I admit "racism" is a big topic. Still, I was unprepared for the many ways people didn't really want to talk about it. First, you had to show your passport: What is your race? That's bound to affect what you say about race and whether it is valid or not. Right? Then there was the argument that if the right mix of dominant and minority participants didn't happen, the discussion would not be meaningful. Next, it was feared the topic would be too big, too abstract, might veer off in too many directions... Finally, there was the "everyone understands racism in different ways..." relativistic objection.
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But you see, I don't think anyone was - is - avoiding discussing racism at all and, if you trace the origin of this latest series of threads on the topic, you'll note that the manner in which people expressed themselves (including showing their "passports") were reactions to the way R asked his original question (paraphrasing now) "why don't you talk about race here?" followed closely with the assertion "I want minorities to take the lead."
This is what set the course for subsequent threads. Indeed, the discussion of how large and abstract the topic is (my contribution, if memory serves - see http://makeashorterlink.com/?C2D713DA8 ) was a direct response to R's implied suggestion we could hash out the ins and outs of racism in a discussion thread by asking really simple questions such as "how are we White folks doing?". I wasn't saying that racism, due to its great width and breadth, is a topic beyond our abilities but rather that it has to be tackled from a multitude of vectors - some psychological, others political, others policy related, etc.
R seemed to be saying that folks here were running for the hills whenever racism was on the table, my reply was that racism is discussed quite often, not as a unified field of thought and action but as a component of other discussions - apparently fragmented, but all moving in a similar direction.
The very good post from Chuck Grimes you included is a case in point. Chuck's dissection of coded language in political campaigning is an important description of one way the problem manifests itself.
But it's only one of many. So we could have a discussion of how this language coding works but this wouldn't be a complete description of racism as a whole.
Another avatar, racist patterns in housing, is a big part of the puzzle but so big in and of itself as to deserve its own thread.
And so on and so forth.
No, I don't see any reluctance to discuss racism; what I see, or rather what R inspired, was a stated reluctance to assume it could handled all at a go instead of being part of an ongoing discussion of the workings of the world.
.d.