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i see the arguments that ng and shakran are making, but i dont accept the premises. it seems to me that the entire logic of "reverse dscrimination" presupposes that racism is effectively over, an element of an irrelevant past--which it isnt--and that the history of racism around which the united states was built has somehow been addressed--it hasnt and i am not really sure what that would even mean short of revolution (which i would not oppose in principle)---so that problems of discrimination based on something as stupid as skin color is not only a matter of rhetoric and unintended consequences of rhetoric.
to accept these arguments, you have to agree with one or another version of that backstory. i dont.
without that backstory, the reduction of racism to a trope makes no sense.
the trick is that what they are arguing about the effects of racist tropes and their appropriation/usage is not in itself wrong.
so in my view, the problem is not with the arguments themselves, then, but in what these arguments presuppose. there IS NO SYMMETRY that links the situation of white folk to that of african-americans, particularly not if you take the history of the united states into account when you think about this--a history which is still relevant in that is shapes everything about the present state of affairs, like it or not. you cannot simply wish away the fact of domination and its history. you cannot wish the past away.
history's a bitch that way, aint it?
you dont like it, but you cant make it go away.
so long as there is no rapprochement at the level or premises, the thread will simply turn round and round across a pattern of term substitution.
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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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