On the rotten core that is women/gender studies - I'm not sure if you already know of her, but you should read about Sally Miller Gearhart, a pioneer in this field. Especially her talk, "The Future - if there is one - is Female."
One thing I have to disagree on here (Warning! White Woman Expostulating! :) ) is the suggestion that white people are fully responsible for infantilizing black people. Uh, no, there have been plenty of self-infantilizers as well. I know blacks were infantilized during the slave days but that changed a lot in the 20th century. Thirty-three years ago, Shelby Steele argued in "The Content of our Character" that black people had to start stepping up and doing the work of developing *themselves*--educating themselves, asserting themselves, being more productive. That white people couldn't fix that for them. His short read, by the way, is every bit as relevant today as it was in 1991.
Medium is full (or was anyway, don't know what it's like now) of self-infantilizing black people exactly as you describe. Helplessness is very much a *choice* in this regard - I, as a white woman, *choose* not to infantilize others, and also to not infantilize myself as a helpwess wittle female in constant danger from a world filled with lustful, uncontrollable rapists. I also *chose* never to let a man abuse me (did you know how much *choice* you actually have? He can't hit a woman who isn't there!) The left worships victimhood and everyone wants a piece of it. People love to *feel* victimized for all the bennies you mentioned, but no one wants to actually *be* victimized.
Anyway, I'm with ya on the Gender Studies for Women idea. It's taught two generations of women, at least, to be helpless little victims and not assert themselves. The Patriarchy would like to thank them very much for their efforts (and special awards and butt pinches for the good little Handmaid allies for boys in dresses!)
This is a totally fair take, and I think I was almost going there with my statements about how women of color use this structure to acquire social clout also. I definitely infantilized myself, which I've written about in an earlier essay. I defeinitely want to read Steele. What I see women of color writ large doing: blaming negative events on racism and sexism by default instead of examining our own roles in our life's outcomes; having an external locus of control. I'm glad to see that you're thinking about this because it's really taboo to talk about it. I've also felt, like you, that to a certain extent we are our own worst enemies when it comes to male emotional or physical violence. Granted, it is difficult to leave an abusive relationship if the man has a financial hold over you. But, mental strength should lead to leaving that person if you have the resources. There are plenty of women who could leave who don't for various reasons; this is exactly why I was so bothered by the woman who got Aziz Ansari cancelled; she could have left but repeatedly chose not to, and then blamed him for what happened when she failed to leave. She had agency she chose not to exercise. I've never been physically abused by a man, but when I was being emotionally blackmailed, it took me a good four years to end it when I was in my twenties. So, if you don't have a high opinion of yourself (which I did not back then), it becomes difficult to leave.
The thing that bothered me the most about ‘Grace’ and Aziz Ansari is that when she asked him to stop, he did. He should never have taken the flack for it, and she needs to grow up because she’s still not old enough to be dating or meeting men (and yes, I know she was in her twenties. I know people much older than her who are still not ready for dating).
What I want to do is to encourage women to get out early, like, as soon as she starts being an asshole, or avoid these people entirely. Women have a lot more choice than they acknowledge as to how they’ll be treated.
I’ve met plenty of WOC who self-infantilize, and plenty of nons who do too. Self-infantilization is the new cool thing! Everyone else is doing it and if you don’t, you’ll get blamed for being an apex oppressor! I suspect this is one reason why so many (often white, but not always) men are ‘going trans’ - they can claim victimhood and distract from who’s placed at the top of the Oppression Pyramid :) Except they make for really shitty-looking women :)
This is why I seek others of my tribe who are ready to, or have already shaken the self-infantilism, regardless of who they are.
"I also call upon the broad group of Asian Americans of all origins to fight back against the equally preposterous idea that we are white-adjacent because we strive to class climb as any other group would do."
That's not why you're perceived as white-adjacent. Rather, it's because you, like whites, have genetic privilege when it comes to things such as a high IQ, non-criminality (good behavior), et cetera. Jews also have this privilege.
