Why Is Racism Unacceptable?

There’s dog and then there’s tail. Racism and white supremacist ideology served an economic institutional structure of exclusion and oppression, from which some profited mightily and many more derived some grudging status satisfactions. When the country was willing to let much of the “infrastructure” go, the rest was a task for propaganda and identity politics. The legal milestone of the Civil Rights Acts was important, but it coincided with a huge expansion of the economy, which entailed a substantial reduction in the number of people in poverty, or excluded from realizing their ambitions.

The willingness of much of the black establishment to abandon MLK’s passion for the economic content of social justice is an easily overlooked shadow factor. Supporting neoliberalism reduced the economic bite, making the “no racism” rule more abstract, for those, whose economic ambitions focused on the new means of extraction. Look at the recent post on the politics of payday lending.

I’ll propose that there were two historic accidents that made racism unacceptable :
1) Hitler! (Your point 9)
2) decolonisation
Those two elements destroyed “scientific” racism, and the rest was just a long fight against acquired but outdated tradition .
Plus, the logic of capitalism in itself is antiracist .

Briefly: racism had a “moral bite” long before Dr. King started leading the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I grew up with racism all around me, in the years before and after Dr. King’s speech. But it was racism of the “I have nothing against ’em, but I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one” kind. It wasn’t the racism that hated Dr. King and refused to allow schools to integrate; it was the racism that wondered why “they” couldn’t wait, and what “they” were so angry about, and couldn’t we all just agree that racists were the ones who hated “them,” and we don’t, so….

“The Daily Show” did a segment last night on two groups, one black, one white, all about racism. The white group was quite sure racism was over in America, at least 50% “solved,” if not 75%. Why wasn’t it 100%? Well, because people (you know, mostly “them,” and we don’t mean other whites; but we are not racists!) wouldn’t stop talking about race. If everyone would just stop talking about race, the white group agreed (so “everyone” didn’t really mean “everyone”), there’d be no racism.

So why was racism so immediately unacceptable? It never was acceptable. When wasn’t it, exactly? Well, all I can say definitively is that by the early ’60’s, in “deep South” East Texas, it was already socially unacceptable to be considered a racist.

Which didn’t mean you wanted “them” in your schools; or your daughter to marry one (well, that was still illegal at the time, wasn’t it?). But racism? Perish the thought! I mean, yeah, there was a race riot in ’72 when the schools integrated (well, it was a fight that shut half of one high school down for the rest of the day, and yeah, that was 18 years after Brown v. Board; but nobody in town was a racist!), but everybody knew whose fault that was; and nobody was a racist.

Nosireebob! And we still aren’t! I mean, it would be better if “they” just stopped talking about it, but….

To me it is like the move to heliocentrism. Scientific racism is just obviously wrong, and is no more acceptable in public than a square earth.

But I think the point and purpose of racism was always to justify discrimination and privilege, and the move to “outlaw racism” is actually a smokescreen to cover the difficulty we have with dealing with privilege and discrimination, which we (well, most of you) do not want to eliminate at all in any way.

“My kid gets a Nintendo while the Sudanese kid starves to death? But I don’t hate him for his skin color, so I’m a good guy.”

Why do we let people give money to Harvard instead of to Morehouse?

What, we can’t even conceive of taking steps to prevent it?

Discrimination, unjust and unfair distribution, is what each and every one of us do every day. We like it a lot.

Oh, I suppose more interesting would be to connect the end of overt or justifying racism with modernism, liberalism, and neo-liberalism. It is a constructed fragmentation.

Homo economicus has no contingent ties, can have no community or historicized demands put on him, and the fact that he cannot discriminate against blacks means he cannot (justifiably, admirably, it is just preference and individual choice) discriminate for whites. Or for Italians, workers, Texans, Baptists, extended family, nation etc.

So become a hedge trader selling junk to the elderly, park the profits in Bahrain, retire to Portugal. Bowl alone. You have no community to discriminate for, unless you choose one.

There has been plenty of scholarship on late capitalism. Discussions of racism bore me, because the anti-racists quite explicitly want to end racism (and sexism, and homophobia, etc) without changing anything else.

I would say it’s something like this:

Up until the 1930s “racism” meant what we now call “scientific racism,” and it was the belief of a majority of whites. Nazism arose from that “scientific racist” tradition, and became its primary representative. That de-legitimized the term to some degree.

In the 50s and 60s the defense of segregation was taken up by KKK-like groups that still proudly called themselves “racist” (as they would’ve called themselves in their heyday in the 1920s). That cements the association: segregation = racism.

Legal segregation dies out in the 60s. Southerners discover that blacks and whites can use the same restrooms, water fountains and restaurants without disaster. Even the most hidebound reactionaries realize that Jim Crow was a waste of time. Since segregation = racism, and they aren’t segregationists (or Nazis), they aren’t racists.

Now I’d say “scientific racism” still lives on in the Race-and-IQ debate, but the only folks who proudly call themselves “racists” are neo-Nazis, Klansmen, etc. No one wants to be associated with those low-class nutters, which is why charges of racism freaks people out so much.

“I’m confused. Are you asking why it is that admitting to racism is taboo even while people continue to be racist?”

Close enough.

But, as you say, “It’s so vague and so demanding, particularly in America.” The vagueness is the key. Racism means, to most whites, racial animus. We used to distinguish it from “prejudice.” Racism was the KKK. Prejudice was just that you didn’t want ‘them’ going to your kid’s school. Well, who could blame that? Sorta like the “fear of black men” which is the topic du jour. It’s not really racism, your just scared but, hey, aren’t most of the people in jail young black men? I mean, I’m no racist, but facts are facts!

So, maybe I’m a bit prejudiced….but I’m not a racist!

Terminology shifts over time. Was LBJ racist in private? We might think so; he might not have. And we dropped “prejudiced” because, well, we all changed our attitudes. And now if everybody would just stop talking about it, we (the white folk) would all feel a lot better…..

The vagueness is why most white Americans think racism would just go away if everybody (you know who we mean!) would stop talking about it. After all, we don’t have any animus based on race. I mean, we don’t wear white sheets and pointy hats, so…. But all that talk about how it seems much harder or impossible to gain that sort of unspoken status and respect if you are black is just unfortunate….but it’s not racism!

So first maybe we should decide what “racism” is. Because:

Why didn’t America settle on a more moderate proposition, like: a little racism is only natural, but dogs and firehoses are not ok.

I’m pretty sure that’s where we are, and have been since MLK’s dream became the only thing we remember about him (which is another reason we aren’t racists anymore; the “dream” is such a lovely idea, and keeps us from paying attention to everything Dr. King said, even in that famous speech).

