Let’s bury – I say, let’s bury the hatchet, but not in anyone’s head, boy.

From OP: “Nevertheless, if you took his primary motive, in resisting civil rights, to be race hatred – i.e. bigotry – I think you would be mistaken. His racism wasn’t a felt emotion of hate but a blinkered vision of the social good. A will to ‘I am better’, not a will to ‘you are worse’.”

When the soft generosity of racism fertilizes the raging hatreds of bigots, we have soil that is ripe for codifying hatred into the legal system, which is what the South did with Jim Crow laws.

NC is the site of one of the early and influential civil rights sit-ins, at a Greensboro Woolworth, back in 1960, three years before Ervin debated Kennedy. Clearly, he was blind to the roiling emotions within his own state.

NC gave us Jesse Helms, whose career was devoted to opposing Civil Rights legislation.

And JUST last year, NC gave us some of the most restrictive voting rules, immediately after SCOTUS struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act.

Wanna see what a NC politician had to say about why these new restrictive voting rules were needed in NC? Here’s one interviewed on The Daily Show: http://bit.ly/1dovzw7

Guess what? It’s about racism – it’s about preserving GOP superiority via restricting the vote. At one point, the GOP operative (since fired) was rattling on and the interviewer says: “You know we can hear you right?” (Please watch – it’s a snap shot into the madness that is happening right now in NC today!)

In America, you can go to whatever church you want to attend. That does not give legislators the right to codify laws that penalize two gay people who love each other and want the privilege of picking up the dead body from the hospital once one’s partner dies. One’s religious beliefs should not mean a child is prevented from getting Social Security survivor benefits when one of his two mothers died – Paul Ryan was able to get these benefits when HIS father died. (These things happened to someone I know – we have laws that codify privileges and benefits to married people – and restrict gays from benefitting from these priveliges. And by God, that’s wrong.)

To yammer about how racism is about hierarchy and bigotry is the real hate – what’s the point of this debate, John? How is Ervin any less of a hater than Bull Connor? As Campbell states in a quote you cite:

“Sam Ervin’s soft southern strategy represented one of the most insidious and effective examples of the white South’s response to the African American struggle for freedom.”

His racially focused sense of “hierarchy” enabled some of the worst legislation that American had to offer. And that we’ve got more Ervins and less Connors is not much of a victory – witness what’s going on in NC today.

I agree that discussing the psychological means by which people justify and perpetuate racism is important (as I said, what felt most valuable in your post was the observation about racist politicians wanting to preserve the power to reward specific black people). And you’re right that focusing exclusively on effects can lead to absurdity. My problem is that it often feels – in Chait’s essay in particular, but he’s hardly the only offender – as if the reverse absurdity, focusing solely on intent, is much more common. Your post here, for example, starts out purely as a discussion of intent – is it wrong to compare people who are anti-gay marriage to racist bigots? To me this feels like a perfect encapsulation of how social justice discussions will default to talking about perpetrators and oppressors with far more heat and passion than is ever given to victims and the oppressed. You bring up an example of sexism, and all of a sudden all anyone wants to talk about is whether the person (body, institution, culture) is “really” sexist or whether there are extenuating circumstances (they’re just looking for the best actor to cast, the judges can’t pick books that weren’t submitted, it’s really the audience’s fault for being prejudiced).

So yes, the psychology of how racism is justified is important if we’re ever to combat it, but I don’t think the framework of this discussion should be to ask whether specific people are “really” racist, but rather a way of explaining what their actions have already shown them to be.

“Similarly, if you’re actively working to deny gay people a simple human right, who the hell cares whether you hate them the way good ol’ boys hated black people, or in some different, more sophisticated way?”

If the goal is changing hearts and minds, rather than simple moral outrage, understanding the specifics of the hearts and minds that one is trying to change is important. On the other hand, if one’s opponents are viewed as necessarily either stupid or evil (or both), the only solution left is to shoot them in the face.

I understand that comprehension of the psychology and motives of racism are helpful from a historical perspective, but I guess the question is, how is understanding psychology politically useful? Generally, trying to make an argument based on what you perceive your opponent’s state of mind to be is not going to be helpful; ‘moderate’ racism is not any more acceptable than ‘strong’ racism, and no one is going to admit to it or accept arguments that take this sort of psychology as being attributed to them.

I mean the defense people use against charges of racism is basically “you can’t see inside my head, my intentions are pure!”. Just like Ervin. Which is why people generally focus on racisms effects to the exclusion of its intentions.

Or maybe too long?

That’s surely true.

There are racist white Southerners today – older ones, mostly – who believe blacks in general are morally and intellectually inferior to whites in general. They have little trouble interacting with black folks they know, like at work, because those blacks are obviously exceptions to the(ir) rule. But these whites regret the Civil Rights Act for precisely the reasons Holbo describes: it deprives the whites of their power to choose who will be deemed an acceptable black. I’ve heard the same kind of whites also regret that property qualifications for voting are history, because they’re not crazy about poor whites voting, either. I believe these whites continue to dominate the GOP. Recent voting-related decisions of the Roberts Court fit their agenda. Money deserves to rule, and conveniently tends to be held by white people, so unlimited donation power helps undo that pernicious equality at the voting booth.

A couple separate thoughts.

#1. Friedersdorf’s complexity argument is pure bullshit. Nobody (to a first approximation) says “this belief I think is very deeply wrong is so complex that I must take it seriously”. Theosophy’s history is very compex but no more right than that of the Creation Science Museum. Timecube’s theory of everything is very complex, but it’s still the ravings of someone who needs their schizophrenia treated. We are not obligated to give special credence to things that are complex if they nonetheless are built on simple basic flaws.

Friedersdorf is not on record as advocating that libertarians need to be more respectful of Marxism because it’s very complex.

#2. Abigail surely doesn’t need me to speak on her behalf, but John, your responses to her give me an opportunity to expound on something that’s been on my mind a lot the last few years. Lucky you. :) My sermon topic for today is “Who is ‘we’?”

We are not all called to be apostles to the homophobes, for starters. Not all of us are engaged, wish to be engaged, or should be engaged in any general program of outreach to people who are still deeply committed to this particular moral BS. Some of us are looking primarily at our obligations as citizens and people committed to principles of equality, and interested mostly or exclusively in discussing things in a context where we don’t have to keep re-justifying why we’re not eating live babies.

This isn’t to criticize engagement and outreach, just to say that it’s not a driving concern for all of us, nor should it be.

This is much the same kind of thing as how most of us aren’t legislators and don’t owe anything to constituencies who hate us and vice versa. When we do engage, we are more likely to be engaging as advocates, with the responsibility to present our own side well. We may wish to debunk, and that calls for one kind of understanding of the opposition; we may wish to try to win over the undecided, vacillating, and weakly committed, and that calls for another; we may wish directly take on our counterpart advocates, and that calls for a third.

Whether Abigail – or anyone else – needs to know more about the etiology of this particular bit of crap depends on what she’s doing, which is a thing to find out rather than assume. :)

“Are you serious about this? You see no potential political utility in grasping how people think?”

I get that you are arguing that Friedersdorf is making a mistake–that anti-gay bigotry is not unlike racism, if you understand the psychology behind it. I guess, rereading it, that you’re joking when you suggest that anti-gay bigots should argue that they are only moderate bigots, and that ultimately there could/should be more tolerance of the varying degrees of bigotry? That is where I got hung up.

John: My apologies if I come off badly this week. I’m stressed and grumpy about unrelated matters and don’t intend to take it out on people here. Sorry for the inevitable lapses.

Sam Ervin is a great subject for another reason … his opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and the arguments he used against it. Including: it would lead to same-sex marriage!

Thanks John for a very thought provoking post. Also would like to second JHW in 11.

Bull Connor is no longer a racist bigot, upholding a system of oppressive and extractive racial segregation. He has been re-assigned to the anti-terrorism taskforce. The Constitution so beloved by Senator Sam is a forgotten artifact; soft is now Diane Feinstein, who is shocked to discover that they suspect her, too.

Sam Ervin is a great subject for another reason … his opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and the arguments he used against it. Including: it would lead to same-sex marriage!

Even without the ERA, the path to same-sex marriage was cleared in part by the elimination of inequality between the sexes within marriage.

So along with semi-defending racism for consistency, Friedersdorf should also be semi-defending anti-feminism.

In all this talk in these recent threads about what marriage is and isn’t and might be and once was, there hasn’t been much (if any; I’ve been traveling…) attention given to the evolution of gender roles within marriage. All these respectable, non-bigoted, non-hate-based beliefs conservatives allegedly hold that are making them resist SSM seem to me to be just one of the replacements for what’s become almost totally taboo: talking about how women ought to be subordinate to men in marriage as in everything else. If we still had old-style marriages where the two people became legally one (the husband), we couldn’t have SSM because we wouldn’t have a “rational” basis for deciding who gets to be the husband.

And the other thing all that BS is a replacement for is disgust at yucky sex. (Which of course is only yucky when gay people do it.)

I really appreciate the larger point about “complex” racism/homophobia and Senator Sam is a wonderful example. I was thinking of Buckley as a prime example of a refined, complex racist (he may have the example of being more familiar to contemporary conservatives), but Sam is certainly better—more colorful and more obsessed with race.

I’m less convinced by the distinction between hierarchy and hate. Say, if your run-of-the-mill racist thinks blacks are like dogs—but he’s really fond of dogs as long as they’re good, obedient dogs—I suppose you’d call that “hierarchy”: He doesn’t have boiling rage against all black folks and is, in fact, quite fond of some.
But surely treating/viewing a human like an animal is hateful? Or in other words – do you think even Bull Connor (or Klansman XYZ) hated all blacks? Wasn’t the problem “just” those who didn’t “know their place”? Isn’t the group of people who universally _hates_ all people of another race pretty small and insignificant? I suspect there may actually be slightly more people who actually _hate_ gays (with blood boiling rage and all), but that, too, would seem to be a pretty tiny group.

I wish I had time to read all the comments, but I just want to say how much I’m enjoying this… I took some notes as I read the post, and look forward to more on this.

Ervin: “All of my life I have been a friend to the Negro race.”

My black friend! See Colbert, Stephen.

How much “moderation” on racism are we willing to put up with, legally?

How much “moderation” on same sex marriage are we willing to put up with, legally?

If the answer to both of those questions is none, then supporters of equal rights have no common ground with moderate opponents of equal rights, just as we have no common ground with extreme opponents.

“shrewd and coherent political philosophies to maintain segregation.”

The fact that they were smarter about their opposition to equal rights makes them more evil, not less. They’re arguing to move such a small distance that you wind up on the most slippery part of the slope.

“good things for blacks should flow down from a morally and socially hierarchical peak”

Trickle down civil rights!

“Civil rights need to be resisted, not because good things for blacks are bad, but because good things cannot come to blacks in a way that suggests that bad things came to them before.”

Colbert + GW Bush = “I don’t see color” + “I think we can agree, the past is over.”

What do we think of [unconscious racists]?
We have met the enemey, and he is us.

Is there a formal term for things you assert without any conscious intent to deceive, but which you don’t advocate or act on outside a single kind of context? “Self-deception”, of course, but of a particular kind.

