Greetings, Netfish (Groupers, all)
I wish to respond to postings by Robert G Goodby and  Bill Bartlett
wrote:

Bill wrote:
> >
> >         RACISM, n, the belief that human races have distinctive
> >         characteristics which determine their respective cultures
> >         - Macquarie

In this as perhaps in other things, Macquarie is mistaken; his
formulation makes racism (1) individual--which it is not, primarily, but
social, (2) neutral and non-disposative --which it is neither, being
first a manifestation of the exercise of power and intentionality, and
second evaluative, and judgemental, and (3) reductionist in the way that
psuedo-elegance in the social sciences often achieves as if by mandate.
I don't happen to have my well-thumbed volume of raymond Williams'
_keywords_, but I reckon it's entry might read somehting like as
follows:

        RACISM, n. a system of embedded social and cultural practices which
first "name" (see WEB DuBois on the problem of double consciousness) and
then disenfranchise and disempower members of non-dominant and despised
"races" for the purposes of (a) reducing or eliminating competition with
the dominant group for (putatively scarce) resources, thereby (b)
preserving for the dominant, naming group its unearned and illegitimate
advantages, on the basis of spurious and unfalsifiable claims (much like
the existence of "God") of the dominant group that some (variable and
contingent set of) trivial physiological distinctions are determinative
and predictive of cultural and individual worth sufficiently to validate
inequities--see (a) and (b) above--in the allocation and distribution of
communally and cooperatively created social goods that would otherwise
be deemed immoral, unethical and otherwise unsupportable.

Whew. Long complicated, compound-complex sentence. But nobody said this
was a simple problem, which it isn't. Barnhart's etymological dictionary
locates "racism"--expressed as "belief in the superiority of a
particular race"--as first appearing in English around 1936. Prior to
that, those practices and understandings which we now know as racism
pretty much escaped critique because there was not a critical vocabulary
with which to realize them--bring them to phenomenological presence--or
with which to explore and explain them.

He then continued:
> > >Technology is neither correct nor incorrect.  It is malleable to the needs
> > >of those in power, the racists (white supremacists) as they impose their global
> > >system of oppression on their victims (people of color).

White supremacists are indeed racists, and no, not all racists are white
supremacists. Racism is a problem and racists prosper in Japan (ask the
Koreans), China (ask just about any non-Chinese), Africa (Kenya comes to
mind, but also Nigeria and elsewhere), to say nothing about Europe
(France, which used not to be so much, has changed) and South America
(e.g., Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, etc.).

Bob wrote, claiming affinity with Bill's and MacQuarie's definition, and
further:
> In fact, the assertion that racism is unique to
> white people (whatever they are) sounds itself suspiciously racist.

        Racism is unique to "White" people in the US, Canada, and anywhere else
that "White" people hold the preponderance of disposative power.
        That remark--"white people (whatever they are)--is indicative of the
most pernicious and difficult facet of white or any other--but since in
the US "white racism" is the problem, we'll confine ourselves to
that--racism. A pretty nearly universal characteristic of this power is
that the characteristics necessary to share in it are arbitrary,
various, and contingent. It is not necessary to stipulate the
characteristics required to possess or utilize or benefit from it it;
only to recognize those--"negroid" or "mongoloid" features, for one
example, "one drop of (fillintheblank) blood" for another--that are
sufficient for _disqualification_.
        It would be difficult to find any "white" person (I include myself, of
course)  in the US who was not a recipient and a beneficiary--albeit
_perhaps_ all unkonwing--of racist dispositions in the assignments of
social goods. The genius of "white" racism has been that it has
dispensed its benefits as a matter of course, such that it has been
difficult for its beneficiaries to discern their unearned advantages
from the general run of things which dispensed those advantages so
overtly as to have become covert. You have only to look in, say, the
Dick and Jane books in which many of us believe (mistakenly) that we
learned to read. Ok, there I date myself. I have frequently been my own
best date.
        One reason why "white racism" has been so difficult to dislodge is
that--ironically, like the claimed disadvantages of affirmative action
for its beneficiaries--to recognize it and one's participation in it is
to call into question one's own "accomplishments"--all the things about
ourselves that we thought we had accomplished because we were "superior"
beings, who worked hard, and had "values, not because of our unearned
structural advantages. Funny how that card gets turned around.
Bbo wrote:
> Let's keep in mind, too, that the concept of race as applied to human
> beings has little or no scientific validity. The "races" most of us
> recognize are social constructs, and not valid biological categories. This
> being the case, ANY claim regarding innate characteristics of particular
> races is not scientifically supportable.

This is true, and probagly unarguable, except at _alt.white.power_ and
with the proviso that we amend the statement to read "ANY claim
regarding the innate (superiority) of particular races...

Gotta go get potato(e)s.. Cheery bye
konopak