On the Hierarchy of Oppression Part Two:
Free Thinker Blues
The last time we talked about the contentious rhetoric that exists between members of marginalized groups, the conversation revolved around comedian Dave Chappell’s transphobic jokes. In keeping with the theme of the subject matter, we tried to keep it as humorous as possible by critically analyzing Chappell's humor through the lens of intellectual consistency and historical accuracy. I don’t know about you all, but I was doubling over with laughter the whole time.
At the time, I believed there was more to say and promised a part two delving deeper into how playing the oppression Olympics between marginalized groups harms the cause of liberation for everyone involved. The months passed, however, and the attacks on trans people became a much bigger issue than combating the ignorance of cranks on Black Twitter. On a personal level, I needed to contend with how much criticism I wanted to levy toward a subset of Black political thought for my largely white audience. So I let it sit for a while, deciding to wait for the news cycle to dictate when I would broach this subject again.
Enter Kyrie Irving and Team Free Thinker.
When Kanye West went full Black Hebrew Israelite (which we also recently talked about) the reaction from Black social media was mixed. While naked antisemitism seemed to be the final straw, Kanye had been making anti-Black statements for years leading up to this and his proud association with the Trump brand and right-wing grifters made it relatively easy for Black Twitter to rebuke his attention-seeking rhetoric. At the same time, there were plenty of folks who claimed that Ye was being canceled for speaking the “truth”. When Kyrie joined the discourse a few weeks ago by tweeting a link to an absurdly antisemitic documentary on Amazon called Hebrews to Negros and then doubling down when asked about it by reporters, the reaction from Black Twitter was a bit more depressing.
In the weeks that followed his initial post, Kyrie went from a steadfast refusal to acknowledge or apologize for what he had promoted (even going so far as to question the very notion of promotion), to a lukewarm non-apology, to getting suspended when he responded to a direct question on whether he had antisemitic views by regurgitating a tired Black Hebrew Israelite talking point: “I can’t be antisemitic if I know where I come from”, to finally giving a real apology and working with the NBA to rehab his image.
Putting the Hebrews to Negros saga into the full context of Kyrie’s history as a public pseudo-intellectual, I don’t personally believe that he holds any serious ideological commitments to antisemitism. I don’t think he is purchasing spectacle in the same way as Kanye West. From flat eartherism to vaccine mandates, what we can glean from Kyrie’s cultural output, outside of sick handles and laser-guided pull-ups, is an affinity for adopting fringe intellectual positions as a shorthand for communicating intelligence. He is a free thinker you see. He doesn’t accept the official narratives handed down to him by those who set the acceptable bounds of conversation, instead, he seeks alternate opinions and narratives and makes up his mind for himself.
And honestly, on some level, I can’t really fault him for that. Questioning hegemonic assumptions is the basis for critical theory. It's a crucial part of my leftist ideological project and I’m really in no position to criticize someone for challenging conventional wisdom. At the end of the day, the difference between me and Kyrie may just come down to which YouTube videos the algorithm put in front of us.
Kyrie the person isn’t really the issue we should be talking about. What’s important to understand is how narratives like the one he shared can capture the imaginations of so many of his fans. His supporters have not walked back their defense of his actions, because unlike Kyrie they don’t have a max NBA contract on the line. And their commitment to these kinds of problematic ideas isn’t rooted in a desire to appear smarter than their peers. Well, at least not entirely anyway. There are deeper forces at work, not the least of which is Black masculinity.
Rachel Nichols Said Nothing Wrong
To once again quote the famed philosopher Robert Rihmeek Williams: “It’s levels to this shit”.
There are two main kinds of defense online when it comes to Kyrie and From Hebrews to Negros. The first is somewhat benign on the surface, the assertion that while the movie he shared is dumb and wrong, the only reason why the NBA and the media are coming down so hard on him is that they are trying to bring a Strong Black Man™ to heel. For these Kyrie defenders, a bit of casual and largely incidental antisemitism on Kyrie’s part pales in comparison to the entrenched anti-Black sentiment that pervades America. It’s this entrenched racism that allows powerful white people to get away with saying racist shit all the time, while any Black person that steps out of line must be punished swiftly and definitively.
You may recognize the general structure of this argument. It’s the hierarchy of oppression.
