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Re: Response

"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."

I find this a major flaw in your position - the grouping of individual lives into grand social classes to be managed on a macro level - as if its acceptable that a few black people oppress a few white people because white people in general oppress black people (although I realize you said this in a gender, not a race context). You tie those few "anomalous" whites to millions of other white people and justify their individual circumstance based on the deeds of everyone else of their skin tone. This is racism.

Simply put, you don't know all black people, or all white people, and thus should not be judging them as a group. Generalizing about an individual's circumstances based on the color of their skin is the very definition of racism. Not all black people have been oppressed, and not all white people have oppressed them, yet you would deal out different sets of rules for self-identification and group selection based entirely on skin color rather than the content of their character.
 
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Re: Re: Response

Are you really presuming that it is simply a correlation that the abuses still suffered by people of color and not related to a racist cause?

You seem to be tracking that way. It seems you are willing to admit that people of color as a whole suffer more than white people in society taken as a whole but you deny that there is any cause that applies to the whole and that we must look for the real cause of oppression by looking at every particular instance. Your only argument for the claim is that some people of color do not suffer from oppression (I guess you mean that some are rich, or some are in places of political power, or some have some other position). Do you really believe that tokenism is evidence against racism?

Let's consider a different example. We would all like a society that was free of rape. Rape is one kind of oppression. We wish that there were none of it at all. Are we supposed to say that rape victims should not as a class of people (a class that shouldn't exist in the ideal world but actually does exist as a result of the oppression) should not form a group to advance themselves as a group of people? Now, what if one of those rape victims was put in a position of power over the rapist, say by becoming his boss, or by controlling some other aspect of his life. Let's even go to the extreme of saying that this was put forward by a government policy that was intended to give retribution against rapists, or perhaps against men, whether they be rapists or not. Let's go all the way to the extreme of saying that the rape victim is now in a position of power over a man who has never raped anyone and even works in solidarity with rape victims. Are we to say that because of this that there still isn't a general problem that affects all rape victims alike as a class even though one of those victims has benefited from a remedy intended for its control? Does it make the association of rape victims therefore an organization "rapist"?

I can't see any difference in your line of argument against the NAACP and equating it as a racist organization and denying that there is a general oppression that exists even where particular individuals have benefited from some of the solutions offered.

So, no, I am not going to protest the NAACP on the basis of race; I am going to protest the American Renaissance, the minutemen, the KKK, and the Nazis, and I'm going to speak against people who think that we live in a vacuum and that confuse the solidarity of those who are oppressed with acting on the basis of a belief that racial differences are legitimate.

I have explained to you the difference, and I'd appreciate a direct response to the full set of arguments.
 

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