Whatever that name might be, it’s the right name for statements like “Same-sex marriages are bad because marriage is procreative.” Nobody requires fertility tests for marriage certificates, and nobody’s trying to impose them. Elderly widows and widowers who re-marry are congratulated, not shunned, even in very conservative religious denominations. There is no effort to discourage fertile couples from adopting. And so on. The only action that statement ever generates is opposition to same-sex marriages, not ever to opposite-sex ones that are infertile by choice or necessity.

I assume everyone has some spots like these. I know for sure I do. It’d be nice to have a compact handle for them.

It appears the link did not, er, link. Here’s the long-form version:

https://crookedtimber.org/2014/03/05/principled-bigotry-is-still-you-know-bigotry/

who denies the master’s right. What a phrase. Who? denies the Master ‘s Right.

I think you could fill a library. Encapsulate much of human history….

@Aristodemus – the only think John and Henry disagree about is the exact meaning of the word “bigot” and John says above that he isn’t interested in debating that definition and it is, indeed, marginal to his point. If you replace “bigotry” by “hatred” (which you can, because John treats bigotry as a subset of hatred) there is no disagreement.

But that doesn’t mean that, if you looked beneath the surface of every defender of segregation, you would have found that their arguments were just camouflage for animosity. Nor does it mean that you would have found a sloppy or unsophisticated thinker. To think this is to oversimplify the social dynamics of racism.

What would be a sophisticated argument for segregation?

I did – you said sophisticated – please point one out.

I haven’t read the comments yet and maybe they will change my mind but I found this a wonderful post.

Link maybe fixed:

Liberty and Sexuality, by David Garrow.

…a desire to create, validate, and maintain a system of power

that, I will grant, is sophisticated (though I suspect never presented as an “argument”)

Moral distinctions are goal-directed. Most of the goals we have operating now are inarticulated, or so fuzzy they can’t be outlined – everyone happy, plus well-fed and comfortable! Except for those bad behavers.
The moral goals of the recent past defer to a non-human authority, or say they do. Which gets us out of the problem of defining what it is we’re doing, why, and to what end. But then we’re left with this received tradition of racist misogynist and God knows what other ists we haven’t yet identified, a lot of harmful nonsense. But it worked for those it worked for, quite well.
Locking the SSM discussion into rejection of or defense of patriarchal misogyny/sexism makes for exciting times, but there’s the much longer, truer history of humans, kind of just sitting there undiscussed.

Native American societies had many different approaches to family life and gender roles, operating successfully before European contact. Some had powerful exclusively female lines of governance working parallel to the male, some had mixed-gender councils. etc. There’s probably a more accurate picture of the “traditional” past, the deeper history of human society, in there than in the last few thousand years of Judeo-Christian Western Civ.
Some indigenous tribes had accepted places for androgynous or transgendered members. Different but equal, not separate, not the same.
Colonizing racism put the kibosh on most of the exemplary there.

The racial disparity in the US prison system is of a piece with the sheer volume of the incarcerated, and it’s a fuck of a lot more to do with economic/behavioral discrimination than it is straight-up pure racist idiocy. The racist part is beforehand, with its effects carrying the color and tone into the present.

Poverty and crime just happen to be unequally distributed among the races, because of the past’s overt racism. So, a racist system, wherein not much but marginal, vestigial actual racist bias. Folks want criminals locked up and punished, and if they happen to be oddly more often minority, too bad. Behaviorism – the new racism.
That’s being encouraged in a gambit of divide-and-conquer.

Most of us are reacting in one way or another to the present consequences of a near-immediate authority that’s provably guilty of the things it’s charged with – bigotry, racist and sexual, with misogyny especially visible, as we move out and away from it.

People inherit the whole thing, including what works in their lives, and there’s some natural reluctance to just throwing it all wide open and starting from moral first principles that aren’t nearly as obvious as they look from under the boot of the patriarchy.

Childish moral constructs like “As long as it doesn’t hurt anyone…” don’t get it.
Because what that really means is “As long as we can’t see the harm from this narrow purchase.” Much of the harm of the present moment, and there is much harm, comes from things that were not visible when they began.
AIDS, broken weather, appalling degradation of natural systems, children raised by the entertainment industry, probably other problems still obscure to us.

Reliance on tradition isn’t weak, it’s vital, but the traditions themselves have to be vital and accurate. We’re in a spot, where the consensus view that everything’s basically fine is delusional, and increasingly hard to defend.
People are thrown back on received ways that worked, for some for a while, or just pioneering the entire deal.
Neither choice seems likely to work.
Not without a clearly articulated goal for moral decision-making.

Problem there is anyone trying to get that goal fixed and clear has to take on the burden of some form of discrimination.
Or else everybody’s fine just like they are.
Or only groups with powerful economic and political voices get their needs addressed.
A muddle of self-interest isn’t going to help much. In fact it bids fair to cripple hamstring anything like serious change/return to effective methods of moral discrimination.
People who scoff at tradition of any sort, while living within the tradition-protected bounds of an inherited culture aren’t fun to listen to, and they don’t have much to offer beyond the anthemic “Gimme some a that!”

Most of us in this discussion discriminate now on rational behavioral grounds, and the modern champions of diversity sit in the middle of an often smug conviction that their “rational” discriminating is valid and true. I don’t think so.
So, while at the top of society theft is glorified by amoral predators, at the bottom theft is punished, often with inhuman severity.
That’s a moral issue whose consequences are already trumping the serious injustices of what I believe to be a false tradition. Problem is it’s the only one a lot of people have.
So what to do?
Mindless uniformity of unthought.
Scorn and contempt! Fun!
Bleagh.

Whenever I see some one making the meta argument that there are “respectable” arguments for some superannuated authoritarian nonsense, without actually making such “respectable arguments”, I am not sure whether simply raising my eyebrows in disbelief is refutation enuf, or whether a prolonged yawn might be called for.

If you are going through life under the illusion that “thinking” is an activity typified by lone lucubration, and ethical conduct requires elaborate prior analysis, sure, I suppose tired rationalizations for drinking the kool aid well after its sell by date, may be of some passing interest. For rest of us, though, it is hard to see reciting tried-and-true formulations in response to people, who just yesterday woke up to events decades in the past, as anything but sweeping up the dung, long after the parade has passed by. Cleaner streets are a good thing to be sure; best to get rid of potential poison, etc. I’m not saying it doesn’t have to be done; to the contrary, I’m in favor of keeping on. I’m just wondering if the argument is really about whether it has to be done, and if digging deeper into the individual psyche is an effective counter, when the problem is a social pathology with institutional manifestation.

To take up the example of gay marriage, it seems to me that the context has to be the Sexual Revolution and the sweeping changes to the institutionalization of sexuality that followed. Marriage in the 21st century is not what it was as recently as 1950. Reactionaries, who woke up to cultural change 30 or 40 years after the Sexual Revolution, to express their deeply felt emotional distress that the institution of marriage had changed, and subsidiary legal reforms were in order, are not going to have sophisticated arguments. At best, they might manage some creative rationalizations, but I don’t expect to be adding any to my Kindle list. You cannot remain asleep in some idyllic suburban subculture of Christian family values, with an active Cable TeeVee subscription (HBO free for three months!), and also be a fount of intellectual creativity; at best, you can be incoherent in the entertaining manner of Glenn Beck or Michelle Bachmann (does Michelle know that she’s living gay marriage?).

To me, Senator Sam is an example of a living fossil. (Well, not living now, of course, but, back when he was debating Kennedy, say, or in Watergate days.) His soft racism, his moderation, makes sense as an adaptation to an institutional environment. In its way, it facilitated an orderly decline, in ways we could discuss, by holding law and law’s high principles, apart from the exercise of raw power on behalf of customary social dominance. Some aspects of the social order were conserved as legitimate, and that helped to facilitate the isolation and reform of others, sparing all of us, the stress of complete breakdown to the social order.

I think if Sam Ervin woke like Rip Van Winkle, he would be more upset by our trashing habeas corpus and the statute of frauds — ancient principles of Angl0-Saxon Law, in his reckoning — than he would by Obama’s complexion. And, he’d be right, imho, if that reflected his true priorities. We are more threatened today, by domination by the Money Power, than Lincoln’s generation was by the Slave Power, but, apparently less aware, less able to marshal history to make our case, because we continue to rehearse old lines, and dissect old disputes, forgetting the urgency of tasks other than street sweeping for the 1960s.

Bruce @ 67:

who denies the master’s right?

“SSM marriage makes sense only in the context of egalitarian marriage.”

Single sex marriage makes sense within the context of the complex web of laws in CURRENTLY place that create protections for the married couple and their children.

No church has to sanction a marriage that does not conform to its interpretations of its religious laws. But the state condones marriage through its laws. That’s why it is discrimination to bar people from the state-sanctioned protections of marriage based solely on gender.

From the OP: “But racism is, essentially, just a hierarchical notion. It really has nothing inherent to do with hate. Bigotry says someone is bad. Racism says ‘I am better’. Which implies someone is worse. But it doesn’t necessarily dwell on it, darkly, let alone violently. Racism can walk on the sunny side of the street, in its mind.”

I don’t understand how you can say you are not defining racism. You are defining racism here.

Main Street Muse – Apparently you’re talking to me, and I’d be happy to talk to you, but I don’t understand what you’re saying.

Do you think I was trying to say something about racism? No, I wasn’t. I was trying to agree with people up-thread would were talking about socially defined gender roles, marriage, religion, the state, and same-sex marriage.

To Bloix @73, I was mixing two very different ideas on that post. In the first part, I was responding to your post. I look at single sex marriage outside of a religious context and focus on the civil laws (not religious beliefs) that protect a married couple. What a church says about marriage is one thing; our laws codify the religious discrimination into fact.

I had a colleague who was gay and when she died not long ago, her partner of 20 years could not claim her body from the hospital – by law, she was not considered “family.” Her child was not considered by the state to be her child and so her child could to collect Social Security survivor benefits. This opened my eyes to the very real problems single sex partners face, due to laws (not religious conventions) that discriminate against them.

#76 – I (a straight, not particularly liberal on social issues middle aged man) was skeptical of SSM when it first emerged as an issue because it seemed so totally in contradiction with the philosophy of gay liberation.

SSM seemed to be all about gaining access certain legal benefits, particularly health insurance and immigration rights. It seemed to me that the proponents of SSM were more or less openly advocating for the right to enter into paper relationships of no emotional weight – fraudulent relationships, if you want to be uncharitable – in order to gain access to these benefits.

I didn’t change my mind until I met gay people who actually were married – in their churches – or very much wanted to be married. It was their obvious sincerity that caused me to change my mind.

Bloix – I see where you’re coming from, but personally I’d support it for the legal benefits alone (which are important)

@77 “SSM seemed to be all about gaining access certain legal benefits, particularly health insurance and immigration rights. It seemed to me that the proponents of SSM were more or less openly advocating for the right to enter into paper relationships of no emotional weight – fraudulent relationships, if you want to be uncharitable – in order to gain access to these benefits.”

Really? Gay men and women are seeking paper relationships of no emotional weight? I think it’s the other way around. Single sex couples have important, long-term loving (as loving as any heterosexual couple) relationships that are legally ignored by the state. And that’s wrong.

John: “Pulling it all together: animosity towards blacks – wishing them ill, for ill’s sake – is not the center of the picture. What is important is that good things for blacks should flow down from a morally and socially hierarchical peak, inhabited by the likes of Ervin. There is also an intense just world hypothesis-grade refusal to admit anything really bad could be happening, and have happened.”

