Skepticism Mentioned versus Skepticism Embraced

How interesting it is that the only things that can be certain are those which we decide in advance to delimit as “true” or “certain,” because math is (certainly) the only realm where certainty lies, and math is founded upon an initial prejudice that consistency should be valued over other things like "diversity” or "the pure joy of movement.” What I mean by this is that the foundations in math, the hand-waving and ad-hoc demonstrations that we take and run with for quantitative thinking, is relative.


Admittedly, consistency and tautology are good places to start for any formal deductive system: assume that something is not the case, and you get that it is --- that seems like exactly the type of thing that you would want grounding your argument. But what if things are not that binary in truth value? What if the way you frame your argument from the get-go is wrong, is question-begging... What if other values are better at grounding our logic (if "logic" doesn't exist), our thinking, and, therefore, our lives?


Just because our mind looks for something does not mean that it exists -- a lot of the nihilism and thoughts of meaningless in life simply come from ascribing a meaning to the question of whether or not a universal meaning to life could be won without ascribing what a satisfactory answer to this question would look like. It therefore becomes a meaningless and therefore "unscientific" (inconsistent) question to ask.


In lieu of the acknowledgment that math (of all things!) cannot be grounded upon logic, we are left with the hair-raising result that proofs of certainty, of truth, of meaning are fragile (and a matter of taste!). It is true that there is always a gap between the is and the ought, but it seems like it must be the case (all instances of necessity would now become musical, as it were) that we are to listen to mathematics as one listens to music. Because it (knowledge) is fragile. Because we (math) are fragile. Because we (human beings are, basically everything...) are fragile. I don't draw the lines you would expect here because how can they be wrong? What are we left with to search for if any time you try to make a point, it won't go over, every time you put out energy it consumes itself, and the faster that you spin your wheels, the faster you have to run to stand in place?


What I don't get is how other people force necessity into their words and actions (their language), if the only thing we must do (of necessity) is to stop thinking of necessity literally. I'm assuming they don't force it, because then it would just be force, and not necessity. Either a) other people are really good at faking it, and we are to become genuine fakes, or b) this hasn't the slightest relevance to things at all and I've totally missed the mark. Probably the latter. Isn't it wrong to fake it, especially if that's something your doing as a "noble lie"? It is all dancing -- but it's not dance, because dance "is founded" on the joy of pure movement -- it acknowledges line and shape and form in and of themselves, it values emotion, and color, and an emergence of meaning that isn't so bluntly literal. This is what I try and put in a math proof, and they'll say it's wrong or not this, or not that. Okay. Alright. Growing process, I'll get there. It all comes in time... and no one can tell you how to get there, or where it goes, or where you are...


If there's any truth to this, don't take it too seriously! You'll crush it... There are people who will disagree with you not because of the content of what you'll say, but from the sheer fact that you try to make points. Pointy people like points! Un-pointy people do not! And there isn't the slightest difference between them. I have no way of knowing how fast your wheels are spinning when you give a response, or whether or not this is something to be valued. I have no way. If you find something you like, launch it into the sun. Just don't stoop. Don't stoop in your thoughts or your language, or when the sun comes up (or doesn't). There is no good response to this! There is no science of meaning! I mean it!


What do you run from? (The cure). My point is that making sense is not literal. And that is therefore a very hard thing to explain from a standpoint of use: we can mention this all of the time. But what is the difference between mentioning, and using? I do not think that we have fully grasped this difference. What does it mean to actually use math in our lives? To be distracted? What does it actually mean to "do politics" in our lives? To be distracted? How many people am I stealing these arguments from? How do you know who they belong to? How can there be a process by which we claim to call some forms of ideas 'common knowledge' by which we can extradite some forms, some assumptions from people, without citing them? How can there not be? What does it mean to be a skeptic about meaning... The fact that we can say "skeptic about meaning" and have it register in the same way something registers when we hear "the car is red" means that skepticism isn't taken seriously. It is taken as an attitude, a scoff, a 'fly in the ointment.' Wouldn't it be wonderful (and terrible) if we needed that skepticism in our lives? When we say healthy skepticism, this is never what we mean. We mean: "take the points that are being given, and see whether they can be verified. Or falsified. And repeated." We do not mean: "Throw the whole thing out. Discard it wholesale! Launch it into the sun! See if it grows back. See if it does do what I say it does in our absence." And this is because, knowledge is fragile. It takes nourishment, and love, and warmth. It takes belonging, it takes holding your views up and suspending their judgment. So, if this is the case -- what is a debate? What is a "political fact"? Is it "politics"? Is it making points...


