30 March 2009: " “It Doesn’t Matter if Ur Black or White.” - Michael Jackson"

This post is about assimilation. While superficially Carles explores the dialectic of racial politics, which often vacillates between assimilative and separatist poles, he also makes a more radical intervention into the question stylistic assimilation, by which the homogenization of humankind occurs under the auspices of fashion. "Sometimes yall need 2 do more to think about the power of imagery. Fashion is more than just ‘trying 2 look cool.’ Fashion is an opportunity to celebrate culture, comment on history, and make other people think, kind of like a progressive freshman English class with a teach with a passionate, liberal-minded teacher." Of course, by citing such the example of the intellectually flabby and flatulent humanistic liberal-arts instructor, with his thread-bare ideology of human progress that so often boils down to a naive faith and prayer in the goodness of others and a stupefaction in the face of the realities of cruelty and oppression, Carles places the entire nexus of fashion and race under the sign of suspicion. The "comment on history" he means to suggest goes beyond the indelible stain of slavery but to the master-slave dialectic itself, so often "celebrated" as progress when in fact it is cementing our bondage. The "power of imagery" is such that it exceeds symbolification and spills into action, gestural behaviors that reinscribe the racial relations as relations pertaining to, at once, both more and less than race as a simple abstraction. The "human metaphors" he selects to illustrate his postulate show how race itself dissolves into metaphor, into the irresolvable paradoxes of language and semiotics. Race is the alibi for the figurative violence of signification. Hence it truly doesn't matter if "Ur Black or White" -- you are still scarred by the traumatic passage into the Symbolic.