John, IMHO you confusing things here. You confuse justifications with reasons. You confuse moderation in public word with moderation in private deeds. You confuse stated intent and confessed knowledge with actual intent and actual knowledge.

#81 – I try not to be snarky but I suppose actually reading is not required in order to comment.

You may remember that among the themes of gay liberation were that sexual liberation was a positive good, that having sex with many partners was liberating, that monogamy was repressive, that marriage was an oppressive institution, and that having children was a way of destroying personal freedom (remember “breeders”)?

When SSM first became a political issue, it was often framed in terms of obtaining health insurance or immigration rights. And if you didn’t care about monogamy or children, you’d marry a friend to get the friend health insurance if he really needed it (i.e. had AIDS), wouldn’t you?

And so I was skeptical. It seemed like a desperate effort to get health insurance for people who were dying, not about winning the right to have genuine relationships recognized by society.

But eventually I met gay people who actually were married – in their churches – and they lived like married people – committed to each other. Not arguments by analogy with race or from first principles.

I still find it a strange turn of events that “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” is now “we’re just like straight people, and all we want is to marry and raise children and serve in the military.”

Apologies if this is redundant.

As I see it, the central principle of racism is “hierarchy” in a particular sense: an Aristotelian differentiation of human and non-human that is the inaugurating moment of politics. For this politician, the African Americans in his midst were, in some powerful sense, beings whose voices produced noise and not speech. The concern for order (which Northern liberals often assumed was the motivating force behind Southern resistance to desegregation) was not in fact central in the minds of Southern elites–or at least not, as far as I can tell, in any way different from the common sense argument that animals should not have political rights.

Why racism must be understood psychologically is that the distinction of human/non-human, speech/noise that renders African Americans non-members of the politically community is empirically groundless–it is, in a precise way, a kind of psychosis. From this–the history of modern racism and the madness of the human sciences and the ugliness of popular culture until very very recently (we would be correct to think of this as an unfinished project). The living refutation of the feeble distinctions abound. To persist with the kind of worldview that Ervin did is a lot of work. It requires the coordination of certain ideas and representations and money and institutional knowledges. The picture here seems anemic when measured against these prerogatives.

Anti-gay feeling is different from anti-African American racism or anti-Semitism or misogyny (though there have been, of course, endless historical permutations and combinations). There is, in the first instance, an ideological investment in what Lee Edelman famously calls “reproductive futurism”–Malthusian anxiety about social reproduction, focused in the figure of the “child.” There is, as Judith Butler notes, an obsession with same-sex sex and the disgust it generates (a disgust that produces a kind of energetic joy for homophobes, apparently).

I think these affective differences make the two hatreds analogous but not identical. Friedersdorf’s solicitude for anti-gay conservatives is, I think, totally misplaced and certainly completely off the mark as far as historians go (liberal and left historians are nothing if not dedicated to the idea that reactionaries ought to be studied sympathetically, as in the Klan literature of the last 30 years, and the new literature on the Right). So, one thinks with one’s enemies, understands that the politics is motivated and coherent, in its way, and not simply “paranoid” (though I think we ought to call it “paranoid” when it is). But beyond that history remains the site of these shabby and degraded ideological projects and ugly schema of domination and exploitation. I find the presentation above unconvincing to the degree that it abstracts from this basic truth.

What’s confusing me is that you keep saying you are not defining racism when in fact you are. “But racism is, essentially, just a hierarchical notion. It really has nothing inherent to do with hate.” How is that NOT a definition of racism? What are you doing, if not defining racism?

Your problem is the example you pick to show this particular kind of racism. You picked a white cat, John, to show how white cats can claim to like black cats. But you picked a white cat whose life was devoted to keeping the black cats in cages. They needed to be in cages. Not because the white cat hated the black cats, but because naturally, black cats should be in cages. And white cats, naturally, should be free make that determination. So of course, it’s not hatred. But to keep those black cats in those cages, Bull Connor’s snarling dogs were essential.

Sam Ervin remains with us today. We see his legacy in Reagan’s welfare queen, in the NC GOP operative interviewed on the Daily Show, in Paul Ryan’s discussion of “this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work…” Maybe those are all the non-brown examples of racism – that racism focused on hierarchy, the sunny side of the street kind of racism. Whatever. It’s insidious. And it grows fat on hate.

Re Holbo vs. MS Muse:

So, I may be totally misreading both of you here (probably am!), but it sounds to me like the disagreement is something like the following.

Holbo says: Look, the racism of Sam Ervine is really not like the racism of Bull Connor. Of course, Ervine’s brand of racism is very bad — it’s insidious, it’s effective, etc., but it’s also a lot more complex, psychologically and otherwise. There’s self-deception going on, etc. We really should understand it for what it is and not conflate it with Bull Connor-style racism.

MS Muse though is I think saying something like: Look, you’re missing that it’s basically like a good cop/bad cop routine. You’re all focused on the psychological complexity of the good cop, and sure maybe the good cop is a lot more interesting psychologically. But you’re neglecting that the good cop is by definition one half of a team, the other half of which is the bad cop (i.e., Bull Connor). You’re making them seem oppositional or at least disconnected, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding. There is, in the relevant sense, no good cop without the bad cop to complete the job, and so also there’s no Sam Ervine going on about paternalism and harmony unless there’s also Bull Connor around to turn on the hoses when necessary.

My reconstruction of MS Muse’s position may be entirely off (MS Muse: please let me know!), but it is I think a position that makes a whole lot of sense.

Some scattered thoughts after reading the comment thread:

We need to remember that racism (not just in thought but in word and deed) isn’t just compatible with “soft segregation,” but with support of particular agendas that reduce institutionalized racism. Starting from white abolitionists we have racists fighting for reduced power of racist systems. LBJ was very much a racist, but also threw his full weight behind civil rights laws, eventually.

Along those lines we need to remember that racism is not the sole property of revanchist conservatism, and that no white person should ever be certain that racism has no grip on their own thinking. Institutions and customs of white dominated society marginalize black and other PoC experiences in most every circle, not just conservative ones.

Indeed the main effect of the taboo on racism is not to make racism intolerable, but to make accusations of racism difficult. White leftists and liberals both are keen to recognize this tendency among the right-wing, but white leftists or liberals play by a similar script. Denying racist intention, pointing out positive contributions, tone policing, derailment, etc. Yes the left knows better than to say “some of my best friends are black,” but, you can make a thoroughly cliché action movie without actually putting everyone in long dark jackets.

While following the lead of many black queer thinkers I am hesitant to accept the framing of the (not even close to completion) struggle for racial liberation with the struggles for queer liberation, our concepts of homophobia, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, transphobia, etc. need to be similarly able to accept that someone actively for one particular facet of queer liberation can still be in both heart and action supporting other forms of homophobia, or transphobia.

Tangentially to the heading and the general gist of the post.
Growing up, around our way, you (the collective) would use boy all the time. As in ‘well boy.’ (No racial connotations) ‘Well’ being ‘hello.’
Except boy would be pronounced ‘ba’ or at times ‘be.’ (not bee, but beh. Kind off) The travellers (gypsies) might say ‘boss’ (which caught on a little, but not enough to make a larger change) ‘Dude’ was rare to the point of non-existent. I tried to bring in bro.
I had a friend who grew up in London but came back in his early teens who used to say bey. (as in beeeee (h) – baaaa with e(h) )
He had an amalgamated London/Irish accent so when he’d greet you (well bey) it would sound like a sheep gasping for its last breathe.
He was a good dude.

#88 – JamieM, your breath is taken away because you are not reading. I am trying to explain my evolution. Most straight Americans have undergone an evolution like mine, if polls and votes are to be believed. The President not too long ago made quite a public spectacle of his belated evolution. Perhaps it would be better if we were all to pretend that we were never prejudiced, that we always understood. But that would be false.

#99 – “the advances made in gay rights in recent years – and they are recent, since 2010 – hasn’t come by changing the minds of the Rick Santorums of the world.”

Oh, but it has. There’s been massive movement among church-going Catholics like Santorum. Over half now support SSM.

“A majority of Catholics in the United States who attend Mass weekly support same-sex marriage… The survey found that 56% of Americans, 53% of Catholics who attend Mass weekly, and 65% of Catholics who attend Mass less frequently would support “a law in your state that would allow same-sex couples to get married.”

http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=19267

Here is where I part ways with modernity. Hierarchy is no more basic than racism. Racism is a hatred, and hierarchy is a vainglory. The social and historical contingencies and concomitants are important but not primary.

Sins are both moral and psychological, and cause actions, and also cause shapes in the material world. Thus we pre-moderns have all the bases covered.

“Hierarchy” has a different meaning in systems theory, by the way, and social scientists should be ashamed of the way they have commandeered the word to label social power relations, in much the same way that economists should be ashamed of the way they use “ecological” in “ecological rationality”. Shame however is also a premodern concept, so perhaps no one will care.

People keep asking: what’s the point? And I find this a bit baffling, because isn’t it interesting?

Actually, it’s kind of like the Eschaton scene in Infinite Jest when the kids are playing a roleplaying Global Thermonuclear War scenario, and they confuse the map with the territory and start beating each other up, and Hal just sits there and watches because it’s very fascinating and there’s an idea somewhere in all of it that he can’t quite catch yet. And that is something I never thought I’d say.

Clearly the problem is with defining “hierarchy” not “racism” if “hierarchy” doesn’t have to concern itself with subordinate. Otherwise it sounds like Esalen or “I’m OK You’re OK”. (Or else what Kurt Newman describes @ 89.) And whatever else you might say, I will never be convinced that conservatives like Friedersdorf are promoting the values of Esalen instead of, say, what normal people think of when they hear the word “hierarchy.”

It was a paternalistic system, in which an oligarchic, landed aristocracy maintained its privileged position as ruling caste by being able to dispense goods through a kind of patronage system.

Sorry, it was an ‘aristocratic system’ in a metaphorical sense, more or less. Legally and institutionally, an aristocracy didn’t exist. Unless you mean something quite else by ‘aristocracy’. But what? And no, white people in the South didn’t maintain their privileged position as a ruling class by dispensing goods through etc. — they maintained it by forcibly and violently denying black people their constitutional political rights and other social and economic rights and opportunities. The dispensing goods bit might have made them feel warm and fuzzy inside as they thought about their awesomeness, but it was categorically not the mechanism through which they maintained their position of privilege.

Definition of hierarchy? There are at least two kinds of hierarchies, after Salthe:

1. Extensional: Scale or composition hierarchies; often spatially nested. E.g. [individual-family-lineage-clan-tribe], [line-beat-scene-act-drama], [quark-particle-atom-molecule-compound]. Members of the lower level are often combined into new units having emergent properties.

2. Intentional thought: Specification, classification and control hierarchies; directed (sometimes temporally) in either or both ways as a sequence. E.g. a business management hierarchy, an automated control system, and some logical hierarchies: [measurement-calculation-theory-law], [mathematical semigroup-group-ring-field]. Units at the lower level have input to higher levels but do not compound to emerge as higher level units.

These can exist in pure form, but real hierarchies also can overlap the kinds, or segue into one another.

The reason it is important to keep “hierarchy” free from definition as “power domination” is because there is no other current word for a chain of levels, whether it is scalar or specificatory. And the concept may be important in many other areas: cognition, mereology, coarse/fine graining, set theory, etc.