I’d suggest also:

* Integration made a contribution. If you actually have to associate with people of a different race, it is harder to believe that they are inherently different in a scary way.
* Similarly, integration in sports made a difference: if your team has a hero who is Black, you have to find a way to rationalize rooting for him, even if you’ve had negative thoughts about Blacks all along.
* The Klan made a difference by being such embarassing yahoos, that admitting to racism meant allying yourself with them.

But it seems to me that your point might be a bit overstated. It is certainly not acceptable in most circles nowadays to be racist against Blacks, but does that really apply to all groups? As a classic example, antisemitism in the guise of anti-Zionism, is just as acceptable in certain circles, especially on University campuses as it ever was. Does “racism” only mean towards Blacks?

(Having said all that — that racism has receded overall in American society, especially toward the center and left of the political spectrum, is still undeniably true. I won’t pick any one out of a list of political actors responsible, because I think it’s hard to isolate: but I can say that the overwhelming factor wherever those gains were made is shame. No matter how dedicated someone is to racism, they still want to be thought of as a good and respectable person. Where racism ceases to be good and respectable, they at minimum have to hide theirs. That’s why comment venues on the ‘Net with anti-racist comment policies tend not to attract racists, and those without do; where racists feel accepted and validated, they don’t feel the need to camouflage or “sugarcoat” their beliefs. The social change has been largely that as racism has come to be identified in more and more venues with imbecility or malice, shame and the quest for social acceptance has gradually crowded it out; a process particularly accelerated in more racially diverse centres where there is a good possibility of knowing — or at least knowing about — living counterexamples to racist or crypto-racist stereotypes. Which is why racism still flourishes best in the most homogenous regions, on which the former “Southern Strategy” now depends.)

With all due respect, I have to say that this post, at this level of analysis, could only have been written by a white man. There are writers grappling with complex and nuanced examinations of US racial history in numerous venues online today — the most high-profile of whom probably being Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic — and their work is well worth anyone’s reading time.

That said, I think rmj is generally on the money. We didn’t so much abandon racism as reframe and cordon it off. THIS act here is definitely racism, but THOSE over there are certainly not. In fact, you’re racist for suggesting it! What’s wrong with you? Why are you always looking for problems? etc.

So why were we able to cordon off some pretty horrific stuff? Well, for one, your point number 6: Ending (certain kinds of) racism fit neatly into an already-existing American ideal of self and nation. We are all about perfectibility in this country. Self-help, self-improvement, model for the world, you name it.

So while we may kick and scream when someone points out a fault, once we come around to admitting the fault we set to work busily eradicating it. Because that’s who we are! Americans. Perfectible.

There are other things going on, of course, so I’ll just end at the beginning: Anyone really interested in mulling these questions, you’ve got a wealth of material to choose from.

@17

My point is that racism is not only alive and well, but deeply entrenched in movement conservatism. Sometimes after an incident there is an insincere and meaningless apology under public pressure. Often times there is not.

Virulent racism is quite open and applauded on the American right.

The rest of society disapproves, but that only encourages them.

JzB

Sweet Home Alabama is ironic. Or, maybe, just straightforwardly anti-racist, I am too culturally foreign to quite get it. See wikipedia or…just read what the band said about it.

Perhaps the conversation about race “stopped” when i) we “stopped” talking about class, or ii) when race-type “things” got too slippery:

‘Two primary ways of evaluating the significance of race stand out at this moment. First, there are the ways it creates disparate life chances, disadvantaging primarily blacks and Latinos through various forms of discriminatory practices (particularly in the spheres of housing, jobs, and access to credit), and, by extension, advantaging whites. This is the principal way, in terms of progress and policy, that we address—or alternately efface and ignore —race. But there is also another dimension to race, a cultural one that is not as clear cut and often more difficult to assess. Race, simply, is meaningful, and meaning, as we know, is often unruly and irresolute, barely constrained by intention or referentiality. Though we may strive to equate race singularly with issues of racism— which Americans widely accept to be a social and moral failing—we keep confronting the fact that the boisterous meaningfulness of race often makes it ambiguous and difficult to grasp.‘ (Hartigan, Jr., J., 2010: 7)

Hartigan (2005: 249) also notes:

‘Frankenberg suggests that ‘‘at a certain point in U.S. history a color- and power evasive public language of race displaced essentialist racism as the dominant discourse on race . . . [and] remains dominant today; it has not been displaced in its turn by race cognizance.’’‘. What, where, that ‘certain point‘ occurred is not identified. It’s an interesting thing to chase down; good luck.

also, too…

Your ten points don’t mention the symbolic and practical importance of certain pre-1963 developments such as, e.g., Brown v Bd of Ed and what followed from it, e.g. Little Rock. (Granted, resistance meant that the Brown decision took a long time to have an on-the-ground impact in the South, and in the North and South it didn’t touch de facto, as opposed to de jure, segregation.) Still, one cd make an argument that the legal battles and the lawyers who fought them, such as Thurgood Marshall, Julius Chambers (who died just the other day), Jack Greenberg, Robert Carter and many others, had an impact in the long run in shifting attitudes, not just in the legal system but among the public.

Harper Lee comes to mind as someone who wrote well and with influence on this topic with To Kill a Mockingbird.

“Americans are still not sure how they even feel about the Reconstruction period. (The Civil War was awesome, obviously. Glory all around. But I’m not holding my breath, waiting for a Spielberg film about Reconstruction.”

“The Birth of a Nation” is a film about Reconstruction. In the 1960s the Yale Film Society made it its first showing each year. Many a liberal Yalie regarded it as one of the best films ever made. Some people today might accept its blatant racism, but I expect that they are in the distinct minority.

Surely there are a range of opinions about Reconstruction (among those who are aware of it), but how many are ambivalent? There is still some romanticism about outlaws like Jesse James, who, like Bonny and Clyde later on, have the aura of populist heroes, battling against the rich elite. How much people connect them to Reconstruction is another question.

The Mississippi history textbook at my segregated high school portrayed Reconstruction as the victimization of the South by the North. It hinted that had Lincoln lived the South would not have been treated so punitively. Scalawags and carpetbaggers were depicted as oppressing Southern Whites and taking advantage of naive Negroes, who were unprepared for freedom and citizenship. The Ku Klux Klan was not seen as a band of heroes, but it was not shown as a group of murderous terrorists, either. Jesse James was not spoken of, but Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, who became a Supreme Court justice, was seen as a major figure in the reconciliation of the country. Curiously, the book made no mention of the end of Reconstruction, giving the impression that it was a slow process that was somehow complete by the turn of the 20th century. Our American history textbook did talk about the election of 1876, but did not mention its significance with regard to Reconstruction.

