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Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

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Helen Pluckrose

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“In 1680, four years after the [Bacon] rebellion, Virginia passed the Law for Preventing Negro Insurrections. It restricted the movement of enslaved people outside plantations; anyone found without a pass would be tortured with twenty lashes "well laid on" before being returned. At a time when white servants and African slaves often worked side by side, the hand of the law reached in to divide them. Prison time awaited "English, and other white men and women intermarrying with negros or mulattos." Already any indentured white servant caught running away with an enslaved African person was liable for their entire lost term of service, meaning that the servant risked becoming permanently unfree. The law separated the members of the lowest class by color and lifted one higher than the other. The goal, as it has been ever since, was to offer just enough racial privileges for white workers to identify with their color instead of their class. The Virginia legislature ended the penalties imposed on rebels for the insurrection of 1676, but only the white ones, removing a source of lingering solidarity among them.”

LawRaceClassSlaveryDivisionAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsLawsWhites
Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
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“These demographics presented real threats to white planters, including a potential cross-racial labor movement. Plantation work was close and intimate, and it fostered a troubling solidarity between the growing Black population and white indentured servants. White planters could not afford for such a dangerous bond to form--which is why in 1705 Virginia's legislature did as much to codify white privilege as it did to establish Black subjugation.”

ClassLaborSlaveryAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesWhite PrivilegeSlavesSlave Owners
Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
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“Never was the two cultures stand-off more apparent than here. In Gunn’s poem, a new neighbour (an outsider) wants them evicted because of their detrimental effect on property prices. She might well have been an academic: in more than thirty years in the humanities side of universities, the attitude towards those skills which I encountered was mainly one of ignorant, patronizing condescension. Just occasionally a student from the science side would dismantle a car in a campus car park only to be moved on by the authorities, as were Gunn’s auto freaks. Among the younger academics, disdain for this culture verged on contempt because of its supposedly obsolete ‘masculinist’ values. Those same academics were also the ones quick to brand any intense friendship between the men of this ‘masculinist’ culture as repressed homosexuality. In truth, sometimes it might have been, and yet sometimes it almost certainly wasn’t: some of the most loyal and selfless friendships I’ve ever known were between working-class young men who, insofar as anyone can ever be sure of these things, really were straight.”

ClassUniversityHumanities
Book:Desire: A Memoir
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“A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in times of stress 'educated' people tend to come to the front; they are no more gifted than the others and their 'education' is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander. That they will come to the front seems to be taken for granted, always and everywhere. In Lissagaray's History of the Commune there is an interesting passage describing the shootings that took place after the Commune had been suppressed. The authorities were shooting the ringleaders, and as they did not know who the ringleaders were, they were picking them out on the principle that those of better class would be the ringleaders. An officer walked down a line of prisoners, picking out likely-looking types. One man was shot because he was wearing a watch, another because he 'had an intelligent face'.”

LeadershipClassSocialismEntitlement
Book:The Road to Wigan Pier
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“Trotsky once wrote: "How many Aristoteles are herding swine? And how many swineherds are sitting on thrones?" Class society impoverishes people, not just materially but psychologically. The lives of millions of human beings are confined to the narrowest limits. Their mental horizons are stunted. Socialism would release all the colossal potential that is being wasted by capitalism.”

ClassCapitalismEconomicsSocialismMarxism
Book:What Is Marxism?
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“How to be a Poet (to remind myself) i Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity… ii Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. iii Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.”

PoetryNaturePoetBreathingPoemsQuietnessHow To Be A Poet
Book:Given
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“It is an obvious fact that the banks and big monopolies are now dependent on the state for their survival. As soon as they were in difficulties, the same people who used to insist that the state must play no role in the economy, ran to the government with their hands out, demanding huge sums of money. And the government immediately gave them a blank cheque. Trillions of pounds of public money has been handed over to the banks, totalling some $14 trillion. But the crisis continues to deepen. All that has been achieved in the last four years is to transform what was a black hole in the finances of the banks into a black hole in public finances. In order to save the bankers, everybody is expected to sacrifice, but for the bankers and capitalists no sacrifices are demanded. They pay themselves lavish bonuses with the money of the taxpayer. This is Robin Hood in reverse.”

ClassCapitalismEconomicsSocialismMarxism
Book:What Is Marxism?
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