The NYT continues to platform crazier and crazier SJW mantras, in the forms of normalizing censorship and seeing neo-Nazis behind every tree.
Today we have “White ‘Power’ and the Fear of Replacement” by Abigail Levin and Lisa Guenther:
Lisa Guenther is Queen’s National Scholar in Critical Prison Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. Abigail Levin is an associate professor of philosophy at Niagara University and the author of “The Cost of Free Speech: Pornography, Hate Speech, and Their Challenge to Liberalism.”
Alright then.
What we have here is basically two adherents of ‘critical legal studies’ (aka a Marxist SJW orientation):
The distinction between nation and state helps to explain why Confederate statues are so important to white nationalists, and why Jews were the seemingly odd targets of a protest ostensibly about the removal of a Confederate statue. By identifying with the Confederacy, white nationalists (whether from the Southeast or the Midwest, or even from Quebec) get to adopt the position of an underdog white nation struggling against oppression and occupation by both a coercive state power, and by a group of “coastal elites” — a thinly veiled euphemism for rich, well-educated, powerful Jews — who are seen as not sharing “our” identity, history and ancestry, but who have nevertheless illegitimately seized the important nonstate sites of power: control of the banks and the ideological power of the media.
Framed this way, with the Jews as “global conspirators” on one side and the hordes of black and brown upstarts on the other, the demonstrators get to be activists in a valiant struggle for liberation from both sets of oppressors. The statues, which from one perspective might be construed as the effigies of losers, are from the perspective of white nationalists inspiring signs that the struggle continues, that Dixie will rise again.
Those are perhaps the two most coherent paragraphs in the piece. The rest is a case study in navel-gazing, postmodernist nonsense:
“Paradoxically, even in its refusal to be replaced, the “we” depends rhetorically and constitutively upon both an opposition to “you” and an address to “you” in order to assert itself…”
“In her book, Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed shows…”
“He is at once invoking the age-old, bedrock, patriarchal claim that women are chattel…”
“Historically, in the United States, white people are the replacers, not the replaced…”
“The historian Patrick Wolfe argues that “settler colonialism destroys to replace,” but that “the process of replacement maintains the refractory imprint of the native counterclaim”…
You get the idea.
