Quote:
Originally Posted by dksuddeth
are some of you people actually trying to tell me that a black person that hates white people isn't racist because he has no political power to put that white person at some sort of financial or political disadvantage?
|
no man, what I tried to say is that you guys keep focusing on racism between individuals and that's not really where the problem lies when we talk about "racism."
If you find discrimination for any reason to be a bad or ugly thing, then you'll hate it when people do it to one another. I'm not disputing that. What I was trying to point out was what we mean by institutional racism.
Also, check this out. When you have systems in place like I wrote about, what do you think happens when you get a bunch of non-racist people interacting? well, you get no ugly words bandied about but you still get all the nasty effects of racism.
Non-racist people still perpetuate racism so long as they operate within institutionalized racism contexts. That's the point and why it's so difficult to pinpoint and address and fix. That's why we say that you can't just "call it good" because people aren't THE problem.
You guys keep asking what happens if this guy does such and such to another guy...well yeah it's fucking racism. I don't know why you need to belabor the point. But it's not the reverse that if this guy doesn't do such and such to another guy that racism is gone.
If we implanted chips in everyone's head and racism as you guys are discussing it ended tomorrow, we would still have the racism that I'm trying to let you guys in on. In fact, this is the major disjuncture. you guys think that we're calling all whites racist or something, I guess. or that we're aiming critique at the individual level.
if you want to answer the question about whether I think that it's purely black vs. white, that's just not the case. I tried to make it clear I was talking about a specific case (the history of blacks and education) so you could take those principles and apply them elsewhere. I chose that specific example because we were talking about Obama.
If we had been talking about McCain, and if we still had discriminatory policies against the Irish, I would have talked about that because their early time in the US was similar to any other ethnic minority.
but the difference between Irish and black discrimination, historically, was the accumulation of capital which blacks were prohibited by law and then by residual effects, they couldn't vote for a long time, and the length of the discrimination. The other thing should be obvious, short of a name there isn't much telling anyone that you're not a WASP, but fuck how the hell can a black man hide his blackness? So when when someone like Obama makes it to the top DESPITE the structural impediments, he still has to deal with interpersonal racism. McCain's family may have had to deal with structural impediments, too. But the difference is that if he somehow makes it out of a shitty school system bad neighborhoods, he doesn't have to deal with as much interpersonal racism anymore. Had this been 150 years ago, he'd be getting similar treatment as any other racial minority granted.
If you fix the structural problems, then interpersonal racism is not going to do much damage other than hurt people's feelings. If you fix interpersonal racism, but don't address structural racism, then everyone will think it's over but the effects of racism will still be in operation.
I don't know how anyone can fuck up my position on this. All of you have been around long enough so even if I didn't post it in this comment I know for a fact that you all have read me post elsewhere that the largest beneficiary of affirmative action is white women. By definition, a "minority" has no power or influence to exert. But that's not the point I was making anyway. The problem is not in interpersonal relations...
I don't know what I was silent in. what did I miss? what should I be outraged over? I know that I haven't been back since my long ass post, so I just got through reading the responses after it. I just find my time better spent elsewhere and most people I think realize that I haven't been here much at all but a few posts over the past year. It's because these kinds of conversations are frustrating not because I disagree with anyone, I disagree with people all the damn time, believe me, I have not many allies in my politics or what I think about the world around me, but the reason is that so many people I think in the back of my head are generally intelligent people who I assume are not just rolling their faces across their keyboard, seem to intent on speaking past one another without making any adjustments in how they think about shit.
Like my post could really not have been posted any clearer, I thought. but now I'm left with my jaw agape at how someone comes away from it thinking that I believe racism to only be a black vs. white thing. if you read what I actually wrote rather than what you think liberals must be saying, then you can even make an argument for black on black racism. you would probably be surprised at the level of black racism scholars who raise that very point...and not in the vulgar way that Cosby does it. And you'd also be able to make sense out of some interesting critiques of the abolishment of separate but equal policies.
There are some very well respected people who argue that it would have been better to keep separate education systems and force the government to adhere to the equal part. Then we'd at least have schools that weren't dirt poor and totally inadequate for training people for Taco Bell registers let alone any knew industries we'd like to create and be competative on the global market.
and if you're wondering why I'm so focused on education it's because normally people are hellbent on arguing over equality at the onset rather than equality of outcome. There's no equality at the onset if the education system is linked to heavily to our country's racist policies of the past...and when people move from my description to the arguments they make over it then that leaves very little left but to try and at least get some equality of outcome from the deal. But believe that we would much rather be addressing this issue at the structural level.
-----Added 21/11/2008 at 10 : 50 : 19-----
Incidentally, when Rev. Wright talks about a "racist america" he's probably talking about it in the sense that I am. but I would suspect that a good portion of his audience are thinking and hearing that america is full of racists. I don't have any data on that, but that's definately how his words are portrayed on the news so at least a good portion of the people not in his pews think he means we are a nation of racists.
but when we think of detroit, we have to think of what it means to live there and what it meant to live there 50, 100, ++ years ago.
back when it was illegal to sell a house to a negro. back when things like buying a car were hard to do until black bankers and black auto dealerships started loaning money to blacks for cars. and until that happened, there was a literally meaning to "the wrong side of the tracks" where you can't just haul your shit in a Glad trash bag to the good side of town.
so while rev. wrights parishioners might hear racism in the sense that the white dude at Tower Records wouldn't hire them, they might forget that it's more because they graduated from a school with a 2.5 GPA and barely know how to read and write as an artifact of shitty education in their historically poor neighborhood than because their skin is black.
but don't forget for a second that the reason they lived in that neighborhood and the reason for their school being so shitty is because of them being black. that's the whole problem with this discussion. it's both because of being black and not because one is specifically black that causes these racial problems that are so concerning. and yes, inter-personal racism is still a problem but discrimination is illegal in a lot of places and venues. hate crime policies are not in place because of inter-personal racism. there are ways to prosecute what happens when a chinese person either doesn't hire, fires, or defaces someone's property. and I'm not making a distinction between nationalism and racism, but if you really want to know about hate crime then you should go read up on it and the reasoning behind it. there are, btw, instances where whites do shit to blacks that can not be prosecuted as a hate crime. but yes, a black person can be prosecuted for a hate crime against a white person and chinese vs. korean; but like many things, the argument is less about what actually happens, but it's because you guys don't understand why hate crime came about and what it intends to stop.