I actually believe some of what I'm writing, and therefore need to let it go. It doesn't belong to me anymore. (Because if the argument isn't already tautologous and grows back in its absence, why keep it? Why "hold on" to anything, if there is such a thing as logic whose essence implies its existence, who springs from the void into a simultaneously coherent and accurate picture of itself and, therefore, everything else).

The reason I am writing this is because if logic is a matter of taste, then academic math can't really be as rigid as it is believed to be in practice. Maybe a lot of other people have these same sentiments. Maybe the whole point is to acknowledge that and keep going because, as stated above, logic is a matter of taste, and the better taste loves working on in silence more than stopping and asking questions. 

All I can really say is that I love finals. I love the cramming, I love the tests, I love the homework, the studying... I love all of the things that I spend so much time memorizing only to never use again. I love the things that I spend so much time learning that I will use again, and everything in between. I can't believe that the gap between academia and everyday life is so big that the things that we learn in school have no bearing on our daily lives, but it's also a very privileged thing to say that I value education because it is competitive. Because it is a competition, because it is a race that we are always running whether we choose to or not, so why not run faster than everyone else so that you finally outrun the question of why we are running at all in the first place? On my best days, I completely sideskirt the question of "why?" I'm learning anything at all, because I basically function by bullying the questioning parts of my brain out of existence from 9AM-5PM. I can't say where it leads or where it's going...

The only sustainable answer I can give to "Why learn math at all?" is that, maybe we will find something that is thought of as a contradiction, and offer a new way to deal with it that revolutionizes the theory, because that's how science moves forward. But it's all just running, to keep running, for more running, so that we can keep running, and then run some more...

These are very basic questions in the philosophy of science, and I feel like they are important because there is an opportunity cost to studying, and part of my conscience always wants to know why I'm spending any time at all on math, especially if it's not the type of thing that brings me closer to the world ("...keep your two feet on the ground!"). It's also definitely not the case that there are mathematicians or professors out there just waiting for someone to come around and save them by solving a problem or offering them help.

Is everything just a competition? How do you get a stable mathematics, if the only reason it exists at the highest levels is to beat other people to a pulp? How can we get logic out of competition that doesn't bully itself out of coherence and existence? Most days I feel like my own mind would leave me behind at any chance it would get, and I'm just left trying to keep up...

This is the circularity that I see in things: 1) Math is not giving a framework of the world. 2) Math is giving a framework and a foundation for math. It is self-fulfilling 3) Each has their own subjective definition of mathematics. 4) "Math is different from a hallucination because _________"

How do I fill in that blank? Because it's math? Because it's logical...? (Then what isn't susceptible to this circularity?) The thing that I actually tell myself is that math is the sort of thing that is worth listening to more than the part of ourselves asking "Why are we doing this?" As though we could just outrun it. I guess you just have to be hungry for it, and navigating the world is more like aesthetics than we thought.

Formal Logic

17 Sep 2016

[I'll update this post as I find things that are interesting in logic]

I'm actually familiar with some of the things here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpeeTHNVnxQ and am watching the second part now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOhGLnxJt4E. (Joel David Thomkins 'The Continuum Hypothesis and Other Set-Theoretic Ideas for Non-Set-Theorists), which makes me glad that I have taken courses in analysis.

I've glanced at some literature on the algebra of cardinals at the University of Iowa library which I would like to understand better.

I tried reading Hermann Weyl's The Continuum Hypothesis last summer and a lot of it went over my head. Sitting in on a formal logic course on Irving Copi's Symbolic Logic (I got the 5th Edition for like $9 online) has been helpful and I'm hoping to get back to Weyl's book eventually.

I've taken two analysis courses and two abstract algebra courses and have done homework assignments on the Riemann Zeta function, Gamma function, and have heard about elliptic curves in a lecture from a course that I was taking for a grade. This is farther than I ever thought I would get in math, so I am happy about that. What I like about formal logic is that it can give me a way back into math, with stronger foundations: Irving Copi's formal logic goes into calculus and algebra by the end, so I would have a way to "stay alive" in mathematics. If I am not accepted to any graduate courses in logic then I would be able to say that I have given it a good run in math and would feel accomplished in my work.

