[lbo-talk] White Supremacy (was Tim Wise)

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Wed Jul 10 16:34:49 PDT 2013


At 09:38 AM 7/10/2013, Carrol Cox wrote:
>DH: Everyone keeps pointing to racial disparities, which are undeniable
>unless you're a reactionary. The point is, what do you do about it? You
>can't attack "racism." The legal environment is very different now from the
>days of formal segregation. Jumping up and down, pointing and screaming
>"racist!" doesn't do squat.
>
> ------------
>
>(Well, it does turn attention away from the material foundations of the
>"color line," focusing attention on how isolated individuals think.)
>
>Somehow, 'racially' 'segregated' housing has to be smashed. This was not
>accomplished simply by making segregation illegal. (Remember that MLK's
>greatest defeat was the failure in desegregating neighborhoods in Chicago.
>But as long as those residential patterns remained unchanged the ideology of
>racism will remain powerful in the U.S.
>
>Note the "somehow" above. No one has any clear plan for accomplishing that.
>
>Carrol
>
>P.S. As I said in an earlier post, there are real problems of language. How
>does one organize mass struggles around police outrages without (for popular
>purposes) using the word "racism"?

Yeah, but there is also a really horrible issue with institutionalized racism in occupations.

In the city where I live, it's a minority white city. I see a lot more black men and women working in diverse occupations. A lot more people of color more generally. Not representative, in the least. E.g., for a city that is 47% black, you don't see 47% black dentists.

People live in the city for a variety of reasons. But there is one thing I learned: there isa strong impetus not to live in the city and that has to do with its identity as "dark". I learned this from my son when he moved back in last year. In other words, if you are racist, you will avoid living here like the plague. Others, those who choose to live here either don't know about the issue and haven't learned the code (it took me two years to understand the code words used here) or choose to live in a more integrated environment.

When I worked a stint in a nearby suburb 26 miles away and near the beach, I felt like I drove from one world into another world. The segregation by neighborhood was really clear in a way it isn't in the city where my home is. There is still horrible pockets of it, where some neighborhoods are 98% white, but in the integrated neighborhoods, the city has the highest block-level integration in the country. this means that, blocks are integrated. If you go by a less granular area, ZIP Code, it can seem integrated, but that's ignoring the way neighborhoods and blocks are segregated within the ZIP.

But what was even worse was that the segregation by occupation was glaring.

Whereas large employers in the city would have an integrated workforce, with people doing all kinds of jobs from clerical work to mid-level management to technology occupations to professional-managerial - still skewed toward whites, especially at the upper end of the pay scale and occupational prestige hiearchy -- in the beach suburb, job segregation within an organization was easy to see. Black people were segregated to a handful of occupations: maintenance, janitorial, help desk, food service. It was bizarre to move from one way of living to another way every day.

This pattern gets repeated all over this beach town, with the exceptions being government and military employment, and some contracting agencies that work for gov/mil.

The difference in black population between the two areas: 47% in the city, 20% in the suburb.

In neither place are blacks represented as, say, 47% of engineers or 20% of dentists, but there's a significant difference in integrationist hiring practices in the city than in the 'burb. People hire people like them. And when you live in a beach commuinity that is built on white flight, that feeling is pretty strong.



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