Anti-Anti-Racism? Or Expression of Will to Make it Retroactively Not Have Been The Case That The Side You Are On Now Was, Then, Not The Side That Was On The Right Side? (We report, you decide)

Disagree. I take it that there are a variety of policies that American conservatives support, as a group, which are objectively racist/misogynist/etc. Conservative figures then announce their support for these policies, hedging them in quasi-factual language. There are, at any time, echelons of more and less ludicrous conservatives who support the racist policy with different degrees of racism. (“All muslims are terrorists” > “All terrorists are muslims” > “I’m afraid of muslims on planes” > “I really can empathize with people who are afraid of muslims on planes”.) Each echelon of conservative racism targets a different audience, and at the same time urges us to be sympathetic to the next-most extreme level of racism. Naturally, if anyone suffers any price for their racist sentiments, even the most moderate echelons will join in a chorus of righteous indignation.

You can quibble with details of that assessment, but the bottom line is, the conservative movement supports policies that are (at least somewhat) racist, appeal to racists, and can be advanced by different degrees of racist rhetoric. Why do conservatives counter-attack when their allies are accused of being racist? In order to advance the very policies that those allies were using racist rhetoric to advance. Being at the forefront of bygone civil rights struggles is neither here nor there, as far as I can see.

Conservatives accept that equality for blacks and women is a good thing and that real social and legal progress has been made on these fronts. Conservatives freely admit those on the losing side of these civil rights struggles were in the wrong.

Conservatives may say these things, but I have never seen any evidence that they actually believe them. So the use of ‘accept’ and ‘freely admit’ is questionable — as in, ‘Joesph Goebbels freely admitted that gassing Jews was a bad thing to do.’

Or they just have a point? American race discourse looks even more comicial than usual to me.

I agree with Brett, many liberals are complicit in racist policies, such as, for example, Clinton’s complicity in the expansion of mass imprisonment, liberal politicians pandering on law and order issues by supporting mandatory minimums, the powdered cocaine/crack difference in sentencing, the gutting of welfare to mollify racist attacks on poor mothers, etc etc etc., and that they should cut it out.

Because surely that’s what you meant, right?

Re: the post-Peterloo “Six Acts” and their ideological premises (International Liberalism’s diabolical seduction of the lower classes, etc.):

Between 1820 and 1825, this coherent but reactionary version of contemporary events and opinions was challenged by critics of many kinds; between 1825 and 1830 it broke down and later on, in the quiet middle years of the century, the good Liberal-Conservative Walter Bagehot found it difficult to believe that there ever could have been Six Acts at all.

— Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement 1783-1867 (revd. ed.) at 214-15.

Isn’t that how it always goes?

Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably — since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.

I don’t see concern about people being fired for a single comment. I see concern about journalists being fired for doing their job in a way that is perceived as incorrect. When other people are fired for their words on matters that have nothing to do with their jobs, too often we see reinforcement of the idea that of course there is no free speech for [blech] corporate employees.

Wow, Blaise, that’s clever! 1984 is just around the corner because it’s no longer socially acceptable to be a racist douche and people have to hide it. That’s a fresh angle. But thanks for citing a misognyist passage to show yet another reason Orwell is overrated . ..

I think a better way to put it is this: contemporary conservatives are determined to rewrite history as to who was/is on the side of the angels in major civil rights struggles. Conservatives accept that equality for blacks and women is a good thing and that real social and legal progress has been made on these fronts. Conservatives freely admit those on the losing side of these civil rights struggles were in the wrong. What they resist is the admission that theirs was the losing side. Glenn Beck, wrapped in the mantle of the civil rights. Sarah Palin, feminist icon. Conservatives are fine with civil right victories, on the condition that these are victories for conservatism, and reproaches to liberalism and progressivism.

I think that many of the commenters are missing this very important point. I didn’t realize it even existed until I took a short journey on a conservative blog, where I was instructed that it was indeed the Democrats, the direct ancestors of the current liberal Democrat [sic] party, who opposed civil rights. Thus the stain is on liberals, and the conservatives, some of whom even admit to earlier error, were the force for change in the South.

More about my experience here.

It’s important to get this out into the open, where, I hope, exposure will defeat the lie.

Conservatives are fully in favor of civil rights having been secured.

The key being that the struggle is now over, nothing to see here. The revisionist dynamic that John sketches depends on–and is perhaps subordinate to?–the conservative denial of the effects of institutions. Racism is a purely private sin, not something that operates on the social level. The civil rights movement was all about having a dream of a country where children are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, not about protest in the street and certainly not about oppressive government regulation and the road to serfdom.

Conservatives seem to be anti-racist when it comes to personal prejudice, but anti-anti-racist when it comes to institutional racism. Whether you want to emphasize how convenient this is for those white men who happen to control the institutions, or whether you want to emphasize how consistent this is with conservative principles of personal virtue and so forth, well that probably depends on how materialist and/or magnanimous you’re feeling on any particular day.

@23 I’m aware of that, but thanks! My point was that a comparing people who object to racism to a caraciturature of a humorless castrating scold isn’t perhaps as strong or clever an argument as the poster likely thinks.

Here it is again: http://phronesisaical.blogspot.com/2010/09/emerging-civil-rights-narrative.html And I don’t know if that clicks over directly, so hopefully this will work too.

I might be equivocating, among other things…
Civil Rights Act

By party
The original House version:[11]
Democratic Party: 152-96 (61%–39%)
Republican Party: 138-34 (80%–20%)
Cloture in the Senate:[12]
Democratic Party: 44-23 (66%–34%)
Republican Party: 27-6 (82%–18%)
The Senate version:[11]
Democratic Party: 46-21 (69%–31%)
Republican Party: 27-6 (82%–18%)
The Senate version, voted on by the House:[11]
Democratic Party: 153-91 (63%–37%)
Republican Party: 136-35 (80%–20%)
[edit]By party and region
Note: “Southern”, as used in this section, refers to members of Congress from the eleven states that made up the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War. “Northern” refers to members from the other 39 states, regardless of the geographic location of those states.
The original House version:
Southern Democrats: 7–87 (7%–93%)
Southern Republicans: 0–10 (0%–100%)
Northern Democrats: 145-9 (94%–6%)
Northern Republicans: 138-24 (85%–15%)
The Senate version:
Southern Democrats: 1–20 (5%–95%)
Southern Republicans: 0–1 (0%–100%)
Northern Democrats: 45-1 (98%–2%)
Northern Republicans: 27-5 (84%–16%)

StevenAttewell: no, I think 1984 is the most apposite of Orwell’s works for this discussion:

“as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia”

Similarly, conservatives have always been in favour of civil rights.

