As long as this nation of millions can sustain conversations which are indeed race-focused then we will always be subjected to doctrinaire arguments about how many racists can dance on the head of a pin. Until a significant majority understands that race is only a useful shortcut and inherently dehumanizing, we cannot truly blame people who use race and talk about race for being inherently dehumanizing.
I'm not saying you can't say 'black' and you can't say 'white' but you can't expect them to mean as much as you want them to mean. Again, who is going to tell us we cannot use these racial terms, who is going to admit that they are not these racial terms? Only a few.
I've seen scores of racial commentators overstep, backtrack, apologize, re-iterate, sidestep. This is inevitable because all racial traffic are houses built on sandy soil. One truthquake and the houses collapse. I think what commentators need to do is make a complete break between race and culture and be proper cultural critics with the understanding that culture is fluid and multidimensional.
But if the aim is not towards increasing knowledge about what is true about all mankind, nothing adaptively transient, like our social definitions of race, are of any substantial use. In 1946, the debate that raged was whether or not Negro men had the intelligence to drive trucks with manual transmissions. Much was made in the Negro press that the fraction capable of this feat was growing every year. These are the things people hang their dignity on, so is it any surprise that they are fragile?
I happen to be one of the few folks I know who has debated with VDare people and those on the left and right - with blogging history that goes back decades dealing with the likes of John Derbyshire, Adam Serwer and Tim Wise. I have fortunately learned the very real downside of approaching any absolutes when dealing with the connotations of race. I neither see the causalities nor need to see causalities between racial identity / membership and social virtues or vices.
The hard part here is dealing with those who transgress in their free speech. I say far too many Americans have a very difficult time keeping the word 'reckoning' out of their vocabulary, which always implies the use of power to reward or punish speech. This is and always will be wed in America to our democratic politics, so it's always a power game. But unless the transgression is a crime, it cannot be a matter of justice.
So ultimately every citizen has to ask, in service of justice, are we ready to legislate new crimes, police new crimes, make arrests, prosecutions, judgements and sentences. It's already clear that is the current process in the 'court of public opinion'. How's that working out? Do ya want more?
I don't trust America to make the right decision today.
Whats pertinent here is that in an actual free society with people willing to listen to each other, almost everything he wrote should be allowed. Indeed what he wrote is being whispered across a thousand dinner tables daily, PARTICULARLY in non African American, non white families.
I mean, why can't the Woke engage? Even if some of the ideas seem mean, or are, or are dumb, or offend. Engage for gods sake. Discuss.
I agree wholeheartedly with what you said. If we do not engage with dumb/offensive/mean ideas we cannot create good arguments to counter them. Good values and morals are not self-evident.
Oct 20, 2023·edited Oct 20, 2023Liked by Free Black Thought
Personally, I am not big on apologies. If someone believes he has made errors, he should state his errors and attempt to make amends. Then, evaluate his new ideas based on their merit. Some of the questions which Hoste posed invited answers. "Why do Blacks always end up on the bottom?" has a simple answer, "They don't."
Here is a real problem -- our unwillingness to discuss the present day impact of breeding slaves for certain purposes.
Similarly but not as sensitive, would be: How do immigrants tend to be smarter and more capable than those who stayed behind or is this a false belief? Do not certain cultural traits make it easier to be successful in certain societies without regard to race? If Whites believe that Blacks are inferior, why do so many Whites throw stumbling blocks in the paths of Blacks?
One huge problem with Wokeism is that is has one simplistic answer for everything- racism. That shuts down thinking, investigation, research, while making society dumber and promoting polarizing cancel culture
I agree. "Suck" is NOT the correct way to view his past words. "Horrifying", "vile", "obscene", "sickening" better describe the purposeful dehumanizing of a massive group of fellow humans for having a different skin color.
