"I am on the left, and angry about the violence of black racists"

I was assaulted by another left-liberal black person who hates me and is certain I am in the wrong in a way he will try to both politicize and criminalize.

I am outraged at this treatment, and worse frustrated partly in political terms because I know that most of my friends and acquaintances in the lefty world will automatically say that he's in the right and I in the wrong because he's black. That's what it will come down to. I've seen this before. He, who hates me, is in the right and I in the wrong because I am white and he is black.

(Whatever the dispute was about will not be discussed. He certainly would not allow it, as he did not).

This happened in an arts institution. In broad daylight. We are both there often. I said something polite and he started a quarrel whose content quickly revealed itself as hatred based on a social justice warrior phony leftist mentality.

I have been, numerous times, assaulted or violated by black men and women in social and institutional positions where they were able to pose as the good guys and make me the bad guy.

I have been mortally threatened by black hospital "nurses." They spoke words of threat and hatred.

I was once almost gang raped as a result of a threat uttered by a black man in a jail I spent an hour in when arrested for a misdemeanor when I was a young man. I am lucky to be alive today.

America is a business society that violently enforces social conformity. You have to be a team player. That is what I think this was about.

I could list hundreds of encounters with black men and women who treated me with extreme hostility though I was polite.

The discussions America needs to have about this are on the left, they will be bitter and acrimonious, and will only not lead to violence if they are carefully managed in public settings where this kind of contentious discussion and argument is possible. I am not a white racist, I am a white radical leftist who considers black Marxists my political friends and black racists, which I now think is the majority in black culture, to be in the wrong, more or less totally.

The discussion needs to happen.

I have the right to be angry. You identity political men and women: I was almost killed because of the toxic effects of your thinking, and more than once, and I continued to be outraged. And you continue your violence, often under official auspices and tolerated by your white liberal friends who look the other way, as they see no evil.

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This time it had an interesting proximate cause. The man had asked me about a philosopher I was reading who had also written an important book of film studies. When I said some things that were a bit demurring, I think he thought I was withholding the gratification of a shared availability of the interesting things. Men often socialize by sharing things, objects of desire or interest. But he didn't appreciate my style of thinking. I don't think I was impolite to him at all, though I believe he found me arrogant. He also felt humiliated, which I would have avoid triggering with him had I understood better how that might be a possibility. He also was apparently treating my statement as not to be considered, interpreted, or evaluated constatively, as a statement about some possible indicated state of affairs in the world, but performatively, and pragmatically, as a move in a social game. That means in turn that the enunciated content of my statement was not or not longer the object or focus of interest to him, that being displaced on an evaluation of the proposed (we can call this thus a "proposition about" the) moral status of the enunciator, or the relative moral statuses in the situation being mise-en-scène or staged. In that case, we are in competition and this is the realm of what for Lacanians is the world proper to and deriving from the "mirror stage," the imaginary world of interpersonal conflict between sibling-like rivals, for the kind of moral infants who engage in this, as many people do (one will recognize here every kind of bully). This is a world of competition in which each desires to be like and unlike the other, and recognized by them for their apparent, and demonstrable, performable, status. The man engaged me in a childish and bullying session of hate speech because he felt humiliated and thought I was performing violence though oppression known through historical memory and to be blamed on people like me. He confuses justice with recognition, and so is a social justice warrior, and that behavior, which is based in identity politics, is implicitly violent, as it is one of hate. But that is because he thought I was performing the social inferiorization of him as a black man by way of a wrongful assertion of my white privilege. We could agree that if there was any element of that even potentially in what in was saying, it would be worth criticizing. But you can only do this at the level of statements, and not at the level of enunciation. Identity politics posits political speech as the work of performances in a theater of social presentations that confirm virtue and vice in a shame/honor culture. That means the content of the statements is far less important than who is speaking to whom and how that performance can be viewed and is framed, mise-en-scène or staged. But to be political one must contest in some public space statements and actions and in terms of a meaningful content, and not merely the manner of their performance, "how I speak to you" and appear when I do so. These must be connected somehow if the speaker can be held to account for what he presents and represents. If the meaning of the statement is reduced to the style of its enunciation or the identities of the enunciating situation (speaker and listener), then we have ad hominem critique. In ad hominem criticism, the person who makes a statement or is author of a text or art work is judged as guilty or not guilty of a crime, a violation of a norm. Sometimes the content matters and sometimes it does not. Usually the content of the work or statement is negated or considered ruined by the sin or vice (sinful disposition) of the author as enunciator who is the subject responsible for it as act. Work then is reduced to act, and statements are actions, things people do with others as victims, and that is what their consequences are, that the good or ill befalls some persons, usually other persons. Which means there needs to be policing and sanctions. Behavior is sanctioned as meeting or failing to meet the expectation that is the norm. Evaluation is in accordance then with the will of the sovereign and/or conformity to the norm. Sanctioning actions or behaviors is a form of evaluation, it depends on right and wrong, good and bad, yes and no. this may be related to the "truth" of the statements if their meaning is considered as aiming at rightness. One could then doubt that the statements under consideration are actually interesting in any way, since you would not normally say anything about them except that they are right, or, Yes. Give us what we demand, and tell us yes or no. This is not true of art works that one might discuss, though it may be thought true of statements. If a statement is "good" if and only if it is true, that is binary in the same way that the moral evaluation of persons as behaving correctly in accordance with norms is binary. The person is liked or disliked, accepted or rejected, and maybe that is what some of us sometimes want. Of course this will mean that lots of artworks are rejected instead of looked at, experienced, wondered about, interpreted, understood somehow, and maybe talked about variously. In social life the problem is perhaps even simpler: it is that of the police.

