Breakthrough Writer: 1A Agenda 10-11-17 Race as Chimera, Movie Get Out, "The Great White Way" and "Understanding Black Patriotism"; Writing Introductions

Essay #3 Options with 3 Sources Due 10/30

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.

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. Three best books I've read and/or taught on the subject of race, which I recommend: Autobiography of Malcolm X, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

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, The Independent, 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.

Nine. In the context of “Our Baby, Her Womb,” support, defend, or complicate the argument that surrogate motherhood is a moral abomination.

Introduction: Can You Write a Thesis That Stands Alone?

Three of the Essay Options Pertain to Race in America

You can write a thesis that stands alone.

You can write a thesis that is followed by mapping components.

You can write a thesis that is followed by a clarifying sentence.

Sample Thesis That Stands Alone:

Sample Thesis with Mapping Components:

Reading Dickerson's and Dyson's essays about race in America, it is clear that a great American patriot, in the tradition of Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, establishes an unflinching view of the condition of racial injustice, the major causes of that injustice, and a vision for a future America purged of that injustice.

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. The three best books I've read and/or taught on the subject of race, which I recommend: Autobiography of Malcolm X, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The TV documentaries O.J.: Made in America by Ezra Edelman and The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross by Henry Louis Gates are very helpful.

Sample Thesis That Stands Alone:

Dickerson's essay "The Great White Way" convincingly argues that race is not an objective reality but a social construction.

Sample Thesis with Clarifying Sentence:

Dickerson's essay "The Great White Way" convincingly argues that race is not an objective reality but a social construction. This fabrication has been made in the service of power so that race is constantly changing to fit the needs of the power structure, this chimerical thing we call "race" is constantly being used to procure privileges for one group while taking away those privileges from another, and this mythical thing we call race is still being fetishized and glorified today.

I'm using the word "fetishized" to mean a mental illness that causes one to have a delusional obsession about something. This racial obsession is related to primitive narcissism (self-idolatry of "whiteness") and rests, as Dickerson explains, on a chimerical delusion. As a source, you can use this John Oliver video from his HBO show Last Week Tonight:

Sample Thesis That Stands Alone:

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.

Sample Thesis with Clarifying Sentence:

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 _____________________.

Why is it probably a good recommendation to use mapping components or a clarifying sentence after your thesis?

Are there any potential problems with the belief that everyone is entitled to their own opinion?

In the World of Critical Thinking Are All Opinions Alike?

Some people say after reading an essay, “Well, it’s just an opinion.” But are all opinions alike? Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, right?

The answer is no.

Opinions are not alike, opinions are not equal, opinions are not similarly valid.

When you have a serious medical ailment, a good doctor's opinion is more valuable than some guy in pajamas eating Hot Pockets and reading "alternative medicine news" on the Internet.

When you have a grammar question, more than likely a college English instructor's opinion will be more valuable than the opinion delivered by some random person chosen from HomeTown Buffet.

When you want an opinion about your leaky roof, an experienced contractor will suit your needs better than a rodeo clown.

Clearly, opinions are not alike, and many people should not be entitled to their ignorant opinions, so we must discard this cliche.

This cliche, that "everyone is entitled to their opinion," submits the lie that we value democracy because we value ignorance as much as we value knowledge.

We don't.

In important matters--matters that have to do with money, well-being, life, and death--we rely on expert opinions and we dismiss amateur or fake ones.

Some opinions are not based on ignorance.

Worse, they're based on willed ignorance and willed obfuscation of the truth, like when people glorify the Confederate flag, Confederate soldier statues, and engage in romanticized "Civil War re-enactments."

According to Pew Research Center, 48% of Americans believe the Civil War was over "state rights." Only 38% believe the Civil War was over the institution of slavery.

Let that sink in. Little more than a third of Americans accept the historical fact behind the Civil War.

48% of Americans embrace obfuscation (clouding the facts) and racist mythology as the reason behind the Civil War.

Such "opinions" are grotesque and undeserving of merit.

Look at this evaluation of opinions.

The Six Opinions

Robert Atwan in his American Now textbook writes six major types of opinions.

As you will see, some are more appropriate for the kind of critical thinking an essay deserves than others.

One. Inherited opinions: These are opinions that are imprinted on us during our childhood. They come from “family, culture, traditions, customs, regions, social institutions, or religion.”

People’s views on religion, race, education, and humanity come from their family.

Inherited opinions come from cultural and social norms.

In some cultures, it's okay to tell others your income. It's a taboo in America.

We are averse to eating dogs in America because eating dogs is contrary to America’s cultural and social norms. However, people in other countries eat dogs without any stigma.

We are also averse to eating insects in America when in some countries giant grubs are a delicacy.

We think it's normal to slaughter trees every year as part of our celebration of Christmas.

We eat until we're so stuffed we cannot walk in America; in contrast, in Japan they follow the rule of hara hachi bu, which means they stop at 80% fullness.

Peanut butter in America represents Mom's Love; in France and Brazil, however, peanut butter is trash and an insult to place in front of someone.

In America, we put dry cereal into a bowl and then pour milk over it. That is not practiced in a lot of other countries.

In America when a woman says yes to a man's date proposal, the man, Louis C.K. tells us, will shake his fist like a tennis champion and scream, "Yeah!" We admire this behavior because we grow up seeing it.

We soak up these types of opinions and customs through a sort of osmosis and a lot of these beliefs are unconscious.

Two. Involuntary opinions: These are the opinions that result from direct indoctrination and inculcation (learning through repetition). If we grow up in a family that teaches us that eating pork is evil, then we won’t eat at other people’s homes that serve that porcine dish.

Or we may, as a result if our religious training, abjure rated R movies.

Or we may have strong feelings, one way or another, regarding gay marriage based on the doctrines we’ve learned over time.

Or we may have strong feelings about immigration policy based on what we learn from our family, friends, and institutions.

Or we may have strong feelings about the police and the prison system based on what we learn from family, friends, and institutions.

Three. Adaptive opinions (Groupthink): We adapt opinions to help us conform to groups we wish to belong to. We are often so eager to belong to this or that group that we sacrifice our critical thinking skills and engage in Groupthink to please the majority.

A student from China back in the 1940s or 1950s was raised in the country. He went to a city school and the richest boy made a sculpture of a butterfly. Everyone loved the butterfly but my student. He explained that a butterfly had 4 wings, not 2. He was sent to the "dunce corner" for the whole day.

He should have kept his mouth shut or pretended that butterflies have 2 wings. That's an example of Groupthink.

Atwan writes that “Adaptive opinions are often weakly held and readily changed . . . But over time they can become habitual and turn into convictions.”

