My point is that the unquestioned acceptance of the ideology of racism, its old form of invisibility---like WS's TB example---has been substantially wiped out. You can't count on universal assent to a remark about "those people" the way you once could---in fact, you can pretty well count on being treated as a pariah. (That noteworthy instance of what they say at the country club when we're not around, Mitt Romney's "47 percent," couldn't possibly have referred to Afrcian Americans alone.)
So everyday ideology (I mean what, for example, the mass media reinforces) has shifted remarkably. But social scientific data points indirectly to the continued existence of racism---with a new form of invisibility, however. Ask a NYPD cop if blacks are more prone to criminality and she/he may well deny it and might even be offended that you would suggest such a thing. But keep a tally of who gets stopped and frisked by that cop and others and you have data that force their superiors to come up with transparently false excuses, such as "the suspect they were looking for was described as black," as if that could account for hundreds of thousands of stops.
One of the sources of the new invisibility is the *mixture* of elements or racism with elements of both economic and social class. Not that class or economic status has replaced race, but that they are now mixed together into something we all evidently have difficulty discussing. (I have in my relatively unscientific mind an image of a physics problem in which the solution is a vector that is the result of a multiplicity of independent forces. So anyone who wants to feel superior to people in the past who seem to have found it so hard to talk sensibly about racism had better check to see that the foot he/she is about to shift weight onto doesn't have a banana peel under it.)
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 7:16 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgand2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2013-07-11, at 7:42 PM, michael yates wrote:
>
> > Marv says that legal barriers to racial equality have been pretty much
> eliminated. I am not sure about this. The history of higher court rulings
> giving meaning to US civil rights laws over the past thirty of so years, is
> one of increasing inability of minority plaintiffs to get justice. And the
> civil rights laws, even at their best, typically require individuals to
> file suit, with all the expense and knowledge this requires. There is
> nothing comparable to what is in the National Labor Relations Act, where
> you have the NLRB which is legally bound to take your complaint or that of
> a union, basically free of charge, and which has a duty to support the
> collective rights of workers [and despite all of the problems with the
> NLRB, sometimes does]. More and more the courts have ruled that you must
> show that an employer had an intent to discriminate, which is very
> difficult to establish.
>
> That's even more telling. I would have guessed no body of legislation had
> been more universally subverted by the courts and regulatory agencies in
> capitalist countries than that governing the conflict between labour and
> capital in the workplace.
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