It certainly makes me take another look at the recent anti-immigration rhetoric.

Can you quote some of this rhetoric? I’ve seen a fair amount of rhetoric lately protesting the presence of illegal aliens in the U.S., but I can’t recall seeing anyone opposing immigration.

However the point I was making is that many womens issues in a personal setting and some in a proffessional setting are best viewed without strict economic viewpoint. People have cultural and religious and traditional imperatives to their behavior. The I don’t care what it costs this must be done because it defines who I am decisions. The decisions make no sense economically but you do them anyway.

When a woman makes a personal impact on my life or I am asked to assist in areas that are so particularly female based that I don’t have either personal experience or a frame of reference I will give as close to a blank check support as I can.

As for the worth of Love passion and children, quite simply when all three are present it is beyond price and you offer freely all you have without question. That equation is always off the books….. And don’t start dissing the 1940’s S.F. Though I will say there is a lot of good contemperary S.F. also. It is just that S.F. Is like sex, you know exactly what you like and all else is off the table.

…I think there’s an awful lot that’s nutty in what you said, but this seems particularly silly. I can just imagine some of its more lunatic applications. A starving person comes to the table, begging for a scrap of bread, and the patriarch (well, he’s got that Y, don’t he?) looks at his matriarch (who lowers her eyes in submission), then looks back to starving person. “Sorry, starving,” he says, “but it looks to me like you need it too much. That’s your burden. It would be ridiculous for me to provide you the privilege of alleviating it. Do you have any talents that I could reward?”

Anyway, who says that what feminists want legally is a reaction to genetics? I mark there’s plenty of sexism rife in the culture. How ’bout we eliminate that?

Unless you’re somehow saying that women only exist as a deviation from men, and so all our problems are caused by being not-men, which I suppose is an argument which could be made, although it whiffs of a 1940s sci-fi pulp with a title like “The Last Woman.”

That’s what I’ve got. A whole bunch of love children and passion. (the passion beget the love children, alas)

Indeed, what shall we do for women? Men must stroke their beards and think hard upon this. what is it that women want? Is this something even discoverable? Women, so tricky! Maybe we could turn them into men, somehow. (Except then we would have to go with love children and passion - that would suck.)

Fortunately, the solution is obvious and lurking in the first paragraph! We should not reward people based on their needs. Love children and passion aren’t saleable commodities. Therefore, nothing for women! Anything otherwise would be communism. Also, nothing for poor people, nothing for disabled people, nothing for elderly people and everything for me (including love children and passion)! yay!

Women were forced into labor by reminding mostly by example of what would be the alternative to accepting a binding contract with recognizable similarities to serfdom. Women should instead be rewarded for what they can provide (Love children and passion) and attracted (enticed) to enter and stay in an arangement rather than be forced to enter and stay in a relationship. To the degree that one feels trapped anger will be present either expressed or suppressed. The critical question is this: Is the trap of ones own making.

On the feminine side of the gender devide very little of the burdens are by choice. A woman does not choose to menstrate ( Its Ok to tell me I can’t spell) or have the discomfort and disability related pregenancy. ( both of these are helped by recent biomedical technology but are still major burdens). Any effort to think about racism will have zero effect on these issues. If you have suffered under racism the effects can be corrected by law custom or thinking. If you are suffering gender realted biological difficulties then no attempt to treat it by law custom or thinking will have any effect on the root cause of the problem. What law can do is allow women to choose a method to relieve these costs of femininity in a manner of her own choosing without being overly sensitive to those who do not share the same issues. This is worth it economically due to the high value women bring to the society (Love passion and species survival). When a burden has removed it will become a non issue. Not being racist corrects racism, whta shall we do for women? Remove the second X chromosone? No we should provide privilege based upon worth first and burden second.

As Always I expect and welcome replies

Not so much yawns as “huh, there’s great big errors of fact in the starting assumptions”. Imperialism long predates capitalism. Racial superiority theories are useful to buttress slavery, but are neutral (at best) for promoting “cheap labour”. Cheap labor as the “most important commodity” under capitalism doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Labor costs have been a steadily dwindling portion of the costs of physical goods, and there are more ways to cut the cost of goods than to cut the amount of labor required. Bad premises lead to bad arguments lead to bad outcomes (which explains the spectacular success of Marxoid economies around the world at providing happiness and prosperity to the common people).

Shackling the long march towards a racially harmonious world to these anciently bad ideas is, itself, another bad idea.

Racism is part and parcel of our current system. Class is what drives it. Modern day racsim intially grew out of a need to justify slavery to intelectuals within colonial nations, which were driven economically into a position of imperialism by the advent of capitalism.

The need not only for raw materials, but also cheap labour, is what created theories of racial superiority. It suits people who rely on the exploitation of workers to continue these ideas.

