renouncing whiteness

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Tue Nov 28 12:47:14 PST 2000



>>> sokol at jhu.edu 11/28/00 02:41PM >>>
At 02:31 PM 11/28/00 -0500, Charles wrote: seriousness in contrast with Wojtek's trying to turn it into a joke, and trying to dismiss these issues as if he has no left political obligation to fight racism, including first , of course, acknowledging it as a real and important social problem for radicals.

Racism is a very serious thing, and so is the holocaust. Its is the usage of those words to justify the "anything goes" approach to political discourse that is difficult to be taken seriously. The difference between you and I is that I have no problem accepting "racist" explanation of behavior if it is adequately supported by empirical evidence, whereas you seem to accept it even if there is not much evidence to support it.

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CB: No that is not the difference between you and me, and I rely more on empirical evidence than you do in this debate. As so often on this subject, you have it exactly wrong and backward. You are the one who daydreams on this topic unrelated to social reality and the facts.

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>
>When I say Blacks will judge, I don't mean anything heavy duty except in
the common sense that of course, Black people are judging whether white people are racist all the time , constantly, but Black people have inferior power to do anything about their judgements in this regard except in the periodic anti-racist upsurges in U.S. history.

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That sounds like a racist idea.

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CB: Only to someone who has wilfully curmugeon thinking about race, like you do, the empirical evidence of which is in many of your posts.

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I would not describe anyone, Black, Yellow, or White as "having inferior power to do anything" about how they are being viewed. It is quite condescending to describe an entire group of people as being a "white man's burden" so to speak.

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CB: The status of Black people in the U.S. as an oppressed and despised minority group is equivalent to saying they have inferior power to change their oppressed circumstance. Here ,you are just expressing phony irony and a sort of crocodile tears for the oppressed groups



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