"The White Negro"
People don’t have ideas, ideas have people. And the oppression narrative might have you.
What the hell is a “White Negro”?
According to Norman Mailer, it’s someone who has “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and [who] for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.” Well that begs the question, what does it mean to absorb the “existentialist synapses of the Negro”?
Mailer describes what it means to be a white Negro by taking the licentiousness, athleticism, and hyper-sexuality of the black stereotype and makes it something the revel in and adopt in the face of oppression. For Mailer, to truly be Negro is to be socially unhinged.
This quote comes from the beatnik’s famous essay also titled “The White Negro” which is little more than a glorification of the hippy, beatnik, hipster culture of America in the 1960s. If you haven’t heard of Mr. Mailer, just do a quick search. He wrote more than eleven best selling books, at least one per decade, since WWII. He’s no obscure figure, but an incredibly influential one. Reading his writings is like reading into the soul of the anti-establishment, revolutionary culture that has infiltrated American culture since Woodstock.
But reading him today, especially this essay in question, helps me understand what’s going on in our culture that sees a need to justify, rationalize, and put into a political context, the rape, murder and kidnapping of well more than a thousand people in Israel. Why are university professors becoming exhilarated at the sight of Jews being slaughtered? Why is Black Lives Matter adopting a paraglider as a symbol of freedom when paraglider just murdered and raped a bunch of peace-loving desert hippies?
Because the victims are not people. They are symbols.
In Mailer’s description of the murder of a shop-keeper, he describes the imagined murderers not as criminals, but as symbols of liberation:
“one murders not only a weak fifty-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly.”
The murder of an otherwise innocent shop-keeper, in this case one who sells candy, is “not altogether cowardly.” He presents this as if the people themselves are not to be considered as individuals with agency, neither the perpetrators nor the victim, but as symbols of political ideas. Property owners and business people against those to whom they sell their goods. Producers versus consumers. The oppressed versus the oppressors.
Colonizers versus the decolonizers.
Decolonizing Portland
A few weekends ago, I traveled to Portland, Oregon, for a wedding. I loved Portland.
The city is gorgeous and is populated likely by the nicest people I’ve interacted with in a city. Although growing up in Los Angeles, the bar isn’t too high.
But what about the reports of all the drug use and crime? Well, yes, I did see a lot of drug use. And I don’t mean people who simply look like they are on drugs, but literal drug use in the streets. Disheveled people huddled up against a beautiful building on a beautiful street, lighting up some substance in a foil square and inhaling it. Others frozen in time, standing up but hunched over as if on their way to mindlessness and zombification. The Target downtown had a sign up in its window stating they would be closing as of the next day.
So yeah, they have some major problems. But I never felt unsafe and I get the feeling that correcting the insane policy of decriminalizing open drug use was coming soon.
I did get to visit the famous bookstore, Powell’s City of Books. What a beautiful store. It was like walking through a playground of books for people of all ages and interests. I bought a beautiful copy of Carl Jung’s Red Book,which after reading the introduction, is like reading a fever dream. So I’ll set that one aside for now.
If you’ve ever been into a library or bookstore, you’d recognize that the people who work there get to display some of their favorites. They usually call them “Store Picks” or something like this. In Powell’s, I couldn’t help noticing that throughout the store, these picks had a common theme: Decolonization.
This was maybe a week after atrocities were committed upon innocent civilians, with hundreds still in captivity, and they chose to display books on decolonization. But why? Why not display a book on anti-semitism and its dangers? Or maybe the dangers of Islamism?
Because that’s what so-called identity politics does to your brain. Just like Norman Mailer saw violence against otherwise innocent people as a symbolic gesture against political ideas, these people no longer see the humanity of who they consider to be the oppressor. They are no longer people, but symbols.
A beautiful city but a warped sense of humanity.
Believe Them
When people tell us what they believe, we should take them at their word. Like Norman Mailer who sees people not as humans but as political symbols. Like Islamists who see Jews not as humans but as evil dogs (their words). We should believe people when they tell us who they are. Like famous Leftist Jean-Paul Sartre in the preface to Frank Fanon’s book, Wretched of the Earth:
“There is one duty to be done, one end to achieve: to thrust out colonialism by every means in their power. The more far-seeing among us will be, in the last resort, ready to admit this duty and this end; but we cannot help seeing in this ordeal by force the altogether inhuman means that these less-than-men make use of to win the concession of a charter of humanity. Accord it to them at once, then, and let them endeavour by peaceful undertakings to deserve it. Our worthiest souls contain racial prejudice.”
I think that last line is a confession and not an accusation.
By every means in their power they are allowed and justified in expelling colonial power. These “less-than-men”, these Negroes along with the help of “white Negroes” who are called upon to purge themselves of the guilt of oppression. I couldn’t help but see a string of references to these violent perpetrators as types of savages with a type of humanity not yet realized. Sounds kinda racist but it’s ok if you’re being racist in support of decolonization I suppose.
And this is why so many people across the world in Western countries, whose entire system is based on concepts of individual human dignity, are abandoning that principle in favor of group identification. They are seeing the world through a political prism which puts everyone into categories of good or bad based on their perceived cultural power. There is no nuance, there is no individual humanity.
These luxury beliefs of the intellectual elite are spilling out into our streets and the abstract is becoming a self -fulfilling reality.