Also, re. the OP: I’m not comfortable with the way talk of “the losing side” is used. For a long time, dissidents in the Soviet Union were the losing side, as they had no power and were suppressed by the police. The same is true of Jewish professionals in Nazi Germany who refused to accept the judgment of the state that they were “unfit” to teach, practice medicine, and so on. Talk of “the losing side” seems to risk moral condemnation of the victims of history even in cases where the oppressors lost the subsequent war for legitimacy.

It’s not an argument so much as an expression of will to moral superiority

This is the pithiest formulation of the vast vast majority of argument from the right. Even places filled with people who like to think of themselves as the thinking man’s conservatives, like the National Review, Heritage, AEI, etc., in my experience almost exclusively make rhetorical expressions of will to moral superiority, cloaked in argument from authority with quotes from famous dead white guys, and sometimes in the language of reality-based reasoning they’ve learned to ape, but almost never from actual facts or with valid deductive reasoning.

Southern Whites have voted against Obama in numbers (as high as 90% in Alabama) that cannot be explained without taking into account the candidate’s skin color. Republicans politically benefit from this fact but they don’t like anybody to talk about it so. It’s pretty simple really. Some non-racist Republicans may be embarrassed for being in league with racists but most I’m sure understand that this is what it takes to win elections and they are not gonna apologize for it. They are going to defend their red-blooded racist base against those un-american liberal insults. As logic suggests, anti-anti-racism is not very different from racism.

http://allotherpersons.wordpress.com/tables-outside-the-south-obama-gets-almost-half-of-the-white-vote/
http://www.pollster.com/blogs/white_vote_for_obama_in_the_st.php?nr=1

All this debate over the relative moral superiority of liberal anti-racists over their conservative racist counterparts appears to be grossly disingenuous. The liberal anti-racists at first did not have to contend with the cultural consequences of their anti-racism. The abolition of racism, for the liberal anti-racist, was initially a Southern project which involved the abolition of Southern racist norms. As soon as the focus of reform shifted from Southern conservative racism to Northern liberal racism, the abolition of racist norms was quietly abandoned by former liberals who gradually realized that the abolition of racism, rather than raising the social and economic status of the the victims of racism, would also lower the social and economic status of those who supported them. A rising tide does indeed lift all boats, but only the owners of boats, and those who work for them, survive. Everyone else drowns.

Perhaps it is my comparative youth, but I don’t see this as a very recent problem. The rhetorical line suggested in the post was already well-entrenched when I attended college in the early 1990s. Before school even started, there were several incidences of racist harassment — death threats posted on the door of one of the few African-American students on campus. Of course, there were official condemnations by the administration, but the student, feeling unwelcome, left school. Now, it so happened that in the dormitory he had been assigned, as well as in several other dormitories, some students were given to displaying the Confederate flag in their windows. I wrote an editorial condemning this practice, as it seemed at best insensitive, and at worst a provocation towards more violence and harassment. Unsurprisingly, the racists turned their attention towards me, and for several weeks I was woken by late-night knocks on my door and telephone calls from irate conservatives who insisted that I was the real racist, because I was accusing them of racism, when all they were doing was showing their affiliation with rebellious Southern culture. Ever since, it’s been pretty clear to me that anyone who wants to yell about who the real racists are is probably doing so to cover up their own bigotry. [The administration also took a dim view of my editorial, as they had hoped to sweep the whole issue under the rug. That cemented my distrust of liberals who talk a good game but don’t back up their yap.]

This is about as exciting as observing that a lot of Socialists are anti-anti-communists. They recognize that communism failed; they just don’t like being reminded by the kind of people who do the reminding.

This piece purports to be about conservative, but in fact it’s about human beings.

Southern Whites have voted against Obama in numbers (as high as 90% in Alabama) that cannot be explained without taking into account the candidate’s skin color.

I don’t know about Southern Whites in particular, but according to this Obama in 2008 lost Alabama 39% to 61%, while Kerry in 2004 lost Alabama 37% to 63%.

Recently someone went on FoxNews and got hammered for suggesting Hitler was a Christian. If a majority listen exclusively to one voice, which listens exclusively to itself, when does the forgetting well get so deep that Hitler reemerges as the hero of WW2?

Seriously, conservatives now like what feminists were saying all that time, pretty much. It only bugs them who the messenger was.

That’s pretty much the only reason why so many of them are still on the wrong side of climate science. They can’t admit the people they hate were right.

Well, that and lots of cash.

“Conservatives accept that equality for blacks and women is a good thing and that real social and legal progress has been made on these fronts… Seriously, conservatives now like what feminists were saying all that time, pretty much. ”

See, this is where you’re wrong. Conservatives accept that law and social mores don’t allow them to be open racists any more (except at home and at the club or the bar), but they don’t much like racial equality and they don’t believe that black people are the intellectual equals of white people. And they certainly don’t like what feminists were saying all that time. They still don’t like it, they don’t accept that women are the intellectual equals of men, and they still demand the right to treat their wives and girlfriends and daughters and women employees and co-workers like shit.

And they really don’t like that they’re not allowed to be openly racist and sexist at work and in public. That’s why they love, love, love anti-anti-racism. It’s a way of being racist in code, so you can’t be tagged with it. It comes with a smirk built right in.

Oh please.

Nobody gives the republican party time of day unless they are either willing to tollerate racists bigots and other hatemongers or wedded to the dellusion that they are going to change it.

Anti-anti-racism is just another way to hate. And when the purpose of the party is to serve only the interests of the greedy bastards who run it, hate is the only product they can sell to the ignorant rubes they get to vote for them.

John Holbo said:

Conservatives freely admit those on the losing side of these civil rights struggles were in the wrong. What they resist is the admission that theirs was the losing side.

Conservatives have nothing to be ashamed about because they had reservations about some aspects of ostentatious liberal “anti-racism”. Liberals, in their hour of triumph, did not heed conservative wisdom on the subjects of unintended consequences of hasty liberalisation and intractable social divisions. Which set in train avoidable social disasters, results of which we are still living with today.

