It seems to stay firmly at the theoretical level, which isn't necessarily all bad ... but ...
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/a-time-for-reckoning-facing-truth-on-the-path-to-unity/
...
The goal of reckoning
is far from stoking a new round of white guilt. While facing the truth will
likely lead to sadness and guilt, the more important aspect is the cultivation
of a willingness to cultivate and craft approaches to theology and church life that
facilitate genuine community and mission among Bible-believing Christians of
different ethnic backgrounds in general and between whites and
African-Americans in particular. To do this in the current climate is a
tremendous challenge when there is a significant contingent of Christians who
regard attention to these matters as distractions from the gospel and the
intrusion of a purported cultural Marxism.
I admit a tremendous frustration every time I see someone use the
language of cultural Marxism as a reason to be wary of efforts to engage
questions of race and life in the church. As I look back over the last 30 years
and think about the different reasons some Bible-believing Christians have
avoided, neglected or resisted questions of race, I find it peculiar that this
campaign against cultural Marxism has emerged fairly recently (maybe as early
as 2001) as a central reason to have hesitation about pursuits of justice.
In all honestly, if the people who express these concerns about
cultural Marxism had lots of examples of congregations that have an allergy to
critical race theory but are leading the way in cultivating and practicing a
faith that addresses the past and present challenges of race, I would be more
inclined to take their warnings seriously. As far as I can tell, these people
are not leading the way toward cultivating a gospel unity. Instead, I see the
act of using the label “cultural Marxism” as a smokescreen or diversionary
tactic that forestalls both the reckoning required to contend with
theological-ethical failures on race and the subsequent work to pursue new
paths of Christian discipleship. These are paths taken where life together
means truly living out the implications of a gospel that compels us to love our
neighbors as ourselves in ways interpersonal and public/political. This does not mean loyalty
to any political party but a true submission to the
Lordship of Christ. This Lordship means we are seeking to have our various
commitments always subject to examination by the Holy Spirit, and a willingness
to respond to what is exposed....
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/the-rhetoric-of-race/
...
Yet, witnessing such
attempts, along with the developing American conversation from a distance, I
have felt a growing concern that the direction of the discourse is destined to
produce a great deal more heat than light. It has seemed to me that recent
years have witnessed a growing essentializing and ideologizing of racial
discourse, as a specific set of discourses of American provenance have been
conflated and projected into the world more generally in ways that cannot but prove
unhelpful. The gains in rhetorical force have frequently come at the expense of
clarity and understanding.
It seems to me that this is in no small measure a result of the
abstraction of discourse encouraged by the Internet, on which vague ideological
concepts can subsume and efface the particularity and variegation of concrete
issues and events (which get rendered as de-particularized symbols of the
concepts). Master concepts such as ‘white supremacy’, ‘white privilege’, or
‘whiteness’—concepts in which countless disparate tensions, inequities, and
frustrations of myriads of individuals’ and communities’ lives can be
agglomerated—may be incredibly low resolution for the purposes of analysis, yet
are effective rhetorical tools for mass mobilization and offer catharsis in
their naming of pervasive yet rather amorphous realities people feel.
When such vague abstract concepts dominate, particular persons,
realities, and events can be stripped of their particularizing features and
employed as symbols of the abstraction. The perception of the confrontation at
the Lincoln Memorial in January last year is a good example of how just one
16-year-old boy’s face could come to bear the symbolic weight of ‘white
supremacy’ and ‘toxic masculinity’, provoking the fiercest denunciations and
attacks. His face served as a lightning rod for people’s anger about all that
the vague master concepts symbolically concentrated in him represented in their
lives
https://mereorthodoxy.com/suffering-our-forefathers-sins-a-latinos-reflection-on-white-supremacy/
...
Whiteness is a colonial category birthed in Portugal. It is there, as Willie James Jennings observes, that imperial expansion and a racial scale mingled and produced the start of whiteness. We see this in the first recorded slave auction. Reflecting on the year 1444, Portugal’s royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Azurara writes:
[On] the next day, which was the 8th of the month of August, very early in the morning, by reason of the heat, the seamen began to make ready their boats, and to take out those captives, and carry them on shore, as they were commanded. And these, placed all together in that field, were a marvelous sight; for amongst them were some white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned; others were less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops [Ethiopians], and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere.
Though all depicted are slaves, not all are equal. Some are “white,” and therefore “fair to look upon, and well proportioned.” Others are “black,” and hence “ugly”—as if they had come from Hell itself. In between the heavenly and hellish flesh are the mulattoes, the mixed who receive little discussion.
