Quote:
Originally Posted by Kobi
dread,
We were having a discussion about the development of ethics and of philosophy. You used race as an example. I kept the discussion to a level of the development of ethics and philosophy using the example you set forth. I did not offer any judgements, nor will I. It is not for me to judge what was appropriate or not appropriate in a different era with different prevailing truths when discussing the development of ethics and philosophy. It was not a discussion about race. Forgive me if sticking to the topic was offensive. It was perhaps, your interpretation of why I didnt say something as opposed to why I didnt.
You dont know me dread or my life or who my friends and lovers have been. I can tell you I am and have been involved with people of color and no one has ever spoken to me the way people here feel they can. Never. Ever.
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No, Kobi, I don't know you. You don't know me. Well, it may not be for you to judge, Kobi, but *I* will judge what happened in a different era. My grandparents were born, lived and died as human beings--while the prevailing ethics of the era was that they weren't really human beings or if they were they were inferior sorts of same, I say that was wrong. I understand, to you maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. But to me--my grandparents, my parents, my sibling, myself, my son and my granddaughter were all born human beings in every sense of that word. That is not negotiable, Kobi--not now. Not 100 years ago and not 100 years hence.
I'm glad, Kobi, that you have never had anyone speak to you the way you have been spoken to here. I would love to say the same but I can't. I have had white people tell me what I needed to do in order to deal with racism--and their sentences sounded very much like yours. I have had white people insist that 'you're really smart for a black girl' isn't a racist statement. The one thing you have done that has surprised me is your inability to condemn racism because you are unclear about whether or not the people who were harmed by racism were--I don't know what--human enough by the standards of the day to BE harmed by it. I have to say I've never had anyone take that stance. Other than that, nothing in this dialog has really been surprising or shocking to me. You see people do feel that they can speak to me the way you did earlier, Kobi. People do feel that they can dismiss racism--past and present--and that blacks just need to 'get over it' and 'stop blaming white people'. Now, I understand that you cannot and will not condemn even that because who is to say that 'you're really smart for a black girl' is wrong or insulting? Perhaps I'm just being sensitive. Perhaps the question "you speak so well, was one of your parents white" is also not a racist statement. Who is to say? I understand that you can't condemn that either.
I don't care who you have dated, Kobi. If I said that I am married to a white woman now, would that mean you would take me seriously then? Would it change a damn thing to know that? What you think telling me that you have deigned to associate with non-whites does to bolster your credibility in this discussion is beyond my comprehension. I didn't say you wouldn't date a (nominally human, at least in the present but not in the past) woman of color. It makes absolutely no difference in this discussion. I'm curious how negotiable the people of color in your life feel their humanity is.
I do want to thank you, though, for one thing you have done today. You have illustrated, *precisely* why I am passionate about freeing liberalism from this meme that has possessed it most of my adult life. I understand that to you, not condemning slavery, Jim Crow, segregation or even lynching is noble and admirable because you will not judge people of the past by the standards of today. The problem is, of course, that means that these things are up for grabs and not settled issues. All it would take is for the prevailing winds to change and there is no reason, at least none you have articulated, to believe that you would consider a return to segregation unjust. If, however, there is a bedrock ethic--that certain things should not be done to human beings and whenever they have happened an injustice has been done--then it does not matter what the prevailing winds do.
I believe that the ideas you express, while well intentioned, harm the cause of equality because it allows too much hedging. I believe that as a queer rights movement we have been fighting a battle with one-hand tied behind our backs precisely because this unwillingness, on our part, to truly condemn the prejudice and bigotry thrown our direction as moral and social evils which must stop. We have avoided doing so because not only did we not want to condemn bigotry in the past, we didn't want to condemn bigotry in the present! So this has given me an opportunity to see how this philosophy plays out in real-time. Largely, the conclusions I had reached about the ideas you have expressed about non-judgement, were hypothetical. I saw glimmers of it from time to time but this is the first time I have ever seen it play out so clearly and in unadulterated form. So I thank you for that. I wish that my hypothesis--that this inability to make reasoned judgements from first principals ineluctably would lead to an inability to condemn or even fight effectively against bigotry and injustice--had been proven incorrect. Unfortunately, you have proven it beyond what I would have thought possible a year ago.
Aj