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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Jona Olsson

Embrace culture, not race

02 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Politics

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Canada, Glenn Loury, identity, Jona Olsson, Kmele Foster, race, slavery, United States

Glenn Loury – who is not exactly a fan of the woke racial agenda – nevertheless hesitates on the idea of racial abolition, for understandable reasons. In a 2022 dialogue with racial abolitionist Kmele Foster, Loury asks for a “sense of racial identity… on behalf of blackness”, on these reasonable grounds:

I don’t just mean dark skin. I mean, descent from enslaved persons in the United States who migrated up the Illinois Central Railroad from Mississippi and Alabama to places like Chicago and Detroit, who fought first to be citizens, then to be equal citizens against travail, and so on. Those stories imparted to one’s children. You descend from people of this sort, you embody the aspirations of prior generations who labored so that you could have this opportunity. The food you eat, the music that you listen to, the style, the way you carry yourself, the musical form that you can create, and art and the literature that I read of people who have struggled with the conditions of blacks in the history of the United States, producing great works of profound human interest but rooted in the African American [experience].

So why eschew all of that? I agree that the racial coloration is itself meaningless, but that experience, those stories, that narrative, that history is not meaningless. It’s something around which a sense of identity could be built. And why would I throw all of that out on behalf of a race abolition program, Kmele?

My response, not far from Foster’s, is: you don’t have to throw out those stories to abolish race. Because those stories do not constitute a people’s race, but rather their culture.

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I am not my race

09 Sunday May 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Politics

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Canada, expressive individualism, identity, Iris Marion Young, Jona Olsson, Martin Luther King Jr., Mellody Hobson, Prince Ea, race, Zadie Smith

My previous points about colour-blindness are important because I don’t want to be misunderstood on a larger issue. I believe the critique of colour-blindness in the current context is well founded. Mellody Hobson, for example, rightly points out that colour-blindness too often means we act as if race isn’t a problem now, and thereby ignore the many ways in which it is. There is a studied ignorance in comments like those of Chief Justice John Roberts, that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Ignoring the current problem is the approach of American conservatives who take Martin Luther King’s words out of context to pretend that he opposed affirmative action, when he clearly and visibly supported it. Yet there is one thing those conservatives do see accurately. And that is that King did express a hope for colour-blindness in the future, “one day”. This is the part that contemporary left-wing critiques of colour-blindness often leave out – with awful consequences. Too often, these critiques refuse even the ideal of colour-blindness. In so doing, they effectively work to condemn us forever to the prisons of our socially constructed skins.

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