No side is without sin in ideological contests. Have we forgotten already that partisan Leftists have been guilty of backing the wrong horse in the race through the maze of History? The Soviet Union during the Cold War, to name just one broken down nag. There have been hasty efforts to muffle the rattling of that closeted skeleton.

Also, Yglesias and Holbo have got their political facts wrong. For the record, the REPs, party of modern “conservatives”, had a stronger voting record on civil rights than the DEMs, notional party of “liberals”. In the 1964 House vote the the average REP was almost 20% more likely than the average DEM to vote in favour:

Democratic Party: 152-96   (61%–39%)
Republican Party: 138-34   (80%–20%)

And of course Eisenhower and Nixon were both early and strong supporters of civil rights. Although its like pulling teeth to get Leftists to admit this, particularly in Nixon’s case.

And dont drag the corpse of the Dixiecrats out for yet another belting. The bodies of Strom Thurmond and Jessie Helms lie mouldering in their graves.

Its really only in the era of post-modern liberalism, in the after-math of civil rights legislation, that “anti-anti-racism” [excruciating construction, what would Orwell say?] has become a contested issue. But thats mainly because post-modern liberals have dropped the civil rights ball and followed their own interest group agenda. With results that speak for themselves in a very sombre tone.

Over the period roughly 1965-95 (what gene expression calls) the second American Civil War, in which the “anti-anti-racist” battle was a major front, claimed the lives of 300,000 people. It also permanently scarred the US political landscape.

All kinds of liberal policies – affirmative action, relaxed law enforcement, busing, federal housing subsidies – were done in the name of “anti-racism” which did not necessarily improve the overall condition of black people. But they did call into question the credibility of “anti-racists”.

This kind of petulant wise-in-hindsight triumphalism seems to be important nowadays, especially to Left-liberals “of a certain age”. But I dont think its very prudent for them to mount this shaky high horse, especially considering some of the obstacles they have put in their own way.

Do those quoting those statistics from the Civil Rights votes even realize that many of the Democrats in question became Republicans?

Is there some sort of idiocy in the water here – where northern Republican liberals in the 1960s, who were a large group, are turned into conservatives because their party not is dominated by reactionary loons?

There was a time, when “racism”, far from being a mere bad attitude expression of which was socially disapproved, was an actual organizing principle for large parts of American society. It justified genocide agains the Indians, and slavery, and later, segregation, etc. “Racism” was tied to various ideas, the range of which included ideologies of white supremacy supporting actual institutions of racist oppression.
Conservatives are always about defending and extending the privileges of vested interests, which is to say actually existing interests, so, to the extent that liberal and progressive reform managed to destroy, say, slavery, or segregation, conservatives are not going to be interested in defending those non-existent institutional structures in the present. History is just a good-bye.

The psychological basis for conservativism, however, includes both those, who seek power and social domination, as well those more passive right-wing authoritarians, who seek to protect an in-group (themselves) against various out-groups. We live in a Media age, and conservatives own a giant corporate Media propaganda machine. Of course, that machine is going to generate appeals coded to motivate those with a “conservative” psychology, and some of those appeals are going to fit the template of historic racism.
What I am saying, is that the “racism” of American conservatism, at this point in time, is mostly bumper stickers, slogans and code phrases, meant to appeal to, and motivate certain psychologies. Some of it appeals to people, who just want to dominate others — they want to feel free to screw other people. This may fit with actual economic structures, so business owners and managers want to feel free to screw employees. Some of it appeals to right-wing authoritarians, who want to feel part of a protected and privileged in-group, and who feel a lot of anxiety and resentment about groups, of which they are not part. As a fairly superficial tool of propaganda, conservative “racism” circa 2010, is philosophically incoherent and unanchored by any particular institution of, say, white supremacy. (The only thing sacred is the power of the large corporate business, because it is the only institution still standing.)

The superficiality and incoherence of anti-anti-racism is a design feature. They can’t lose an argument; having neither concept nor interest to defend, their expressions are endlessly fluid and plastic. They don’t have to worry much about a conflict between social dominance orientation colliding with the egalitarian impulses of right-wing authoritarians, precisely because the discussion is so confused and confusing.

I fail to understand, here, exactly why there is any presumption that “a conservative of 1950” and “a conservative of 2010” are, in any meaningful way “the same side” of anything.

I mean, it isn’t as though the attitudes are purely abstract; they are based on the society in which one lives and ones opinion of whether it is in need of sweeping changes. Or are you holding to the position that they are somehow eternal positions, and that as a committed liberal one must believe that no possible human society can exist in which the morally correct thing to do is to preserve it against potentially dangerous changes; that even if all of your own policy preferences have been implemented as a meta-liberal you would still be obligated to press onward for frontiers of social justice you personally haven’t conceived of and might find repugnant if explained to you?

Marc @ #58 said:

Do those quoting those statistics from the Civil Rights votes even realize that many of the Democrats in question became Republicans?

Well I did beg people “don’t drag the corpse of the Dixiecrats out for yet another belting”. But since you insist:

Let us begin and carry up this corpse
Singing together…

Of course I realise that the Civil Rights vote caused a whole bunch of Dixiecrats to jump ship to the REPs. LBJ acknowledged that the divisive vote had harmed the DEMs: “We have lost the South for a generation.”.

But most REPs stayed on-board. Except their ship started to change course.

I am more interested in the much larger bloc of REPs (many northern or western liberals) who had a subsequent change of ideological heart on this matter. The obvious case being RM Nixon.

These moderate REPs can make a strong claim to representing the American heartland (the “silent majority”). They were in favour of civil rights in the early sixties. Yet they became “anti-anti-racists” from the late sixties onwards.

The mid-sixties were the high-point of liberalism. Liberals had the world at their feet and they blew it. I am interested to know if they have learned anything from this experience. Just askin’.

Marc said:

Is there some sort of idiocy in the water here – where northern Republican liberals in the 1960s, who were a large group, are turned into conservatives because their party not is dominated by reactionary loons?

These “northern Republicans” were “conservatives” on most questions alright. Why else would they join the REP party? I don’t think its plausible to construe Rockefellers and Lodges as keen to make the world over. They were “liberal” on race relations though.

But that sentiment started to dwindle as the results of ideological liberalism started to flood in. I mean, they were promised Martin Luther King and civil rights marchs and they got Stokely Carmichael and race riots. It looks like conservatives got a case of twice-shy on a high-stakes three-card trick.