For example, it’s easy for one to be against guns in Santa Monica. However, those views might be less “adaptive” in rural parts of Kentucky or Tennessee.

It's easy to be a vegan in Southern California, but you'll have more challenges being a vegan in certain parts of Texas, Kansas, and the Carolinas where barbecue is king and where mentioning the word "vegan" is akin to saying "Satan."

Four. Concealed opinions. Sometimes we have strong opinions that are contrary to the group we belong to so we keep our mouths shut to avoid persecution. You might not want to proclaim your atheism, for example, if you were attending a Christian college. Or you might be reluctant to express your Christian faith at a college that champions secular humanism and disdains religious faith.

Five. Linked opinions. Atwan writes, “Unlike adaptive opinions, which are usually stimulated by convenience and an incentive to conform, these are opinions we derived from an enthusiastic and dedicated affiliation with certain groups, institutions, or parties.”

For example, the modern “Tea Party” people or self-proclaimed Patriots embrace a series of linked opinions: Obama is not American. Obama is a socialist. Obama is helping terrorists get across the boarder. Terrorists helped elect Obama. Obama wants to strip Americans of their right to own guns so that the government and/or terrorists can move in and take Americans’ freedoms.

As you can see, all these opinions are linked to each other. Believing in one of the above opinions encourages belief in the other.

Six. Considered opinions. Atwan writes, “These are opinions we have formed as a result of firsthand experience, reading, discussion and debate, or independent thinking and reasoning. These opinions are formed from direct knowledge and often from exposure and considering other opinions.”

Often considered opinions result in examining mythologies or fake narratives that are drilled down our throats and we deconstruct these false narratives so that we can see the truth behind them.

Considered opinions are practiced by Vulcans, according to Jason Brennan, author of Against Democracy. Sadly, Vulcans are a tiny percentage of the population.

Troll opinions based on fake news are held by Hooligans.

No opinions at all are held by the mindless shoppers, known as Hobbits.

There are many fake narratives as a result of inherited and involuntary opinions:

The Civil War, according to many in the South to this very day, was about "state rights" and "Northern aggression."

Columbus “discovered” America.

The European pilgrims “shared” with the American Indians.

White slave owners “blessing” Africans with Christianity.

The pharmaceutical industry making our health job one.

Mexican workers in America "stealing" jobs from Americans.

Poor people "choose" to be poor.

Poor people deserve to be poor because they're bad, morally flawed human beings.

Rich people are rich because they possess superior virtue, and God wishes to bless them with abundance.

Obese people got fat from indulging in the sin of being selfish, slothful, and gluttonous.

Developing critical thinking skills means being able to pick apart a false narrative and examine the true narrative behind it.

Some would define literacy as developing critical thinking skills and that failure to do so is to remain a mindless consumer, a Hobbit, an obedient child to the parental authorities of market trends and advertising.

It's your choice: You can either swallow the blue pill (blissful ignorance of the Hobbit) or the red pill (uncomfortable, often painful truth of the Vulcan).

The blue pill leads us into a fantasy world of chimeras, mirages, and self-delusions.

The red pill is the truth from developing considered opinions and valuing those opinions over ones based on ignorance.

Inherited Opinions About Race

Race as a Chimera

If ideas about race are not based on informed opinions but inherited opinions based on myth, fiction, and fantasy, it's helpful to contrast the fantasy of race, based on inherited opinions, with its reality, based on informed opinions.

Inherited opinions are not the result of critical thinking. They are the result of mindless absorption of ideas.

This is where Debra J. Dickerson is helpful. She begins her essay with two fascinating paragraphs.

She writes:

When space aliens arrive to colonize us, race, along with the Atkins diet and Paris Hilton, will be among the things they’ll think we’re kidding about. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when the president tries to explain to creatures with eight legs what blacks, whites, Asians, and Hispanics are. Race is America’s central drama, but just try to define it in 25 words or less. Usually, race is skin color, but our visitors will likely want to know what a “black” person from Darfur and one from Detroit have in common beyond melanin. Sometimes race is language. Sometimes it’s religion. Until recently, race was culture and law: Whites in the front, blacks in the back, Asians and Hispanics on the fringes. Race governed who could vote, who could murder or marry whom, what kind of work one could do and how much it could pay. The only thing we know for sure is that race is not biology: Decoding the human genome tells us there is more difference within races than between them.

Hopefully, with time, more Americans will come to accept that race is an arbitrary system for establishing hierarchy and privilege, good for little more than doling out the world’s loot and deciding who gets to kick whose butt and then write epic verse about it. A belief in the immutable nature of race is the only way one can still believe that socioeconomic outcomes in America are either fair or entirely determined by individual effort. These two books should put to rest any such claims.

***

Race Is a Chimera

Dickerson's opening paragraphs make it clear that race is not an objective reality but a chimera, something so beyond real and so beyond description that the United States President could not explain the concept of race to space aliens.

Chimera Defined

A chimera is a mirage or a fantasy that gets embedded in our heads and becomes our "highest reality" and obsession.

Chimera's Distinguishing Characteristics

Even though the chimera is not real, it eventually takes over and becomes the apotheosis--the highest point--of our existence.

A chimera is constantly changing shape, color, and texture so that just when we think we have grasped it and possessed it as our own, it changes its characteristics and becomes something completely different. We find ourselves no longer obsessed with the "old" chimera, but want the "new" one. However, we fail to see that it's the same chimera, just in a different shape.

A chimera speaks to our capricious, fleeting desires. It speaks to our condition of not knowing what we really want even though we compulsively have convinced ourselves that we do.

The chimera is the mother of compulsion, desire, and disillusion.

The chimera begins by intoxicating our emotions and propelling us into the angelic realm followed by a crash into the demonic underworld.

A chimera begins as an idle thought, a fantasy, a myth, a rumor, a piece of gossip, and it grows inside the imagination until it develops a life of its own. Often, the truth cannot stop a chimera. It lives on in spite of evidence that shows the chimera to be a mirage.

The chimera is about the psychological condition known as impoverishment through substitution. Lacking authentic connection, love, belonging and meaning--the basic human needs--we seek inferior substitutes. The more we fill these basic needs with substitutes the more impoverished we become. A Lexus, a Rolex, a desirable house in a high-status zip code, a prestigious university degree, a trophy spouse all become a substitute for the spiritual vacuum.

The chimera can be a myth that explains our identity and our sense of entitlement in the world. Often, a cultural identity will be rooted in the myth of exceptionalism: our "people" come from superior stock and are entitled to lord over the others, and it is imperative that our "good stock remains pure" so we must keep out the others. Elaborate mythologies--chimeras--are constructed to give license to this type of narcissistic thinking.