...
Whether Iberian or Anglo, French or Dutch, conceptions of whiteness shape how European empires construct the Americas and Caribbean. But these conceptions are not identical; “whiteness” isn’t monolithic—it comes in various forms. When a seventeenth century Spaniard, for example, conceives of herself as truly white, superior, and Christian, she does so as a Roman Catholic who interacts with the world through Spanish. For her, to be white, superior, and Christian is to be an Iberian Roman Catholic who speaks and thinks in Spanish.
Not so for the seventeenth century English. They think that being white, superior, and Christian is to be a free English citizen who speaks English and is Protestant. Walter Mignolo captures how these conceptions fit within two general colonial categories. “’Whites’ in South America were Roman Catholics and spoke Latin (or Romance) languages.” Matters differ in North America. There whiteness was “based on Protestantism and Anglo-Saxon languages.” Hence alternative views of whiteness are tied to geography, language, and religious communions. Each informs imperial competitions for global power.
Yet during the seventeenth century, the Anglo-Saxon based conception of whiteness begins to surpass its Iberian counterpart. And by the nineteenth century, ex-Spanish and ex-Portuguese colonies start championing “Latinidad”—a cultural and political vision of a Roman/Latin-based community. This movement originates among the Creole-Mestizo/a elite. Speaking of the ex-Spanish, Mignolo observes: “White Creole and Mestizo/a elites, in South America and the Spanish Caribbean islands, after independence from Spain adopted ‘Latinidad’ to create their own postcolonial identity.” Columbian Torres Caicedo was influential here. According to Caicedo:
There is Anglo-Saxon America, Danish America, Dutch America, etc.; there is also Spanish America, French America and Portugese America; and therefore to this second group what other scientific name applies but Latin?
...
https://mereorthodoxy.com/whiteness-christian-identity/
...
The problem of white identity living parasitically off of
theological identity has not magically disappeared over time. The use of white
identity to influence theological and soteriological vision continued in
America for centuries, albeit in increasingly hidden ways. Just as the Colonial
Virginia law-makers had done, white Americans in the 19th and 20th Centuries
held onto social power and maintained the appearance of Christian virtue by
obscuring their hatred. Marybeth Swetnam Mathews’ book, Doctrine and Race details the use of
segregation among white, Christian ministries in the early twentieth century to
maintain white supremacy where standards of doctrinal fidelity were used against black people whose
identity as Christian had barely been conceded after centuries of denial:
This insistence on separate ministry begins to
hint at why white fundamentalists did not call for a mission among American
blacks. Rather, they preferred to maintain their distance, calling for
white-controlled seminaries to train black men to prevent the tide of
modernist, socialist, communist, or Roman Catholic thought among African
Americans nationally. (Mathews, p31)
While the
examples in Mathews’ book are from almost one hundred years ago, it exposes an
almost liturgical pattern. White advantage and the appearance of Christian
virtue are maintained through grudging social concessions that are then a claim
for moral high ground to be used against black people. This pattern continues
today when white people claim colorblindness in response to calls to address
systemic racism. Overtly racist words and actions do not benefit white people
who like their social advantages and also like the title, ‘Christian,’ but
covert words and actions do.
This isn’t just
a societal problem, it’s a church problem. White identity continues to have a
parasitic relationship to soteriology. We can see this in James White’s 2016 summary of the black church as more prone to error than
the white church, and in Paige Patterson’s letter questioning the commitment to inerrancy of a black
candidate for SBC President. We can see this when white Christians flee diverse
cities, or avoid living in black neighborhoods when they do move into cities.
We see this when white Christians don’t even consider attending black churches
close to where they live. De facto segregation is perhaps the most common means by which
white Christians today retain social privileges along with some semblance of
the title ‘Christian,’ following in the hypocritical steps of previous
generations of white Christians, and the hypocritical steps of Peter and the
Circumcision Party in Galatians 2.
White identity
may one day be removed from the top of theological and social hierarchies, just
as the Portuguese and Spanish were. It may transform and adjust in
some form, but the association of immutable characteristics with theological
judgment and segregation is not going to magically disappear. It has infected
Christian hearts and churches for centuries. We are setting up future
generations of Christians to repeat Peter’s mistake and the mistake of our
‘white’ ancestors if we do not openly attack and undermine both the broken biblical
anthropology and the disparate social conditions that continue to racialize our
darker-skinned neighbors.
