> Ok, say Obama wins. Let's check back in on Jan 20, 2010, and see who
> was having the hallucinations.
>
> On Feb 20, 2008, at 8:38 AM, Max B. Sawicky wrote:
>
>> Hallucinatory.
>>
>>
>>> Obama’s White Men: Do They Hear Something Blacks Don’t?
>>> Wednesday, 20 February 2008
>>> by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Chris Doss's response nails precisely the problem that Black Agenda Report is getting at. Chris thinks it's a matter of changing people's ideas. That racism is fundamentally a matter of individual level thought and behavior. Thus, white men becoming less racist is seen as a huge transformation in society.
But the racism that BAR -- and, really, leftists in general -- are typically taking about only about how people think about or act toward black people (and people of color more generally). That is more properly called bigotry. Racism -- the various isms that leftists are trying to criticize, expose, and dismantle -- are *also* structural.
What that means is that you have to look at the tacit, normative rules that structure social institutions. It's in those tacit norms that structural racism operates. We don't typically see them precisely because we think of them as _normal_. And that's why the folks at BAR aren't going to give two shits about white folks who are no longer personally racist. Because their no longer personally racist behavior and thoughts ain't gonna do much about the kind of racism they're talking about.
take the Horatio Alger dewd's comments in the story B just forwarded. There are two kinds of racism operating there.
1. where he says, to paraphrase, so I had to choose, was I going to save money and spend it on the right things or was I going to buy rims for my cadillac and go out to eat. I shouldn't have to explain dude's racism with the cadillac ref.
2. that he says this at all -- success is about sacrifice and making the "right" "normal" decisions and purchases, aspiring to a normative ideal of what the good worker, citizien, consumer is -- is to enunciate a norm that is at the root of oppression
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