Disneyland is a chimera about American innocence. This saccharine amusement park takes us to a land where we can be kids again. It's a sentimental worldview that celebrates the idolatry of America's sense of false innocence.

All successful brand marketing is based on a chimera.

Costco represents exclusive membership to a club that offers unlimited abundance at prices so cheap "you can't afford NOT to buy that barrel of green olives and designer blue jeans."

Mercedes represents the apotheosis--the highest point--of success.

Apple computer represents the hipster intellectual who disdains the country bumpkin languishing over his PC.

The past and the future are common chimeras. A lot of middle-aged people can't live in the present because they're fixated on their "past glory years" when they had found "lightning in a bottle." They may go see the Rolling Stones, a group of 80-year-old men wearing Depends and strumming guitars, to relive their glory years.

In fact, these old audience members didn't even have glory years. Their memory of the past is grossly inaccurate and it contributes to their chimera.

It is possible to be crippled by a layers upon layers of chimeras.

Racial identity can be a chimera of self-idolatry and privilege or it can be a chimera of stigmatization and subservience.

The Confederate flag is a chimera of "history," "family honor," and "the glories of the past." Take away the veil, though, and we see that the Confederacy is a moral abomination that embraces the sociopathy of slavery.

Often, people carry chimeras inside them and take these chimeras to the grave. They would rather live with the drama of a self-destructive chimera than face the emptiness of a life without illusions, a life that has to start from ground zero.

A chimera is a social construction that gets passed down from one generation to another. Even though based on a lie, this chimera becomes its own reality and becomes more powerful than the truth. As we will see, race is one of those chimeras.

Chimera Example #1: The Chanel No.5 Moment

I used to know a well-dressed couple in the early 1990s who would go to the same nightclub every weekend. They wore new outfits every weekend because they never wanted people to see them wearing the same clothes. They drove a Lexus, and they were good at having Chanel No.5 Moments together.

The man would whisper into his girlfriend's ear at the bar, and she'd laugh in this superior way. They were convinced they were the greatest thing at the club and that all eyes were on them.

But two things you need to know about them. They were in debt, living paycheck to paycheck, and they hated each other. Behind closed doors, they argued and fought viciously. But they were good at having Chanel No.5 Moments together. For them, life was enduring the intervals between one Chanel No.5 Moment and the next.

Fast forward to today. The man died from kidney failure. All his money spent on clothes and car payments didn't allow him to have health insurance.

His girlfriend is now homeless. She wears one of her outfits from the 90s, but now it's tattered, full of holes, and looks like a collection of stapled rags. Decades of smoking have rendered her skin is green, scaly, and reptilian. Her eyes are black skeletal sockets, and her face has no flesh on it. Her hair, once lustrous and shiny, is now so dry and straw-like that if someone lights a match too close to her she will light up in flames.

You might see her in Culver City buying frozen yogurt with dirty coins she scrounged from the bottom of a dumpster.

One could argue she and her boyfriend were destroyed by their chimera, which for them was the Chanel No.5 Moment. Such a moment doesn't exist. As one detective says to his detective friend in HBO's The Wire: "Life is the **** you go through every day while waiting for grand moments that never come."

Chimera Example #2

In the summer of 1969, while riding my bike with my friends, I thought I saw Christmas lights. This became an obsession that tormented my father. He had to bring me to the truth that there were no Christmas lights.

The Destructive Chimera of Race

Just as my father had to teach me the truth that my "Christmas lights" were a chimera, Debra Dickerson and Jordan Peele do the same about race. Race is a chimera, a delusion, a mirage.

Race as a Chimera in Debra Dickerson's "The Great White Way":

Why can't the Earthling President define race to the space creatures?

Because its definition always changes in accordance with self-interest and the dictates of power. Since power is the central drama of existence and race is used as a pawn in the service of power, race is "America's central drama."

But race is not a fixed or objective entity. Race can be associated with melanin, language, religion, culture, law, lifestyle, art. Race is arbitrarily assigned to makes laws about voting, marriage, privilege, and employment.

Race is not rooted in biology or science. Its rooted in the power players who use race to reinforce their power at the expense of everyone else.

Dickerson continues:

Dickerson continues to show that not only "blackness," but "whiteness," is a chimera:

***

We learn from Dickerson's essay that the Irish, Hungarians, Italians, and Slavs were at one time not considered white until the white Anglos in power needed their votes and they granted them the status of "whiteness."

In Louisiana, before Italians were considered white, Italians were lynched.

How could Italians, Irish, and Southern Europeans not be white one moment and then white the next? Because race doesn't exist. Race is a canard, a social invention created in the service of power.

Race as a Chimera Invented in the Service of Power in Jordan Peele's Get Out:

One of the greatest movies made in the last 10 years is Jordan Peele's Get Out, which shows how powerful this chimera is. The movie shows how white people have a fantasy notion of the black race, and this fantasy notion makes the white act in ways that are so egregious that Peele had to make a horror film.

Lexicon for Understanding Themes in Get Out:

Point 1: Appropriation: White people stealing from black culture: language, music, dance, style, art, etc.

Point 2: Fetishize or fetishization: White people wishfully thinking that black people are a super physical race in order that white people can justify their exploitation of black people evidenced by slavery, Jim Crow, and what Michelle Alexander and others call the "New Jim Crow." Of course, this fetishization of black people is part of the white person's chimera about the black race.

Point 3: Condescension or patronization: White liberals who think they are "enlightened" when in fact they treat black people the way a smug adult addresses a child.

Point 4: Whiteness as a mythical religion or the apotheosis (highest point of development) of self and American white people's religion of entitlement. In this regard, "whiteness" is a form of idolatry and narcissism. Just as blackness is a chimera, so is whiteness.

Point 5: Whiteness Love Affair with American Origin Myth of Innocence: The idea that whiteness, as a state of being offering Disneyland-like innocence, purity, and entitlement, created the greatest country on Earth based on honor and virtue as a smokescreen from the evil, greed, and avarice that created slavery, racism, and Jim Crow. This myth is connected to American Exceptionalism, which we will cover later.

Point 6: The romanticization of whiteness and the Confederacy: This can be seen in the 5 remaining states (as of writing) that still wave the Confederate Flag over government buildings, erect statues of racist Confederate generals, name streets after racist Confederate generals, and conduct Confederate Army re-enactments in which people dress up in Confederate uniforms and re-live the days when Whiteness as Religion ruled the country without being contested by effete academic intellectuals and other unpatriotic Americans.

