[Peace-discuss] Anti-racism

[C. G. Estabrook]

It's worthwhile to distinguish between legal structures and popular attitudes, 
even if there are areas where they shade into one another (e.g., the 
non-enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, or prejudicial police practice). 
The same is true of night and day.

The civil rights movement ended legal segregation and contributed to 
conscientization of some regarding racial prejudice. For others, it increased 
racial prejudice (e.g., whites who concluded "the government does everything for 
black people!").

The latter reaction was encouraged by the long-standing elite strategy of 
playing upon divisions in the working class -- and race was always a potent 
division, as limited success of 20th-century union organizing in the South shows.

Jay Gould, American financier at the turn of the last century, remarked, "I can 
always hire one-nalf of the American working class to kill the other half."  He 
was not referring specifically to race, but it helped. --CGE


Robert Naiman wrote:
> "legal" seems too narrow. economic discrimination can persist in the
> absence of laws enforcing discrimination. in fact, discrimination can
> persist without being strongly reinforced by censorious attitudes,
> through customs and practices that may seem nominally neutral but have
> the effect of reproducing existing disparities.
> 
> for example: a legacy of British colonial policies in Northern Ireland
> was that Protestant workers disproportionately held factory jobs. a
> foreman comes before the workers and says,"we have a few openings."
> workers tell friends, neighbors, cousins. as a result, the applicant
> pool is all Protestants, and only Protestants get the jobs. no law
> said only Protestants would get the jobs. and censorious attitudes
> didn't have to be particularly strong for people to spread the news to
> their social circles which happened to be overwhelmingly Protestant.
> in such a situation, you would need affirmative action for redress. it
> isn't sufficient to say, there are no discriminatory laws, and the
> censorious attitudes aren't so bad.
> 
> 
> On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 8:23 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
>> [Racism refers to legal structures that penalize groups defined by descent.
>> Racial prejudice refers to censorious attitudes towards groups defined by
>> descent.  Both are present in Israel. Racism, but not racial prejudice, is
>> now largely absent in the US (altho' some, like native Americans, may justly
>> not think so).  --CGE]
>>
>>        March 4, 2009
>>        SEGREGATION IN ISRAEL
>>
>> Israeli Association for Civil Rights
>>
>> Some 55 percent of Jewish Israelis say that the state should encourage Arab
>> emigration;
>>
>> 78 percent of Jewish Israelis oppose including Arab parties in the
>> government;
>>
>> 56 percent agree with the statement that 'Arabs cannot attain the Jewish
>> level of cultural development'
>>
>> 75 percent agree that Arabs are inclined to be violent. Among Arab-Israelis,
>> 54 percent feel the same way about Jews.
>>
>> 75 percent of Israeli Jews say they would not live in the same building as
>> Arabs.
>>
>> http://prorev.com/2009/03/segregation-in-israel.html
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> 
> 
>