[Peace-discuss] Race & class

Sun May 16 14:38:36 CDT 2010

[T]hat eugenics must target whole classes: I am frank to say that I do not see how it is possible to 'sort out individual values within each class' and make an 'individual selection' of those fit to reproduce, nor am I at all sure that such selection would be really eugenic. p. 17, footnoted, Margaret Sanger to Frederick Osborn, 12/29/39.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: "Jenifer Cartwright" <jencart13 at yahoo.com>
Cc: "peace discuss" <Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Monday, May 17, 2010 12:09 AM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Race & class

> John's quotation is of course correct. The individual class backgrounds of SC
> justices don't matter very much.  The question is, will they do the will of the
> economic elite in a overwhelmingly business-run society?  Obviously, that looks
> better when it's done by representatives of other classes, like Sotomayor &
> Obama.  The institutions of the higher learning that they attended - Princeton,
> Yale, Columbia, and Harvard - have as their primary job the education of the
> children of the American elite and talented members of other classes who will do
> the bidding of that elite.  That's where Sotomayor & Obama come from, and they 
> both learnt their lesson well. They passed their examinations - fealty to the 
> dominant class - with, so to speak, flying colors...  --CGE
> 
> 
> On 5/16/10 10:06 AM, Jenifer Cartwright wrote:
>> As I recall, one of the reasons given for Sotomayor's nomination is that she
>> was raised in the projects. Here's the wiki entry on that and a bit more (the
>> law is less stressful than detective work????):
>>
>> "Sotomayor was raised a Catholic
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic>^[3]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-bg052609r-2> and grew
>> up among other Puerto Ricans who settled in the South Bronx
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Bronx,_New_York> and East Bronx
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Bronx,_New_York>; she self-identifies as a
>> "Nuyorican <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuyorican>".^[12]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-nyt-witn-09-11> At
>> first, she lived in a South Bronx tenement
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartment_building#United_States_and_Canada>.^[16]
>>  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-wapo061609-15> In
>> 1957, the family moved to the well-maintained, racially and ethnically mixed,
>> working-class Bronxdale Houses housing project
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_the_United_States>^[16]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-wapo061609-15> ^[17]
>>  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-time-cover-16> ^[18]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-17> in Soundview
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundview,_Bronx> (which has at times been
>> considered part of both the East Bronx and South Bronx).^[19]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-18> ^[20]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-McKinley-19> ^[21]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-nd-apt-20> Her
>> relative proximity to Yankee Stadium
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_Stadium_(1923)> led to her becoming a
>> lifelong fan of the New York Yankees
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Yankees>.^[22]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-Smith-21> The
>> extended family got together frequently^[16]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-wapo061609-15> and
>> regularly visited Puerto Rico during summers.^[23]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-mcc060709-22>
>>
>> Sonia was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_diabetes> at age eight,^[8]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-Hoffman-7> ^[20]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-McKinley-19> and
>> began taking daily insulin <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin>
>> injections.^[24]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-mh052809-23> Her
>> father died of heart problems at age 42, when she was nine years old.^[7]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-nyt-mother-6> ^[16]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-wapo061609-15> After
>> this, she became fluent in English.^[8]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-Hoffman-7> Sotomayor
>> has said that she was first inspired by the strong-willed Nancy Drew
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Drew> book character, and then after her
>> diabetes diagnosis led doctors to suggest a different career from detective,
>> she was inspired to go into a legal career and become a judge by watching the
>> /Perry Mason <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Mason_(TV_series)>/
>> television series.^[8]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-Hoffman-7> ^[22]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-Smith-21> ^[24]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-mh052809-23> She
>> reflected in 1998: "I was going to college and I was going to become an
>> attorney, and I knew that when I was ten. Ten. That's no jest."^[
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-Smith-21>22
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-Smith-21>]
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor#cite_note-Smith-21>"
>>
>> ^
>>
>> --Jenifer
>>
>> --- On *Thu, 5/13/10, John W. /<jbw292002 at gmail.com>/* wrote:
>>
>>
>> From: John W. <jbw292002 at gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Race &
>> class To: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu> Cc: "peace discuss"
>> <Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> Date: Thursday, May 13, 2010, 9:33 PM
>>
>> 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
>> </mc/compose?to=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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