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it's worse than simple incoherence logically---the particular state's rights arguments we've treated to above comes out of the reconstruction period and was used throughout it, and again in opposition to the civil rights movement, to attempt to short-circuit policies and laws that were set up to assure that african-americans were treated equally. this history is to my mind so ugly that it baffles me each time i see the same kind of arguments repeated here. and there's no wishing this history away. it doesn't change. there's an overwhelming amount of documentation that demonstrates this linkage.
the only tweak on them above, really, is now a perverse appropriation of the discourse of diversity has been tacked on.
from what i can figure, the problems are structurally about the same for these folk as it was for their intellectual forebearers in the opposition to civil rights---they're freaked out that the federal government is acting because they are concerned that if it does act, they will loose. this because the petit-bourgeois right is made up of the eternal victim, is built around the mythology of its own victimization...so better inaction and incoherence, particularly in a situation of crisis--seemingly because if there's inaction and incoherence, these folk might not loose, but if the federal government act, they seem sure that they definitely will.
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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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