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Integral World: Exploring Theories of Everything
An independent forum for a critical discussion of the integral philosophy of Ken Wilber
Joe CorbettJoe Corbett has been living in Shanghai and Beijing since 2001. He has taught at American and Chinese universities using the AQAL model as an analytical tool in Western Literature, Sociology and Anthropology, Environmental Science, and Communications. He has a BA in Philosophy and Religion as well as an MA in Interdisciplinary Social Science, and did his PhD work on modern and postmodern discourses of self-development, all at public universities in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Integral Culture War

Joe Corbett

The issue of racial violence against blacks captured in the slogan of BLM in present day America is not well supported by the facts.

I'm not a mediator or diplomatic therapist of polarized socio-cultural relations. But this does not make me or anyone else any less integral (or enlightened) than those who choose to play that role. My role is to storm the barricades of the defences of delusion, to shatter and break the ivory-tower cubicle of cognitive privilege many on the left today have fallen victim to under the aegis of Academic Race Theory (the ART of deception).

The ART of deception is usually referred to as Critical Race Theory (CRT), but it is neither critical (because it is merely cynical) nor theoretical (because it is merely a narrative fantasy). I make it the focus of my attack in this essay because it has hijacked Critical Social Theory, turning social justice into a divisive and unwinnable race war through movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM) at the expense of a solidaristic and winnable class war.

Academic Race Theory is the ideological underpinning of the BLM protests. It asserts that American society is constructed as a white supremacist system, and it seeks to dismantle white supremacy through projects of racial emancipation and anti-subordination to the white supremacist system. One wonders if it also thinks that any democratic society with a majoritarian ethnic group is also a supremacist system of, by, and for that majority as well, and what might be the consequences for any group that seeks emancipation through “insubordination” to the democratic majority rather than enculturation, integration, and negotiation. But critiquing the ART of deception will not be my task here. Instead I will focus on storming the ideological barricade of its defensive fortress, which is the wall of denial erected by many white liberals with a “messiah complex” (aka cuck mentality) regarding black culpability in their presumed victimization by white supremacy.

First, a controversial graph showing “Interracial Violent Crime Incidents” for 2018. Critics of this graph say it is misleading, and racist, because adjusted for the percentage of their population, incidents of black violence against whites is only twice that of incidents involving whites against blacks, not the nearly 10 times suggested by the total number of incidents. Thus, the reasoning goes, if blacks were the same percentage of the population as whites, all other things being equal, the total number of violent incidents of whites against blacks would go up to about half the number of incidents currently of blacks against whites. So the wide gap in incidents shown in the graph is considerably narrowed.

Interracial Violent Crime Incidents” for 2018

On the other hand, all other things being equal, if blacks were the same percentage of the population as whites, and with the same rate of violence against whites as now, there would be over 2 million incidents of violence of blacks against whites, compared to the 250k incidents of white on black violence. That's the part of the equation that doesn't get discussed in “balancing the data”. And when we do, we find that black on white violence is just as problematic as the “racist graph” shows.

Interracial Violent Crime Incidents” for 2018

What the graph actually shows, then, is not a white supremacist system that oppresses and commits acts of violence against blacks, for which we need a BLM movement to dismantle the system of white supremacy, but just the opposite. It shows a black supremacist anti-system, orders of magnitude more dangerous to whites than the KKK is to blacks, which terrorizes and commits acts of violence against whites, for which we may need a white lives matter (WLM) movement to raise awareness of black violence on white lives, and to shatter and subdue the ideological non-sense of the ART of deception that has infected the social fabric. Storm the ideological barricades! “RACISM!”, they'll shout.

The BLM tactic of using incendiary videos unrepresentative of the actual statistical race relations in America is not only misleading but leads to counter-factual and false ideas about a “white supremacy that needs to be dismantled”, which is their ideological agenda. The political dishonesty of using selected videos as media clickbait to mobilize their insubordination troops is on the order of the Nazi's using all manner of deception to mobilize the public for its own purposes. The danger of this movement of empowering blacks to become even more violent towards whites cannot be underestimated. It could even lead to a full-blown race war, and that will not end well for the minority against a heavily armed white population.

The issue of racial violence against blacks captured in the slogan of BLM in present day America is not well supported by the facts. However race as it is linked to class injustices is very well supported, and this is where the discourse on social inequality needs to go, towards class, not race. By racializing social justice the white working class, who are the presumed beneficiaries of white supremacy with their “white privilege”, are only alienated and driven towards Trumpian white nationalism, and thus any chance for solidarity between blacks and whites against their common oppressor, the political and economic oligarchy, is destroyed.

The statistics on racial violence and crime does indeed show that something is very wrong with race relations in America, but that is not simply indicative of racism. It indicates that the legacy of racism has left its mark in intergenerational poverty and all the psychological, cultural, and social problems that are brought with it. That is best addressed by means of class analysis and mobilization, where all boats are lifted in solidarity, and where the violence of interracial relations can be left behind along with the class injustices against our common oppressors.






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