[Peace-discuss] Race & class

[John W.]

A big part of this trend toward "diversity" is that the US Supreme Court has
set it in stone, more or less, in terms of the legal structure.  Race and
gender are protected classes and can elicit greater judicial scrutiny.  But
with only a few very narrow exceptions, class (i.e., poverty) has never been
considered by the Supreme Court to be a protected class worthy of any
special legal protection.  Hence the saying by Anatole France is as
pertinent in America as it is just about everywhere else:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges,
to beg in the streets, and to steal bread - the rich as well as the poor."



On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 7:28 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:



> Walter Benn Michaels, "Chav chic, and respect the poor" (Le Monde
> diplomatique):
>
>    ...at a time when class difference in the US is as high as it’s been in
> the last hundred years, we’re being urged not to talk about what we never
> talk about (the inequalities produced by capitalism) and to talk lots more
> about what we always talk about (the inequalities produced by racism). Why?
>
>    Well, one answer, of course, is the absolutely central role race and
> racism have played in our history. But it’s not a very good answer. The
> extraordinary inequalities of the last 30 years were not caused by racism
> and the catastrophic consequences of the current crash will not be
> alleviated by anti-racism. Indeed, these days anti-racism is as much a part
> of the problem as it is the solution. In every neoliberal society, the
> response to more inequality has been a call for more diversity because the
> core commitment of neoliberalism is that the only inequalities we need to do
> anything about are the ones produced by prejudice.
>
> Walter Benn Michaels on anti-racism and diversity from "The Trouble With
> Diversity":
>
>    We would much rather get rid of racism than get rid of poverty. And we
> would much rather celebrate cultural diversity than seek to establish
> economic equality.
>
>    Indeed, diversity has become virtually a sacred concept in American life
> today. No one's really against it; people tend instead to differ only in
> their degrees of enthusiasm for it and their ingenuity in pursuing it.
>
>    There’s no reason why people with a certain set of genes ought to be
> reading a certain set of books and thinking of those books as part of their
> heritage, or why, when they read some other set of books, they should think
> of them as part of someone else’s heritage. There are just the things we
> learn and the things we don’t learn, the things we do and the things we
> don’t do.
>
> Benn Michaels, from The Chronicle of Higher Education:
>
>    The argument is that anti-racism today performs at least one of the same
> functions that racism used to — it gives us a vision of our society as
> organized racially instead of economically — while adding another function —
> it insists that racism is the great enemy to be overcome. But all the
> anti-racism in the world won't take any money away from the rich and won't
> give any of it to the poor.
>
>        ###
>

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