The Sound of White Christian Privilege.

I don’t usually disagree with someone so much that I feel compelled to go toe-to-toe with them over Tumblr, but I just came across this “brief take on the mosque controversy in New York,” and it made me wanna freestyle. Because I cringed all the way through his argument, and I realized that this was the discourse of privilege in action:

As I see it, the World Trade Center was taken down by a fundamentalist Islamic group, in the name [of] Islam, and that’s the key. To put a mosque in the place of (or relatively near) what was the focal point of a religious attack in the name of that religion is almost like rewarding the attackers.  (And don’t you think that the Taliban, and Al-Quada would be celebrating this fact — “We took down their World Trade Center and get a mosque in its place.” Is there a better invitation to encourage further attacks?)

The first thing I want to talk about this line where he says the construction of a Ground Zero Mosque, as they call it, is like “rewarding the attackers.” The word “reward” is significant because it depicts a position of power: Only a person with money, for example, can reward a person without money. So when this writer — and Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich — use similar rhetoric to campaign against this mosque, they are also implying that they have the power to “reward” someone with something that is already guaranteed by the Constitution. In their minds, they can.

We saw this position of power at work with Proposition 8, where one class of people’s “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” was put up to a popular vote. The oblivious nature of privilege means that there are thousands of people who could not understand why this was problematic — largely because their rights would never be put up to a popular vote. That’s the privilege.

Of course, there is also a discourse of fear being wielded in this argument — “Is there a better invitation to encourage further attacks?” — and that’s because fear is historically how the hegemony gets its way. It’s a note that would have only seemed odd in its omission.

There are hundreds and hundreds of places in New York City to build a mosque and a cultural center.  Is there any necessity to its placement near the WTC site? Of course not. And wouldn’t that placement be akin to building a booth for selling Confederate flags, and paraphenalia from the Confederacy at the place where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated? Doesn’t that involve the same kind of sensitivities?

The next brilliant ploy of privilege is group consensus. When you are in the majority, there are certain things you take for granted. Like, for example, how a Muslim place of worship becomes somehow analogous to the pro-slavery Confederate because we said so. But to answer his question, this does not involve “the same kind of sensitivities” at all. By even having this conversation, we are immediately Othering the Muslim victims of 9/11, and telling their families that their religion itself is beyond the pale of decency — according to so-called sensitive peace-loving and overwhelmingly white Christians everywhere.

The privilege of group consensus means that one group of people in America is able to tell another group of people that my ancient myth is better than your ancient myth with a self-imposed authority that allows them to decide what “decency” and “sensitivity” means in the first place.

The point of this post is to lift the veil and get to the heart of the matter, because no one is really saying it: The Ground Zero mosque debate is not about “sensitivity” as much as it is about the exertion of white Christian supremacy in America.

stuckintransit asked: What do you think of the current hardcore scene?

I probably sat here for ten minutes looking at this question and thinking, “I don’t know!”

Honestly, I haven’t had a ton of hardcore cred in a long time, and I stopped going to shows for fun many, many years ago. But when I think about the potential I saw in the hardcore scene when I first discovered it in 1986 — and when I realize that was twenty-four years ago — I can’t help but feel like, to some extent, I was given a post-dated check that I’ll never be able to cash.

So all I have are more questions.

Like, how is it that even though 7 Seconds sang “Not Just Boys Fun” in 1984, the hardcore scene is still a totally male-dominated subculture? Or, if hardcore is about revolution and change, why is it that the scene is totally unwilling to give up on rote traditions like slamdancing and stage-diving? And why was I always the only non-white kid singing along to “Break Down The Walls” at Youth of Today shows in 1988? What is it about hardcore that — in spite of its literally hundreds of anti-racist songs and fanzines and T-shirts — still utterly fails to attract more people of color today? Also, is it weird that hardcore kids spend hundreds of dollars on 25-year-old T-shirts when they could be spending that money on things that really matter in the world? Is it about mining for nostalgia or forward-thinking?

The hardcore scene influenced my life in profound ways, and I will always owe an amazing debt to it. But it’s flawed, and I wouldn’t be paying that debt by pretending that it’s not. As for my own personal experience — and this might be an unpopular thing to say — I’d argue that the scene itself is something like the Buddhist parable of the raft: We build a raft to cross a river, but if we continue to carry that raft on our backs once we reach the shore, it can only weigh us down. If we’re going to move forward, we need to abandon the raft, and leave it for the next person.

sayyes asked: Which interview you've done for an article has affected you the most?

I know that it feels like I should talk about a positive experience, but actually, the first experience that comes to mind was also the worst: It was the time I flew down to Washington, D.C. to write a Tool cover story for Alternative Press in 1997.

I’d love to tell you the whole story — and one day, I will write this all down — but for now, I’ll distill it into this synopsis: I have never met any one group of people so collectively deluded about their own so-called artistry as I did that day. Their naive sense of entitlement was absolutely staggering, and at the end of the day, I called my editor and told him that I would not be writing this piece after all. He’d have to send someone else to get treated like a moron, I told him, because that’s not what I tell people I do for a living.

It ultimately affected me because, at this point in my life, I realize this was a major missed opportunity. The story was there, but I was too caught up in my anger to see it: It was the best 4,000-word argument for humility that I never wrote.