Wat Tyler, essaying the role of weary wiseman wrote:
>
> How did I know that racism was going to be defined away as being somewhere
> else and at some other time.
I wonder what discourse he has been reading. It hasn't been _this_ one.
Racism "defined away as being somewhere else and at some other time.
What's the best current example you can think of of (alleged) egregious
racist practices. The brutal (alleged) violation of a black suspect by
white cops in Brooklyn last weekend. It is probably a perfect example of
the ways confusions arise over the operations of racism. Somebody is
gonna wanna say, if it's true what the guy alleges about the cops--that
the beat him while shouting racial slurs and then sodomized him with a
plunger handle, and then shoved the bloody, feces-smeared handle into
his mouth and slapped him around while taunting and jeering at him, and
then left him in critical condition for 45 or more minutes, and then
lied about it and tried to cover it up and relied on thier brother cops
to cover for them--if all or even a substantial part of that is true,
how can you then say that this is merely the racist act of a group of
rogue individuals? Do you really believe that actions of these cops--if
what is alleged shown to have occurred--would have occurred if they knew
there was a strong presentiment against such actions within the
institutions they belonged to and supported; that is, if they hadn't
thought they had permission? And that that permission was not personal,
but institutional. I don't see how racism can be defined much closer to
the here and now.
Wat continues:
> Certainly it's nothing that we would actually
> know anything about except for the bleeding heart Anglo liberal guilt that
> is the guilt of a small child who harbors a 'dangerous' thought about
> someone else and actually believes that thought can do real harm at a
> distance and so denies its existence rather than let it turn back on
> oneself. To know racism one must actually experience it rather than
> abstract it away in elaborate rhetoric with all the importance of a high
> school debate.
Here again is the central theme of this whole thread: guilt. Wat, too,
asserts that a particular kind of guilt is spurious, that kind
associated with "bleeding heart Anglo liberals. And Wat displays an
admirable facility for demonstrating his familiarity with its
simulacrum: the small child who, blameless of malice or bad intent,
innocently utters a bad thought. This, Wat assures us, is the best that
he--and I guess, by extension, he would include in that classification a
larger collective "we"--can do about the practice of racism. For he/we
cannot have experienced it, and thus are not competent to talk upon the
subject, no more than high school debaters.
My claim all along has been that we do in fact experience it, though not
as the objects but rather as the authors or heedless participants in it.
We will not know the humiliation of watching ourselves be watched when
we shop, but we will know the thrill of being vigilante watchers, alert
to the first sign of misbehavior. We will probably never know the
condescension that greets a new minority hire who has to "prove"
themselves, not just once, but to everybody, in turn, down the pecking
order; but we know how it feels to formulate our own tests for them to
fail. In a paradoxical parallel, we never have to wonder whether our
coworkers will think we were hired to meet an imaginary quota; but we
will have imagined it of others. We, or our children, take the privilege
of attending the college of our choice so for granted that we can
complain when the school chooses to admit a minority student in
preference to yet another cookie-cutter cheerleader. But we cheer--as I
heard countless noisy carsful of Louisianans, Floridians, Alabamians,
Georgians, Texans, Mississipians, and others do in the noisy aftermaths
of LSU games--cheer "our niggers" for beating "their niggers."
If there really weren't social arrangements and agreements that
approved and sanctioned racism, if racism were really only a matter of a
cruel but arbitrary and inexplicable behaviors of few deluded, obnoxious
individuals engaged in practices that would be regarded with shame and
rebuke by their fellows, do you think people who benefit from it would
be so free to invoke its most egregious slurs, loudly and with evident
abandon and freedom from restraint? They wouldn't do it unless they
thought the social arrangements in place at the place and time would
support them. It's not the brutal cops in Borrklyn (a felicitous typo),
it's the Denny's managers and help who verbally abused a group of
Asian-looking students in (Ithica?), some place in New York, upstate,
near a prestige college. Called 'em Gooks, and made 'em wait while
several groups of WHite patrons were seated first. And then, when they
got mad and tried to leave, sicked a gang of local kids on 'em, and
called the cops finally when several black students offered to even th
odds. Some of that's town and gown; but there's the magnifier effect of
race. The name calling signals it. This could have happened to Kristi
Yamaguchi or Michelle Kwan, or Akiro Kurusawa, or my friend michael
chang, or my student ju-Chuan...or to me in Japan or in China or
Vietnam.
