Up@dawn 2.0

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Pluralism vs. hate

The Ideology of Hate and How to Fight ItThe battle for the soul of our culture.
We pluralists do not believe that human beings can be reduced to a single racial label. Each person is a symphony of identities. Our lives are rich because each of us contains multitudes.
Pluralists believe in integration, not separation. We treasure precisely the integration that sends the antipluralists into panic fits. A half century ago, few marriages crossed a color line. Now, 17 percent of American marriages are interracial.
Pluralists are always expanding the definition of “us,” not constricting it...
Many of today’s mass murderers write manifestoes. They are not killing only because they’ve been psychologically damaged by trauma. They’re not killing only because they are pathetically lonely and deeply pessimistic about their own lives. They are inspired to kill by a shared ideology, an ideology that they hope to spread through a wave of terror.

The clearest expression of that ideology was written by the man charged with a killing spree in Christchurch, New Zealand. His manifesto has been cited by other terrorists; the suspect in this weekend’s El Paso mass shooting cited it in his own manifesto.

It’s not entirely what you’d expect. At one point its author writes about his travels around the world: “Everywhere I travelled, barring a few small exceptions, I was treated wonderfully, often as a guest and even as a friend. The varied cultures of the world greeted me with warmth and compassion, and I very much enjoyed nearly every moment I spent with them.”

The ideology he goes on to champion is highly racial, but it’s not classic xenophobia or white supremacy. It’s first feature is essentialism. The most important thing you can know about a person is his or her race. A white sees the world as a white and a Latino sees it as a Latino. Identity is racial... (David Brooks, continues)
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Toni Morrison, ‘Beloved’ Author and Nobel Laureate, Dies at 88

Toni Morrison, the 1993 Nobel laureate in literature, whose work explored black identity in America and in particular the experience of black women, died on Monday in New York City. She was 88... (continues)
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After El Paso and Dayton, Three Ways to Think About Mass Shootings

...To read of Jordan Anchondo, who died of bullet wounds because she threw her body over her two-month-old son to save him, and her husband, Andre, who died beside her while trying to protect them both, is to move past tears of pity to those of rage. This should never happen. But, amid the sheer madness and horror of the killings, it seems worth making some necessary distinctions. We can’t act wisely without seeing straight, and we can’t see straight if we don’t see clearly.

First point of clarity: the problem is guns, their availability, their lethality, their omnipresence in American life, and their protection by the ruling political party. There are racists in every country. There are video games in every country. There are mentally ill people in every country. There are not gun massacres in every country. And, when there is one, comprehensive new laws are passed, and there is seldom another. Why are there so many in America? Because there are too many guns in America, and, in particular, too many lethal guns easily purchased—guns modelled on military weapons whose only purpose is to kill as many people as rapidly as possible. Study after study, correlation after correlation provide the evidence on this point: control guns and you reduce gun violence. If we banned assault weapons and all their diabolic accessories, the number of gun massacres in America would be reduced—as was true during the decade between 1994 and 2004, when there was a federal ban on such weapons. We can have the same confidence in this correlation as we do in the efficacy of vaccines or antibiotics. Gun control works... (Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, continues)

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