A few historical corrections here:
1. “The abolition of racism, for the liberal anti-racist, was initially a Southern project which involved the abolition of Southern racist norms.” BZZT! The civil rights movement had deep historical roots in the North, as black voters flexed their muscle to push for local civil rights measures throughout the 30s and 40s. In fact, the Southern civil rights movement was built using tactics pioneered in the Northern struggle, and much of the same activist personnel. See: Martha Biondi’s To Stand and Fight and Tom Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty.
2. Strottchi at 56 ignores the statistics quoted at 30 which show that Northern Democrats were more likely to vote for the Civil Rights Act than Northern Republicans. Even Southern Democrats were more likely to vote for the bill than Southern Republicans. If the Republicans had truly stood alone in 1964, they would not have been able to pass a law advocated for by two Democratic Presidents and pushed through a Democratic Congress.
3. Strottchi’s link to the “second Civil War” site is a tissue of lies.
4. Conservatives had more than “some reservations” about parts of legislation – William Buckley explicitly stated that black people should not be given the vote in the South full stop. That’s not Goldwaterian pettifogging over constitutional principles, it’s wholehearted allegiance to segregation. Goldwater himself either knew what he was doing when he toured the South on the arms of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms denouncing forced integration in front of all-white crowds or he was a fool. Nixon’s deliberating heightening of racial tensions is a matter of public record, as are Reagan’s.
5. Strottchi at 64 – Northern Republicans, like say, Javits, Lindsay, and Rockefeller were Republicans because of the long-standing regional, ethnic, and class signifiers of the party. However, they were also firm proponents of public higher education, public health insurance, public works, social welfare, and more. Arguing that they must have been conservatives because they were Republicans fundamentally misses the historical truth that for most of the 20th century, both parties had a liberal and conservative wing, the slow realignment of which we have been seeing for the last forty years.

JG @ #63 said:

Look Jack, Bloix was rightly faulting you for talking crap rather than just coming out and saying what you actually think…I understand you’re worried about being disemvowelled again …Which of these anti-racist policies were an example of the Left going too far, or caused the civil rights Republicans to reconsider their views?…So come on, which of these…policies is it that ruined the advancement of the blacks? 

I would not be quoting Bloix as reliable source on anything if I were you. That guy needs to spend a whiles on his back in a dark room to get his mind right.

But I appreciate your encouraging words about navigating the minefield of political correctness on this site. Its the little things that count.

Now, where were we? Oh yes, I have to cite chapter and verse what went wrong with “anti-racist” policies. Where do I start? This is a blog so I will try to be brief.

Unconditional welfare is a good example of Left-liberal policy over-reach which slowed “the advancement of blacks”. The aid to dependent children program was meant to tide over poor families faced with the unexpected arrival of another mouth to feed. It was not designed to subsidise an epidemic of unwed mothers.

And it was the “anti-anti-racists” who led the movement to reform welfare. Let me point you in the direction of the (formerly liberal) social scientists who gathered around the Public Interest. They spent thirty years writing up and slogging through social science reports pointing out the myriad problems with liberal policies which finally culminated in the passage of the welfare reform act in the mid-nineties. Results of which speak for themselves.

But I cant do better than quoting the rough and ready common sense of Jerry Pournelle on this:

If I were a Klansman determined to keep the Blacks down I would have:
A lousy school system that concentrates on intellectual abilities and ignores skills;
High minimum wages so that entry level jobs are all off the books;
Open borders to bring in lots of cheap labor to soak up the off the books jobs;
A campaign to get Blacks to think that academic achievement was “acting White”.

More generally, “liberals” might make more social progress if they spent less time hunting for “conservatives” inner racist and more time fixing up their policy messes. Its Pharasaic and looks like projection to me.

“Maybe you can start by explaining why it was that so many REPs – who are supposed to be the party of “conservatives” – voted for the Civil Rights laws in the early sixties. But then, from the late sixties onwards, had reservations about “anti-racist” policies.

I suggest that it was the outcome of some “anti-racist” policies that swung their “anti-anti-racist” politics.”

We all know you’re trying to sell a story which you yourself know to be ridiculous.

Beyond the points that Steve lays out above:

1. There was a distinct group of people who did move from being “liberal” in the 1950s to being “conservative” in the 1970s and beyond. Were they motivated by the excesses of anti-racism?

2. Multiple studies have found that the group that made that transition were reacting to the following: the negative impacts of the desegregation in housing were not uniformly distributed. The impacts of that desegregation were most strongly felt in urban white neighborhoods which bordered traditionally African-American communities.

3. But let’s analyze what happened. African-American communities had been intentionally segregated by a wide variety of mechanisms, including legal restrictions, informal financing norms of not lending to African-Americans, police violence, and so on, up to and including what can only be described in some cases as genocidal ethnic cleansing.

4. After residential segregation ended, African-Americans would move into adjacent (or reasonably close) white communities. These communities then experienced large levels of urban flight. So, there was a group of people who disproportionately bore significant and concentrated economic losses with the end of (formal) residential segregation.

5. So, the heart of the question is: why did movement of African-Americans into a previously white neighborhood cause large amounts of urban flight? Unfortunately, there is no other explanation than the population of those white communities had a certain level of racism. In general, an entire block would be busted as soon as a single African-American moved into it. It did not matter what the character or wealth level of that African-American was (and it was fairly common that the first African-American moving into a previously all-white neighborhood had higher incomes than the average income of whites in the area).

6. It was precisely those neighborhoods and the white people affected by this process who generated the most significant transitions between considering themselves “liberals” to considering themselves “conservatives”. Multiple studies have shown that the white neighborhoods most affected by the above process were precisely the ones generating the most notable shifts in political opinion. The first instances of this were in the late 1940s, as this process began, for example, in Detroit – which had race riots in the 1940s and was electing openly segregationalist politicians by the mid-1950s.

7. What the underlying reality was, however, is that the population of those neighborhoods was actually always deeply illiberal: they liked it when the government focused money and attention on them (which the New Deal did, on symbolic, theoretical and economic levels) and disliked it when it didn’t notably increase the cash spent on them and when the government needed to shift the symbolism of the New Deal.

8. The only way number 7 could have been avoided is to continue residential segregation in the United States. But that residential segregation could have only been maintained by maintaining those instruments that kept African-Americans segregated (racism encoded into legal codes, violence, etc). So the anti-anti-racism could have only been avoided by keeping the very structures of racism strongly intact.

