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From: Bill Connolly
Date: 1/29/01
Time: 9:18:27 PM
Remote Name: 12.89.129.150
I’m a former student of Professor Pearson and I’ve been paying some attention to the dialogue on this message board. Race is obviously a daunting issue and something that’s not easy to grapple with, on so many levels. Personally, I feel that the real racial problem in America is not largely a “black issue,” or the “Negro problem,” as it’s often been framed. Much like Noel Ignatiev, I feel that the main problem lies in the construction of “whiteness”; more accurately, the fact that whiteness has been built to represent and maintain privilege in society.
Below are some links that raise some interesting points that are relevant to much that is being discussed right now.
**On Reverse Racism:
“Only if racism is thought of as something that occurs principally in the mind, a falling-away from proper notions of universal equality, can the desire of a victimized and terrorized people to band together be declared morally identical to the actions of their would-be executioners. Only when the actions of the two groups are detached from the historical conditions of their emergence and given a purely abstract description can they be made interchangeable.” http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/race/fish.htm
**On Whiteness as Privilege:
“Whiteness is not a culture. There is Irish culture and Italian culture and American culture - the latter, as Albert Murray pointed out, a mixture of the Yankee, the Indian, and the Negro (with a pinch of ethnic salt); there is youth culture and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no such thing as white culture. Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it. Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance than big feet…The white race is a club. Certain people are enrolled in it at birth, without their consent, and brought up according to its rules. For the most part they go through life accepting the privileges of membership, without reflecting on the costs. Others, usually new arrivals in the country, pass through a probationary period before ‘earning’ membership; they are necessarily more conscious of their racial standing.” http://www.postfun.com/racetraitor/features/thepoint.html
“Both historically and in contemporary society, the relationships between racial and ethnic groups in this country are framed within a context of unequal power. People of European descent generally assume the power to claim the land, claim the resources, claim the language. They even claim the right to frame the culture and identity of who we are as Americans. That has been the case ever since Columbus landed on the North American continent.” http://www.rethinkingschools.org/Archives/15_02/Int152.htm