RE:Rajiv Malhotra’s responses to Elst on whiteness

[Guest guest]

"vrnparker" <vrnparker

Tue Sep 21, 2004 10:49 pm

RE:Rajiv Malhotra's responses to Elst on whiteness;

I agree with R.Malhotra's point that Christianity is controled by a

white heirachy. But connecting Whiteness and Christianity is just a

coincidence of history and its incorrect to say that true christainity

has anything to do with any race, white or otherwise.. I disagree that

race is the proper gauge to measure the validity or invalidity of an

issue.

Every nation,tribe or culture that was overwhelmed by euro-centricism

has one thing in common....they all share the misfortune of being

betrayed from within. Wether it is the American Indians, Hawaiians,

Indians, Africans. All these groups willingly allied themselves with

the European powers in order to acheive supremacy over their own

people and neighbors. Greed and oppression have never been a monopoly

of one race.

The fact is the white race has been just as victimized as any other

throughout history. Why one human's suffering is considered more

important than anothers has always bewildered me. the very word slave

comes from the word Slav because a majority of mideveal slaves were

white east europeans enslaved by non-white Arabs. A majority of

America's downtrodden,homeless and unemeployed are white americans.

While other races get government and academic support in the form of

affirmative action, white americans are just expected to rot or be

well to do as if by birthright.

So any idea that promotes one race above the other is damaging. So

what if Indians want to act like white americans.They are thousands of

white americans that act like indians.

This whole academic assault on whiteness is just another form of that

old sickness called racism. It never ends. it only morphs into a

different flavor of the same old tyranny. Before it was normal to

insult, demean and discredit blacks and asians. Now its normal to

abuse whites. What a shame.

"Until the colour of a man's skin

Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes -That until the

basic human rights Are equally guaranteed to all, Without regard to

race(There will be War)

Bob Marley (A half white and black Jamaican) was it the white side or

black side that made him great? It was both and neither. It was his

spirit that made him great. Vrn Parker

 

PS If anyone wants to forward this to Malhotra do so. I agree that

european based civilization is problematic but to say it has anything

to with race is wrong. every crime you blame on 'whitey' has been

committed by every other race. Its culture not race. I as a white

american was raised a hindu and am convinced that I am giving more

than I am taking from the environment around me. That is becasue of

the values I was raised with. These are not Indian racial values. They

are spiritual cultural values that are inherently available to any

human being regardless of race.

 

 

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior

And another

Inferior

Is finally

And permanently

Discredited

And abandoned -

Everywhere is war -

Me say war.

 

That until there no longer

First class and second class citizens of any nation

Until the colour of a man's skin

Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes -

Me say war.

 

That until the basic human rights

Are equally guaranteed to all,

Without regard to race -

Dis a war.

 

That until that day

The dream of lasting peace,

World citizenship

Rule of international morality

Will remain in but a fleeting illusion to be pursued,

But never attained -

Now everywhere is war - war.

 

And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes

that hold our brothers in Angola,

In Mozambique,

South Africa

Sub-human bondage

Have been toppled,

Utterly destroyed -

Well, everywhere is war -

Me say war.

 

War in the east,

War in the west,

War up north,

War down south -

War - war -

Rumours of war.

And until that day,

The African continent

Will not know peace,

We Africans will fight - we find it necessary -

And we know we shall win

As we are confident

In the victory

 

Of good over evil -

Good over evil, yeah!

Good over evil -

Good over evil, yeah!

Good over evil -

Good over evil, yeah! /fadeout/

 

 

 

indicjournalists, "gargsam" <gargsam> wrote:

> Rajiv Malhotra's responses to various comments on whiteness;

>

> In various , Koenraad Elst wrote: `The most deplorable turn in

> Rajiv Malhotra's latest enthusiasm is his idea of racializing the

> critique of Christianity. This at a time when the centre of gravity of

> Christianity is fast shifting to the non-white world, with e.g. black

> Anglican bishops blocking pro-homosexual reforms proposed by white

> liberal bishops, or with most Catholic missionary institutions all

> over India now being manned by Keralite and other indigenous

> missionaries, or with a third of Jesuit novices worldwide being Indian

> and most Jesuit novices in the US being Vietnamese or Mexican. More

> importantly, Christianity is fundamentally a truth claim and should be

> criticized in terms of true and untrue, more than in the Marxist terms

> of whose interests it serves, or than in the neo-Marxist terms of

> whose racial identity it can (supposedly, but unconvincingly) be

> equated with.'

