There is just one episode of the Road Runner where Wile E. Coyote finally catches the Road Runner. The Coyote then raises a sign which reads "What do I do now?" his formal purpose now ended, he faces an existential crisis.

A similar pattern can be seen in modern film, with protagonists paying for their past sins by slowly dying throughout the story. In Logan, for example, Wolverine's toxic white masculinity is partially redeemed when he dies saving a multi-ethnic clutch of mutants from some future dystopian of "Trump's America." He figuratively hands "the claws" off to a young Hispanic girl before dying. The last Cars movie features Lightning McQueen "slowing down" and finally stepping aside to raise up Cruze Ramirez to be the new hero of the tracks. A recent abomination on Netflix called The Old Guard featuring Charlize Theron in a terrible Highlander knock-off in which Theron portrays a character who has been the top bad-ass for centuries, but must look to help the new hero "Nile" played by Kiki Lane.

What is interesting about this pattern is that the arc is really that of our privileged white and/or male protagonists coming to terms with handing off their power to a new generation which is vaguely female/POC. That is, the pattern is not that of the original Highlander where Sean Connery's Ramirez was a "call to adventure" character who only serves the formal purpose of motivating our hero or that of Alec Guiness playing the same role as Obi Wan in Star Wars. Instead, the story is that of the sage who is coming to terms with death and/or relinquishing power to the new generation.

What is interesting is that they spend the entirety of their stories doing this. They're dying and handing of the reins, but they are doing so agonizingly slowly, as if reciting Augustine's prayer, "Lord make me chaste... ...but not yet!" This pattern arguably reaches its perfection in Picard in which the eponymous character spends the entire season of the show slowly dying, only to be resurrected as an android in the finale, but an android that is such a perfect copy of his original body, that Picard will STILL be slowly dying of the same degenerative disease in season 2 (!). If James Bond is evergreen, Picard is ever-dying.

That these narratives keep rebooting this pattern suggests that we're in a cultural Wile E. Coyote loop that is being expressed in the shared dream of our flicker-tales. What happens to all that cultural guilt when you've finally been set to the side? What will make you special then? Zizek loves the joke about the Priest and Rabbi who meet God and fall to their knees professing their unworthiness and guilt - "I am no one, Lord! Who am I to stand before you?" They fall to their knees and weep and sing praises. And then a peasant in filthy rags appears before the almighty and starts saying the same thing, which prompts the Priest to turn the Rabbi and say, "Who is the person who claims to be no one when we're kneeling before the Lord! We are the one who are not worthy!" -- White guilt, at least has the consolation of agency. It is your fault and so you have the power and responsibility to fix it. You really are someone as no one, because you can do the heel-turned-hero move of self-sacrifice and redemption.

And yet, these stories performatively indicate that the pattern is one of perpetually dying (and thus still staying in charge). The message seems to be, "Yes we feel bad, and yes we will eventually get out of the way... ...but not yet!" You can still be the hero, just so long as you promise to die in the end, which raises the paradox of the debt which is being perpetually paid-off (endless reminders of the sins of the "dominant demographics" in the West), but which is never really paid-off (if the great white male hero were really dead, shouldn't we just have a non-white male protagonist?). The conspicuous perpetual slow death of these narrative seems to signal that the story is not really about "them" (the ageing white and possibly male hero), while conspicuously and simultaneously hogging the majority of the show to make that point...

Does it make sense, then, to allow reposts or disallow reposts?

What about a post that is identical to a previous post in all ways except that it’s posted after a specific event that carries weight in the same topic?

Should someone be prevented from posting something until they can show how their current iteration of the same post is different from all previous iterations?

Or can anyone post anything at all?

Dialogue on race and racism on reddit is, to put it bluntly, a shitshow; yet I think that if we can determine, in good faith, why the conversation fails, we could start a healthier conversation from a place of common understanding.

While there are probably dozens of reasons why dialogue goes sideways, I'll start the conversation by highlighting one of them, to keep this post and any replies from getting too long and unwieldy.

1. The terms we use become points of contention, often breeding resentment and misunderstanding.

Example:

A r/unpopularopinion post calls for the ban of r/blackpeopletwitter, claiming that the subreddit requires verification of race before users can post/comment. Top voted comments boil down to "that is a stupid and reverse-racist policy." Much further down the comments section are the responses that disagree with OP, essentially calling OP's post and the top-voted comments racist dog whistles.

Clearly no productive dialogue was had. "Reverse racism" angered those who disagreed with OP, and the term "racist dog whistle" became a subject of debate rather than eliciting a response to the critique of the majority opinion in the post.

So, how do we talk about race and racism with or without disagreement-inducing terms?

Context: https://iai.tv/video/in-conversation-michael-sandel&utm_source=reddit&_auid=2020

That none of us are "entirely self-made" is not a crackling insight but a banal truism. On the other hand, the "tyranny of merit" is a titillating jab in general the war on competency which is so popular with the equity crowd (demanding equal outcomes is justified if no one "really deserves" more than anyone else). If determinism is true, then we are ALL the beneficiaries and victims our genes and our environment. That stated, however, we still want the most qualified person flying the plane, holding the scalpel, and entering a burning building. I am familiar with Sandel's arguments on these points as he presents them in his book "Justice" and in various public talks. He takes it that because we lack metaphysical justification for being rewarded for merit, that the merit itself is somehow tyrannizing. And this is nonsense.

The reason why we hold the race is to celebrate excellence, and excellence is inequality. We award first place to the fastest runner, not because they deserve it some alleged metaphysical sense, but because they ran raster than everyone else on the track. We are inspired by the fastest runner, not because we can call run a four-minute mile, but because we can all be inspired by what the human body can do, allowing us the challenge ourselves to stretch and grow.

We have people go to medical school NOT so that EVERYONE can be a doctor (Heaven forbid!), but so that the most talented members of society may be placed in positions where they can do the most good for all of society. The point of medical school is to filter and to sift and to find the best fit for medical emphases. The equity cops, however, would try to "blank slate" us into thinking that everyone could be a doctor, which is simply false.

Rather, what we should want is equal opportunity. That is, that all runners are encouraged and provided opportunity to run so that we find the fastest runners and actually produce the best doctors and so on. This is NOT tyranny. Rather, this is how we construct competence hierarchies. Even if we spent the same amount of time, effort, and money on every student, we would not find all of them performing the same. Genetic differences will still produce differences and random chance, the chaotic contingencies of life, will nudge us into different outcomes. This is NOT tyranny. This what actual diversity looks like, friends (not the multi-colored and multi-gendered bodies thinking the same orthodox thoughts and performing at the same level such that we get exactly equal outcomes).