You fall into the same trap that all others do.  There is no black history or white history.  There is only history.

GET A GRIP.

Or just accept reality.  Maybe that is the real answer.

think about it for a sec. if someone were to compose a comprehensive history, a history en masse of every culture as they developed into what we have now, then we would be close to having "history" in the sense that i think you're intending. but even then you would still have a biased story, the bias of the author, or the editor, or the fact-checker, or the publisher, and there would be so many absences of cultures who could not participate in a written history, either because they are gone or because their own history hasnt been passed on generationally as ours has.

Every historian has their bias.  But as of now, we have many black historians as well as white, it is up to the intelligent person to read each and assimilate all.  We dont need 'Black history'.  We need black historians to laud their ancestors and tell us what perhaps (but not a given) the other historians may leave out.

I still maintain there is only one history.  I never said that you can get it from one source.

well TBT I must agree with doc here, history encompasses all races, religions ad infinitim...

To TaBoo Tenente:

It's hard to know where to begin, it really is. On the one hand, if I were grading this as a paper presented by someone in the earliest stages of , say, a master's in philosophy, I'd have to say that on technical grounds it's a pass. The standard of writing is very nearly acceptabe.

Unfortunately, it's also a ragbag of unquestioned, uncriticized assumption; an instance of the nonsense that can be created on the back of a reasonably wide acquaintance with technical terminology and assorted postmodern concepts, an acquaintance much wider than the understanding attempting to deploy those concepts, that terminology.

C- in terms of style. F in terms of content.

Here's why.

Let's begin with a 'postmodern contextual blindness'. Is it a postmodern blindness to context we are talking about? Is it a context blind to postmodernism? Or is it a blindness caused by a postmodern context? I suspect you mean the last, and that this plethora of meaning is in itself a part of the sanctimonious condesencion you've mistaken for postmodern wit and neo-Nietszchean ennui.

Ambiguity is only of value when it's ironic, a deliberate communication in its own right. If this were satire it would be wonderful. Unfortunately, it's meant to be an analytical criticism and as such is an utter failure.

Here's why.

My quote provides a brief, general history of Western Civilization, which finds its moral and philisophical roots in a overwhelmingly white perspective

Your history doesn't grasp that 'white' as applied to race is a post-colonial term that has only assumed its significance as 'universal evil' in the era of globalization and the triumph of commodity fetishism, where all bodies are inscribed with market as opposed to moral values, where 'black' has presently a higher market value than 'white' , where postmodernism is no more a metanarrative than Christianity, and where the writing of history is complicit in the revaluation of the categories you think you understand.

Postmodernism is not an explanation, only one more type of questioning. Your 'white perspective' is itself a creation of that questioning and as such cannot be used in the way you try to use it, as an explanation of what went before it. You think you know something, and in the attempt to present what you think you know you demonstrate only ignorance of the conditions which make your knowing possible.

You also demonstrate a chronic ignorance of the history of Christianity.

For example, I should think that we would not be exaggerating in the least if we suggest that Western Civilization rests upon a foundation of both Platonic and Aristitelian logic, while our religious foundation rests on a completely subsumed Judeo-Christian monotheism. I use the word "subsumed" to indicate that the Roman (a conglomerate of Germanic populations absorbing the cultures birthed near the Mediterranean Sea) Empire fully translated the doctrines of early Judeo-Christian culture into a Roman aesthetic.

Western civilization is not to be separated from its 'religious foundation' . The two are inextricably intertwined: from Augustine's Politics and City of God in which the civil foundations of a Christian polity are laid out, to Aquinas' Summa theologiae which synthesized Aristotle and Plato with Christian theology. Rome as a 'conglomerate of Germanic populations absorbing the cultures birthed near the Mediterranean Sea' had nothing to do with this process - other than in giving it a political status by making Christianity the official religion of the Empire. Certainly Western civilization derives from judaeo-christianity, that abominable melange of fear and ass-kissing, but a truly Roman aesthetic predated and was vanquished by Christian morality while what succeeded it was first 'Romano-Christian' and then Roman Catholic.

