Carnet intime
One wag I know has proposed only half-jokingly a simple constitutional amendment that would resolve at a single stroke many problems in US democracy:
Reduce the representational weight of self-proclaming straight white males to 3/5 per man, the same figure constitutionally applied to black slaves until after the Civil War.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/
https://quillette.com/2020/09/19/down-the-1619-projects-memory-hole/
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174140
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/magazine/criticism-1619-project.html
I would love to have the chance to lecture the offended Ottawaian anglo-students, many of whom are not black, that their attack on racism is essentially racist. Exactly the case in the US with the Woke, who are surprisingly though incompletely “dialectical” in their reactions. Thesis –> Antithesis –> … but NO SYNTHESIS.
At least in the Sartrian (Hegelian) reading of Négritude there was a Aufhebung, a sublimation, an erasure, if you like, of the conflict, a transformation of its terms, per Sartre though not in fact, into universal post-racial citizenship and thus into class conflict.
Dammit, I said all this clearly in my 1977 dissertation, which has had zero effect in/ on the World 😉
“From what I can tell from what I know of my classmates, there are still some people have not changed a whit since high school, same easy going racism, same blind patriotism, same scorn for the different, same indifference to idea and intellect. The best thing, and it’s a poor best, is that they are all going crazy with anger in the knowledge their spokesman on the national and world stage is going to be sent packing.”< E.L.