What They Mean by "White Supremacy"

 The word gets tossed out all the time, but seeing them actually define it is always useful:

"When I say white, I am not talking about skin pigmentation. I am talking about a worldview that embraces white supremacy. That includes many whites, but also a lot of brown and black bodies that also are white in their worldview.”"

Examples, De La Torre said, include U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whose legal opinions have routinely supported the dominant culture, and Hispanics who supported Donald Trump.

Baptist News

White supremacy is basically Americans governing on behalf of typical American norms and views. 

The way that intersectionality, social justice, and hypermodernity work is to actively attack "whiteness" (traditional Western culture) and accuse it of all working for 'white supremacy.' This is in spite of the fact that it was the "white supremacist" system that appointed Justice Thomas, and that it was in the context of Western models for human rights and objectivity that the concept of universal human rights was born. 

Other peoples are allowed to have their own cultures and experiences, and they are encouraged to live those experiences and to share them widely. But, anyone who is living in a way that resembles traditional American perspectives is pathologized. 

To the social justice left, it is only possible to positively be part of a non-white cultures or to be a hypermodernist that actively disassociates oneself from traditional Western culture. 

27% of People in 1937 Didn't Have Religious Membership

 An interesting paragraph jumped out at me while looking through an article on religiosity: 

The polling giant has been measuring church membership since 1937 when nearly three-quarters of the population (73%) reported membership in a house of worship. For much of that time, membership remained at about 70% but began to decline after 1999. By the late 2000s, membership had dropped to about 62% and has continued to fall.

KTLA 

Many people would focus on the fact that this article talks about membership in houses of worship dropping dramatically, but the fact of the matter is that it is pretty surprising that nearly a third of Americans historically did not see themselves as members of a particular religious tradition. 

This reminds me of polls from the 19th century which showed that a third or more of scientists were atheists, and polls of Parisians from the same time which showed similarly that only 80% of them identified as Christians. Neither the Jewish or Muslim populations of the city would scarcely make up the rest of the 20% to 100, so sizable religionless populations did exist in those times. 

It may very well be the case that a third of Americans have always been somewhat religionless. I am not saying outright atheist, though certainly it would not be too difficult to believe that maybe 1 in 10 Americans were historically atheist as Rodney Stark has implied, but I can imagine that a very large amount of Americans had extremely mild views about God and spirituality. 

The early 20th century was a time when the occult flourished, after all, and the 1950s onwards were full of New Age movements, fixations on things like hypnotism and Freudian psychology. 

Americans tend to be so obsessed with this idea that grandma & grandpa (and great-grandma & great-grandpa) were pious pillars of their community, along with absolutely everyone else in the community, that they forget that there were porn theaters, prostitutes, alcoholics, atheists, literal Communists and Anarchists, practitioners of the occult, etc., thriving in urban areas, and no doubt having presences in towns and villages. 

What Is Tradition?

 First, tradition, in the sense of it being an ideal,behaves the same way that any sort of high culture behaves. It is a series of ideas and reference points... thus, it is always an imagined, perfect thing, that does not reflect reality completely. Reality is always streaked through with human flaws.

Just like democracy or the idealized monarch, tradition is an ideal that people try to uphold. Of course, it is different from ideals in the sense that it is largely based on something handed down and much of it does not necessarily exist in a way that is ideological...

Tradition could be conceived of as the ideological prior to the popularization of the ideological. It can also be conceived of as a meta-ideology, or an ideology for everything, It is meant to encompass all wisdom, and to be the underpinning of some sort of civilization. Perhaps it can even be said that tradition is open to itself being manifested in a series of ideologies. 

Tradition is to ideology as perhaps civilization is to culture. For it is something that can spawn multiple cultures, and, in addition to spawning culture, it contributes to many other things. 

Of course, we can cut up the concept of tradition infinitely, just as we can cut up the category of culture infinitely, until each region, each age-group, each subdivision of art has a culture, and it is easy to digress infinitely on something like this, and even easier for someone to say that they do not share this lofty view of what constitutes tradition, but remember, we are using tradition here in a way that transcends any sort of normal use. 

Tradition is no longer just a word filling an expected linguistic role. 

In this context, it is part of an ideology, and a way of life. 

Colonialism & La Raza Cósmica

Res nullius, or terra nullius, was a doctrine that basically justified the colonization of massive parts of the world. Honestly, this is something that modern scholars have read back into the colonization efforts. Essentially, it deals with the justification for the taking of land from native populations. 