Power domination is an intentional hierarchy which may employ other extensional ones (e.g. nation-state-region-locality) to exert its control. But I imagine that power domination itself is usually only two important levels anyway: the controllers and the controlled, with the minions in between. Thus, power domination is an intellectually paltry form of hierarchy.

There is “primordial” fear and loathing of the other. Then there is the world in which there is an other of the other, which is the political world. No one possesses any immunity from this world. And whatever rationalizations one develops for such a world or one’s respective position in it, I fail to see why one should expect them to be entirely coherent or fully intentional. That leaves room for “racisms” of all sorts. (American, nor Yankee exceptionalism can claim no special privilege).

Which is kinda what is so irritating about these sorts of one-sided discussions, in which everyone competes to be “in the right”, and abhor (any contamination by) what is wrong with the world. No such “metaphysics of presence”, i.e. no such assumption of full intentionality, is possible, without accounting (impossibly) at the same time for the material conditions and structural constraints that render actual specific intentions and corresponding potentials or dispositions possible. And correspondingly, there is no one single continuous line of racism operating invariably throughout the course of a history. Rather there are material conditions and socio-structural constraints that leave there legacy effects, which “empirically” regenerate varying forms of intentional or attitudinal racism, but in changing contexts. E.P. Thompson spoke of sparing the denizens of the past from “the enormous condescension of posterity”, though in a specific context and perhaps not with full generality. But the general point would be how our mis-recognitions of (the legacies) of the past contribute to our failures to “see” present situations with any “clarity”. If we are at all to undo the material scarcities and twisted structures that have given rise to present predicaments.

JH @117:

1. “Black people are born black people…” That’s a fair point, and I’ll have to think more about the aristocracy stuff.

2. The long quote about Ervin etc. (sorry I kept misspelling his name), only shows that there was a certain conception of social hierarchy afoot among a certain set of white supremacists. Even if I were to take this entirely at face value, which for the purposes of the argument I’m happy to, it doesn’t at all speak to what I was saying.

You had originally said that the dominant class in the South (i.e. white people, or rich white people) “maintained its privileged position as a ruling caste [I’d prefer ‘class’ — js.] by being able to dispense goods through a kind of patronage system.”

This is straightforwardly a causal claim about how the dominant white class maintained its position of privilege — about what causal mechanism was responsible for this. I think the claim is false, and I don’t see how a quote about what certain people thought would be the ideal social hierarchy says anything about that one way or the other. I mean, you’re surely not denying that black people more or less continuously tried to win or assert their rights and were violently suppressed, again continuously?

Why would I need to calm down? Did I say anything rash?

Nah.

This is where your post start to founder, and where I direct my fire:

Bigotry is an inherently negative attitude. But racism is, essentially, just a hierarchical notion. It really has nothing inherent to do with hate. Bigotry says someone is bad. Racism says ‘I am better’. Which implies someone is worse. But it doesn’t necessarily dwell on it, darkly, let alone violently. Racism can walk on the sunny side of the street, in its mind.

Ervin does not seem to be bubbling over with race hate, in an emotional sense. This is why he felt that charges of racism, against him, were unjust. A racist is a bigot is consumed with hate. Ervin looked in his heart, saw no bubbling hate, per se, for the black man. He exonerated himself on that charge, and felt anger at his unjust accusers for calling him racist.

What he felt was love of hierarchy and order and preservation of social status.”

And yes, I do understand what you’re saying, and I understand well enough that I don’t think you truly grok what you’ve been reading. In a sense, I suspect art and literature is clearer on the matter than history, per se.

What’s that suppose to mean?

It’s just that…it’s kinda plain that you don’t really get it. Have you asked yourself, for instance, why you use the term “soft strategy” rather than “soft tactics”? I mean, of course not, they’re just two words among many you’ve wrote, but there’s a universe of different implications flowing from word choice like that, so at least subconscious?

There is never a particularly strong differentiation of North Carolina Jim Crow from, say, Georgia Jim Crow, either. What’s there is just “more carrots”, “Progressive Jim Crow”, and other ladled words that can’t carry very much in terms of actual meaning.

Look, I’m not that invested in the discussion. You can do the dismissal, and I’m going to bed.

To me, racism means assigning, as permanent, some essential human characteristics to a large ancestral category. These characteristics can be negative or positive or mixed, it doesn’t matter. When it’s not done for a purpose, it’s mostly a honest mistake of identifying a false cause-and-effect. When this turns into animosity and hatred, it becomes also a species of chauvinism, jingoism. Bigotry is something like cultural absolutism, contempt for other cultures.

Ervin, based on the quotes above, doesn’t sound like much of a racist, or even not at all, to the extent that “I don’t think you can measure the relative abilities of races in a generation” could be interpreted as a rejection of race-essentialism. Also, his “the majority of Negroes, like the majority of whites, prefer to go to their own churches, etc.” doesn’t sound bigoted (there is no contempt), but rather cultural-nativistic: they have their culture, we have ours, most of everyone likes it, let’s keep it this way.

“Single sex couples have important, long-term loving (as loving as any heterosexual couple) relationships that are legally ignored by the state. And that’s wrong.”

@82: True. But there are plenty of loving long-term relationships that are legally ignored by the state. I do not mean to say that gay people shouldn’t be fighting for the right to marry, only that the resulting tributes to the super-wonderfulness of bourgeois marriage with Mom and Mom or Dad and Dad with Bobby, Susie, and the family labrador have obscured this somewhat.

For what anecdotal evidence is worth, I know people who oppose same-sex marriage but are happy to support civil unions and legal protections for gay people. I suppose they’re bigots. But they are decent people who wish no one harm and they are out there. They can be talked to. Throwing around the word “bigot” is not especially helpful.

Happy Easter! Kids are satiated with chocolate and jelly beans.

To JS @ 94 – yes, that’s what I’m trying to say.

To John, somewhere down in the thread: ““These men [the North Carolina ruling class] shared a vision of conservative modernization based on white supremacy, minimal government, social hierarchy, low wages, and anti-unionism.”

God help us. These people are back in NC… with a vengeance. And now they want to destroy K-12 and higher education as well.

John – I don’t think you understand the impact of the very serious issues that result from the ideology of these “leaders.” Like you, I’m fascinated by their psychological make-up. Unlike you, I attribute much of their behaviors to the emotion of hate. Living in NC now, I can tell you these leaders are filled with hate and fear, not a benign sense of creating and maintaining order out of chaos.

There are hierarchies everywhere – in the university system, I am on the low-end of the totem-pole, as contingent faculty with a two-semester contract. Next year, I will teach three classes, not four, but lose half my salary (which is not big to begin with.) As much as I love teaching, I hate this particular hierarchy. It’s annoying enough that I am now planning an exit strategy.

In my situation, I am free to exit at will. I don’t like the hierarchies of the university – it does not accurately reflect the value I offer my students, the university, etc. I can leave if I want.

There is a difference between what I can do and what Sam Ervin’s black “friends” could do. I am not legally bound to stay within that hierarchy. Sam’s “friends” were legally constricted in ways that were really quite terrible.

To use Sam Ervin as your example is the problem. His hierarchy was not possible without hate-filled violence. That you don’t recognize that duality is a problem with your argument. That he lived in one of the most moderate of the Southern states doesn’t change the fact that the threat of violence was needed to uphold his racial hierarchies. And in 1960, the benevolence of the NC ruling elite towards blacks did not stop civil rights activists from selecting Greensboro as the site of one of the first sit-ins at a Woolworth’s counter.

Had you chosen Lincoln to explore the subject of racism, now that’s a cat of a different color….

I do not see Sam Ervin’s kind of racism as being isolated to the South, FYI. I hail from Chicago, still one of the most segregated cities in the country, a city with white racists who, in 1966, stoned MLK when he marched through a white neighborhood to focus attention on desegregating the neighborhoods. After that experience, MLK said of Chicago: ““I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.” (http://bit.ly/1r3vP7E)

Of course in 2008, Chicago was the city that gave us the first African-American president. The complexities of race in America are endlessly fascinating.

Clay Shirky @ 99, if you are of a philosophical bent, you may be interested in Brian Leiter’s book ‘Why Tolerate Religion?’ Or perhaps you won’t be since you have summarized a portion of his thesis already.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9839.html

I think if we really want to fight the evil of racism, we have to become anarchists.

Those who are intent on declaring that “racism = hatred” fear that if we declare that “racism = hierarchy”, all the passion and conviction will be drained from anti-racism politics.

No one knows where the mental ends and the social begins. No one knows if we can or should reduce “hatred” to the amygdala or if “hatred” is always joined with a whole host of ideations that are socially-conditioned.

If we isolate Bull Connor from Sam Ervin, maybe we find a way to better de-legitimize Sam Ervin and adopt a rhetoric that better exposes the ill-meaning ideology of moderate racists (Holbo’s hope). But maybe the isolation backfires and we mistakenly legitimize Bull Connnor as merely a hot-headed hierarchist. And when has there ever been a successful anti-hierarchy movement? (“Hierarchy = hatred”: imagine a day when such a bumper sticker did whatever “racism = hate” does today).

It’d be better if anti-racism really were effectively replaced with anarchism. Then we could safely let go of the whole “racism = hatred” and work on the root issue: I want to avoid another’s misfortune without having to bother with helping them. But various contingencies make that impossible.

The settlement and development pattern in North Carolina varied enough from most of the South to create a tension in the white supremes (what a term!) Immigrants included religious refugees seeking freedom, escaped indentured servants, and with the opening of the Shenandoah wagon route kind of an end run into the western part of the state by yeoman farmers who are also more liberally sprinkled through the state than might be the pattern elsewhere in the South. Some of these tendencies also influenced the history of Tennessee and certainly Virginia from the Shenandoah west. The need to create a coalition large enough to rule.

The populace of the state rejected (as did Tennessee) the first ballot initiative proposing secession and it is alleged though I have no citation the 2nd ballot was rigged.

Ervin and company was operating under the constraints of the time to form the electoral majority. That is not a judgement of the morality of the situation but rather an observation of the practicalities.

The group currently holding sway has resorted to every degree of political force at their disposal to maintain control. Voting districts are incredibly jiggered. Once again the minority rules.

John Holbo, my point about arts and literature relates to the fact that you felt that analyzing the internal state such that you are given distinction and richness matters a great deal. As such, the great fiction writers has an expertise that isn’t really matched by historians, like being able to relate the inner state of the characters they draw to the outside effects of their worlds.

My irritation is with your obtuseness, mostly because the ground you are defending has been worked over pretty well. I also know North Carolina history pretty well (and I don’t think you have it right there, either), too. There isn’t a debate to be had here.

Hey Bruce, have you read Bank’s Player of Games?

Holbo @93:

Anyway, to me it isn’t so obvious that you can’t have Sam Ervin without Bull Connor because I’m taking a more historical view… The Romans had Sam Ervins, in a sense; but, I think, they didn’t really build up from a base of Bull Connors.

