I think I’m falling for Candace Owens. — No. No, not in love, not romantically, that’s wholly the realm of Shoshauna alone, Shoshauna alone with her Sam. — Yet I am certainly being intellectually seduced.
This might surprise some, will not surprise others, but she’s a lightning rod of modern political thought and parlor discussion, so of course I would eventually walk along a stroll down her path, and what views I took in on the journey, what insights, what delights for dissection.
I love somebody calling out the racist policies of the left from a strong vantage, somebody garnering the influence of Conservative Black Americans (what politics in capitalizations), I love her smashing of cultural totems used as intellectual enslavement. She is a provocateur of the highest order, and there is much worthy of admiration in that.
Yet I hear in Blackout too many of the same arguments that make me cringe as made me cringe at the left throughout Trump: negation. There is nothing crueler than negating the identity and culture of an individual, no matter how abhorrent it might seem to you or how detrimental you may perceive it to be towards whatever you’ve come to see as “the ends”, but as a fundamental rule we should understand people are why the are for a reason. Understand the reasons, understand the being. Understand the experiences, understand the individual. Reason and understanding at the levels required to carry this approach with you throughout one’s myriad individual interactions in life will reach a near divine, limitless reserve, a limit that reaches the equals the capacity to carry the consciousness of every living being. Once one really gets the habit down, one can extend that empathy well beyond the merely living to a universal scale. But all this requires first understanding negation.
Negation shapes our understanding of the entirety of our perceived reality around us, an intellectual tool used from our infancy to give shape and mentally craft our worldview. Socrates tells us to know nothing for that way we avoid negation, that way we allow ourselves to receive the signal of existence, for there are no avenues or chemical pathways we reject and close off, no rivers damned.
Ms Owens frequently denigrates modern Black culture for its gratuitous sexuality and glorification of violence, a classical critique of much of hip-hop, and one not entirely unfounded despite what defenders of the faith might say. I love Cardi B, I think she has an energy and wit that speaks to something extremely relatable within all of us that we’ve been trained over millennia to largely repress in public, judging it as equivalent to having loose moral structure, and so coming to negatively judge the same sensations within ourselves. When the local holy men determine morality, so often it ends up anti-sex, as promiscuity so readily corrupts the strength of the time-tested strength of the family unit, the ancient stories of Lilith and Jezebel abound. Violence speaks to an ability to use physical power in the aims of ambition, even if the ambition ends at the protection of kiln and kin.
When I hear Cardi, I hear someone who loves their body proudly, in a manner to which they have long been denied on these shining shores of the Puritans, and I hear a working class woman have the ambition to work her way to the top, damn the obstacles, and they are many. Yet I’d be lying if I said my eyes didn’t pop when I heard her tell me she wanted me to hit the little dangly thing in the back of her throat. Damn. Here’s a woman that could eat me up, quite willingly it would seem, and leave me utterly at her mercy without power. Of course that might make Shoshauna nervous.
I feel like this is why Cardi B pairs so perfectly well with Candace Owens. Owens extolls the virtues of a strong family unit maintained on the traditions of faith, family, and a sense of legacy that extends generations down the line. In this we develop an appreciation of the time-tested methods for living that have survived through the long nights as well as in daylight. Conservative philosophies of the Edmund Burke/Booker T Washington school with their onus on individual responsibility and an adherence to deeper social institutions outside of frequently tyrannical government align perfectly with the history of Black America, and makes for an entirely understandable intellectual harbor within which she comes to reside. Though the language is shocking (I would note in nearly the same way as Cardi B is shocking), can we deny the full truth of Candace Owens calling out the nature of the Democratic Plantation?