I did touch on some Set Theoretical basics with my '14-'15 Algebra I students, so I'm glad that they'll have some access to Set Theory.

I learned that DeMorgan's Laws for Logic give an analog for the way that I need to remember to explain semantic incompleteness. I had previously noted:

Week of 9/12/16: It is the case that in any language, there is always something that cannot be expressed. It is not the case that there is some thing that cannot be expressed in any language; for, to name it would be to invalidate the reason we were searching for it. - (On the notion of semantic completeness)

This can be expressed in formal logic as: 

¬∃x∀yφ(x,y)  = ∀x∃y¬φ(x,y)

I am thinking of the left side as:                                       and the right side as:

"It is not the case that there is a subset of the                   "For every subset of the real line there

real line which is such that for every language,          =   exists a language such that it is not the

the specific subset of the real line is inexpressible"         case that the subset of the real line is 

                                                                                       inexpressible."

Now, the left side is what we were given from the notion of semantic completeness. It is interesting that this is logically equivalent to saying that for every subset of the real line, there is some language in which the subset can be expressed.

The error I was tending to make in natural language was to say the negative case of the Week of 9/12/16 Quote: "It is not the case that there is some thing that cannot be expressed in any language..." Using formal logic keeps this straight in my head.

Quote of the Week

Week of 9/5/16 “It is striking that we are less likely to criticize violinists, say, than political philosophers, for failing to provide justice-promoting guidance, as if being interested in identifying truths about justice meant that one was more rather than less culpable for failing to tell us how to bring it about… But I find it hard to feel more impatient with political philosophers than with those who show no interest in justice at all” Adam Swift's The Value of Philosophy in Nonideal Circumstances, 367.

Week of 9/12/16: It is the case that in any language, there is always something that cannot be expressed. It is not the case that there is some thing that cannot be expressed in any language; for, to name it would be to invalidate the reason we were searching for it. - (On the notion of semantic completeness)

Derrida's 'Of Grammatology'

Gayatri Spivak’s translation Of Grammatology (1974) of Derrida’s De la Grammatologie (1967)

Derrida is considering Saussure’s linguistics and says that Peirce had some things right in linguistics, then talks about Rousseau, Claude Lèvi-Strauss, presence, metaphysics, and morality. The people he’s writing about that stuck out to me are Claude Lévi-Strauss, Rousseau, Saussure, Husserl, Hegel, Diderot, and Bergson.

Main Idea: Derrida says that metaphysics of presence cannot account for the spacing within writing. That is, if I print a written document, the "actual meanings" of the words on the page do not account for how the shape of the page, formatting, type of ink and paper, and shape of paper affect the meaning of the document as a whole. This has implications for the relationship between speech and writing: while each has characteristics that are unique to it, there is no sharp divide between the two. How would our lives (or, more exactly, our writings) be different if, instead of writing on rectangles, we wrote on circles or S-shaped paper? How would our lives be different ("how would the meanings of our writings change...") if, instead of writing upright we always had to stand on our hands to write as a social norm? The "literal meaning" (even these will have to be discarded) of the word "blue" will still mean what "blue" means regardless of the shape of the paper it is written on, or whether it is written by someone who is upright or standing on their hands. However, since metaphysics of presence can't account for spacing (I want to use the word style), repetition does not produce the same meaning time and again, but rather, a simulacrum is produced. In this way, there is always a trace of ineffability within articulation; of absence within presence. So "blue" is not a standalone referent from the signifier in the process of evocation and how we write or say the word (upright? upside-down? Is it spray painted?)... how we talk about it is tied up with what it is.  

Why it's useful: This forces us to consider whether, in language, it is the ideas themselves, reduced to simple (logical) statements, that are most important in describing what is being told. In a way, Derrida is saying that if you only focus on logic, you drain speech and logic of the character, musicality, and the things that make language and communication worth actually hearing or listening to. This is called Derrida's critique of logocentrism. I like this for my own life because it forces me to consider that to tell a good story, it's not about focusing solely on translating the plot into formal logic, but rather, the ideas and logical connectives become emergent from within a discourse through the act of explaining and gesturing. I think that this holds true for what masters of a discipline or sport would tell you as well: if you focus only on the finish line, you probably won't run a very good race! If you focus only on the degree, you probably won't get a very good education. If you only think about getting the dive over with, ya might not look so graceful in the air...

