"You might think that there are templates drawn from experience: the Movement for Black Lives and its remarkable ability to mobilize around not only specific issues of police violence but force a long-overdue reckoning with structural racism. Or perhaps the Women’s March during the inauguration, which drew out a huge contingent of new activists who were suddenly energized to take steps they wouldn’t have contemplated a few months prior. Or even Occupy Wall Street, whose cultural and economic footprint has far outlasted the height of the movement’s presence in Zuccotti Park. Yes, you might think that. But according to the Arbiters Of The Way Things Are–like Mark Lilla–you would be WRONG...
I don’t know why Bannon envy is so seductive to pundits like Lilla…actually, strike that. I do. But Bannon envy–He’s a svengali! Look at how he’s organized his base! If only we could put our finger on the pulse of the True American like he can!–is a death trap for progressive political strategy and anyone purporting to be serious who embraces it should be studiously ignored if not outright ridiculed. However, Mark Lilla is a wealthy white man who has mastered an academic affect and convinced gullible editorial gatekeepers that he has something original to say, so here we are. Simply put, the reasons for Lilla being foisted upon our public discourse are the same reasons a wife-beating racist Goldman Sachs banker who likes nazi cosplay and looks like he’s coming off a nine-day bender has been anointed a deep thinker. But Lilla is in too deep to see the irony involved in his argument that Bannon is the best interpreter of left politics...
Lilla’s implicit norming of the worldview of people like him paints anything else as deviant, and his whiteness overrules all else in his critique of the social movements that, in his view, may have “laudable” goals, but have not stayed in their place. If you want to really understand why it was the white moderate for whom Martin Luther King, Jr., saved his most scathing critique in the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, here you go."
Never compare something to the MauMau rebellion...
FB: "Lilla naively assumes that whites would feel like they have a stake in, for example, protesting the murder of Philando Castile is only we didn’t emphasize that Castile was a black man. This is, to use a technical term, dumb...
To surrender the critique of structural racism in favor of an anodyne argument of “it’s not fair to someone of any color” is to cede essential ground in the battle for justice and equal rights in this country, and it takes equal amounts of casual racism and hubris to make that argument with any sort of serious intent."
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