Sanctions, policing, loving and hating persons perhaps, all come together in prisons. This man made me think of prisons and prisoners. If you are a prisoner, you have no positively potentialities of movement of any kind, or there are extremely limited. You have negative ones that others around you can only fear. If there are no affirmative potentialities of what you do or can do, then everything "said in," or that can be said in relation to, your art work is reducible to your character, which is to be punished or excluded. It will facilitate this if we all fear each other. In that case, we should all be expected to desire maximum liberty of expression and laissez-moi-faire. Maybe that's most of what we can hope for right now. I wish there were productive discursive interactions. I don't think they would be governed by a norm of truth. I think of them as like riffs and jam sessions in jazz. This man thought I had played a wrong note. And he thought I was telling him how to play. I'm sorry, brother, I didn't mean any offense. I don't want to feel hated by you, I find that unpleasant and I admit I'm wimpy about this. I don't mean that in a queer way, I just don't like to be insulted and hated as I guess you don't either. So what do I want, we hug each other? I don't know. We are not prisoners. He reminded me of some people who act like them. I admit that's on me. I hear he's an artist, I bet he does some good work. Today I try to develop some of my angry rants into a philosophical essay the way I learned in school in France. Tomorrow I'll do my own writing, you don't have to like what I write. I could find it easier, I admit, to live with less hostility. I thought we were having a friendly discussion. I did it wrong for you, I'm sorry about that. If he still hates me and I can't make the peace, I hope he doesn't hurt me. I don't think he will. I did think his reaction was extreme, but this is America and my own reaction was rather strong, I don't like being treated that way. If he is still a moralist about this, I think that is awful. Prisons are built by moralists to protect their faux innocence. They are run by bossy bullies. You can wonder whether your neighbor wants to be one of the, it's nasty.

Dear Black People,

I am going to try to not to hate you, which is a potentiality in me that tends to reemerge when I feel threatened, which usually happens when I am threatened, usually with physical violence, sometime in the indirect way that is mediated and sanctioned, wrongly to be sure, by institutional authority. I also am going to try as hard as I can to understand your culture so that when I am around you I can manage to adjust to your expectations. Partly that is a survival tactic, more than it is driven by actual respect; I must admit that, it's true. I know you demand respect. I know how touchy many of you are about and every possible or imagined slight that could possibly be interpreted as warranting the activated resentment based on a sense of being slighted. I shall continue to assert that I have the perfect right to consider the social norms that I have learned that come partly from the culturation that is presumptively not optional but also partly from an active work of thinking and partly about cultural objects that appeal to my tastes.

I also assert the right to evaluate the very social norms that you may take for granted in enforcing against me, and of course that is a point of almost certain conflict, though that is only in the absence of genuine democratic discussion in which different social and cultural norms at least as interpretable and applicable in any instance can be and are up for discussion. I have not yet seen many instances ever of those norms and values being discussed in a way that would permit any judgment other than "I/we are right and you wrong" because we are right to be the way we are-- and to expect you to comply. The first items of discussion that I would ask to be put on the agenda are:

-What are the mentalities that contribute to policing and incarceration? I see these very broadly, and believe the key concept here is capitalism.

-When is interpersonal violence acceptable and when not? And considered precisely as a way of "doing" a politics?

-How is cultural integration best pursued? What do we say to people in minority cultures who reject it?

-How do you politicize and criticize what anyone is doing without showing contempt? (This man who is obviously very concerned about being shown respect, as so many people in black American culture are, was very angrily disdainful to me to punish me for supposedly being disdainful to him--even though that was not my intention).

-When is a conversation necessarily about race and possibly not?

-How do we de-escalate conflict in cases of disagreements that we might well want to articulate rather than just keep to ourselves? We all know how to escalate them.

-What are the respective norms of liberal and democratic social life, and how do we make our communities and social lives and interactions more democratic? So that we can talk to each other without just getting angry.

(I obviously think a lot is bound up in some of these questions.)

Of course, with black nationalists I take it there is no discussion. As is probably the case with left-liberal/progressive “identity political” Democratic Party liberals. I only would have this discussion with people on the anti-capitalist left. It’s pointless otherwise. Liberalism weaponizes resentments that originate in genuine experiences of social oppression in order to defend the system that continues it. We have to call their bluff when people do that, whether they are Zionists, feminists, or whatever else. You can tell when people are doing this by the immediacy as well as intensity of their reactions. They don’t think, they “know,” and that is why, often with great angry hostility, they will try to shut you down. Cancelling, policing speech, calling people out, taking people out, a whole apparatus of a carceral mentality. Focus on identity and cultural nationalism will make certain that such regimes of thought and action always prevail and are not truly challenged.

And with liberals who think that all criticism is violence, therefore any disagreement is merely propaganda for the competing faction, there is no discussion and no point in bothering, since it's obnoxious media speech. Which is performative. Like Trump. He worked to destroy the public sphere so that real discussion is impossible. How can we rebuild it? And is a crisis situation an opportunity for doing so?