On Aug 20, 2011, at 4:33 PM, // ravi wrote:
> But they do. Which is the point of Joe’s example. I sense that nobody, including Adolph Reed, wants to take to the street or whatever with calls for “justice” and “equality” while refusing steadfastly to explain where the injustice and equality lies (or why).
Murder and oppression of Palestinians. Mass incarceration - more than any other country in the world. How much more specific can you get?
> Reed’s clever use of superlative in “over-specifying the mechanism” doesn’t brush away the point that such specification is really the __practical__ carrying out of a programme, built around an understanding of inequality that builds solidarity within a plurality of grievances.
Eh?
> I don’t know of a thing called “generic racism”.
Adolph's context makes it pretty clear what he meant:
> The postwar activism that reached its crescendo in the South as the “civil rights movement” wasn’t a movement against a generic “racism;” it was specifically and explicitly directed toward full citizenship rights for black Americans and against the system of racial segregation that defined a specific regime of explicitly racial subordination in the South.
I.e., a specific set of laws and practices, as opposed to the attitudinal stuff that so many PC anti-racists condemn. Why the confusion about something so obvious? Does it have something to do with what Adolph said a couple of grafs down:
> 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.
Doug