Schedule from 3-22-4-19 Spring 2017
3-22 Essay 2 Due. "Green Guilt" 25
3-27 "The Great White Way" 68 and "Understanding Black Patriotism" 55
3-29 "People Like Us" 62
4-3 “Prudence or Cruelty?”, 172 "Cutting Food Stamps Will Cost Everyone," "The Economic Case for Food Stamps," "How America's Welfare System Hurts the People It's Supposed to Help"
4-5 "Wages of Sin" and "Eat Cake, Subtract Self-Esteem" 181-202
4-17 In-Class Bluebook Exam
4-19 Essay #3 Due
Essay 3 for 150 points. Options: 1,400 words typed options and 3 sources is due no later than the start of class on April 19.
One. Refute, support, or complicate Asma’s assertion that green guilt is not only a relative to religious guilt but speaks to our drive to sacrifice self-indulgence for the drive of altruistic self-preservation and social reciprocity. See Elizabeth Anderson’s online essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”
Two. Develop a thesis that supports, refutes, or complicates the assertion Debra J. Dickerson, who wrote the “The Great White Way,” would find Michael Eric Dyson's essay "Understanding Black Patriotism" a complement to Dickerson's ideas about race, power, and hierarchy.
Three. Support, refute, or complicate Debra J. Dickerson's argument that race in America is more of a social fantasy than a reflection of objective reality.
Four. Show how the Jordan Peele movie Get Out builds on Debra J. Dickerson's argument that race in America is a cruel invention designed to create a hierarchy of power, one that can be seen in all its horror in post-Obama America. For sources, see NYT review , The Guardian review, and the Variety review.
Five. Develop a thesis that analyzes the human inclination for staying within the tribe of sameness as explained in David Brooks’ “People Like Us” (very popular with students).
Six. Support, refute, or complicate Nicholas Kristof’s assertion that slashing food stamps is morally indefensible.
Seven. Addressing at least one essay we've covered in class (“The Wages of Sin” and “Eat Cake, Subtract Self-Esteem), support, refute, or complicate the argument that overeating, anorexia, and other eating disorders are not the result of a disease but are habits of individual circumstance and economics.
Eight. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that feminist-political explanations for anorexia, as evident in Caroline Knapp's essay, are a ruse that hide the disease's real causes.
Conclusions
Harvard Writing Center on Writing Conclusions
“The Great White Way” by Debra J. Dickerson
One. In the first paragraph, Dickerson writes that the president will struggle to explain what race is to space aliens. She suggests that no one knows what race is, yet it is the “central drama” of America.
Why is race, which is such a vague and confusing term, our nation’s obsession?
No one knows what race is because the whole notion of race is fake.
In fact, the whole the notion of race in America is the first "fake news."
People are freaking out today about all the fake news going around, but African-Americans have been the victims of fake news since America's beginnings when lies were told about the identity, history, and purpose of black Americans.
3 Groups of Americans and Only One Can Identify Fake News for What It Really Is
Hobbits: who wish to stay uninformed and ignorant. They conform to whatever "norms" and practices there are. Their goal in life is to not rock the boat.
Hooligans: Believe and spread fake news and try to shape policy based on fake news. The white supremacists were the first to spread the fake news of race in order to justify their ownership of slaves.
Vulcans: rational, educated people who develop informed opinions, consider opponents' views, and see world events in the context of history. Sadly, Vulcans are becoming a smaller part of the population.
Back in the days of slavery, the voices of Vulcans were eclipsed by the voices of Hooligans, a group of white supremacists who delivered the first fake news.
Two Types of White Supremacists
There are two types of white supremacists, the psychotics, the ones who really believe in it; they are 7 on the Evil Scale because they're dumb enough to believe in this fake news.
Then there are sociopathic white supremacists who invented the fake news of race all the while knowing that the news was fake. They invented race because it was a money-making opportunity. Their motive was purely money-driven whereas the white psychotics' fake news belief was religious and ideology-driven. The sociopaths, who were willing to exact cruelty on black people knowing full well that race was complete BS, score a 10 on the Evil Scale.
If there is a hell with lower and lower compartments, then the white sociopathic racists will go in the worst chamber.
Why Race is Fake News: No Science
There is no scientific or biological view of race. There is however a social construction of race based on arbitrary forces so that the definition of race is always changing.
