>
> 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.
"Like the idea of diversity itself, history functions at best as a distraction from present injustices and at worst as a way of perpetuating them. Henry Ford said a long time ago, "History is bunk," the purpose of this chapter will be to show that he is right."