Cheap labour is the most important comodity under capitalism. Products only become cheaper when they are either made by workers who will work for less, or a manufacturing method which requires less labour is developed. If a workforce is united, they will often fight for better wages. When this happens the employer is faced with two choices, give them better wages, or get cheaper labour. The marketplace often decides which choice they make. When the economy is suffering it is usually best to sack the workers and get cheaper labour. Where do you get cheaper labour from? Imigrants are best because they are usually more desperate for work.

How do you keep the imigrants working for less money? That’s easy! Make sure they have very few rights, and play up any differences in culture and skin colour that you can. The media usually lends a helping hand in this one. Bingo! The sacked workers resent the immigrants anyway because they took their jobs, but now the immigrants won’t get any help from the rest of the workers cause they’re Black/Hispanic…..insert race here. (Please feel free to replace ‘imigrants’ with ‘poorer people’ in what I have written.)

Solution: fight racism with unity, pretty obvious one that, but it took the civil rights movement in America to even begin to start achieving this.

Sorry, this is very long winded and generalised….. but now we come to the question of cultural racism i.e anti Semitism, Islamophobia…etc.

Anti Semitism has strong roots in medevil British history, but has flared up throughout Europe at one stage or another down the years. The York pogroms (Of which I only have a verbal history passed on to me by an anti nazi campaigner from York.) occured simply because the Jews in the area were allowed to charge interest on money they lent. Christianity was the dominant religion and forbade this. The anti semitic laws in England at the time meant that this was about the only way a jew could make a living. Of course, the people who owed them the most were the Noblemen who owned most of the area, and had tremendous power over the peasants. They decided that it would be best to simply drive out the Jews instead of paying them back. Bobs your uncle, a pogrom…. anti semitism spreads across Europe and becomes convenient muck in collective ages to be wheeled out by the ruling class every time they need a scapegoat. It’s similar to Indigenous Americans and Canadians having to rely on gambling laws to make a living.

OH GOD THERE’S MORE……. here we go…..

Islamophobia as we know it is slightly more contemporary, and fills the void left by universal condemnation of the industrial slaughter of the Holocaust. Fortunately, it really is very simple. It’s about the War on Terror and is being used to devastating effect right here in Blighty. If India were for any reason to rebel against American dominance, they’d have to resort back to the simple skin colour arguments. But Islamophobia suits for now anyway because most police officers and white supremicists can’t tell the difference between Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus.

Moral? As long as profits are more important than people there will be war and racsim, and the white supremacists will benefit from the common (Although not good.) sense conclusions that people draw from the shitty situations they find themselves in.

All very surface level arguments I know.

I’ll stop there because I’m anticipating yawns.

We also need an upbeat, positive message, instead of this never ending doom-and-gloom. Let’s figure out the way to repackage our ideas and make them palatable to common folks.

This is the most disturbing statement I read, because it shows that we really do have to question whether so-called legitimate issues that just happen to negatively impact non-whites and non-Christians are intential efforts to institutionalize racism and other forms of hatred.

Neo-Nazis and their ilk are the same inside even if they manage to repackage themselves and become effective at spinning hatred so it looks upbeat and positive.

It certainly makes me take another look at the recent anti-immigration rhetoric. Mixing some politicians love for using fear as a political tactic and racism creates a toxic mess.

Let me start by saying that I am a White person who has been in predominantly Black environments, and I do get the sense from my own experience that it is much harder to be black in a predominantly white environment than it is to be white in a predominantly black environment. I think many whites make the mistake of thinking that blacks think like we do, but that is not generally the case. Are there prejudice blacks? Sure, But does the level of black prejudice rise to the level of white prejudice, no.

That said let me go through your statements, and discuss each one.

You said, “am i racist for not wanting to put my children in that situation? i’m worried about them being in a situation where there is no one at all who looks like them.”

If you live in the US and you are white, your kids will have no problem seeing people like themselves. The textbooks they use in the schools will have more whites than any other groups. The videos and other teaching materials will also likely have a high number of whites. Then when they get home and turn on the TV, read books, or play with toys, they will be exposed to whites. Will the majority of their classmates be the same race as them (in NOLA), no. Does that mean they will be forever scared, no?

You said, “recently, right after katrina when there were few choices, they were in a day care that was about 90% a-a. my 4yo would come home upset because the children would tease her about her “long blonde hair” and they’d pull on it and try to touch it. they teased her about her clothes because they weren’t urban wear. she frequently was hit and would often come home with scratches and bruises. every day when we picked her up she was off in a corner playing by herself. it was starting to happen to our 2yo too. mysterious bites, hair chunks missing, lots of crying.”

In my own experience children this small are not reacting to your daughter’s race, but to someone being different. I can also assure you that preschoolers have no real sense of “urban wear” versus “suburban wear”. As far as the hair goes, I think the kids were probably curious. My stepson is Black and at 4.5 years old, and he liked to touch my hair because it was different from his Mommy’s hair. The best way to handle this is to tell the kids something like, “people have many different types of hair. Everybody’s hair is pretty.” Although assuming these kids are playing with Barbie, they already have at least some sense of white people’s hair because they don’t make Barbies with black people’ hair texture.

