vindication!

John McCrarey recently blogged about calling out the left for its hypocrisy in attacking Melania Trump and her (legal!) immigrant status. John wrote on Facebook:

Apparently, no one thought #DeportMelania was racist or deplorable when it was being used by verified Democrats and journalists (is there a difference?) on Twitter just a short time ago.

John then writes that his third ex-wife, a diehard liberal, gave the following response:

She is not a person of color. So not racist. She could be purple[,] and it still would not be racist. It[']s not xenophobic. It[']s lashing out at the hypocrisy of Trump. But then you knew that. You’re a smart guy.

John's sentiment:

The ignorance of that statement is mind boggling. And it is why you can never change minds of people who are so invested in hate they will never see reason. Ah well.

I wrote the following comment in response to the above:

“She is not a person of color. So not racist.”

Silly John! Of course she’s right! The term “white,” after all, denotes neither a color nor a race! You can be racist against whites and still not be racist because that’s the asymmetrical (and hypocritical) dynamic the left has derived from postmodernist thinkers. Jacques Derrida talked about pairs of opposites (white/black, man/woman) in which the first element of the pair was the “privileged” one. This thinking bled out from academe into normal society. Fellow PoMo thinker Michel Foucault, following Nietzsche, claimed that society was a web of power structures that determine both authority and “truth” (always in quotes for postmodernists). So with whites presumably at the top of the social power structure in the West, racism can only flow downward; it’s never symmetrical. That’s the beast you’re dealing with; that’s the mindset you’re up against. Blame Nietzsche for this fucking mess; he had interesting things to say about reality and people, but ultimately, he’s one of the fathers of postmodernism, which lies at the root of PC culture.

Cleaning up academe by jettisoning most of its leftists is vitally important if we really want to see profound healing in America. But that’s not likely to happen anytime soon; the left dominates over 90% of every academic field except science, and even there, the PC cancer has begun to settle in (cf. scientific research on the correlation between race and intelligence). Really unfortunate.

Our best hope, for now, is to persuade young people to skip college and go to trade schools to pick up some practical (and very lucrative) skills. Practical reality is like garlic to the PC/PoMo vampire.

It was nice to see, in a weird bit of synchronicity, some vindication for my way of thinking when I woke up this morning and saw the following on Instapundit:

WHY POSTCOLONIAL THEORY IS NOT HELPING HONG KONG:

Over recent weeks, political turmoil raged in the form of mass demonstrations that saw 1 in 7 Hong Kong residents take to the streets to protest an extradition bill that would have allowed alleged suspects to be deported to stand trial in Mainland China, where the legal system is subject to the arbitrariness and discretion of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The fear that any dissident could be targeted isn’t unfounded as stories about billionaires and booksellers being kidnapped by Beijing operatives, only to be prosecuted in show trials on the Mainland and in some cases even tortured in jail, are well known. The extradition bill left almost no room for doubt about China’s ambitions to further override the civil rights guaranteed to the people of Hong Kong by the Sino-British Joint Declaration and renege on the agreed-upon “One Country, Two Systems” framework.

Elsewhere, Union Jack flags were handed out and flown in the streets. As photographs of these flag-bearing protesters, many of whom cut across demographic lines, began making the rounds on social media, two things became apparent: a) the uneasy reluctance of mainstream Western media to conduct any sort of meaningful analysis of these scenes and b) the ready willingness of some quarters of Twitter to engage in vitriolic attacks of the Hong Kong protesters, accusing them of being complicit in colonialism.

For those who embrace the ideological frameworks of various forms of “Social Justice” Theory including postcolonialism, decolonialism, critical race theory and intersectional feminism, seeing the Asian inhabitants of a former colony raise its colonial flag simply does not compute. Within this ideological conception of the world there is a very simple understanding of power dynamics in which oppression must always come from people seen as having dominant identities – white, male, western, heterosexual, cisgender, ablebodied and thin – and be inflicted upon those seen as having marginalized identities – people of color, colonized or indigenous people, women, LGBT, disabled and fat people. When all of these elements are considered together, we get the framework of ‘intersectionality’ and it is through the language and activism of intersectional scholars and activists that most people encounter these ideas.

Eastern people who complicate the narrative of Western oppressor and Eastern Oppressed are understood to be speaking into and perpetuating oppressive discourses of colonial power which apply much more broadly than their own situation. From this perspective, by aligning themselves symbolically with the flag or philosophically with the ideas wrought by colonial legacy, the protesters were understood to completely invalidate the legitimacy of their liberation movement. Other criticisms reserved for the protesters include rebukes for lacking sensitivity and solidarity toward other countries with victims of colonialism. The journalist Ben Norton went so far as to say that the British flag was a symbol of “genocide, murder, racism, oppression and robbery,” and that the “pro-democracy” activists in Hong Kong were in effect, pro-colonialist groups, funded and backed by the “Western NGO-Industrial Complex.”

This argument perfectly exemplifies how one’s basic reasoning and moral calculus can get muddled when steeped too heavily in this kind of postcolonial theory.

Postcolonial theory has postmodernist roots, so it's only natural that it put forth an anti-Western victim narrative, such as the sort of drivel we see written by "scholars" like Edward Said. Intersectionality, as a concept, also traces itself back to postmodernism, especially of the Foucaultian variety, given that Foucault, following Nietzsche as stated above, saw human interrelationships primarily through the lens of power. It was reassuring to see the article's author picking up on the same dynamic I had named in my comment, and the author is correct to point out that postcolonial theorists can read events in Hong Kong only in a certain way. Their own ideology handicaps them, preventing a more accurate apprehension of reality.