White identity
is the modern equivalent of a twisted idea of what it meant to be Jewish in the
1st century. The human heart is sinful indeed, who can understand it? But with
bold faith and spiritual eyes, we can confront false identities that inform
conduct that is out of step with the gospel.
...If white identity is removed one day from the top of the theological and social hierarchies I have no reason to believe that whatever replaces it will be better or more just. Take Doug Shadle's advocacy for canceling the 19th century. Sure, there's a lot about the 19th century I wish hadn't happened, particularly in connection to bloodleeting and racist agendas but I don't think it is necessarily a given that those racist agendas were then what a blanket description of white identity can sometimes describe them as being here and now.
What do I mean by that? Well, to give a for instance of Pacific Northwest aboriginal groups, it turned out that hunter gatherer cultures were perfectly capable of having a robust sense of what we would now call intellectual property rights on the one hand and a deeply entrenched network of slavery practices on the other. A focus on the Atlantic slave trade across Africa, Europe and the United States could run the risk of ignoring the slave trade between Africa and India, for instance, or the slavery systems practiced by aboriginal groups in the North and South American continents.
To put it in the harshest and most provocative way possible, merely changing the scapegoat ethnic or racial identity that is held responsible for the failures of a network of cultural and economic systems doesn't mean we're going to stop scapegoating. In one WASPy era the scapegoat might be foreigners or Jews or blacks but in Zimbabwe the scapegoat of choice might be whites for a dictator and in Uganda different African groups can regard each other as seeds of social and cultural ruin without reference to whiteness at all.
Let's take Doug Shadles invitation that we cancel the 19th century.
https://classicalalternative.substack.com/p/cancel-the-19th-century-a-preview
and the assertion that the symphony in some way is a pillar of white supremacist ideology
https://classicalalternative.substack.com/p/its-a-matter-of-perspective-ii
Well, okay, so how about if in the age of the coronavirus pandemic all of the arts get decimated to the point where they are not economically viable?
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/25/musicians-income-wiped-concerts-cancelled-orchestras-earnings-performances-self-employed-players
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2020-03-25/movie-theaters-recover-coronavirus-closures
It's one thing to set yourself against the ideologies of aesthetic autonomy and Romantic era notions of art as a sanctifying sacramental religion in a post-Wagnerian mold. Richard Taruskin's set himself against both of those for more or less his whole academic and public career and I'm openly sympathetic to those agendas. It's another thing to treat the entire Western musical range of traditions as symbolic of a white supremacist ideology predicated on a conception of race that, as the philosopher John Gray put it in Seven Types of Atheism, wasn't even formulated until the Enlightenment.
In his book Imagining Native America in Music Michael V Pisani pointed out that sixteenth and seventeenth century European thinkers were taken with polygenism, an idea that claimed that racial groups had an irreducible common ancestor so blacks would be descended from a black first ancestor, whites the same, and American Indians had a common ancestor. Pisani pointed out that what this meant in reference to all the above referenced, is that while many a European may have assumed Adam was white there were some who proposed that American Indians, not being descended from Adam, may have been unstained by original sin. If to a biblicist or biblical literalist such an idea would seem preposterous it's one of those things that can seem peculiar to a twenty-first century CE reader on other grounds. It may thematically tie in with ideas that whites have had about their innately higher levels of learning and so on but the stereotypology of the noble savage and the merely savage savage could find a potential mirror in variations on whiteness of more recent vintage in which there's the cultured urbane educated English sort at one end and the racist redneck hick at another end.
Writing as I do with an interest in music what I find aggravating about these sorts of discourses is that these are battles at the level of historiography more than history, and they can seem to be battles that are establishing outcomes for academic turf wars that do not necessarily yield two to five notes or more of music in which the ideologies imputed to or read into musical canons of every sort yield music that necessarily "solves" the problems found by academics in the music of the distant or recent past.
I think there's a case to be made that musicians should be all the more eager to learn from the symphonic tradition what can be translated into other types of musical life and activity if it may be that the age of the symphony is in some way waylaid by this pandemic and governmental responses to it. We may not need to "cancel the 19th century" at all, if all that means is changing focus from the 19th century canons to other 21st century constructed canons proposed by academics whose advocacy is open and never in doubt. The novel coronavirus may render the symphony itself and whatever it's said to represent moot.
As someone who admires a lot of work by Beethoven but considers him, compared to Haydn, a self-important bloviating blowhard I think fans of 19th century concert music might benefit from a reminder that as eras change the "timeless" nature of anything turns out to not be timeless. There are people who in the next ten years will have probably grown up never hearing any of the songs of John, Paul, George and Ringo and there's no reason at all to think their musical lives will have been impoverished for it. There are people who can go through life having never heard Beethoven's Fifth or Ninth who can make music and love music.
