[lbo-talk] Noam Chomsky is losing it

123hop at comcast.net 123hop at comcast.net
Tue Sep 27 23:16:25 PDT 2011


Not trying to be difficult, just trying to understand.

People of color are disporportionately jailed and punished for crimes that white people walk away from. Of course, they are also poor. But if poverty were the only variable, then there wouldn't be the disproportion.

How do I talk about this without talking about prejudice against people of color? Perhaps not conscious, but real.

Joanna

----- Original Message ----- From: "Dennis Claxton" <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org, lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org, lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 10:45:27 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Noam Chomsky is losing it

At 10:36 PM 9/27/2011, Dennis Claxton wrote:


>He's basically saying that calling out someone as racist is not
>politics because, again in the part you clipped, "It doesn't lend
>itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about
>what counts as racism."

I meant to include this. Reed also says:

My point is that it's more effective politically to challenge the inequality and injustice directly and bypass the debate over whether it should be called "racism."

I do recognize that, partly because of the terms on which the civil rights movement's victories have been achieved, there is a strong practical imperative for stressing the racially invidious aspects of injustices: they have legal remedies. Race is one of the legal classes protected by anti-discrimination law; poverty, for instance, is not. But this makes identifying "racism" a technical requirement for pursuing certain grievances, not the basis of an overall political strategy for pursuit of racial justice, or, as I believe is a clearer left formulation, racial equality as an essential component of a program of social justice.

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