Tag: Freddie DeBoer

do some good, white men

I like this by Freddie deBoer, and I think he is absolutely right:

I understand that a lot of white men feel a little at sea right now and are kind of trying on different personalities in an effort to be cool people. I have a modicum of sympathy! What should white men do, in 2021? Comfortably and unapologetically occupy their space as white men and make conscious decisions to increase justice and reduce suffering in whatever ways they are able. I’d like white men, in other words, to be good people, as all of us have the capacity to be, and to leave the endless impotent posturing about one’s identity to others. If you’re a young white man and you’re trying to navigate evolving social mores, I think that the path forward is blissfully simple: do everything you can to be a good person and do not waste a single moment feeling guilty about being a white man. Such guilt never helped anyone, and besides, your concern is your integrity, and integrity is about choice. You didn’t choose to be white or male, so those things are not relevant to your integrity. Be kind. Be honest. Be gentle. Protect those weaker than you. Tell the truth. And don’t spend a day of your life apologizing for who you are. I promise, you’ll do more good for others that way than you will farming likes and retweets by complaining about white men on Twitter.

We lose a lot of energy and passion by imploring people to spend a lot of time navel gazing, instead of getting out in the world and doing something good. This is especially true of the Church. Many churches, it seems, would rather do the work of meeting together and observing their own shortcomings, and this often takes away from getting out and being the hands and feet of Christ.

Now, this isn’t at all to say that introspection does not have a time or place, nor that we should be completely unaware of the social position our various identities bring to us. But those observations should fuel us to doing some good in the world, not wallowing in our own guilt. Nor should it be used as a way to exclude or marginalize anew, or to excuse oneself from doing Good for others.

racial justice politics

21st century racial politics always takes place in the shadow of our inability to do anything about our racial problems. We are forever creating weird rituals to center and honor and elevate Black people, in lieu of feeding poor Black children or freeing Black prisoners. The deal we’ve made, essentially, is to say “Sorry about all the oppression, Black people. Can’t do anything about it! But tell you what, white liberals will be very weird around you for the rest of your lives, out of a very sincere desire not to offend or oppress you. We can’t do anything about Black poverty or violence against Black people, but we’ll act like racial injustice is, like, double plus bad in polite society. Also Wells Fargo will send out a very respectful Kwanzaa email every holiday season. So that’s nice.”

Freddie DeBoer, “I’m Somehow Less Concerned with Whether the Holocaust was ‘About Race’ Than I Am with the Six Million Murders”

anti-capitalist

Writing about Bari Weiss and China, Freddie DeBoer is dead right on this:

What Weiss and other “classic liberals” will eventually have to grapple with is this: you cannot meaningfully stand for human rights if you think that among those rights is the right for corporations to participate in unfettered capitalism. People who espouse these politics love to act as though there’s no space between market rights and civil rights, such as the rights to free expression or association. Many rights-focused people, whether liberal or libertarian, suggest that civil rights and capitalist rights are the same in kind. The problem, among other things, is that those capitalist rights invest ultimate power in profit, including the power to trample those other rights. Under capitalism the profit motive is insatiable. If you think the norms and institutions of “the West” protect us from such corruption, I advise you to consider (for example) that prisoners are forced to labor for pennies an hour while private entities reap the benefits.

I’m less thrilled with socialism than I used to be, but I still know capitalism is a system that brings out the worst in people, and depends on keeping the mass of people poor and addicted to consumption for the benefit of a rich few. Your “rights” mean very little next to the “right” of corporations to do whatever they see fit in pursuit of profit.

We need a better system.