And then follows this vacuous screed from what Gore Vidal was pleased to
call in The Nation recently the house organ of the police security
state, Dow-Jones's Wall Street Journal:
> "The story, as much of the nation
> by now knows, concerns a particularly vicious attack on a Haitian immigrant
> taken into custody after a disturbance outside a Brooklyn social club. What
> exactly happened in the initial encounter between the police and the
> prisoner in the middle of the night of August 9 isn't as yet clear.
That gives the editors the leverage later to come back and say, well, in
view of what the cops say this guy was doing, though they may have
gotten a little excited, they were really out there protecting our
interests. Clever fellows.
TWSJ story continues:
> "What is
> indisputable is that the prisoner, Abner Louima, was beaten after his
> arrest, assaulted with a plunger in the station house bathroom, where, he
> says, one police officer held him down while the other wielded the
> plunger."
Now right in here, Chomsky would say something like: It is not
"indisputable" in the least. For one thing, the description seriously
understates the victim's condition. Is "assaulted" a clever pun on the
reports of which the public story is composed? If the normal use of a
plunger in a police station might be, say to beat people, and some
distinction is necessary between being "beaten" with a plunger and
"assaulted" with one. So, the lexicographical parallels notwithstanding,
does being "assaulted" fairly represent the magnitude of the offense?
Ask yourself, what if it were you? Would
"assaulted" cover it? Raped and sodomized with the handle of a plunger.
Compare this description of the "assault" with whatsoever coverage there
was a couple of years ago of that attack on the (white) female jogger by
the (black) gang "wilding" ritual.
And I guess that this now is the valorous Wat again who, from the
cavalier way he seems to regard the enormity of the act he is
trivializing, has still not had his first serious proctological
examination, I would guess:
> I suppose that having a plunger shoved up one's butt and various
> organ damage done might be considered vicious.
An ill-considered rhetorical device, by my reckoning. And one which, if
interpreted in the context of the message as a whole, supports my
thesis. I make no assertion myself from certain knowledge, yet I
strongly suspect that Wat would reject the characterization of that
remark as marking him as actively assenting or at least acquiescing to
of the very racist discourse he seems to be saying he wants to rebuke.
But the dismissal of the seriousness of it works to support racist
practice. It is supported by larger social structures which, like the
armies of the undead, can despatch their emissaries willy-nilly for
there is always another corpse to take the place.
The act was not antecedent nor was it irrelevant to the social and
cultural status of the victim. But Wat, who began by saying that he
warned a us against the dark forces that wanted to denature the evils of
racism by deflecting its sanctions against another place and time, here
abandons the present and urges us into the effacement and erasure of the
victim, whose
> name, race and
> immigration status are completely irrelevant unless you suppose that
> Haitian immigrants either deserve it or might just as well stay at home if
> they want to be abused.
No they are not. The event only happened because of the name, race and
immigration status of the victim. Make him not "Abner Louima," a Haitian
(or at least, a dark-skinned man apprehended outside a Haitian club,
that the cops had their eye on for troublemakers, make him Gramm Rudman,
white prepster in town from Burlington Vt before starting school,
looking for a few laughs and a maybe a bit of brown sugar, and I promise
you, he doesn't go home with a colostomy bag and a taste of his own
feces on his tongue. Maybe in Juarez, or just outside of it, if he got
mouthy.
IMHO, this is not a situation that calls for worldly savoir-faire.
> The story continues to do damage to any imaginable
> truth, that which "is," according to some sources. The editorial must be
> read in full. It goes on to underappreciate the quick moves of cops to
> repackage and remarket their product and maximize a lot of free air time.
> What is most unusual about the incident is not the damage but that the cops
> got caught.
In this, we agree in practice, if not in principle, if I understand
aright. In the hinterlands we only got to see very short snatches of the
story. But it is with the next and last statement that I must take
exceptional issue. Wat says
> I say this is an excellent opportunity to exercise capital
> punishment as a deterrent.
That would be a kindness, I believe. Worse for them would be long
incarceration in prison, if retribution be the end (another little
scatological pun!). But whatsoever happens to the individuals, they were
just the ones that were there at the time. It is the climate and the
atmosphere of complicity in the practices, either from blindness or
willful ignorance, that constitutes the wellspring, and the fertile
ground, for localized practices. Must I reiterate: Discriminatory or any
other kinds of social practices for that matter die out if they are not
functional to the health and maintenance of the system. Anytime you can
see a repellant practice, that works to truly disadvantage those who are
already disadvantaged in social discourses--and this won't include a
class for white males until at least 2050 in the US--don't waste time
wondering why it should be so; ask instead first what are the benefits
of such practices, and to whom they would most likely offer undue
advantage.
All for now, but not for long.
konopak
"There's just no such thing as a self-made man." --inanymous.
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