Basically, if a land is not effectively occupied, it is nobody's land. Some of the definitions try to make this more concrete by talking about societies that have not yet advanced to a position where they had not yet mixed their labor with the earth in any permanent way (Frost), but I think it may be more appropriate to emphasize the sparsity of population that usually described most of these places. The land was simply never occupied in truly significant ways, for one, and the obvious fact that when the English colonists took up position in Massachusetts Bay they could easily negotiate for settlement rights. 

The land could fit a lot more people than the 5,000 or so that were there, and, especially through technology and trade that the natives did not have, they would be able to radically change the region. We could say that the Europeans were able to apply a mix of res nullius and negotiated settlement: it was obvious that there was enough room for both parties, and it was also obvious that there would be advantages to mixing with the Europeans, so why not negotiate it? Why not be cooperative? 

From the perspective of the natives, the sacrifice of some amount of their hunting grounds for new potential allies that could give them trade and technological advances that would put them above their enemies. Moreover, the Wampanoag had just suffered a massive crisis of disease -- oddly enough, disease that may have had no connection to European colonization, and the disease even resulted in a spiritual crisis as their medicine men could not handle or explain it, and it led to many converting to Christianity early on (Wikipedia).

Obviously, conflict eventually occurred, and one can imagine that very similar stories unfolded in many other regions, where the initial settling was met with some amount of peace and acceptance, but it all boiled over, as it eventually boils over. 

I believe that when we think about the history of colonization in these terms, it is more understandable. Just as such, most sticking points in history can be tackled when we understand that the problem was less black & white. 

But because the interpretation of history can be weaponized for advancing a left or right position, we have to actually resolve it in a more final way. 

Cue la raza cósmica.

Perhaps the one thing that makes this a sticking point in North America is the lack of intermixing. The narrative among Latinos, as I understand it, is that they have become la raza cósmica -- the problem of colonization is resolved by bringing all Latino identity into a single racial construct. 

Are latinos white? Yes. 

Are they Indian? Yes.

Are they black? Yes. 

Can more recent immigrants from Asia and the Middle East have children & grandchildren grafted onto the Latino community? Well, that's the plan, isn't it? The Latin Americans are the cosmic race being unfurled by God: all peoples coming together into a post-racial existence. 

In a sense, the cosmic race is the post-race. 

While I am not sure if this is what was meant by Vasconcelos when he wrote about it in the 1920s, this is how I have understood it from interactions with a limited amount of Latinos that I know. The undestanding is far from scholarly, but just like in most cases, the folk understanding of an idea is often more important than the scholarly version. 

Jose Vasconcelos who coined the term 'cosmic race'

The Latin American world solved the problem of the legacy of colonialism through dissolution of racial identity and intermarriage. While there may still be some that think in terms of castizos & mestizos, and it may even be a theme that would one day reemerge, it is effective in making the sins of history be forgotten via the union of victim & offender into a single national identity. 

In a sense, it is the most elegant of all resolutions, for it renders conflict irrelevant by making the grief and guilty a little bit of everybody's, and its measuring becomes something irrelevant. It could even be said that the only reason that "native lands" is still relevant among Norte Americanos is because they have not dissolved their differences through intermarriage.

The racial heterogeneity of North Americans, and their obsession with diversity, may actually be what is holding them back from fixing the problem. Nobody can move forward because we are still in the game of counting grievances and using history to jockey for position. We are stuck in a narrative of diversity that is not helpful, instead of a narrative that resolves our identities into a single one. 

Reference Points & Culture

Culture is just as much about reference points as it is about differences in values. I would even argue that it is sometimes because the reference points are different and present the dilemma or the mythos behind the value differently that we sometimes see nuances in values. Even when we agree very much with another person and identical values with near identical prioritization, we will ultimately express these things differently and engage with the world with a different attitude because of the influences we have received from different reference points...

The reference points can be so different that almost no common ground exists. I very much learned this when sitting in a class in Korea and the professor wanted to come up with a neutral reference point to stage an example... Obviously, no major politicians were used, and so he started naming some local celebrities which myself and other foreigners hadn't heard of... He then even named a few famous American singers and movie stars which, surprising to me, some of the other foreigners and locals had not heard of. 

Konan

He finally came down to referencing a character I later found out was the star of a Japanese animated series who played a detective - Konan from a show called Case Closed. He asked if everyone knew who he was, and many of the non-Korean Asians knew, and I remember after describing the scenario, I raised my hand and said,

"Wait, are we talking about Conan... the... Barbarian?" 