The monolith you refer to is no monolith but a figment of your own fevered ignorance. Your only excuse is that you've been taught this gibberish by people no less ill-informed than yourself, and learned to dress it in terms culled from books which you've read but not understood.

Subsequently, we can trace all of our religious, literary, philisophical, and mathematical evolutions to this Roman, white perspective (including the absorption of Moorish algebra). What does this all mean? It means that our perspective is a united perspective, but also a limited one. Lingustically this implies that our system of sign and symbol, the development of memory both individual and communal, is based on a white system.

Moorish algebra? Algebra was first developed in pre-Islamic India ('zero' is an Indian, not an Arab, concept). While work was done to develop algebra as a mathematical system by the likes of Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780-850) his pioneering work had far greater influence upon the 'white' thinkers of Europe than among his fellow Arabs - to so great a degree that 'Arabic Numerals' do not form a part of Arabic script. As to the 'white system' you identify - it may be white in your estimation but in mine it's grey, just like every other system of thought, questionable in its origin, culpable in its uses, and indeterminate in meaning.

Let's leave postmodernism for a minute and examine some of the unquestioned assumptions you so glibly take for granted.

More importantly, it is through this system of understanding that we interpret the world--through this system we were capable of dominating and subhumanizing all other cultural elements. By transplanting subhumanized cultures (those of the various African racial identities and those found throughout the Americas during the period of the "explorers") into our own, we forced those cultures into an environment where their own systems were forced to the fringes, where their languages were also forced to the fringes. Similarly, language theorists have suggested that women have been marginalized in our society by forcing the female-specific system of sign and symbol to a position external to mainstream language.

The culture of domination and 'subhumanization' you refer to is the mainstream of human cultural production since it first began to be recorded in Ur in ancient Mesopotamia some ten thousand years ago. It's the norm. Of course, it's now the proper and polite thing to do to decry humanity's ineradicable tendency towards slaughter and carnage, conquest and domination. But that doesn't alter what actually is.

The injustices you decry are one thing. But your peculiar use of emphasis, in other words the things you reveal about your position by what you choose to emphasise, identifies you as one who, without thought or attempted criticism, has accepted the anodine narative that all violence is morally wrong, that politics must by nature be egalitarian, that difference oughtto be eradicated wherever it is found.

In other words, you are one more whining liberal who wishes to impose a totalitarian vision (tinted no doubt a particularly effete and nauseating shade of pink - and surely a postmodern such as yourself can see the irony of being refered to as 'pink' in this context - can't you?)of how things should be. And here, in your own words, is that vision -

I mention all of this to suggest that it is not an obsolete mode of thinking to refer to historical conditions imposed by our white system of conquest. If we intend to equalize the condition of human beings, regardless of gender or skin color, we must understand why our current condition pushes black people and women to the fringes.

(Emphasis added).

Who is to determine the basis of equality? You? On what ground - your own estimation of your fitness to judge? It's not so much the incomparable arrogance with which you make this announcement of a New World Order that must appal any competent thinker nor even that your political vision is no more than the regurgitated shibboleths of an anile liberalism that no longer grasps what a Liberal was - but the fact that you are utterly oblivious to the meaning of your own words.

One last thing before I abandon you to wallow in your self satisfied ignorance. When you wrote the words 'WHITE SENSES' were you really oblivious to the fact that you were restricting the comprehension of the universe possessed by every individual to something formed only by the color of their skin?

Probably.

Didn't you realize that's racist?

To Taboo Tenente:

again, it's difficult to know where to begin. How about at the beginning, with communication as punishment. Because that's the motive behind the production of this effusion of pseudo-intellectual vomitus. You intended to chastise my wife for having the gall to stand up and say what it's no longer considered polite to say - that the narrative of the White man has as much validity, as narrative, as any other. Which is why the body of what you posted is phrased in terms of mockery, and lessons handed down from on high to the ignorant masses.