We read in Dickerson's essay: When white Americans wanted to exploit Italians, Italians were "black"; when white Americans needed Italians' votes to fuel their agendas, they granted Italians "white" status. Race is a canard subject to change in the service of the kleptocracy, a rule of governance that steals from its people.
This history of white America is a history of kleptocracy against black Americans. This painful truth is underscored in the magisterial essay "The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates in which Coates covers every thing you can imagine that has been stolen from black America: identity, body, mind, soul, art, property, to name some.
Motive for Inventing Race: Kleptocracy
What remains is that race has always been defined in service of the kleptocracy, in which the powerful, who define their power based on racial identity, steal from the exploited, also based on racial identity.
Race is defined in the service of power.
Because people of color have traditionally been excluded from the American Dream and there is a history of genocide, slavery, and Jim Crow (segregation and racism), human rights violations that were rooted in the idea of race.
The violations were so egregious and heinous that the only way white people could rationalize these acts and appease their conscience was to construct a devilish idea of racial entitlements for whites and racial exploitation for blacks.
Conclusion: Race is "fake news."
To reiterate, African-Americans were the first victims of "fake news."
The Origin of Fake News: White Supremacy:
White Supremacy is a false religion designed to justify and rationalize the evils of slavery and Jim Crow. The results of White Supremacy are exploitation of black people and a mass psychosis of those white people who drank the White Supremacy Kool-Aid.
Genocide, slavery, and Jim Crow were justified by white people who, intoxicated by the doctrine of White Supremacy, felt entitled to treat others in the horrid manner of racism and all its resulting evils.
Today's Kleptocracy:
In our contemporary society, we enslave migrant workers in tents up and down the agricultural worksites of California and elsewhere.
In the United States, we imprison black and brown men for the same crimes as whites at a ratio of 10:1 even as the prison system has become a multi-billion-dollar industry that has created millions of jobs.
We have strict laws for drug offenses, but not alcohol in light of this fact: 80% of all drunk driving arrests happen to white men. In a white-ruled kleptocracy, this makes sense.
Ideas of Race Today
So race, even in its vague definition, is still a hot-button issue and points to a crisis of injustice and moral bankruptcy.
Race is not a physical reality, but it is an obsession because it's part of White Supremacy's obsession with the IDEA of race, and as Debra Dickerson shows in her essay, the IDEA of race is a psychosis of never-ending, arbitrary racial definitions that keep changing to conform to the needs of those in power.
Two. What does Dickerson mean when she writes that “race is an arbitrary system for establishing hierarchy and privilege”?
Ultimate Hypocrisy of White Europeans Who Came to America
The creators of White Supremacy, who escaped the tyranny of European kings knew the value of freedom. They talked about freedom. They preached about freedom. They sang songs about freedom. They wrote poems about freedom.
My God, those white Europeans loved their freedom.
But put on your brakes, ladies and gentleman. They didn't like freedom as much as they claimed apparently because they sure didn't give a damn about freedom for black people.
Or put it this way: They loved money more than freedom and they only valued freedom for themselves, not others.
White Envy
White profiteering sociopaths who were envious of the profits slave traders were making in Britain, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere, wanted a piece of the action.
How Could The White Sociopaths Play the White Christian Farmers?
The white sociopaths whose only religion was money knew the white Christian peasants and farmers were too religious and too caught up in the command "Love thy neighbor as thyself" to embrace slavery, so the white sociopath conmen insidiously put White Supremacy, the belief that God and Jesus are white and that the world was made for white people, into the white peasants' Bibles and soon enough the peasants and farmers drank enough of this White Supremacy or "evil Kool-Aid," as I'm fond of calling it, and they were on board with the white conmen.
White Inventors of Race Were Conmen and Sociopaths
Here's an important point: The white conmen were too clever to be fooled by race. They knew that race doesn't exist, that race is a canard and they used race as a canard to fool the white peasants.
The white peasants actually believed in the Kool-Aid the conmen gave them.
Hell Revisited
The psychotic peasants would still go to Hell because there's no excuse for their "complicit ignorance," as I like to call it, but they're not as diabolical as the white sociopaths who invented White Supremacy for their own profit.
Review of White Supremacy
White Supremacy is an evil religion, a hybrid of Christianity and white superiority narratives, which states whites were put on Earth lord over everyone else in any manner they saw fit.
The false religion was the first fake news.
In the United States, there was no such thing as "race" until slavery came along.
