>>> kirsten neilsen <kirsten at infothecary.org> 06/06/99 11:19AM >>>
>>>> i think that the media focus on the former (sensational)
>>>> promotes complacency .....
> Charles: Yes, you said this before. There is some truth in it
thank you.
> but to me, it does not get at the main issues and problems of the
> complex racism. (sic)
i never claimed that i was getting at the main issues and problems of complex racism. rather, i was speaking specifically of a particular effect of media coverage of racism in this country. (((((((((((((
Charles: But you weren't the only one talking. I was talking about the problems of the complex of racism more holistically than you. As a matter of fact I never said anything to you, until you said something to me, as I recall. From below , it seems you criticized me without having read or understood what I said.
By focussing on the one aspect that you do without relating it to the whole. Since the problem of fascistic racism is an important part of the whole problem of racism. your focus on the issue you describe above to the exclusion of fascistic racism causes your analysis to go astray.
(((((((((((((
> Charles: Also, it seems the implied solution would be to publicize
> the most violent ( I would say violent,not overt) acts LESS, no ?
> I don't agree with that at all.
no, i wouldn't agree with that either. but our initial discussion was
about attributing events to racism where racism was *not* the cause,
thereby adding to the obfuscation with out the positive corollary,
that is, publicizing a violent racist crime.
Charles: I don't agree that that was "our" initial discussion. I don't see a very significant problem of attributing racism to events where racism is not the cause. I see the opposite problem - not attributing racism as a cause when it is - as the main problem as between the two. I don't discuss the problem of false attributions to racism much except to say that it is not a very important problem or part of the denial of racism syndrome.
> Charles: On Littleton, my argument ...was that the most significant
> SOCIAL AND POLITICAL motive (not necessarily their own personal
> primary motive) was that racism. Why ? Because hatred of jocks is
> not as important of a social problem as racism.
well, that's not how i recall your position, but you're entitled to
evolve.
interesting how, in the case of littleton, you oppose racism with hatred of jocks. how disingenuous. how about racism vs. alienation of white suburban youth under late capitalism, of which one of the many manifestations is racism.
((((((((((((((((( Charles: Actually I didn't evolve on this aspect but said the same thing from the beginning . See my original post below. The opposition between racism and hatred for jocks was not mine. It came from the newspaper article which I was criticizing in part for putting racism and hatred of jocks in competing categories. Interesting how your substantial misunderstanding of what I said has you attributing to me ( putting racism and anti-jockism together) exactly what I was criticizing. Your misrememberance of what I said makes your criticism of my position off.
Also, in my other posts on this thread I discussed repeatedly the relationship between racism and alienation from capitalism.
I also mentioned that especially the mass murder aspect was most likely connected to the Hitler/Nazi fetish and not hatred of jocks, for obvious reasons.
Charles Brown
ORIGINAL POST
>>> "Charles Brown" <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> 04/22/99 03:09PM >>>
It is despicable how the media is downplaying the racism. One local headline is
"Group hated athletes the most ". It starts out:
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris hurled insults at Jews, blacks and Hispanics... But they REALLY hated the athletes, who had power and popularity - everything they didn't. (end quote) .
The text itself has he word "really" in all caps.
We in the Black community, veteran scientists of the vast media phenomenon of covering up racism and constantly nurturing in the minds of the masses a sense that racism is not that big of a problem in U.S. society, read this as "white people, don't get to thinking that these kids' main problem and motive was racism. The main thing was they hated athletes". Yea, right, a big social problem in U.S. history and society, the hate of atheletes. Did you realize that America once enslaved athletes ? That Hitler hated athletes more than Jews ? All the typically prevaricating news coverage is saturated with "damage control" to prevent people from connecting their horror at the crime to a horror at racism in general. I hope Chomsky and Parenti publish books on this media coverup of racism phenomenon alone.
By the way, contrast this with the whole O.J. Simpson months long, virtual reality maxi-series, which had coverage priority at least equal to that on the current war. It was astonishing. A relatively private murder, of the type that thousands occur every year became a national religious ritual. There can be no other explanation for this coverage extraordinarily out of proportion to its social or poltical import: it was a Big Brother method of baptising a new generation in the myth of the Black rapist and murderer ( See Angela Davis' essay "The Myth of the Black Rapist" in _Women, Race and Class_ on history of the icon of Black man as rapist and savage as a bulwark of U.S. racist consciousness). Ironically, some of the truth broke through even in the O.J. Simpson maxi-series with the revelation of the Nazi cop Mark Furhman. Notice how the professor's tapes of Furhman's racist ravings have never been made public.
Or maybe the media's motive was to get an O.J. Simpson as an athlete, that widely despised and victimized group.
In this and the current genocidal mass murder,we have the reverse aspect of racist mindcontrol: Playing down in the mass consciousness the scale of actually existing white fascistic racist consciousness , organizations and cliques in the U.S. If the truth of how racist America is today were common knowledge it would be much more difficult to argue that affirmative action is not necessary by alleging that racism is a thing of the past. The signal characteristic of Reaganite racism ( the new racist line seeking to role back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement) is the DENIAL that racism is still a significant problem in the U.S. The post Reagan monopoly media has a term for those who accuse anybody of racism in politics, business or anything else: "playing the race card" or "race baiting". The right wing cries out that Black leaders are falsely portraying Black people as victims. America is really a wonderful place of racial harmony and Black people are just a bunch of lazy ! ! , malcontents., etc., etc.
Mark my word. We are about witness a whole lot of creative and diversionary sociological/psychological/theological pronouncements and explanations all designed to keep the great mass of white people in denial about the representative racism of this horrific crime.
Charles Brown
>>> "William S. Lear" <rael at zopyra.com> 04/22/99 01:58PM >>>
On Thursday, April 22, 1999 at 13:44:44 (-0400) Max Sawicky writes:
>...
>Evidently the two gunmen in Colorado are not from downscale
>families. They each had two parents. The kids' facility with
>computers suggests they had decent employment prospects. The
>school itself is said to be pretty good. So money seems to have
>little to do with their story, at least in any simple way.
If your evidence that they were not "downscale" is merely that they had two parents, I'll say that the case is still open on that. But, from what it sounds like to me, it was a big dose of good old-fashioned All-American racist violence. But race and class are closely linked here, so it's never too easy to dismiss one or the other.
Bill