Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Not that you need my feedback or approval, but this makes clearer what the last ouvre muddied.

I second Crow and am in complete agreement regarding feelings/attitudes vs institutions. Liberals focus obsessively on the latter, thus directing their ire at the lower orders. They rail against the poor and ignorant while settling into their season seats at the Koch Ballet at Lincoln Ctr.

Libs focus on attitudes almost entirely to the exclusion of institutions. Conveniently enough. This is rampant at Comcast's MSNBC. I also have a Facebook "friend" who rails relentlessly against the rubes when he's not regaling us with tales of fun at Vanity Fair Oscar parties.

I'd only add that racist attitudes have the maddeningly persistent capacity to continue to divide, almost hopelessly, people whose class interests are one and the same. Thus benefiting Power, of course. My problem with attitudes is less a matter of taste and more frustration with how self-and class-defeating those attitudes are. Many aspects of race and racism have changed and much for the better. But this crippling divisiveness is as bad as it's ever been, if not worse.

CZ, I certainly agree about the self-defeating divisiveness; I do kinda wonder how much the notion of *racial* Otherness is really contributing to it any more, though. Particularly among younger people, who to my eye and ear have developed a very crossover culture. The divisiveness is a very overdetermined phenomenon and deserves closer analysis than a wave of the arm in the direction of racism.

People with appendicitis generally run a fever. Aspirin, however, is not the treatment of choice, though it does tend to lower fevers. Being anti-racist in America, in this day and age, is perhaps a bit like being anti-fever at the bedside of a person whose pustulous appendix just burst.

That's not bad. Certainly clearer than the earlier ramble.

Identity politics has nothing to do with improving a society's injustices. It has everything to do with reinforcing tribalism.

People like to forget or ignore that just like desperate circumstance makes for less-well-rounded children in the poorest slums, it also makes for less-well-rounded children in the land of NASCAR and fundamentalist churches.

The commonality of the source causes poses a problem: it points at the weakness of tribalist identity where that identity pretends at egalitarianism. Probably this causes a bit of existential discomfort among those with enough self-awareness.

Clearly, more and better education is called for(*).

The urge to make this an issue of bigger bureaucracy in the "education sector" finds use in your medical analogy. Here, it's like layering a new treatment on top of the salicylic acid: leeching and cupping.

I'm afraid the sepsis is going ahead unabated.

Chom u wattles into another old chestnut

Racism divides us job class exploiteds

Racism might that is well worked up ritualized institutionalized mutual
"race hate"
but not our pre judgement of each other
and not even our mutual antipathy can over come
effective self organization and class awareness
It's a case of organizing to purge but organizing to trump and transcend

Sometimes it works and the white hats take the hand
some times it fails and the black hats win the trick

Combating pre judgements head on can be as divisive and dysfunctional
On occasion
As other times necessary and sufficient

the soul cleaners sanctimonious missions
can as easily misdirect collective efforts and intensify splits
as rectify a composite struggle's internal contradictions

The Chinese call this task
As like ordering a room after a banquet

Depends on the parties involved how much pick up
There is to do
But you have to pick up and put back
every time no matter the party's characteristics

That public discourse has followed polite discourse down the road to
Non racialist talk
Suggests to me the corporate culture has deemed the experiments of the 60's
And early 70's a success
One set of rules
And submerged spontaneous non encouraged
two sets of outcomes

The drug laws apply to all but spontaneous enforcement leads to
The prisoning of huge chunks of each next cohorts black males

Ie
It's now anti racism that splits the merit white liberals
from the mcshit job class palefaces that constituted
the new deal majority

The Nixon wedge has an exact opposite the Clinton wedge

Perhaps a little Danish cruise ship tour will help clear out the cobwebs.

It did. The thing is an emanation, not an essence; an effect, and not a cause. The idea that's coming into clearer focus for me is that it's easy to condemn racism, because everybody, or nearly everybody, agrees that racism is bad.

What's a harder sell is condemning the structures and institutions that produce it, as a bee produces honey. Like f'rinstance the SATs and the Stanford-Binet and the drug laws and the police departments and and and: the list is endless.

Get rid of the causes of racism, and you get rid of racism.

Deplore racism, and you get to feel virtuous for as long as racism endures -- which will be forever, unless somebody is doing something more about the things that cause it than your average Bill Maher anti-racist is doing.

