On Nov 7, 2008, at 9:25 AM, Chris Gehlker wrote: > > On Nov 6, 2008, at 10:51 PM, David Cake wrote: > >> There are degrees and levels of racism. The plain, >> old-fashioned racism, worries about genetics and descent. The >> advanced, modern, kind still manages to discriminate against plenty >> of people, but does it based on culture and class that just happens >> to coincide with race. I saw a blog today that called it racism 1.0 >> and racism 2.0. > > I think this is absolutely backwards. The US didn't go to war with > Japan during WWII because they thought the Japanese were sub-human > monkey people. They went to war for geopolitical reasons and then the > government started a propaganda campaign to convince people that the > 'Japs' or 'Nips' were sub-human. > Similarly the white Americans didn't decide to acquire slaves from > Africa because they believed that Africans were actually inferior. > They chose Africa because slaves were relatively cheap and available > there and only later came up with Biblical and pseudo-genetic > rationalizations for the practice. > > People will always dehumanize their enemies and those they oppress > because it makes it psychologically easier to kill/exploit them. End > the exploitation and the rationalization is no longer needed though > it may linger for awhile.
I don't see these two descriptions as being in competition in any way, and I think both are very insightful. In the case of slavery, for example, certainly the institution of slavery encouraged racism as a rationalization, but at the same time, blacks were targeted for slavery partly because of pre-existing racist beliefs. It's a feedback loop, I think. You can start the wheel turning with racist beliefs (as I think slavery did) or it can start as a way of facilitating other interests (racially demonizing the enemy in WWII), but once the loop is started it'll keep rotating back and forth between the two, getting stronger as it goes. This is probably one of the reasons racism is so endemic. There are certainly others. -Patrick _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