That said, I admit I've read and liked his past work from Substack (which obviously had nothing to indicate his racist past). I'll add that the central part of his reasoning in the apology was not addressed in this otherwise very comprehensive article; I believe he was a teen at the time. As I remember it his point was that these were the views of a child who has since grown, gotten educated, and changed his mind.
But the rest of the article is right, I don't know how to take the apology. There's something off about it. I applaud many of Hanania's articles that seem to celebrate classical liberalism and individual rights, but he's veered from that at times with his support of IQ studies and some strange genetic determinism.
So in the end I agree with the author that this is someone to watch carefully. I don't think someone should blacklisted forever for views they held as a child; IF he has repudiated them. But has he really? I don't know.
He was no longer a teen. As an example, he was 24 when he wrote that "despite being indoctrinated with the ideology of racial equality, white women still know in their gut that black men are dangerous" - he was born in 1985 and the quote comes from an article published in 2009. And the tweet which seems to be implying that Black men are animals was posted in May this year.
I stand corrected. I still read his Substack but I will say I'd have subscribed if his past hadn't come out. The animals story was in the context of homeless people attacking commuters in NYC. I live here, and in the heat of the moment I've said many unprintable things about them; I had one guy who was zoned out closely follow me with my kid, another naked guy who is wrapped in newspapers stands outside the B&N at the upper west side and screams at people... yeah its not pleasant. And it has definitely gotten worse since 2020.
If we had a city worth a damn we could spend a lot less on other things, and use the ridiculous taxes and fares to treat mentally ill homeless to both keep them from hurting other people and themselves. I think that could be square with the most rigorous individual rights advocate (and I count myself among them).
I fully agree with you that the New York City should do much more to solve the problem of mentally disturbed and aggressive homeless men who are attacking other people. However, I don't think that Hanania meant homeless people attacking others. This is what he wrote: "Daniel Penny getting charged. These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits." https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1656770321368883201
Many people under this tweet asked him whom he meant and he did not explain it. Let me add that Alvin Bragg, the New York County District Attorney who filed criminal charges against Penny, happens to be African American. Hanania clearly implies in his tweet that "Daniel Penny getting charged" is outrageous and I guess that he was thinking about Bragg when he wrote "These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits."
Anyway is there any other possible interpretation of his tweet? Homeless men are not "walking around in suits", so he did not mean them. I think that he meant Black men (possibly not all Black men, but only those Black men whom he sees as "bad"). As I said earlier, he had an opportunity to explain whom he meant and he did not do it. And of course there is also a long tradition of portraying Black people as animalistic.
I think that he deliberately refrained from making it clear whom he meant by "those people" in order to be able to claim that he did not say anything racist.
Yeah, that's pretty bad. Put that way it looks like he's specifically referring to the DA. Who I'm not a fan of, but I wouldn't call him an "animal".
Race and crime is a very difficult topic to discuss. People who are otherwise very reasonable have been known to fly off the handle. Name calling opponents definitely doesn't help if your end goal is a race-neutral, objective legal system for everyone based on rights. It sort of makes the case AGAINST such a system being fair for everyone when you're actually a racist (and not the new-fangled "anti-racist" racist but a real one).
Unfortunately he did worse than name-calling Alvin Bragg in this tweet. The tweet was about "these people", not only about Bragg's decision.
You say that when it comes to race and crime, "people who are otherwise very reasonable have been known to fly off the handle", but there is a reason why many people "fly off the handle" on this subject. If they did not hold prejudice towards Black people, they would perceive Black criminals in the same way as other criminals.
Unfortunately even highly intelligent and highly educated people can be prejudiced towards Black people - I feel that it is often difficult to understand for those who imagine a typical racist as someone ignorant and uncouth. And I am not sure if Hanania really felt angry when Daniel Penny was charged - he may be simply saying things many of his followers (some of whom are very openly racist) want to hear.