College is a time for throwing out babies with bathwater and leaning in to our fiercest denied impulses, and like so many mine was transgression and radicalism. For a young White boy in Texas during those Bush year highs, there was no easier radicalism for me than to The Left. I campaigned for doomed Democrats, wore Obama stickers in high school, and preached the progressive gospel with a zealot’s fervor. In university, in those heady days of the early 2010’s, I signed up for classes based on how interesting I found the names, and I came across one class that would forever change my life: Radical Black Philosophies. I know, what a name! Props to Texas A&M University for having the respect to facilitate such a class, despite the dismally low student interest. In a school of 50,000, I sat everyday in a class with three others taking in the radical history of Black Philosophy in these United States, and my mind, it officially blew. The length and depth of the American struggle was unknown to my ignorant immigrant eyes. I moved here in 3rd grade, I thought by now I knew my state, I mean my best friend since the 9th grade was Black, we had been involved in politics forever, we knew what was up! Right? Right? Wrong.
Certain Shibboleths among the Democratic elite I had come to ignorantly accept as the truth, I mean it was history, it was written in the books. Brown v The Board of Education began the transition-the inevitable transition-over the next decade that would culminate in establishing Civil Rights. Yet Mary Dudziak wrote a paper that led me to see otherwise, to see the true nature of why we gained our “civil rights”. In “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative” Dudziak reveals how the government only underwent programs of desegregation in efforts to win the Cold War. The true initiator of our globalized world view, the Cold War meant that for the first time in a serious way the United States had real geopolitical investment in how other nations perceived it, and America’s treating Black people like shit had a funny way of making African nations look more favorable towards the Soviet Union. How many times could an excuse be made for the Nigerian ambassador being denied service in a humble American diner?
With the rise of social movements led by the likes of King and others alongside these geopolitical movements outside our borders led to movements happening within. Then, in typical fashion, the government figured out what the most-least it could give to the people and keep things chugging along, and it spat forth the well named titans of progressive legislatio:, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Nevermind it took a few goes to get the bills right without continued agitation, nevermind that the voices of Black America said “this is not enough”, for it was enough to the establishment and that’s that. No wonder they found it easier in the end to kill the King- shot him dead from the street and drove off- and no wonder in the aftermath of that the heart of the community fell apart. The encouragement of drugs and further pollutants on top of this defeated spirit only further cemented the deeper social ills all around. Of course the community now sing along to the loving combat of Cardi B.
Lyndon Baines Johnson served his entire life as an avowed segregationist, quick to cut down any nigger who dared to look him eye-to-eye, his word choice not mine, and yet is hailed as a hero for his passage of civil rights. So accepted has it become as progress that its no longer accepted as an insult that it was initially necessary and gets called “civil rights”, permanently and further setting up blacks as an outside group whose legality gets determined by court fights outside the rest of American-kind. LBJ came about in a world where Blacks served Whites in expected lockstep command, and he left the world having created a political party where it became near guarantee of the one and the same. The American Narrative today would have you believe good people vote to The Left, because they care about helping those who are down, and nobody has had it worse or is more down than Black people. Of course Blacks should feel they are being insulted. Yet because the Repubican party does not seem to speak to their values, an argument Ms Owens does a great job undermining, then what choice is there left but The Left? What motivation does the Republican party have to cater to Black votes if that effort is without hope? So the Democrats lock up Black support completely, meaning the vote gets taken for granted, and the Republicans go about trying to shore up all the rest. Well, if all the Blacks are going to vote for the other guy, an easy demographic left is the poor, ignorant Whites who are afraid, and in their fear and ignorance act out to the detriment of all around. Instead of education, we just call them racist.
Here is my initial and circuitously come-upon point: this negation will only drive those potential allies away and into the arms of who will take them. We all want to be heard and respected, plain and simple. We want our experience of life to matter, our hard-gained knowledge gained by the great wealth of sensation that comes to determine our identity and being to help contribute towards something beyond ourselves. Yet when we are negated, when we are informed that our sensations are unworthy of consideration as a factor, we feel the deep hurt of spiritual rejection, of our being wronged, and so seek to impose that sensation upon the perceived motivator of this great hurt. The well-woven web of human relations is so intersecting so very far back, that the truth of a thing can feel almost impossible to comprehend, particularly when studying the knots in favor of the whole quilt. Yet in the seeking comes the finding of the infinite God truth, an infinity that can never be ours if we’re negating its ignorantly unwanted aspects.