To me, your argument seems self-perpetuating: its okay to group people based on race because racism exists in America – because racism was used against these people, we will use racial selection to bring them back on level.

That was not my argument. I was talking about whether it is appropriate for members of a particular oppressed group to self-identify and to work together to end their oppression. With people of color, that oppression is ongoing in so many ways that one cannot possibly count. It is fully appropriate for people facing the same issues of oppression to self-identify as oppressed people and to work together to end that oppression.

I did not give you an argument for affirmative action, which is what most of your response is premised on. I also did not give an argument against affirmative action. What we are talking about is whether it is appropriate to say that a white power-based organization, one that self identifies with race, equates to a corresponding group representing oppressed people of color. You claimed that both sorts were racist groups because they defined themselves in terms of race. I have argued that the issue isn’t so much whether a group defines itself in terms of race but the reasons why a group might self-identify with race and whether those reasons are legitimate or illegitimate. Oppression against people of color is not only historical but ongoing, and so it seems appropriate that people of color band together and work in solidarity on issues related to their oppression.

Affirmative action is merely one strategy that has been used by certain groups to change that oppression equation, but whatever the merits of that strategy, it is not relevant to the question of whether it is appropriate for one group to self-identify.

We’ve suffered the same misguided efforts in our educational system. Once, boys performed far better than girls in schools and attended college at a higher rate, so some argued that we should pay special attention to the needs of girls to catch them up. Today, girls outperform boys in school and attend college at a higher rate – I’ve recently begun to here that we must pay special attention to boys in school because they’re falling behind. Wouldn’t a better solution be to pay the same attention to all students, without selecting them for different treatment based on gender?

The question isn’t whether boys or girls perform better in school but whether their performance is tied to overt or systemic oppression. I suppose your argument would be that because girls, who as females have suffered great oppression of many types in society, received some preferential treatment in terms of schooling, that boys have suffered oppression because of this system. But, again, you are talking about a kind of affirmative action, which isn’t the subject of this discussion unless you mean to move from the specific case of some females getting better treatment than some males in some one area that we can from that deduce a general statement about sexism in American society. That, of course, is a fallacious move. There is no doubt that there are any number of cases where people who belong to the dominant class suffer at the hands of the oppressed class all over the place. These are anomalous. The system certainly benefits males over females in so many respects that it seems appropriate to me that there’s a women’s movement but not an identifiable man’s movement.

Perhaps your point is that since a group like the NAACP supports affirmative action, and you take affirmative action to be racist, that therefore the NAACP is a racist organization. That’s not what you have said, but that seems to be the gist of your argument. And, here the question of affirmative action is relevant, but it’s murky. In principle, there is nothing racist about affirmative action; it merely expresses the fact that spaces that should exist for people of color in society do not exist and that society should make a priority of opening them up. Of course, in practice, what happens is not always fair because other kinds of class distinctions aren’t considered, as though the only kind of oppression is racial oppression. But, that doesn’t make affirmative action racist, merely that the application of it might be classist in some other respect. So long as we understand affirmative action as a tool for opening up space and opportunity as a form of resistance against oppression, there’s nothing wrong with it. No matter what, affirmative action is not in itself racist simply because it uses race as a classification; all that does is acknowledge a category of oppression. Of course, a particular policy may be mis-applied, but that in itself is not racist.

The NAACP is not a racist organization, and affirmative action however many failings there have been in practice is not inherently racist, either. Denying the need for what’s at root behind affirmative action or behind the NAACP is racist.

I’m incredibly encouraged by young children, who today seem to mix effortlessly among their peers of different races and cultures. However, as they age, we teach them that they are different because of the shade of their skin and we must pay special attention to the needs of some over others.

You act as though the needs of people of color are trivial and that we all live as equals in a society with equal opportunity for all.

All of the items that I mentioned earlier contribute to this (affirmative action, BET, etc.). If the entire American debate of racial inequality occurred within one generation, I might be inclined to agree with your conclusions – we should make the masters the slaves for a while so they know what its like, and then set the scale back to equal and move on into the future with perfect understanding.

You are missing the point. Groups self-identify and work not so that they can be masters but so that they can destroy a master/slave relationship. It is fully appropriate to criticize any group that puts forward an authoritarian agenda, or an authoritarian means to an authoritarian agenda. This is one of the problems on the left, too much permissiveness of authoritarianism simply because there’s a bigger authoritarian fish to fry. The problem is disempowerment, but you don’t erase disempowerment simply by means of empowering one person at the expense of another. Presumably, in affirmative action programs, what should be happening is providing opportunities for space. Why they are criticized is because they seem to limit space punitively, but I think the problems are much, much deeper than a simple linear analysis of any given particular situation.

The problems run much deeper. One problem with affirmative action is that it’s simply a program of reform of the way the United States is governed, a government which ultimately must use arbitrary distinctions to enforce its power. There’s an internal contradiction in that.