The problem is that this just isn’t that true anymore in the age of commercial wokeness. Anti-Black racism is still aided and abetted by power structures in America but the mechanical operations of oppression are much more esoteric and hidden within structural biases. They are obscured by a pop culture operating under a fiduciary responsibility to appear nominally anti-racist. This is a long-winded way of saying that public white figures just can’t get away with saying froggy shit anymore.
Donald Sterling (who, it always needs to be said, received an award from the NAACP) was forced into selling the Los Angeles Clippers when audio surfaced of his cartoonishly racist arguments with his mistress. The same goes for Robert Sarver who is selling the Phoenix Suns after an investigation found that he was the driving force behind an abusive, racist and misogynistic workplace culture. Sarver and Sterling aren’t random racist hotel workers who call the police when a Black person is Blacking too much and too close to their general vicinity. These are NBA owners and billionaires, the most powerful people in the sport, forced to sell billion-dollar assets against their will because of documented cases of overt racism. Kyrie is being asked to donate a tiny part of his net worth and meet with some people.
The thing that frustrates me with this kind of argument is that these are the same people who demand immediate and perpetual penance for any perceived racism on the part of white people. Sometimes it’s deserved, like when Jon Gruden lost his NFL head coaching job after emails surfaced where he made undeniably racist remarks. Other times, it's less clear cut, like when Rachel Nichols lost her job as an NBA reporter when she complained to another colleague that her losing the NBA finals halftime gig to a younger and less experienced Black woman journalist was part of ESPN’s largely hollow commitment to appear diverse.
Let’s say a white player had shared The Trayvon Hoax, another documentary based on a book and available on Amazon, that claims a conspiracy to cover up Trayvon Martin’s complicity in his own death through a fake girlfriend and false witness testimony. And let’s say that player was given a similar set of conditions from the NBA to keep his job. I find it hard to believe that Black twitter would complain that the punishment is too harsh.
That brings us to the other kind of Kyrie defense, which we don’t need to talk about too much because it’s simply a matter of Black antisemitism. These are the kinds of people who accept the general premise of Hebrews to Negros and feel Kyrie’s punishment is the product of a Jewish-controlled media. There’s not much to say about the substance of this argument other than that it signifies the portent of some kind of Black skin/brown shirt alliance. We’ll touch on that a bit later.
You’re the man now, dog.
What links the hierarchy of oppression argument to the straight-up antisemitic one is a misguided defense of Black masculinity. There is a sense that Black men reside at the very bottom of people's thoughts around representation and inclusivity. Going by statistics this doesn’t really seem like a legit take. By most metrics, Black women still deal with more violence, more discrimination in the workplace, and less access to positions of power and privilege. But from a sociological perspective, there is some truth to this general idea.
Black masculinity suffers under the weight of an enforced dichotomy when it comes to representative depictions in popular culture. There is the omnipresent caricature of the hyper-violent, misogynistic, borderline sociopathic Black male. An image that is celebrated as an antihero in urban ballads and vilified on the local evening news and born from neo-slavery era propaganda. On the other end of the spectrum is the upstanding patriarchal male. The Sidney Poitier of it all. It’s telling that for my generation the personification of Black male respectability was Bill Cosby.
The former is unquestionably self-destructive as evidenced by the many recent tragic high-profile murders of rappers like PnB Rock and Takeoff. The latter is becoming largely unattainable because of both the deteriorating economic conditions under late-stage capitalism that limit the opportunities for an upstanding middle-class life and the changing attitudes around patriarchy and women's roles in society. As a Black man, you can either consign yourself to the nihilistic inevitability of urban violence and social exclusion (unless you sign a record deal) or you can dedicate yourself to the increasingly Sisyphean task of constructing the Black version of white patriarchal bliss.
Of course, most Black men don’t fit neatly into this dichotomy, myself very much included. And there are many of us dedicated to building a new kind of Black masculinity that doesn’t rely on hierarchical power for self-worth. But for some, more than you might expect there is a sense that there is a hole where positive Black masculinity should be. They feel like something was taken not just from Black people as a whole but Black men in particular. They aren’t wrong but they aren’t right either.
Strange Bedfellows
There can be a tendency within populations of oppressed peoples for some to adopt the aesthetics and tactics of their oppressors. This happens because the oppressors are often the only example of power and its application that the oppressed are given. There is a desire not to deconstruct systems of power and exploitation but rather to see oneself represented in them. Therefore, systematic explanations for alienation and exclusion that Black men experience are ignored in favor of convoluted conspiracies of “they” and what “they” don’t want you to know.
