I used to talk about hate crime, and I came up with a pretty good standard. For most people whose opinions and common sense I respect, the consensus is that if you're going to get shot in the head, the race of the person who did it doesn't really matter. Murder is murder.
My key phrase from that discussion was 'racial animus as proximate cause', because while I have some reasonable tolerance for an academic discussion, I respect the law a lot more. Stare decisis being what it is (a damned good and civilizing principle) I tend to take that razor to new racial research. I have a hard time believing, as that goes, that it's easier to get an anti-racist law from fresh theory and research made in countries with a great deal more racial violence than our own. Over here we flip-flop and re-legislate every four years. It's retarded. Then again we have a lot of bored and obsessed academics, and a surfeit of faith in scientific socialism in the US. Call it exceptionalism.
So here's what the chart means.
The more power you have, the less you need a coherent racial reason to do what you do. The inverse is also true. The more powerless you are the more you need a coherent racial theory to do what you do.
So I'm also thinking of generators of racial theories and audiences for those theories. As you go to the right, the theories become more coherent. If you are powerful, you're attitude is going to be 'whatever'. In the upper class, you may be cognizant of race but "it doesn't matter if you're black white, red green or purple". In the middle class, you may require a some general principles, like affirmative action. Down the power curve in the working class, you need something sophisticated like a theory of intelligence as might be provided by the Virginia House of Burgesses or The Bell Curve. In the underclass, where you have no power, a simple color bar enforced by law is what you need. As your individual power to manifest your racial discriminations decreases, you need more racist social infrastructure.
Recent Comments