With culture the mere mask of power, who in America is afraid of Shakespeare and Woolf?

"Today's American radicals have a property that distinguishes them from most radicals in history, in the United States or anywhere else. They are essentially self-hating ex-Europeans. They are European-American, and their culture, to the extent that they have one in common, has become an object of guilty embarrassment masquerading as hatred.

The reduction of this rich culture to a single quality, named by a color ("white" and "white-ness") drains it of everything anyone (themselves or others, perhaps even ex-colonial subjects with more self-confident curiosity) might find in it that is interesting. For, whether good or bad, or, more often, both, something that is interesting is an object of wonder and curiosity, an enigma that calls for better understanding.

Culture (in the sense of the arts and the sciences considered from the standpoint of intellectual history) is reduced to society understand in political terms that are also crudely moralistic: culture is a mask of power, at least if it is the culture identified (wholly?) with 'privileged' groups exercising 'domination'.

I question the extent to which all of the European peoples are privileged oppressors. Practices of colonial domination were brought back to the European metropole and used against workers and the poor there, while they were also taught to the children of the bourgeoisie as a set of challenges and lessons in being dominated just enough for the people practicing domination to understand, the better to enforce and believe in.

At any time up to the very recent past at least, the vast majority of the population of even the most economically advanced and imperialist countries, like England in the 19th century, were dirt poor and greatly oppressed. Would you like to be a British coal miner in the 19th century -- or the 1960s? Colonialist styles of policing and war, including "humanitarian" wars, are even today borrowed from for policing and military operations (war and policing become identified and indiscernible) in the cities of the rich countries, including America today. No neat dividing line, ideologies notwithstanding, separates out cleanly only black and "of color" minorities or any other subjected group from persons classed as 'privileged' who could sometimes fall through the tracks. Indeed, historically the bourgeoisie is a class itself marked by the experience of precarity, which it internalized and tries to master in various ways, and part of this is the pervasive fear of "falling" from class superiority into the situations facing the poor classes.

We really can speak of the "99 percent" that is most of us, and stop buying and selling the notion that large classes of people who are not only not billionaires but very far from that status indeed, are busy "oppressing" people presumed "beneath" them, whether it is part of their intention to or not.

Finally, the European heritage and that of the colonized subject meet and combine in many situations. This is the cultural form of the post-colonial condition. The Mexicans understand something about this that people in the United States generally do not: While it is a myth, like many myths it contains some truth both as a fact and a matter of right: The Mexican form of the postcolonial ideology avoids saying "I am European, you are indigenous," to instead claim that "we" all share an identity from both of these roots. We will have reached, culturally, a post-racial condition in the US when we can all say this about ourselves, qua citizens of a society that has multiple roots. But the left-liberal ideology is based on divisiveness, to which it adds a moralization based on its ideology, whose principle is that individuals "truly" belong" not to an identity shared by the people of this country, but to one that is particular to their sub-group. This tends towards a "corporatism" in the fascist sense, as thought of in Mussolini's Italy. Imagine that we have political electoral districts on a map drawn by ethnicity. Then we have representatives in the government who each represent an ethnic group in all its particularities. If you are "white," you will be represented by someone in the Congress who represents "whiteness." Most people today would find this horribly reactionary and offensive. But they imply the necessity and thus desirability of this since they obviously want there to be a particular representation of blackness and brownness. These would seem at first ideological positions linked to actual ideas and policy programs, but it would rapidly disintegrate into clientelism. The politicians would do favors for those they represent, in return for their votes. The 50 states could be replaced by the much more logically coherent idea of a plurality of ethnic and other identities.

Again, I am not criticizing the left, so much as a tendency that no claims its name and mantle. This leftism certainly is unlike every other historically, at least until recently and particularly in America.

World culture is becoming predominantly global and postcolonial. The culture condition of post-colonialism is hybridity. Everyone will be a little bit this and that. The superficial form of this is cultural tourism, celebrating the exotic as colorful commodity to be consumed to acquire more cultural and symbolic capital. The profound form of it is a greater understanding of who the world's people are, at a time when global culture, unified by capitalism, is more singular and less diverse than ever.

So who is afraid of Virginia Woolf, or Aeschylus and Shakespeare? No one owns these things. They belong to those who appropriate them. By that I mean, pick up a book and read it, talk about it, make sense of it. Maybe some people should become less afraid to listen to rap music; others might become less afraid of Beethoven. Ideas don't kill people, stupid people misusing them do. Culture is not a mask of power but a distorting mirror. Its objects are interesting by definition. Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is reversed. Everyone wants today to change the world, but to do so we need to work hard and continually at understanding it.

I read European books and see European films. I look at others too. I don't think this equates to "whiteness." The liberal left is caught up in what are at best a series of straw man arguments, against nonexistent bogeymen who populate their rhetorical ideology and that merely.