Jack Strocchi quotes Jerry Pournelle:
” If I were a Klansman determined to keep the Blacks down I would have:
… High minimum wages so that entry level jobs are all off the books …”

Since the USA has had one of the lowest minimum wages among OECD countries for most of the past 30 years, it is clear that this strategy was not actually attempted.

* miss-formatted there, there shouldn’t be any strikethru.

Barry Goldwater was an early-sixties conservative – the Republican presidential candidate in 1964 – who opposed the Civil Rights Act, like the rest of the conservatives of that era, from W.F.Buckley to the John Birch Society.

As for the Mayflower (which if I’m not mistaken is the touchstone of Yankee ancestry) it is rather striking that all but one of Boston’s Puritan churches became Unitarian around the time of the Revolution. Whether it was due to radical fervor or backlash against the first Great Awakening is fascinating to Unitarians though perhaps stupefying to the general.

The debate is clearly evolving. The origial one pitting black slaves against white slave owners gave way to one between racists and anti-racists. Now it’s between anti-anti-racists and anti-anti-anti-racists.

Wow, the food in this thread is toxic.

John Holbo, retroactively inserting himself on the right side of a conflict that he wasn’t even alive to fight. There are no limits of space or time to moral self-congratulation.

One of the moments that was key in ending my self identification with conservatism was back in high school when I realized that conservatism, while pretending to be an ideology of consistency and maintenance of tradition, is actually an eternally dying, eternally revising ideology that worships an imaginary past that they have to rewrite every generation to erase battles lost and causes that, in retrospect, were unworthy.

I was there. I don’t have to retroactively insert myself in the fight. Everyone I know who was conservative at the time thought they had good reasons to oppose the Civil Rights movement, ranging from, “Black people can’t think or feel pain like white people,” to “real Americans are white, and they should run things,” to “the Constitution is violated when the federal government imposes itself on the states,” to “you guys are going too fast.” You can find examples of all varieties of opposition to Civil Rights in both parties, from the unapologetic racism of William F. Buckley and the Dixiecrats, to the mealy-mouthed variety of Daley Democrats.

Anyone who watched Nixon and Reagan campaign knows that they both, consciously and clearly, made appeals the entire anti-black continuum. Conservatives today are retroactively inserting themselves into the fight, and on the side that conservatives of the day opposed with guns and dogs and firebombs.

What’s changed is that, as noted above, the parties changed. The Republican party sent out engraved invitations to the opponents of Civil Rights, most of which were accepted, and at the same time embraced ideological conservatism, and the Democratic party changed and enforced anti-segregation (you be anti-segregationist without being anti-racist), driving out the Haley Barbours, many poor southern whites and many northern working class whites.

But make no mistake, on overt segregation, the left won and the right lost. On racism, the war is still being fought, with victories on both sides.

Substance McGravitas @ #89 said:

The fight’s over? See this thread.

You call this thread a fight. Thats a fight.

The fight was bjk’s metaphor. If you don’t want to call it a fight, fine. But there is a loser, and it’s obviously Strocchi and his ilk.

@ogmb (17)

No, what I’m saying is the article sounded worryingly to me to endorse the idea that racism exists solely on one side of the political spectrum. Are there really no racist Democrats in the US?!

I accept however that this isn’t the main thrust of the post, though judging from some of the comments I’m not so sure!

Substance McGravitas @ #94 said:

The fight was bjk’s metaphor. If you don’t want to call it a fight, fine. But there is a loser, and it’s obviously Strocchi and his ilk.

I dont remember agreeing to you acting as referee in this “fight”. So you won’t mind if I set aside your “decision”.

While we are on the subject of verdict of History, just the other day (in NYT no less) I am reading a big article on academic various studies which concludes that rotten cultural conservatives (“anti-anti-racists”) might have had a scientific point after all, with their endless harping on “family values” and “reality of race”. Please forgive me for quoting extensively but I must be allowed to savour this moment:

Moynihan’s analysis never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers, whose arguments ultimately succeeded when President Bill Clinton signed a bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.” But in the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned.

Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.

“We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned.

Scholars like Professor Wilson, 74, who have tilled the field much longer, mentioned the development of more sophisticated data and analytical tools. He said he felt compelled to look more closely at culture after the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which attributed African-Americans’ lower I.Q. scores to genetics.

At the same time prominent African-Americans have begun to speak out on the subject. In 2004 the comedian Bill Cosby made headlines when he criticized poor blacks for “not parenting” and dropping out of school. President Obama, who was abandoned by his father, has repeatedly talked about “responsible fatherhood.”

Conservatives also deserve credit, said Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, for their sustained focus on family values and marriage even when cultural explanations were disparaged.

Unbelievably, they NYT quotes a rogues gallery of the Cultural Right (Moynihan, Murray) without averting her maidenly eyes. What has the world come to?

I very much like the phrase “after decades of silence”. I can remember being puzzled by the controversy when I was twelve. Now they tell us!

All this is pretty old hat to me, but apparently breaking news to liberal elites at Harvard. Who would have thunk it?

I suggest a deal be struck: lets give all the political credit for introducing Civil Rights legislation to much-celebrated liberals and the policy credit for adapting that legislation to “actual and existing” clients to the much-maligned neo-conservatives.

That way everyone can go to bed feeling good about themselves.

Deal?

While we are on the subject of verdict of History, just the other day (in NYT no less) I am reading a big article on academic various studies which concludes that rotten cultural conservatives (“anti-anti-racists”) might have had a scientific point after all

You may find a link to this in the National Review link I posted upthread the other day. “Maybe conservatives had a point all along” is pretty rich coming from a writer at The National Review. It’s kind of a Trent-Lott-invoking-Strom-Thurmond thing.

What I try “not to care about” is the retrospective assignment of moral credit

See your previous comment.

So the clause beginning “particularly” means you do try to care about retrospective assignment of moral credit. Redefinition is the substance of the post and thread, so okey-doke.

Substance McGravitas said @ #103 said:

So the clause beginning “particularly” means you do try to care about retrospective assignment of moral credit. Redefinition is the substance of the post and thread, so okey-doke.

You know you’ve won the argument when the other guy starts to all lawyerly, nit-pickin’ words.

Just out of interest. How many of those who have posted here are not white?

“Tim, if one doesn’t know that the Dixiecrats switched parties during the 50’s-70’s, one istn’t competant to discuss US political history.”

I know that very well: hey, it’s even mentioned in the thread above.