I know that one function of history textbooks is to whitewash events, but I do think that one reason that our books were not frank about Reconstruction was a sense of shame, even in the segregated South. And I think that a widespread sense of shame continues, which is perhaps one reason that a movie about Reconstruction would be a difficult sell.

You could approach this in the (sort of) backward induction sort of way. If something had become a taboo, that means that it used to be a dangerous phenomenon in the society, growing more and more dangerous. To survive, the society had to made it a taboo. Or perish. It survived. Doesn’t mean it was, necessarily, a deliberate effort; just a matter of evolution.

“Birth of a Nation” is an interesting example because it wasn’t intended to be a racist film. D.W. Griffith was a white southerner whose views were much as Billikin describes, one of the “I’m not a racist, my family always had black servants” school. Of course it came out to be a very racist film.

In its time, BoaN was a groundbreaking film that revealed the power of the film-maker’s art, but it also unintentionally revealed the evil that underlay the myth of the Lost Cause. In that sense it’s an important film because it showed how a film could tell not only the story that the film-maker wanted to tell, but another story as well.

Griffith deserves some kind of credit because after the film came out he seems to have realized what he had done, and some of his subsequent films appear to be apologies for BoaN. His next film was “Intolerance”, and he later addressed racism of the anti-Chinese variety in “Broken Blossoms”

You might criticize Griffith for not addressing the African-American question again, and for not using a Chinese actor for the hero in “Broken Blossoms”. But neither of these were really possible in 1920s Hollywood. He did make a certain effort; whether he fully atoned for BoaN is now for history to judge.

Turn the clock forward two decades and we get “Gone with the Wind”, where the basic attitudes are the same, but Reconstruction just doesn’t get mentioned that much.

Things have changed in the south. I can remember when “The Star-Spangled Banner” was not allowed in (white) public schools, and TV stations played “Dixie” when they went off the air. But even then Lincoln had attained much of the heroic status he has now. Back further back in the 1920s and 1930s there were still many people who reviled Lincoln as a sort of Satanist anti-Christ dictator.

reason @ 45:

Are you sure? Currently we in the US seem to be proud, as a nation to be able to stand on our own, which has it’s good points and bad points, even at times it means flipping the bird to the rest of the planet.

I’ve always been fascinated by the question, although I have no answer to it, but it can only be understood in a less US-centric frame.
First, I think that Americans underestimate the importance of anti-racism as moral and social norm because they assume, as several have done in the thread, that it is somehow universal. Until you have spent time in a country where racism is completely acceptable and widespread, you don’t get it. To me that country was Russia, because it’s the one I know best (although the same can be said of most Eastern European and Arab countries; I don’t know Asia well, but afaik, it seems it would apply there as well): when you have a highly educated girl from a priviledged background and no political agenda say in a university class discussion that “I don’t get this “All men are created equal”: my Daghestani neighbors are messy, unclean, loud, they stink and are stupid, they are obviously not my equals” and the other students completely get her point… when everyone you know, regardless of social, economic, educational, political background, will casually express overt racism (not of the unconscious prejudice kind, but of the direct “N- (yes, they still use the word) or Arabs are obviously inferior people” kind)… when flat rental ads routinely ask for “ethnically Russian” candidates… when Obama’s election is greeted with incredulous laughter, racist jokes and widely seen as the ultimate proof of the decadence and downfall of the US… well, then, you really start to understand that anti-racism as an ideal and norm is a reality and a huge progress, even if it does not eradicate racism overnight.
Anyway, just to say, anti-racism is not universal at all. Many people in the world do not hold it even as an ideal but tend to consider racism as a natural fact of life. I’d venture that only America (not just the US) and Western Europe (+ Australia and probably a few other countries) hold it as a moral and social norm. Which is to say: anti-racism has only become a norm in those countries where for centuries, institutionalized racism (even before its latest “scientific” version) had been, in various forms, the underpinning of imperial societies. The violence needed to implement / sustain that system and the violence of the resistance it encountered (repeatedly leading to riots, uprisings, colonial / civil wars, mass killings and eventually genocide) ended up threatening the very existence of those societies (and in Germany’s case, actually destroyed the country), so a radical social transformation was forced on them, leading to the formal embrace of anti-racism.
To the rest of the world, racism is not a system or a theory, but an accepted fact of life in societies where racial homogeneity, though never theorized or codified in the Western fashion, is considered a reality, a given, where “diversity” is neither recognized nor desired. “Racism” is a foreign word (in the Russian case, literally – they just transliterate it), so you cannot really claim to be “racist” or “anti-racist” in those countries, as it makes no historical or cultural sense locally, but the reality is that racism is alive and well in most parts of the world.

Holbo:
I’m open to suggestions about good writings on the subject of how norms regarding tolerability of racism have evolved over time. What were the things you could say in polite society, or on the op-ed page, in 1943, and 53, and 63 and 73? In Boston. And in Atlanta. I’m sure someone’s written that book, but I don’t happen to know which specific book it is.

I haven’t read Randall Kennedy’s book on the N-word (or his other books, for that matter) but it might be relevant here, at least for the U.S. context.
link

Also interesting to look at how norms in pop culture relate to those in society at large. (Hollywood-made movies during WW2, for ex., often featured multiracial groups of heroic soldiers even though in the real army, of course, African-Americans were in segregated units. See, e.g., this bk.)

I’m fairly cynical; I would go with #2, with a twist.

Not “Northerners did it”, but “Northern ELITES did it, as a way of discrediting the Southern elites who were their traditional competitors.” With a side of “northern elites leveraged their dominance of the judiciary and the media to make it impossible to be in a position of public trust and respect while openly racist, knowing that they would be able to keep going to schools where every child had married parents with a college education without open racism and the Southerners wouldn’t.”

(I see the fast-changing language around homosexuality as the next iteration of the same thing.)

Random Lurker 08.07.13 at 11:08 pm

” Plus, the logic of capitalism in itself is antiracist .”

No, it’s not. An excellent example, Captain, would be from your own planet Earth, in the region known as ‘The United States of America’. This, of course, would be long before WWII, the Eugenics Wars, and the formation of the United Federation of Planets. In ‘The United States of America’, racist justifications were used for the primary capitalist system of the time, the mass production of ‘cotton’, a plant-derived fiber used in textile industries.

