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To mangle a Malcolm X quote: You don't stick a knife in a man's back then pull it out and say that that treating his wounds would be discriminate against those
by eesmith 5y ago
To mangle a Malcolm X quote: You don't stick a knife in a man's back then pull it out and say that that treating his wounds would be discriminate against those who had never been knifed.
Here's more of what Kendi says in the context of what you quoted, at https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/june/ibram-x-kendi-definition-of-antiracist.html https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/june/ibram-x-kendi-d... :
> As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.”
> ... The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a “race-neutral” one. The construct of race neutrality actually feeds White nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-White Americans toward equity is “reverse discrimination.
> That is how racist power can call affirmative action policies that succeed in reducing racial inequities “race conscious” and standardized tests that produce racial inequities “race neutral.” That is how they can blame the behavior of entire racial groups for the inequities between different racial groups and still say their ideas are “not racist.” But there is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas.
I take it you would have been against reparations for the Japanese and Japanese-Americans interned during the war, justified on racist reasons. I take it you are against any sort of reparations for those people still alive today whose lives were directly harmed by racist laws?
After all, both of those are remedies for past discrimination which require(d) future discrimination.
- yucky 5y agoThere are two huge differences in the Japanese internment issue. One, it's more recent and many of the victims are still alive. Two and most important, reparations for direct victims wouldn't be based on race, it would be based on if they were actually in an internment camp. Not all Japanese Americans were placed in these camps, so those who were not would not need reimbursement for what FDR and the Democrat Administration did to them in the 1940's. That last part is key. CRT makes no difference between abolitionist and slaveowner, it simply judges based on skin color. That is racist.
- eesmith 5y agoI think you missed where I wrote "I take it you are against any sort of reparations for those people still alive today whose lives were directly harmed by racist laws?" Jim Crow laws weren't abolished until the 1960s. People alive today suffered from those laws. Do you think they should get reparations, and if not, why not? The Japanese-Americans were in internment camps because of mid-20th century views on race. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which legislated reparation explicitly names "race prejudice" as one of the factors. See https://www.congress.gov/bill/100th-congress/house-bill/442 https://www.congress.gov/bill/100th-congress/house-bill/442 . I've read a decent amount now about CRT, from the people who have developed the concept over the last few decades. It does not do what you say it does. What I have seen is how the popular nay-sayers use it as bogeyman term used to reject or diminish any examination of systemic racism. That said, EVEN IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE ME, do you think reparations for living people based on harms caused by historical race prejudice is itself racist? It seems that if you do, then you think the internment reparations of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was racist. And if you do not think it's racist, then you agree with Kendi, LBP, and Justice Blackmun. Here's a more specific example. In 1924 the city seized the beach resort own by the Bruce family. The owners were Black, and it was one of the few places in California where Black could get into the water. Quoting https://www.npr.org/2021/10/10/1043821492/black-americans-land-history https://www.npr.org/2021/10/10/1043821492/black-americans-la...: > White residents set up barricades to keep Black beachgoers from getting to the ocean, and the Ku Klux Klan, active along the California coast, reportedly planned attacks against the Bruce's resort. > "They slashed tires, they burned mattresses under the porch of the resort, they tried to blow up a gas meter of one of the residents here," Shepard says. "They had 24/7 phone campaigns and made threats against Willa and her family." This made the news because the California legislature passed a law to return the land to the family, long after the owners were dead. Is this law a form of reparation? Is this law racist? Personally, I see it as a form of reparation, and not racist, but rather trying to right an historic wrong based on race prejudice. What do you think?
- yucky 5y agoKendi's comments and the CRT framework in general are COLLECTIVE, not individual. That is the issue. It assigns collective blame based on skin color, not actual individual culpability. It also assumes oppression based on race/ethnicity, not on actual experiences of an individual. We know there were black slaveowners for instance, so how does that affect the calculus? There is no non-racist way to blame people for something they had no part in simply based on the color of their skin.