Is there a reason you clipped my post the way you did and then followed it up with the tag that "Debates over who is "most oppressed" are obscurantist."? This gives the appearance that I am engaged in doing exactly that which is not the case. That's why I wrote: "I find it less than helpful to try to list one minority group as more or less oppressed than another. It leads nowhere and is a tool used divisively more than anything else." There is no such thing as "most oppressed" and attempts to label one group more oppressed than another is more than just a bad idea. I posted the data I did to demonstrate how meaningless such categorizations are because you can be guaranteed that someone will disagree and claim that sure enough blacks have it worse than others or Native Americans have it worse or whatever and post numbers to "prove" it. I deal with this shit all the time. Notice how quickly someone did exactly this? Peter Ward jumped right in to claim that: "I think attention to back oppression is legitimate. Blacks have, and continue to be, uniquely persecuted compared to other ethnic groups and I believe this fact is significant. In addition to poverty, blacks have been subject all sorts of other abuses, such as police harassment...." Of course attention to black oppression is legitimate who the fuck disagrees with that idea? Every minority group's story of persecution is unique, so what? Does Peter believe that in the US poverty and police harassment never happen to NDN's and/or Hispanics because of their race or that it happens at a lesser degree? Or perhaps my favorite belief that there aren't enough NDN's around so that it doesn't matter as much? There are real world negative consequences in making such statements. My own tribe recently disallowed the claim of tribal membership to descendants of black NA's. These were the descendants of freed slaves once held by my tribe who intermarried into the tribe. In the run-up to the election the reasons given for denied enrollment were claims that NA's are more persecuted because we have suffered internment up through the 20th century, face greater poverty, have experienced a greater level of genocide, that we're the only group not allowed access to our own assets and they must be managed by the Great White Fathers in Washington, blah, blah, blah, along with the anger in the NA community over the perception that in the US race is ALL about what Blacks want and no one else. All this shit is directly attributable to statements like Peters. He's fanning the flames of a fire many people are trying to put out. I'm pretty sure Julio used the phrase he did because it's sometimes easier to just write it out that way not because he really believes that in the US Blacks have somehow suffered a greater oppression than NA's or Hispanics. His follow up post seems to confirm this. But his statement is taken at face value by someone like Peter and there is a real danger in that as I hope I have partially demonstrated above. I don't want to sound like I'm ragging too much on Pater but his statement is obviously false and should be pointed out as such.
John Thornton