Holbo @137:

“His hierarchy was not possible without hate-filled violence. That you don’t recognize that duality is a problem with your argument.” [MS Muse]

I guess I don’t see what I’m missing. You seem to be saying that, since the overall ecology of racism was a function of there being both Sam Ervin and Bull Connor-types around (obviously I think so, since I’m arguing so damn hard for this conclusion)

Well, you do seem to be missing the “duality” insofar as @93, e.g., you seem committed to the claim that you can have Sam Ervin without Bull Connor — or at least that this is an open possibility — even if as a matter of fact the South had both. I don’t think the people disagreeing with you are misreading you (tho to a small extent I was insofar as I took one of your claims to be about the South generally when it was about NC in particular).

That was very good. A good explanation of where we are and where liberalism insists we must go. The notion that homosexuality is a sin must become a sin and anyone who fails to affirm that those people who believe homosexuality is a sin are sinners, must be utterly completely shamed and shunned from the public square. In addition you provide the abstract reasoning why this is true. Very good stuff.

It is also totally and completely wrong because it lacks any context. All sorts of people believe all sorts of wrong things about other people. We don’t need to identify all those beliefs and ban each and everyone one of them on pain of the ultimate public shaming and shunning.

We did it with with racism and do it because the reality of racism was so awful.

More Republicans support civil unions and/or gay marriage than oppose it.

If in 1900s the Democrats in the deep South, had supported full civil rights for black Americans and only asked that interracial couples be banned from marrying but be granted fully equal civil unions, racism would not have been that bad and we would not have had to utterly ban any expression of racism.

This was never about the ‘right’ to marry. This was always about complete state and cultural approval of homosexuality. What I should have seen, and did not see, was that in addition any contrary expression/thought was to be totally banned.

This blog post on a book about “The Jurisprudence of Denigration” ties into Holbo’s post:

‘In Windsor, Justice Kennedy argued that section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act was the product of “a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group”—that it came from a “purpose . . . to demean,” “injure,” and “disparage.” As Smith writes, “Justice Kennedy and the Court thereby in essence accused Congress—and, by implication, millions of Americans—of acting from pure malevolence.” ***

‘At the level of moral discourse too, however, we find disagreement about basic premises, with “no way to achieve closure or resolution of the disagreements.” At this point, we search for some “common ground from which to reason.” And here, we find “widespread support” for one proposition: that “it is wrong to act from hatred or malevolence or ill-will toward others.”‘

Link (I’m on my phone so fuck the HTML.)

http://conlaw.jotwell.com/denigration-as-forbidden-conduct-and-required-judicial-rhetoric/

I keep thinking that somewhere in this thread we should consider the neuroscience that says actions come first, pre-conscious , then the justification. Not sure how broad or narrow that finding is, but it certainly supports -at a different scale, perhaps- the historical evidence that racism is epiphenomenal of dominant/submissive relations.

and…Yes, anarchists will recreate hierarchies, but they’ll be instrumental and come with a built in Egg-Timer of Liberty!

@133:

Oops! Sorry, not my specialty. I might have garbled the 17 mn figure as the population of Rome at the time, (which would have included Italy, Southern Spain, Greece, and Tunisia?). But I think the 500,000 killed in the destruction of Carthage might hold. Carthago delenda est and all that.

But I’m a bit surprised at the 60-65 mn figure. IIRC the estimate for the population of Europe in 1493 has been put at just 60 mn, (though I don’t know if that estimate extends all the way to the Urals, since it was cited relative to the “new world”). Some estimates have Timur-leyn and his men killing 17 mn before he was finished, a century earlier, which was estimated to be 5% of the population of the entire world at the time.

At any rate, the Romans were fairly brutal militarists, with a genius for engineering, but whose culture was mostly borrowed finery. One of my favorite counterfactual fantasies is: what would have happened if the Carthaginians/Phoenicians had won the Punic Wars, (as they very nearly did the 2nd one), since, though we know little of them, they were very clearly industrious and ace traders, (which might have been there weakness in enforcing alliances rather than relying on mutual trading advantages), and what then would have been the legacy of the ancient Mediterranean world to subsequent history?

At any rate, many empires have acknowledged the diversity of peoples under their rule. The Persians were quite proud of their multi-ethnic, polyglot diversity, provided submission and tribute to the Great Shah were forthcoming. And the Ottomans left local affairs in the hands of local notables, in fairly tolerant ways. And, of course, the Emperor Akbar gave his great speech on religious tolerance, (even as he was militarily ruthless), which far exceeded anything the West was capable of conceiving at the time. I don’t think Roman law was so exceptional.

” opposing civil rights our opinion of what civil rights consists of for anyone and everyone including for gays is assholery”

It’s beyond silliness at this sordid juncture, but the real discussion, I thought, such as it was, was about what constitutes civil rights as regards marriage.
Any disagreement, here, was primarily overcome by disgust, contempt, vituperation, name-calling and a stubborn refusal, by some anyway, to engage beyond scolding.
Not much to bring to the wider table.

Here’s a confounding truth-like thing:

Atrazine is the second-most widely used agricultural chemical. It’s been shown to have an endocrine-disrupting effect on frogs, with the correlative idea that it may have similar effect on young humans. Especially males. This looks to be borne out by symptomologies inc lusters around areas of wide-spread Atrazine use.
So a young male human with endocrine-disruption will be more or less feminized.
So is that okay?
No, because of choice. Or something.
Not because it’s an unnatural consequence, but because it wasn’t intentional result on the part of the boy. Or frog.
But there’s something else in there, something around “natural”, something around a traditional view of human completeness, biology, and reproduction.

Personally I’m a freak patriot, freakier the better says me. Mutants forever!
What animates my animosity, here, besides the smug vacuuity and latent sadism – enough all by itself, is the bourgeois idiocy, from which springs the assertion of “rights”, that being gay is just another iteration of the grand human mass of normalcy. A refusal to fly that freak flag.
Being gay is a demographically large but still minority phenomenon.
No problem until it’s time to hand out those little badges of normalness.
Everybody gets one!
Just for showing up!
It’s hard to celebrate true diversity at the same time you’re pretending there’s no real difference between people, but by golly you’re almost doing it.

John Holbo: ‘If you took the Jim Crow South, raptured away all harshest sorts of racists and replaced them with much milder-mannered racists, you could still have a racist system.’

I think you are wrong about this, and this speaks directly to your formulation of Muse’s objection. According to you, she is saying: ‘anyone who is part of a racist system involving extreme racism is an extreme racist’.
But that doesn’t seem to me to be the most plausible presentation of the argument. What she seems to be pointing towards is that the fact that you can’t have a racist system without extreme racists. The problem with your argument is sociological rather than philosophical . You are suggesting that a whole society of ‘mild mannered racists’ might constitute, say, a durable social system of segregation. But this seems to ignore so much of what we know about the character of the ‘racial authoritarianism’ that actually ruled in the South. Everybody knew where the boundaries were, and it was accepted by all that certain transgressions were ‘unacceptable’. I find it sociologicially implausible that one could create such an authoritarian society with mild and moderate racists. You don’t have to personally endorse the violence that you know is going to be executed on transgressors to understand that it is necessary for propping up the society you live in. Taking the notion of ‘extreme racist’ to denote one willing to use violence, I find it implausible that a segregated society like the Jim Crow South could exist without massive tolerance (and not a little fear) of the violence.

“[W]e should not want, under ‘proper conditions of society,’ the interference of the soldier, of the policeman, and of the hangman. Legislature, magistracy and armed force, are all of them but the offspring of improper conditions of society …”
-Karl Marx

It seems that Marx, at least, believed there could be no segregated society without Bull Connors to buttress them.

If you took the Jim Crow South, raptured away all harshest sorts of racists and replaced them with much milder-mannered racists, you could still have a racist system.

In my experience of the South, growing up there during the last days of Jim Crow, it was abundantly clear that the social architecture rested on a foundation violence. It was omnipresent as a threat, even if, as a white child of middling status, I only occasionally got to see it applied. You could feel it, smell it, taste it — even in Aunt Pittypat’s drawing room. What you say here is probably true in theory, but I can’t imagine anything remotely like it replacing what I remember. The very dome of heaven would have collapsed around us.

Everybody gets one!
Just for showing up!

Look! The gheys think they’re people! Silly mutants!

John (168): I am not sure I agree entirely. Of course there can be racist structures without overt violence, as you say. But isn’t it the case that these are always in the last instance backed up by the threat of violence? Take Harvard or the country club not admitting Jews. This racism comes across as very polite and cultured – but in the end, what if someone insisted? What if a Jew didn’t admit they were Jewish and attended Harvard until found out? Then it seems to me the violent construct that is the state is appealed to and its violence is brought to bear to kick that person out. Or what if racism against blacks in Chicago manifests itself through higher interest rates for home loans – if someone affected by this racism were to refuse to pay the excess interest, the state and its capacity for violence would once again enter the picture (seizing their house).

I guess what I am trying to say is, racism is a structure of oppression and as such is always backed up by violence in the final instance, namely, when it is challenged.

But you could have had a milder system of racism in the South, counterfactually, without violence being an essential part of it. Just have some system of social norms, exclusions, associations.

I think what christian_h says (@170) is right, but let me try this a different way. So let’s take this hypothesis of a “racist system” but not a racist state, and no violence to back up the racist system. Well, I think “racist system” is ambiguous here. The easiest way to conceptualize this sort of case, I think, is one where you have a class stratified system (where I mean “class” in the broadest possible sense of social classes), and the racism that exists within the system is incidental to it. That is, you could lose the racism without losing anything essential about how the class system (again, broadly defined) works in this society. It would be foolish to deny that some such society could exist, but I think one fairly obvious thing to say about such a society is that the prism of race, or of racism, wouldn’t give one much insight into it. At all. That comes along with the racism being incidental.

On the other hand, the more essential you want to make race to the workings of the society — in other words, the more explanatory power you want to grant the categories of race and racism with respect to the society in question — the harder it’s going to be to realistically make the case that racism in the given society is not backed and supported by the sanctioned violence of the state.

(168 genuinely clarifies your position for me, by the way. So no point responding to previous.)

Just to be clear, I’m talking about proper, lynching/firehoses-level violence when I talk about state-sanctioned violence @172.

National Unified Discrete Generatives Executive.

the National Utility for the Direction of Grievous Emotions

Argh dangling modifiers. The “it” the oppressed do not challenge refers to racist structures, not violence.

Oh man, being involved in this thread was amusing after all!

Anyways, will skip post 163 since I’m so obviously indecipherable…

Let’s look at post 168 a bit. Let’s ask what exists to differentiate a school with mild bullying and severe bullying. Might I say that this generally occurs because the school makes every effort to prevent (or not) things from going all Lord of the Flies? Perhaps severe bullying exists because of where those students come from–broken homes broken neighborhoods, or perhaps it’s prep kids with overbearing parents that’s got a shark-toothed lawyer on speed dial? Does the school society just anarchically organize into mild bullying because there isn’t any coercion or incentives by administration to engage in severe bullying? Given what we know about how hazing practices develop, probably not.

John Holbo, people have agency, and bullies tend to be cowards. If there was no institution of terror on minority groups/women/whatever, a black man on the street would be quite free to throw a punch at a white woman who insulted him. Black people would be free to own property in peace, and some would gain wealth–like Chinese in Indonesia or Hakka in China or Jews in the Hapsburg Europe. That doesn’t mean ethnic tensions do not happen, or that murderous ethnic riots do not occur.