Key Terms

Differance: Tied to the notion that to mean something, it must differ from other things and defer to what system we use to eff something effable (i.e., “able to be grokked”; it’s really hard to explain what the “eff” in ineffable means[1]). Both difference and the supplement are emergent from Derrida’s consideration of the relationship between speech and writing.

The supplement: tied to the notion of evil, imitation, presence nature, “the light of day,”, inside versus outside, our relationship to signs and referents, our believing that we have a lack, the possibility of a guardrail in our thinking, and getting ahead of ourselves in our thinking. Heidegger also said in Being and Time that we exist as fallen, and as such tend to get ahead of ourselves. I did like the quote “As soon as man comes to life, he is ready to die,” some of the things he says about fallenness, and the anticipation of death serving as an individualizing principle, but that’s about as much as I want to say about that man’s work. A tangential point is the relationship one has to the footnotes of a book gets better and better the more one reads the book because the index and footnotes are getting closer – the first full sentence I understood in German was from Being and Time! So that was cool. There’s also a German dictionary of relevant terms in the HarperCollins edition. In getting ahead of ourselves, we can come to care more about the signs for things than the things themselves, and I think that’s part of what Derrida is saying about perversion. Anways, supplementarity is the play between substance and absence that no metaphysical or ontological concept can comprehend (266). 

Key Quotes: I see p. 180 & 181 as the “heart” of the text

Auto-effection is a universal structure of experience. All living things have the power of an auto-affection. And only a being capable of symbolizing, that is to say of auto-effecting, may let itself be affected by the other in general. Auto-effection is the condition of an experience in general. This possibility – another name for “life” – is a general structure articulated by the history of life, and provides space for complex and hierarchical operations. Auto-affection, the as-for-itself or for-itself – subjectivity – gains in power and in its mastery of the other to the extent that its power of repetition idealizes itself. Here idealization is the movement by which sensory exteriority, that which affects me or serves me as signifier, submits itself to my power of repetition, to what thenceforward appears to me as my spontaneity and escapes me less and less… Conversation is, then, a communication between two absolute origins that, if one may risk this formula, auto-effect reciprocally, repeating as immediate echo the auto-affection produced by the other. Immediacy is here the myth of consciousness… As soon as nonpresence comes to be felt within the voice [vowel] itself – and is at least pre-felt from the very threshold of articulation and diacriticity – writing is in some way fissured in its value (translated in 1974 from Derrida 1967, 180 – 181, – italics added by me!).

Notable WTF Moments from Rousseau

But in the north, where the inhabitants consume a great deal off a barren soil, men, subject to so many needs, are easily irritated. Everything that happens around them disturbs them. As they subsist only through effort, the poorer they are the more firmly they hold to the little they have. To approach them is to make an attempt on their lives. This accounts for their irascible temper, so quick to turn in fury against everything that offends them (Derrida 1967 in Spivak 1974, 244).  

The country is not a matter of indifference in the education [culture] of man; it is only in temperate climes that he comes to be everything he can be. The disadvantages of extreme climes are easily seen. A man is not planted in one place like a tree, to stay there the rest of his life, and to pass from one extreme to another you must travel twice as far as he who starts half-way…. A Frenchman can live in New Guinea or in Lapland, but a negro cannot live in Tornea nor a Samoyed in Benin. It seems also as if the brain were less perfectly organized in the two extremes. Neither the Negroes nor the Laps have the sense of the Europeans. So if I want my pupil to be a citizen of the world I will choose him in the temperate zone, in France for example, rather than elsewhere. In the north with its barren soil men devour much food, in the fertile south they eat little. This produces another difference: the one is industrious, the other contemplative (p. 27; italics added by Derrida) (on p. 242 in Spivak’s translation of Derrida).

Hopefully we have learned by now that if you call another culture primitive or basic you are only expressing your own ignorance of something beyond yourself!

A good quote from Rousseau: “He who imagines nothing senses no-one but himself; he is alone in the midst of humankind” (this is Rousseau on page 203 in Spivak’s translation Of Grammatology).