Frankly, if Leftists are going to talk about privilege and victimhood, then let's look at this issue more broadly. White men who have ADHD and are bald, fat, hairy, and ugly don't have very much privilege, for instance. Where's their victimhood reward for this? Because they don't get one, they're probably much more likely to get drawn to the alt-right and nebulous figures such as Donald Trump.
Part of this is the composition of these groups. Indian Americans are rich and high achieving because the ones who come here had to be in India. Black people were brought here against their will. I'm not sure I buy the IQ argument. You have more recent African immigrants to the US who are smart and high achieving as well, so generational poverty affects outcomes greatly. Same thing with Jews - they were not forcibly brought here and often excelled in their fields before they came. And your point about white men is why I advocate for class-first analysis.
Obviously there are selection effects here. It's worth noting, of course, that even in Britain, where the Indians are less elite, Indian children perform almost as well as white children do in school. And Indians in both East Africa and Fiji are a market-dominant minority even though they were poor laborers when they first came over there.
I suspect that, even at their full potential, Indians in India would be less smart than Western whites or East Asians are. But I do suspect that Indians' IQs in India are still significantly depressed due to environmental factors. And obviously it's easier to leave India if one is smart since duller Indians don't have anywhere near as many job opportunities. Though apparently the Indians in Western Europe--mostly Britain--are almost evenly split between well-educated and poorly-educated ones:
And for what it's worth, I don't mind low-IQ immigration just so long as there is something for them to do here, but I also want to be much more active in recruiting and attracting global cognitive elites. My own parents had to wait ten years before they could legally immigrate to the US, for instance. They had to move to Israel in the meantime because immigrating to the US wasn't an option for them back in 1991, unlike in 2001. In 1991, the US's doors were unfortunately shut tightly for them. And they were well-educated Russians, with Master's Degrees in Chemistry and Physics, respectively.
I'm unsure if the West actually got the smart Jews because Soviet Jews also performed very well when it came to things such as chess and educational achievement, in spite of Jewish quotas.
I agree that we need more high skilled immigration here and should take in a steady amount of low skilled immigrants as well, just not a flood. You’re right about environmental factors and poverty- the latter significantly diminishes a person’s potential not just in terms of ability and intellectual development but because they simply don’t have the social capital. Mediocre children of rich people end up doing almost as well if not as well as their parents bc of said social capital. I do think though that culture matters a lot, and elites just refuse to consider that certain groups emphasize education to a degree where they can overcome class position, like East Asians and south Asians.
FWIW, I do think that emphasizing education to a greater degree over the centuries for certain groups—such as Ashkenazi Jews and Indian Brahmins—might have also allowed them to evolve to—on average—become smarter than their neighbors. There’s no reason that human evolution has to stop at the neck, after all. And any genetic differences that exist would simply be the protect of different environmental selection pressures over the centuries, millennia, et cetera.
Agreed with the rest of your post here.
Honestly, my main issue with open borders—I mean the kind of open borders that would have half of Sub-Saharan Africa moving to the West—is that the West might very well stop being attractive to cognitive elites afterwards, both to its own, existing cognitive elites and to foreign cognitive elites who would otherwise have wanted to move to the West. Countries shouldn’t be making themselves so dumpy that their own cognitive elites will flee and abandon these countries. We already saw this experiment occur on a smaller scale with Northern US cities and their white flight in the past. Cognitive elites don’t want to live in places like Detroit.
One contrary argument that might be made is that immigration increases overall economic activity regardless of the level of skills those immigrants have, which of course benefits the cognitive elites by reducing the prices of services. But, this also seem to me to increase the wealth divide between the knowledge class and everyone else. I think the US and West in general will not cease to be attractive to all manner of people even as we decline in influence because we're still rich and the standard of living is so much higher. I think the idea of individual liberty is also attractive to people from more collectivist societies who are thus inclined, as they can be more 'themselves' in such a society. My mother, for example, came here because her relatives ostracized her for leaving an abusive marriage in India. She was unskilled, as was my father, but they both achieved the dream as much as it is possible for people who came from poverty. They own their house and another property in India and have amassed a moderate amount of wealth. They're not rich, but solidly middle class.
