[Peace-discuss] Anti-racism

[Robert Naiman]

I have no problem with making a distinction between legal structures
and popular attitudes. I was making a different point: that the
categories of "legal structures" and "popular attitudes" don't cover
"racism," unless one expands the categories of "legal structures" and
"popular attitudes" to include the absence of redress, since there are
tendencies for disparities created in the past to be
self-perpetuating, even in the absence of legal discrimination and
popular prejudice.


On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 2:53 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
> 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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>>>
>>
>>
>>
>



-- 
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org