Meditations on the 360° Kickflip

8 August 2016

Meditations on the 360° Kickflip

A boomerang is not a boomerang because it is thrown once and returns to the thrower. A boomerang is a boomerang because anytime that it is thrown, it is returned to the thrower. To hold is to release, to possess is to let it go. It’s all in the flick. It’s all in the flick. It’s all in the flick.

I spot my landing and skate spot, make sure it is free of debris, try to make sure that distractions around me are kept at a minimum. I tell myself that I will fall, that I will scrape knees and elbows, and that it’s part of the process. Love the ankle twists. Love the sprained elbows and sore hips. Wear a helmet and protect your noggin. Look at road rash as though it is just pavement and concrete giving you free tattoos; they tell a story of your likes and dislikes through etchings in your skin. Here is the 5-0 I messed up on before I knew how to 5-0. Here is the pebble I hit that sent me flying, here is the time I decided to “Send it one more time!” at the suggestion of a friend against my better judgment. I scoop my back foot and try to find my balance, thinking as though I were on two wheels the whole time I am jumping over my board. Even as the board is spinning below me, I try to find a way to level myself and throw the board with patience. A boomerang is not a boomerang because it is released and comes back once. A boomerang is a boomerang because to hold it is to release it, and because every time it is thrown it returns to the thrower. Boomerang, boomerang, boomerang. Forgot the flick, skinned the knee, dust it off and laugh. Try again, throw it higher, throw it farther, throw with patience. Don’t forget the flick.

I know that my best work is reflective of my work on the fundamentals. Do your core work and stretch in the morning; get a warm up in and eat your quinoa and vegetables. Go to bed at night and sleep. Wake up in the morning ready to go, and remember why you started. Enjoy the ride and love every minute. Push it. Scare yourself.

Catch it with the front foot first as it comes around. Get your back foot back on the board. Ride away and make it look easy.

Skatepark ramps are my mini mountains // halfpipes carve out twin peaks.

On the best days I float // on the worst days I scar

Graffiti on the walls and banks tag the park in a form of writing that is unique and comes from the heart. This is a form of writing whose essential function is not to favor enslaving power (Derrida on Levi-Strauss in Grammatology, 139), but to uncover, to excavate and to decorate.  Flip tricks, when caught, make music sound better and the writing on the walls come to life. 

To Mitch!

7/17/16

To Mitch!

The time has come for me to write a letter that you may have known that I would write, eventually: an ode, a refrain. But not a goodbye. No, certainly not a goodbye.

I have struggled for many years to put words to paper and I know that the gravest sin I could have committed is only to have held back what I can give of myself, which is really about giving back. In so many ways you raised me: kept my chin held high, made sure I had a life outside of books. I still have your mask that you made in high school circumscribed in the words “King at Last.” I would like to think that it has been my anchor and helped me to keep my head on straight. I looked up to you as a carpenter and craftsman, as knowledgeable about cars and engines, of animals and the wilderness. I even taught 8^th grade math for two years and tried to keep kids from doing all the crazy things we used to do at that age! I still think about you all the time. Last week I rode my bike back out on Rosedale, through the part with all the hills that go out to Highway 100 and imagined that I was chasing you the whole time. I couldn’t keep up. I went through Indian Hill Nature Center and could hear Schlicht yelling at us about being good on our field trip, keeping our bug logs, and could see Jerry tackling trees and everyone laughing about it. The bridges are still there and the stream still runs beneath them.

I had always pictured you as Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, dodging mishaps, always sneaking by somehow without a scratch. I guess that’s why I’m angry about things. I wanted you to be here when I finished school in Colorado and I wanted you to be here when I went off to be a teacher so I could tell you all the things my kids said, about all the bike rides I went on. All the skateboarding I’ve been doing. I think that’s what I’ve missed the most is just the thought of how much fun it would’ve been to get into skateboarding together. Snowboarding was awesome and I’ll never forget jumping around on tables in our basements, strapped to a snowboard, balancing on odd pieces of furniture. I’ve heard this tribute in my mind for a  while and this year was the first time I noticed that I couldn’t just let my mind run when I ramble and trust that I would make good things in speech. I don’t know if that’s a fact about me getting old or having my mind on too many things, but right now that’s a fact.

