Showing posts with label Kimberle Crenshaw. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kimberle Crenshaw. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 6, 2022

When did being a victim become the highest of values in the west? CARL BENJAMIN: The U.S. Civil Rights Act, 1964.

The guest is Carl Benjamin, who Wikipedia describes as 

a British far-right anti-feminist YouTuber and political commentator. A former member of the Eurosceptic right-wing UK Independence Party, he was one of its unsuccessful candidates for the South West England constituency in the 2019 European Parliament election

This is the reason why fascism exploded as it did.  Fascism was in response to the failures of communism to overthrow the capitalism.  Now the only place it really succeeded was in Russia in 1917 with Lenin overthrowing the provisional government.  But it was the communist revolutionary who got imprisoned by the fascists, called Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci, who said that that's only happened in Russia because Russia is a deeply corrupt country where the people do not support the institutions of government.  So they didn't care if they got overthrown by a small organized minority.  And he accurately, I think, said, or pointed out in his Prison Notebooks, this is not going to happen in the west, somewhere like the United States, Canada, or England, where the institutions are by and large not corrupt and the people uphold them because the people believe the institutions are the best they're going to get and they like them and they think they're important and sustain the world that we have around us.  And so from this, you have a small group of activists in academia, in Harvard Law School, they call themselves the Critical Legal Scholars initially, but they ended up turning themselves into something called the Race Crits, the Critical Race Theorists.  This began with Dereck Bell's alternative course, where they were teaching what would come to be called The Intersectional View of Society, essentially a great expansion of Marxism out of the economic sphere into every other sphere of life.  In her earliest essays, Kimberle Crenshaw, she's the person who coined "intersectionality."  In 1989, she gives her essays these really long titles, and I can really remember, "A Black Feminist Critique of Liberal Human Rights."  In this one essay, she analyzes three particular American Supreme Court decisions, pointing out that what's happening here is that she believes, as a black woman, she has identified a problem, an absence in American Human liberal rights doctrine, which is, for example, when a pair of black women were denied a promotion in a company, a helicopter company, they were being discriminated against by the people above them, the judge ruled, for being as either women or as either black.  So a black man could be discriminated on the basis that he was black, but, of course, he had a privilege because he was a man.  A white woman could be discriminated against on the fact that she was a woman but had some sort of privilege because she was white, claiming that this was a gap in human rights law.  All intersectionality does is chain these together.  That says, what about a black woman who isn't privileged in either one of these ways but is discriminated against both of these ways.  That, in fact, she has a worse level of discrimination, and things are worse for her, and as soon as you start taking on this attitude, you realize that, oh, this is a key weakness in human liberal rights doctrine because what they're doing is staying within the paradigm and essentially warping it into something it's not intended to be.  From this, she writes an essay in 1991, called "Mapping the Margins," where she continues to expound this point of view.  This is where the intersectionality is properly formulated.  And in the conclusion of that, she says, "Look, we can use . . . in this essay, she explicitly cites Gramsci, because Gramsci's position was look, we can't overthrow capitalism in the west while society is strong enough to support its institutions.  He has a nice way of framing it, "When we attack the state and it trembles, behind it is revealed a strong fortification, or rampart, of society.  He says that it's the society itself that we actually need to overthrow [interesting distinction] in order to be able to bring about communism.  Crenshaw says that's a great point, and that we can use this weakness in liberal human rights legislation to attack society itself by promoting minoritarian interests.  And what we can do is find the intersection between being black, being woman, being gay, being trans, all the other identity categories.  And she openly postulates in the conclusion to this essay, that we can form coalitions of marginalized groups in order to strengthen that political voice and hopefully overthrow the regime of white/CIS/hetero/patriarchal norm of capitalism in order to, using their own logic, in order to hopefully bring . . . it's always very speculative, in order to "might bring about a better future."  "Might"?  Brilliant.  Such a secure way of overthrowing society.  I think this is why it's been so unbelievably quick because they're using their own internal logic.  All they do is expand the concept to mean its antonym.  Take any concept.  Racism is at once a person's opinion, which is located in yourself, and it's also objective, outside of yourself, and there's no one person who is responsible for it.  So you've got two opinions, two definitions that are openly contradictory that have been compressed into the same thing and it allows them to pivot at any point.  

When did being a victim become the highest of values in the west?  The U.S. Civil Rights Act, 1964.