{"id":55741,"date":"2018-02-15T02:06:03","date_gmt":"2018-02-15T02:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=55741"},"modified":"2018-02-15T02:06:03","modified_gmt":"2018-02-15T02:06:03","slug":"white-supremacy-and-the-dangerous-discourse-of-liberal-tolerance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=55741","title":{"rendered":"White Supremacy and the Dangerous Discourse of Liberal Tolerance"},"content":{"rendered":"

White Supremacy and the Dangerous Discourse of Liberal Tolerance<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Paris Review<\/a>
\n2018-02-13<\/p>\n

Ismail Muhammad<\/strong><\/a>
\nOakland, California<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nA scene at the race disturbance in Wilmington, North Carolina<\/a>. Originally published in Colliers Weekly<\/em>, November 26, 1898.<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Watching Donald Trump<\/a> speak about the violent white-supremacist rally that took place in Charlottesville<\/a> last summer was a surreal experience. Not the first press conference where he referred to neo-Nazi<\/a> protestors as \u201cvery fine people.\u201d I mean the second time, when he repudiated those fine people. \u201cRacism,\u201d he intoned, clearly reading from a teleprompter, \u201cis evil \u2026 white supremacists and other hate groups are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.\u201d Nobody could mistake his droning boredom for actual investment in the words he was speaking: his attempt to embrace the decorous discourse of liberal tolerance was baldly hypocritical.<\/p>\n

As the summer ended and the fall semester began at U.C. Berkeley, where I study literature, far-right agitators descended along with the cool weather. A succession of activists and pundits\u2014Ben Shapiro<\/a>, Milo Yiannopoulos<\/a>, and their ilk\u2014made their way to campus. They brought the far-right protestors and threats of violence along with them, all the while invoking the language of tolerance and free speech. Berkeley\u2019s former chancellor Nicholas Dirks even cited<\/a> the campus community\u2019s \u201cvalues of tolerance\u201d in defending Yiannopoulos\u2019s appearance. The myriad ways in which people were deploying the word tolerance managed to drain the already-insufficient term of its content. All that was left was am empty concept that could accommodate any agenda. It was more clear than ever that the language of tolerance had become ineffective, just a mask behind which antipluralist demagogues could hide.<\/p>\n

Admitting that Trump and the far right are capable of surprising me makes me feel unforgivably naive. At this point, to be surprised feels like a luxury, and I find myself bored with the chorus of outraged liberal critics who sound the alarm every time Trump breaks another democratic norm. But it\u2019s worth inquiring why white supremacy continues to surprise us when white-race hatred is such an intractable aspect of American society. And how our shock perpetuates that violence.<\/p>\n

In Charlottesville\u2019s aftermath, I turned to Charles Chesnutt\u2019s<\/a> 1901 novel, The Marrow of Tradition<\/em><\/a>. In his novel, Chesnutt\u2014an impossibly industrious author, activist, lawyer, and educator\u2014looks back at the wreckage of post-Reconstruction<\/a> racial politics and attempts to answer these questions via historical fiction. Marrow<\/em> is, among other things, an examination of how the genteel language of tolerance obscures and enables antiblack violence. In his focus on historical calamity\u2014the Wilmington massacre<\/a> narrowly and the collapse of Reconstruction more broadly\u2014Chesnutt uses the form of the novel to examine how our shared language reinforces white supremacy\u2019s grip on American society…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Marrow” is, among other things, an examination of how the genteel language of tolerance obscures and enables antiblack violence. In his focus on historical calamity\u2014the Wilmington massacre narrowly and the collapse of Reconstruction more broadly\u2014Chesnutt uses the form of the novel to examine how our shared language reinforces white supremacy\u2019s grip on American society…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,26,23674,20],"tags":[333,898,897,28042,879,28041,28039,28040,21273,28043,28044,28045],"class_list":["post-55741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-social-justice","category-usa","tag-charles-chesnutt","tag-charles-w-chesnutt","tag-charles-waddell-chesnutt","tag-ismail-muhammad","tag-north-carolina","tag-paris-review","tag-the-marrow-of-tradition","tag-the-paris-review","tag-wilmington","tag-wilmington-insurrection-of-1898","tag-wilmington-massacre-of-1898","tag-wilmington-race-riot-of-1898"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55741"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55742,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55741\/revisions\/55742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}