moping around chicago. misanthropy. outside of society.
I was ready for a nice, six weeks back in the USA and am already excited about leaving in late June. Not at all what I wanted, believe me.
Why upon returning home can’t I have a month’s respite from my cracker hate? It’s a troubling contempt to confront. (See my archives.) I’m not talking about my active hate, but a general, passive and white contempt: a general contempt white liberals most often embrace that authorizes their ignorance of their passively embraced bargain with white power. After all, contempt is that thing that permits a disregard for something that should be considered.
Let me give an example of this kind of contempt. Back to teaching for only one day and Praise has had to endure a white woman in authority explaining to her what’s wrong with Praise’s difference (the classic Asians-are-passive stereotype) while claiming the wonders of being able to be color blind. And not because of any mistake was this cultural scolding encouraged, but because Praise didn’t seek permission to leave work at her scheduled time. Nothing like liberal white women explaining life to women of color to welcome us back to the states in a way that manually and actively cultivates useless white hierarchies. It’s cultural gentrification. White Expertise. Racist feminism and its cultural anthropology might not be the first kind of white supremacy we’d expect to experience on return to the US after four years, but liberal whites are often used to indoctrinate people of color into the bargain with white power.
It’s also no coincidence that rejecting the bargain with white power alienates me (and some of you, too,) from much social participation in activist communities. It’s institutionalized social misanthropy. Having rejected liberalism’s desire to work within white supremacist traditions, I’m undesirable to most white activist communities. Try to explain this at a General Assembly and see how far you get. And pardon my cynicism, but I’m not about to use this misanthropy as an excuse to hang with teens in black running around the outskirts of most liberal activist action. I’m not interested in throwing bricks through windows and playing tough within a protected white protest.
It’s not the worst thing for a writer to be left alone, I guess. It’s just that it makes a return home a sad confrontation with the liberal status quo that has long ago embraced the worst aspects of moderation and cooperation in democratic capitalist culture.
Looking forward to locking myself in the studio I rented and writing.