I remember someone acted shocked for a moment, like I had just implied that this random Japanese detective character was a barbarian... They had zero reference point for Conan the Barbarian. The professor then acted exasperated... naming even an internationally famous animation character that was beloved in the minds of both Japanese and Koreans was not enough because there was a Westerner and an Uzbek who had no idea what he was talking about, and this confusion even brought about a clumsy exchange of words that came off wrong and made someone even wonder if I was saying something racist because they had no idea about the larger-than-life Robert E. Howard character in the Western world. 

I remember thinking about how my negative and skeptical attitude towards certain things could be confusing. For instance, I found that when I talked about the industrial revolution and WWII being catalysts for feminism because it changed the labor market, people were shocked, some even offended, that I would suggest that the changing workplace was a major factor and not idealistic women revolutionaries. Even conservatives talked about how the newly found roles of women were something that were fought for. However, "women filling in for men who were at war" is a very common trope for explaining the rise of second wave feminism in America. 

I also remember that every reference to multiculturalism in Korea would quickly come back to international marriages, the bulk of which were disproportionately mail order brides, and the discussion was also influenced by the number of women who married soldiers and ran off to America in the decades previously. Slavery wasn't a topic, and there were no ethnic minorities to be found at all 50 years ago in South Korea barring a limited amount of well-off Chinese & Japanese merchants, few of whom were integrated or even necessarily interested in integrating. 

But while these differences exist, I've also learned to realize that Koreans and other non-Westerners have very similar values to us. The prioritization can be different, but I have found that it would be no more radical a difference than you would find between a conservative Dakotan and a liberal New Yorker. What is often incredibly different is the references that they have that affirm these values. 

And it is these cultural differences boil down greatly to the way that we refer back to a thing, whether it is through pop TV, literature, or the local history. It is because of these very reference points that we end up with some very different ideas of how problems should be solved and values should be asserted. A Korean who is against alcoholism would immediately see the problem not just in terms of drunks at bars and drunk driving, but also of people being forced to consume alcohol at social functions through work and family, and also in the overall price of the product. Norwegians would likely not see either of these issues in their society, and the way that they would conceptualize the problem would be more about the individual's relationship with alcohol.

It's hard to come up even with specific examples of 'what an American refers to when they think of X versus what a Korean thinks of,' because so much of what we believe, as Westerners or as Koreans, is actually quite personal. What amount of Americans are strong Christians anymore, and what amount of them are going to come at it from a Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or Mormon angle, that emphasize different aspects of the Biblical teachings of Christ, or maybe not even the Bible at all..? What amount of Americans are patriots, and how many of them are into the 1776 style of patriotism and folk libertarianism that comes with it, or what amount of them are more into the romanticization of 20th century events more than those of the deep history? Such a difference may appear to be subtle, but an Alabaman with roots to the Confederacy and the American revolution may look at these questions of American patriotism very differently than a black American from New York whose grandfather was a Tuskegee airman. 

But what is actually important about American culture in this context is that the black New Yorker and the white Alabaman both are aware of each other's references, while the average Korean could be excused for not knowing much at all about the Tuskegee Airman and 20th century American war (because so much of patriotism in America is located in the framework of military service), the Confederacy, or the American revolution. 

There are, no doubt, easy to find examples of two sets of Koreans & Americans where it is actually the Koreans & Americans having more in common in belief and values than they do with their fellow country men, yet simply not having the same reference points. 

A Brazilian Catholic, a French Catholic, a Korean Catholic, and an American Catholic, all conservatives sympathetic to traditional values and rigid morals, will have infinitely more in common with each other than their countrymen who are opposites, and a lot more in common with each other than even tepid cultural Catholics with one foot in the door of the secular world who are compatriots. They will also have plenty of reference points to draw on from the Bible and Catholic history and characters... 

But the second that a political or social issue comes up, even when they believe the same things, the way they express it and the images and ideas kicking around in their mind will be ultimately different. Even if the Brazilian and the American both support gun ownership, they draw upon different legal principles and histories. Even if the Korean and the Mexican are both against alcoholism and drug use, the contexts in each country are going to be radically different. 

Being of the same culture does not mean being of the same values, but it means being of the same network of ideas and references. Globalism can chip away at this, but the differences are ultimately immutable simply because nobody is surrendering their language nor are they going to spend 15 years watching Brazilian TV and reading pulp fiction novels just because. 

Some shows will be vectors for spreading a nebulous global culture, but we also know that a comedy skit about how terrible your boss is or how funny science geeks are is not actually going to inculcate people with culture. Moreover, Korean Netflix is filled with local content that is generally much more popular than foreign content -- the foreign content is something consumed more individually and in a more niche fashion. Cultural differences will not go away, and thus our reference points will not go away.