But I would find it extraordinarily difficult to describe Charlton Heston as a “Dixiecrat”. That would be a very weird name indeed for someone who actually marched with Martin Luther King.

My point is entirely the opposite, that Heston wasn’t a Dixiecrat in any way, shape or form: and yet he still made that move from anti-racism to anti-anti-racism.

John Holbo @ #107 said:

Look, Jack, you obviously don’t just care about this, you are mildly obsessed with it. Also, you are determined to make out how what I wrote is wrong. But your only evidence that I am wrong, or cartoonish is, apparently, that I am ‘banging on about it’. But I only said it one (1) time. Namely, in this post. If what I said isn’t actually wrong, what’s wrong with saying it one (1) time?

John,

The reference to you “banging on about it” was really a shot-gun blast directed at CT. If I am going to take pot-shots at you I should have used my sniper rifle.

For sure conservatives should be ashamed they kept the Black man down for so long. But liberals need to do some thinking about the way they have gone about raising him up since then.

I really do not care who gets the credit for Civil Rights because I don’t know anyone alive who merits a mention. If you say it should go to liberals and their legatees then I will accept that.

Although, if the truth be told it was a combination of mostly Black Christians with a sprinkling of Jewish Communists and maybe the odd white liberal who did most of the heavy lifting in the early days.

If you really want to give credit for Civil Rights then mention should be made of the role of LBJ’s arm-twisting “treatment” in getting it over the line. See here and here for some memorable moments.

You see, LBJ really knew how to talk the language of the good ‘ole boys in the courthouse gang. He talked down to them, but he didn’t talk down to them, if you know what I mean. It helps a lot if you are trying to convince a Southern Man to speak his language and not come across as a snooty Northerner. Contemporary liberals could learn something from that old hand.

the “Johnson treatment,” as displayed here with Senator Theodore Green of Rhode Island. Newspaper columnist Mary McGrory described it as “an incredible, potent mixture of persuasion, badgering, flattery, threats, reminders of past favors and future advantages”;

Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee recalled feeling that “a St. Bernard had licked your face for an hour, [and] had pawed you all over”; and Hubert Humphrey described it as a “tidal wave.” Johnson’s most notable victory as majority leader was the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first such legislation since Reconstruction.

They sure don’t make ’em like that any more.

John, I think Jack wants you to admit that bussing was as bad as lynching, and the fact that you won’t means he’s willing to toss around ahistorical crap and stamp his foot. He’s using a tactic straight from the anti-anti-racist playbook to derail the thread, is all.

“one may be able to detect a hit of disdain for the southern whites”

You want to elaborate on that? You really want to get into that pathetic old storyline? Right-wingers complain that they can’t make jokes about blacks any more – political correctness and all that – and in the same breath they also complain about purported jokes being made about white hillbillies. They always want it both ways. It’s pretty much the definition of the modern American conservative.

“I really do not care who gets the credit for Civil Rights because I don’t know anyone alive who merits a mention.”

John Lewis, one of the central organizers of the Selma marches, is very much alive today and is a US Congressman. During the health care debate, he was called a “n*gger” by conservative protesters outside the capital.

Other living leaders of Civil Rights include: Charles Evers, Jesse Jackson, Joseph Lowery, Fred Shuttlesworth and many others. Many other only died recently – Benjamin Hooks died six months ago, for example. Many of the seminal events were only 60 – 45 years ago and many occurred either just before or during the Vietnam War. It’s not ancient history. Your attempt to make it so is not appreciated.

I think he’s trying to get you to admit that racial discrimination is racial discrimination, even if the motives are good.

It may help to show an example instance of racial discrimination of the offensive-to-conservatives variety.

“Are southern white men racist, misogynistic, with violent tendencies?”

“What happens when you insult a white man from the South?
His testosterone surges. He pumps out more of a stress-related hormone. He suddenly starts challenging a very large man who wants to pass by in a very narrow corridor. And what happens when you insult a Northern white man? Well, he doesn’t seem to care. That’s what researchers learned when unsuspecting college students were rudely bumped and insulted, and then tested for their reactions…”

You Insult Me, Sir: Lab Study Says Southern Men Take Insults Seriously (FWIW – and from 1996, granted …)

Henri Vieuxtemps you are proving my point. I earlier mentioned the 90% of white Alabamans who voted against Obama and you respond by complaining about “disdain” for white Southerners. So what you are saying is that reporting facts about that group of people is evidence of how “‘anti-racists’ happily propagate their own set of stereotypes”.

The only people caught stereotyping on this thread so far (as far as I have been paying attention, sorry if I missed somebody else) have been Jack Strocchi (“subsidise an epidemic of unwed mothers” to quote just one of his nasty propaganda slogans), and you: “I bet you probably think …”. Yep that’s stereotyping.

American conservatives want to have it all: they want to reserve the right to stereotype blacks, plus the right to stereotype anti-racist liberals as “disdainful” of white Southerners. They want to characterize political correctness as an affront to free speech, and they want to cut off any debate about why 90% of white Alabamans vote against a black candidate by claiming that even mentioning such a fact is unfair stereotyping. Yep you are a typical conservative and the story you are giving us is the same old same old mixture of arrogance and whining.

you are a typical conservative

The weird thing about Henry V. is that he is not a conservative. On most subjects, he comes across as a socialist or anti-capitalist populist of some sort. It’s only when the subject of black people comes up that he moves from the left edge of the CT spectrum to the right edge. Very strange.

I’ve always assumed Henri V is abb1 with a different screen name.

Henri, the explanation for why that 90% is important was made upthread.

I think Brett Bellmore needs to revisit the basic explanation of and justification for positive discrimination, because he doesn’t understand what it is for.

I’ve always assumed Henri V is abb1 with a different screen name.

Yes, this is clearly right. Doesn’t change his one of a kind presentation as a communist who detests black people.

“I think Brett Bellmore needs to revisit the basic explanation of and justification for positive discrimination, because he doesn’t understand what it is for.”

The problem here is with the belief that “what it is for” is sufficient excuse for what it IS.

I think he’s trying to get you to admit that racial discrimination is racial discrimination, even if the motives are good. And that the definition of “racist” isn’t “disagrees with the NAACP”.

Uh-huh. Let me see if I follow this: No cat has eight tails. One cat has one more tails than no cats. So cats have nine tails. Hmmm . . . seems airtight, just like discrimination is discrimination is discrimination. But my cats stubbornly persist in having just one tail apiece.