George Fredrickson's notion of "ethnic chauvinism" may be more useful for coming times than the "color-coded" variety of the phenomenon that historically defined the term in most white-settler colonies. Going by the speech of Frau Freja Lindgren it's probably a good bet that 'cultural racism' is going to be the new guise of the problem even as folks are busy congratulating themselves on seeing off phenotype based racism:

...[R]acism is not universal nor is it the same everywhere it exists. As Stuart Hall states, racism is always historically specific. There are two broad interpretations of racism and its shifting meanings. One is the traditional notion linked to scientific racism, that is, genetic or biological racism. The second is what is known as the new racism, sometimes called cultural racism. Taguieff and Balibar in France, and Gilroy in Great Britain use this notion to refer to a racism of ethnic absolutism or racisme differentialiste. In this kind of racism the word race is usually not even used. Cultural racism assumes that the metropolitan culture is different from ethnic minorities' culture but understood in an absolutist, essentialist sense, that is, "we are so different that we cannot get along together," "minorities are unemployed or living under poverty because of their cultural values and behavior," or "minorities belong to a different culture that does not understand the cultural norms of our country." Nevertheless, cultural racism is always related to a notion of biological racism to the extent that the culture of groups is naturalized in terms of some notion of inferior versus superior nature.

Cultural racism sounds like a French phenomenon to me. Didn't they just outlaw the hijab? Even we have not gone that far -- though I hear some guy got kicked out of Congress the other day for wearing a hoodie. So maybe we're not that far behind.

"Like f'rinstance the SATs and the Stanford-Binet and the drug laws and the police departments and and and: the list is endless."

SATs are first on your endless list of things that "produce" and "cause" racism? ROFL.

You don't have to be an aficionado of high-flown verbiage that French literary talk shows used to be infamous for--even when the interviewee speaks plain English--to get a hang of concepts like "social pathology" and "culture of poverty" (with nary a reference to skin color or even chicken in sight). Your very own Brooklyn politico will do nicely.

It's not a French phenomenon. The dialogue against Islam and immigration across western Europe and the UK all sounds like that.

The thing that came into clearer focus is indeed an improvement. Your "causes" list fall under what is conventionally termed "structural racism," by the way.

I think still that people need to work on an individual level to learn not how to be racist, though. There are lots of things that aren't on the level of the prison system or economic inequality that are enough to make minorities plenty uncomfortable in daily life without white people even noticing them.

Meritism breeds racism
The repeated loser groups merit their loss
They are inferior
We can meliorate the consequences of their loss
Head start their kids and feel compassion day and night

But they persist in losing
It's not just statistics it's got a real basis

Now the cycle begins again

Group Culture change

Stuff liberals wouldn't force on tribal remnants

What's a harder sell is condemning the structures and institutions that produce it,

Speaking of which, check out the NYPD's Operation Clean Halls. Not a lot surprises me anymore, but this did. Although I'm not sure why it did...

Good Mr. Smith, the original post was expressed well enough to not require apologizing and rephrasing, and the angry reaction to it seemed to be a knee-jerk PC thing, whereby anyone questioning the standard narrative on "racism" has to be rudely reminded to first kowtow to the fact that racism is important. Even if you already knew it, and most everyone already knew it--particularly in the land of pop culture that is Maher's playground, where the acknowledged Klan-types only get airtime as a subject of mockery, perhaps on Howard Stern's show. All this while a post-racial president speaks regularly, openly, and to massive applause, about slaughtering hordes of little post-racial children wherever the crosshairs fall. Clearly, the old style of publicly-avowed racism is not the problem. And those who rail against it while congratulating themselves for doing so (a la The Help) often seem to be:

1) Ignoring the behavior patterns in the now that cause new subgroups to be marginalized and brutalized to popular acclaim

while

2) Making clear how incredibly enlightened they are for having spoken loudly about a decades-old problem that has already been solved, and which is completely uncontroversial to do battle against.

Let's not forget the long history of "racism" against Celtic blood concentrations, the exclusion of "Irish" or "Polish" or "Czech" and varieties thereof from whiteness, et cetera. Those who now manifest that current examples of "racism" are trademarked by their loudest social denouncers are committing their own acts of whitewashing against what institutions and behavior patterns cause different illusory subsets of people to be screwed over with the changing of the tides. Whenever they see someone questioning this type of behavior, they angrily shout accusations of ignoring racism--suggesting that they themselves, and those who adopt similar cultural manifestations, have a special claim on enlightenment not possessed by those who don't address racism the proper way. E.g., the lifeblood of old-style racism.

