“ The argument, in its simplest form, will be that we love race — we love identity — because we don’t love class. We love thinking that the differences that divide us are not the differences between those of us who have money and those who don’t but are instead the differences between those who are black and those who are white or Asian or Latino or whatever.
— Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality
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Walter Benn Michaels
cultural identity
race
inequality
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“ If there were no such facts or truths, if the world invariably and unresistingly became whatever we might like or wish it to be, we would be unable to distinguish ourselves from what is other than ourselves and we would have no sense of what in particular we ourselves are. It is only through our recognition of a world of stubbornly independent reality, fact, and truth that we come both to recognize ourselves as beings distinct from others and to articulate the specific nature of our own identities.
How, then, can we fail to take the importance of factuality and of reality seriously? How can we fail to care about truth?
We cannot.
— Harry G. Frankfurt, On Truth
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Harry G. Frankfurt
truth
“ We live at a time when, strange to say, many quite cultivated individuals consider truth to be unworthy of any particular respect. It is well known, of course, that a cavalier attitude toward truth is more or less endemic within the ranks of publicists and politicians, breeds whose exemplars characteristically luxuriate in the production of bullshit, of lies, and of whatever modes of fraudulence and fakery they are able to devise. That is old news, and we are accustomed to it.
— Harry G. Frankfurt, On Truth
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Harry G. Frankfurt
truth
2 notes
