I’m also going to go out on a limb and say that there is some diversity of thought in the world of anti-racism.

The typical individual has almost zero effect on the overall society.

Personally, I really don’t know what race is assigned to me. I’m not even consistent in my self-identification.

Or I’m sorry, are you like Stephen Colbert?  Do you not see race?  Do you not know what race you are?  Is this not a factor of identity you acknowledge?

My question has to be oddly phrased, because normal phrasing cannot describe the consequences of the point I’m trying to contest: That every member of a society which is on the whole racist must be racist.

Also, it seems to me that slavery in America didn’t end because people suddenly started listening to abolitionists and realized it was wrong in some great moral awakening.  It was completely economically untenable within the burgeoning Industrial Revolution.  Industry required resources from African colonies and so needed its labor supply to stay where it was for the purposes of deforestry and mining an’ such.  Also, the problem with slaves is they really can’t buy the products manufacturing offers – no purchasing power.  Thus the North/South conflict.  It’s been argued that we never ended slavery, just universalized it and deracialized it.  Not so sure about that one, but in any case, I mention all this to show exactly how the economic system one finds themselves in is able to dictate moral priorities rather neatly…

Also, I would advise those unfamiliar with America’s historical ethnic settlement patterns to read Wilber Zelinsky’s 1973 classic “The Cultural Geography of the United States,” specifically the chapter on Appalachia (extending westward across TN & KT to the Ozarks, Okla., E. Tex). For more recent work, see Colin Woodard’s “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.” A brief summation on the region we are discussing from Woodard: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember_2011/features/a_geography_lesson_for_the_tea032846.php?page=3

“Greater Appalachia

Founded in the early eighteenth century by wave upon wave of rough,
bellicose settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of northern Ireland,
northern England, and the Scottish lowlands, Appalachia has been
lampooned by writers and screenwriters as the home of rednecks,
hillbillies, crackers, and white trash. It transplanted a culture formed
in a state of near-constant warfare and upheaval, characterized by a
warrior ethic and a deep commitment to personal sovereignty and
individual liberty. From south-central Pennsylvania, it spread down the
Appalachian Mountains and out into the southern tiers of Ohio, Indiana,
and Illinois, the Arkansas and Missouri Ozarks, the eastern two-thirds
of Oklahoma and on down to the Hill Country of Texas, clashing with
Indians, Mexicans, and Yankees along the way. Intensely suspicious of
lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers alike, Appalachia has
shifted alliances based on whoever appeared to be the greatest threat to
its freedom; since Reconstruction and, especially, the upheavals of the
1960s, it has been in alliance with the Deep South in an effort to undo
the federal government’s ability to overrule local preferences.”

No region has received fewer migrants–both international and domestic–than this area, retaining the ethno-cultural traits initially set by frontiersman since the original breaches of the 1763 Line of Proclamation. It is distinct from the Corn Belt/Midwest to the north and also from the agrarian, genteel coastal South to the east and south.

Whether race is the ultimate factor or not (this is the general subregion that gave us the Ku Klux Klan, btw), the historical record is clear in that the red areas depicted in the map above line up almost perfectly with one of the oldest, most well-documented subcultures in the U.S.; an area whose “core” may be Appalachia, but whose ‘hill folk’ cultural reach extends much farther to the west.

The racism which exists in the Western world today, for example, stems from the violence of the Atlantic Slave Trade (not slave trading in general, mind you – recall that there were instances of slaves becoming emporers in Rome).  Beginning in the early 15th century, we have a ramping up of rhetoric tying race to slavery.  There were Spanish ministers even then who expressed moral outrage over this growing phenomenon, but they were successfully silenced.  They had to be – this was purely economic justification of a very, very lucrative engagement.  For example, we find hundreds of years of proponents citing Biblical examples, notably that of Ham, in order to rationalize their physical and psychological atrocities.  So, this particular ideological framework existed for so long, we still see it playing out in our current social structure, demographics, employment figures, etc.  Ideas don’t die when proven wrong, they merely become sublimated in some often strange ways.

So, in some ways, yes racism will probably be with us for some time, but I’m a firm believer in moral progress – every day brings new changes…

Nope. This is not at all a tenet of anti-racism, and if someone told you it is, I wouldn’t listen to that person anymore. If you’re talking about the people who have caused the most racial problems in our nation (or throughout the world), it is definitely /not/ low-status white folks who are responsible.

Despite that nowhere in this blog does it propose that racism was the ONLY factor, there are those who insist on treating it so simply.  Meanwhile, they accuse the poster of a lack of analysis (he also didn’t bring up particle physics – gasp!).  Projecting much?

I think the efforts here to trivialize the role of race by expanding the article beyond its own purported scope are telling.  Even when we discuss these relationships in terms of institutional bias, it seems people tend to personalize this issue profoundly.

So tread carefully all those engaging in antiracist work…