“But apparently, we humans also share 60% of our DNA with a banana. How arbitrary is that? Half of our genes have counterparts in bananas! We are just a bunch of very complicated and violent bananas.”

aus: Xiaolu Guo: A Chinese-born writer’s quest to understand the Vikings, Normans and life on the English coast, Guardian online, 15.8.24, im Internet.

Abb.: Thomas Baumgärtel: Banane am Kreuz, 1983, im Internet.

08/24

“Guilt … is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since then it is no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication, it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness. …

I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices.”

aus: Aude Lorde, zitiert durch: Emma Dabiri: What white people can do next, o.O.: Penguin Random House UK 2021, S.92.

Abb.: Poster Rex (gegründet durch Markus Lange und Lars Harmsen), 2014-

08/24

“Unfortunately, much of the present ‘anti-racist’ conversation is ahistorical and lacking in this analysis. It is also generally devoid of analysis of class or capitalism, which it seems to have largely replaced with interpretation of interpersonal ‘privilege’. …

It is far more persuasive to be presented with a clear vision of the type of society we want to create because we all stand to benefit from it, rather than being chastised to transfer your ‘privilege’ to a ‘black‘ person, especially when the steps about how to actually do that are the best vague and nebulous. …

[For example, Holiday Philips writes,] ‘An ally is someone from a non-marginalized group who uses their privilege to advocate for a marginalized group … They transfer the benefits of their privilege to those who lack it.’

First of all, this is wildly generic. Who is the ‘non-marginalized group’ and who is the ‘marginalized’? … Many white people are not in possession of enough privilege to transfer its benefits to anyone. … Moreover, how would they transfer it?

Are the benefits of the ‘privilege’ we are demanding they transfer merely material benefits extracted through the exploitation of the poor? Of migrants? Of sweatshop labourers? Of the environment? Because the mainstream anti-racist conversation is conveniently devoid of any analysis of class or capitalism, this crucial question is left unanswered, and the ”transfer of privilege’ to ‘marginalized groups’, irrespective of individual circumstances (these transfers always seem to be framed in terms of individuals rather than systems), starts to look like the transfers of resources to people in the global north – who, although members of ‘marginalized groups’, still often have structural privilege over other people with whom they might share racial, but not class, identities. …”

aus: Emma Dabiri: What white people can do next, o.O.: Penguin Random House UK 2021, S.5, 16, 22, 23.

Abb.: Jaelin-doodles: End your privilege, im Internet.

08/24

“This unconscious tendency to double down on the racial categories ‘black‘ and ‘white’, making blanket statements about the behaviours, beliefs, actions and desires of diverse groups of people unified under fictive, generic ‘races’, highlights how many of us still apparently believe that race exists as a natural biological reality. I have serious reservations about popular social movements, however well intended, that reinforce a reinvestment in racial categories in this way. ‘Allyship’ being described as a ‘selfless act’ exacerbates the division, assuming a fundamental and immutable separateness between ‘different’ ‘races’, offering charity at the expense of solidarity. … With … its fetishizing of privilege without any clear means of transferral, as well as the ways in which it actively reinforce whiteness, allyship is not only up to the task, it is in many ways counterproductive. …

Race is one of the most powerful, seductive and enduring myths of the last four centuries … The concept of a ‘white race’ and a ‘black race’ … is a socially engineered concept invented with a very specific intention in mind. That intention was racism. Until we understand this beginning, there will be no happy ending. … We have to at least attempt to imagine outside and beyond the race logic inherited from long-dead élite European me, and conceive other ways of dreaming, living and being.

aus: Emma Dabiri: What white people can do next, o.O.: Penguin Random House UK 2021, S.14, 19, 27, 142.

08/24

“Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. … [war der] Gründervater des amerikanischen Pragmatismus. … Richter Richard Posner fasste Holmes’ Position einmal zustimmend in die Worte, er habe das Recht ‘in die vorherrschende öffentliche Meinung‘ verwandelt, ‘ähnlich wie Nietzsche die Moral in die öffentliche Meinung verwandelte’. … Holmes bedeutenster Schüler war John Dewey … Wie es scheint, kann Demokratie für Dewey auf der vermeintlich gewaltlosen Idee erwachsen, dass Menschen andere Menschen besitzen können, nicht aber aus den gewaltsamen Mitteln, mit denen dieser Unterstellung ein Ende gemacht wurde.”

aus: Omri Boehm: Radikaler Universalismus jenseits von Identität. Berlin: Ullstein 2023 (engl. Orig.-Ausg. 2022), S.87-98.

Abb.: Robert Gober: Hanging Man – Sleeping Man, 1989, Neues Museum Nürnberg.

08/24

“Indem er aufzeigte, dass menschliche Mündigkeit von Verantwortung abhängt, sagte … [Kant] uns zwar nicht wirklich, was Menschen sind, sondern vor allem, was sie nicht sind: Sie sind keine Naturgeschöpfe. … Während es sinnvoll geworden ist, von Tierrechten zu sprechen, ergibt die Rede von Tierpflichten keinen Sinn. … Anders als Naturgeschöpfe … sind Menschen frei, moralische Zwecke zu verfolgen. Deshalb sollten sie selbst kategorisch als Zwecke und nie als bloße Mittel behandelt werden. Sie haben nicht einfach einen Wert – wie ihn Dinge dadurch erlangen können, dass sie benutzt werden. Sie verfügen vielmehr über eine Würde, die ‘üer allen Preis erhaben’, also absolut ist. Wie Kant in der Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten erklärt:

‘Alles [hat] entweder einen Preis, oder eine Würde. Was einen Preis hat, an dessen Stelle kann auch etwas anderes als Äquivalent gesetzt werden; was dagegen über allen Preis erhaben ist, mithin kein Äquivalent verstattet, … hat nicht bloß einen relative Werth, d.i. einen Preis, sondern einen innern Werth, d.i. Würde.’ …

Sklaverei ist die paradigmatische Verletzung dieses absoluten Grundsatzes, weil sie auf der systematischen Reduktion von Menschen auf bloße Mittel basiert.”

aus: Omri Boehm: Radikaler Universalismus jenseits von Identität. Berlin: Ullstein 2023 (engl. Orig.-Ausg. 2022), S.49-51.

Abb.: Felix Droese: Reise ins Glück, 1992, Produzentengalerie Hamburg, im Internet.

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