Kamala Harris: Enjoy The Long Weekend

[Dill]

(06-14-2021, 03:36 AM)hollodero Wrote: But honestly. If someone says "there's no reason to talk to white people, there are no good apples and they make my blood boil" or how they are demented, violent predators, how they have five holes in their brain, are out of their minds and killing a white person might be more blessing than sin, then there's really no need to add context. The only context that would change anything would be if these speeches went on to say "...are things someone despicable said which I hereby quote in disgust", or else there really is no excuse, no matter how many words you find to muse about academia and principle or institutional racism and empathy for the students or whatever really. These are racist, hateful words, Mr. Mantooth is right about that and I find it puzzling why you even try to talk around this. Sure seems like a deliberately upheld blind spot.

Well, that appears to be Wes's position. But I am surprised you take that tack too. Do you disagree with me that scholarly and scientific inquiry teaches us to question social dogma, invites us to pursue the kind of inquiry which doesn't already have the answers at the beginning?  The modern research university was born with Humboldt's terms Lern- and Lehrfreiheit, right? That doesn't mean bad ideas, hypotheses, theories, etc. cannot be superseded or rejected, but we don't start with rejection. We start with inquiry and analysis, from which rejection can proceed, be rationally argued for if justified, but not demanded at the outset of discussion/inquiry. I'd like to know if you disagree with this "musing" about the Academic research ideal, as the sine qua non of the research university. And if you do agree, why then should that ideal should be cast aside here, as if we were reading tweets encapsulating political views rather than statements made in the process of academic demonstration of how one begins to process rage by acknowledging one has it and describing the experience.

Because I prize those academic ideals, I find it hard to assent to rejection prima facie before analysis, before I have relevant background on the speaker, what was said, or why. And if I choose not to be coerced into rejection before analysis by a shift in focus to my character to explain why I won't jump to conclusions in this case, I ask why principled refusal should cast me as "talking around a deliberately upheld blind spot" or, worse, something that "rhymes with bassist"? Neither of those responses engages with the points I have actually made about speaker intent and context--unnecessary to engage Khilanani's points on the ground she made them, and same now for Dill. 

A further point, one ALWAYS places other people's statements in some kind of context in order to make sense of them. We make assumptions about speaker intent and other parameters. So, taking up again the above mentioned ideal, it matters greatly how we are imposing that context, how aware we are of what we bring to statements we decode, and especially if we are replacing the original context with something else--without even realizing, let alone acknowledging that. 

This awareness/investigation of context also includes asking why this lecture is selected for news attention while others about the same topic (e.g., the other Yale lecture link I posted above) are not--thus sending Khilanani's statements into a circulation of venues where there will be little interest in the original context, perhaps illustrating a lead theme of her talk--absence of white empathy for Black rage. 

It seems to me that you, Wes and others are responding to soundbites from a news article as if they had been presented as a series of tweets by someone who actually believes all white people are "demented predators" and "killing a white person might be more blessing than sin." One result of this is that someone who is thinking deeply about current, unbalanced race relations, and posing serious questions to both whites and people of color regarding the issue of rage denial, is suddenly just a person using "racist hateful words," and we should condemn her and those words rather than address the questions she has framed with them. "People of color can be racist too! Don't excuse 'their' racism with double standards" looks like the best lesson we can take from that impoverished reading.  Nevermind that POC generally aren't in control of our medical institutions and imposing a racial double standard upon whites and denying it at the same time.