Martin Luther King has been dead long enough that he can be turned into a nonthreatening symbol free of any challenging content. Since the most famous sentence in his most famous cultural product, the “Dream” speech, can be removed from cultural context and twisted into an argument against affirmative action, he’s also a convenient one to appropriate.

It’s as simple as that. He was much more controversial even in the 1980s, when the official King holiday started being a thing.

” Plus, the logic of capitalism in itself is antiracist .”

No the logic of capitalism is to create or emphasize difference, to create gradients in value from which use-value can be commodified into the universal exchange value of money. The most profitable differences will change over time.

Racism and anti-racism, and their conflict are profit centers, but less profitable than they use to be.

Or, to answer the simple question simply:

This is the way taboos work.

The logic of capitalism is not anti-racist, it’s color-blind.

aspergum @ 51 (or whatever CT decides to re-number it to):

“The men declared equal were, explicitly, white men”

No, it really was not explicit in the Declaration, at all. If it had been, then a central theme of the Lincoln-Douglas debates would have been irrelevant. The only thing that the Declaration says explicitly is, “all men are created equal.” Douglas and others argued that this was *implicitly* restricted to white Northern Europeans; Lincoln argued that it really applied to men of all races.

As far as I can tell, Douglas was making it up. And his view–that the “all” in the declaration had secret, invisible-ink restrictions to “all white northern europeans”–seems to have been a fabrication that only comes into ideology pretty late in the day, e.g. 1840s and 1850s.

The default view was that “all men” meant all men. One strong confirmation of this point is the Cornerstone Speech of Alexander Stephens, the VP of the Confederacy. He is a stone-cold racist and white supremacist. Does he think that the Declaration’s claim was restricted to whites? Not at all: he reads it just the way Lincoln does, and concludes that Jefferson was simply flat wrong. On the point of interpretation, a leading theorist of white supremacy agreed that the Declaration’s claim of equality was not in any way restricted to white people. That’s why he thought it so pernicious!

Anyhow–the debate over the interpretation shows that there was no such “explicit” restriction as you imagine.

The logic of capitalism is not anti-racist, it’s color-blind.

I disagree. This would involve abstracting capitalisms from their local material historical conditions.

Some 19th century capitalisms, as said above, used racism for imperialism, chattel slavery, and to sustain political rivalries. It’s very much like, and connected to, nationalism and internationalism/globalism, they connect and intersect in ways that create arbitrage opportunities.

Rainbow kids singing: “I’d like to buy the world a Coke (instead of Pepsi), in perfect harmony.” But if everybody drank Coke, then capitalism would create a competitor. See the “1984” commercial:”We’re rebels, we use Apple computers, we’re not like everybody else.”

Creating (and destroying) identities to sustain and accelerate consumption is a large part of what late capitalism does.

Slavery is not a capitalist institution, and imperialism is about acquiring resources and markets.

Shakespearean Shylock was rich, but he had to live in the ghetto. Under capitalism poor people live in the ghetto, regardless of religion or ancestry. Shylock and Antonio both live in East Hampton, next to each other.

Mao Cheng Ji 08.08.13 at 4:24 pm

” Slavery is not a capitalist institution, ”
Why does everybody keep saying that – it’s all about acquiring and exploiting (human) capital.

“and imperialism is about acquiring resources and markets.”

And that’s not capitalism?

Here you are

http://www.bostonreview.net/fiction/varieties-blackness

It’s fairly wide ranging, not all about this topic, that bit just stayed with me

Thanks, Ronan.

John Holbo in the OP:
It’s so obvious to us, now, that ‘don’t be racist’ is a categorical imperative. How did it get that way? In our public morality? In our personal moral self-conceptions?

JH posed this question in the OP and then has proceeded to re-pose it his thread comments.

But how about ‘don’t be sexist’? Isn’t that a similar categorical imperative today? Are there any even rabid anti-feminists who would get up on a soapbox today and proclaim: “I am a sexist. I believe women are inferior to men”? Few if any, I would think. It’s usu. more limited — e.g. “women are worse at certain things like science” — and even then all **** hits the fan (cf. Summers, L.).

Or how about the statement ‘war is glorious and healthy for the species’? That was the kind of thing that plenty of serious Western intellectuals said before 1914. No one says it today. Even if someone is still nuts enough to think it, no one says it. Not in that way.

There is a fairly large lit. on norm change. I don’t know, but it’s possible JH may find the beginnings of an answer to his question there. IOW, don’t look specifically to the lit. on race for the answer. Look at accounts of how norms and practices changed in other areas (e.g. duelling, for one example).

In short, JH’s specific question is an special case of the more general question “how does it become unacceptable to say/believe X?” There are other cases of this, I think, not just the racism case.

“Why Is Racism Unacceptable?”

Because the Nazis ruined it for everyone.

LFC wrote:

Or how about the statement ‘war is glorious and healthy for the species’? That was the kind of thing that plenty of serious Western intellectuals said before 1914. No one says it today.

Not that I’ve read him more than once or twice, but I am under the impression that this is pretty much exactly what VD Hansen was saying in the run-up to our invasion of Iraq, and then for most of the rest of that war as well? If not the species, then civilization.

Victor Davis Hanson’s views on the glories of war are very, shall we say, situational. at any rate Iraq was barely supposed to be a war. It was supposed to be a few days mopping up some old business from the Nineties and an eternity of being showered with petals (and oil) as “liberators” by the grateful newly-democratic Iraqis.

marcel @80
the species/civilization distinction is important.
VDH might have said the latter, I doubt he said the former. (But Dr Slack is more familiar w VDH than I am.)

Rmj at 81: But blatant white supremacist racism was always too raw and ugly for popular consumption.

What does “always” mean here? Blatant white supremacist racism was the public popular consensus up until around WW2 as far as I can tell.

What does “always” mean here? Blatant white supremacist racism was the public popular consensus up until around WW2 as far as I can tell.

Then I guess we’d disagree on what “blatant white supremacist racism” is; because I’ve seen it, and it’s pretty damned ugly. A lot uglier than just making sure blacks drink from the right water fountains.

But that’s one of the issues we always come back to here: the question of definition.

Some of that is pretty clearly wrong — eliminating slavery in North America just a few years later did not end capitalism or wipe America off the map

It’s not wrong, since North America did not “eliminate slavery.” It eliminated plantation chattel slavery and the agrarian planter class, which was swiftly replaced with convict leasing — which was literally the criminalization of being a Southern black, in a public place, and not engaged in slave labour — and debt peonage, both of which persisted down to just after the Second World War and were instrumental in the industrialization of the South.

