Reason Is White

Looking 'White' In the Face - The New York Times:

I've got to hear a lot of African Studies, NAACP and Black Lives Matter people talk on MPR in the last year. The following is from a white PHD of philosophy and religion at east coast schools like Villanova.

I think that what modern philosophers call “pure” reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction.

To the extent that the Greeks, Romans and Jews are "white", that would be a correct statement.

Given that racial assumption, Western Civilization is "white".

The author uses the following rather obtuse paragraph to make the claim that "race is destiny" -- who you are, how you turn out, are all determined by your race.

Were I there, there would be “here.” That is a simple thought whose depth we never plumb. In my own work I cite it frequently to criticize the idea of “the one true religion.” We have seven grandchildren and when the last one was born I remember thinking that a little black child was also being born that day, as dear and innocent as our granddaughter, who was going home to a desperate situation where the odds will be stacked against her. We begin with an originary natal equality and then we crush it. “Switched at birth” stories, like Mark Twain’s “The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson,” have a deep ethical and political import. Were I there, there would be here. That should transform everything.

If he was correct, the planet would be a homogenous tribal culture devoid of philosophy, science, technology, etc. How you were born would be your destiny and "progress" would be an unknown term -- like the English language, nations like England, writing, etc.

Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Condoleezza Rice, Washington Carver, Martin Luther King, Thomas Sowell, and uncounted other blacks would not exist, because "race would be destiny". I submit that we do not live in that world

People who try to walk a mile in the shoes of the other, to live among and dedicate their lives to working with the oppressed, are also sensitive to the fact of their own privilege. They know they can never truly identify with them. They understand this paradox but it doesn’t paralyze them. This problem also comes up in Christian theology — God intentionally assumed our mortal condition but it wasn’t an inescapable plight visited upon the divine being without its consent.

One of the most cherished aspects of the left is the paradox of the "victim without choice". Blacks are asserted to have no choice, and no chance. Similarly, whites always have "privilege" -- they created the entire framework of the modern world -- the very concept of reason itself. Even God is denied the power to save -- he had a choice, so can't be a "true victim" in the universe created by the professor.

I came to philosophy through religion and theology and as a result philosophy has always had a salvific and prophetic quality for me. It has always been a way to save myself, even as in antiquity philosophy did not mean an academic specialty but a way of living wisely.

God and creation are denied -- free will is very nearly denied, yet somehow, miraculously, the author arrives at the power to "save himself" -- to be his own ultimate, to be his own god.

Postmodernism -- a rather long word for insanity.

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