>

> Rajiv Malhotra's response: Third world Christianity is CONTROLLED by

> western institutions in the same manner as MacDonald's controls each

> of its franchises worldwide even when it appears to be a small

> restaurant run by 10 minority employees. It is no longer sensible to

> localize the discourse and the whole meaning of `minorities' must be

> re-examined in the global era. The institutional mechanisms of global

> religious and cultural control are imperialistic in nature. It is a

> way for whiteness to hide behind the mask of neutral-looking

institutions.

>

> Will the Vatican have a Latin American pope and relocate to Brazil

> (since the Hispanics outnumber whites among the Catholics worldwide)?

> Certainly not! When you look at the Southern Baptist controlled

> churches in India's Northeast, these are branch offices of the Empire

> and not for spiritual purposes.

>

> Elst wants Indians to remain confused between spirituality and the

> sociopolitical agendas that drive Multinational Religions. Too many

> Hindu preachers are ill-equipped to deal with Christianity as

> essentially a political movement that was started by Emperor

> Constantine. This is because they failed to do purva-paksha of the

> Abrahamic religions and either trivialized their criticisms (which are

> no more than attacks) or else got lost into the equally nonsensical

> `sameness' of spirituality.

>

> Read the book by Jonathan Kirsch, `God against the Gods,' that

> explains this 4th century fight to eradicate polytheism, and how this

> campaign was a weapon for Roman Imperialism. Read the Da Vinci Code

> for a fictional drama with some overlapping ideas. Read 'Constantine's

> Sword,' by James Carroll that won critical acclaim for its history of

> the Constantine origins of institutional Christianity. Read Princeton

> University Prof Elaine Pagels' highly acclaimed books on the history

> of early Christianity. These works are not some Hindu conspiracies,

> but have been ignored by Indian intellectuals.

>

> Furthermore, please read about the Church doctrine known as

> `inculturation' which clearly promotes use of native symbols and

> practices as a way to get in the door and remove suspicion, but this

> is only step one in a multi-step process to gradually upgrade the

> symbolic status of Christianity and downgrade the symbolic status of

> native faiths. Several years later, a converted family is told to hate

> their ancestors' rituals and symbols as being demonic. Prof. Rita

> Sherma has studied the history of this inculturation strategy that

> started in Latin America and Africa to convert tribes and is now

> widespread in India.

>

> I am afraid Elst might be unintentionally misusing his knowledge of

> Christianity to keep Hindus morons. I did not read his entire piece

> and only saw the few sentences passed to me, so my response is based

> only on what I read.

>

> His other remark was that I misunderstood the book, `How the Irish

> became White.' This is startling. I never came across any scholar in

> Whiteness Studies (and I work closely with many) who said anything

> different than the following: In America, there were Anglo-Saxon

> controlled labor unions which clearly and explicitly restricted

> membership to white persons, and which defined white persons in ways

> that became the subject of fights and litigation. Whiteness became the

> criteria for membership on who could get what work, literally like a

> varna system. The Irish were an English colony, so upon arriving in

> America, these Irish were denied membership in the all-white labor

> unions. There were many violent episodes over this, before the Irish

> were reclassified as whites and eligible for membership. (That event

> in the 1840s is referred to as the Irish becoming white.) This is such

> a well-known factoid of American history that it surprises me to find

> a rigorous scholar such as Elst missing it so completely.

>

> The book by Karen Brodkin (of UCLA), `How the Jews became White

> Folks,' describes the same struggle Jews went through to get into the

> white club. Only by studying the history of past immigrant groups can

> Indians understand America and how to renegotiate their equal cultural

> and identity place in it. Otherwise they will remain like pets being

> `kept' by their keepers – a condition that some whites (including many

> otherwise liberals) thrive on.

>

> Finally, I don't understand why this concern among many NRIs to evade

> Whiteness Studies. This academic theme (of de-centering whiteness) is

> central to American Studies and Cultural Studies departments in many

> US colleges today. The most popular undergraduate course in Princeton

> University is taught by Prof. Nell Painter on Whiteness Studies and

> she is writing a book on The History of White People.

