This article runs into several of the issues that plague Rand in general.

First, it rails against the option of living as a parasite. But parasitism is a valid evolutionary strategy, and there's no rational reason any given human being should avoid choosing it. Indeed, it makes much more sense for an average person to prefer a system that allows them to engage in a certain amount of "parasitism" than it does for them to support a system where they are left at the mercy of the handful of people at one end of the IQ bell curve.

Second, it treats "individual thought" as the primary method of man's survival rather than the much better candidate of "social conditioning". You may have to think hard about how to eat and what to eat if you are trapped alone on a desert island, but in real life most people are guided into jobs that earn them money they can go to spend at the supermarket, where the poisonous berries have already been screened out.

Third, it presupposes that there is an objective psychological thing called a "human being" with a fixed nature. But people are wildly varied and, well, not as collective as Rand ironically assumes. So you get statements such as "you can't find happiness in procrastination, promiscuity, or pot", which is laughable given how many people find real enjoyment in those things.

Basically, while Rand is very interesting in that she lays out her premises very clearly and straightforwardly, in a way that few other philosophers dare to do, she ends up falling prey to the fact that she is writing in reaction to her communist upbringing, and so therefore ends up basically accepting a communist framework. She becomes a mirror image of Marx, agreeing that society is defined by a class struggle, only siding with the other class. But the Marxist framework is inherently flawed and reductive, and cannot be saved merely by flipping it.

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Like I said, it's controversial. It is much harder to define "black" and "white" than it is to define "Asian" or "Mexican." Yet these constructs won't go away and the more they impact society and the individual, the more they become things in themselves. I don't think there's a perfect solution.

Gordon definitely seems to be operating from a less practical, tangible vantage point, which makes him harder to engage with than most people who draw this distinction.

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That's quite different than what I was assuming it meant. In reality, it practically has nothing even to do with ethnicity, which in a sense makes it a kind of misnomer. I'd certainly not include modern immigrants or even other dark skinned ethnicities under this specific meaning, as I suspect that doing so introduces quite a lot of obfuscation into the discourse on this subject.

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>Maybe I'm misunderstanding you here, but that doesn't make sense to me because simply having dark skin does not, in general, determine one's ethnicity. There are multiple ethnic groups (e.g., Arabic, Brazilian, the plethora of distinct African nations) that can exhibit such a phenotype of dark skin color.

This is largely true, and Gordon might actually disagree with the explanation I'm about to give. But Black people in the U.S., at least those whose ancestry goes back to slavery, have some common experiences. Slaves in particular had their their identities and genealogy erased, and in a sense are more a distinct ethnicity than European Americans since we can trace our ancestry more easily. So there's a commonality between most Black Americans that goes beyond skin color. They have a culture that is distinct from both Africans and other Americans.

It gets complicated when you consider that many Black Americans are immigrants from Africa. Gordon may be including them, or he may not. They share some commonalities, but not others. I'm not including people in all countries because this is, to my knowledge, a largely American construct. Other countries have different experiences with racial stratification.

Not every Black person agrees with this. But there is a rationale for it that goes beyond academic obsurantism. It is controversial and, again, I'm not agreeing with Gordon on everything. But I think the shift towards capitalization is both respectful and logically sound.

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Interesting

Thank you for the classic definition. Can you agree with me that it immediately falls apart, as a definition? “The possibility to have done otherwise “ is way too frivolous as a philosophical statement. Possibilities are figments of the mind, acted upon to varying results. It’s impossible to define all the possibilities of a given phenomenon so we have to leave that out of the definition for sure. “Otherwise” is also problematic- another figment that we construct from experience.

Why we do things, isn’t because of chemistry. If you chose to, you will change your brain chemistry. Free will is a phenomenon of mind and the pieces and atoms of our selves are not mindful. It’s not that much of a mystery, unless you’re a reductionist mechanistic sort. Which seems to be the fashion around here, but if living in that metaphysical framework makes you happiest, by all means, go ahead.

Just don’t insist it’s the only one. Don’t absolutize your conceptual schemes, man.

No as I'm reading it, I think the author would generalize both Black consciousness and black consciousness across many different racial groups. The distinction seems to be that black consciousness is the IMPOSED concsiousness that these groups experience (inferiority, enslavement) while Black consciousness is an act of self-realization that your own lived racial identity can serve as the basis for interacting with and analyzing reality

The problem again comes in with the attribution of absoluteness to a relative mind-set. Some thought is heavily conditioned- it is not very free. Other thinking is less conditioned , it’s more free. This value plainly exists, whether or not it exists in what is called “objectively “

Monkey thinking is a lot more conditioned than human thinking, but it’s much more flexible and adaptable than ant thinking.

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Maybe I'm misunderstanding you here, but that doesn't make sense to me because simply having dark skin does not, in general, determine one's ethnicity. There are multiple ethnic groups (e.g., Arabic, Brazilian, the plethora of distinct African nations) that can exhibit such a phenotype of dark skin color.

So, what theoretically are they claiming is unifying all these distinct ethnicities? It sounds to me like the distinction is solely based on optimism versus pessimism towards these groups and peoples, i.e., something to be celebrated, rather than to be viewed through the lens of lazy stereotypes and prejudices.

Again, I'm probably misunderstanding your explanation though.

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Read Black Skin, White Masks for a unique blend of existentialism stemming from Sartre as well as a depiction of the particular experience of blackness as colonized subject. He actually talks about the overlap of existential freedom and breaking free of forms of white guilt for the white person as well as feelings of black interiority for the black person.

There are unifying things about existential experience, but also definitive experiences of racial oppression, historically or otherwise.

I think there are a lot of nuanced takes from vantage points other than the main European existentialists and absurdist(s).

I'm generally not a fan of existentialism and I don't exactly "get" this guy, so I can't perfectly represent his viewpoints. But the capitalization makes perfect sense to me. "Black" with a capital B refers to Black people as a distinct ethnic group, while "black" originally framed Black people in terms of darkness, impurity, and arbitrary racial norms and standards, the inverse of "white." The capitalization puts "Black" alongside "Asian" or "Cherokee" as a thing in and of itself.

I found his explanation of this needlessly opaque, but it's a pretty simple construct. Capitalization is just a way of framing Black identity in terms other than isolated attributes or social norms, like where someone falls on the "paper bag test."

I should mention that calling someone "black" without capitalization does not carry the racist connotations it originally did. With or without capitalization it's the preferred term. This is not to imply that "black" is a racial slur.

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Oof...the very notion that (in this case, blackness) would be a "dent in your sisyphusian boulder" begs the notion that "blackness" is a flaw one is saddled with.

Rather than speak againat it, you've managed to reinforce the notion that sometimes a differentiation based on inherent starting point is needed...the "black experience" is predicted on both living it but also having it imposed on you, at birth, by a larger societal group who wants to "other" you from the get go, before you even have a chance to form your own identity.

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Language is fluid and changes constantly. All of human history can tell you that. Why is this specific situation so different?