[lbo-talk] Obama's inaugural address: make change our friend!

Dwayne Monroe dwayne.monroe at gmail.com
Wed Feb 6 11:47:46 PST 2008


Doug wrote:

Re: racist America. People dismissed that Gawker analysis of Hillary's strength among Latinos and Asians, but there's something there, no? It might be time to update Roediger's proposition that despising black people is the way to join the white race. It may be that despising black people is the way to become Americanized.

....................

Maybe.

I'm not naive enough to completely dispute what you're saying (because, there is indeed out and out racism: full stop and Anubis knows that pre-atomic age Euro ethnics got their White membership card, in part, by jumping on the 'let's hate darkie!' wagon).

Still, I wonder if it's a sufficient explanation.

That is, many of the Latino/Black and Asian/Black conflicts I've witnessed and been hit square in the jaw by have resulted from localized conflicts over influence, political clout, resource allocation, dating, religion, even the look and feel of changing neighborhoods.

Very concrete matters which almost always lead to trouble with a capital T.

In other words, what the Gawker writer breathlessly describes as "growing anti-Black racism in Latino and Asian communities" (And how do you measure this? Grocery store chatter? Rude YouTube comments? Incoming machine gun fire?*) often looks to me like typical inter-group misunderstanding and chauvinism, suitably amped for our nihilistic moment and kitted up with off-the-shelf racist conceptual tools.

But mind you, this enmity doesn't flow in only one direction.

It won't do to talk about anti-Black racism from other minorities in a void, as if Black Americans (who can be just as unkind to immigrants as any other American wanker) sit in a corner, tearfully watching their would-be ethnic allies hurl insults and move on to posher locales.

Sometimes, there's racist synergy...or is that tensegrity?

Alright, I'm in a nostalgic mood: time for some Siouxie. Perhaps "This Unrest".

.d.

*

Okay, I guess the study he cited which measured how lazy 50+ percent of Latinos think Blacks are is something to chew on but what is that actually telling us about anti-Black racism?



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