Charles Brown:
| Definitions for tough cases is what lawyers do all the time.
| We cannot make the defintional problems the reason for not
| fighting for the substantive power to the people, as a whole
| and as individuals. That the law won't be perfect cannot be
| an excuse. All laws are imperfect, like mathematics.
If "we" are going to call the cops, we'd better know _exactly_ what we're calling them for, or they may get ideas and do a lot of things we didn't expect them to do. It's not the kind of thing I'd want to leave up to lawyers. (Of course as an anarchist I don't even want there to _be_ cops, much less call them, but I'm going along with the scenario for the moment.) What I'm trying to get at here is not the trickiness of drawing statutes but the difficulty of knowing what we're doing when we outlaw racism (or pornography) -- if indeed we're really doing anything.
It seems to me that as long as the social system is as it is, the basic theme of class conflict is going to constantly resonate in other relations and categorizations. So insofar as ethnic difference can be detected, like other differences (sex, age, region, cultural style, and so on), it is likely to pick up the fundamental beat and become another edge or term or tool of oppression. And of course this includes artificial ethnicities, such as "The White Race". But the bourgeois answer, soc-dem or soft cop variety anyway, is not to abolish these edges and terms and tools but to regulate them by incorporating them into statutes and institutions, without dealing with the class system which energizes them (of course). I don't find this to be a satisfactory solution.
To jump over several steps -- ever read the Race Traitor stuff? The reason I ask is that it seems to me that the people connected with that appear to be headed toward the more radical idea that the racial system has to be demolished, not regulated or contained, which is what I think legal suppression suggests.
| Outlawing fascistic racist speech is not the only anti-racist
| proposal of the Left. It also, supports affirmative action,
| and all of the civil rights laws as interpreted pre- the
| Rehnquist and Reagan court. We are for returning to those
| anti-racist measures and advancing them further. So there
| should not be a problem with the obstruction you mention when
| the entire anti-racist program is broadcast.
Well, we had the entire anti-racist program and the bourgeoisie reversed it, or sold it out -- something happened to it. Doesn't this suggest that something more fundamental than prohibiting certain kinds of expression is required? The government can restrain people from doing things but it can't provide what we might call "unracism" -- the freedom to live without reference to race oppression and conflict -- because that's actually a positive, constructive process.
Gordon