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boohabian |
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The notorious Boohab slams racist thinking right and left.
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raucus
and racial
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Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution -- Frederick Douglass, August 1893 |
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boo what? test your
racism |
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race man's home companion |
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operating
theories |
| Sunday, January 12, 2003 |
| it is clear that racism is socially corrosive and anti-individual, as others have noted, it is a low form of collectivism. (more accurately it's a xenophobia, but i'm not in a hairsplitting mood). it is in the state's interest to keep racism from undermining market freedom and individual liberty. so the state must regulate all such racism that reaches a certain threshold. but this interest has not been explicit in the law until statutes like the fair housing act were passed. this is why people's opinions of laws and policies are such a good indicator of their own racism or lack thereof. the answers they give when queried generally show recourse to racial prejudices and stereotypes. "you can't change racists" is saying you can't legislate morality, but the premise of civilization is that you *must* legislate morality. i think too many americans are justifying their [fuzzy] thinking on race based on an uncritical acceptance of their racial identity rather than on a principled anti-racist agenda. that's why we get into this ridiculous parsing of individual comments by individual people, rather than looking at the course of institutions, laws and policies. the disadvantages 'racial minorities' encounter, more or less uniformly across the group are nothing more than the effects of institutional racism past and present. ghettoes didn't form spontaneously. the tax base for ghetto schools didn't disappear by magic. so here's the clincher. to enact a law or institute a policy that reverses the structural impairment of the racial ghetto is a direct assault on the praxis of jim crow. it is forced integration in response to forced segregation. it is the cure for the disease. resistance to this never anti-racist in nature, it is almost always justified in terms of a palliative to those [whites] it 'inconveniences'. what i'm saying is that the backlash is unprincipled and represents a retrenchment of racism because these institutional corrections are NOT zero sum, that is, if you truly believe in the premises of market freedom and individual liberty. so one must be very clear that this assertion of the state interest is explicity anti-racist, pro-freedom and pro-individual liberty in nature. otherwise you give new people old reasons to be intransigent about the vast problems we as a nation have in delivering the goods of america across racial lines. 11:38:55 AM  comment []
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Last update: 4/12/2003; 6:47:59 PM.