These were not slavery in some abstract, metaphorical, “tweaked” or otherwised forced sense of the term. They were literal variants of slavery. The Constitutional Amendment that made way for them — convict leasing particularly — was frank and specific about this.

I would defense “extreme white supremacist racism”

s/b I would define [& c.]

He was wrong about the diverse applications of slavery, yes.

Not all slavery was like in the US, based on race. Actually, race-based slavery was somewhat of an anomaly. For example, during the enslavement of Indians in colonial Mexico, Aztec aristocrats were honored as such, educated, and ordained as priests, they lived in luxury, spoke Latin, traveled across the ocean to meet the king of Spain, wrote the history of the conquest from their point of view, and owned slaves. Actually, the whole colonial system was kept in place by winning over the Indian overlords and according them a high-status level in society. While US race-based slavery mutated into racial segregation with misogyny laws, Mexican slavery turned into classism with a mostly Indian underclass, a political class that did not exclude any race or mixture, and no misogyny laws.

Non-race-based slavery (Mexico) was much more prevalent than race-based slavery (US) and racial segregation only existed in South Africa while still practiced in the US. I think the reason Americans are more acutely aware of and less tolerant of expressions of racism than other nationalities is because racism is integral to its social history. It is a feature and not a bug.

I think that the ‘Nazis ruined it’ explanation really does work. 1963 is 19 years after 1944; just enough time for the first cohort after WWII to rise; just a few years after that previous generation had to explain the Nazis to their children.

@Doctor Slack

Yes, African slaves were also shipped to Mexico, however, they could be freed by their master. Slaves were part of a social category, not a racial one, which does not mean that slavery was any less brutal in Mexico than in the US. The difference is in how slavery based on social status plays out differently than race-based slavery down the road. For example, one of Mexico’s “founding fathers”, (insurgents rather than intellectuals), Morelos, was black and while Lincoln was fighting a civil war, Mexico elected its first Indian president.

@103: That’s not how taboos work. Consider rape/pedophilia accusations. They’re easy to make against low status people. Against high status people (e.g. Catholic Church), it generally causes a group denial as everyone gets uneasy.

The weirdly revealing defensiveness in your post is also interesting, Eric H. In fact nobody in this thread has said racism is confined to one party, or to “conservatives” only at all times in history, or to Republicans.

(Being on a site where one expects to find informed and honest people in the comments threads, nobody has explicitly spelled out that the Southern Strategy was about the Republicans outmaneuvering the Democrats in the South by appealing to racist and segregationist values. But then, one shouldn’t need to, since in responsible company there shouldn’t be a wingnut coming over the horizon having angry disputes with the voices in his head.)

Moi: “Perhaps one short answer is that during Reconstruction the terrorists won.”

John Holbo: “But my question is WHY.”

Having grown up in the South, it seems to me that Southern society is quite conformist, at least by comparison with the rest of the US. And that means that to a degree, might makes right, because people conform to the dictates of the powerful. I also think that there is a high incidence of authoritarian personality types in the South, who will not only defer to the views of the powerful, but embrace them. So I do think that part of the reason that racism is widely unacceptable today, even in the South, is that the Feds won the civil rights battles of the 1950s and 60s.

Now, institutionalized racism is quite acceptable today, in part because it is not recognized as such. Vide Justice Scalia’s remarks about “racial entitlements”, in which he ignores the entrenched entitlements of whites.

Eric H 08.09.13 at 1:34 am

” The self-deception in this thread is interesting.”

So is the Freudian projection :)

” Eugenics are mentioned only once explicitly, and implicitly several times. This was a favorite theme of early 20th century Progressives, but the Nazis did indeed ruin it for everyone and now everyone wants to deny that part of the legacy (remember this every time you think you have discredited all libertarianism on the basis of something Hayek wrote). ”

The difference is that if you go into a progressive, liberal or leftist discussion, and bring up eugenics, no progressive, liberal or leftist will support it.

If you go into a Hayekian discussion, and bring up Pinochet, a number of them will support him, and lie through their teeth to do so.

Which immediately reminded me of this contribution to public discourse in another country: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.540278

How did right wingers come to believe that “the progressives in the early 20th century supported eugenics” is some sort of devastating “gotcha” that’s supposed to render liberals speechless?

Did it get started with Jonah Goldberg?

i would’ve put ‘fear of wrath of calamitous urban uprising’ in the top ten.

I think a better title for this post might be ‘why is racism officially denied’, or ‘why is racism repressed’.

Hidden racism has barely abated in some areas, but it is easy to see why public racism has become unacceptable. It is because there is no countermanding document of civilization that propagates racism, so racists couldn’t fight back. It isn’t in the Bible, and it isn’t in the U.S. Constitution. If it were, we would be in a VERY different situation right now.

After that, I think it is partly due to children. Kids tend to accept everything as having coequal status, and usually have to be taught to hate by example. When the Civil Rights Act attacked racism in public, the Vietnam War taught kids to question the values of their parents, and black actors became featured in Hollywood film and television (enormously important), then a lesser number of kids everywhere acquired racism. It becomes an anathema to discourse.

I think this generational process may be a part of the reason for acceptance of gays, too. However, on the question of homosexuality there may be a longer stronger backlash by the Biblicals, because the alternative logic is the devaluation of the Bible into a time-bound spiritual document, a reality that must be stoutly resisted by seekers who need to believe in an absolute. Indeed one of the most interesting questions in the world right now is one that has been barely thought about: how will the Pope try to square the circle? Perhaps he will point out that no one is compelled to follow the dietary restrictions in Leviticus either.

11. It’s a heat shield, or a way to circumvent having the conversation entirely. Because why? Because white people don’t care about black people.

Now if you say that to a white person, they’ll get defensive, like, “Hey, I’m not a racist!” Like whoa, why go there? Why make the debate so uncivil all a sudden?

Remember when Kanye West said the same thing about George Bush on live TV during a Katrina benefit? (“George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”) That was probably one of the most misinterpreted statements in the history of TV. No, white people, he didn’t say George Bush *hates* black people, he said he *doesn’t care* about black people. Those 2 things are substantively different. But white people would rather answer to the charge of racism than to indifference, because it’s easier to forgo the use of the n-word than it is to actually show you care.

Sesame Street.