Point 7: 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. In other words, the white people in the film have what amounts to a fake grasp of black people, and this fake grasp, based on their self-serving mythology about race, is a large part of their racism.

Point 8: Kleptocracy: a system of stealing from the people. In the context of slavery and Jim Crow, America's system of stealing from the pocketbooks and bodies of black people evidenced today in structural inequality. Today, whites have 700% more real wealth than African-Americans. The film's climactic ending points to the ultimate kleptocracy.

Sample Thesis and Outline Comparing "The Great White Way" to the Jordan Peele movie Get Out.

Paragraphs 1 and 2: Using an introductory technique from today's lesson, 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. Or define the term kleptocracy, discussed at length in Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay, "The Case for Reparations," which can be used as a source for Works Cited. (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."

Lexicon for Understanding "The Great White Way" and "Understanding Black Patriotism"

My sources for the following lexicon:

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

The New Jim Crow by Michel Alexander

We Were Eight Years in Power and Between the World and Me, both by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The satirical novel Black No More by George S. Schuyler

The satirical novel The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

PBS 6-Part Documentary by Henry Louis Gates: The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

One. American exceptionalism: America is the greatest country on Earth. America's moral superiority gives America the moral obligation to shine its light throughout the planet, to bear its influence everywhere, and to spread its superior democracy with pride and determination. Dickerson's analysis of American kleptocracy contradicts the myth--or chimera--of American exceptionalism.

Two. American kleptocracy: Through a system of race privilege, America stole its wealth on the backs of people of color and due to systemic racism, this kleptocracy, evident in America's history of slavery and Jim Crow, continues in more insidious ways: structural inequality in housing, healthcare, and education, The New Jim Crow in the form of mass incarceration, and racist, opportunistic politicians who rise to power using dog whistles, codes that stir racist anxieties in white people.

Three. Hiccup Narrative of American History: Yes, America committed the sin of slavery, these historians contend, but slavery was merely a case of the hiccups in a long, rich, glorious history of American exceptionalism in which unpleasant blemishes like slavery will soon be washed away (if they haven't been washed away already) as America shines like an innocent lamb.

Some contend that the Hiccup Narrative is legit and evidences the need for us to shut up about race. "Water under the bridge, dude. Stop inflaming your grievances and playing the victim. Whining about the sins of the past will get you nowhere."

Others contend that the Hiccup Narrative is a canard: a plastic, superficial Disneyland-like narrative in which many white people remain in love with their sense of mythical innocence while stealing from black people in the way of structural inequality (housing, education, healthcare).

Four. Systemic Racism Narrative of American History: Slavery was not just a side show of the great American narrative. Rather, slavery was the foundation of America's wealth and fast rise as a superpower.

The foundations of America's kleptocracy, born from times of slavery, continue to flourish in explicit and implicit ways as too many American whites continue to commit the sin of "whiteness idolatry," worshiping their race while stigmatizing others and maintaining systemic racist institutions to keep this idolatry alive. This narrative is most powerfully rendered in the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Five. Racist sociopath: A businessman and a conman who has no emotional investment in race and is smart enough to know that race doesn't exist except as an arbitrary social construct, yet he uses race--slavery, for example--to make money knowing full well that the evils of slavery, Jim Crow, and other types of racism will afflict millions with great pain. As a sociopath, this type of racist has no empathy and no concern for anyone but himself. As an opportunist, this sociopath sees that the invention of race and slavery can make him rich and powerful, and that's all that matters. As an aside, if there is an afterlife called Hell, the sociopath will descend into its hottest chamber.

Six. Racist psychopath: Much different than the racist sociopath, the racist psychopath, historically a poor white farmer or laborer, is a believer in his racial superiority and others' alleged inferiority. He may have received these racist beliefs from his parents, his grandparents, the local barber, books he read, movies he watched, friends he hangs out with, or all of the above.

Unlike the sociopath who knows that race is a delusion, the racist psychopath has consumed the racist Kool-Aid. He is emotionally invested in ideas of race. His identity, status, sense of family honor, sense of social class are all tied to his belief in his white supremacy. Most racists are psychopaths.

Ironically, the authors of racism, sociopaths who saw the riches that could be made from slavery, did not believe in race. The sociopaths fed the lies of white supremacy to the dupes. If there is a Hell, dupes or psychopathic racists may find themselves there, but not as deep a chamber reserved for the racist sociopaths.

Writing Effective Introduction Paragraphs for Your Essays

Weak Introductions to Avoid

One. Don’t use overused quotes:

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

“To be or not to be, that is the question.”

Two. Don’t use pretentious, grandiose, overwrought, bloated, self-regarding, clichéd, unintentionally funny openings:

Since the Dawn of Man, people have sought love and happiness . . .

In today’s society, we see more and more people cocooning in their homes . . .

Man has always wondered why happiness and contentment are so elusive like trying to grasp a bar of sudsy, wet soap.

We have now arrived at a Societal Epoch where we no longer truly communicate with one another as we have embarked upon the full-time task of self-aggrandizement through the social media of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.

In this modern world we face a new existential crisis with the advent of newfangled technologies rendering us razzle-dazzled with the overwhelming possibilities of digital splendor on one hand and painfully dislocated and lonely with our noses constantly rubbing our digital screens on the other.

Since Adam and Eve traipsed across the luxuriant Garden of Eden searching for the juicy, succulent Adriatic fig only to find it withered under the attack of mites, ants, and fruit flies, mankind has embarked upon the quest for the perfect pesticide.

Three. Never apologize to the reader:

Sorry for these half-baked chicken scratch thoughts. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and I didn’t have sufficient time to do the necessary research for the topic you assigned me.

I’m hardly an expert on this subject and I don’t know why anyone would take me seriously, but here it goes.

Forgive me but after over-indulging last night at HomeTown Buffet my brain has been rendered in a mindless fog and the ramblings of this essay prove to be rather incoherent.

Four. Don’t throw a thesis cream pie in your reader’s face.

In this essay I am going to prove to you why Americans will never buy those stupid automatic cars that don’t need a driver. The four supports that will support my thesis are ______________, ______________, _______________, and ________________.

It is my purpose in this essay to show you why I'm correct on the subject of the death penalty. My proofs will be _________, _______, _________, and ___________.

Five. Don’t use a dictionary definition (standard procedure for a sixth-grade essay but not a college in which you should use more sophisticated methods such as an extended definition or expert definitions):

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines metacognition as “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking process.”

General Principles of an Effective Introduction Paragraph

It piques your readers’ interest (often called a “hook”).

It is compelling.

It is timely.

