Robert G Goodby wrote in regard to a post by MichaelP, in which Michael
challenged Bob's assertion that guilt--say, better responsibility--for
past evils did not descend upon the heirs of unearned advantage, by
inquiring why, if wealth were inheritable, should not debt also be. A
good point, which Michael himself spolied somewhat by conflating this
issue with "rape, pillage, and plunder." Bob says quite rightly that his
ancestors, immigrants living in poverty in new york or chicago of
cleveland ethnic ghettos, neither robbed nor raped nor pillaged anyone.
        The problem is, for Bob, that the argument his example attacks is
irrelevant to the issue.
        FOr one thing, as a result of racism--I shall not call it
"institutionalized racism, for that is the only meaningful kind there
is--Bob's ancestors were spared the necessity of testing cultural
capacities--their willingness to work or their drive for success--or the
merit that working for success confers against "greasers, spics,
niggers, chinks, japs, redskins, slant-eyes, gooks" etc., because those
groups were excluded from entering into the arenas where the
competitions between "wops, huns, micks, frogs, limeys, guinneas,
slobovians," etc. were already occurring to the enthusiastic
accompaniment of brutality, murder, lynching, and intimidation directed
at discouraging and disciplining any attempts my the marginalized to
step "above themselves."
        Same's true with respect to the claims of superiority that arose out of
surviving the Depression. Howsoever steep the competition was, and
howsoever difficult the times, they were infinitely easier for the
survivors because they didn't have to compete with the 15-20 percent of
the population that was excluded from the start.
Next, Bob argues that he is being made to believe, illegitimately, that
he is hold himslef guilty by resemblance, if not by association:
> 2. If some members of some putative racial groups committed racist
> atrocities in the past, am I answerable for those atrocities simply
> because some would place me in that "racial" group today?

The answer is yes, to the extent that you deny your profit from those
events, or attribute it to sources, causes, or reasons that deny the
role that racist practices played in those profits. Answerable, in the
form of an admission that, for all the apparent successes your
forebearers and yourself, it was not as purely your or their own merit
that earned them and you whasoever success they and you have enjoyed but
by the systematic exclusion--and in many cases the elimination--of a
significant fraction of their potential competitors.

> Were we able to say "yes" to #2, we might as well extend it to class and > sex as well...and than who among us will be declaiming about inherited > and unlimited responsibility?  And let's not have a statute of limitations > either....I'd like to sue the poor blokes whose great-great-great> grandfathers owned the electroplating shops in Birmingham and Sheffield > where my g-g-g-grandfather was poisoned by hazardous wastes. Won't they be > surprised--particularly if, as is likely, they're working stiffs > themselves this time around!
>
Now your flirting with truly revolutionary consciousness, something
dutifully drilled out of you by your education. Yup, yore right there.
That'd be a significant kettle of fish.

Michael had written:
> > But he can't - with any degree of honesty -  define the limits of his own > > responsibility. it's not that the court is still out, it's that there > > hasn't been a court set up to define those limits. He (and we)  have only > > a limited idea of what damage has been suffered at the hands of racists > > and he ( and we) can have no certainty as to the continuing effects > >
>
Bob rejoins:
 No, such a court has never been established and never will, if for no
 other reason than the history of injustice is so enormous and
 infinite. All of this energy spent on litigating historic grievances
often doesn't amount to much. Witness President Bill's coy flirtation
with the idea of apologizing for slavery....even if he had (and, of
course, even a   symbolic step like this was too much for him), it
wouldn't have been  nearly as welcome (in my eyes) as some real Justice
Department action to investigate the placement of toxic industries in
poor, non-white neighborhoods.
 A giant class action suit, or the rhetorical equivalent thereof,
involving most of the human species and most of our history simply
isn't going to get us anywhere. What it will do is divert needed
attention from ongoing, existing injustices...the ones we're
responsible for because they're the  ones we can change.

I reply:
We may not idly dismiss Bob's good-faith in his outrage at the continued
predations on poor, usually minority communities by corporate intersts
indifferent or (viz. Texaco, Avis, Denny's) actively hostile to
equitable distributions of the goods of communal social production.
But his assertion that, because it appears to him to be impossible to
devise a court in which social responsibility could be litigated, no
such effort ought to be undertaken exposes a typically narrow
Americanness. What, if anything, does he suppose the courts of national
reconciliation in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, South Africa, etc are
supposed to be about, other than the public acceptance and atonement for
barbarities inflicted upon one's fellow citizens. Bob may--and it
doesn't become him, imo--scorn and reprobate the Prez for his offer to
apologize, but it arises from a spirit that still sees nothing--that is,
experiences no remorse or personal humiliation--for which to apologize.
        So pervasive in our culture are the (often hidden in plain sight)
repressive mechanisms of racism that I believe it is impossible for any
"white" (don't ask, disingenuously, what constitutes "white;" it is
anybody who isn't marginalized in dominant society for and doesn't have
to explain or justify their "color") to have achieved their majority in
the US without having been touched--we may say infected--by it. Racism
is addictive, for once attached to it, it becomes difficult to imagine
life without it.
        Dominant, white culture in the US is addicted to racism, which
addiction it tries to hide and deny at every turn, but the consequences
of which continue to pile up as social debt that will, we can be
confident, eventually have to be repaid.
        An apology and $100 per person/year levy on everyone who ever checked
the "white/caucasian" label on any official/public document, proceeds
deposited for per capita redistribution among those who cannot make that
claim--that 'd do for a start and probably be cheap in the long run.
        Btw, does it strike anyone as strange or interesting that, the push to
do away with "labels" accompanies so closely the burgeoning of precisely
the sensibilities that animate and nourish this debate?

Cheery-bye
konopak