In a larger perspective, we agree on far more than we disagree, and as this discussion moves forward, the area of difference becomes increasingly small. Yet, in every difference no matter small, there is room for infinite life and activity.

It is good to have this discussion with you. You, who may be anonymous, have something of an identity, a body. You are embodied in syntax and style, in the range and scope of your arguments, in your relationship to me. Thank goodness you aren’t an idea in the heavens, but a concrete, realized reality that can be engaged. You are not anonymous; everything identified has a name.

And, yet, because of your stance, both nameless and named, perhaps I know you, perhaps I don’t, it is very difficult to put ideas into action, to build a community of action, to do anything with these ideas. In the name of freeing the idea from the name, we have enslaved the idea from the active being. Because we treat the symptom and not the cause, we foster the façade of equal communication (by stripping everyone of their names) without providing the actual substance, (and ironically, without actually stripping people of names – they merely replace one body for another). If everyone, for instance, wore uniforms to school, would that do anything about oppression? If everyone were forced to wear the same color, would we not find some other identifying mark, some other means of oppressing one person over another?

My argument is simple. We have not freed the person from oppression merely by stripping the clothing of oppression, just as we haven’t taken even one step toward ending oppression simply because white people don’t say “nigger” to African Americans or “bitch” to women. In fact, all that has done has helped create closet racists and closet sexists who clothe their oppression in ways that’s harder to understand. It’s a lot more hidden than the white cloth of the Klu Klux Klan.

What’s more by making our communication more anonymous, not only have we not freed ourselves from the substance of the oppression, we have also not freed ourselves from names. The names are only different and harder to understand. I know who you are somehow, “anonymous blogger,” and yet you insist on speaking a different language that we must work harder to translate.

Even more than that, there is quite a bit of value in being able to identify people as people, to being a somebody, since those identifications of ideas with people are the only means we have of joining together, befriending each other, and taking active resistance. I can’t organize with an idea in the sky. What’s annoying about the Churchill talk wasn’t that it was Ward Churchill but that people seem more interested in his ideas than in organizing with the man. So, I’d say the reverse is true. We pay too much attention to ideas as ideas than to people as people. Why Ward Churchill and not you? Why is there so much attachment to a man who is a brilliant scholar, who has great ideas, and hence to the value of idea over anything else, and then the attachment of that name to that idea, and not an attachment to the man? We need people and beings with which to organize; we can’t do anything with a mere, bodyless idea, even if there were such a thing.

This was intended to be a small preface. I wanted to get specifically to some of your other remarks.

So what are my main arguments and counter-arguments? The sexism/genitalia analogy is flawed because genitalia are physiological structures the removal of which would cause pain and continued discomfort.

I wasn’t making an argument by analogy; all arguments by analogy are flawed because it’s not by virtue of something being like something else that something is true but the reasons that make both true. Analogies are used simply like new clothes to illustrate the reasons of a point; they are linguistic expressions intended to shed light that other words couldn’t shed. Analogies being what they are, you can always point to a critical difference, or else they wouldn’t be analogies. Similar triangles are not necessarily congruent ones. So, of course, there’s a difference between psychological and physical pain, but my point wouldn’t change if I could give you a pill that would take away all the physical pain. The oppression relationship does not therefore change simply because you take away one of the key symptoms defining the oppression relationship. A lot of Churchill’s point about colonialism is the same as the point I am making here.

A better analogy might be forgoing men's vs women's traditional clothing. Since such clothing has traditionally been associated with particular roles and pre-conceptions about the relative "place" of males and females in society, it's not a bad idea to prevent such pre-conceptions from even being a possibility in a given environment by simply having both men and women dress the same way. And to a certain extent that's what happened in the business world, where women started wearing clothing that more closely resembled traditional men's suits.

I would argue that you simply exchange one oppression relationship for another. When the emphasis on sexual equality comes by making sure people are wearing the same kinds of uniforms, then you’ve merely enforced conformity without there actually being a change in the understanding. The example you used about the workplace happened the other way around. Because people challenged the value judgments about the differences between men and women, some women felt more free to dress as men. Unfortunately, at the same time patriarchy has not been successfully challenged so that you have both women and men both fighting for patriarchal ideals. It’s natural that when you challenge an oppression relationship that it’s likely to look different afterwards as people change their mode of expression, but the mode of expression is not the same as the reason for the oppression relationship. The modes only help give us metaphors for what’s really going on.