If we were to do open borders, or at least much more of them, though, and not just for cognitive elites, then I think that limiting it to parts of the world that are not heavily Muslim or African would probably be a good idea. So, Latin America, India, and non-Muslim Southeast Asia. Very moderate Muslim countries such as Turkey and Kazakhstan can also be included here.
This isn’t the frame that I was looking at things. Rather, I fear that too much immigration of the wrong kind could increase the corruption, dysfunction, crime, et cetera in the West. It might already be happening to some extent in Western Europe even right now, with the routine terrorist attacks and murdering of people for “Islamophobic” speech. US cities such as Detroit and Baltimore also aren’t shining beacons of good governance. I fear that with too much immigration of the wrong kind, much more of the West could end up looking like Detroit or Baltimore, or like one of the Muslim ghettoes in Western Europe.
I agree with your entire analysis. Do you hope to reach race reductionist members of the PMC or are you directing this toward working class folks in the hopes that they will challenge race reductionism? If the former is part of your audience, I believe it would be helpful to avoid terms like "class supremacy" and "neo-racism" that put them on the defensive just as much as accusations of "white supremacy" and "class reductionism" piss us off.
As I assume people on Substack are a mixture of the former and class traitors like myself, it’s those of us PMC people who don’t agree. I don’t think I’ll ever convince the people I’m critiquing judging from past interactions, but you’re correct in your assessment. I’m a bit biting much of the time. And this is after heavy editing.
Women are the worst. I thought that was what you meant. Penny says no. That’s all Penny says. I think maybe you mean women are the best? Because Penny says you told her what you meant but she can’t tell me. It was really more implied. (As I said she only says no)
If the Democrats lose both the Senate and the White House, as looks increasingly likely, hopefully there will be a big push within the party to reassess their emphasis on identity, especially given Republican gains among black and Hispanic voters. But I'm not holding my breath.
Thanks for having the courage to be so brutally honest. You have an important perspective based on hard-won experience that deserves to be widely heard.
Emotional terrorism is such a good way of putting it - and accurate! These dynamics are why I have far, far more internalized shame and fear from my years in internet feminism communities than I do from being raised Catholic. This way of thinking about the world fucks people up, and makes us more afraid of each other than we need to be. It destroys trust.
Goodness, where to start… my entry point was the feminist communities on LiveJourrnal circa 2004. After lurking for a few weeks, I made a “girl power”-type post sharing a news article about a woman who’d kayaked or something between two islands in the Pacific, which was accompanied by a picture of two people from the island she’d arrived at helping her up the beach. I got over a hundred comments calling me, her, and the story in general “racist” and “colonialist.” I’d say that set the tone for my future misadventures.
Idk, probably because there really isn’t one. Kayaking to an island is the same as colonizing it? It’s racist for a white woman to be helped up the beach by two Pacific Islanders?
Thanks! I have been following your stuff but have a been a little behind on my own reading I’ll admit. I appreciate that you’re writing from a perspective that is usually hijacked by the left like my own.
On the rotten core that is women/gender studies - I'm not sure if you already know of her, but you should read about Sally Miller Gearhart, a pioneer in this field. Especially her talk, "The Future - if there is one - is Female."
I don't, thank you for the rec!
I'd like to hear your thoughts after you're done.
One thing I have to disagree on here (Warning! White Woman Expostulating! :) ) is the suggestion that white people are fully responsible for infantilizing black people. Uh, no, there have been plenty of self-infantilizers as well. I know blacks were infantilized during the slave days but that changed a lot in the 20th century. Thirty-three years ago, Shelby Steele argued in "The Content of our Character" that black people had to start stepping up and doing the work of developing *themselves*--educating themselves, asserting themselves, being more productive. That white people couldn't fix that for them. His short read, by the way, is every bit as relevant today as it was in 1991.
