IBARW: The interaction of race and class.

[loligo]

As early as 1940, social scientists noticed that if you looked at the history of the Deep South, whenever cotton prices fell, lynchings tended to jump. The link seems to pass what one of my professors used to call "the intra-ocular trauma test" ("It hits you right between the eyes!"), but in the decades since then, the size, the meaning, and

Comments

[loligo]

I think you've clarified pretty well by now that you agree that racism exists and is a bad thing, so I do hope people aren't still giving you grief over that. What I was trying to capture with that metaphor was my understanding of your larger point concerning the magnitude of racial oppression versus economic oppression, and what the relationship between them is: that the second is much greater than the first, and that eliminating the first wouldn't have much bearing on the second. My apologies if I've mischaracterized that.

I don't know, I found the whole week's worth of discussion to be fascinating but also incredibly frustrating. Here we had this confluence of people who are all interested in social justice in different ways, and it ended with everyone savaging each other over semantic nitpicks, rather than exploring possible areas of cooperation. It seems like a real wasted opportunity.

I think that if I had chosen to walk into a widespread discussion of race wanting to draw attention to the importance of class issues, I would have picked an overall rhetorical strategy that sounded a lot more like "Yes, and..." rather than "No, but..." Things got off on the wrong foot and just went wronger from there.

[serialbabbler]

One nice thing about life is that you don't actually have to stop discussing things just because awareness week is over. (But I suspect that nitpicky-ness is a chronic condition on the internet so most debates seem to break down that way no matter how long they last or how careful people try to be in their wording.)

I enjoyed reading your thoughts on the interaction of race and class. Have you ever read The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen? If not, you might check it out sometime. It's very much on topic.

My metaphorical view of things is that we've built our entire civilization on quick sand and, at the moment, a lot of us are arguing about who's living in the basement.

[loligo]

On differing tactics: I'm just thinking out loud here, so I'm not sure this is going to lead to a real point, but let's see.

Racism is often defined as prejudice plus power; in other words, there's an interpersonal component and a structural opponent. Class-based oppression could be looked at the same way, but I think everyone pretty much agrees that the interpersonal component there is not particularly relevant. No doubt it exists -- people have all kinds of prejudicial beliefs about the poor, that they're dirty, lazy, stupid, violent, etc. But if one could somehow implement an interpersonal solution such that all those prejudices went away, and we had, I don't know, the CFO of Tyson's saying "Oh, I love hanging out with the guys from the chicken processing plant at lunch -- they're such wits!"... well, that would be nice, but the essential problem would not be solved. It might make people more accepting of the real solution (structural change), but it does not itself constitute a solution.

But many people feel differently about racism, and they are not necessarily wrong. In one sense, changing the economic structure of society would, *by definition* eliminate racism, because without the power differential, racism is "just" prejudice. But race-based prejudice is no small thing, even without economic disparities to back it up, and there is absolutely no guarantee that economic equality would eliminate it. In fact, it might even exacerbate it as people seek ways to differentiate themselves from each other. In other words, from this point of view structural change is a partial solution at best, whereas an interpersonal solution that eliminated prejudice would do the trick just fine. The remaining power differentials would no longer be a problem *from the standpoint of eliminating racism*, because people would no longer be applying that power in a race-biased manner.

And I'm sure someone somewhere in the whole multi-journal dispute must have said all this already, but at least it was useful to me to work it out.