On Nov 24, 2009, at 7:29 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> Which would be another reason why we might not want to flush culture
> and history down the toilet as WBM want to do.
On the advice of my mental health consultants, I'm going to retire from this battle, so this will be my last word. Perhaps, in your zeal to find the bad quotes in The Trouble With Diversity - and I don't like Michaels' stuff about Wal-Mart, for obvious reasons - you missed the fact that the first chapter begins with the story of Homer Plessy, of Plessy v. Ferguson fame, who deliberately violated Louisiana's racial segregation law to provoke a legal challenge. The chapter goes on to talk about the history of racialization in American life, and about the role of culture as our current metric of racial difference. I.e., about history and culture, which you claim he's flushed down the toilet. The next chapter takes up the relations between blacks and Jews (and the definitions of blackness and Jewishness) over time, and discusses Birth of a Nation, The Turner Diaries, Mozart, Coltrane, The Strokes, and Jay-Z. And Emerson and Douglass.
Perhaps you also missed the point that Michaels came to this topic through his study of American literature, especially of the 1920s.
So, argue with Michaels all you want, but argue with what he actually wrote, not your caricature of it.
My last words on the topic.
Doug