Medium is full (or was anyway, don't know what it's like now) of self-infantilizing black people exactly as you describe. Helplessness is very much a *choice* in this regard - I, as a white woman, *choose* not to infantilize others, and also to not infantilize myself as a helpwess wittle female in constant danger from a world filled with lustful, uncontrollable rapists. I also *chose* never to let a man abuse me (did you know how much *choice* you actually have? He can't hit a woman who isn't there!) The left worships victimhood and everyone wants a piece of it. People love to *feel* victimized for all the bennies you mentioned, but no one wants to actually *be* victimized.
Anyway, I'm with ya on the Gender Studies for Women idea. It's taught two generations of women, at least, to be helpless little victims and not assert themselves. The Patriarchy would like to thank them very much for their efforts (and special awards and butt pinches for the good little Handmaid allies for boys in dresses!)
This is a totally fair take, and I think I was almost going there with my statements about how women of color use this structure to acquire social clout also. I definitely infantilized myself, which I've written about in an earlier essay. I defeinitely want to read Steele. What I see women of color writ large doing: blaming negative events on racism and sexism by default instead of examining our own roles in our life's outcomes; having an external locus of control. I'm glad to see that you're thinking about this because it's really taboo to talk about it. I've also felt, like you, that to a certain extent we are our own worst enemies when it comes to male emotional or physical violence. Granted, it is difficult to leave an abusive relationship if the man has a financial hold over you. But, mental strength should lead to leaving that person if you have the resources. There are plenty of women who could leave who don't for various reasons; this is exactly why I was so bothered by the woman who got Aziz Ansari cancelled; she could have left but repeatedly chose not to, and then blamed him for what happened when she failed to leave. She had agency she chose not to exercise. I've never been physically abused by a man, but when I was being emotionally blackmailed, it took me a good four years to end it when I was in my twenties. So, if you don't have a high opinion of yourself (which I did not back then), it becomes difficult to leave.
The thing that bothered me the most about ‘Grace’ and Aziz Ansari is that when she asked him to stop, he did. He should never have taken the flack for it, and she needs to grow up because she’s still not old enough to be dating or meeting men (and yes, I know she was in her twenties. I know people much older than her who are still not ready for dating).
What I want to do is to encourage women to get out early, like, as soon as she starts being an asshole, or avoid these people entirely. Women have a lot more choice than they acknowledge as to how they’ll be treated.
I’ve met plenty of WOC who self-infantilize, and plenty of nons who do too. Self-infantilization is the new cool thing! Everyone else is doing it and if you don’t, you’ll get blamed for being an apex oppressor! I suspect this is one reason why so many (often white, but not always) men are ‘going trans’ - they can claim victimhood and distract from who’s placed at the top of the Oppression Pyramid :) Except they make for really shitty-looking women :)
This is why I seek others of my tribe who are ready to, or have already shaken the self-infantilism, regardless of who they are.
Great essay! I wrote a post in a very similar vein to this awhile back.
https://open.substack.com/pub/dzvyenka/p/hegemony-101-black-history-month?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3crww1
This is brilliant, thank you.
"I also call upon the broad group of Asian Americans of all origins to fight back against the equally preposterous idea that we are white-adjacent because we strive to class climb as any other group would do."
That's not why you're perceived as white-adjacent. Rather, it's because you, like whites, have genetic privilege when it comes to things such as a high IQ, non-criminality (good behavior), et cetera. Jews also have this privilege.
Frankly, if Leftists are going to talk about privilege and victimhood, then let's look at this issue more broadly. White men who have ADHD and are bald, fat, hairy, and ugly don't have very much privilege, for instance. Where's their victimhood reward for this? Because they don't get one, they're probably much more likely to get drawn to the alt-right and nebulous figures such as Donald Trump.