Re: but a Marxian view would maintain that these represent improvements from what came before — i.e. feudalism or direct slavery

Well, sort of. *Marx* and his original disciples would maintain that. But there were/are lots of different kinds of ‘Marxists’ in the 20th-21st centuries, and some of them (particularly in Latin America) expressed some sympathy for pre-capitalist modes of production. You can still see a bit of this in the Peruvian and Bolivian far-left today and their appropriation of Inca cultural imagery. Eric Hobsbawm’s discussion of peasant politics in Peru is pretty interesting along those lines.

Re: Obviously ‘feminism’ has much the same status as ‘affirmative action’. For many it is a symbol of reverse discrimination and overreach and etc.

I don’t think that’s at the core of the case against feminism. The core anti-feminist case (at least as far as I’m concerned, and I’d happily accept the label) is that men and women are ‘equal’, but are also essentially *different*, and modern feminism wants to force them into a mold where they come out looking the same.

Late to the party, but here’s my 2 cents:

One of the big anxieties of the postwar era was the fear that Americans were too outer-directed (to use David Reisman’s term)–that we were all turning into men in grey flannel suits, etc. American individuality was seemingly on the decline, and Nazi Germany gave an excellent illustration of what happens to a culture when the populace succumbs to mass conformity.

At the same time, the symbol of rate hatred in America was a bunch of guys who put on identical white robes, completely obliterating their individual identities, in order to terrorize black Americans.

Racism came to be seen as a symptom of mass conformity, and to be a racist publicly meant that you weren’t thinking for yourself. People keep mentioning To Kill A Mockingbird, which is a perfect example of the new emphasis on individuality and how it intersected with racism. Atticus’s message to his children is to treat people as individuals, a notion that is still the central message that is supposed to be taught children about racial attitudes. (BTW, Malcolm Gladwell had a nice article in the New Yorker a few years back about the problems with Atticus’s moderate liberalism, but that would be a whole ‘nother post.) American identity has been tied in to individuality since the colonial era, of course, which is why anti-racist arguments like those in TKAM were so effective.

“In point of fact, they’re sort of right: Pakistani and Afghan immigrants to Sweden are responsible for insanely high rates of rape and sexual assault.”

Could you qualify this Hector? Or at least back it up with evidence? I know there has been stats selctively chosen that show high levels of sexual assualt/crime etc by certain groups in certain places at certain times, but I think you need more off a theory than this

Ronan,

Yes, look up the numbers on the amount of Swedish rapes committed by foreigners.

Rape is rampant in many South Asian cultures, both Hindu and Muslim, so I’m not clear why anyone would be surprised that unassimilated South Asian immigrants commit a lot of sexual assaults. the problem with Sweden is that they’re into this multiculturalism business, and they don’t demand that the Immigrants assimilate.

I’m South Asian, idiot. The problem isn’t color, it’s culture.

“I don’t think that’s at the core of the case against feminism. The core anti-feminist case (at least as far as I’m concerned, and I’d happily accept the label) is that men and women are ‘equal’, but are also essentially *different*, and modern feminism wants to force them into a mold where they come out looking the same.”

The problem with that is that previous generations of women haters always rooted their case for it in the fact that they were different. This really isn’t a new wrinkle in patriarchy. They never claimed that they were just bad people who really disliked women for no reason and couldn’t help themselves. It was always because women were different and that difference was legitimate grounds for treating them different.

I take it that you would probably regard an argument that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they are emotional creatures incapable of rational thought to be beyond the pale. Of course, that same argument in the 17th century would have been defended not as arbitrary discrimination but as a basic matter of common sense pertaining to biological difference between the sexes. You could of course make the argument that people in the 17th century, even they might have a similar logic to their arguments were getting it wrong where as now you are getting it right. I’m betting not.

Very generically speaking, men and women are different isn’t a hard argument to make. But given the long history of prejudice masquerading as pseudo-scientific hogwash, I would think we should approach arguments rooted in basic biological differences between men and women with a high degree of suspicion.

By the way, if you would like to take this debate to a more real level, I would gladly arrange a tennis match between you and Billie Jean King.

Dingbat @ 59 asks,
“Isn’t it the label itself? Was the term “racism” ever applied to what we now call “scientific racism”? Or was “racism” –the term–invented and always conceived of as something bad?”

By the citations collected in the OED, it was an unfavorable word from the start, and it doesn’t seem to have been used by the believers in what we call “scientific racism”. But the word was used before the Fascism and National Socialism made the pseudo-scientific form infamous.

An interesting quote:
“Association of races and classes is necessary in order to destroy racism and classism.”
A good, modern sound, no? It’s from 1903, Proc. 20th Ann. Meeting Lake Mohonk Conf. Friends of Indian 1902 , and it’s the very first entry for the word.

It gained currency in the 30s, duh, and has been with us since. “Racist” appears 1926. These aren’t absolutely definitive, of course, but “racism and classism” is a surprising phrase from that long ago.

Re: You could of course make the argument that people in the 17th century, even they might have a similar logic to their arguments were getting it wrong where as now you are getting it right. I’m betting not.

Well, yes, of course I would make that argument. The reality is that women and men are similar in some ways, and different in others. It’s equally possible to exaggerate (or wrongly identify) differences, as it is to understate or fail to recognize them.

To take a more specific argument: I think women should be able to run for office (my dislike of democracy set aside), to be leaders of businesses, to be engineers and physicists, to take the primary provider role in their relationships/marriages, etc.. I also think that because of innate biological differences, relatively few women are going to be interested in these sorts of things, and that left to themselves, we are going to end up with a society in which most people gravitate, at least to some degree, to semi-traditional gender roles (and in which most leadership roles are taken by men). That isn’t a problem, unless you subscribe to feminist dogma.

Re: And that would probably work on someone who believed only whites are capable of racism.

What part of ‘it’s not color, but culture’ did you miss?

I think South Asian *culture* is absolutely inferior to Scandinavian or other European cultures….do you seriously disagree?

‘the problem with Sweden is that they’re into this multiculturalism business, and they don’t demand that the Immigrants assimilate’ (Hector St Claire, 134)
One of the peculiarities of Swedish culture is the belief that there is no Swedish culture and that their values and priorities are universal.

@ John, 108

Nothing quite so sophisticated as all that. I said and meant the thread, not the OP: 22 and 26, primarily, but also what was *not* being said in any comment. But now that I re-read the OP, I think maybe 1, 3, and 8 contribute to the overall theme. The feel of all of these together seems to say, “Yea, us! We were enlightened and remain so, while the other guys are neanderthals and have only gotten worse.” And yet, survey data do not show an overwhelming party divide on this issue. So long as current Dem attitudes are assumed away, the underlying institutional problems remain unconfronted. That was my point.

