Culture is not just a mask of power: What Robin DiAngelo gets wrong

The reason Robin DiAngelo is wrong is that:

Not all racial differences should be attributed to inequality or oppression, even if none of them can be exactly separated from it.
Diversity training is fine, but not if all differences are considered tools of oppression, and every feature that may correctly or properly be said to distinguish European-American from African-American culture (note that African and European culture were already quite different even before colonization). 

Thus, it is really absurd to claim that everything ‘white’ suburbanites or anyone else tends more to like is only enjoyed as a matter of ‘white supremacy’ or something like that.  Do I like Bach and Boulez because they are European, or because I like their music?  I like their music partly because it fits a social habitus of practices and the understanding particular to them. 

Still, “the Bantu Tolstoy is Tolstoy.”  The consequences of this need to be drawn consistently.  Shakespeare does not just give the reader lessons in subjectivity in a patriarchal and nascent colonialist society emerging as part of the early modern European absolutist state in a transition from the medieval world.  He certainly does give one that, but not only that. 

That this because culture is not merely an expression of social relationships.  It also, in all its particularities, always in some imperfect and flawed way images the ‘divine’ itself as what is beautiful, true, or good in social life.  The ethics and politics of this are both separable and interdependent.  There is a political way of viewing all expressions of ethical truth (as in most great art) and an ethical way of dealing with the problem of living a good life in the world as it is. 

Because culture and value are not merely an expression of social institutions, practices, relationships, and ideological notions that situate and form persons as subjects, culture is never merely a mask of power.  Though surely it also is always that also.  Artworks have the capability of taking a critical stance on the notions of value that are represented.  Shakespeare does not only give us documents of civilization at a certain state of happiness and barbarism, he also gives us reflections on that, as well as complex legitimations of it. 

What would it be to enjoy art works that express the truths that the society we live in finds affirmed in them, while also enjoying and understanding the ways they help us criticize those very values and the society with it? Most modern art is more critical than visionary.  It is revelatory as much of what we don’t like as of what we do or might. 

The question whether all art is only a mask of power and injustice is related to the questions (a) whether the political can be reduced to the personal and the moral, and so (b) whether ad hominem arguments denouncing persons have political value or epistemic legitimacy, and (c) whether we should perfect society by having social institutions and authorities enforce correct social norms, especially when they are political, as they always are, and finally (d) whether politics ultimately is identifiable with governance or management. If it is, we will tend towards having an administrative state operating under a permanent or always invocable state of exception (so that the laws, especially those limiting governments and governance and protecting liberty, are declared valid but inapplicable in the instance because the situation is one of (declarable) crisis), and then there will be little liberty. This society will also tend towards solving problems at the level of discourse, and policing individuals for correctness of their thinking.

The task of the left in this case is partly to come up with a better solution than the conservative liberal one of minimal and limited government. The problem with that of course being that what from a managerial perspective are ‘social problems’ will be many and unaddressed.