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August 13, 2003

Check Your Head on 54

Again, I find myself screaming into the wind. At least Yglesias sees things as I do.

I believe that many folks are stupefied by the distinctions between racial identification, racial discrimination and racist discrimination. For them, it is all of a piece and anyone who claims that it is not is a liar. So for them, the obvious solution is to eliminate race, to deracinate the law and the language and thereby deprive the world of the terms and tools it might use to do evil.

If I was a history student, or perhaps one of Orwell, I could succinctly describe by analogy precisely how fallacious such thinking is. But all I can do is speak directly to the subject.

One has to have faith that it is possible to be anti-racist. But I think these same confused people are those who believe that 'everybody is racist' as if race were original sin itself. They submit to the essentialist idea which is that people, given racial identity, will of necessity conflict. It is an expression of the belief that Races are naturally antagonistic. And it is this false idea that causes them to believe that any government of the [naturally racist and antagonistic] people, armed with tools of racial identification will inevitably degenerate into a racial spoils system. People are bad, disarm them.

The belief that one can be anti-racist inevitably forces one into figuring out how and looking for examples. This requires disciplined thought and study, which we can presume that the electorate will not do. But for thinking people to suggest that racial discrimination for the purposes of assistance is the same as racial discrminiation for the purposes of exclusion is tantamount to saying that arrest of a suspect is the same as kidnapping. Moreover they presume that every racially conscious law ever made or followed in the United States of America is indeed racist. Is this logical?

Colorblindness is an ethos appropriate to a great deal of American life, but it is not appropriate to the law so long as racial disparities exist which might be evidence of exclusion. When there are no longer claims of racial injustice, the law needn't deal with it.

Who can show that there are no racial hate crimes? Such is one burden of proof of those who would blind the law to racial distinctions. More importantly the burden of those who refuse to acknowledge race is that they are more fair and just than those who do. Both I think are burdens they are incapable of bearing.

Posted by mbowen at August 13, 2003 02:27 PM

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Posted by: Ibyx at August 14, 2003 01:11 PM