6.11.26 - Bar Prep Day 3: Race Relations Feel Bad Right Now
Today I actually did Bar Prep. Yesterday (Day 2) I did not. But I got distracted with some other conversations and internet browsing and I have one takeaway. Race relations feel bad right now. Writing this mainly for historical record purposes, because I won't have much intelligent to say other than description.
The rampant uptick in antisemitic rhetoric, the discourse around the Karmelo Anthony Verdict, just the vibe in the air feels off.
This is banal point, perhaps, but I've lived through a lot of racially charged moments--and being a high school debate kid/insufferable personality/very online--I remember the conversations around them pretty vividly. Trayvon Martin. Ferguson. BLM. Obama announcing DACA. The Women's March split over Louis Farrakhan. Demonstrations after October 7 on my campus, putting the jewish and muslim student communities in tension. Something about right now feels bad in a different way. Like there isn't consensus on what the goal is anymore. I think at some stage it was a consensus that color-blindism, Star Trek style liberal pluralism was desirable. A rough consensus, but a workable one.
That worldview ultimately, unfortunatley hardens into Woke, where talking about group differences or groups at all is impermissible. Because people thought it threatened that future goal. This worldview was enforced by every major institution in America using an insane regime of social pressure, shame, etc. I think there is an emerging consensus among reasonable people (including me) that this was bad, and harmed race relations a lot.
So we got post-woke, people in my age group and especially younger responding often by forcefully transgressing the taboos against identifying group interests, talking about groups, some irreverent humor, yadda yadda. I was one of those people who thought this was a positive development and reflected a more healthy attitude.
I guess, at base, I always had a baseline optimism that our age group--even when they were "based" or edgy or on the other end when they bought into the explicit racialism of Woke 1.0--still were fundamentally post-racial in their behavior. My social circles have varying political beliefs, but the consistent element is that they're all pretty diverse (basically all my male friend groups are like this meme: https://images3.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED647/617a9113ec822.jpeg). At the end of the day, this was all culture war nonsense without a lot of bite on who people hung out with and what they did in the world.
I think that this faith is being chipped at a little bit, recently. Just because the language has gotten so coarse, and the far right being so much less equivocal about their intentions, no longer burying it under irony and memes. There are people who want to refashion the country around white identitarian lines--openly. And they are in polite society just saying it. They're in the administration. They're in the staffer class. They're just saying it.
Old me would say, well its better that its just out in the open so we can have a conversation about it--because I'm fundamentally liberal in my outlook and I believed that when exposed to sunlight they would just lose (and whatever seeds of merit their critiques DID have could be incorporated by responsible parties).
Now I do not have this faith and I have a better understanding why the dogma of Wokeism developed in the first place. It was a like a dam for all this ugly shit we're seeing. We all lived behind the dam and thought it was annoying, but none of us have really been in the water. Dam's broke now.
knxnts