Best answer to a stupid question, and some attached meanderings

Jan 08, 2009 08:25

I'm mainly posting this to bookmark a good snappy comeback, relayed to me by a fellow student in my department who has worked with Gayatri Spivak.  Evidently a student said to her in lecture once, "I'm just a white guy, what can I do?" and she replied, "Rage against the script history has dealt you."  This both has the advantage of being curt, heading off a diversive discussion, and of giving someone something serious to chew on.

Thinking about one of the figures who towers over this blog, I thought of a nice corollary.  John Brown, rage made flesh.

Perhaps in line with this, or perhaps in contradiction with it ... I've been thinking lately about whether I might not be still, in some sense, politically, a Kansan.  I find that in Kansas it is much easier for me to be in touch with my rage and find it attached to proper targets.  In California, somehow righteous rage is always partly deflected for me, in that it enters a cycle of finding a partial object in white liberals who are sympathetic but don't fundamentally get it and then wondering whether I am really so different from them.  Union politics have been depressingly gray for me, and in terms of community politics, the question becomes what I as a white guy from another state, who in some sense is doing his part for the gentrificaton of North Oakland, can productively do that is different from the appropriative moves of white liberalism?  Is there anything I can do other than get out of the way?  And this question is not so different from the one the student asked Spivak, except that it is a little more instantiated and less defensive.

From this angle the mural of John Brown, above, looks judgmentally.  Hamlet's indecision is alien to the nature of rage made flesh.

And perhaps, as one friend often reminds me, this is a "being determines consciousness" moment, or as wrongshore once told me, getting involved would change my outlook.  I moved back to Oakland in October, but I'm not really involved in anything in Oakland.  I'm a student in Santa Cruz, treating Oakland as a nice place from which to commute because I was tired of Santa Cruz.  Yet, there is plenty of stuff going on in Oakland, such as this protest which happened yesterday.  I might have been there, except for the first day of lecture yesterday in Santa Cruz.  Reading the coverage, I'm not sure what to think.  So I'll reserve judgment until I talk with some people, except to say that the particular politics of rage made flesh as practiced by some white "manarchists" has always seemed dubious to me ... then, it's too easy to slide into cheap psychoanalysis, Oedipal rage transferred onto the social scene, etc.

Compared to all of this, the politics of Kansas felt deceptively straightforward: a world full of things that need doing, people who need allies, and the institutions of white liberalism seem appropriately thin and embattled for what white liberalism really is.  Then, I need to remember that the politics of Kansas would probably seem much more complicated if I were there for more than two weeks.

race and class, movement-building

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