Thursday: "Have you seen her?"
That's not how that expression works, man. Sometimes it's better not to "borrow" too much.
With respect to the particular charge resulting in losing substandard-but-very-needed housing, there are approximately three levels:
Personal. I am "on record" as saying I admire the words of Nasir Jones on the topic of this slur:
"If they call you a -------/ain't nothing to it, tell 'em Nas made you do it." So if I'd been hypocritical
and really "dropped a bomb" on the topic, then I'd really be in for it, huh? Sometimes you
"don't really remember" things you've done, right? So maybe "segueing" out of the facility as
quickly as possible, turning down "severance" gifts clearly designed to "manufacture consent",
was just the thing! You could do this over and over again, depriving people of their professional
and personal reputation and various *Lebensmittel* at the same time! Awe-some, right?
Kind of not really. But close!
First of all, there is a disturbing rise in the number of Caucasian people who think casually using
the n-word, or with some bizarre "sophistication", is "a jam". It isn't. (Even if I, for the first time in
my life, had managed to do so. "Oh, I see how this works." I don't think you see how it doesn't work.
The score would then be Personal Idiocy: 2, Obligatory Social Politeness: 0 or something like that.
Sure, "that's a common score", kid.) Secondly, the "normal sociological perspective" now being
maligned as "critical race theory" would be something like: "Honestly, that's just kind of the
feeling of meeting you sometimes, even if you're 'fastidious' about terminology, or maybe
even more so as you get older. Don't add it to your repertoire but on some level it's not the
essential thing. Right? You got me?"
Social role: In terms of abruptly terminating a resident "without further ado" or much attention
to any systematic, logical process the questions are twofold. Firstly, although many would have
their Foucauldean ears perked up for a fiendish "self-moving mover" unable to be stopped as
an instance of command-and-control, there is a critique which is not quite as "forbidden" as
the fashionista who handed this pseudo-judgment down might think. "Was the charge one
with 'a factual basis'? Often complainants about something like this wouldn't want to come
forward personally, so it's indeed possible there wouldn't be a specific, precise person to
refer to here on the level of 'let me at 'em'. Furthermore, maybe you wouldn't know whether it
was exactly a true complaint or not but it'd be clearly believable, it could be a 'factually
accurate' claim or not and it'd be worth pursuing on that level. So it was like that, right?
Oh, it wasn't like that."
Furthermore, in terms of the 'wise ones' casually littering their North Portland residences
with learned uses of the n-word there is a further, harder rationale to consider: "the opposite
of a witch-hunt is no witch-hunt". Consider: "I guess you really understand how I feel
when I hear that, man. No lie. On the other hand, considering how f-ed up transients of any
background are and how much you just need to 'keep the peace', it actually really couldn't
be the shibboleth she acted like it could be. Like, maybe I would really want it like that, but
it isn't like that. Furthermore, as the years have gone on I've found that there are some
former 'racists"'I actually have a broad level of moral agreement with, and many 'liberal
optimists' I formerly admired who turned out just to be bags of tricks. So it doesn't
really wash on a 'moral outrage' level, either, unless they're about it." What "the actual
rules" for the generic question would have to be, in other words.
Social context: In a similar fashion to "But I've actually never said that in my whole life",
I have recently made in *various* online fora certain professional claims "unpopular"
with some people in Portland who would have an interest in such things. They have
not really been "refuted"; the general procedure is more "confutation", "I'll show you",
"See what happens to them on a given day, what a pathetic loser they are." This shows
a high level of persecutory stick-to-it-iveness and a low level of logical imagination:
"confutation" is not a refutation, it can comfortably coexist with the literal truth of
claims it downplays. A major American author is a weaselly, "obscure" loser?
Those with better knowledge than "our best" would easily say: "This is the problem?
This is difficult for you to conceive?" So it is more the charge's "consilience" with
this general culture of defamation, rather than being deprived of certain social
supports I wasn't exactly owed, that is the galling thing.
Jeffrey Rubard