One thing which I've learned , in both good and bad sense, is to take people at face value with what they say. I think one of the disadvantages we have of generally being a prosperous society is that we assume people to want to live, flourish, and achieve happiness. That assumes a long line of philosophic principles about what values are and what goals we want to achieve; for those of us in Western countries that means individual rights and the freedom to construct our own lives. This elevation of the individual is a bright but tiny blip in the long history of the 300,000 or so years of human history marked mostly by ignorant superstition and its brothers; persecution, starvation, and mass death.
So when we hear people defend looting, racism, murder, or glorify death - things which we normally see as overwrough metaphors- they actually do mean they're FOR those things as incomprehensible as it is to most of us. Actually the more I think about the more anti-Hannaia I become lol. Yeah, take him at his own word. And some of those words are ugly. Especially this last few weeks I've had enough ugly for a lifetime.
Here's my response about Richard Hanania: He's an unapologtic bigot. He doesn't represent any compassionate, unbiased person. And though he is obviously a thoughtful man, he presumes from subjectively-rendered data points to produce the results he desires. Stay away from him.
This does nothing and says nothing. One person on earth thinks another sucks. Great.
He has rights, ideas, changes, and though I don't like what he said, I certainly (truth is most people) know why he said it. Silencing people is authoritarian. The Woke/Far Left need to back off or they will get authoritarianism, RightWing authoritarianism.
If anyone wonders if Hanania has changed, just read his recent take on Canada’s expansion on MAID’s program to include people with mental illnesses. It’s pretty clear he hasn’t changed, but just became better at disguising his bigotry. Personally, I don’t care how smart this man is, and wish he’d stay clear from any policies’ development.
Richard “Hoste” Hanania is - by way of your detailed description of his past and current writings - a liar, or severely deluded about his own beliefs. I wouldn’t believe anything he says. If you’re going to really change, make a deep dive into your past and make amends wherever needed you need to be honest with yourself and others. He is neither and not worth the time to follow.
As long as this nation of millions can sustain conversations which are indeed race-focused then we will always be subjected to doctrinaire arguments about how many racists can dance on the head of a pin. Until a significant majority understands that race is only a useful shortcut and inherently dehumanizing, we cannot truly blame people who use race and talk about race for being inherently dehumanizing.
I'm not saying you can't say 'black' and you can't say 'white' but you can't expect them to mean as much as you want them to mean. Again, who is going to tell us we cannot use these racial terms, who is going to admit that they are not these racial terms? Only a few.
I've seen scores of racial commentators overstep, backtrack, apologize, re-iterate, sidestep. This is inevitable because all racial traffic are houses built on sandy soil. One truthquake and the houses collapse. I think what commentators need to do is make a complete break between race and culture and be proper cultural critics with the understanding that culture is fluid and multidimensional.
But if the aim is not towards increasing knowledge about what is true about all mankind, nothing adaptively transient, like our social definitions of race, are of any substantial use. In 1946, the debate that raged was whether or not Negro men had the intelligence to drive trucks with manual transmissions. Much was made in the Negro press that the fraction capable of this feat was growing every year. These are the things people hang their dignity on, so is it any surprise that they are fragile?
I happen to be one of the few folks I know who has debated with VDare people and those on the left and right - with blogging history that goes back decades dealing with the likes of John Derbyshire, Adam Serwer and Tim Wise. I have fortunately learned the very real downside of approaching any absolutes when dealing with the connotations of race. I neither see the causalities nor need to see causalities between racial identity / membership and social virtues or vices.
The hard part here is dealing with those who transgress in their free speech. I say far too many Americans have a very difficult time keeping the word 'reckoning' out of their vocabulary, which always implies the use of power to reward or punish speech. This is and always will be wed in America to our democratic politics, so it's always a power game. But unless the transgression is a crime, it cannot be a matter of justice.
So ultimately every citizen has to ask, in service of justice, are we ready to legislate new crimes, police new crimes, make arrests, prosecutions, judgements and sentences. It's already clear that is the current process in the 'court of public opinion'. How's that working out? Do ya want more?