The bad faith that can seem to happen in musicology and music history can be, if this hobbyist guitarist and amateur composer can dare to be so plain, developing a range of ideological stances through which music people love is collapsed into a range of ideologies and myths founded on what are ultimately extra-musical and non-musical indicators or standards of legitimacy and authenticity. Meanwhile, the boundaries within or across musical styles that, in so many cases in the West are really hemmed in by the constraints of equal temperament 12 tone chromaticism and no more, are treated as more sacred and impermeable than they ever really were, or are.
To put this in an admittedly simple way, plenty of electricians and plumbers and construction workers can enjoy classical music without feeling condescended to. That so much of the music in the "classical" traditions was written, as the composer George Walker put it, by elites for elites does not always have to entail, as Rick Robinson has cogently put it, that such music is inherently elitist.
But a good deal of discourse within academic contexts can seem determined to keep the discussion at that level.
I've been on this hobby horse at my blog for years, of course, but I have been disappointed by the ways in which artists and arts journalism have seemed to cede any and all populist impulses to Trump and to totalitarian mass movements. The risk of such a rhetorical and intellectual stance has seemed self-evident to me--if the "creative" classes view any and all forms of populism as some variant of Nazi rebirth or as Marxist agitprop (whether endorsed or condemned) then arts castes and tastemakers are still running with post Cold War stereotypes and myths that I would think we've had decades to do some work to dismantle.
It's a topic for another post but I'm struck by how attempts to develop jazz/classical fusions in communist bloc nations can seem to have been more effective, for my listening pleasure, than comparable experiments in the non-communist or non-Marxist west. Ellul wasn't wrong to highlight in The Empire of Non-Sense the ways in which many of the aesthetic and technical revolutions of modern art evolved in mostly parallel paths despite the ideological oppositions between Western capitalist/democratic systems and communist systems. It can turn out that the arts of technological societies can converge on matters of technique (in Ellul's definition and usage) despite obvious and florid conflicts at other levels of political ideology or metaphysical claims. But what is interesting to me after decades of listening to and reading about music and considering Western arts criticism is what was summed up by Leonard B. Meyer, that there has been a crisis in which the Western ideology of pluralism has simply not been broad enough or versatile enough to take on board the actual pluralism in the world. For those who define pluralism in pejorative terms or who take pluralism itself as a goal what's struck me lately is how those who swear by pluralism in the arts don't seem to really be able to make much of it.
In other words in a market-driven arts scene pluralism is the ideology of advertisement and for what might alternately be "the long tail" or the proposal of a new canon to displace the old one in which contemporary advocacy established what should go and what should be brought in. A pro-pluralist agenda can establish the "what" without necessarily coming up with a clear or convincing reason "why" and get shipwrecked on the matter of "how" in pandemic conditions.
But the anti-pluralist stance can seem to run aground in another way. If the Enlightenment, for instance, was to be a kind of universal best of humanity why was that meted out so unevenly in practice? As John Gray put it in Seven Types, the Enlightenment simultaneously gave us aspirations to universal rights for men and a range of ideologies about race, sex and caste that ensured that the exceptions and exemptions would be realized in practice in contrast to the abstraction of the universal rights of man. Freedom of opportunity and expression for everyone ... who deserves it.
Something my brother once shared with me as he was reading up on the development of communism in China was that many of the power broker families who ran things before the transition simply said they were communist and transitioned into maintaining powerful rules in the society. To formulate this generalization in a way that can translate into my ongoing blog riffs on canons and ideologies and music and talk of politics, those who lord it over others in a way Jesus taught his followers to not emulate can come up with all kinds of ideological rationales for why they get to be the appointed ones who lord it over others and it's often literally as well as figuratively, politically and metaphorically their business to establish why these confessional/professional categories entitle them to their stances. Any sort of despot can invoke enlightenment as a reason for the despotism. Sometimes and in some places that can work out in the form of talk about race while in others it emerges through other affirmations. My brother's perhaps dour sentiment of late has been that so many have fretted about the military-industrial establishment that the educational-industrial establishment doesn't get the same criticism. Talk of race and racism can bring some of the past sins of academia to light but what doesn't seem to be doubted so much is that the academics of today can prescribe the cure for the racist ideologies that were formulated by, well, many an academic of the past. Maybe, but is what's going to be put in place actually going to be an improvement?
