Drexciya on DeBoer

Commenter Drexciya wrote a thought-provoking post in my last thread. Other commenters seem really interested in what s/he has to say, so I wanted to share his/her post on the front page.

Freddie is a deliberate writer, and his posts are reflections of strongly held political beliefs. If he has a post that dismisses the symbolic importance of a black president or sees a comparison between Obama and a despot that committed multiple genocides/murders as an appropriate counter to the sincere reaction of black children and black people to the inspirational and aspirational import of Obama’s presidency, it’s not because he’s stupid, it’s because he’s decided that it doesn’t matter. His emphasis on a “material” definition of racism is contemptuous of the idea that racism has a psychological and emotional element and that such elements are worthy of equal note and staunch efforts to counter their impact and he holds modern feminism/anti-racism/pro-queerness (i.e what he calls “identity politics”) as trojan horses that secretly hope to promote “neoliberalism”. Furthermore, in true left-coalitional fashion, if anti-black racism or black people are rhetorically or materially set against the racism he feels is reflected by foreign policy (or any position that’s deemed leftist canon) anti-black racism and thus, black people, become rhetorically subordinate, substantively irrelevant and free game for any manner of dismissiveness (up to and including posting misrepresentations of people’s resume to shut them up).

I give that brief summary to say this: the left has made a sincere mistake in not taking him seriously. He’s presented and reflected the most effective variant of a model of leftist engagement (often seen by Matt Bruenig, Doug Henwood, David Sirota, etc, etc) that’s crafted “leftist” rationales to hold nearly all ascendant radicalism, mobilization and prioritization of black, anti-racist and even feminist claims as not just insufficiently leftist, but as malignantly anti-leftist. His presence serves not just to promote himself, but to provide “acceptable” ways for leftist people whose leftism begins and ends at white and maybe general poverty to ignore, mock, dismiss and argue against both the political action of “identity politics” types, the language they’ve used to form that political action, and the valid, substantive claims that make them willing to hold “identity claims” at equal or greater significance than what normal, usually white and male, leftists would expect or agree with. All the tactics from calling identity politics inherently neoliberal as a shorthand, to using Adolph Reed/BAR writers as rhetorical shields to acceptably dismiss any inconvenient black thought/thinkers that are gaining popularity, to reducing twitter mobilization to lazy and overly broad assessments of “hashtag activism/twitter outrage”, to calling any white people who’ve correctly internalized the lessons from their e-socialization with prominent writers/thinkers of color (and number themselves among their supporters) posturing liars who don’t “really” believe what they say, etc, etc, may not have gotten their start with him, but has an accessible and replicable form through his posts and his twitter feed.

I’m not saying he’s not a comical, infuriating figure (I regularly read him because he’s both of these things), I’m not saying the left should take him seriously because his arguments are good (sometimes they’re ok, but I more frequently find them disingenuous, narrowly framed and I find their implications and oversights odious), but I am saying that he should receive the same treatment one would give a significant Republican or libertarian, because if the backlash against the growing and evolving empowerment of marginalized groups takes a form, the variant that’s most likely to gain representation in left/liberal spaces would both look like deBoer and it would use his approach. Nominally, he supports BlackLivesMatter, Black Panthers, and holds himself as a leftist who takes anti-racism seriously, but substantively his engagement with those positions looks like…that post. Which is offensive, racist, contemptuous of black political aims, as many black people express them, shallow and a perfectly representative shorthand for leftist engagement on issues that the generally white male-decided left have decided not to engage with using anything that looks like gravity or sensitivity. Just as recently, he’s called for why the left should go after Trump voters, he’s called intersectionality a “failed discourse that cannot win”, on the same day as he posted that (IIRC) he used black people’s proportion of the population (and white people’s greater proportion) as implicit reasoning to go after the latter more and despite being nominally pro-reparations, he spread that awful, awful, embarrassing anti-Coates/anti-reparations Adolph Reed interview with Henwood.

The tl;dr version of the above is this: Where racial politics are concerned, I’m a firm believer of nipping things in the bud. While Sady Doyle’s post from years ago is one of the rare examples of mockery having an effect against him, I find his influence considerably broader than it was then and presently immune to that form of engagement. That was a deeply, deeply disgusting tweet, but it’s not problematic in a way that chiefly proves that Freddie is silly; it’s one that’s presenting a model of white leftism that’s flaunting its compatibility with a kind of left-attracting white nationalism, which is notable because it’s experimenting with various ways to not just treat but prove that claims from the segments of the black left that lack cultural, political and social associations with the generally white socialist/marxist/left-organizer left are not just illegitimate but also aren’t worthy of deference and empathy. I think that’s dangerous, and should be met with argumentative and depictive postures which express that danger.