I guess I would want to add to the list in the OP, or at least note that this is a major contributor to 10, “During the 1950s and 1960s, religious leaders and people of religious convictions took the lead in changing minds about treatment of their fellow man.” Obviously, you have MLK and others leading from the pulpit, but you also have Jewish kids heading to the South and confronting the problem(s), the CORE leaders organizing Freedom Riders (which I consider to be among the most hair-raising adventures ever undertaken voluntarily), and friggin’ Moses marching alongside MLK. We’re a lot less swayed by that now, but it meant something then. The Social Gospel is also something that was a part of the original Progressive movement, but not so much now (though the current Pope seems to be trying to revive it).

Also, I would emphasize the combination of television and the genius of non-violent confrontation in #7. The media could not have shoved anything down our throats without those visceral images being projected into our living rooms, and no amount of blogging (#1) would have blunted the impact. Also, what was said in 121 – the entrenched media tried to stop “race music”, but it hung around until the British Invasion opened the floodgates.

I would also add #11, The Great Migration(s), which moved blacks out of the South and into the North and West in numbers too large to be conveniently ignored. They voted, went to school and work, joined unions, attended church, and proved to be nothing like what the racists claimed. That as much as anything changes minds.

@Barry 112, thank you for demonstrating my point.
@AL 116, having neither read Goldberg nor being a right winger, I cannot say. Do you assume that everyone who doesn’t agree with you across the entire spectrum of thought is a right winger?

Late to the thread, but this from 122 is just breathtakingly ignorant:

It isn’t in the Bible

It would certainly come as news to the thousands of people who spent decades pointing to passages from the Bible to rationalize racism, slavery, and associated evils that it “isn’t in the Bible.”

I can’t quite tell whether the post was willfully ignorant or just plain lacking in knowledge, so I’ll leave it there.

Could we talk about this at Stone Mountain, Georgia? It would be so much better for our discussion to have Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E Lee, each on horseback, looking down upon us at those lovely picnic tables. BTW, this bas relief is the largest in the world, started by the same sculptor who did Mount Rushmore, but finished by the KKK, with its dedication in 1972. This is where, in 1980, then candidate Ronald Regan named Jefferson Davis his hero. While the Voting Rights Act suffered serious damage in 2013 at the hands of the atavists on the Supreme Court, try damaging this shrine to racism. Just try.

John Holbo,

I don’t consider ‘women should be allowed to run for office’ as a feminist principle, per se. I think the feminist podition would be ‘in a perfect world there would be equal numbers of men and women leaders’, which i disagree with. also, while I believe semi-traditional gender roles will make most women (and men) happiest in the long run, I also believe it’s important that they be freely chosen out of a set of alternatives. With the exception of abortion rights, I think most other feminist lifestyle choices should be available to women, though I might disapprove of them.

Re: Why do we let people give money to Harvard instead of to Morehouse? What, we can’t even conceive of taking steps to prevent it?

I can conceive of plenty of steps to prevent it. In the Hectortopia, we’d nationalize Harvard and turn the campus over to UMass. Failing that, we could just revoke the tax exempt status of some of our richest universities. Of course, good luck trying to pass that through a political system riddled with loyal Ivy League alumni/alumnae.

John Holbo, don’t be utterly silly.

Re: You can say that the only thing you consider ‘feminism’ is some strawman – or strawwoman – position.

“Men and women are innately and behaviourally almost identicall, barring a few trivial reproductive details, and therefore any difference in social outcomes between the sexes is ipso facto evidence of implicit discrimination and/or malign social conditioning that should be overturned” is a straw man?

That’s *exactly* the party line of most of the intellectuals who self-identify with feminism nowadays.

Maybe some early feminists believed in “open the doors for women, let everyone follow their natural bliss, and let the chips fall where they may”. But by that logic, Milton Friedman was a liberal.

“Men and women are innately and behaviourally almost identicall, barring a few trivial reproductive details, and therefore any difference in social outcomes between the sexes is ipso facto evidence of implicit discrimination and/or malign social conditioning that should be overturned” is a straw man?

Yes. Feminists, remember, support robust maternity leave regimes, workplaces that do not force women to choose between child-bearing and careers, laws that protect people who can get pregnant from employment discrimination and all sorts of other things rooted in understanding the differing burdens human reproduction places on men and women. (By the way, this understanding of differing burdens undergirds the intuition that only the person who has to live through a particular pregnancy is in a position to determine whether she can do so.)

No feminist I know and a vanishingly small number I’ve read will call the reproductive details “trivial.” After all, most of the ones I know have given birth. Just btw, I can pretty much guarantee they used fewer drugs than you or I would have.

It’s easy to define a political position or tendency when you can just make it up to suit your polemical purposes. But feminism is far more grounded in reality than you make out. (And far more grounded in reality than its opponents, by and large.) I don’t know if it’s bad faith or bad understanding on your part, but it’s one of the two.

John, toying with your food is surely okay, especially in your own dining room, but the hapless floundering under your paws is kinda hard to watch. Maybe I should go look in on Belle again — at least she tends to take bigger bites….

Or even adopting your preferred normative viewpoint (strictly for the sake of argument), feminism could be defined as the belief in women’s equality with men. It doesn’t follow that, say, tacit support for female suffrage is in 2013 evidence that someone holds to this normative principle. It’s more naturally interpreted as an accomodation to current political reality, I’d have thought…

Oh, yeah. John, I’m stealing “convenient confabulation.” I speculate that you did too.

“My point of view is “Most people will be happiest in a dependent/provider, complementarian relationship. On this matter, physiology agrees with Philippians. And most of the time, the dominant higher status partner will be the man, and both parties will be happiest with that set-up.”

Now I’m really confused. Philipians says nothing about happiness in marriage. (And if it did it would likely say that in light of the imminent return of Christ, a happy earthly marriage is unimportant or even a distraction from what’s crucial. Paul was way off on the timing.) You’re equally and quite astonishingly inaccurate in your understandings of Phillipians, physiology, and feminism. No wonder people are rude to you.

Patrick,

Philipians illustrates the love of Christ for mankind, which is supposed to be the model of the how a man loves his wife.

Hector, is the love of Christ for mankind supposed also to be a model for how a woman loves her husband — how any marital partners love one another? How any people engage with one another?
Somehow Jesus, god as human, gets lots in your hierarchical modeling that seems to me to fail to grapple with the paradoxes, complexities, and beauty of the very notion of the trinity. (I refrain from querying your notions of “nature.”)