Now you can argue, as you tried to do, that such an act is silly. Instead of removing the "causative agent" of perceived sexism (the clothes), why not simply have everyone rid themselves of the pre-conceived notions they attach to particular types of clothing? Then men and women can wear whatever they want, and it's up to the rest of society to stop making value judgements about those particular types of clothing.

Well, ok, then why not carry that argument to words like "bitch" and "nigger"? Jim, you should start calling black people "niggers" and when they scream at you, you can just explain to them that they're being silly.

Why should I do that? My argument doesn’t entail that. The freeing of words and names from the value judgments attached to those words does not entail that I therefore should use those things; it simply entails that people should be free to use them. Of course, that’s a minor point since I don’t think that would change the essence of your argument.

We are going to have names that signify things which are ugly and horrible. “Ugly” and “horrible” are but words, and yet they do have a certain signification that we as a people generally agree upon, and they aren’t very nice. They represent a consensus in the way that “bitch” and “nigger” have as well in the history of oppressed peoples. Your point seems to be that the names that people have, when they attach themselves to ideas, should also have the same signification. You distrust them; they signify self-promotion, or whatever sin you think produces a hierarchical relationship. It tends to insult you in a certain way when I or others sign their names and dare to attach them to an idea; it taints and dirties the ideas we should be able to consider purely on their own terms. But, I have challenged the reasons to you behind giving the name such a foul signifier and suggested that it was not the real problem. In other words, I can still communicate to you as a named person, and we can still have a real conversation. If I use the word “bitch” to most women or “nigger” to a black person, what is my point? Why am I using them? For what purpose, and can there be a conversation about them? Surely, they are names, too, and history can change how names are used.

The larger point is that simply imposing a meaning on certain words does not erase the oppression. How many white people think they aren’t racist simply because they get so mad when others say “nigger?” Quite a few I’ve come across! And, I would even argue that it was understanding the fallacies of racism that produced such a consciousness about certain words and how they’ve been used historically to denigrate people that have created the aversion, not simply because there was a refusal to use certain words. The process is backwards.

So, even if there were something pernicious about using one’s own name or using any name that might be identified with an idea, the process isn’t to refuse to use it but rather to have conversations like the one you and I are having in order to convince each other about the values implicit in names. If the real value is as I argued last time fallacious, if you accept that intellect isn’t a higher value and that people having intellect aren’t to be valued more highly, why would you urge us to use names even less than we already do? Why would you turn the process backwards?

There may well come a time when white people can call black people "niggers" without any ill-will or hurt feelings of any kind. But few people would say that such a time is now.

Similarly, there may well come a time when people can attach their names to text without anyone even thinking of the possibility that it could be a back-handed way towards self-promotion. But I would argue that such a time is not now. The current entire cultural context (you admitted to this) is one of people being recognized and receiving "credit" for whatever actions they engage in. And in that cultural context, putting a name to text one writes is very difficult to divorce from the possibility of self-promotion. Until that cultural context changes, that possibility will always be the case.

This example assumes there is something fallacious in assuming that there’s a certain value just because a certain name is used. So, like I said, we aren’t that far removed. Afterall, we are both after an end to hierarchies and oppression – we simply don’t agree on the means of resistance.

And just as affirmative action was in part a way to attempt to change the cultural context with respect to racism, actively remaining anonymous can be viewed as part of an attempt to change the culture of property-ascriptive, hierarchical-valuation of people.

In previous essays, I have defended the need for some kind of affirmative action, especially in the sense that the oppressed class should work together to destroy the class relationship. I do disagree with the method, which I would consider mainstream and patriarchal, in which affirmative action has often been applied to destroy that relationship. I think many of the methods you here defend are many of the methods to which I would object, and yet I would argue that affirmative action is necessary and can be more robust and radical in its orientation. Affirmative action has been a big government solution that…….., but before I go into that, do we want to see that we are getting somewhere with this discussion? I think we are.

It would be great if we could discuss these things, as we often do, inside an affinity group or some other format, but alas, perhaps we already do.

Cheers,
Jim