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to build a little on baraka guru's post above, which i agree with entirely...
one function of the conservative inversion of the conventional understanding of the term "racism" is as a loop which plays back into the basic grid that shapes the identity that conservative discourse imposes/articulates, that of Victim.
in this, the populist-speak of the right plays to a dangerous old game of the sort we saw in all it's grandeur in the context of the reconstruction period (after the american civil war)...what it connects to is a sense of petit-bourgeois being-injured as a function of, say, the idea that african-americans should be given a plot of land and basic equipment (40 acres and a mule) in order to begin working toward economic autonomy...reconstruction demonstrated in the 1870s how this went down amongst the petit-bourgeois conservatives of the period. it's the same move, the same resentment, the same problem: behind all this stuff about racism there is another, "real" victim which is white folk.
it's puerile and ugly and it's only because folk live in such a historical vacuum that there's any novelty or interest to it.
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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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