JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
>
>
> Is this mostly how racism works--that they're discriminating against/locking
> up/excluding/killing people for their own good? It manages to survive such
> arguments, which is stunning. The primary thing that works is the objects of
> racism saying 'Uh-uh, no more,' which is proof that the establishment line
> about "helping" was a lie. One thing we have made some progress on in this
> country is racism. Yeah, racism has worked for a longass time, but it's
> nothing like it was, so we'll just keep kicking at it, right?
>
Yes. Overt racism, even in t he years before the breaking of Jim Crow, was never as important as the huge web of implict assumptions and expectations that virtually defined "american" life. I don't have a copy around this minute, but Toni Morrison wrote an important essay which focused on the presence of race in american literary works in which all the characters were white and no one ever mentioned race.
Those implicit assumptions become visible in their cruder forms -- i.e., no reasonably sophisticated person would call Iranians "uncivilized" as one of my students did during the Hostage crisis. But that sense of Arabs & Iranians as backward probably helped the sophisticates in the Defense Dept to underestimate the resistance they would encounter in Iraq. U.S. generals and aircraft engineers in the '40s couldn't -- just simply _couldn't_ see how good a fighter the Zero was. That cost a lot of American pilots their lives.
Nothing in the '60s worked so well to break through racist assumptions as the riots in the cities: the response of many overt racists was "Hey -- those folks are serious." If the Iraq resistance is fierce enough it will tend towards having this effect.
Carrol
> Jenny Brown