On Jan 5, 2008, at 10:12 AM, Charles Brown wrote:
> Well, you know, phlogiston doesn't exist, so there's a mild
> implication that maybe racism doesn't exist if sometimes it seems like
> phlogiston.
That wasn't what I was implying, mildly or at any other strength. When people talk of systemic racism as a system while rejecting talk of race affecting individual decisions, they make it sound like an abstraction without any concrete reality. The risk is that that kind of thinking makes racism exist everywhere but actually nowhere, like phlogiston.
Doug