roachboy

i have been performing my ambivalence about this forum by checking in from time to time, looking to see the general state of discourse in here...normally, i have been finding it really really easy to simply move on to something else, but politicophile's post is so thoroughly absurd that it seemed to me to require a response.

first, as seems usual in these degenerate times, the real conflict in this thread is over control of terms and, by extension, the frame within which debate can happen. so the question "what is a color blind society" is not one that makes sense posed in the abstract--the question seems to me more "what does the contemporary right mean when it uses this term...."--and what it means is pretty straighforward: the right prefers to pretend that racism, and more problematically class divisions (which intertwine with good old american racism in often very ugly ways--witness nola) is no longer a going concern--from this ridiculous assumption follows the question of whether affirmative action can be seen as a relic of the bad old days the functions of which have gone from attempting to address the history and ongoing consequences of a racist society to replicating the problem it purports to address, but this time at the expense of--well who?---well, petit bourgeois white men as it turns out....

now in the inverted world that conservatives inhabit, the last clause would in itself be racist. this is the correlate of politicophile's post above. from ANY viewpoint not constructed on its knees before the televisual pulpit of the right, that claim is wholly absurd--but let's put that aside for a minute and think about it, shall we?

it often looks like the contemporary right has a particular axe to grind across this debate--the sense of victimization that befell lots of petit bourgeois whites during Reconstruction. contemporary conservativism replicates this response, and with it the whole set of arguments from the "state's rights" crowd of the 1870s-1880s and beyond. of course, i suspect that conservatives would prefer not to think about this history, following the same "logic" as ustwo's post above (which, sadly, seems about par for the course): history? what history? what me worry? why is the past binding on me?


so from two directions in as many sentences, you get a logic that converges on what the real point of conservative opposition to aa is: a sense of being-victimized by attempts to redress the foul history of the united states when it comes to racism: begin with genocide (the native american population) add slavery, close the cover and grind: there you have it, a lovely american history milkshake that you too can drink in the privacy of your own home.
so the motor of the right's usage of the term "color-blind society" is a sense of being-victimized. the specific class interest that this sense of being-victimized speaks to is that of the white petit bourgeois. the object of this sense of victimization: federal level attempts to redress racism. the specific target: affirmative action. the argument: usually some weak admission of the previous need for such legislation followed by a hollow claim to have triumphed over it--and at this point, much of what i would say dovetails with alansmithee's posts above.
the goal: a "colorblind society"--which means?--a society in which there is no federal-level effort to redress racism, in which this history, its present, its future are all pushed to the local level, where the implications of all this can be ignored, all in the interest of..well what? i have never understood this step: to wrap your head around what the right is saying, you have to buy into an entirely revisionist history of race relations in america. if you reject that history--and there is every reason to reject it, beginning with the ridiculous nature of its most basic claims---so i am not sure that there really is a goal behind the right's opposition to aa taken on its own terms--but i can say what i think its the motor for the arguments themselves: channelling economic anxiety on the part of a social group particularly vulnerable to changes in overall economic organization onto a red herring, a fake issue--the function of which has nothing to do with the content of conservative "arguments" but rather is about articulating and cementing a relationship--the right as defender of petit bourgeois interests.

politicophile, above, outlines a sense of conservative outrage, primarily because he lost control of the frame of reference and so cannot control the debate. conservative arguments against aa presuppose control of the frame of reference, because the claims against aa floated by the right are not arguments based on either history or an understanding of the present--they are a mobilization of signifiers that affirm an identity of interests between the contemporary right and their anxiety-filled, debt-bubble riding petit bourgreois constituency. outside the rights own frame of reference, their claims against aa are nonsense.

but rather than acknowledge that, you get another, all-too-typical move: a second-order claim to victimization: you do not respect my attempts to control this debate, therefore you are a racist. just shows what the draining of meaning is about, in the hands of the contemporary right.

i do not agree with everything alansmithee posted above, have not seen anything approaching an adequate refutation of his basic claims about the relationship of class and racism in the history of the united states, nothing approaching a coherent response to the thumbnail sketch of what aa was and was not about: what i do see is alot of facile coded nonsense from the right.

sad thing is that it appears that, like many many debates, this started off ok then dove straight into this kind of nonsense. because i have been thinking about tfp in general, i link this to, for example, the conservative disprespecting of host in another thread---the one person who systematically tries to take seriously the idea that conservatives can and should be countered with information--and you get a really unpleasant image of the politics forum: self-referential, self-confirming, a space for "debate" amongst folk who have too little time and dont really want to be pushed outside their already given frame of reference--there is nothing at stake here in debate. maybe this is a function of messageboard culture in general--patterns of usage that have people stuffing the occaisional political post into a crammed day of whatever one has to do to get over in a deteriorating empire....

there is nothing at stake here because nothing can be...i can't figure out why i do this any more. i would not be surprised to find the same reponse with host. i suspect that there is a cadre here that really would prefer to turn this forum into a conservative circle jerk, a space where the empty claims of the right can be floated without reference to an external world that refutes them at every turn. look at nola and tell me that there is no class stratification in america, and no intertwining of racism with class in america. this alone should pulverize anything the right has to say about racism as a thing of the past. there are many such circle jerk spaces out there--anmd i suspect there will be more and more of them as the therapeutic requirements for conservatives grow more pronounced.

if that is the way this is going here, you can have it.
i have other things to do.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite