Kritik: Race. (No true Blacksman fallacy.) I.

Kritik: Race. (No true Blacksman fallacy.) I.

Last year I brought a friend of mine, a charming girl by the name of Tiffany, into the Palomar College Debate team. I knew her through (if I may speak causally) having met her sister Kirjsten. This first correspondence began under the auspices of finding a computer programmer for a game that I was designing.

After having met Kirjsten, a truly charming girl who was rather easy on the eyes, if I may say so, I thought back to her as the “really cute Scandinavian girl” (one of many, admittedly) that I had met on the Palomar Campus.

It was not until I saw her again that I had what Zen Buddhists call a satori – a sudden awakening – I thought: You know, I think that this girl *might* identify as African American. I am not so sure, but the curve of her nose and the tinge of chocolate in what I had taken to be vanilla skin might suggest some sort of, what’s the word? “Black heritage”.

The essentialism is of course practical; the objectification is for phenomenological purposes. It was not out of the side of his mouth that Slavoj Zizek said that political correctness is a tacit form of totalitarianism. If we are not free to describe our experiences as they appear to us, we are all ways, one and all, slaves to dogmatism. The project of phenomenology was to escape the tendency of the human mind to fit things into boxes that are pre-sumed ubiquitous, focusing in stead upon the precise description of individual experience in a way that is often counter-intuitive, de-constructive, and requiring a great deal of strain and effort that the conventional man does not want to put forth.

But no thing is more important than this effort, the nihilation of pre-conceived categories, than in dealing with the most oppressive of categories, as well as the silliest: That of race.

Dm.A.A.