So if I may summarise: a cheese sandwich is just a very, very bad pastrami and rye. Fyi communism is also a movement, not a normative doctrine. Good news about the arc of history bending towards justice though…

“I can throw dozens of papers at you, demonstrating that both current and prenatal androgen and estrogen levels affect a variety of begavioural traits- risk taking, social dominance, status seeking, conscientiousness, mean and variance of IQ, etc. (I’m a biologist, for what it’s worth, so if you really want to start getting into the citations, just let me know).”

And I can walk over to the biology building and find a feminist biologist who can debunk some of them, provide her own references, and give a more persuasive interpretation of what the data show. Given the conversations I’ve had with her, and those I’ve had with you, I am confident she’s a far better scientist. (Certainly she’ll spell “behavioural” correctly, Canadian or US style.)

What you can’t do is prove that these data require that the particular marital arrangements which just happen to privilege your sense of entitlement are “natural,” and will “satisfy” “most women.” Quite apart from the fact that the marital arrangements you value have historically had to be enforced with quite horrific violence (which continues even in “civilized” cultures) they vary widely by culture and historical moment, and the bulk of women (and some men), not only avant-garde feminists, change them when they get the chance. (One example: women, given the choice to reduce the number of times they bear children, almost always do so.)

Back in the day, people like you said women didn’t want to vote. They do. You said they didn’t want to have unfettered access to their bank accounts. They do. You said they didn’t want to be surgeons. Some do; some don’t. You said that they’d only be happy in the home. They aren’t. You said they wouldn’t be happy in complex high-stress professions. Some are; some aren’t. I’m with Holbo on the notion that feminisms today are continuous with feminisms past, because that continuity highlights that anti-feminisms are also continuous. Your oh-so-generous tolerance of women’s agency is a fallback position from the positions you’d have adopted before 1920, Seneca Falls or even the rise of Christianity, which encouraged women to follow Christ, even if their husbands were pagan. (Jesus was pretty clear about the sanctity of the family, “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.”)

In this case the “Bell Curve” phenomenon is instructive. As with gender, “scientific” studies of relative racial IQs came after the racist belief that African peoples didn’t have fully human intellectual capacity became central to a particular social/political arrangement. At that point, all sorts of science “proved” that black people weren’t capable of holding political power. Reactionaries, enamored of their privilege, asserted that a subservient position made blacks happier. Once the anti-racists more or less won those battles, the resistance fell back to the “science” of IQ to explain persistent inequality. I’m a literature/history of ideas guy, and it’s striking how similar you sound to a preacher in the sixteenth century England explaining why a wife who defies her husband should be beaten until she complies. Because, you know, women are happier when you show them the Lord’s way, i.e., who is boss. That you, like our society, have more or less retreated from that maximal position is a Very Good Thing, but it’s not everything and you still cling to what you can.

I reread Philippians last night. (St. Paul is always worth reading, if only to remind us in what ways the founder of Christianity was nuts.) There’s nothing in there about marriage, unless you import it, which is precisely what you do to the science, over and over. However, there’s a good deal about humility that’s worth all our attention. I wish you would take that as seriously as you do what you torture the text into saying about relations between the sexes.

“possessing public identities” Sorry.

It’s not as though the movement moved for no reason.

Okay, so you’re not an Austinian, you’re an Aristotelian – at least when it comes to social phenomena. Good to know.

I’d guess the point is that you seem to be attributing a telos to a movement. Which is fine by me!

What I wanted to say was that I do agree with you about the normative doctrine bit. But surely the specification of the normative ideal has to be sensitive to gains made, the current context and struggles, etc. I mean, look: the set of demands enumerated in the Manifesto include a graduated income tax and 10-hour work day, I think. So are you goin to say that anyone who agrees with such today accepts some of the core demands of communism? is kinda sorta a communist, to some extent? That’s a bit ridiculous, no? But mutatis mutandis for feminism, surely.

As I said, I don’t think it’s an argument about how to use words but about how to analyse concepts, but I agree it’s gone on too long. And sorry if I haven’t been clear.

Re: Well, put your doxastic money where you epistemic mouth is!

I don’t know what doxastic means, though I suspect you’ll be telling me.

Re: Don’t you see how evidentially pitiful the notion of a dozen papers on pre-natal androgen is, as a proof of your vast and really highly specific historico-culturalo-social-political claims?

Not really, because I’m not arguing that all women want A, B, or C, just making broad claims about general tendencies. I don’t think women are as interested or as well suited as men for leadership, for example, due to the effects that prenatal sex hormones have on behavioural traits related to status seeking, social dominance, etc.. That doesn’t mean there are *some men* who have low levels of social dominance, and *some women* (Indira Gandhi, Queen Elizabeth I, Sarah Palin, etc.) who have high ones. In fact, the existence of a spectrum of behavioural traits within men or within women, and the fact that you can find hormonal correlates, is actually good evidence that androgen/estrogen balances effect behaviour, and that (by extension) they probably explain a lot of male vs. female differences as well.

E.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio

Re: We know how these things go – if we are shrewd. So try to be a bit more shrewd about how the confabulation creeps in.

No, *we* don’t know anything of the sort. *You* ‘know how these things go’, I don’t agree that there is any confabulation going on, at least on my side. The difference here is that the radical feminists (and, maybe, the most extreme evangelical conservatives) want to force men and women into ideological boxes that make them comfortable by abolishing challenges to their worldview. Gender realists simply acknowledge that differences between the sexes are real, innate, and phyciologically rooted, even while we acknowledge that these are simply differences in average position along a spectrum, and that reality is complex.

Re: I’m a literature/history of ideas guy

I am entirely ignorant of just what relevence the history of ideas has to questions of behavioural ecology. The facts are the facts, even if they make you (or Gloria Steinem) uncomfortable. Incidentally, I notice that rather than citing facts or studies to disprove the hormones hypothesis, you’re bringing up sixteenth century preachers, which is interesting, but also irrelevant.

Re: I reread Philippians last night. (St. Paul is always worth reading, if only to remind us in what ways the founder of Christianity was nuts.)

Christianity was founded by a group of people, not by one man. Even if St. Paul’s works were lost to the ages, you could still reconstruct most of Christianity from the works of St. John (or the three Johns, if you choose to believe there were three of them).

Re: Given the conversations I’ve had with her, and those I’ve had with you, I am confident she’s a far better scientist.

I don’t think your feminist biologist friend would argue with the actual studies, but would simply argue that there is quite a bit of variation within sexes in behavioural traits, *which i already conceded*. I should point out here that I study plants, not people, so on this matter I am merely an educated spectator rather than a researcher.