SimpleDon
Veteran Member
I don't have objections to your definition of an individual's racism. I know, hard to believe.
And I don't have any problem with the idea that there are very few people left who believe in the racism that you defined.
What I can't do is accept that there is no social or institutional context to racism. Where do you think that racism comes from? How does one become a racist?
Is it an inbred human condition, one that comes from the genes? This is a rhetorical question. Hopefully.
And if individuals can somehow become racists without learning it from society, what is there preventing individual racists from influencing society? Say by electing other racists to office where the elected to office racists would consciously or unconsciously write their racism into society's laws? Say, as a wild example, to separate children by race in education. (This actually happened)
If there is no social or institutional racism, and people grouped together in races don't exhibit natural, inbred characteristics, why are there so many more poor minorities?
Any finally, if what you say is true, what use is the very concept embodied in the word "race?"
My take on all of the above. I am not a Socratic method enthusiast.
Racism is primarily a social and institutional phenomenon. A person has to be taught to be a racist.
Our main problem today with racism isn't with the handful of overt racists, it is with the legacy of 400 years of legal, institutional racism. This always was and continues to be today a tremendous waste of human potential.
So many minorities are poor because their parents and grandparents were forced into poverty by this legal, institutional racism. And it is very hard to work oneself out of poverty. Not impossible but very hard to do.
We would be better off as a nation if it were easier to and more of the talented poor could do it. Likewise it would be better for our nation if more of the untalented children of our wealthy would be forced out into the lower income and wealth brackets commensurate with their modest abilities where they could cause less damage, think George W. Bush.
Our problem is with poverty, not racism. There is no reason that we have to tolerate poverty and the problems associated with it, crime, drug addiction, etc. We are the wealthiest nation on earth. Other nations with lower per capita income and resources have effectively eliminated poverty.
But the disproportionate number of minorities trapped in poverty isn't the only lingering effect of legalized racism that we suffer from today. In order to increase income inequity, a decision that we made in the 1980's, the goal to eliminate poverty had to be abandoned as well, of course, as the goal to help the poor minorities recover from the legacy of the legal racism.
In addition, in order to build an electoral coalition to support increasing income inequity, wage suppression is never a popular electoral strategy, diverse groups for whom there are more important issues than poverty and their own wages had to be brought in. One of these groups in 1980 was made up of the overt racists. But these people were not very popular with the majority of Americans so a meme had to be formulated to accommodate the overt racists. A meme that at its most basic level would allow good people to accept bad people. In a word, lies.
It is the elements of this meme which we see repeated everyday here. A kind of soft racism from people who are not real racists. The irony is that while the number of real overt racists has continued to decline we are left with this soft racism, which while not driven by the discredited theories of racism still has the same effects as the overt legal racism of the past.
This is the way that I see the problem today, not as fundamentally one of racism but part of a larger problem in which race has as it always has, been caught up in and in which the minorities once again have been forced to suffer disproportionately, because they are the ones with the least power to change their circumstance.
