All, Step back a moment...
<snip> > Ham said: > Multiculturalism in the U.S. was fostered by the Supreme Court's outlawing > of school segregation in 1954 and became "politically correct" following the > Civil Rights revolution and liberalization of immigration laws in the > mid-60s. The object, of course, is to render society colorblind to cultural > and racial differences. In effect, it alters our traditional value system > to make discrimination in any form immoral. Thus, all people are viewed as > equal and no nation is culturally superior to any other. > > > woods reacted: > Ah... you just didn't bring up segregation as a good thing did you? The black > drinking fountain and the white drinking fountain? (combining threads) [Arlo] reacted Happily we have right-wingers like yourself who make it a mission to point out "racial differences". Happily, whites always seem to come out on the "better" side of that. You know who also was not "colorblind to cultural and racial differences"? Hitler. In fact, I think he was for school segregation too! And no one could accuse him of "appeasement". >Andre responded: > Thank you Arlo for putting it in this way. I was shocked and offended when I > read Ham's post. I don't have much, but what I did have insulted my > intelligence. Shame on you Ham!! mel: First off, 'race' is a charged judgement and we need to be careful how we parse any phrase containing that word. Racial Discrimination is a highly emotional word formulation. It can represent a social level at war with a perceived biological fact, so to the original practitioners it would have 'seemed' moral, but clearer intellectual eyes saw that the perceived biological trait was not a valid one. Most folks would now probably agree, but it took several centuries of suffering and death to get everyone on the same page. Racial Discrimination... Let's look at it closely as -- making a judgement based on race. The federal government, to counter the perceived, and more often than not real, evils of segregation was forced to engage in a very real form of racial discrimination, although from the converse point of view. Forcible mixing, inelegant, was used to shake up social behaviors on both sides of the racial divide. The result was not a success without cost. Whole 'black communities' that had been created in a self-sufficient manner were inadvertantly crushed and destroyed. This does not argue to return to segregation, but it points out that there is real anger on the part of some who were 'helped' by the move. The object, of course, WAS to render society colorblind in the general application of the law. It largely worked, but if you travel in the American south, especially, you will find there are a lot of angry individual people of all colors. If that doesn't show us the war between biological and social and intellectual, then I guess we need to analyse that more closely in MOQ terms. The assertion that a multi-cultural view became politically correct after this period of forcible integration is only partly correct. There was an over-sensitivity to how people as groups interacted. It manifests itself even today in a double standard that operates in a largely disingenuous way. Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy among others have pointed this out in their comedy routines from time to time. It is human nature that we never know the limit of a tool until we exceed that limit. So it is with social tinkering. Both the government bureaucracies, as enshrined policy, and folks in the ivory tower, as holy writ of their victory over the low quality of segregation, have stuck with a form of racial thinking that is indeed dicriminatiory. But they are often blind to it. I remember being chastised in an undergraduate class when I used the word 'discrimination' correctly about an argument between terms in a 19th century philosophical critique. The professor told me to use the word 'discernment' instead, as his eyes darted quickly over to the only African-American (black in those days) in the classroom. His name was Steve. When we left class that day Steve leaned into me and said. "I discern that professor 'X' is an ass." So, an extra breath would be good...before characterizing someone's post. <snip> thanks--mel Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