I don't trust America to make the right decision today.
Whats pertinent here is that in an actual free society with people willing to listen to each other, almost everything he wrote should be allowed. Indeed what he wrote is being whispered across a thousand dinner tables daily, PARTICULARLY in non African American, non white families.
I mean, why can't the Woke engage? Even if some of the ideas seem mean, or are, or are dumb, or offend. Engage for gods sake. Discuss.
But no. We cancel. Fire. Scream. Insult.
Forced genuflections will lead us nowhere.
I agree wholeheartedly with what you said. If we do not engage with dumb/offensive/mean ideas we cannot create good arguments to counter them. Good values and morals are not self-evident.
Personally, I am not big on apologies. If someone believes he has made errors, he should state his errors and attempt to make amends. Then, evaluate his new ideas based on their merit. Some of the questions which Hoste posed invited answers. "Why do Blacks always end up on the bottom?" has a simple answer, "They don't."
Here is a real problem -- our unwillingness to discuss the present day impact of breeding slaves for certain purposes.
Similarly but not as sensitive, would be: How do immigrants tend to be smarter and more capable than those who stayed behind or is this a false belief? Do not certain cultural traits make it easier to be successful in certain societies without regard to race? If Whites believe that Blacks are inferior, why do so many Whites throw stumbling blocks in the paths of Blacks?
One huge problem with Wokeism is that is has one simplistic answer for everything- racism. That shuts down thinking, investigation, research, while making society dumber and promoting polarizing cancel culture
I agree. "Suck" is NOT the correct way to view his past words. "Horrifying", "vile", "obscene", "sickening" better describe the purposeful dehumanizing of a massive group of fellow humans for having a different skin color.
That said, I admit I've read and liked his past work from Substack (which obviously had nothing to indicate his racist past). I'll add that the central part of his reasoning in the apology was not addressed in this otherwise very comprehensive article; I believe he was a teen at the time. As I remember it his point was that these were the views of a child who has since grown, gotten educated, and changed his mind.
But the rest of the article is right, I don't know how to take the apology. There's something off about it. I applaud many of Hanania's articles that seem to celebrate classical liberalism and individual rights, but he's veered from that at times with his support of IQ studies and some strange genetic determinism.
So in the end I agree with the author that this is someone to watch carefully. I don't think someone should blacklisted forever for views they held as a child; IF he has repudiated them. But has he really? I don't know.
He was no longer a teen. As an example, he was 24 when he wrote that "despite being indoctrinated with the ideology of racial equality, white women still know in their gut that black men are dangerous" - he was born in 1985 and the quote comes from an article published in 2009. And the tweet which seems to be implying that Black men are animals was posted in May this year.
I stand corrected. I still read his Substack but I will say I'd have subscribed if his past hadn't come out. The animals story was in the context of homeless people attacking commuters in NYC. I live here, and in the heat of the moment I've said many unprintable things about them; I had one guy who was zoned out closely follow me with my kid, another naked guy who is wrapped in newspapers stands outside the B&N at the upper west side and screams at people... yeah its not pleasant. And it has definitely gotten worse since 2020.
If we had a city worth a damn we could spend a lot less on other things, and use the ridiculous taxes and fares to treat mentally ill homeless to both keep them from hurting other people and themselves. I think that could be square with the most rigorous individual rights advocate (and I count myself among them).
I fully agree with you that the New York City should do much more to solve the problem of mentally disturbed and aggressive homeless men who are attacking other people. However, I don't think that Hanania meant homeless people attacking others. This is what he wrote: "Daniel Penny getting charged. These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits." https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1656770321368883201
Many people under this tweet asked him whom he meant and he did not explain it. Let me add that Alvin Bragg, the New York County District Attorney who filed criminal charges against Penny, happens to be African American. Hanania clearly implies in his tweet that "Daniel Penny getting charged" is outrageous and I guess that he was thinking about Bragg when he wrote "These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits."
