[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Kobi

dread,

I have always respected you for the way you communicate ideas and provide history. I did not in any way intend to say anything about you being an angry black person. I apologize for anything that could have been interpreted this way.

Thank you. Apology accepted.

We are back to standards... and can you go back in time and apply todays standards to yesterdays reality. Kind of difficult to do. What people believe changes over time thru experiences and new thoughts. What is appropriate today wasnt seen as totally acceptable at the time of the civil war. Can we apply todays standards and judge people for having adhered to the prevailing thought? It is counterproductive.

I think that there are times we can. If, for instance, someone asked me if I thought that the Nazi take on Jews was at all correct, had any basis in fact, I would say no it didn't and that what happened in Germany between 1932 and 1945 was immoral. In the same vein, I would say that the idea that, say, my grandmother (born in 1903) wasn't really a full human being such that she was capable of the full range of thought and ability and that therefore, her constrained choices were no worse than she deserved was wrong. I understand that you do not think that we can say that it was wrong and therefore cannot say that what happened to her was unjust but I disagree. So, okay--to you segregation wasn't an injustice but my family experienced it as an injustice and we were fully human back in 1903 and in 1922 and in 1963 and in 1967. I get it that you think that maybe those folks in those years who said we weren't might have had a point, again I disagree. I didn't become human because the mores changed, the mores changed because enough people finally started to internalize the idea that blacks were human.
I understand that, to you, expressing absolutes--even the absolute that I am a human being--is problematic but I disagree.

[At any rate does this have to do with ANYTHING? I was using race as an example of an idea because you claimed that the diversity of ideas--without qualification--is what makes America strong. I was asking--and you have avoided answering--what about racist ideas made America stronger such that now that those ideas are (or were) in attenuation the nation is less strong than when racist ideas were widespread and socially acceptable? So are you saying that my using the history of race in America to demonstrate how intellectually bankrupt the idea that any idea is something that should be accepted no matter how sound it is or isn't, I am somehow saying that white people are responsible for the conditions of my life?

I will answer you tho I am not sure what you are truly asking here. And let me finish before you jump on me cuz what I am saying and what you might think I am saying are two different things. Hatred of any kind does make us stronger people. Why? Because it gives us room to grow and develop and see things differently. If we were all purple and all thought the same and did the same and had the same, we would be a pretty boring species. But we are different.

I'm going to tell you something about my family. My father grew up without a father because some white folks decided to hang his father from a tree. My mother lost one of her brothers because some *other* white folks decided to hang him from a tree. My father's brother wasn't able to go to college because he couldn’t serve in WW II because some white man ran him down and his leg never fully recovered and he never was able to walk right again. Now I want you to keep this in mind as I tell you what I am reading here.

Translated what you are saying is that the lynching of my grandfather and uncle and the wounding of another uncle, as well as my parents being beaten with sticks, having dogs set upon them and being sprayed with fire hoses is all just so many broken eggs necessary so that we can all sit back now and be smug. Pardon me for not wanting you or anyone else to be able to feel quite so smug because we overcame it but I would just as soon have met my grandfather and my uncle thank you very much. To you, perhaps this was worth it, the unfortunate cost of doing business. To me, if the benefit was that we could be stronger, I think we could have done with a little less strength and a little more justice.

Now, you had no way of knowing that relatives in my family had been lynched and I do not blame you for not knowing. However, when I read what I quoted above it appears, to me, that you are saying that all the horrors that were visited upon black people were justified or at least made okay by the fact that we were able to grow. Well, not my uncle and not my grandfather. They weren't able to grow because they were dead. Death has a way of reducing ones reproductive fitness and learning ability to zero.

I might be misreading you but I hear you saying I think immigration is a bad thing. I dont. My family was immigrated here and we Italians in Providence were not allowed to walk on the sidewalks or the Irish would kick our asses.

You are misreading me. You said that immigration was what made us strong as a growing industrial society. I was saying to you that true as that was, when the Irish got here they were discriminated against--and then they became okay. When the Italians got here they were discriminated against--and then they became okay. What I was saying is that America has been down this road before, the rhetoric being used today could be lifted straight out of the 19th century and applied to the Irish or the Italians when they got here. The justifications could be lifted right from the 19th century anti-immigration paroxysms. This is nothing new.