Part of this is the composition of these groups. Indian Americans are rich and high achieving because the ones who come here had to be in India. Black people were brought here against their will. I'm not sure I buy the IQ argument. You have more recent African immigrants to the US who are smart and high achieving as well, so generational poverty affects outcomes greatly. Same thing with Jews - they were not forcibly brought here and often excelled in their fields before they came. And your point about white men is why I advocate for class-first analysis.
Obviously there are selection effects here. It's worth noting, of course, that even in Britain, where the Indians are less elite, Indian children perform almost as well as white children do in school. And Indians in both East Africa and Fiji are a market-dominant minority even though they were poor laborers when they first came over there.
I suspect that, even at their full potential, Indians in India would be less smart than Western whites or East Asians are. But I do suspect that Indians' IQs in India are still significantly depressed due to environmental factors. And obviously it's easier to leave India if one is smart since duller Indians don't have anywhere near as many job opportunities. Though apparently the Indians in Western Europe--mostly Britain--are almost evenly split between well-educated and poorly-educated ones:
https://jsmp.dk/posts/2019-09-26-braindrain/immigration.html
I'm glad that we agree about class-first!
And for what it's worth, I don't mind low-IQ immigration just so long as there is something for them to do here, but I also want to be much more active in recruiting and attracting global cognitive elites. My own parents had to wait ten years before they could legally immigrate to the US, for instance. They had to move to Israel in the meantime because immigrating to the US wasn't an option for them back in 1991, unlike in 2001. In 1991, the US's doors were unfortunately shut tightly for them. And they were well-educated Russians, with Master's Degrees in Chemistry and Physics, respectively.
I'm unsure if the West actually got the smart Jews because Soviet Jews also performed very well when it came to things such as chess and educational achievement, in spite of Jewish quotas.
I agree that we need more high skilled immigration here and should take in a steady amount of low skilled immigrants as well, just not a flood. You’re right about environmental factors and poverty- the latter significantly diminishes a person’s potential not just in terms of ability and intellectual development but because they simply don’t have the social capital. Mediocre children of rich people end up doing almost as well if not as well as their parents bc of said social capital. I do think though that culture matters a lot, and elites just refuse to consider that certain groups emphasize education to a degree where they can overcome class position, like East Asians and south Asians.
FWIW, I do think that emphasizing education to a greater degree over the centuries for certain groups—such as Ashkenazi Jews and Indian Brahmins—might have also allowed them to evolve to—on average—become smarter than their neighbors. There’s no reason that human evolution has to stop at the neck, after all. And any genetic differences that exist would simply be the protect of different environmental selection pressures over the centuries, millennia, et cetera.
Agreed with the rest of your post here.
Honestly, my main issue with open borders—I mean the kind of open borders that would have half of Sub-Saharan Africa moving to the West—is that the West might very well stop being attractive to cognitive elites afterwards, both to its own, existing cognitive elites and to foreign cognitive elites who would otherwise have wanted to move to the West. Countries shouldn’t be making themselves so dumpy that their own cognitive elites will flee and abandon these countries. We already saw this experiment occur on a smaller scale with Northern US cities and their white flight in the past. Cognitive elites don’t want to live in places like Detroit.
One contrary argument that might be made is that immigration increases overall economic activity regardless of the level of skills those immigrants have, which of course benefits the cognitive elites by reducing the prices of services. But, this also seem to me to increase the wealth divide between the knowledge class and everyone else. I think the US and West in general will not cease to be attractive to all manner of people even as we decline in influence because we're still rich and the standard of living is so much higher. I think the idea of individual liberty is also attractive to people from more collectivist societies who are thus inclined, as they can be more 'themselves' in such a society. My mother, for example, came here because her relatives ostracized her for leaving an abusive marriage in India. She was unskilled, as was my father, but they both achieved the dream as much as it is possible for people who came from poverty. They own their house and another property in India and have amassed a moderate amount of wealth. They're not rich, but solidly middle class.