Anyway is there any other possible interpretation of his tweet? Homeless men are not "walking around in suits", so he did not mean them. I think that he meant Black men (possibly not all Black men, but only those Black men whom he sees as "bad"). As I said earlier, he had an opportunity to explain whom he meant and he did not do it. And of course there is also a long tradition of portraying Black people as animalistic.
I think that he deliberately refrained from making it clear whom he meant by "those people" in order to be able to claim that he did not say anything racist.
Yeah, that's pretty bad. Put that way it looks like he's specifically referring to the DA. Who I'm not a fan of, but I wouldn't call him an "animal".
Race and crime is a very difficult topic to discuss. People who are otherwise very reasonable have been known to fly off the handle. Name calling opponents definitely doesn't help if your end goal is a race-neutral, objective legal system for everyone based on rights. It sort of makes the case AGAINST such a system being fair for everyone when you're actually a racist (and not the new-fangled "anti-racist" racist but a real one).
Unfortunately he did worse than name-calling Alvin Bragg in this tweet. The tweet was about "these people", not only about Bragg's decision.
You say that when it comes to race and crime, "people who are otherwise very reasonable have been known to fly off the handle", but there is a reason why many people "fly off the handle" on this subject. If they did not hold prejudice towards Black people, they would perceive Black criminals in the same way as other criminals.
Unfortunately even highly intelligent and highly educated people can be prejudiced towards Black people - I feel that it is often difficult to understand for those who imagine a typical racist as someone ignorant and uncouth. And I am not sure if Hanania really felt angry when Daniel Penny was charged - he may be simply saying things many of his followers (some of whom are very openly racist) want to hear.
One thing which I've learned , in both good and bad sense, is to take people at face value with what they say. I think one of the disadvantages we have of generally being a prosperous society is that we assume people to want to live, flourish, and achieve happiness. That assumes a long line of philosophic principles about what values are and what goals we want to achieve; for those of us in Western countries that means individual rights and the freedom to construct our own lives. This elevation of the individual is a bright but tiny blip in the long history of the 300,000 or so years of human history marked mostly by ignorant superstition and its brothers; persecution, starvation, and mass death.
So when we hear people defend looting, racism, murder, or glorify death - things which we normally see as overwrough metaphors- they actually do mean they're FOR those things as incomprehensible as it is to most of us. Actually the more I think about the more anti-Hannaia I become lol. Yeah, take him at his own word. And some of those words are ugly. Especially this last few weeks I've had enough ugly for a lifetime.
Here's my response about Richard Hanania: He's an unapologtic bigot. He doesn't represent any compassionate, unbiased person. And though he is obviously a thoughtful man, he presumes from subjectively-rendered data points to produce the results he desires. Stay away from him.
This does nothing and says nothing. One person on earth thinks another sucks. Great.
He has rights, ideas, changes, and though I don't like what he said, I certainly (truth is most people) know why he said it. Silencing people is authoritarian. The Woke/Far Left need to back off or they will get authoritarianism, RightWing authoritarianism.
If anyone wonders if Hanania has changed, just read his recent take on Canada’s expansion on MAID’s program to include people with mental illnesses. It’s pretty clear he hasn’t changed, but just became better at disguising his bigotry. Personally, I don’t care how smart this man is, and wish he’d stay clear from any policies’ development.
He has every right to wish for or against MAiD. Its not bigoted. Its an opinion on life and practical costs.
Sure, he can wish and have whatever opinions he wants, as do I, and my opinion about him is what I stated above.
His craving for attention seems insatiable. I see no need to indulge him. I am not for canceling him but I would never trust him.
Richard “Hoste” Hanania is - by way of your detailed description of his past and current writings - a liar, or severely deluded about his own beliefs. I wouldn’t believe anything he says. If you’re going to really change, make a deep dive into your past and make amends wherever needed you need to be honest with yourself and others. He is neither and not worth the time to follow.