You were the proof for so many of us that you could be young, bright, smart, well-liked – God, everyone in town knew and liked you – adventurous, funny. You were proof that we could have it all, and then some. You were our world.

I can’t tell you about all the things that I’ve learned or all the people I’ve met in the past few years, but I still want to try, to put my mind at ease knowing that I haven’t left you behind. In everything I do, I always know you are with me because I am not going through this alone and you were and are my best friend. I was afraid to come back to Cedar Rapids the year after you left, but now I think it’s time for me to be here and to be happy, and feel young and wild and free like you would want. I know, you’re saying “c’mon Veg, get on with it,” “okay, Reg, we get it. I’m here and I’m never leaving.” I know that’s what you’re saying because I can hear it just as much as I can hear the cicadas outside. Summers in Iowa man, gotta love ‘em. At least I’m not doing corn detassling this summer! Oh man. I was going to go out again for it, but just can’t submit myself to that any longer. Part of me is afraid to be alone with my mind for that long, and that is a new thing. I have never felt that before.  

I have met people that will totally destroy you and tear your entire life apart if you let them, and it’s not because they are bad people. It’s because the same thing happened to them and they do not know how to communicate this to others effectively. I have met the sweetest and brightest children, the wisest parents and grandparents, people who live well with everything handed to them, and others who work really hard for everything they have.

I don’t know why I’m doing this if for no other reason than to be able to trust my own voice again; to have a clearer mind. I want to be able to hear you when you call back to me, and to know that it’s really you there, just as I am sitting in this room. We have friends that are rockstars, friends that are musicians. We have friends in politics and in sports. Friends in law school and in business, friends that are married with children. Friends in music and in medicine. Friends that teach and dream. Friends that love and adore you. Friends that miss you.

It wouldn’t feel right for me to move on in life without writing you, so know this: I’m not writing to say goodbye. I’m writing to say write me back. That I can hear you when you laugh at my bad jokes and that I still chase you in the wind. That I didn’t catch you. That I couldn’t keep up. 

Postscript

1) I am most cogniscent here of circumscription as delineating or marking boundaries, and the closest thing we get to in geometry to overlap: "to construct or be constructed around (a geometrical figure) so as to touch as many points as possible." Circumscription thus gives a sign for how embedded "we are" "in each other." We see this in your work on Mask 1, in bridges over streams, and in friendship. 

2) To "mean," we have to love. It would sound rhetorical to say "you give me meaning," but we certainly don't get it in isolation! Logic and meaning are thus maddening and enriching, embodied and dissolving, solidifying and granulating, and none of these things, and something completely alter to these things. Friendship thus gives us an orientation in time, a project to organize our lives around, sources of authority, and a grounding for our reasons. You have been all of these things and more simply by being a source of love. 

How to Un-Steal a Continent

13 July 2016

Since the social ontology of whiteness is ethically unsound from a historical point of view, we need a political justification for our actions that does not begin "I am white, so therefore I am entitled to these actions that are off limits to everyone else: ..." The speciesist critique might add that the political justification for our arguments also cannot begin "I am a human, so therefore I am entitled to these forms of domination over non-human forms of life..." It is important to note here that the feminist or antiracist feminist critique here would not necessarily be to say that we can't have a political justification for our acts which begin "I am a male, so...," but rather, that we must root all forms of domination from our private, social, public, and political (which ideally are one in the same!) selves. 

I am not writing to suggest that colonization is the only historically relevant fact to say that the moral grounds of whiteness are unsound; I am suggesting that if our political justification for our actions does not respond to colonization, then we are participating in the act of forgetting white supremacy. 

Who loses out from that act of forgetting? Who benefits? 

The fact that it still needs to be said that whiteness is not an ethically sound source of authority is part of the issue.

To me, the question "What would it mean to socially mitigate white privilege in the US?" is equivalent to the question "What would it look like to seriously un-steal the continent, the economy, the education system, the political system, our religious systems, and "the criminal justice system?" We cannot undo history, but we can continually grapple with it in a way that gives us an ethically sound control of our future. 

