--- Art McGee <amcgee at well.com> wrote:
[before anything else, hello, Art. Speaking as a fellow nationalist, and also as someone who, like yourself, likes their language on the strong side, I hope you'll take the remarks below in the spirit in which they were intended]
>
> Sigh. Let's go back to Modern Race Dialogue 101:
>
> 1. Substitute for the words "white people" the following
> words: Imperialists, Capitalists, Racists, White
> Supremacists, Eurocentrists.
>
> 2. Now calculate just how many "white people" living in
> Africa (or America, or who are even on this list) do NOT fit
> in any of those categories. There wouldn't be that many left.
There are very definitely degrees of being an imperialist, capitalist, etc ,etc, and not all of them are incompatible with being a perfectly decent person. You're equivocating here; you want to use a sense of imperialist, racist, etc which justifies swearing a lot and being angry at someone, but you can't make this stick. So you weaken the categories to allow, for example, Dennis to be considered a racist because he's insufficiently respectful of the purely African provenance of hip-hop, without also realising that someone who's only 'racist' in this highly attenuated sense isn't a proper target for this kind of rage.
>
> I hate having to explain the obvious each time I try to talk
> to white folks, but WHITE, when spoken of by Black folks,
> has very little to do with phenotype or racial categorization.
I think you've got an excessively high standard of what is obvious in this regard. I was brought up in an exclusively white community, and have only one or two non-white friends, all of whom are British Indians. I'm sure that I'm not the only person on this list in a similar situation. How the hell would I know anything about how black people talk? It's good of you to explain what you mean by these terms, but it doesn't exactly predispose potential supporters in your favour to be hit over the head in the first lesson.
Oh yeh, and you probably want to be a bit less keen on using the word "phenotype" in the context of black people. It's a complete misuse of a biological term which just doesn't apply.
>
> Notice how you can somewhat tell who the white people are
> on this list by their attempts to intellectualize racial
> oppression out of existence, whereas for the Black and other
> non-white people, the idiocy of such simplistic formulas is
> self-evident. Yet the "white" people think, because of their
> Eurocentric worship of the so-called western intellectual
> tradition, that they are smarter or have it all figured out,
> when instead, they need to be committed to an asylum for the
> mentally disturbed. Yes folks, their denial is that serious.
>
This just isn't true, though, is it? Or if it is, it's only true in the sense that some (not all) people on this list think that racial oppression is a result and/or subset of class oppression, and you admitted yourself that this was probably correct.
> In any place where Black people have not come to some sort
> of more conscious realization of their "Blackness", such as
> Brazil, they are MORE OPPRESSED than they are here simply
> because they have no way to fight back against the elephant
> that is standing on their neck. They can't see the elephant,
> so attribute their poverty and oppression to something else,
> or in the time honored tradition, blame themselves for what
> is beyond their own personal agency to correct.
>
> What is wrong with you people? Are you just stupid,
> disingenous, or both?
There's a lot to agree with in the longer of the two paragraphs above; as a Welsh Nationalist, I think that Art has succinctly summarised the counterargument to Doug's contention that nationalism is intrinsically racist and anti-socialist. I don't see how the heck it leads into the conclusion that anyone is stupid or disingenuous, though.
>
> Yes, and Yoshi, being a woman of color, but also being
> someone clued in to common sense, clearly understood that I
> wasn't really contemplating some terroristic purge of white
> people from the African continent, raping virginal white
> women and then sending them packing, which I know was the
> scenario that popped into your White Supremacist heads.
Oh give it a fucking rest mate. For starters, the mystic bond of blood which unites an African-American man and a Japanese woman in their non-whiteness, doesn't appear to have extended to your spelling Yoshie's name in the way which she includes it at the top of outgoing emails. Second, either you haven't watched the news lately, or you don't know as much about Africa as you think you do. You might notice that in Zimbabwe over the last six months to a year, a group of Africans who have an excellent claim (indeed, a legally contractual claim) to a lot of farmland currently occupied by white farmers have begun to, as a result of a highly complicated political situation, admittedly, with no obvious heroes and villains, begun to take direct action to drive the white farmers out. This has taken the form of, marching onto the farms, badly beating and occasionally shooting the white farmers (and occasionally their labourers) and, in several instances, raping any women they find (some white, some not, some virgins and some not, though I don't quite see what that's got to do with anything). There is nothing "White Supremacist" in assuming that someone who talks about something which sounds very like what is actually happening in the news, is talking about those actual events.
> I was really trying to see what sort of contortions your White
> Supremacist mentality would twist into to try and disabuse
> me of the African people's right to do such a thing.
I would be very interested to discuss with you the correct solution to the political problems of Southern African decolonisation. But there is no point in pretending that the way in which some Africans are going about solving this problem is not, as a matter of fact, involving committing acts of murder and rape.
d^2
===== ... in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. -- Bertrand Russell
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