Tuesday, January 03, 2017

XXX Are Evil

(via a commentary on AWARE giving men voting rights [even if circumscribed])

Critical Intimacy: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak - Los Angeles Review of Books

Ed: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the person who wrote "Can the Subaltern Speak"

"This is something I say to my students in the villages. I say, “I’m your enemy. I’m good and my parents were good but two generations do not undo thousands of years.”

Why do you say you are their enemy?

Because I’m a caste Hindu. I’m the top caste. We are the ones who have made these people untouchable. We’re the ones who have refused them rights to intellectual labor so they could serve us, so they could be trained for manual labor."


This is a great articulation of how the philosophy of Original Sin permeates modern post-Marxist discourse, and how "XXX Are Evil" is a great one line summary of them. So for example feminism can be summed up as "Men Are Evil".

This is also why there is the idea of "allies" - individuals who are not members of an "oppressed" group but still support it, and yet are always held in contempt and suspicion, because they are viewed as evil (and a twitch away from reverting to oppressors).

This extract also showcases the ideas of group responsibility and group rights.
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