Now I suspect that there were probably some problems in that day care, but why should we assume that those problems are because the kids are Black?? You may be able to find another day care and not have any of these problems (the other thing to note was that it was right after Katrina–I would not be surprised if there were a lot of kids acting out given the upheavel their families were in.). You may find a White day care with the same problems (biting hair pulling etc.). I think if someone assumes that a day care or school is bad because the kids and/or teachers were Black, then that is racist.

You said, “i don’t know if not wanting them to be in this kind of situation makes me a racist. the way my girls and my friends’ daughter were treated reminds me of how african american children were treated in the early days of desegregation. or in schools where they are an extreme minority situations.”

Wanting your kids to go a a good school without academic or behavior problems is fine. I think we just have to be careful not to go over board in relating the problems to African Americans.

You said, “it’s not that there are too many african americans in public schools, but that there are too few whites. the whites have abandoned the new orleans public schools. they’ve ‘white flight’-ed out to the suburbs or they’re in parochial schools. the only non-catholic private schools here are strictly for the very rich, costing an arm and two legs to go to.
i know that nola was a 70% black city. and if the schools were 70% black, i’d have no problems (except educationally”“which i can supplement after school) sending the kids to public school.”

There are two ways to think about racism. We can think about racism at the structural level and racism at the personal level. It is very hard for you to change the structural level, but you can change things at the personal level. To me this situation is the product of both personal and structural racism. From a personal perspective individual Whites are choosing to leave, and because of the bitter combination of segregation and classism, it is harder for African Americans to get out. My thought is if a person partakes in White flight then that person is part of the problem, but I understand why people want to leave a crappy school system. I suspect the Black parents over in New Orleans east (a black middle class area) probably were worried about the NO schools too and parents have a right to do that. But I also think people need to take on the structural problems as well.

Before I complete the rest of this answer……can you tell me the name of the school the kids would go to??? I want to look up some info. on the school.

I am white. I grew up in Detoit. I attended Detroit Public Schools for 11 of my K-12 years, plus two years of public pre-school. 90-95% of the students in every school I attended were black. When I was in elementary school I was frequently picked on in the way you described. My parents chose to keep me in the system but they often would talk to the parents of children who beat me up because of my race. What they found was that most of those parents were very surpised to learn that their children were engaging in that sort of behavior. As the children got older, the physical violence stopped completely. There were still some kids in school who would verbally taunt me but really those cases were rare.

I ended up getting a good education in the public schools. I also may have gotten a taste of what it is like to be a minority. Certainly more of one than my peers in all-white suburban schools or private schools. Also, familiarity with people who are different than one can do a lot to ‘unlearn’ stereotypes. I am sure I still have some but I honestly believe that I have fewer than my parents do and that is a direct result of being placed into a situation where I had many African American peers. Basically what I am saying is that overall, it was a positive experience.

I really don’t like racism I never have. But I truly hate the idea of breaking a working society to fix racism.

I’m glad that you don’t like racism and that you never have, but your second sentence strongly implies that while you may not like racism, you do not dislike racial privilage nearly as much. Why do you think breaking a “working society” is necessary to dismantle racism unless as someone has said, racism is a key part to making it work or at the very least doesn’t hinder its operation?

Also, the argument that we’d better not fight racism(which isn’t really that bad now, or in other places in the world as if that has anything to do with it except serving as a shield to put in front of you) because it might cause the White Supremacists to come out of where they have been held in check, and do something is one I’ve heard before but not much. Yes, they may come out in response, but hey, they were always there whether their presense is noted or not. The threat of them should not be used to keep any efforts to combat institutional racism in our society from taking place, or they win(along with their less extremist counterparts) even if when what they do consists of posting their hateful rhetoric on internet forums and reveling in the violent behavior of others of their ilk. Of course, this statement is much easier to make when you don’t experience their hate firsthand.

Before I came here, I was addressing some comments written by someone calling his or her self “Alabama Black Snake” who perhaps (under other monikers) shared charming information about his work as a government employee, the type who carry guns, as well as racist rhetoric including that involving African-Americans, fried chicken and watermelons. If he or she is indeed what he or she claims to be, then I think that this is a sign that this working system of which he or she is a part of in a fairly important capacity, is in serious trouble, although this person’s comments could also be seen as a sign that at least there is some work going on in their sphere and he or she is lashing out in response.

Why do you believe that the “system needs to be brought down” in order to minimize and eliminate racism? Is it because you believe that our current society is based on racism and without racism it will collapse into chaos?

I believe that we can minimize and eliminate racism without resorting to revolution and civil war.

But, really, I think that your response claiming that if we are too vigorous in fighting racism that there will be revolution & bloody civil war is ridiculous.