CB: "US society is still shaped by the racism and white supremacy of its history. The denial of this is part of the American extreme anti-historical/presentist consciousness."
[WS:} The "peculiar institution" is as American as the flag and apple pie, so I am not sure who is seriously denying it. I also do not find debating this very interesting, it is like debating whether the earth is round or the sun rises in the east.
^^^^^ CB: The "peculiar institution" is slavery. It was abolished. What the Reaganite deniers of racism claim is that the US 2010 is no longer impacted by the "peculiar institution"; that there are no longer any "incidents or badges of slavery" as the 13th Amendment puts it.
Yes, what I am saying seems obviously true to me, boringly trivial even ( smile).
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To my mind, a far more interesting question is why segregation patterns persists long after the "peculiar institution" and its legal vestiges have been gone. Blaming it on people's attitudes looks like evading that question.
^^^^^ CB: No. Blaming it on their culture, in the anthropological sense of "culture"; their idea system. It's a social, not individual psychological explanation. Culture derives from history. ^^^^^^^
When you look at from another angle, other countries, like Brazil, also have a large ex-slave populations, yet they seem not to be as segregated as the US. Even we assume that Brazilians have different attitudes than Americans, it begs the question why?
^^^^ CB: Yes, that would be a question to ask and answer. I think Brazil has a higher percentage of people of African descent than the US. And it has larger percentage of people with Indian heritage. Those might be factors in the explanation.
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I do not have any definite answers to it, this is not really my area of specialization, but I have a strong feeling that it has something to do with the operations of the market, which seems to permeate the U society to a much greater degree than elsewhere. There are a lot of ways in which the market can contribute to solidification of prejudices, chief of them being catering to those prejudices to market stuff for sale, and people being able to act on those prejudices to design their entire way of life i.e. where they live where they shop what kind of culture and entertainment they buy etc.
^^^^^ CB: Maybe. I'd say the market enters in this way: the market is a rat race. So, white people ,most of whom are struggling in this rat race, understandably are against things like affirmative action which would drop them even further back in the overall rat race. They aren't students of history and social science , who engage in analyses and discussion such as we are having now. There trying to make it in the present. They don't feel they are responsible for the crimes of white supremacy , slavery, Jim Crow, nor do they perceive that they have advantages over Black people and other people of color.
Actually, Obama's speech on race in Philadelphia during the campaign is significant because it expresses understanding of both the Black and Brown perspective _and_ perspective of many struggling white people, as I discuss in brief above.
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I mean, prejudice of "others" is very common across all social groups, yest most of those groups do not have an option to shop for ways of life that embodies and solidifies their prejudices. For example, Croats and Serbs might have prejudices against each other but they also did not have the luxury of buying into products (like housing) that further exaggerated these prejudices. They may be telling ethnic jokes about each other, but lived in the same neighborhoods, went to same schools, movie theaters etc. It is only when the market gives people a choice to design their way of life based on their prejudice - payed out by marketers - is when they do start separating people.
^^^^^^^ CB: Yes, on your main point, capitalist ideologists , like Justice Scalia, proudly proclaim that _in_equality is the aim of our system and is the result we want from it. I am not surprised that socialist Yugoslavia made big strides against ethnic residential segregation.
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In any case, these are my two cents on the issue.
Wojtek