It is relevant to the human condition and to your topic.

It transitions to your topic and/or thesis.

The Ten Types of Paragraph Introductions

One. Use a blunt statement of fact or insight that captures your readers’ attention:

It's good for us to have our feelings hurt.

You've never really lived until someone has handed you your __________ on a stick.

Men who are jealous are cheaters.

We would assume that jealous men are obsessed with fidelity, but in fact, the most salient feature of the jealous man is that he is more often than not cheating on his partner. His jealousy results from projecting his own infidelities on his partner. He says to himself, “I am a cheater and therefore so is she.” We see this sick mentality in the character Dan from Ha Jin’s “The Beauty.” Trapped in his jealousy, Dan embodies the pathological characteristics of learned helplessness evidenced by ___________, _______________, ________________, and _______________.

John Taylor Gatto opens his essay “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why” as thus:

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in the world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: Their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teacher’s lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel, they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

Gatto goes on to argue in his thesis that school trains children to be servants for mediocre (at best) jobs when school should be teaching innovation, individuality, and leadership roles.

Two. Write a definition based on the principles of extended definition (term, class, distinguishing characteristics) or quote an expert in a field of study:

Metacognition is an essential asset to mature people characterized by their ability to value long-term gratification over short-term gratification, their ability to distance themselves from their passions when they’re in a heated emotional state, their ability to stand back and see the forest instead of the trees, and their ability to continuously make assessments of the effectiveness of their major life choices. In the fiction of John Cheever and James Lasdun, we encounter characters that are woefully lacking in metacognition evidenced by _____________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.

According to Alexander Batthanany, member of the Viktor Frankl Institute, logotherapy, which is the search for meaning, “is identified as the primary motivational force in human beings.” Batthanany further explains that logotherapy is “based on three philosophical and psychological concepts: Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.” Embracing the concepts of logotherapy is vastly more effective than conventional, Freud-based psychotherapy when we consider ________________, ______________, __________________, and ________________.

Example of Definition

In his essay "The Complacent Intellectual Class," Neil Theasby writes:

I WOULD LIKE TO COIN A PHRASE, the complacent intellectual class, to describe the overwhelming number of pundits, thought leaders, and policy wonks who accept, welcome, or even enforce slovenly scholarship. These people might, in the abstract, like research that maintains the highest standards, they might even consider themselves academics or bona fide researchers, when in fact they have lost the capacity of maintaining even the most basic standards of rigor.

I am motivated to do so after reading Tyler Cowen’s new book The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. I propose the term with some trepidation. Cowen—a George Mason University economist, libertarian theorist, and “legendary blogger” (to quote the book’s inset)—is often a smart commentator who puts his finger on a lot of interesting social phenomena, introduces novel ideas, and proves worth reading from time to time.

But books are different from blog posts and op-eds. And this book fails so glaringly that it makes me despair for this country’s literary culture and intellectual life in general. So let me use Cowen’s latest venture to illustrate what we should all demand from the work of our intellectual class, lest our nation continues to vegetate in the pretend-thinking of #AspenIdeas pseudo-academia.

Three. Use an insightful quotation that has not, to your knowledge anyway, been overused:

George Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two great tragedies in life. The first is not getting what we want. The second is getting it.” Shaw’s insight speaks to the tantalizing chimera, that elusive quest we take for the Mythic She-Beast who becomes a life-altering obsession. As the characters in John Cheever and James Lasdun’s fiction show, the human relationship with the chimera is a source of paradox. On one hand, having a chimera will kill us. On the other, not having a chimera will kill us. Cheever and Lasdun’s characters twist and torment under the paradoxical forces of their chimeras evidenced by _____________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.

Spencer Kornhaber begins with a quote in his essay "Lady Gaga's Illness Is Not a Metaphor":

“Pain without a cause is pain we can’t trust,” the author Leslie Jamison wrote in 2014. “We assume it’s been chosen or fabricated.”

Jamison’s essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” unpacked the suffering-woman archetype, which encompasses literature’s broken hearts (Anna Karenina, Miss Havisham) and society’s sad girls—the depressed, the anorexic, and in the 19th century, the tubercular. Wariness about being defined by suffering, she argued, had led many modern women to adopt a new pose. She wrote, “The post- wounded woman conducts herself as if preempting certain accusations: Don’t cry too loud; don’t play victim.” Jamison questioned whether this was an overcorrection. “The possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it,” she wrote. “Pain that gets performed is still pain.”

Jamison’s work might come to mind when watching Lady Gaga’s new documentary, Gaga: Five Foot Two, or when reading about the singer postponing her European tour. The pop star this month informed the world that she suffers from fibromyalgia, which causes chronic muscle pain. In the documentary, she visits the doctor, she curls up on a couch, she cries in agony. On Instagram, she prays while holding a rosary. The caption is a lengthy apology to her fans for having to postpone upcoming performances due to her condition.

While forthright, Gaga’s statements about her struggle have been somewhat couched in embarrassment—and the public has responded with both sympathy and skepticism. “I use the word ‘suffer’ not for pity, or attention, and have been disappointed to see people online suggest that I’m being dramatic, making this up, or playing the victim to get out of touring,” she wrote. It’s not the first time she’s been doubted or criticized about something that her body has gone through. When hip surgery made her cancel her 2013 tour, some folks accused her of faking her injury because of underwhelming ticket sales.

In many ways, this skepticism is deeply familiar. It is a documented fact that women tend to report more pain than men—but also that their pain is seen as less credible, with women less likely to be given strong pain relievers, facing inordinately long wait times to be treated, and likely to be told that their problems are mental or emotional rather than physical. It’s not hard to draw a line from the presumptions underlying that inequality to the gendered way that literature and music about suffering is often classified. It’s also easy to see how such attitudes give rise to the “post-wounded” affect Jamison writes about.

This bias is, in fact, so familiar that there are scripts that a plugged-in, empathetic person might use to respond to Gaga. “Believe women,” goes the mantra of campaigns to curb sexual assault. “Believe the patient,” counsels medical literature on the topic of pain. But Gaga’s situation presents another test of compassion and trust. Believe the pop star? Who’d be so gullible as to do that?

Four. Use a startling fact to get your reader’s attention:

We read in "Why 'fake news' is an antitrust problem" by Sean Illing:

Five of the world’s largest companies by market capitalization are tech companies. In the past 10 years, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook have all joined Microsoft at the top of the list.

Each of these companies dominates its primary market, and is gradually expanding its reach into secondary markets. Have they become too big? Are they full-fledged monopolies at this point? And if so, should we rein them in?

