[lbo-talk] Graeber

[// ravi]

On Mar 13, 2013, at 1:34 PM, Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:
> ravi wrote:
> 
>> Do I want to live in a nation where racial tolerance is achieved via 
>> isolation or one where I might be called names (which has occurred in the > USA as well) and might even face violence, but get richer opportunities 
>> for cultural and social interaction
> 
> I just don't accept Wojtek's premises.  He makes it sound like some television sitcom where gruff but loveable characters from diverse backgrounds talk tough with each other, but ultimately care at the end of the day.
> 
> No, sorry, no fucking way that's even close to the fucked up reality of racism in continental Europe.  People get murdered here by Nazis, subject to discrimination in housing and employment, attacked by cops, and subject to a horrible control regimen of the immigration authorities, not to mention the constant vicious discourse of mainstream politics.
> 
> Maybe England is a different thing entirely, but on the continent, it's a nasty situation.  Don't prettify it by saying there's some de facto integration with a merely political incorrect public discourse.  That's a huge distortion of reality.
> 

I don’t think you need to accept what you characterise as Wojtek’s premises, in order to see my point. No sitcom caricature (or prettification) is needed to see my point.

People of colour get murdered in the USA too (after 9/11, the first guy to get killed in “revenge” in the USA, IIRC, was an Indian sikh male). They are subject to discrimination in housing (the dour landlord expressed it thus to me, a prospective tenant: "at least I won’t be renting it out to blacks”) and employment (I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of non-Asian people of colour I saw at the high-tech research lab I used to work at), etc, etc. We are building a bloody 600 billion dollar fence, for crying out loud, to keep out those lazy, parasites who are taking our jobs away.

As I have been saying, non-white people understand these factors quite well, the range of expression and pervasiveness notwithstanding.

What does not follow is that non-white people value public transportation, the welfare state, social interaction, etc any less than white Americans do. Or, OTOH, that they calibrate or weight these factors in the same way.

Leave alone the distinction I attempted to draw within non-white experiences of adversity.

	—ravi