Posts tagged libertarianism

As an undergraduate student at U.C. Santa Barbara, I took a musicology course about Afro-American music. The instructor talked at least once a week about how whites dressing up in black face was offensive and oppressive to Black people (he was black.) To my white eyes, the absurdity of the appearance of whites in black face just didn’t look like black people: it was a long ways from sober and erudite black ideals I knew like Shirley Chisholm, Julian Bond, Dick Gregory, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and so forth. They lacked the wit and creativity of Sly Stone, Bill Cosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder or Flip Wilson. Minstrals lacked the certitude of self of James Brown and Bob Marley. They don’t have the poetry of Jimi Hendrix or Billie Holiday. It didn’t add up to me that racism existed outside of uneducated white people in fly over land wearing thier bedsheets or the war souvenirs their uncles and fathers brought back from Europe. I was told differently.

My instructor told me about one sorority girl that took the same course a year or two earlier and expected an easy “A,” but wasn’t given it. She complained to him - he told her that was the grade that she earned on the exam. The following week, this girl had some of her sisters stand at the threshold of the door to the small theater that the lectures were held in and shout a phrase in unison with his name and the word “nigger” in it. He was still a nigger to a white girl after he went to the trouble of earning doctorate in a field that straddled social sciences and the study of music, elevating it to merit being a course offered at least once a year at a campus of The University of California. He made that point opening his file cabinet holding the essence of his education and slamming it shut because it meant nothing to this narcissistic, entitled white girl. Afterward, he was embarrassed for losing his composure and apologized to me. I told him he didn’t have to apologize — I understood what he meant. It’s the lesson I remember best above all others as a student at UCSB.

I’d think that these young whites just don’t give a shit about the oppression that Ron Paul’s message and policies bring against other people who are unlike them. Ghettos, high school drop outs, jail and teen pregnancy are merely abstractions to this slice of the voting population. They’re floating through their lives absorbing the twisted logic of how libertarianism isn’t racist per se, embracing Paul’s isolationist rhetoric having been exasperated by a decade of trillion dollar wars thousands of miles away, again, somewhere in Asia. And it’s easy to do that, to say that the money spent on war could go towards something else, but it wouldn’t go in to feeding and building people because Keynesian economics isn’t libertarianism or Austrian school economics. It’s too inconvenient for narcissistic people to have to work through all of that cognitive dissonance. To that end, because they won’t be bothered to work through the rhetoric to get to the base of libertarianism and Ron Paul’s nearly covert bigotry, I say that you’re being too kind to say that these supporters of Ron Paul are uninformed.