Before the fake news of White Supremacy, people in America did not have a consciousness of race or skin color. Race and skin color were inventions, or if you will, an elaborate fiction or fairy tale designed to justify genocide, slavery, and Jim Crow.
White farmers and slave owners drank the Kool-Aid and saw themselves as “good Christians” even as they exacted cruelty upon people of color. They were able to use White Supremacy (“I’m just doing what the good Lord ordained me to do.”) to assuage their conscience and perform heinous acts, which constituted the most depraved human rights violations.
Three. What attitudes did white Americans feel toward European immigrants from Ireland to Greece?
They were looked upon as subhumans that would takeover America as “mongrel hordes” unless the white Americans started breeding more.
There was a racial hierarchy with Anglo Europeans at the top, Italians, Slavs, Greeks, and Irish at the middle, and brown and black people relegated to the bottom.
Hostility was so bad against non-Anglo Europeans that 11 Italians were lynched in Louisiana in 1891.
The Anglo whites wanted to assimilate the southern Europeans into more jobs and get their votes, so they “promoted Southern Europeans to whiteness,” whiteness being equivalent to the gold card of freedom, respect, and privilege.
This privilege gave “fascist-leaning Italians” full respect while patriotic Japanese were put into internment camps.
One of the horrid things about southern Italians becoming full white Americans was in sharing white Americans’ hate and disdain for people of color. For example, we read that Italian Americans took delight in beating up black people.
This was their sick rite of passage into “being fully white.”
Four. How was FDR’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal a sort of affirmative action for whites only?
The states could decide who got the New Deal money and it always went to poor whites, never to blacks. White liberals in the north allowed southern states to do with the New Deal as they liked, state by state. There was no federal enforcement so that all people benefited.
During the Depression, relief only went to poor whites. Poor blacks received nothing.
Blacks were not eligible for Social Security until the 1950s.
These injustices, which happened 70 years ago, give weight to the argument for affirmative action, Dickerson argues.
We did have affirmative action for the poor, Dickerson reminds us, but 70 years ago, it was only the white poor who received it.
Fake News and the movie Get Out.
Chris, the black protagonist, attends a white family's party and he is subject to a hailstorm of fake news about his identity, origins, and purpose.
Sample Thesis and Outline Comparing "The Great White Way" to the Jordan Peele movie Get Out.
Jordan Peele's movie Get Out cogently helps us understand Debra J. Dickerson's connection in "The Great White Way" between race as a fantasy and white privilege as a kleptocracy. Through the lens of Peele's film, this connection is evidenced in four major ways including __________________, _________________, ________________, and _____________________.
Paragraphs 1 and 2: Explain the connection between race as a fantasy and how this racial fantasy fuels white privilege and its aim to conduct a kleptocracy in which black Americans are its victims. (Two 150-word paragraphs for 300 words)
Paragraph 3: Argue that Get Out builds on Debra Dickerson's idea as it pertains to the racist fantasy of the black male, in which the black male is perceived as "superior physical specimen" on one hand and servile dolt on the other, the subtle racist jabs or condescending microaggressions that reinforce this racist notion of the black male, the self-destruction that afflicts blacks who try to assimilate in white society, even liberal white society, the denial of racism that whites enjoy boasting about in a post-Obama America, and how white America's racist ideas lay the groundwork for justifying the kleptocracy of black America: the systematic state-sponsored stealing of every ounce of body, mind, and soul from black culture. (150 words for 450 subtotal)
Paragraphs 4-8 (five paragraphs at 150 words each would give us 750 words for a subtotal of 1,200 words)
Conclusion: Show the broader ramifications for a movie about the kleptocracy and its relevance in a post-Obama America (200 word paragraph for 1,400 total).
You can consult the following movie reviews for your Works Cited:
NYT review , The Guardian review, and the Variety review. For an even more in-depth essay about the kleptocracy against black America, you might consult Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay "The Case for Reparations."
“Understanding Black Patriotism” by Michael Eric Dyson
One. What is the difference between black patriotism and “lapel-pin nationalism”?
The history of black people is the history of struggle, to fight against slavery, Jim Crow, unfair incarceration laws, unequal income distribution, to name some, and this struggle for a better country through the struggle is far more in-depth and arduous than people spewing easy slogans and clichés.
The history of black America is to fight the fake news and replace it with real news because the truth shall set you free.
