Rage IS the machine?
A man of principle (me), reconsiders his body of work?
My buddy @ChrisCuomo is contemptuous of people who use rage as a currency or business model; they come on X or YouTube or put up a podcast and stoke fury in exchange for clicks or likes or follows or subscriptions. They monetize social unrest. I never saw myself that way. Never thought in terms of “prospecting” for new followers by mining outrage...and my modest follower count proves it. But I woke up this morning and had to look in the mirror and honestly assess the way I’ve been posting/writing about certain topics—notably race—and the ripple effect my output likely has had, even in my smallish pond.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe in everything I write/post; I’m invested. I can’t recall anything I’ve written, even long-form, where the primary objective was building an audience for profit. (My agents and publishers would not have been happy to hear that.) I wrote about what engaged and, yes, enraged me. But I did it as a kind of exorcism, to get it out of me. Yeah, sometimes I wanted to rile people up, but that’s because I thought the situation called for riling. I wasn’t doing it just to create havoc for its own sake or feed some general appetite for controversy.
I wrote—write—for myself. It has been thus ever since I began writing my first “seems to me” essays in third grade. My mom had saved these handwritten gems in a lovely folder for me, but like many such mementos, the folder disappeared through the course of the decades and moves from here to there.
Similarly, I tweet what I legitimately think. If others approve, wonderful. If they disapprove, even if it means I lose them, no skin off my large Neapolitan nose. This also helps explain why my follower count isn’t higher than I think it deserves to be. In the age of Godwin’s Law, TDS, and purity tests, “heterodox” thinking (a term popularized by Claire Lehmann to describe the open-minded intellectual eclecticism she hoped to showcase in her magazine, Quillette), is not a recipe for fan-base sustainability.
Backstory. When it comes to writing on race, I’m no whitey-come-lately. I did my first formal piece on race in 1970 for the Brooklyn College newspaper, the Kingsman, after the city university system switched to an “open admissions” acceptance model; this basically reserved a college slot for anyone with nine functioning neurons who managed to graduate from high school. Prior to that, Brooklyn College and several other city institutions had had high standards. Or let AI tell it*:
These incoming hordes needed to be accommodated, so the next semester portable structures began popping up all over campus, defiling the lovely greenbelts and grassy knolls. And though open admissions was pointedly designed to help black students, young people of all races who were indisputably “not college material” (as we were once allowed to say) soon were sitting alongside me in my various classes in those ghastly prefab buildings. I’m sorry, folks, but the odds that a student who barely squeaked through high school with a 66.7 GPA will perform at the level demanded by profs in the kinds of advanced coursework I took were about the same as the odds that BC would remain a lovely urban oasis with those fucking aluminum buildings everywhere. And in fact, for a variety of reasons, a staggering two-thirds of students admitted under the new policy failed to graduate within the usual four years.
Then in March 1981 I wrote this (amateurish and somewhat overwritten) piece for the New York Times. My purpose was to call attention to the casual anti-black racism I saw around me daily. So see, folks, I didn’t always wear a Klan hood while I wrote. Indeed, my first major piece, for Harper’s the following year, was extremely sympathetic to the denizens of Harlem, where I then worked as a salesman; if anything I wrote rather disdainfully of the stuffed-shirts and Stepford-wife types in midtown.
But my basic position from day one has been consistent and two-fold:
1, race, which is scientifically nonexistent anyway, is awful and needs to go away, and
2, any cognizance of race in formal policy is an un-American abomination.
As John McWhorter explained in his insightful and entertaining book on the subject, there is no such things a good racism. I have long felt pretty much equal contempt for the KKK and the NAACP; they differ only in degree.
Anyway, I’ve taken a long time working my way back to my main point, which is this: Yes, I still feel principled when I write, as in my most recent piece on those unfortunate diversity efforts in med schools. I believe that what I write deserves to be written and read. But increasingly of late I step back and take a more Cuomo-like look at the inevitable reception given my work, and I end up asking whether my “contributions” to the collective body of American thought are making matters worse. I can’t help but notice that every time I write a piece on race I’ll get truly bigoted comments about “those damn n—rs” as well as furious comments from black people who assume that I’m the kind of guy who walks around using the n-word all day.
So no matter how principled I think I am, I gotta wonder if I’m helping or hurting.
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*I’m not a fan of appeals to authority involving AI, but this was the easiest summary and I’m pressed for time: