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the notion of "the race card" is kinda interesting. if you remember, it entered masscult through johnny cochoran's closing arguments at the o.j. simpson trial, which was a kind of amazing bit of televised theater. if memory serves, he used it as a way of insinuating exactly the opposite of what it's come to mean--it was a device he used to undermine a guilty verdict by going after the motives of those who chose to see simpson as guilty. at stake really was the jury and this whole presumption of innocence/beyond a shadow of a doubt business (which is itself kinda odd if you really think about it: absolute certainty? what the fuck is that?) anyway...somehow it migrated into conservative ideology. out there, it turned into a cheap-and-facile device the effect of which is to treat racism in the united states as if it were some arbitrary factor introduced into an otherwise normal and fun game by Bad People. so it trivializes the matter. it also relativizes positions--if one "plays the race card" one is making a move. the game could have proceeded without it: there is nothing necessary in it. nothing follows from reality, from history---o no. it is a move in a game.
it is of a piece with the bigger conservative-specific fiction that the united states has somehow managed to entirely shed its history and the effects of that history in one Magical Moment, kinda like that Zero Hour that was supposed to have happened sometime in the early summer of 1945 at which point all those bad fascists suddenly went away and the Modern Post-War nation-state emerged in all its Heroic and Pure Grandeur blah blah blah---but like the stunde null, the precise location and timing of which remains of course always a Mystery as most things that never happened seem to do.
something that big happening...you'd think people would notice. like they'd wake up that day, whenever it was, and feel differently. or there's be dancing in the streets maybe and/or fireworks a week later and you'd be able to look back because obviously the press would have noticed that Event, the one that enabled the united states to magically shed it's history and all the effects of that history.
you'd think.
anyway stupid premises lead to stupid arguments and so it is in this thread. blah blah blah the persecuting Other who plays the "Race Card" into an otherwise fun and exciting game in which everyone is all kumbaya equal four square and regular and all that. blah blah blah the cops were right. blah blah blah i don't like academics.
maybe the more interesting question: when exactly *did* this Magical Moment when the entirety of american history ceased to matter happen? someone shook the etch-a-sketch....why didn't we notice? did anyone notice? why doesn't anyone tell the rest of us about such things? maybe it's a conservative secret, something that comes along with the clown nose and the decoder ring when you join the club.
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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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