into some mysterious “collective unconscious” – the use of the actual word “unconscious” indicates this . All of group X are one thing or another – be they Jews, whites, blacks, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie or any other collective noun one may choose. The logic of (a) Does the individual have any choices at all? and (b) Is there any empirical or scientific evidence to back up the collective uniformity theory? are not tested. Hence I would argue that the primary thesis being advanced is one of “supreme determinism” or pa**ive observation of inexorable forces beyond any active control, and this theory could be applied to any dichotomy in social science (tall vs short people, for instance). However there needs to be a more rigorous argument to support this “determinism” theory rather than stating it as a self-evident truth. That’s when the argument starts becoming interesting.
