Survival strategies are romantic particularism- they assume monolithic group identity

(Ruth Wilson, Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

Romantic particularism purports to reclaim an oppositional epistemology and aesthetic that had been obscured by the historical forces of Europe let loose in the world. In fact, it fails to escape the universalism elaborated by the modern university insofar as it reproduces, in form and function, idealist philosophical assumptions about who and what works, for whom and to what end. Romantic particularism has great appeal outside the university through its identification of an “authenticity” in cultural practice that needs recognition, though hardly revision. Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s 1990 Florida courtroom defense of the ultra-machismo rap group 2 Live Crew as “literary geniuses” was a strategically wily move on his part.1 After all, he helped save some Black men from punishment for “crimes” few white men are charged with committing. However, the result of his approach is to maintain the struggle against racism at a level of abstraction (that is, unacknowledged maleness) that refuses to engage the complexities of power within the ranks of the disfranchised. He reads nauseating lyrics as unassailably valid African American cultural practice (“It’s a Black thing; you wouldn’t understand”), in spite of many, many Black women’s daily struggles to get out from under the crap of that rap.