You should be careful what you mock, TT. It takes a very wise person to not reveal the extent of his folly in what he chooses to laugh at. And that, in this case, is simply another measure of your failure.

I'm going to assume, since you label yourself a postmodern, that you have read Jean-Francois Lyotard, in particular his seminal text of the postmodern movement The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), as well as his Libidinal Economy (1974). But then again perhaps I shouldn't since the entire thrust of those books is towards a statement such as 'no discourse is privileged to pass judgment on any other' - which is the very point you fail at every level to appreciate.

im just too tired to take responsibility . . .

Then remain asleep. Who asked you to take responsibility for anything? And what are you too tired to take responsibility for? Learning to comprehend a discourse you claim to understand, perhaps? On the basis of what we've discussed so far I'd say you were certainly too tired to do that. Or perhaps it was simply too difficult. Over-reaching oneself is very tiring after all.

But what was it you thought you were being asked to take responsibility for? Educating the ignorant? Illuminating the unenlightened? Saving the whale? Patronising incompetent wannabe that you are, you fail even to realise the first and most glaring consequence of postmodernism as a movement of thought: that a) there is nothing for which we can be held responsible for (since narative is just that and no more, stories about the world, not real events with real consequences) and that there is no one to take responsibility since every social actor is no more than an unwitting participant in an on-going fiction.

In the hands of an actual postmodern this can lead to the realization that irony and laughter can serve to return us to a 'moral' (as opposed to moral) universe, and a politics of civic equity founded on a real grasp of the inability of any narrative to explain the way the world is.

But you suffer from a peculiarly American disease(irrespective of whether you are American or not): chronic iron-y deficiency.

And yet, little hero that you are, and despite your avowed weariness, take responsibility is just what you do.

You take on the responsibility of showing us (everyone other than yourself) all the WICKED AND HORRIBLE AND EVIL AND BAD AND NASTY SHIT THAT HAPPENS IN THE WORLD ALL THE FUCKIN TIME, MAN.

Genocide, Imperial expansion, racial conflict, social marginalization and... and... and...

Shall I hold your hand while you go back to sleep, little hero? Or wipe the snot from your upper lip while you weep your crocodile tears you posturing infant? The point of criticism is not to show the world how clever the critic is but to bring about a shift in consciousness. That such a shift is possible is demonstrated by the relevance of Plato and Aristotle to the present, by the overwhelming role played by Kant's work on reason in the development of that passing curiosity, the individual; by the role of Marx, Hegel and Feuerbach in creating the intellectual conditions necessary for the development of Modernity and the rise of commodity fetishism (which is the true and abiding religion of Corporate Capitalism the world over).

But then, these people were thinkers and real human beings, as opposed to self-satisfied puppets jerking off as they yank the string of their own ego (do you recognise yourself in that last statement, little hero? No? Then go back to sleep, little man, go back to sleep).

you have to take an african studies course or an alternative lit course to read a quality selection of black authors. and if you get one, you've probably already read it. what about in history? cool to have a black history month. that way you can spend at least one month searching for references to influential black citizens. world of science, world of art, world of . . . why go on? as if you did not know, this western world is a white world, built on white philosophies and religions, built on the backs of two old civs, greek, roman, and every ounce of our language and our understanding of the world comes through WHITE SENSES.

I confess, little hero, it's this passage in particular that's made me angry enough to spend this amount of time whipping your worthless hide.

Tell me, TT. Do WHITE SENSES feel hunger in ways that differ from black senses? Do WHITE SENSES experience pain, love, fear, doubt, differently to black senses? If you cut WHITE FLESH does it bleed something different to what black flesh bleeds? If you say yes to any of the foregoing you demonstrate that you are a racist, since you reify universal human characteristics on the basis of skin color. If you say no, you demonstrate that there is no such thing as a WHITE SENSE, just as there is no such thing as a BLACK SENSE. If you say nothing you admit only what is readily apparent: that you are a fool who does not understand what he says even as he says it.

