>
> --- On Wed, 10/7/09, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> >
> > It is curious that we're post-racial, yet people are
> > painting swastikas and hurling racist epithets -- the events
> > that prompt the rally to begin with.
>
> People painting swastikas is pretty damn rare in the US, and you can't
> really marginalize yourself from mainstream society more than by declaring
> yourself a Nazi. I have no opinon on Michaels, but you can't leap from
> actions committed by marginal groups to the society as a whole. You are
> always going to have outliers, groups with marginal opinions. One could just
> as well argue that the existence of socialist pamphlets means that socialism
> is a deep feature of US society.
>
Really? On what basis do you make this claim? In the four years I've worked in Mount Pleasant, MI, there have been three instances of swastika graffiti and one of a noose hung from the ceiling in a laboratory, during February as I recall... and, of course, these are only the ones that made the student paper. Furthermore, about a third of my student athletes were told by coaches, parents or peers that blacks have an extra muscle in their leg that makes them able to run faster and jump higher and another third were told that there are no physiological differences between the races except that blacks came out the jungle around the time of (American chattel) slavery and therefore had to run away from predators and chase prey more recently in their evolution than white people did... And almost all of my students read black urban poverty in Detroit, Flint, Saginaw, Lansing, Jackson, Toledo, Gary and Chicago VERY differently - and as a far greater threat (of violence, drugs and higher-tax-based state expenditures) - than the white, small town and rural poverty they see whenever they drive to Mt Pleasant or across the UP. I can't get them to own up to believing that all black men are hung like horses and that blacks have natural rhythm that whites don't... but you should see 'em squirm when I talk about it. And many of the folks from Western Michigan think the lazy-ass, always illegally-here, crime-prone, education-indifferent, public support-loving, free medical care-receiving Mexican migrants who work the vegetable fields and fruit orchards are ruining everything... all less than 50-75 miles from where Michaels lives. Among my students, therefore, I have racism in both its biological and cultural forms... and hardly a single student with any native understanding of institutional and structural racism - though it appears that Michaels thinks these aren't racism, but classism sans racism. Yup, racism (analytically, if never empirically, separable from classism) he dead - my ass.
And, remember, this is Michigan, not Maine, not Indiana, not South Carolina, not Texas and not Southern California...
In Shag's quotes you read Michaels again and again and again writing about "we" and constantly generalizing about "them" and he's just plain wrong on both accounts... The lower Ninth was vulnerable and its people abandoned only because they were poor? Then why didn't poor white people outnumber poor black people there - oh, because the lower Ninth is a vestige of a once-upon-a-time racism that's now dead, really? Thank goodness corporations, which may engage in multicultural hiring at headquarters, don't (often) seek out poor, minority and disenfranchsed (all three are important) locations to compete with each other for the corporation's more dangerous, polluting and once-unionized production operations... cuz, if they did, their might be a top-of-the-food-chain multiculturalism undermined by a bottom-of-the-ladder melding of classism and racism which would have to be analyzed.
Is he able to say these thing because, as I've suggested and others have noted again and again and again, he doesn't actually do empirical research - outside of his interactions with folks at UCB, UofC and in professional meetings? I know Doug talks to people - and Reed, too - and have never read either of them making the kinds of broad, sweeping and empirically unsupportable claims Michaels does... thus the appreciation in one direction and the perhaps unnecessary name calling in the other. I don't understand the support for these arguments, given their vulgarity, by pretty damn sophisticated people... no matter their quite justified fury at the brain-dead monofocal idiots they have to deal - and who may be killing important left media outlets, destroying academic departments and coopting public programs.