[lbo-talk] Are Conservatives Racist?

[// ravi]

On Aug 19, 2011, at 11:05 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Aug 19, 2011, at 10:55 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> 
>> I saw it in the context of the larger thread's focus on how to engage race
>> - which CC didn't make explicit, but I see where you were coming from.
> 
> Also, a point that Adolph Reed makes often, and one that Seth implicitly makes in his Jacobin piece, is that racism isn't what it used to be. Seth's article lists some "attitudes" held by conservatives towards black people. They're noxious, but they're a long way from Jim Crow and lynch mobs. As Adolph argues, back in the day, one fought actual racist laws. Fighting a set of attitudes is a different ball of wax. But a lot of left rhetoric around race doesn't acknowledge this.
> 

In that sense, the left-over racism, as illustrated by Coburn’s frank and guiltless explication, is more harmful, I think. Not that any of the below is new thought, but:

Earlier racism seems to have been based on wrong notions of fact: black people are lesser human beings and deserve their station as slaves or an underclass. Any form of mixing is bad due to natural laws. With a dollop of the usual hatred and fear of someone different. BTW, this is not entirely gone. As I have mentioned before, it has been bizarre to listen to white coworkers in the US describe how outsourcing of IT will not affect them because they do high-level technical work which just cannot be done by Indians (subtext: of course not you, ravi, Indian, but those Indians in India).

But today, the difference between racism and anti-racism is one of interpretation of fact. As CB noted, there are structural causes to outcomes - the outcome differential that results from these structural causes is racism. But here we enter a theoretical realm.

One theoretical tack: One can look at the persistent attainment differences between groups and claim that these cannot be entirely explained by individual actions (or lack thereof). If there isn’t something in the individual body (as shown and accepted by the first round of anti-racism effort), then there has to be something about the environment. That’s the leftist type argument, from what I can tell. But there are other theoretical tacks one could take (such as individual responsibility based on free will, arguments and statistics about the suffering of Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants, etc) which even if theoretically unsound gives off not the stench of racism but the fragrance of intellectual debate and disagreement and one’s own individual merit (the immigrant wife of one friend wrote to me defending strong limits on and reduction of welfare, with the simple logic that if she could make it, having arrived almost penniless on these shores, then why not others who were born here and “enjoyed” welfare and still made nothing of themselves?).

I have often thought that the right way to understand Dinesh D’Souza’s title “The End of Racism” is not as a descriptive term, but as a declarative term.

All of which reminds me for some reason of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and the little I understood of it.

	—ravi