You could of course say that you were arguing in terms of sensibility and aesthetic. A statement such as 'the white world can only be understood in terms of a white sensibility, the black world only in terms of a black sensibility' is perfectly acceptable and demonstrably true. The aesthetic semsibility underpinning the canon of Bach's work is fundamentally opposed to that underpinning the canon of the works of a black rapper. There is no point of communication which makes those two worlds comprehensible to each other.

But so fucking what? To say such a thing is to point out only what is blindingly apparent, as well as glaringly obvious in its absence from the nonsense you actually produced. Your entire production is a demonstration only of what postmodernism is not (an explanation) and an eminently successful presentation of your own ingrained, unquestioned bigotry.

Let me put it in words that even you can understand: to claim to be a postmodern makes it impossible to speak of such a thing as a WHITE SENSE, the former nullifies and makes impossible the latter. A 'WHITE SENSE' would be, if it could be shown to exist in any sense at all, a meta-narrative: the very thing which postmodernism calls into fundamental question.

And yet you present this impossibility to us as if it is a thing existing self-evidently and to be accepted at face value as in some way abrogating the right of the 'white narrative' to exist or be given consideration.

Go back to sleep, little hero. Go back to your dreams of self-importance and your delusions of comprehension. And should you wake up, bear one thing in mind.

Don't ever again presume to condescend to my wife, you arrogant little shit.

oh, brother.

feel free to make incoherent blatherings if you need to, but keep the profanity isolated to your own neo-nazi propaganda-spewing site, okay? you want to have a discussion, let's discuss--though i'd prefer rational, articulate (not an avalanche of rhetorical nonsense) discussions.

deep breath, brother. one, two, three . . . .

now, can we discuss?

tbt

crikey, you're an asshole, icehole. let's (temporarily) assume that you have at least a low-level awareness of what you're talking about:

I'd be very careful on this. I may not agree with what Simon has to say, but I think you'll find he has taught at college level? Please correct me if I'm wrong Simon. And "if" he has then he more than likely has more than a low-level awareness

dr miller,

obviously empice has some background or he wouldnt be using the terminology . . . that he was using. that doesnt change the fact that most of it was used as an attack on me rather than anything i placed in my article.

whether or not he knows what post-colonialism means, not just today with its feminist and identity politic connotations, but in the sense that he seemed to be suggesting, i dont know. nor do i know why he threw marxist terms used to study primitive religions at me, or why he equates what he calls "metanarratives" with postmodernism when at most, a metanarrative is a technique that sometimes finds its way into postmodern art, but has found its way into art from the very beginning of all art.

none of that is the point. right now i am studying postmodernism in school which is, of course, why im writing about it now. i would love to discuss postmodernism with anyone who knows about it, even (especially) if they disagree with me. but empicecream's response was not a well-thought out argument. it was an often-time illogical, emotional outburst on someone else's page--mine--and little of it had to do with postmodernism. it had to do with is political beliefs and also his relationship to someone i disagreed with.

im sure you will agree that LW is perfectly capable of defending her ideas, which she did, by the way, in her own article where this response was originally posted, as linked at the top of this article.

crikey.

tbt

TbT I take offense at the "where is the discussion remark" I am open to your thoughts and have always remained civilized and respectfull when answering you.

MM

moderateman,

you are right: whether or not you agree you are always willing to discuss, and you have some impressive emotional-control skills that i sorely lack. honestly, in the midst of this unexpected whirlwind, i've lost track of the "where's the discussion" comment i made.

was it directed at you? if it was, im sorry.

tbt

Taboo, you had a great article, but it seems to be deteriorating into a he said she said diatribe. Perhaps we can restart this fresh looking at another aspect of it and try again.