>My position is—and I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this
>bluntly, yet to no avail, in response to those in blissful thrall of
>the comforting Manicheanism—that of course racism persists, in all the
>disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and “attitudes”
>that are characteristically lumped together under that rubric, but
>from the standpoint of trying to figure out how to combat even what
>most of us would agree is racial inequality and injustice, that
>acknowledgement and $2.25 will get me a ride on the subway. It doesn’t
>lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument
>about what counts as racism.
cf. Michaels from Doug's interview:
>what race does for people on the left is turn
>politics into a kind of ethics for them. so they
>have a tremendous commitment to thinking of
>themselves as ethically superior to their
>opponents because their opponents are not simply
>people who support a different political
>construction, a very different political system,
>they are not people who are committed to the
>free market, they are people who are also
>racist. so we spend an incredible amount of time
>on the left trying to make sure our enemies
>aren’t just people who have strong ideological
>differences with us but are also bad people. i
>not only just think that is a complete waste of
>time and intellectual energy but it is also
>deeply misleading. it helps us misrecognize them.
Granted, Michaels is talking not writing here, but the quote from Reed is not only miles better in terms of getting the point across, but the point itself is nuanced in a way that is missing from Michaels. That nuance makes all the difference I think.