Unfortunately, the damage of slavery has been done – we can do nothing to punish long dead slaveholders or help long dead slaves. The damage of the Jim Crow era is also passing, as fewer and fewer people remember being forced to use one water fountain or another. However, your efforts to cure these past wrongs by allowing racial selection among those who were its past victims and not among those who were it past perpetrators, plants a fresh seed of racism in a new generation. Do you think that white 18 year olds don’t feel wronged when their black classmates of equal qualification get into better colleges because of affirmative action? The seed in planted, divisions are drawn, and racism is perpetuated. If racism was wrong when their grandparents practiced it, why should we force it one these young people – people who wouldn’t even think black people were different from white people unless we taught them.

And, the era now in which people of color live will pass, too, and I suppose you will argue that it is too late. Your remarks show a serious lack of understanding the degree to which people of color suffer oppression TODAY.

Your entire argument is based on the idea that the balance in unlevel, but this relies on the idea that at some point, we will decide that balance has been reached and we can stop dividing people into groups based on the color of their skin.

We are talking about the reasons for the unbalance not the mere fact of unbalance. People lack the ability to run as fast as a cheetah not because of oppression by cheetahs on humans but simply because cheetah run faster. That in fact is a biological unbalance, and there’s little reason to try and correct it. More white people have brown hair than are blonde, but no one is trying to mix all the hair colors together to correct the inbalance. However, some ways in which we are different are enforced arbitrarily and without reason; these are forms of oppression. It’s perhaps no one’s fault that someone is paralyzed, but when we make it difficult on account of that for that person to survive, then we are practicing a kind of oppression that should be corrected. We shouldn’t simply work to “balance” out the condition but much more importantly to destroy the cause of the discrimination, namely an ethos that values people who aren’t paralyzed more than those who are. That value must be challenged, and anything in the system that perpetuates that value must be challenged. With people of color, we could talk endlessly…whether it’s the way laws are enforced, or the aesthetics of the culture, or the way immigrants of color are looked upon and treated, or on and on and on and on and on. In general, the reality is very grim, and we have not faced up to the need for a radical appraisal of the current situation. It goes well beyond liberal solutions or socialist solutions to the problems. We need to think extremely hard about the nature of our decision-making, even deeper to the nature of society, and especially civilization, and ultimately to the ontology of ethics itself. There’s something fundamentally wrong. Isn’t that what all religions come to? The crisis is spiritual, meaning that the crisis is at the very root of our assumptions and thought processes.

I find that impossible. How will you decide when equality is here? Who will decide? Even if you declared equality at some point in the future, you would still be dealing with an entire population that has lived a life where division based on race was accepted – do you think they’ll just drop what you taught them?

I don’t accept that we are after a “balance,” as though the problem were simply an equation. The problem is in the causes, however we are to think of the word “cause.” As such, we are looking for a rational distinction here, not a numeric one. As such, we should be able to do better, even though we will never exhaust our problems. Those who fight against oppression aren’t utopians; they reject perfect societies. The one I’m fighting for simply isn’t a self-contradictory one, much like the world we find ourselves today.

Regardless of the fact that some people were discriminated against in the past, dividing people into groups based on their skin color is absurd.

Yes, of course it is. We find ourselves in an absurd world as it stands, that people are so divided. But, as divided, it would be even more absurd for the oppressed class not to recognize the problem and stand together to do something about it.

It can be no less absurd to allow a group of black people to band together because of their race than to let a group of white people do it. All of your ideas seem based on a vision of a giant scale of justice with white people on one plate and black people on the other.

I hope I have clarified to you that you have misunderstood the essence of my point.

This is not how society works. Not all black people consider themselves on the same plate as other blacks – the same for whites. Its not about a giant social balance, its about individuals and their behavior towards others. The solution isn’t to level the scale, the solution is throw out the damn scale, changing the minds of the individuals like the bigots in the hyatt as well as the minds of people like you who want to fix a double standard by applying a new double standard.

That is precisely why people of oppressed classes should band together, to destroy the scale as it currently exists. If they are banding together simply to get on one side of the scale or into a balance, then they aren’t working against oppression, they are accepting the categories of oppression. But, there’s no way to do that unless people identify a problem, self-identify with other people who are oppressed, and work together with anyone willing to destroy the causes of the problem.

That you fail to see the distinction is why you will never understand just how pervasive racism is in society, and so you will fail to see why the scale is still so tilted. Don’t go after people of color who mobilize together; go after the powers and abuses in the system which produces such absurdity. When you go after those who identify together and work for their mutual advancement in the face of the system, you will be continued to be called a racist even though I believe that you don’t believe you are. Racism is entrenched by those who defend the current system that produces racism, and without going after that system in some manner (whether by reform, which I think is a waste of time, or by resistance). If you place the blame on those who are forced into racial categories based on their oppression for perpetuating racial oppression, you will only be called out again and again, however unwittingly it is. In fact, because it is unwitting, that’s the outrage, not to see people’s condition, to empathize, and to stand in solidarity.

We can’t fix racial division by perpetuating it. This is as misguided as our efforts to fight terrorism by attacking foreign lands. After which volley of the fight do you decide that the fight should be over and violence should now be ended? Stop using bullets to enforce peace.

You confused the means that people use with the reason for their self-identification. I pointed that out to you in the previous response; I’ll simply point that out again and refer you back to everything else.

Thanks and hopefully you will continue to move us forward,

Jim Macdonald