If we were to do open borders, or at least much more of them, though, and not just for cognitive elites, then I think that limiting it to parts of the world that are not heavily Muslim or African would probably be a good idea. So, Latin America, India, and non-Muslim Southeast Asia. Very moderate Muslim countries such as Turkey and Kazakhstan can also be included here.
This isn’t the frame that I was looking at things. Rather, I fear that too much immigration of the wrong kind could increase the corruption, dysfunction, crime, et cetera in the West. It might already be happening to some extent in Western Europe even right now, with the routine terrorist attacks and murdering of people for “Islamophobic” speech. US cities such as Detroit and Baltimore also aren’t shining beacons of good governance. I fear that with too much immigration of the wrong kind, much more of the West could end up looking like Detroit or Baltimore, or like one of the Muslim ghettoes in Western Europe.
I agree with your entire analysis. Do you hope to reach race reductionist members of the PMC or are you directing this toward working class folks in the hopes that they will challenge race reductionism? If the former is part of your audience, I believe it would be helpful to avoid terms like "class supremacy" and "neo-racism" that put them on the defensive just as much as accusations of "white supremacy" and "class reductionism" piss us off.
As I assume people on Substack are a mixture of the former and class traitors like myself, it’s those of us PMC people who don’t agree. I don’t think I’ll ever convince the people I’m critiquing judging from past interactions, but you’re correct in your assessment. I’m a bit biting much of the time. And this is after heavy editing.
lol, i know the feeling
This is a very honest and beautiful essay. On many points, your analysis is spot on.
Women are the worst.
You missed her entire point.
I think the statement is quite correct, but perhaps incomplete.
I'd read it this way: "Women can be the worst when they behave as the author describes."
Still subjective, define "worst," but I think accurate.
He heard exactly what he wanted to hear.
Women are the best?
Where are you going with this? I need more.
Women are the worst. I thought that was what you meant. Penny says no. That’s all Penny says. I think maybe you mean women are the best? Because Penny says you told her what you meant but she can’t tell me. It was really more implied. (As I said she only says no)
If the Democrats lose both the Senate and the White House, as looks increasingly likely, hopefully there will be a big push within the party to reassess their emphasis on identity, especially given Republican gains among black and Hispanic voters. But I'm not holding my breath.
They seem incapable of learning anything. Their hubris borders on suicidal.
They've become the group they claim to despise - the unquestioned authority - the white men of the past.
Call me old fashioned, but I like the term "Oppression Olympics" to describe the inverted hierarchy
Thanks for having the courage to be so brutally honest. You have an important perspective based on hard-won experience that deserves to be widely heard.
Emotional terrorism is such a good way of putting it - and accurate! These dynamics are why I have far, far more internalized shame and fear from my years in internet feminism communities than I do from being raised Catholic. This way of thinking about the world fucks people up, and makes us more afraid of each other than we need to be. It destroys trust.
Oh man I’d love to read more about your experience in that subculture.
Goodness, where to start… my entry point was the feminist communities on LiveJourrnal circa 2004. After lurking for a few weeks, I made a “girl power”-type post sharing a news article about a woman who’d kayaked or something between two islands in the Pacific, which was accompanied by a picture of two people from the island she’d arrived at helping her up the beach. I got over a hundred comments calling me, her, and the story in general “racist” and “colonialist.” I’d say that set the tone for my future misadventures.
I don’t even understand the point of offense
Idk, probably because there really isn’t one. Kayaking to an island is the same as colonizing it? It’s racist for a white woman to be helped up the beach by two Pacific Islanders?
Something something "treating people of colour as 'The Help'"
Oh, I think I love you. You simply must check out my Substack page: The Chaos Trials. I'm always about to be cancelled. Great piece.
Thanks! I have been following your stuff but have a been a little behind on my own reading I’ll admit. I appreciate that you’re writing from a perspective that is usually hijacked by the left like my own.
Welcome to the fold comrade! 😎