To get answers to these questions, I reached out to Sally Hubbard, a senior editor of tech antitrust enforcement at the Capitol Forum, a nonpartisan legal investigative company that offers analysis to policymakers and industry stakeholders. I asked her to walk me through the case for using antitrust laws to regulate the major tech companies.

Antitrust laws exist in order prevent monopolization, which occurs when a company so dominates a market that it effectively eliminates the possibility of competition. This is tricky when it comes to a tech company like, say, Google, which has a monopoly in the search market but not in the digital advertising market.

Antitrust enforcement, at least in the past 40 years or so, has focused on protecting consumers from high prices due to a lack of competition. But the problems created by tech monopolies are different: Consumers aren’t paying higher prices to use these platforms, but they are handing over massive amounts of personal data and allowing companies like Facebook and Google to disproportionately influence the news and information Americans consume.

We don’t need to bust up these companies, Hubbard says, but there are very good reasons to use antitrust law to promote more competition in this space. “Fake news,” she told me, “is partly an antitrust problem” because the dominant algorithms of Facebook and Google control the flow of information. If there were more competition, purveyors of fake news would have to figure out how to game more algorithms.

There are currently more African-American men in prison than there were slaves at the peak of slavery in the United States. We read this disturbing fact in Michelle Alexander’s magisterial The New Jim Crow, which convincingly argues that America’s prison complex is perpetuating the racism of slavery and Jim Crow in several insidious ways.

We read that in the latest study by the Institute for Higher Education, Leadership & Policy at Cal State Sacramento that only 30% of California community college students are transferring or getting their degrees. We have a real challenge in the community college if 70% are falling by the wayside.

8,000 students walk through El Camino's Humanities Building every week. Only 10% will pass English 1A. Only 3% will pass English 1C.

99% of my students acknowledge that most students at El Camino are seriously compromised by their smartphone addiction to the point that the addiction is making them fail or do non-competitive work in college.

Five. Use an anecdote (personal or otherwise) to get your reader’s attention:

Gavin Francis writes in his book review "Irresistible: Why We Can't Stop Checking, Scrolling, Clicking, and Watching":

The school near the GP practice where I work held an internet safety evening recently, subtitled “How to Keep Your Child Safe Online”. It was in the school hall, hosted by police officers, and explained the role of something called the “Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre”. The blurb on the leaflet promised parents of children between five and 11 would learn more about the dangers of the internet, and in particular, social media. I’m not sure when it became normal for kids to have to cope with malicious online messages, and be savvy about paedophiles masquerading as peers. In Irresistible, Adam Alter makes the frightening case that even without these hazards, modern connectivity threatens the health of not just our children, but everyone.

A child I knew of killed herself after a humiliating post was shared widely around her school. An adolescent patient told me that he wakes three or four times each night to check his phone for messages, and struggles to concentrate in class. Last week a social worker told me that children in an “at-risk” family were being neglected – the mum lying on the sofa playing with her phone while the kids put themselves to bed. I know a six-year-old who walks with his hands held to his chest, thumbs blurred by movement, adopting his dad’s habitual posture, though he doesn’t yet have a phone.

Ta-Nehisi Coates from "My President Was Black":

In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages. The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat. The moment seemed to buoy Obama. He had been light on his feet in these last few weeks, cracking jokes at the expense of Republican opponents and laughing off hecklers. At a rally in Orlando on October 28, he greeted a student who would be introducing him by dancing toward her and then noting that the song playing over the loudspeakers—the Gap Band’s “Outstanding”—was older than she was. “This is classic!” he said. Then he flashed the smile that had launched America’s first black presidency and started dancing again. Three months still remained before Inauguration Day, but staffers had already begun to count down the days. They did this with a mix of pride and longing—like college seniors in early May. They had no sense of the world they were graduating into. None of us did.

Jeff McMahon:

When my daughter was one year old and I was changing her diaper, she without warning jammed her thumb into my eye, forcing my eyeball into my brain and almost killing me. After the assault, I suffered migraine headaches for several months and frequently would have to wash milky pus from the injured eye.

One afternoon I was napping under the covers when Lara walked into the room talking on the phone to her friend, Hannah. She didn’t know I was in the room, confusing the mound on the bed with a clump of pillows and blankets. I heard her whisper to Hannah, “I found another small package from eBay. He’s buying watches and not telling me.” 

That’s when I thought about getting a post office box.  

This could be the opening introduction for an essay topic about “economic infidelity.”

As we read in Stephen King’s essay “Write or Die”:

“Hardly a week after being sprung from detention hall, I was once more invited to step down to the principal’s office. I went with a sinking heart, wondering what new sh** I’d stepped in.”

Six. Use a piece of vivid description or a vivid illustration to get your reader’s attention:

My gym looks like an enchanting fitness dome, an extravaganza of taut, sweaty bodies adorned in fluorescent spandex tights contorting on space-age cardio machines, oil-slicked skin shrouded in a synthetic fog of dry ice colored by the dizzying splash of lavender disco lights. Tribal drum music plays loudly. Bottled water flows freely, as if from some Elysian spring, over burnished flesh. The communal purgation appeals to me. My fellow cardio junkies and I are so self-abandoned, free, and euphoric, liberated in our gym paradise.
But right next to our workout heaven is a gastronomical inferno, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, part of a chain, which is, to my lament, sprouting all over Los Angeles. I despise the buffet, a trough for people of less discriminating tastes who saunter in and out of the restaurant at all hours, entering the doors of the eatery without shame and blind to all the gastrointestinal and health-related horrors that await them. Many of the patrons cannot walk out of their cars to the buffet but have to limp or rely on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory aids, for it seems a high percentage of the customers are afflicted with obesity, diabetes, arthritis, gout, hypothalamic lesions, elephantiasis, varicose veins and fleshy tumors. Struggling and wheezing as they navigate across the vast parking lot that leads to their gluttonous sanctuary, they seem to worship the very source of their disease.

In front of the buffet is a sign of rules and conduct. One of the rules urges people to stand in the buffet line in an orderly fashion and to be patient because there is plenty of food for everyone. Another rule is that children are not to be left unattended and running freely around the buffet area. My favorite rule is that no hands, tongues, or other body parts are allowed to touch the food. Tongs and other utensils are to be used at all times. The rules give you an idea of the kind of people who eat there. These are people I want to avoid.

But as I walk to the gym from my car, which shares a parking lot with the buffet patrons, I cannot avoid the nauseating smell of stale grease oozing from the buffet’s rear dumpster, army green and stained with splotches and a seaweed-like crust of yellow and brown grime.