However, these tensions are nothing compared to what it was like in the Americas. When there was slavery in the sugar isles, every white man was automatically part of the local militia who might be required to assist in alerting and putting down a slave rebellion. When slavery was abolished and law had to make pretexts for compelled labor anyways, systemic violence based on racial identification was used to keep the price of labor down. That was true in Jamaica, and it was true in Mississippi. More than that, the state, and the private organizations allied with the state, specifically compels white men and women to engage in passive exclusion, and recruits white men who wants a little extra “spice” in their lives for the rough stuff. And believe you me, the state engaged in considerable violence against any white people who violate those rules, even strangers that didn’t know the lay of the land–this tendency was probably the main way Jim Crow was at all restrained, because some Northern State gets furious when one of their white sons gets sentenced to some unsanitary logging camp and dies. The entire economic and social order of the Dixiecrat South twined between economic motives surrounding cheap labor and the ideation of white men reaping bounty from the natural world. With merely “mild” racism, however that’s supposed to work, the South would have collapsed economically and politically out of insufficient organizing force, and virtually all Southern elites were intensely aware of it, however they viewed their institutions. That goes for LeRoy Percy and it goes for Sam Ervin. Jim Crow fell, in large part because black people could flee to manufacturing jobs outside of the South in the thirties and fourties (not to mention that they *had* to flee from the consequences of being excluded from New Deal programs). Jim Crow also fell because the basic extraction industries became uneconomic no matter how cheap the labor was (and the boll weevil).

There was just not ever anything useful about a “moderate” conception of Sam Ervin’s sentiment, and because you prefer Sam Ervin’s self-assessment rather than the assessment of people victimized by the society he sat at the top of (aside of one black favored son mayor), you’ve been off to some cockamamie-landia creating these clever little internally consistent constructs that carry no weight. You also expect people to take this seriously. In a world full of violent people and violent societies who pretend that they aren’t as intractably violent as they are, and who are fully backed by state organs.

I have to say that I may disagree about the possibility of a structurally mildly racist society existing without any recourse to violence against the excluded class. Isn’t there always going to be some coming down to brass tacks moment? What happens when your daughter wants to marry a Jew, and you realize that then she and your future grandchildren won’t be members of the Maidstone anymore? Won’t you (as hypothetical mildly racist dad) want to stop her from doing a thing that will ruin her life? I think nothing is more traditional here than a private talk with the young man involving your brother, your sons, and a number of shotguns. OK, one thing is more traditional: you can also beat the tar out of your daughter, which you may well have been doing the whole time, since, as a racist, you’re liable to be a bad person in other ways too.

Now, you may protest that as you’re only mildly racist you won’t do anything at all to dissuade the young lovers. But if not, then in only a generation or so, your mildly racist society will be completely dismantled by mixed marriages. What will your disapproval mean if it has no consequences? What will happen when enough sons and daughters of echt-WASPs have married Jews? I mean, you might still prevent them from joining the Maidstone Club, but if that’s literally the only racist content of your mildly racist society then I don’t think it merits the designation.

Or let’s say in your mildly racist society a black person sues because he was passed over for a promotion at the firehouse, because it’s a rule that the next rank up is only for white people. This is pretty mild exclusion, because you do let black men be firefighters, just not chiefs or their immediate junior firefighters. What happens? Either the government affirms that it’s acceptable to restrict some jobs to whites only, or not. If it does, then your racist society has got the might of The State on its side, even if all that’s happened was a politely argued civil suit, right? If not, how does your mildly racist society continue its mildly racist practice of only having white fire chiefs? Now the State intervenes on behalf of the black firefighters and forces you to change your policy, doesn’t it? Or let’s push it further: the government does nothing. It says “Salem’s firehouse policies are its own affair.” And now you keep on not promoting anyone, OK. How does that exclusionary system work? How is it that the white people can keep running the firehouse? Only one way: something bad is going to happen to the black firefighter that brought that suit. Really bad. Bad enough that everybody else is going to think thrice before they “stir up any trouble.” That’s the only way for it to work.

I can perfectly well imagine a large group of white people who are racist-sub-Erwin, who are not motivated by vicious hatred but by a feeling that things are as they should be, and people shouldn’t be up and changing everything, and so forth. What I can’t imagine is them successfully maintaining a systematically racist society. You’ve stipulatively given them one (a hand-me-down from Bull Connor, presumably)–I see it falling apart in about 10 seconds if the oppressive, omnipresent fear of unpunishable violence is removed. I can’t even begin to imagine them getting to one from scratch if you didn’t give it to them. I mean, it’s logically possible that such a society could exist, I guess, but only in a trivial way. This doesn’t vitiate your observations about the Skittles-like rainbow of racism we can taste–inside my mind–but I think it’s a fair point that Erwin can only wave placidly to us from atop the colorful float of moderate segregation if there are a fuckton of Bull Connors, both State-employees and free-lancers, running in hamster wheels under there to keep the thing moving along the parade route.

OK, having just discussed this with John over dinner I mostly retract this disagreement; he really means to exclude everything we might reasonably think of as a racist State from discussion. So, it’s cheating to put all of North Carolina in here, and especially cheating to put the Jim Crow deep South. What we disagree about is the type of thing that constitutes racism, partly. He’s imagining mild exclusion rather than soft segregation, I think. So, not the system Erwin actually supported in real life, but something like what the Maidstone Club employed in real life until like 10 years ago, namely they don’t let any Jews in (there are three Jewish members now, but it was a big deal.) So, an imaginary society in which people are mildly racist, exercise freedom of association in an unpleasant way to further their racist aims, but don’t make life difficult enough for the oppressed class that they would really be moved to take action against it. Not an actually existing or previously existing society in which — very obviously — State violence was the backstop of the racist social structure.

Apologies (again) for dragging in the Romans again, but BW’s post in conjunction with john c. halasz’ earlier comments sparked a passing thought…

The Roman Empire was, considered over its total span of many centuries, remarkably peaceful with very few rebellions against Roman rule; this is why people like Michael Doyle take it as a model for imperial success, talking of the ‘Augustan threshold’ of incorporating conquered subjects into the polity and so forth. We have numerous representatives of those conquered subjects hymning the empire for its role in bringing peace, order, civilization etc.

Do we take this at face value? Not wise – and to be fair, it was a Roman author who put into the mouth of a barbarian character the great criticism that “they make a desolation and call it peace”. The Romans’ capacity for violence is well established, against anyone they define as an enemy and especially – with the exception of their Italian former allies in the Social War – anyone who rebels against their rule. If you step out of line, they’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks; most people therefore keep quiet and do what’s expected of them, while those that don’t – the Jews in the first century, most obviously – get made an example of.

The Roman state was pretty minimal, the Roman army was thinly stretched, mostly along the frontiers and/or protecting the emperor against potential rivals. Peace was maintained not through constant oppression and control but through the constant threat of retribution – not necessarily immediate violence, but the sense that sooner or later you would be made to pay. In the absence of any sort of police force, we may assume the same about internal social order: don’t mess with the elite, because they have people who will make you sorry, and the run they system of justice to which you would appeal against this.

In such a system, BW’s hypothetical mildly racist dad doesn’t even need to threaten violence or even himself contemplate it; it is implicit in the private chat with the unsuitable young man even in the absence of hefty male relatives and shotguns. Roman fathers, one suspects, wouldn’t have any problem with overt threats, but a more squeamish modern father might be able to convince himself of his repudiation of such things and nevertheless benefit from them. Which may well be the same thing that Durkheim is getting at…

Re Roman population figures #156: all to be taken with barrels of salt, and personally I incline to the lower end of the spectrum of possibilities, but 50-60 million for population of empire at its height seems plausible – in which case, 17 million for the empire in mid-C2 BCE also seems plausible. No idea about the basis for estimates of Carthage casualties, but it was a rich region; Caesar said to have taken a million slaves in his Gallic campaigns, larger area but less developed.

194 Neville Morley: The grave-markers of Roman aristocrats even from the Republican era often contain lists of treasures pillaged from various newly conquered places, and obviously the Empire was yet more rapacious. I agree there was less rebellion than there might have been and have often wondered about it. Threat of brutal clampdown or hitting of the sweet spot between onerous taxation and provision of useful services…?

= = =
P2: Opposition to same-sex marriage is complex.

“One thing I’ve noticed in this debate is how unfamiliar proponents of stigma are with thoughtful orthodox Christians — that is to say, they haven’t interacted with them personally, critiqued the best version of their arguments, or even been exposed to the most sophisticated version of their reasoning, which I find to be obviously earnest, if ultimately unpersuasive.”
= = =

If one starts out with 1=2, well…

Cranky

John Holbo: “Barry, I take it you think it has simply failed to occur to me that Sam Ervin might have been a liar, rather than self-deceived. In this you are quite mistaken: I have duly considered both options and have opted for self-deceived as the more likely of the two, based on the evidence. So tell me: why do you think the other option is more likely? Is it just that you don’t believe that someone could exhibit as much cognitive dissonance as I attribute to Sam Ervin. Or is it that specific facts about Sam Ervin’s career suggest to you a different interpretation than I offer?”

I expect that he lied to himself and lied to others, as well. My point was that you seemed to be taking somebody’s public (and highly self-justifying) statements as true, with no proof.

“… was that you suggested – way upthread – that we should think about what would happen if all the Bull Connors were, as it were, raptured away, and replaced with Sam Ervins. ”

I never suggested that we “rapture away all the Bull Connors.” I said that Sam Ervin and Bull Connor were two sides of the same coin. I was looking at the reality of Jim Crow South, even as it existed in a “benevolent” Jim Crow state like North Carolina. Sam’s hierarchy of power was not possible without Bull Connor’s violence. Or whoever passed for Bull Connor in NC at the time.

I am not an academic and do not fly into realms of the hypothetical, alas…

@207: …and such an arrangement might even bumble along…which had established it in the first place…

Sigh…. Lost in the forest of mine own dependent clauses yet again.

John @211:

Not to uncork the Latourvian-sized can of sociological complication*, but this…

I was just thinking about the abstract possibility of self-perpetuating social norms, which I take to be rather important for figuring out how racism can, potentially function

…is too passive a construction to bear the weight you ask it to bear.

There is nst as a “self-perpetuating social norm”, for the same reason, as Latour likes to point out, that you can never find the office in which bureaucracy is produced. If you want to understand how racism is constructed and maintained (define it how you may), you are going to have to look at what norms the people in the system perpetuate.

And if some people in the system get the short end of that system’s stick, such as (to pull an example at random) black people in the United States, what sorts of things are other people perpetuating to keep that short-end-y bit in place?

And I take your proposition to be that if there is enough false consciousness to distribute not just to the oppressed but to the oppressors, you can imagine a system that keeps people in their place without any plausible threat of violence backstopping the system, a sort of fiat currency of oppression without the gold standard of burning crosses and snarling dogs to back it up, even in theory.

I doubt, on both theoretical and historical terms, that you can support this argument, but in light of your plea that people be clearer about what we are talking about, is that at least a framing of your belief that doesn’t rely on the spooky action at a distance of self-perpetuating norms?

* Yes yes I know I was just quoting Durkheim, Latour’s mortal enemy. As Whitman said, “I contain multitudes. Sue me.”

