The Terms “Post-This” and “Post-That” — as Indicators of an Inability to Think and Communicate

28 May 2015

Pretentious intellectuals piss me off

Consider the title, “The Fire This Time: Black Youth and the Spectacle of Postracial Violence.”

I suppose its well-intended author meant to indicate that bad things are happening via his metaphorical use of fire. But there is no clear indication of the manner in which black youth are related to the spectacle of violence. Are they bystanders watching commotion or creators of it?

The author compounds this fuzziness by tossing in “postracial” — despite the fact that we are certainly not in a race-unconscious era. Perhaps he meant the reference ironically. If so, irony is difficult enough to grasp, without further confusing it with wobbly semantics.

The term “post-anything” often reveals a misunderstanding of the incessant continuity of change

What comes after post-this? Post-post-this? Subsequent-post-that?

Was the author’s title just poorly chosen for an otherwise brilliant work?

Probably not. What would you make of the following gray matter skittering?

Young people in the United States, especially poor people of color, are faced with a sense of hopelessness in the future that is almost unparalleled in recent history and is a script for despair and reckless violence.

But when hopelessness moves beyond itself and embraces the need to reclaim public memory, history and empowering forms of civic literacy, there is a space for developing new modes of understanding, insight and an alternative sense of the future.

It is within such critical and energizing spaces that new pedagogical and analytical frameworks emerge in which it becomes possible to imagine a new and more comprehensive understanding of politics, one that is right for a new historical conjuncture.

It is also a space in which to rethink the tactics, strategies and tools necessary to turn this newly discovered truth into an event, one in which hope merges with indignation, the ethical imagination and new political formations as part of a broader struggle to create a radical democracy.

That is the challenge young people face today, but it is certainly not only their challenge. As [James] Baldwin once stated, it is "time to go for broke."

One of my law professors once said that intellectuals and academics often intentionally make themselves unclear, so as to escape accountability

He complimented one of his demanding (and just deceased) colleagues by saying, “He did not suffer fools gladly.”

I think self-soothingly back to this conversation, when I wonder whether my irritation with semantically pretentious academic types is morally acceptable. I concluded, as both professors evidently did, that somebody’s got to have standards, or else everything goes to shit.

The moral? — If you want someone to read and act on what you wrote . . .

Assemble words in ways that reveal the ability to think accurately and communicate understandably.

PeteFree.com

The Terms “Post-This” and “Post-That” — as Indicators of an Inability to Think and Communicate