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there is a curious problem with ancient threads that get bumped in that it is not obvious how to deal with the entirety of the previous discussion--does it still matter? does it still frame the debate? do you respond to posts that are over a year old?
anyway: i read through the more recent tendrils gorwing off the seemingly dead stump from before and wondered if i had accidentally stumbled in to another of those annoying college republicans stage pinhead agitprop bakesales while pretending that the pricing policies something like a coherent metaphor for how affirmative actions works. same goofball thinking from the right in the responses.
it's like there is some secret conservative parlor game that involves trawling around for threads in which they can say exactly what got shot down each of the last 20 times it was posted so they can write the same arguments down again. maybe they get fabulous prizes. maybe there is something erotic about writing this kind of argument, something erotic i wouldnt understand because it think the arguments are just stupid.
the question is not "discrimination in general" but the problems caused within the u.s. by slavery, then by the appalling sequence of events that was reconstruction, a history of racism, a civil rights movement after world war 2 that demanded a lot more than affirmative action--things like basic changes to the american capitalist order--but instead the movement was handed affirmative action. so the question of discimination was, and remains, about this particular type of discrimination practiced by these particular agents upon this particular set of other folk for no reason really beyond the color of their skin.
if the americans were a bit less world class in their virtuoso use of racism, they probably would not have seen the extension of anti-discrimination legislation to include other groups--but they were, and the americans really have no-one to blame but themselves for it.
to read that history does not matter from the same people who in other threads spend much time grovelling at the feet of the fetish-objects the call the Founding Fathers, defending obvious lunacy like the doctrine of original intent is just funny.
they do seem to like the reconstruction period, however, these folk who claim that history is not binding on them except when they say it is....they reproduce alot of the arguments floated by white poorer southerners of the period: like the sense that they were the victims of federal government attempts to provide some recompense for the folk who had previously been understood as objects, commodities...dealing retrospectively with the fact of racism and its effects...you know, i am sure these people felt that history did not weigh on or bind them either--hell, by reconstruction (1870, say) the civil war was over, it was history, it ended ....what....5 years before why should the past weigh on the present. and there were the same arguments for limiting the authority of the federal government, which threatened the continuity of systems of racist privelege---the same types of arguments for states rights, for local control....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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