Well, in terms of the role of self-perpetuating social norms and violence in maintaining discriminatory socio economic systems, what would all of this say about the Jews (or Roma) in Europe (pre 20th century) or the position of ‘Untouchables’ in the Indian caste system ? Obviously both are extremely complex, contingent realities, and violence figures centrally in maintaining both (I assume.. explicit and implicit, centralised and decentralised? etc) but .. (okay I have nothing more to add)

Relatedly, I haven’t read the lit (as they say) on slavery in North America, but this was an interesting (if verbiagey) review

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-17/reviews/slave-capitalism/

of Walter Johnsons new book which compared the ‘Genovese school’ of how slavery functioned (by this review, though it’s simplified, through paternalism and with less recourse to violence) and what the new histiography says (where violence is central.)

This might all be irrelvant, I accept.

Holbo @205:

Let all future discussion proceed on some solider sociological basis.

Yes, good!

Holbo @211:

I was just thinking about the abstract possibility of self-perpetuating social norms, which I take to be rather important for figuring out how racism can, potentially function.

This is radically unlike any existing thing.

Umm…

I think a helpful addition to the thought experiment John is recreating here is to assume for a moment that the tendency towards racist thought is universal — a default condition of humanity, even among practicing (aspiring?) non-racists.

In this framing it is inadequate to define a non-racist as someone who simply never forms racist thoughts (since you would be — mostly correctly, I believe — assuming this type of person out of existence). Rather, an aspiring non-racist must actively engage, reform and reject racist thought in perpetuity, anywhere it arises, including from within him/herself and especially as it evolves into newer, less familiar forms in the future.

From here, I think it is quite easy to see why the Erwin / Friedersdorf line of thinking requires special attention. The key point is that folks in the E / F camp already have rejected racism, albeit on their own inadequate terms. Having taken this first step, they are searching for a resting place, an equilibrium state where they can comfortably reside as a bonafide non-racist in perpetuity, absent any further changes that they currently view as uncomfortable. But of course no such place exists.

At the same time, within the aspiring non-racist crowd, measuring the degree of one’s non-racism vs. that of others loses its utility — i.e., today’s tolerance is tomorrow’s bigotry, or perhaps more applicable here, yesterday’s tolerance is today’s bigotry.

And so we arrive at a view of anti-racism that — helpfully, in my opinion — requires momentum. Milestones are meaningless from (but not before) the moment they are achieved. And the distinctions between the views of Erwin and Bull Connor, between Erwin and Freidersdorf, can be properly understood as critical to engage precisely because they are far too attractive to those seeking that illusive and illusory equilibrium state.

Thanks,
ISOK

the New Underling Directive for General Expropriations

Oh, geez, no.

For the last time, I’ve always understood what you were saying. I never thought you were defending anyone’s racism, nor have I ever thought you were valorizing Sam Ervin. Moreover, I had *always* connected it to the discussion about people “moderately against gay marriage” and moderation like that. My problem was that you plainly do not understand what you ultimately were writing about, because you effectively never accepted the sheer inescapability of racist structure as far as individuals are concerned. Your extended postulation, in effect could never, ever, actually happen in the real world, because your point that there is a material meaningfulness in the distinction between the mindset of Ervin and Connor elides the nature of what they are immersed in. Put in the severe landscape of what American history might mean to black people, there is no little sense of dancing in the minefield. So if you’re going to go dancing in the minefield, what are you going there for? From my perspective, a sense of being an intellectual shock jock, of the sort that might think it’s fun to defang and declaw a tiger and take it for a walk in the park on a leash. “Hey, it can’t bite anybody, isn’t it cool?” While everyone just sees a really big tiger, who presumably can overpower it’s silly handler no matter.

It’s not as if I don’t go, “well, um….What Would Eric Foner Say About This?” Walter Johnson? Douglass A Blackmon? And that’s just the white people who would know. What about goodies but oldies black people like Baldwin, and people now like TNC or Jamelle Bouie? What do you think the noise would be if you made this a comparison between one Nazi work camp commander who went out of his way to preserve labor (and campaigned on his “thoughtfulness”) until the end of the war versus another who just worked the Jews to death. Or anything else like that? Of course I went all in hot shot, because this one is easy–like I said at the very beginning, this is not really a novel argument. Not using it as a shell game to absolve people or to get the target person or group to engage with the system (with futility) might be novel, since they are the classic motivations, but I’ve seen something like this many times, and in a diversity of lights.

Again, not an especially benign sort of argument, and I do think well enough of you that I’d expect better. Won’t stop me from reading and enjoying any of your other work–This sort of thing is just a hazard, sometimes, of reading what white people think. Brush it off and move on. However, in the meantime, make plenty of squeaks.

“The “one drop” rule, combined the tie between skin colour and social position blocked the operation of normal processes of assimilation and attenuation.”

And why was this one-drop rule needed? The incidence of rape was quite high on the plantation – white men raping black women. (T Jefferson being one; the only slaves freed upon his death were related to Sally Hemings, who was herself the product of rape – Jefferson’s father-in-law was Sally’s father; her mother was one of his slaves, which made Sally the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife. Sordid. Too sordid!)

Ok, one more somewhat minor point.

Holbo @219

I think what js. is saying is that my non-reality based hypotheticals, in the thread’s past, seem inconsistent with my urging that we be more reality based, in the thread’s future. This is not hypocrisy or inconsistency but self-improvement.

I certainly wasn’t indicting you with hypocrisy, and neither really with inconsistency. The problem, as I see it, is that the “self-improvement” is going in the wrong direction, so to speak. Earlier there was confusion, and on all ends — I think we agree on this. But your clarifications (which have undoubtedly been helpful) have, umm, made clear that you’re interested in a somewhat extraordinary-seeming hypothetical scenario that as you yourself put it is “radically unlike anything existing”. I’m just having a bit of trouble seeing how this is helping you with the “solider sociological basis”.

Cosign with js on the major point of 227. That was why I used the idea of Nazi camp commanders. In the police state South, racism was not tribalism. It was an organizing ideology that intrinsically incorporated control of the State in its themes.

I deny it too.

A few quotes from the original post and responses:

“Bigotry is an inherently negative attitude. But racism is, essentially, just a hierarchical notion. It really has nothing inherent to do with hate. Bigotry says someone is bad. Racism says ‘I am better’. Which implies someone is worse. But it doesn’t necessarily dwell on it, darkly, let alone violently. Racism can walk on the sunny side of the street, in its mind.

Ervin does not seem to be bubbling over with race hate, in an emotional sense. This is why he felt that charges of racism, against him, were unjust. A racist is a bigot is consumed with hate. Ervin looked in his heart, saw no bubbling hate, per se, for the black man. He exonerated himself on that charge, and felt anger at his unjust accusers for calling him racist.

What he felt was love of hierarchy and order and preservation of social status.”

–The conclusions do not follow from correct premises. We’ve gone over this segment before.

Then:
“Pulling it all together: animosity towards blacks – wishing them ill, for ill’s sake – is not the center of the picture. What is important is that good things for blacks should flow down from a morally and socially hierarchical peak, inhabited by the likes of Ervin. There is also an intense just world hypothesis-grade refusal to admit anything really bad could be happening, and have happened.”

–the very union of the US was dependent on the dehumanization of blacks. And dehumanization is…fundamentally wishing them ill, for ill’s sake. Just because a just world hypothesis is used to exculpate the annihilation of the black self, of black families, etc, doesn’t mean that the 3/5 thing and everything that flows from it is not about what it is.

How about:
“This is common sense, but we’re on the internet, so let me add the thing I shouldn’t need to: I’m not saying that I know, for a certain metaphysical truth, that Sam Ervin’s heart was as pure as the driven snow, when it came to being free from the least little bit of racial animus. I assume the contrary, since I am not insane. Nevertheless, if you took his primary motive, in resisting civil rights, to be race hatred – i.e. bigotry – I think you would be mistaken. His racism wasn’t a felt emotion of hate but a blinkered vision of the social good. A will to ‘I am better’, not a will to ‘you are worse’.”

–just like Bush being able to peer into Putin’s eyes and see a good soul, right?

The issue here is that you fundamentally reject the idea that “moderate racism” couldn’t exist:
“And speaking of saying things that should be obvious: the overall moral of this Ervin story isn’t about same-sex marriage, obviously. The point is: moderate racism is an important psychological/sociological category, to which we are semi-blinded by our (rightful!) exclusion of moderate racism as defensible moral position. The importance of thinking about moderate racism is mostly this: there are more Sam Ervins around today than Bull Connors. As society becomes less tolerant of racism, racism involves more double-thinking. No one exceeded Ervin at that! But when we think about racism we think: Bull Connor and dogs and firehoses.”

–nobody I know is actually blinded by “exclusion of moderate racism as defensible moral position”. People tend to have this idea that racism is inherently immoderate. People can have racist thoughts, yes, but a person like that is not a “moderate racist”. People can have a racist ideology, yes, but that means that a person is racist. Of course, there are different sorts of racist ideologies, but none of them are “moderate”, because, again, racism is inherently immoderate. There’s no sort of Overton Window thing going on here, and both Ervin and Conner followed the same ideology.

Look, I understand. I mean, when I was a kid in college, I said some of the worst stuff on CEDA debate email forums, giggling about how clever I was with my wording or whatever. Stuff I wish I never said, because they hurt people I care about unknowingly. That sort of behavior though, has always been attractive to excessively clever people. So dude, as a person that’s been there before, seriously, you’re just hanging on to a few specious meanings that don’t mean what they mean. Conflating racism with hierarchy? Tribalism? Something something primordial Not-Racism?

please

Then as a last point, allow me to plead with you to ask yourself: “How would a black public intellectual I know react to this post?” Could be someone you know. Could be someone famous, like Gates or West.

From me also, re John’s 229.: Aha! Because I also do not agree with John’s operative definition of racism – as I wrote seemingly a long time ago in 170, “racism [I should add now, in my understanding] is a structure of oppression”.

I certainly do agree that understanding the differences between the Bull Connors and the Erwins is worth the debate, but I do fear I also agree a little bit with shah8 that John’s definition of racism isn’t completely harmless – let me try (and likely fail) to explain why and how:

I think that John would agree that his definition – like the one many of us use – identifies racism as a social phenomenon, not an individual behaviour. (Right?) And yet its allowance of, say, “reverse racism” (or more generally, forms of micro-aggression motivated by what John identifies as tribalism) undermine this understanding. After all there really is no social structure of exclusion or domination of white people in the US – so any “reverse racism” would amount only to a sum of individually exclusionary or hateful behaviours. [John’s example of the shooting in KC does not challenge this argument, I’d assert, because while there is not currently a social structure of exclusion or domination of Jewish people in the US, historically there was such a structure.] This to me is dangerous, since it opens the door to the “everyone does it, it’s only natural to be tribal” defense of racism. (Ironically, since John in fact seems to intend to challenge precisely this kind of excuse making of the moderate racist.)

Relatedly, the identification of racism as a form of tribalism also undermines another to me crucial understanding: that race itself is a concept constructed by racism. Because in my understanding this is not how the concept of tribe is (or was when the tribe was still a meaningful sociological or political category) constructed. The “modern” equivalent of the tribe would be the nation – an artificial community for sure but often historically justified as the modern expression of a tribe or confederation thereof. Race on the other hand is a purely modern (as in , started with the transatlantic slave trade) concept I’d think, as modern as racism.

Anderson,

Where did I express any opposition to civil rights for gays?