They must be racists :-)

SG, in short, it WAS determined to be racially discriminatory, but the majority thought it was ok to racially discriminate if the victims weren’t black, and you weren’t too crude in how you went about it.

They were “discriminating” on the basis of “race”, that’s what racial discrimination is.

Scent of Violets, that was simply incoherent.

No, Brett, because if it doesn’t break the law it’s not discriminatory. You do understand that if something doesn’t meet the conditions for racial discrimination it’s not discriminatory, right?

There should be laws against narrow-minded bigots like you, SoV.

“No, Brett, because if it doesn’t break the law it’s not discriminatory.”

No, not quite. If something doesn’t meet the legal standards for discrimination then it’s not met the legal standards for discrimination.

As SoV points out, just about all of us discriminate in our choices of sexual partners and yes, there are legal standards about what sort of discriminations we must make (children, blood relatives, consenting etc) and there are huge areas where there are no such legal standards (thankfully, sex, gender, race, nationality etc).

All are discrimination but only some involve that legal/illegal boundary.

Brett – Personally, I understand the propaganda motive behind your effort to claim the word “discrimination” for right-wing purposes. But surely you understand that affirmative action is both different in its motivation (which you’ve already acknowledged) and in its results from, say, segregation.

I can walk you through those differences if you really don’t understand them.

If you can look at modern college admissions and say that the key problem, race-wise, is that blacks get too many opportunities to go to college, you’re just not living in the same universe as I am.

S of V, I do, of course, understand what you were up to: You were implying that I’d made some sort of logical fallacy in noting that the official ‘anti-racist’ movement today insists on officially mandated racial discrimination. Because they insist on policies which take similarly situated people, and treat them differently purely on the basis of their race. Which IS, after all, what we mean by “racial discrimination”, sq’s bizarre mutation of legal realism aside.

So what you’re saying is that yes, you are a bigot, and that you do in fact discriminate against men (I’m guessing) when choosing sexual partners.

Do you discriminate against men, Mr. Bellmore? Can you tell us, precisely when it was the last time you had sex with a man?

The situation here, with respect to “anti-racism’, and “anti-anti-racism”, really IS that the monster hunters, by increments, became monsters, too.

The law school admissions process was not monstrous. The plaintiff in the case had a good GPA and tested well – but so did other white folks who tested and graded a little less well and got in. There were a lot of factors in the admissions process, and race was one included for the stated aim of increasing diversity, which, as the court pointed out, served a state interest and was not based on a quota. No white applicants were hosed, beaten, dragged behind trucks, had crosses burned on their lawn, sentenced to longer jail terms for smoking crack instead of sniffing coke and so forth.

But guess what: in reality there are no races, it’s all in your head.

Just because something is “all in my head” doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. People like Charles Murray are celebrated by Strocchi and the New York Times. The fact that Murray’s construction of race is all in his head doesn’t keep that construction from having consequences in the real world.

And “there are no races,” while true in a biological sense, does not imply “it’s all in your head,” so he’s not making it very obvious what his point is.

HV:
You don’t have an argument, which is made pretty obvious by your lack of attention to mechanisms that could even tenuously work with your suggestions. If what you’re saying makes just as much sense after replacing “blacks” with “immigrants” and “whites” with “people whose grandparents were born here,” you’re being too abstract.

@156, they weren’t deemed undesirable because of their grandparents, but because a whole lot of them were impoverished and (consequently) often involved in dubious/criminal activities. As the correlation between their names/accents/appearances and poverty was getting weaker, the negative stereotypes got weaker too. This is how it works.

@157, those relevant to this discussion: yes, definitely.

but that’s in the past.

And yet, as Strocchi points 0ut, the New York Times feels comfortable giving cover to overt racists like Murray. (Though Strocchi errs in suggesting this is something new.) It really takes an act of will to ignore this stuff, which is very commonplace in venues that aren’t the famously liberal New York Times.

I’m finding it easy to picture HV in a Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Race-based discrimination is against the law, but is still wide-spread, as you’d see if you read any of those sources I listed, some of which include experiments that control for all non-race-based variables. (Housing audits, for example, that send out pairs of people with identical outfits and resumes and credit reports.) One response to race-based discrimination could be suing, but mostly in real life people can’t prove that the reason they weren’t hired or weren’t shown an apartment for rent is because of their race. Big studies can and do show systematic discrimination, though, so another way to deal with that is to treat discrimination as an ongoing problem rather than as something we can relegate to the past. This will help people stop blaming Black people for continuing much higher rates of poverty and unemployment, which in turn could help lessen these patterns of discrimination.

So what, what’s wrong with that? I don’t see the relevance. Cancel your subscription.

Let’s go to the tape: You said about anti-black racism that it’s in the past:

It’s a legacy of centuries of slavery and racial discrimination; but that’s in the past.

I pointed out that it is not, and that even venues like the New York Times are quite comfortable giving cover to an overt racist like Murray. Mind you, I quoted the passage of yours that I was responding to, so as to make sure there was no confusion about my point.

But you couldn’t see the relevance – and were forced to revert to irrelevant boilerplate: “Cancel your subscription“. What’s that supposed to mean?

I’m always pleased to reach the point when someone is so irrevocably cornered – and the cognitive dissonance has become so irreconcileable – that he’s reduced to babbling and denial. My work here is done.

Except …

I just can’t resist this:

Race-based discrimination is against the law. I don’t think this statistic is enough to infer causality, but if it was, the only meaningful anti-racist action I can imagine is bringing discrimination charges against employers

Right. This is what I mean by cognitive dissonance – or brain damage, or whatever it is. You spend an entire thread discussing affirmative action, and you still can’t even imagine any other kind of action being taken in an environment of employment discrimination.

People with similarly defective imaginations used to say that, hey, lynching is against the law, and what else can you do?

If HV is using “all in your head” to describe things believed by lots of people who intersubjectively agree on what’s being described, he isn’t using the words in the same way other people are (assuming he cares about the niggling little details of how words are used in practice, connotations and so forth).

I’m navigating stormy waters here, but I’m guessing what is being said is that race is a social construct. Which it is. The problem of course is that “racism” is chock full of both denotations and connotations. Irishmen and Catholics aren’t races either, but they’ve frequently been discriminated against as if they were in the popularly understood sense of the term.