If one is angry toward one’s country, its lies and morally wrong practices, then one has hope for change. True abandonment of one’s country is not expressed anger or outrage but apathy, and the percentage of people of all colors who stay at home on election days speaks to apathy.
In contrast, there is “My country, right or wrong,” which is a dogmatic credo of the ignorant peasant who subscribes, not to patriotism, but to jingoism, the act of cheerleading or being a fanboy for one’s country without doing the research or hard work concerning the relevant issues.
A jingoist is a Kool-Aid drinker or fanboy who blindly embraces all things that pertain to one’s country.
A true patriot, according to Dyson, is a critical thinker who wants an accurate diagnosis of America's ills in order to make a better America.
Two. What examples does Dyson provide regarding hypocrisy of patriotism?
Dyson points at the five deferments of Dick Cheney, hawkish on terrorism, who may have been hawkish when he was calling the shots, but when it came to him fighting he stayed home from the war five times. He really used those deferments but was eager to make others fight his war.
In contrast, African American critic of American racism Jeremiah Wright surrendered his student deferment and volunteered to join the Marines.
Essay Option from Above
Develop a thesis that supports, refutes, or complicates the assertion Debra J. Dickerson, who wrote the “The Great White Way,” would find Michael Eric Dyson's essay "Understanding Black Patriotism" a complement to Dickerson's ideas about race, power, and hierarchy.
Paragraph 1: Summarize Dickerson's essay: 200 words
Paragraph 2: Summarize Dyson's essay: 200 words
Paragraph 3 Thesis: Argue that Dyson and Dickerson argue that true patriotism is improving America's character by exposing its flaws, such as the kleptocracy against black America, helping America understand the pernicious mythology behind race, helping America transfer the lessons of justice from the Civil Rights Movement and apply those lessons to injustices today: police brutality and mass incarceration, to name a couple of examples, and being on guard against America's regression to racism in a post-Obama America. (150 words)
Paragraphs 4-8 would be the body paragraphs that expound on the above. (150 words each for 600 words and 1,150 subtotal)
Paragraph 9 would be a counterargument-rebuttal paragraph for 150 words for 1,300 subtotal.
Paragraph 10 would be your 100-word conclusion for a grand total of 1,400 words.
Related Readings
"There Is No Such Thing As Race"
"Race Is a Social Concept, Not a Scientific One"
Citing Electronic Sources Included YouTube
Example of an Essay That Never Uses First, Second, Third, Fourth, Etc., for Transitions But Relies on "Paragraph Links"
Stupid Reasons for Getting Married
People should get married because they are ready to do so, meaning they're mature and truly love one another, and most importantly are prepared to make the compromises and sacrifices a healthy marriage entails. However, most people get married for the wrong reasons, that is, for stupid, lame, and asinine reasons.
Alas, needy narcissists, hardly candidates for successful marriage, glom on to the most disastrous reasons for getting married and those reasons make it certain that their marriage will quickly terminate or waddle precariously along in an interminable domestic hell.
A common and compelling reason that fuels the needy into a misguided marriage is when these fragmented souls see that everyone their age has already married—their friends, brothers, sisters, and, yes, even their enemies. Overcome by what is known today as "FOMO," they feel compelled to “get with the program" so that they may not miss out on the lavish gifts bestowed upon bride and groom. Thus, the needy are rankled by envy and greed and allow their base impulses to be the driving motivation behind their marriage.
When greed is not impelling them to tie the knot, they are also chafed by a sense of being short-changed when they see their recently-married dunce of a co-worker promoted above them for presumably the added credibility that marriage afforded them. As singles, they know they will never be taken seriously at work.
If it's not a lame stab at credibility that's motivating them to get married, it's the fear that they as the years tick by they are becoming less and less attractive and their looks will no longer obscure their woeful character deficiencies as age scrunches them up into little pinch-faced, leathery imps.
A more egregious reason for marrying is to end the tormented, off-on again-off-on again relationship, which needs the official imprimatur of marriage, followed by divorce, to officially terminate the relationship. I spoke to a marriage counselor once who told me that some couples were so desperate to break-up for good that they actually got married, then divorced, for this purpose.
Other pathological reasons to marry are to find a loathsome spouse in order to spite one’s parents or to set a wedding date in order to hire a personal trainer and finally lose those thirty pounds one has been carrying for too long.