Josh Jasper,

That is very generous of you. You will allow people to express whatever opinions they want behind closed doors. You just won’t tolerate any contrary public opinions regarding those things you feel are rights. Quite liberal of you.

someguy88

JFC, RFC. I don’t care at all what you *SAY* in the public square. It’s when you take your money and find propositions designed to limit equality that I care about.

You think Eich was fired because of what he said. He wasn’t. His company was put under public scrutiny because he funded a bigoted law. If you fund bigoted laws, you should expect the people your bigotry offends to take offense, and refuse to do business with you.

You seem to want a world in which you live consequence free, but no one else does. Quite conservative of you.

someguy88 So basically you’re telling me that I’m a liar? Ok. Well, that’s one way for you to “win” here. Just assume that people think what you want them to think in order to prove a point, even if they say otherwise.

Best of luck in awarding yourself first prize at everything ever. I’m done with you.

Re Holbo:

So, christian_h has pretty much already said what I wanted to say (@240), but I’m going to say it anyway.

The thing is, the conception you appear to have ended up with — racism-is-at-bottom-tribalism/everyone’s a racist (cf. ISOK: “the tendency toward racist thought is universal”, in a comment which you appear to endorse @238) — this position is I think borderline offensive, and I think shah8’s point @236 about how plausible such a position would seem if one were black or brown is really worth considering. (It also doesn’t seem to me a particularly novel conception — it seems Hollywood-safe for example.)

Hmm. That maybe comes off a good bit harsher than I’d planned. Let me try this in a different way. Waaaaay upthread you said you wanted to identify the conceptual core of racism with hierarchy, and I’d suggested this seems plausible to me. Properly understood, it still seems plausible to me, in good part because the notion of hierarchy includes within it the notion of an asymmetric power relation. Now you’re evidently giving this up (cf. the mention @229 of cases where there’s “an equal balance of power between mutually despising groups” as falling under the category of racism).

One basic disagreement then is that I (and some others) want to limit the category of racism to cases with asymmetric power relations; you (and others) want racism to straddle both such cases and cases where such asymmetry is missing. Why? What do you gain from this (esp. when considering what you lose)?

Whatever problems may exist with my characterization of racism (cf. 227), it has the virtue of providing a framework for explaining how white people oppressed and oppress black people (and brown people, etc.) in the US (and other places). Your conception of racism, on the other hand, would seem to have the decidedly more dubious advantage of providing a framework for showing how black people can be the real racists! This is clearly not what you want — so why go this route?

Hmmm John (247) now I feel you misunderstood me (meaning I did not express myself clearly). My contention was not merely that race is socially constructed – if this was my claim then yes of course just about any position but that of the biological racist agrees. My contention was that racism is prior to race in a way that tribalism is not, IMHO, prior to the concept of tribe. In my understanding, race was constructed as an explanatory concept to explain why, when slavery within Europe was now (post Middle Ages) a bad thing, the transatlantic slave trade was nevertheless justified in natural law.

What I’m really squeaking at is the construction that racism is some kind of shadow of hierarchy, such that you can examine it, reason with it, or manipulate it by addressing the underlying hierarchy.

I think shah8 is just objecting to a kind of reduction of racism to hierarchy whereby it’s bled of its specifically racist comment. Think of the crude Marxist saying something like, “Race is a distraction, it’s all just class!”, and then think of a more abstract version of this that replaces “class” with “hierarchy” but essentially takes the same attitude towards the specific racist content. That sort of thing.

But my framework does not lack this capacity. I’m perfectly capable of explaining everything you can explain. I’m not denying any of the known facts. My view doesn’t make them appear mysterious, does it?

It’s true that your framework doesn’t lack this capacity (and I didn’t say that it did — sorry if I seemed to imply it). But it does make the oppression incidental to the racism: you could lose the oppression and still have the racism. So while your conception may not make the relevant facts mysterious, it makes their explanation secondary, or conceptually derivative, or some such. I’m not saying you couldn’t have some such concept like this — let’s call it [backwards-r]acism — I just don’t see its usefulness because when I’m thinking or talking about racism, it’s because of an interest in social oppression. Otherwise, this thing we call racism needn’t occupy our minds so much, politically at least.

And so also, I’m not building in a notion of oppression into my conception of racism to ward off Teh Crazies — I’m doing it because in my own thinking, it’s the conception I find to be politically and socially useful. And I’m certainly not seeing what I’m missing by holding on to it.

When people see you building your definition of racism to discount any race based animus except that expressed by whites or against the relatively less powerful, expressly for your own political purposes, many of them are going to think you’re being something of a sophist, to put it mildly.

Sorry, is this directed towards me? I actually laid out a proper genus-differentia characterization of what I take racism to be, up above. Here (from 227):

I think racism is a species of institutionally implemented oppression of a social group; its differentiating feature is that the social group in question — the oppressed group — is identified by certain phenotypic characteristics.

This — obviously — doesn’t commit me to the insane claim that only white people can be racist, in this or any other possible world. But it does commit me to thinking of racism as a species of institutional oppression. I admit this, happily. Now, this sophistry because?

I guess I just think your definition is bad. Racism isn’t always and everywhere institutionally implemented oppression. Racism can be non-institutional and non-oppressive. At least, that’s what I would think ordinary use of the word racism suggests. Trying to jigger the definition such that non-oppressive non-institutional animus about nominally hereditary phenotypic characteristics is not a variety of racism is the sophistry. What else would you call such animus? Most people would call it racism. Go ahead and deny people the use of the word. You’ll still have non-institutional animus based on nominally hereditary phenotype. I’d say it makes more sense to just say you’re strictly concerned with institutional racism, rather than try to redefine racism as only institutional.

Holbo @256:

Note, though, that those quotes are at least (if not more!) supportive of oppression-is-inherent-to-racism position than your racism-is-at-bottom-tribalism position.

Yeah, no carrots. Maybe the picture of one, for the benefit of those outside Southern society. Any carrots, like, oh, The New Deal for black people in the thirties, would have substantially upset his base. You see him on TVin the sixties and seventies, doing his avuncular best, even as media permeated the world and spotlighted the peculiar system that made Sam Ervin. Spotlighted the tension between American ideals and threatened Pax Americana in the process. The formal system outlived its usefulness and the rest of American elites escorted it off the premises before jetting off to Accra to sign a mining concession. Even still, took thirty more years before North Carolina stopped sterilizing minority women. Something Ervin had to have approved informally.

“A long-lasting distribution of power based on racial differences is hard to achieve – normal processes of assimilation see to that (see Rome, which eventually had Arab, Gallic and Punic emperors). So Sam Ervin’s world was unsustainable without frequent recourse to violence.”

The way I read it, he wasn’t a proponent of “distribution of power based on racial differences”, but only of cultural segregation: separate churches, schools, social organizations. It may be naive, but it doesn’t imply a desire for race-based distribution of power.

In reality, the minorities themselves often resits assimilation and try to maintain a segregated cultural existence. I don’t think they associate it with lowering their share of power in general. I suppose they balance the disadvantages caused by cultural separation against the benefits of close cooperation inside the community.

John,
having brushed with Ze Kraggash on another thread, I’ve come to the conclusion that he is a professional (loosely speaking) stirrer, and monumentally insincere. If you take what he says litterally then it is clear than he, not Sam Ervin, is the naive one.

I’m assuming Ze Kraggash is a nom-de-someone-recently-banned-from-the-site-under-another-alias.

No worries John. I did not realize the whole book had to be examined. In that case, I’m not qualified to play and will never be. Apologies for the interruption.

institutionally implemented oppression of a social group … identified by certain phenotypic characteristics

I get that you think it’s a bad characterization; I still don’t get why you think it’s sophistical.

Personally, I’d tend toward the view that that definition of racism could well be sophistry.

In the context it was meant, it more or less gives the right answer, or at least avoids some common fallacies. And it uses abstract, universal terms that sound like they would be context-independant.

Problem is, if you take it outside that context, to some country other than the USA, or some century other than the 21st, it’s really not much of a guide to what would, or should, be called racism. Irish or Muslim aren’t really identifiable phenotypes, and two-sided racial violence like that hapenning in the South Sudan right now isn’t really one group institutionally oppressing another.

Which suggests to me a definition adopted not with the goal of being usefully true, but of avoiding the issue.

But maybe I am wrong and it’s just bad…

John @281 – So rules of primogeniture are not sexist?

I’m assuming Ze Kraggash is a nom-de-someone-recently-banned-from-the-site-under-another-alias.

Of course! I hadn’t thought of it, but it’s almost certainly true, isn’t it? Dude certainly knows how to pick a ‘nym.

Irish or Muslim aren’t really identifiable phenotypes

The Victorian yellow press depicted the Irish as low-browed, pugnacious-jawed, ape-like creatures. Contemporary racists are pleased to find for Muslims an iconic forerunner in back-issues of Der Sturmer. So maybe stereotype is more useful here than phenotype?

Perhaps there’s a fraternal twin Earth where pinkness is denigrated because the pig is the sole surviving close relative of homo-sapiens ? Hit movie of 1967, on that twin Earth, may have been”Planet of the Pigs”.

Oh wait, no, I blew that one. Abb1 it is.

Chait explains what he meant when he said what he said:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/cliven-bundy-shockingly-turns-out-to-be-racist.html

To his discredit, Tuccille summarized my point as follows: “No need for debate, it’s all about internalized racism.” This is the precise opposite of my argument, which held that while conservatism and racism may be historically, sociologically, and psychologically inseparable, it is absolutely necessary to debate conservative ideas on their own terms. (Self-quote: “And yet — as vital as this revelation may be for understanding conservatism, it still should not be used to dismiss the beliefs of individual conservatives. Individual arguments need and deserve to be assessed on their own terms, not as the visible tip of a submerged agenda; ideas can’t be defined solely by their past associations and uses. ” Seriously, somebody tell me how I could have made this point more explicitly.)

I didn’t realize murder was the denial of civil rights, even in new millennial America. Who says this?!

A la Jim Buck’s comment, an example here.

First and last couple of paragraphs from that article, for which no year is given (it’s from a newspaper’s archives):

Federal corrections authorities have denied parole for a man convicted of the racially motivated killing of jazz musician Steve Harvey in 1980.

…

Harvey, a 27-year-old saxophonist, died in November 1980 after being beaten with a baseball bat at Penn Valley Park.

A Jackson County jury acquitted Bledsoe of first-degree murder the next year. After a community outcry, federal authorities brought civil rights charges and then persuaded a Jefferson City jury that Bledsoe, who was white, had violated Harvey’s right to use the park simply because he was an African-American.

It’s difficult to google for examples, since various combinations of the words “murder,” “denial,” and “civil rights” bring up so much that isn’t directly to this particular point. But I’m sure some of the lawyers who hang around here could elaborate.

Jim Buck & Janie M – thanks for the followup. This has escaped me somehow. Very depressing to know that in the age of Reagan and Clinton, civil rights cases were needed to bring murderers to justice.

This sums things up quite perfectly:
“Howard Lee, the first African American to be elected mayor in North Carolina in the twentieth century, explained: “Blacks tended to be rejected in the South as a race, as a whole, but accepted individually, and I always found that if that kind of system could continue then the power brokers could decide who would have certain privileges and who would not. . . . And it would be those privileges that would still give them a certain amount of power.””

A key component of racism is power. You can’t have racism without it. And the moderates, whether in the case of racism or sam-sex marriage want to have the privilege and power to choose what’s “right.”