The fact that there were people living on this continent for tens of thousands of years before colonizers and settlers came to this continent coupled with the fact that we have drastically low levels of representation of Native Americans in "American political institutions" means that the only way you can say that this representation was taken away from Natives are (listed in increasing amounts of colorblindness):

1) Natives did not have education and politicality/political modes of being prior to the arrival of whites to the continent

2) White representation was formed in socio-educational and political institutions without an act of violence

3) Said violence was justified because of white supremacy 

I think that all three claims are logically untenable and that if there are people here whose roots on this continent extend back for tens of thousands of years, their voices should take priority in forming our social and political institutions. This is not a radical claim; this derives political authority in something outside the promise of violence (i.e., duration and lived tenure on this continent) in a way that responds to the historically ethical unsoundness in the foundation of whiteness on this continent. 

The Eradication of -W-h-i-t-e- -S-u-p-r-e-m-a-c-y-

9 JULY 2016

Reginald Anderson

Cedar Rapids, Iowa

9 July 2016

OPINION OF THE WEEK

Conclusion 1: Whiteness is contingent

                How do we know this? Whiteness and relevant (meaning colonized[1]) racial identities were racialized through white supremacy. Mills’ account of the historical project of racial domination in The Racial Contract gives a suitable outline of the way in which whiteness and colonized racial identities are founded on white supremacy. The symptoms of the historical project of racial domination leave us with a material basis[2] for whiteness which has been used post hoc ergo propter hoc to fallaciously defend white supremacy because this is the only way in which white supremacy can logically be defended. Tone policing[3] is also often offered as pseudo-support for white supremacy. Since racialized identities are performed by humans within human societies, white supremacy is not separate from the ideologies and worldviews that human beings hold.

Conclusion 2: Whiteness can be leveraged for just means

                Given the fact that colonized racial identities are performed and reinforced through human beings, attacks on post hoc ergo propter hoc logically fallacious moral defenses of white supremacy and calling out tone policing are an attack on white supremacy itself. The question is thus not whether whiteness is a good or bad thing and whether you should feel guilty about colonized racial identities; it’s what you do with it that counts. The question is whether your whiteness is rooted in liberating others and eradicating white supremacy through an active grappling and wrestling with the origin of the historical project of racial domination in the Hegelian master self that fuels western expansion, black exclusion from the dialectic of recognition which produces self-consciousness (including missing a turning signal, even if that was the issue in why we lost Sandra Bland; reaching for an ID or wallet during a traffic stop by a cop, even if that was the issue in why we lost Philando Castile; or freedom of expression in wearing a hooded sweatshirt, even if that was the issue in why we lost Trayvon Martin), and asking yourself whether the world we live in is safe for human beings who are not like you. If we were to take seriously the notion that Leonard Peltier should and could be removed from jail, how many people would have to speak up about it to free him? Where would those voices have to speak from to register as a valid questioning of his criminality?

Conclusion 3: Black Lives Matter Given the fact that eradicating white supremacy is not done by questioning whether white people should feel good or bad about colonized racial identities, the eradication of white supremacy is to be prioritized over the protection of the white fragility complex. To say that my work is dedicated to the eradication of white supremacy is to say that Black Lives Matter more than job security, materialism, militarism, living out your dreams, how much money I will make this week, and how much money I will make next week. To say that my work is dedicated to the eradication of white supremacy is to say that Black Lives Matter more than for-profit prisons and the American Criminal Justice System. In my opinion, to say my work is dedicated to the eradication of white supremacy is to say that Black Lives Matter more than the American education, judicial, and economic systems, and that Black Lives Matter more than American Christianity[4] or the perpetuation of whiteness as a colonized racial identity.

Sometimes if you leave the candle behind you find that the sun was out the whole time…

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[1] The moment of biting one’s tongue occurs as a result of “whiteness,” “white supremacy,” and “colonized” being colonized terms

[2] Youtube: “Charles Mills on Materializing Race,” Web. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtU5TjPiyO0. 9 July 2016.

[3] http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/12/tone-policing-and-privilege/

[4] This is where I will be thrown away. I am here referring to American Christianity as a tax-deductible, state-run religion (following Vine Deloria, Jr.’s God is Red) which was imposed on this continent through violence during the conquest of North America and South America. Also, since Jesus was Jewish, it would be anti-Semitic to oppose his followers. This is where I differ from Nietzsche’s self-identifying as the Antichrist and Osho’s making jokes at Jesus’ expense.