"Racism" and the other "isms" don't pop up when they're unpopular. It's always easy--and usually pointless and selfish--to squeal about how bad unpopular things are. Low is the risk when you try to get a laugh at the special-ed kid's expense, right? How brave you are.

Yes Nonny, the S.A.T.s:

Madison has $1,000 more credit than Dakota. If they go to Saks on Sunday during a 30% sale, and all bracelets are originally $399, how many more bracelets than Dakota can Madison purchase?

Brit pink Galloway
pulls off
a real fist in your face ballot box caper

And that frog lefty is raising a few back hairs too

Ballot boxing in context can still have it's role dear hearts

bantam weight
Nihilists nicities
not withstanding

Maybe u stop and ponder every time
Before entering
places of state ballotry

But to go inside and spit at the alter is no genuflection

bang the box loudly !

Arka notes
new targets

Indeed

Latin bracero immigrants and Asian brainiacs

Likely our brother nation can be seduced by this blandishments
of the decider- divider cliques

Arka talks of poular isms
The now popular ism relevant to father's post is anti racism

Careful Arka, even mock SAT questions might cause more racism!

I agree with the blogger. We've done all we can do for the blacks. I am tired. I have race fatigue. I am just trying to hold my situation together. Zimmerman? How about the thousands of blacks that kill each other. Read Rich Lowry in the NY Post from yesterday. White people aren't killing blacks people, black people are killing black people. Racism had nothing to do with it and hasn't since Johnson. The blacks need to stop having ou or wedlock babies and destroying their own neighborhoods. We give them housing, schools, food stamps, medicaid. Some racist society that is. Racism isn't the problem anymore. Blacks are making their own problems. Guess what, I am not a racist. This breaks my heart. This is tough love i am writing. I can't believe people on a communist blog agree with me. My friend told me read this blog you won't believe it. But you're right there is no more racism. Thank you for letting me say these things. I care about black people than the liberals do. The blacks are destroying themselves and it is a tragedy.

I agree with the blogger. We've done all we can do for the blacks. I am tired. I have race fatigue. I am just trying to hold my situation together. Zimmerman? How about the thousands of blacks that kill each other. Read Rich Lowry in the NY Post from yesterday. White people aren't killing blacks people, black people are killing black people. Racism had nothing to do with it and hasn't since Johnson. The blacks need to stop having ou or wedlock babies and destroying their own neighborhoods. We give them housing, schools, food stamps, medicaid. Some racist society that is. Racism isn't the problem anymore. Blacks are making their own problems. Guess what, I am not a racist. This breaks my heart. This is tough love i am writing. I can't believe people on a communist blog agree with me. My friend told me read this blog you won't believe it. But you're right there is no more racism. Thank you for letting me say these things. I care about black people than the liberals do. The blacks are destroying themselves and it is a tragedy.

Perhaps the question is not so much are there racists in the U.S. (There surely are and more than just a few) or is everything bad that black people experience due solely to racism (they are not), but rather what should we do about race. On the one hand, class-based programs, such as full-employment (decent jobs for all) or good public housing, the abolition of the prison system, decriminalization of drug use, national health care, etc. will benefit blacks relative to whites. But they won’t fully close existing differences in employment, wage, health outcomes. Here, what we might think about is how to build a working class movement aimed at the abolition of capitalism. There is surely a race divide among working men and women. It needs to be addressed inside the working class, the sooner the better. This is difficult to even begin accomplishing because so few workers have organizations such as unions that would provide spaces within which race can be discussed and solidarity across racial lines be built. Still, I don’t see any good alternative to trying. I have a feeling that black and other minority workers would be more than willing to build the kind of working class solidarity I am talking about, one that encompasses all of life and not just in workplaces. Plenty of whites would too. And they would be more than willing to talk about race and deal in a comradely way with racism, overt or not. I speak from some experience teaching workers and also, though not nearly as much, prisoners.

Jack 2:10, saying things like "the blacks need to stop..." is an erroneous group judgment. It implies that all black people, rather than some, are responsible for the problems you discuss.

Imagine that someone said, "The whites need to stop spending all their money on WWF and Nascar so they can get an education and get better jobs?"

Then, imagine that you were white, and that you not only didn't like WWF and Nascar, but that you hated both of them.

Jack was being ironical, I think. Being a New York hipster myself, albeit of a somewhat antique vintage, I know irony when I see it.

Obama's being ironical, too; the problem is that the military keeps taking him literally. Don't risk ruining the joke with your naughty blog.