Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> Doug, with all due respect, I thought you'd be more critical of the
> manufactured martyrdom of the "everyone hates us Jews/Blacks/Serbs/_____
> (fill in your own group)" variety.
Wojtek, that is Chauvinism you are describing, a subdivision of racism, and far from the most important sub-division of racism. I am somewhat at a loss to describe exactly how racism, in its most vicious aspects (vicious
most of all to blacks, but in fact it poisons *all* relationships, even when blacks are not involved), "works." But however it works, personal feelings of "hatred," etc. are not its defining feature *or* its continuing cause. It is an ideology that "makes sense" (that is the purpose of ideology) of one of the most glaringly visible facts of American life, that huge numbers of blacks are in some mysterious way or other kept in poverty, isolated, jumped on by cops, etc. Notice, I'm really arguing that even the jumping on by cops, while obviously an expression of racism, is not so much, ultimately, an expression of racism as much as one of the continuing causes of racism. Racism is simply *not* an independent "entity," but the ideological expression of material social relations. The most obvious of these, and the starting point, was slavery, but only the starting point.
Incidentally, very very few racists "hate" blacks, or even dislike them.
Carrol