Envy, avarice, spite, and vanity fuel both needy men and woman alike. However, there is a certain type of needy man, whom we'll call the Man-Child, who finds that it is easier to marry his girlfriend than it is to have to listen to her constant nagging about their need to get married. His girlfriend’s constant harping about the fact their relationship hasn’t taken the “next logical step” presents a burden so great that marriage in comparison seems benign. Even if the Man-Child has not developed the maturity to marry, even if he isn’t sure if he’s truly in love, even if he is still inextricably linked to some former girlfriend that his current girlfriend does not know about, even if he knows in his heart of hearts that he is not hard-wired for marriage, even if he harbors a secret defect that renders him a liability to any woman, he will dismiss all of these factors and rush into a marriage in order to alleviate his current source of anxiety and suffering, which is the incessant barrage of his girlfriend’s grievances about them not being married.
Indeed, some of needy man’s worst decisions have been made in order to quell a discontented woman. The Man-Child's eagerness to quiet a woman’s discontent points to a larger defect, namely, his spinelessness, which, if left unchecked, turns him into the Go-With-the-Flow-Guy. As the name suggests, this type of man offers no resistance, even in large-scale decisions that affect his destiny. Put this man in a situation where his girlfriend, his friends, and his family are all telling him that “it’s time to get married,” and he will, as his name suggests, simply “go with the flow.” He will allow everyone else to make the wedding plans, he’ll let someone fit him for a wedding suit, he’ll allow his mother to pick out the ring, he’ll allow his fiancé to pick out the look and flavor of the wedding cake and then on the day of the wedding, he simply “shows up” with all the passion of a turnip.
The Man-Child's passivity and his aversion to argument insure marital longevity. However, there are drawbacks. Most notably, he will over time become so silent that his wife won’t even be able to get a word out of him. Over the course of their fifty-year marriage he’ll go with her to restaurants with a newspaper and read it, ignoring her. His impassivity is so great that she could tell him about the “other man” she is seeing and he wouldn’t blink an eye. At home he is equally reticent, watching TV or reading with an inexpressive, dull-eyed demeanor suggestive of a half dead lizard.
Whatever this reptilian man lacks as a social animal is made up by the fact that he is docile and is therefore non-threatening, a condition that everyone, including his wife, prefers to the passionate male beast whose strong, irreverent opinions will invariably rock the boat and deem that individual a trouble maker. The Go-With-the-Flow-Guy, on the other hand, is reliably safe and as such makes for controlling women a very good catch in spite of his tendency to be as charismatic and flavorful as a cardboard wafer.
A desperate marriage motivation exclusively owned by needy, immature men is the belief that since they have pissed off just about every other woman on the planet, they need to find refuge by marrying the only woman whom they haven’t yet thoroughly alienated—their current girlfriend. According to sports writer Rick Reilly, baseball slugger Barry Bonds’ short-lived reality show was a disgrace in part because for Reilly the reality show is “the last bastion of the scoundrel.” Likewise, for many men who have offended over 99% of the female race with their pestilent existence, marriage is the last sanctuary for the despised male who has stepped on so many women’s toes that he is, understandably, a marked man.
Therefore, these men aren’t so much getting married as much as they are enlisting in a “witness protection program.” They are after all despised and targeted by their past female enemies for all their lies and betrayals and running out of allies they see that marriage makes a good cover as they try to blend in with mainstream society and take on a role that is antithetical to their single days as lying, predatory scoundrels.
The analogy between marriage and a witness protection program is further developed when we see that for many men marriage is their final stab at earning public respectability because they are, as married men, proclaiming to the world that they have voluntarily shackled themselves with the chains of domesticity in order that they may be spared greater punishments, the bulk of which will be exacted upon by the women whom they used and manipulated for so many years.
Because it is assumed that their wives will keep them in check, their wives become, in a way, equivalent to the ankle bracelet transmitters worn by parolees who are only allowed to travel within certain parameters. Marriage anchors man close to the home and, combined with the wife’s reliable issuing of house chores and other domestic duties, the shackled man is rendered safely tethered to his “home base” where his wife can observe him sharply to make sure he doesn’t backslide into the abhorrent behavior of his past single life.
Many men will see the above analysis of marriage as proof that their fear of marriage as a prison was right all along, but what they should learn from the analogy between marriage and prison is that they are more productive, more socialized, more softened around his hard edges, and more protected, both from the outside world and from themselves by being shackled to their domestic duties. With these improvements in their lives, they have actually, within limits, attained a freedom they could never find in single life.
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