Well, the other problem as I note in my no tail/one tail comment is that people like Brett give every appearance of wanting to get people to agree that some practice constitutes discrimination or racism in very specific senses of those word just so he can turn around and accuse them of racism/discrimination in another sense of the word.

So, how about it, Brett? If people talk about discrimination in one sense, do you promise not to conflate it with another definition of discrimination? And further, do you promise to abide by the other person’s judgment when they say you’re violating your agreement? No fair promising, and then stand in judgment of yourself for breaking your word, right?

SoV,
What you’re doing in your comment isn’t totally clear. I disagree with HV and Brett Bellmore. You seem to be quoting me in order to use HV’s real intention against the latter, which seems a very unusual thing to do because he and HV agree.

“So, how about it, Brett? If people talk about discrimination in one sense, do you promise not to conflate it with another definition of discrimination?”

Why, I’m glad to. I’m glad to, because I’m not accusing the “anti-racists” of discrimination in some different sense of the word. I’m accusing them of racial discrimination in the exact same sense as I use “racial discrimination’ to describe the Klan or the Aryan Nation: “Treating similarly situated people differently due to their race.”

I’m categorically denying that racial discrimination is something different when committed by a restaurant owner who doesn’t want to serve blacks, or a college admissions officer who doesn’t want to admit Asians.

It’s the same freaking thing.

Admissions officers want to admit Asians, and African Americans and white people and women and men. Really. They want to admit a diverse group of students for the educational benefits to the students taken as a group.

Which is exactly why it’s not the same freaking thing, and why it’s intellectually dishonest to insist that it is. Affirmative action exists to bring people in. The discrimination enforced by lynching, defended by William F. Buckley, symbolized by Philadelphia MS, and enacted by morgage brokers, real estate agents and executives like those at Texaco (remember them?) exists to keep people out.

I’m categorically denying that racial discrimination is something different when committed by a restaurant owner who doesn’t want to serve blacks, or a college admissions officer who doesn’t want to admit Asians.

It’s the same freaking thing.

Well, if that’s the way you want to roll, then by your own definition you’re just as nasty and racist as these guys and you discriminate every bit as ferociously as they do; you’ve already implicitly admitted that you refuse to consider sleeping with a man, did you not? Actually – come to think of it – you’re worse than they are, since by your own lights you know better. And to echo your use of italics for emphasis, it’s the same freaking thing. Exactly.

@174, Admissions officers want to admit Asians, and African Americans and white people and women and men.

Why, in this day and age, do admissions officers (and you, apparently) believe that African Americans are different from European Americans in some meaningful way?

Even those deeply invested in racial identities understand this; check out Eugene Robinson:
http://www.baltimorebrew.com/2010/10/13/eugene-robinson-speaks-in-baltimore-on-the-disintegration-of-black-america/

Despite this focus on race, Robinson went on to explain how the root of the problem has to do with systemic poverty that affects millions of black and white Americans and how it is an issue he worries is no longer a priority for politicians today.

“Well, if that’s the way you want to roll, then by your own definition you’re just as nasty and racist as these guys and you discriminate every bit as ferociously as they do; you’ve already implicitly admitted that you refuse to consider sleeping with a man, did you not?”

Leaving aside the obvious point that the difference between men and women is sex, not race…. Leaving aside that I’m half of an inter-racial marriage, with a bouncing 2 year old mixed race son… (So are my next-door neighbors, small world.) Your rant makes no sense. There’s a fundamental distinction between private acts of discrimination, and acts by state entities. The 14th amendment applies to the latter, not the former. Nobody has a legal right to non-discrimination by potential sex partners, the legal right to non-discrimination by governmental entities is written right into the Constitution.

I know you’re trying to be witty, S of V, but you’re only making it halfway there.

SoV@175:I’m not sure what HV means when he says “It’s all in your head”, and I’m guessing that he means that he means race and racism isn’t real in the sense of biological characterization, but that is real in the sense of how people treat it.

Why would I be interested in your guesses about what he thinks? He used a very common sentence, which denotes an accusation of delusion. Your contortions trying to get what he actually typed into the comment box to make some kind of sense–which seems to mean assuming he believes things that would be plausible for you to believe or to say, even if he’s never mentioned anything in that ballpark–in order to represent him as saying something you think is defensible, has no recognizable purpose.

more sov: To put it another way, there’s no such thing as witches; that didn’t keep people being from burned up or drowned or pressed to death because someone thought they might be, that the witchy stuff was “all in their heads” as it were.

You have gotten the analogy backwards. The correct analogy to what HV said would be to tell the accused witches (in Salem in 1592) that their belief that other people have been calling them witches (and have put them in prison for witchcraft) is delusional.

Henri Vieuxtemps, in the statement you are defending, continued: The world is not a place with a bunch of races competing against each other; or at least it doesn’t have to be such a place – but unfortunately the ‘anti-racists’ with their constant race-baiting just won’t let it change.

The plain meaning of the above sentence is “if victims of racism didn’t believe in racism, they would no longer blame our problems on the racism of other people, and would no longer make this world a worse place by imagining divisions where, in reality, all is peace and harmony. The fact that you are defending him makes me think you didn’t understand what he was saying or how insulting it was.

Delusion and socially constructed beliefs are not at all the same thing; delusion is the failure to share the socially constructed beliefs, or the failure to comprehend the effects of one’s actions in the real world.

…more specifically, if you were a southern white man, or an advocate for state rights, or a mild right-winger of the ‘personal responsibility’/’tough love’ variety, you would be repeatedly accused of being a racist (as in the Kitty Rehberg incident, for example). And soon enough, you’d get the impression that there is indeed a race war going on in the society, and black vs. white is the meaningful and indeed the only way to frame the issues. Well, congratulations, ‘anti-racists’ have just reinforced racial divisions nad produced more animosity.

Also, if you were a “culture matters” kind of anti-anti-racist, you would have your doubts whether “social mobility” (as generally understood) would have the kind of integrative effect you’re overtly claiming for it.

and it’s obvious that the only thing you are interested in wasting words on is ensuring the sparing of the tender feelings of privileged white males in the most prejudiced parts of the United States.

I don’t care much about anyone’s feelings, just trying to cut through sanctimony and point out to the glaring inconsistency.

Who is privileged – the rednecks, the hillbillies, the trailer trash? You’ve gotta be kidding. Sorry, but I don’t see how this is different from accusing blacks of ‘milking the system’ and ‘hating whitey’, or some such thing. You’re playing the same game.