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There’s an essay at this rather vile alt right website:
which suggests that the neo nazis have rebranded “racialism” as “racism-lite.” The racist analogue to class consciousness?
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Not quite.
It essentially means ‘classified as non-white by society’, i.e. someone whom society treats as not a member of the
race.
For example, i am latinx but, probably because i have a middle-American accent and only slightly olive skin, people tend to classify me as white and hence i am not racialized.
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It’s not about want or desire, it’s about making good citizens. That’s it. If you want to live in a corporate hellscape, that’s how we get it, by adopting corporate ideas across all of society. Not everything should be about turning a quick buck. That’s how you get Trump in office, thinking that corporate models will solve all of our problems. They will not.
I refuse to give into this corporate attitude. I refuse to make myself a product to be sold on my value. I will retain my humanity in the process and I will continue to remind my students that there are alternatives to capitalist ideology. It’s depressing that so many people buy into the idea that we have to conform. Fuck ALL that noise.
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Where do you get the corporate thing? It’s a strawman argument. You’re blindly associating brand with commercial or corporate. I used the term brand, but that’s just shorthand for combination of perception, reputation, association, etc. around something. Companies use branding, but they don’t have a monopoly on it.
When you remind your students there are alternatives to capitalist ideology, are you an asshole about it, or are you decent about it? I am going to assume you are decent about it. You want them to form a positive perception of them. And guess what: you are crafting a brand for those alternatives. You’re doing exactly what I suggested: making them want to adopt your ideas.
Or maybe you’re not.
I see the logic there, but the term is used differently in different contexts, no?
I also see it used to refer to whites. The point in doing so is usually to say that even though whites often don’t think of their whiteness as being a particularly significant factor in their lives – that is, they’re rarely made aware of their own racial status – being perceived as white does indeed play a big part in their lives.
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Because it is literally a business concept and you can’t divorce it from that context! Even in the case of physical branding, the concept was to ensure that one’s cattles (which was part of one’s livelihood) was differentiated from those of others… and in the modern world, it’s about marketing, buying, and selling!
I refuse to be a product, even if I’m doing that marketing. I’m a human being.
I am not selling a product. If they want to get a good grade, they show up, particpate, and do the work. That’s it. I’m not selling them anything. I’m sharing the knowledge I’ve obtained over the 10 years of busting my ass doing my graduate degrees. I’m not selling myself or history. I’m telling them stories about the past to help them better understand the present. And NO, that is not fucking branding…
That’s not the point of teaching history!!! It’s not to sell them anything, it’s the increase their knowledge of the world and of showing them one way of understanding it! I don’t need them to be clones of my and adopt all my thinking… I just need them to understand the complexity of the world a bit better and to be able to do a little historical thinking. I don’t expect them all to just all adopt my own value system at the end of the semester. That’s not how that works.
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As always, I admire your extensive efforts here, but wouldn’t it be easier to just admit that as a secret Soros employee/indoctrinator, all you do is open up their innocent heads so you can turn them into socially engineered robots, by pooping in daily doses of vile cultural marxism?
(tee hee)
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But seriously, we wonder why we ended up with a “billionaire” reality TV star as president… precisely because we treat education (and literally everything else, including each other) as something to be bought and sold. We marketize EVERYTHING and we just sort of accept it, and then wonder why we’re in the sort of trouble we are as a… globe.
No one reads their Polyani any more…
Much less their Marx or their Foucault…
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I see that your consent has yet to be manufactured.
Your resistance is futile. Time has proven that no one can resist these bargain basement prices for long.
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That is not the purpose of education. The real purpose of education is to teach students to think on their own; to give them the skills to discover for themselves, to synthesize their own concepts and express them coherently, to look at the work of others not only as a source of information, but also with a critical eye.
The problem that you run up against is that “branding” as a concept has been tried in education, and it’s dead. Those bridges are burnt, and the ashes have been scattered to the four corners.
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Is it dead? I wish it were, but corporate “charter” schools are still popping up, and many university administrators chatter more and more about catering to students “customers” by “advertising” their campus, yes, “brand.”
Edit: e.g., another example that just appeared today:
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I’m glad I was already well-established in my own career by the time the concept of everyone needing a “personal brand” was popularised (somehwere around 1997 by Tom Peters, according to Teh Wiki). There are people so immersed in the neoliberal world that gave rise to this concept (or have lived their entire lives in it) that they have real difficulty conceiving of anything that can’t or shouldn’t be branded.
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Blitzkreig?
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Me too… I’ve had people suggest it to me… and… I can’t. I just can’t do it. It’s my own stupid stubbornness in part that will likely hurt me professionally in the long run, but I really… just can’t.
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I should have been more precise; it is dead among reputable educators.
ETA:
That’s the thing. If you’re genuine, and you go about your day doing the best you can and working to help others - you’re already doing it.
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Ah, yes indeed.
I think whenever administrators refer to students as “customers” or use any other bizspeak, educators should ask what the administrators’ plans are for implementing profit-sharing. The google-eyed, open-mouthed reactions would be priceless.
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That’s… can we… no. I am not a brand… I’m just not. I’m failing as a human being, but I’m not a brand. I don’t care how you spin it or try to make it sound palatable. That’s not how I want to live my life.
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That’s my point. When you live your life, create and refine relationships with others, build a reputation, that’s real. And it’s so much better than what gets shilled as “personal branding.”
When people talk about “personal branding,” they are trying to do, artificially, what others do naturally. In other words, when you’re doing it right, it’s effortless. When you apply effort to it, it becomes fake.
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The closest I’ve come over the years is having what some have called my “trademark look” in terms of fashion and perhaps demeanour, but it isn’t anything deliberate or calculated to sell myself. If other people want to treat me as a product, I can’t control that. But what dey sees is what dey gets, with no flashy labels or logos applied to the tin.
The kind of people who obviously work at branding themselves immediately raise red flags for me. They’re often fraudsters like Elizabeth Holmes (who was stealing Steve Jobs’ look in the process) or Rick Singer (from the college admissions scandal, who wrote a book about personal branding for students that only furthered the idea that everything can be branded).
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