Often I see cooks and dishwashers, their bodies covered with soot, coming out of the back kitchen door to throw refuse into the dumpster, a smoldering receptacle with hot fumes of bacteria and flies. Hunchbacked and knobby, the poor employees are old, weary men with sallow, rheumy eyes and cuts and bruises all over their bodies. I imagine them being tortured deep within the bowels of the fiery kitchen on some Medieval rack. They emerge into the blinding sunshine like moles, their eyes squinting, with their plastic garbage bags twice the size of their bodies slung over their shoulders, and then I look into their sad eyes—eyes that seem to beg for my help and mercy. And just when I am about to give them words of hope and consolation or urge them to flee for their lives, it seems they disappear back into the restaurant as if beckoned by some invisible tyrant.

The above could transition to the topic of people of a certain weight being required to buy three airline tickets for an entire row of seats.

Seven. Summarize both sides of a debate.

America is torn by the national healthcare debate. One camp says it’s a crime that 25,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year from treatable disease and that modeling a health system from other developed countries is a moral imperative. However, there is another camp that fears that adopting some version of universal healthcare is tantamount to stepping into the direction of socialism.

Eight. State a misperception, fallacy, or error that your essay will refute.

Americans against universal or national healthcare are quick to say that such a system is “socialist,” “communist,” and “un-American,” but a close look at their rhetoric shows that it is high on knee-jerk, mindless paroxysms and short on reality. Contrary to the enemies of national healthcare, providing universal coverage is very American and compatible with the American brand of capitalism.

Nine. Make a general statement about your topic.

From Sherry Turkle’s essay “How Computers Change the Way We Think”:

The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer.

Ten. Pose a question your essay will try to answer:

Why are diet books more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more fat?

Why is psychotherapy becoming more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more crazy?

Why are the people of Qatar the richest people in the world, yet score at the bottom of all Happiness Index metrics?

Why are courses in the Humanities more essential to your well-being that you might think?

What is the difference between thinking and critical thinking?

Eleven. Present the reader with a hypercritical point of view that shows off your assured writing voice. As we read in "Whitewash" by Chris Lehmann:

LIKE A RECUMBENT SLOTH JOLTED INTO A PANICKED FLIGHT RESPONSE, David Brooks has belatedly noticed the rancid politics of right-wing racial confrontation. The New York Times’ most venerable voice of conservative moderation is here to inform you, gentle reader, that the deranged incursion of Trumpinistas into the corridors of conservative power has transformed his beloved GOP into “more of a white party in recent years.” He seeks to nail down the flagrantly bogus argument that the Republicans had, over much of their modern career, been within the bounds of “basic decency on matters of race” via a single cherry-picked statistic: “A greater percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act than Democrats.”

Twelve: Use an attention-getting analogy or comparison:

Tim Wu opens his essay "Subtle and Insidious, Technology Is Designed to Addict Us":

Thirty years ago, we accepted secondhand smoke, sugary sodas for kids and tanning salons as simple facts of life. What will we think is crazy 30 years from now? That we lived without enough sleep? Treated animals so badly?

If psychologist and marketing professor Adam Alter is right, the answer may be our use of addictive technologies. By his account, we have casually let ourselves become hooked in a manner not unlike Victorians taking cocaine and opium, thinking it no big deal. We, like them, are surprised at the consequences.

Who is our audience when we examine racism in America?

According to Jason Brennan, author of the book Against Democracy, there are three types of Americans, and they represent the audience anyone has when talking about race.

Seven. Hobbits: Mindless consumers who are indifferent to deep political discussions. They are "nice" people, but they don't want to be bothered with disturbing topics like racism in America. Most of their time is spent in the zombie state as they stare at their smartphones. They are the majority of Americans.

Eight. Hooligans. They are society's trolls, generating and consuming fake news, denying racism, the Holocaust, and climate change as "communist radical left-wing plots" designed to conquer America. While not as big in numbers as hobbits, hooligans are a growing political force, and their fake news, with the help of Russian infiltration in American politics, gives hooligans unprecedented political power.

Nine. Vulcans. These are the educated class. They rely on informed opinions, they consider their opponents' views, and they try to be fair and responsible in their civic engagement. Unfortunately, Vulcans are only about 3% of the American population. Imagine, then, trying to discuss the tragedy of racism in America with fellow Americans when only about 3% are willing to go on that ride with you. It's a formidable task, indeed.

Ten. 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.

These white Europeans loved their freedom.

But not for everyone because as soon as they saw a money-making opportunity, they disregarded freedom for black people.

Or put it this way: They loved money more than freedom and they only valued freedom for themselves, not others.

Eleven. 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.

Twelve. White Supremacy: White Supremacy is an evil religion, a hybrid of Christianity and white superiority narratives, which states whites were put on Earth to 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.

"The Great White Way" by Debra J. Dickerson

Since race doesn't really exist, there must be a reason for this arbitrary construct:

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. That white privilege has created a legacy of kleptocracy evident today is supported by 2017 statistics from The Economic Policy Institute, which shows that white Americans have seven times more wealth than African-Americans. Many could argue that seven times greater wealth is a flagrant and criminal disparity of wealth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dickerson continues:

If race is real and not just a method for the haves to decide who will be have-nots, then all European immigrants, from Ireland to Greece, would have been “white” the moment they arrived here. Instead, as documented in David Roediger’s excellent Working Toward Whiteness, they were long considered inferior, nearly subhuman, and certainly not white. Southern and eastern European immigrants’ language, dress, poverty, and willingness to do “nigger” work excited not pity or curiosity but fear and xenophobia. Teddy Roosevelt popularized the term “race suicide” while calling for Americans to have more babies to offset the mongrel hordes. Scientists tried to prove that Slavs and “dagoes” were incapable of normal adult intelligence. Africans and Asians were clearly less than human, but Hungarians and Sicilians ranked not far above.

It gives one cultural vertigo to learn that, until the 1920s, Americans from northern Europe called themselves “white men” so as not to be confused with their fellow laborers from southern Europe. Or that 11 Italians were lynched in Louisiana in 1891, and Greeks were targeted by whites during a 1909 Omaha race riot. And curiously, the only black family on the Titanic was almost lost to history because “Italian” was used to label the ship’s darker-skinned, nonwhite passengers.