I still find it hard to believe that the aclu and the feds require months and months to get an injunction. Maybe I am naive but it seems there might be another reason for the delay.

Okay, but that doesn't mean the ACLU hasn't filed for one and it doesn't mean that the Justice department isn't figuring out the best way to attack the problem. I suspect that what Justice is waiting for is for the inevitable test case to go before the SCOTUS (it's what I would do) and then they will file an amicus brief. Citizens are going to be stopped and they are going to sue on 4th and 14th Amendment grounds because this law really DOES make US citizens strangers to the laws of their homeland.

[I'm sorry but I don't see folks who are arguing against a racist law as being racist.]

dread, again, who is saying it is a racist law? A legislature passed it, a governor signed it.

So? The Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott decision said this:

A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a "citizen" within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.

Now, I would say that those two passages are pretty unambiguously racist. I recognize that you do not. I recognize that you think that, perhaps, blacks had no rights to which a white man was at all obliged to respect. That does not change the fact that it is racist.

Who's perspective makes it racist? Yours? Mine? Without judgement, it is just a law. With judgement applied by differing groups of people, it is a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective. Does this make you right and me wrong or me right or you wrong? Or does it mean we just are looking at something given our respective experiences and coming to somewhat different conclusions?

I am starting here--all human beings are human beings. Whether or not the majority thinks they are human beings at any given locus in history is *entirely* irrelevant to the question of their humanity. Where there is a conflict between the claims of humanness by one group and the disavowal of that claim by another group, I will ALWAYS fall on the side of the group claiming humanness. The group disavowing the humanity of another group is always wrong. Always. This law is racist because it targets a group of people based on ethnicity. This law is taking place in a context where OTHER events are occurring that also target this same group. It is racist because it takes a group of people, separates them out from the community and then says that they will be treated differently because they look different. From the logic you are deploying here, George Wallace might have been right when he said "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" and Martin Luther King, Jr. was wrong. I reject that premise on its face.

Isnt that what this country is about? We, as a people, cannot even agree on "all men are created equal" means. When it was written it meant alll white men. Then it meant white and other men. People can fall back on that tidbit and say constitution says nothing about women so what are women?

Deploying your logic, women are only as human as the society says that they are in any given historical period and, as such, only have a legitimate claim to justice AFTER the society has decided that they are human enough to be deserve justice. I disagree. And, in fact, all men are created equal seems pretty straightforward to me. Again, I understand, that to you it isn't and who has a claim on equality depends upon when we are talking about. I reject that idea as well because--not to be insulting--I don't EVER want it to be left to someone with your ideas as you have expressed them here to have to decide whether or not I am human enough to be deserving of justice. Given what you have said in this discussion and your utter unwillingness to call a moral evil by what it is, I think that you could very well happily support the idea that I am not human enough to be covered by justice. Am I calling you a racist? Not at all. I am saying that I don't trust your moral compass as you have expressed it here because I am unconvinced that you would say that my grandmother was fully a human being in the year of her birth (1903) simply because in 1903 the prevailing zeitgeist in America was that she wasn't.

Absolutes are problematical in anything because knowledge and values and beliefs change. All I ask for is to not be belittled or called names because I state a reality different from someone elses reality.

I'm not going to call you names and I'm not going to belittle you. But I am going to say that I think you are wrong. However, you prove a point that I have been making here and on the dash-site for going on five years now. That point has to do with this 'who is to say what is right or wrong'. I have maintained that this view is wrong because, taken to its logical conclusion, it renders us UTTERLY mute on the subject of justice. Given your stated beliefs I'm not sure you can even say *TODAY* whether or not I am a human being simply because there are people (Nazi's for instance) who deny my humanity and therefore it might be possible that they are right and I am wrong. Any ideology, philosophy or worldview that cannot look at, say, the Holocaust and given the facts *inevitably* arrive at the conclusion that it was unambiguously evil is not one I will trust at all.

I dont think it is too much to ask.

It's not too much to ask.


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