>

> Washington Post had a front-page article on the Whiteness Studies

> courses being taught in 30 US colleges. UC Berkeley had a conference

> on whiteness and its proceedings were published by Duke University

> Press. So why are these Indians afraid? This is why I brought in a

> dialog with Jeff Hitchcock, a white man, so that the Indians who

> thrive on mimicry (and are afraid to decolonize on their own) may be

> able to mimic his Center's work and get decolonized. We will need

> whites to decenter whiteness in our lives and get decolonized, but not

> the Dr. Elst kind who wants to censor or sidetrack our inquiry.

>

> May I recommend that serious Indian thinkers should delve into

> Whiteness Studies by reading the materials referenced in my Sulekha

> column, and consider attending a college course or a conference?

>

> Please note that my column is built on the extensive writings of

> scholars within this field, so Koenraad please do read these authors

> carefully, and let us not block the Indians' right to learn what may

> appear to some whites as their dirty laundry. The idea is entirely

> respectful of white culture, neither glorifying it nor trashing it but

> de-centering it and putting in under the microscope to study

objectively.

>

> At one Indians' academic event I recently attended, the mere use of

> the term 'whiteness' and 'white gaze' caused the most violent reaction

> by an Indian scholar of some important position - I had ever witnessed

> this kind of academic hysteria in my life. The man was very much

> suffering from whiteness complexes, with his bow-tie, white wife,

> overdone pseudo accent, enjoying white patronage, etc. (This is not

> true of every Indian who westernizes, as I know many who are also

> comfortable with their Indianness, but not this man.)

>

> Clearly, this framework is going to become a serious intellectual way

> to problematize the sepoys. So the theme is larger than about whites,

> as it also covers mimics. This is why I am utilizing a white liberal

> who runs the Center for the Study of White Culture as my collaborator

> to bring this theme into the discourses on India and Indian culture.

> This would enable Indians pursuing the whiteness game to self-reflect

> and expand their understanding about matters like identity projection

> and their subconscious use of western categories as universals.

>

> First, one must acknowledge that such a culture exists, i.e.

> whiteness, just as there is black, hispanic, Chinese, Arab, Indian,

> etc. culture. This requires naming it, and the academicians came up

> with whiteness which I merely utilize.

>

> Second, once identified and named, this culture must get studied

> objectively from the outside perspective, just like all others have

> been for nearly 500 years. This causes great tension among many whites

> and their Indian mimics, because becoming the object of inquiry is

> discomforting and makes people self-conscious. Yet this is what they

> did to others all along under "intellectual freedom", "scientific

> inquiry" and so forth. So reversing the gaze cannot be legitimately

> denied to others.

>

> Third, once the white gazers are the objects of gazing, the dominant

> culture suddenly looses its awe and its universality. Why should

> western thought be de facto the universal norm? It becomes decentered

> as one of many cultures, and its epistemologies become one worldview

> among many. Human rights and ethics from western thinkers (that are

> enshrined in global institutions as the norm) begin to appear to be

> relative to the European experience and based on European history.

> This is a major step towards genuine pluralism of cultures.

>

> The power structure being studied is at two levels: (i) the

> institutions of society and (ii) the deep culture behind these

> institutions which controls them. This deep culture is whiteness.

>

> Whiteness is a set of memes (culture) and not a set of genes

> (biological). It has many faces and mutates as it spreads.

> Christianity is one of the key ingredients of whiteness. Proselytizing

> is about the spread of whiteness memes to dislocate non-white

> cultures, and this is abundantly clear from Christianity's effects in

> Africa and Latin America. Christianity is the myth of white people.

> Just like all other peoples' myths, it also gets analyzed objectively

> in this discipline. Empire building is intertwined with cultural soft

> power, and this is why US foreign policy promotes Evangelism globally.

>

> The terminology "whiteness" is causing this anxiety. But I did not

> make up this term and used what the academy has already turned into a

> discourse. However, it is telling that naming this culture so directly

> causes anger: scholars claim that remaining unnamed has been its major

> success factor and that making it the object of study is the best way

> to decenter it.

>

> Emory Student's comment raised important issues which deserve

> discussion: `Are Indians mimicking whiteness (or whatever you want to

> call this dominant American Christian culture)? Bobby Jindal is a good

> role model for this lot!!! How does mimicry relate to what was

> previously called the sepoys? Is this topic causing discomfort because

> many Indians have assumed white status? Can America become multi polar

> such that whiteness is not the central culture but merely one of many

> ways to be a full-fledged American?'

>

>

> Regards,

>

> Rajiv