Yet it was this very bureaucratic impulse and political self-interest that eventually led America to “promote” southern and eastern Europeans to “whiteness.” The discussion turned to how to fully assimilate these much-needed, newly white workers and how to get their votes. If you were neither black nor Asian nor Hispanic, eventually you could become white, invested with enforceable civil rights and the right to exploit—and hate—nonwhites. World War II finally made all European Americans white, as the “Americans All” banner was reduced to physiognomy alone: Patriotic Japanese Americans ended up in internment camps while fascist-leaning Italian Americans roamed free. While recent European immigrants had abstained from World War I-era race riots, racial violence in the 1940s was an equal-opportunity affair. One Italian American later recalled the time he and his friends “beat up some niggers” in Harlem as “wonderful. It was new. The Italo-American stopped being Italo and started becoming American.”

While European immigrants got the racial stamp of approval, the federal government was engaged in a little-recognized piece of racial rigging that resulted in both FDR’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal being set up largely for the benefit of whites. As Ira Katznelson explains in When Affirmative Action Was White, these transformative public programs, from Social Security to the GI Bill, were deeply—and intentionally—discriminatory. Faced with a de facto veto by Southern Democrats, throughout the 1930s and 1940s Northern liberals acquiesced to calls for “states’ rights” as they drafted the landmark laws that would create a new white middle class. As first-generation white immigrants cashed in on life-altering benefits, black families who had been here since Revolutionary times were left out in the cold.

What attitudes did white Americans feel toward European immigrants from Ireland to Greece?

They were looked upon as subhumans that would take over 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.”

How were 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.

Dickerson continues:

Disbursement of federal Depression relief was left at the local level so that Southern blacks were denied benefits and their labor kept at serf status. In parts of Georgia, no blacks received emergency relief; in Mississippi, less than 1 percent did. Agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from the new Social Security system, subjecting 60 percent of blacks (and 75 percent of Southern blacks) to what Katznelson calls “a form of policy apartheid” far from what FDR had envisioned. Until the 1950s, most blacks remained ineligible for Social Security. Even across the North, black veterans’ mortgage, education, and housing benefits lagged behind whites’. Idealized as the capstone of progressive liberalism, such policies were as devastatingly racist as Jim Crow.

To remedy this unacknowledged injustice, Katznelson proposes that current discussions about affirmative action refer to events that took place seven, rather than four, decades ago, when it wasn’t called affirmative action but business as usual. He’s frustrated by the anemic arguments of his liberal allies, who rely on the most tenuous, least defensible of grounds—diversity—while their opponents invoke color blindness, merit, and the Constitution. In short, affirmative action can’t be wrong now when it was right—and white—for so long.

Together, these two books indict the notion of race as, ultimately, a failure of the American imagination. We simply can’t imagine a world in which skin color does not entitle us to think we know what people are capable of, what they deserve or their character. We can’t imagine what America might become if true affirmative action—not the kind aimed at the Huxtable kids but at poverty and substandard education—was enacted at anywhere near the level once bestowed on those fortunate enough to be seen as white.

***

For a larger discussion of the kind of justice that would address "poverty and substandard education" as the "true affirmative action, I recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay, "The Case for Reparations," available online and published in his book We Were Eight Years in Power.

Essay Option 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. Three best books I've read and/or taught on the subject of race, which I recommend: Autobiography of Malcolm X, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Notice how the thesis is embedded in the prompt:

Debra Dickerson makes a compelling argument that race is not an objective reality but a social fantasy evidenced by ______________, ______________, ___________________, and _________________________.

While much about race is indeed a fantasy, as Dickerson claims, the kind of racial grievances Dickerson expresses are an equal fantasy based on false evidence and faulty reasoning, which includes __________________, ________________, ________________, and ________________________.

By connecting arbitrary definitions of race throughout pivotal moments in American history, Debra Dickerson makes a convincing case that race is an unjust social canard evidenced by _________________________, _____________________, _____________________, and _______________________.

“Understanding Black Patriotism” by Michael Eric Dyson

Introduction:

Your authenticity and legitimacy for something are not based on how zealous you are in your praise and cheerleading.

Take relationship status on Facebook, for example. A lot of people say their relationship is "complicated." This doesn't necessarily mean their relationship is on the rocks.

Their complicated relationship reflects the contradictions and complexities of real life.

You don't totally like your partner or your composition instructor or your job or your home life or even yourself. There are things about you that you like, but if you're honest there are also things about you that make you a pain in the butt to yourself and to others.

The situation is complicated.

Complexity is evidence of depth, maturity, intelligence, and detailed knowledge of something.

Simplicity is evidence of naivete, willed ignorance, and bullheaded incuriosity.

The above is the guiding principle in Michael Eric Dyson's

One. What don't a lot of white people not understand about black patriotism?

According to Dyson, real love for country, or anything else for that matter, is "complex," not a simple proposition. To know something, to take a "deep dive" into something is to have a profound and complex grasp of it. This complexity cannot be reduced to simplistic, nationalistic soundbites of cheerleading that you hear from nationalist Kool-Aid drinkers.

The second point about real patriotism is that it is fueled by anger. Why? Because anger means you have hope for the thing or person you're angry at to change.

When your girlfriend is angry at you all the time, she has hope for you and the relationship. When she stops being angry, she's given up on you. The relationship is over.

An absence of anger is not a sign of love. It's a sign of hopelessness and despondency.

Or just as bad, an absence of anger is the Kool-Aid drinker's infantile cheerleading based on ignorance.

An informed opinion about our country will give you hope, anger, and complexity in your analysis. The cheers of a Kool-Aid drinker are the cheers of an ignoramus.

Two. 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.

Three. What examples does Dyson provide regarding the 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 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.

Comparing Dyson and Dickerson for your essay:

How are Dyson and Dickerson on the same page?

One. By taking an unflinching look at racism in America, both are setting higher standards for American ethics. We don't set higher standards for a country unless we have higher expectations. Higher expectations are evidence of a love of country.

Two. Higher expectations express the hope that a country can change and make atonement for its past sins.

Three. Great patriots like Martin Luther King, now regarded as a heroic figure, was once "branded a traitor," Dyson writes, but his moral honesty and courage was necessary for the advancement of America's civil rights.

Four. Both Dyson and Dickerson abhor the double standard that is exacted on arbitrary racial divisions. Dick Cheney, who received five deferments so he did not have to fight in the war, became a bureaucrat who was more than eager to send other parents' children to war, yet few questioned called him out on charges of cowardice and hypocrisy.

In contrast, the African-American pastor for President Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, who made similar criticisms as Martin Luther King and who volunteered to join the Marines was branded by the Alt-Right as a traitor, and the implication was that Barack Obama was as well.

Breakthrough Writer

September 25, 2017

1A Agenda 10-11-17 Race as Chimera, Movie Get Out, "The Great White Way" and "Understanding Black Patriotism"; Writing Introductions

Comments

Categories

Pages

Recent Posts

About

May 2020

Archives

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31