It’s hard to not see the parallels between this kind of Black patriarchal conspiratorial thinking and the white nationalist great replacement rhetoric that drives the Qanon conspiracy and other proto-fascist movements in America. I mean…they both end up blaming the Jews.
I am in no way suggesting Kyrie Irving is a fascist. The point is that the appeal of a movie and book like Hebrews to Negros is the exact same appeal that drives scores of disaffected young white men to the arms of Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson. The idea that there was a mythic and sacred past stolen from you by nefarious forces who are afraid of your true power is the driving force behind fascistic rhetoric. It's a simple tale of good versus evil and an easy explanation for the complicated feelings around living as an atomized and alienated individual in a chaotic world.
There is a tendency among white liberals to view the Black community as a monolithic entity representing some idea of perfect victimhood. Because of our undeniable marginalization, we must all react to that mistreatment with the same non-violent grace, dignity, and responsibility of a Sidney Portier character or Dr. King in the one speech he ever gave. Anything else is an aberration, an example of opportunistic grift or exploitation as a useful idiot for foreign hostile actors. Remember when Russia was supposedly driving anti-police protests to hurt democrats?
In reality, we are just people. Susceptible to the same kinds of ego-massaging rhetoric that can either power righteous revolution or horrific violence against other marginalized identities. Like Jewish people, or Black Women. Democratic politicians and pundits are very quick to blame Black men when we do not uphold our responsibility as the dependable backbone of the party coalition. Stacey Abrams and Keisha Lance-Bottoms preemptively suggested that Abrams's eventual gubernatorial loss to Brian Kemp was due to Black men being susceptible to misinformation as well as a touch of misogynoir against Black women in positions of leadership. There may be some truth to that. There also may be an issue with Abrams girl boss, gatekeep, gaslight energy on the campaign trail along with promising to raise the pay and numbers of police or with Lance-Bottoms pushing through a $90 million playground for cops and destroying Atlanta’s last remaining greenspace in the process.
At the end of the day, the cause of Black men’s alienation isn’t Black women, it isn’t the LGTBQ community, and it isn’t a Jewish conspiracy to usurp our role as God’s chosen people. It’s capitalism, the same thing that causes everyone else’s alienation. An automated system for extracting profit that depends on an alienated and fungible labor force. That Jewish people, Black women, Asians, and other marginalized groups of people participate in this system is in no way related to their personal identities. The problem is that liberals and the left in general aren’t offering a compelling alternative narrative. White people grow up in this country with a learned sense of normative whiteness. When that normative whiteness is questioned, some white people look for simple narratives that can reaffirm their position at the top of the hierarchy. Similarly, many Black men are raised in a patriarchal milieu, a kind of cosmic misogynistic background radiation. When lived experience does not affirm Black men’s perceived place in the hierarchy, we too can look for simple narratives to explain why this is.
Kyrie served as an example of how appealing these kinds of narratives can be. His supporters demonstrated how deep this commitment to the oppression Olympics runs within marginalized communities. Irving was called out and called in. For the sake of his career and perhaps a genuine realization of the damage he caused, he’s making amends and saying the right things, but in that moment where this all began it’s important to note how his fortune and celebrity did not inoculate him from seeking answers to feelings of alienation. The proof is right there in his initial defense of posting the movie: “I can’t be antisemitic if I know where I come from.”
Knowing where you come from is a popular way to deal with feelings of alienation, and it's something that has and continues to be deprived from the Black experience. Kyrie represents the deep need that many of us have for connection to something greater than us and more meaningful than the circumstances we find ourselves in. There must be a way to fulfill that need in a way that promotes solidarity between marginalized identities instead of pitting us all against each other in a struggle for limited space within an unjust and unnecessary identitarian hierarchy. Because in the end, mythical narratives and hatred toward demographically identified enemies won't save us.
Solidarity will.
Solidarity forever.
Homework:
There are a lot of aspects of this that I didn’t cover and to that end, I would highly recommend Black Breadtuber F.D. Signifier’s videos on the manosphere that delve deeper into the topic of masculinity and how the search for meaning and connection can lead people down some dark and deeply stupid paths.