Race & Murder

EmaChissit at cs.com EmaChissit at cs.com
Tue Apr 27 20:55:36 PDT 1999



> Thank you for the personal insult.

Quite. I'm afraid that I felt insulted by your failure to actually read what I wrote and to pay attention to the words I quote from the person I was addressing initially. This is insulting.

In another post you think that I am personally attacking you. However, as you can see below, I am addressing the way that fascism, nazism, and neo-nazism gets tossed around. More often than not it has been equated with racism specifically targeted at blacks. As others have pointed out since, racism is deeply connected to nationalism and the industrial revolution and it takes different forms in different contexts.

F&N depend primarily on marking out a world of purity/ impurity. The impure can be defined in various ways. The tendency is to identify physical characteristics that help identify the alien, impure Other.


>
> I don't know what it means to say that there is not a "necessary"
> connection between fascism and racism (btw, hatred of Jews is usually
> referred to as "anti-semitism" and not "racism").

I wrote: "How ignorant for anyone here to assume that contemporary forms of Nazism *must* and only *must* be about racism which is then magically defined as hatred, oppression, slurs, bigotry against people of color and Jews"

I think it is VERY scary for people to assume Nazism must be founded on racism as we know it now. The Other for a fascist political movment could easily be defined as any group whatsoever. Marking off a group defined as impure more than likely takes place when there appear to be physical characteristics that can be pointed to. But, as we know, this is often very arbitrary. Take a look at that website dave spoke of. The people who hate white trash and rednecks appear quite capable of assigning and identifying physical characteristics: they look dumb for example.

There is of course a
> strong historical connection between neo-naziism and white supremacy in the
> United States. I simply cannot fathom why someone would want to obscure
> this connection through talk about what is "necessary" and what is not.

Yes, there is. But again, I find a lot of sloppy thinking and an inattentiveness to the actual historical circumstances surrounding the rise of fasism and the ideologies associated with those political movments.


> I never suggested that a complex set of factors did not "determine" this
> event. Of course it did. I'll leave as an exercise for you to explain why
> the simple assertion that racism was a factor contributing to the shootings
> evokes so much hostility and what seems to me to be willful
misunderstanding.

The hostility was provoked by your misreading of my original post. It was also provoked by sloppy usage of words like fascism and nazism. As I recall, this thread started because Charles Brown believed that racism explained a great deal. He believed that the idea that these young men hated jocks was ludicrous. Others jumped in on occasion to buttress this point without offering much in the way of reasoning or evidence.

The question could also easily be, "Why is it so easy to hurl the label racist at anyone who doesn't necessarily think that racism was a primary factor in this incident?" I am NOT saying that you said this. However, I do think that the race card is getting played here and that does bother me. I find it entirely understandable, but ultimately unproductive. I would add that I don't appreciate one sided explanations which attribute sexism to an event either.

As was pointed out early on, if this were an incident motivated largely by race hatred against blacks, hispanics, Jews (and yes people do and have define Jews as a race) then it would seem likely that they would target large groups of those groups. They did not. They killed, intentionally, one black man. They set out to kill many many more people at random, apparently whites. They ended up kill mainly whites. Early on people on this list dismissed this as important. They argued that killing whites was incidental.

They argued that it was some sort of cover up for really wanting to kill blacks, etc.

Emma Chissitt



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