Defense of Truth

Image from: http://www.theatricalcombat.com/Image%20Files/gallery/stickysituation/sticky3.jpg Intellectuals often feel a certain affiliation to cosmopolitanism. They are by and large concentrated in cities (and even there within universities), and are products of the modern refinement and departmentalization of knowledge and inquiry. Their thoughts, concerns and communications span the globe, but are generally so focused at an elite audience that between their cloistered mental departments and the smallness of their community they must formulate and nourish defensive attitudes and stances against the various localisms they must participate in but see beyond. In a quintessentially postmodern way (which is still quite modern nevertheless), they often choose to defend against localisms by celebrating the rootlessness of their modern condition--by celebrating ALL localisms. This is the elite sort of cosmopolitanism Friedman describes in his insightful article which I referenced weeks ago. ...

In a brilliant critique of the postcolonial concept of "hybridity" as a cosmopolitan goal for the mixing of humanity, Jonathan Friedman defines racism and essentialism in a surprisingly clear way before explaining how the implications of these concepts ensure that hybridity is a self-defeating philosophy. First, there are two separate arguments that are made in conjunction with racism: "All X are bearers of a set of traits, physical or cultural" Cultural traits are reducible to physical ones Point 1 above is racism proper (eg. all blacks have small brains but athletic physiques, or all blacks are naturally animist), and point 2 is merely essentialism--the idea that beings have an essence from which their traits and practices can be derived (eg. Blacks are naturally animist because their brains are too small to understand reason and empirical evidence) Which seems the more insidious to you: racism or essentialism? My reflexive answer would be essentialism of course, ...

I didn't want to become one of those grad students who takes forever to find out what he wants to study, so I entered the Masters program at PITT with an idea what I wanted to do as a dissertation: national identity in the Ivory Coast. It sounds like a straightforward enough concept, but I encountered an article while I was taking a history course which looked at several case studies of the construction of racial, ethnic, and gender identities over a variety of geographical locations and historical periods that made me radically re-think the entire concept of identity . It's a concept that makes intuitive sense to most people, I would imagine. It means who you are, right? The layperson could also probably understand quite readily that there seem to be many different levels at which our "identity" can be determined or constrained. A black person may feel more of a racial component to identity than a white person, for example. My religious identity takes primacy over my...