Top Stories Sunday 01 Dec
Pandagon on conservative pundit’s treating of blacks as a monolithic group:
And, by the way, let me explain something about being black – it’s one thing to assume a black monolith, it’s frequent political shorthand. The problem is when persons so far removed from said experience (such as the conservative white man David Horowitz) presume to lecture us as a class that we must do something in order to redeem ourselves or some such nonsense. What if I just sat down and told all the Jews how they could stop making people mad at them, or told the Irish how they could solve all their problems? Give me a large enough podium, and Horowitz’s security force might even make a show of throwing me out, or better yet, the man himself might write some coffee-stained missive about how much of a threat I am to my country.
Max Speak on Islam, stereotyping and multiculturism:
When you see the word “multi-culturalism” uttered in a negative context, it usually means the speaker is referring simply to democratic tolerance. It’s hard to criticize anti-racism or tolerance, so you recast them as an uncritical acceptance of barbaric practices by others (typically equated with ‘culture,’ and thus constructed as a group stereotype, as above). Racists defend themselves by accusing their critics of racism. Once again, I’d like to emphasize that I believe this kind of argument takes place in a confined space in the brains of many warbloggers. I do not think it spills over into personal relatioins, business affairs, or other minorities. I think it stems from the manner in which the emotional reaction to 9-11 is made into a political imperative, an imperative which creates a political need for a bull story about “Islamic culture.”