I think your missing the point and your mixing things up by comparing to modern society. This isn't a critique of industrial labor or blue collar jobs in themselves. It's a critique of limiting opportunities for people from one race to one specific type of job and moreover, only to the lowest strata within those fields. The education system proposed by Washington (and many others) offered blacks one path, a path to an industrial job in which they had no hope of true upward mobility. In the vast majority of the situations the bosses were white and the owners were white and no mater how hard a black person worked, they were never going to gain those positions. In my eyes that that's a fundamentally racist system because opportunities are not equal and the system reproduces power inequalities.
Limiting or creating? This was what I said initially. This is very similar to the critique of Williams (and Sowells) findings that minimum wage laws and welfare act negatively against the economic interests and welfare of minorities. Rather than increasing higher level opportunity, the bar for entry is raised in actuality.
I don't buy the "white boss will never let a black person do X", regardless of era. I've seen the opposite too many times, even from overtly racist people (overtly as in, white people who will call black person a my pals to their face, complain about lazy my pals this and worthless my pals that, etc.). Regardless of racial prejudice, when X black man is a superior technician/driver/worker/etc, guess who gets the job. Very rarely do people "cut off their nose to spite their face".
You have to start somewhere, and you can't start at the top.
What the fuck is going through your head, Dak?
First of all, go back and read my original post. I didn't come out saying that Booker T. was a flagrant racist. I said that despite his best efforts, he comes out propagating the language and hierarchy of hegemonic racism. Someone doesn't have to be a racist to be racist.
I know what you are trying to say but I find this formulation problematic. There's overt and covert. Most of the charges I find of "knowingly/unknowingly propagating X" are in issue in interpretation - like the aforementioned work on minimum wages and welfare. In this case, a
very questionable standard for application of the "Racist" labels exists.
Second, I would never say that modern rap culture doesn't perpetuate racial stereotypes; you introduced that binary. And I agree with it! Instead, try to look at how actual African American critics like Ken Warren, or Gene Jarrett, or Cynthia Nixon have worked to better understand pervasive racism. People who actually make room for Booker T. Washington as a writer, but who still acknowledge that racial elements cling to the branches like Spanish moss. People can actively try to move past institutions such as slavery while still perpetuating stereotypes. You're not thinking very critically about this at all, and it's one of your shortcomings, in my opinion.
I didn't bring up hiphop and rap only for perpetuating racial
stereotypes - in fact that wasn't why I brought them up. It was for essentially crafting a new underculture of ghetto consumerism to resubmerge a rising minority working middle class into fruitless or counterproductive "endeavors". If all rap did was perpetuate a stereotype it would be a massive improvement.
You attribute all these presumptuous claims to what I've said, calling it a "faculty lens," and it's utter bullshit. Step back for a second and use your brain.
I probably said "faulty" lens at some point, but I like "Faculty Lens"
.
Finally, I knew you would critique Jameson's post in that way. It just goes to show how utterly simplistically you understand literary studies, and perhaps you don't desire to think beyond that point. I can very well say that psychology is nothing more than approaching a text (i.e. person) with a preconceived notion of how a human being is supposed to think and behave; but I don't think it's that simple. You can at least try and redirect your misguided hostility against something other than literary studies.
To some degree psychology does necessarily act on and take a normative expectation of human behavior. But that's not the entire scope of the field. So I could say "yes but it's more than that". On the other hand, it appears you are suggesting that Jameson said something quite
other than my interpretation, when I was indeed wondering why you would post something that appeared to fall right in line with what I had already speculated based on other explanations of the current model, or theory, of applied literary analysis. So it's not a "yes but" but a "Completely wrong" response.
I don't have any desire to become a literary analyst as a profession, so in that sense I "don't want to think deeper about it". However, I don't have any hostility towards a profession that is, or at least should be, heavily invested in the preservation of the written word.
I do have a thusfar perpetual question mark over how literary analysis as it stands is something other than what it continues to appear to defend itself as: A deconstruction of texts for the purpose of a completely unrelated reconstruction....to what end? A teleological process of reconfigurement for it's own sake? I doubt it - and so inquiring minds want to know.
It is not necessarily a lack of critical thought that leads to a different conclusion, and "face value" or a "superficial critique" is often quite different depending on perspective.
Anyone know anything I can read on the psychology behind philosophy? I found speculating the psychological processes of Ayn Rand pretty fun while reading Atlas Shrugged and Anthem. I was wondering if there was a psychologist who went in-depth on this kind of thing.
This would be interesting; not necessarily applied to Ayn Rand but in general. I don't buy Freud's idea of literal "penis envy", but Ayn Rand existed as a strong case for it.
