[lbo-talk] words for the black community

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Jul 4 13:50:11 PDT 2004


joanna bujes wrote:
>
> It is extremely ill-natured of you to take people to task this way.
> Please stop.
> You swing back and forth between pomposity and crabbiness lately. What on
> earth is the matter?

The "non-sense" might have been crabbiness. The numerator/denominator was a plagiarism from Barbara Fields and I meant it with deadly seriousness. Jon's question is incoherent, and any attempt to answer it will only further confuse an already confused question. All you can do with the question is smash it and try to reset the discussion in rational terms.

You can't discuss racism (an ideology characterizing individuals in various ways and degrees) at all sensibly until you have first focused sharply and ambitiously on the objective condition of black people in the u.s., _independently_ of what anyone (black or white) "thinks" of blacks.

And part of the reason that I may be both crabby and pompous is that damn it 10s of thousands of us _learned_ this through thought and practice, often rather painful practice and confused and stumbling thought, in the '60s and 70s, and it gives me a fucking pain in the neck to see what was once so clear become so damn obscurred.

Carrol



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