From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Sep 25 2002 - 00:21:42 MDT
At 05:43 PM 9/24/02 -0700, Mike Lorrey wrote:
[Mike:]
>> >This behavior of blacks in the US and aboriginals in Australia
>> >cannot
>> >be solely or even mainly attributed to white racism, since other
>> >minority groups that suffer from racist attitudes among white
>> >supremacists, particulary jews and asians, do not engage in such
>> >crime
[me, parodically:]
>> "It *is* their skin color genes, your honor, nothing more, just makes
>> some of them *bad to the bone*!"
>This only thing absurd is your libelous claim that I was implying that
>skin genes have anything to do with this real phenomenon.
>This is the sort of outrageous crap that comes up from those on the
>list who don't want to be confused by the facts
Hang on, which facts? You listed five groups of humans: `whites', which I
took to mean the dominant power group in your nation and mine; US
descendants of African slaves; Australian aborigines who lived in the same
place for the past 50,000 odd years and have zero cultural or particular
genetic connection to the former group; `jews', who are presumably a
somewhat diverse sub-set of `whites', and `asians', who could be immigrant
Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Indians, Pakistanis, etc, living in the USA.
You found it worthy of note that the second and third groups are
over-represented in jails in countries where the power mostly resides with
people of the first group, who are often bigoted and racist in their
behavior toward all four other groups.
The only obvious linkage that I can see that would allow you to couple the
second and third groups and draw attention to them is their skin color.
This is not an arbitrary factor, of course, since it is one of the markers
that white racists have traditionally selected as a target for their hatred
and discrimination. Hence one plausible reason why two utterly different
groups of people with dark skin are disproportionately jailed is that the
law and the community represented by the law is racist and discriminatory.
Pointing *that* out is not, of course, racist.
But you appeared to go much farther than that, and in a contrary direction:
you implied that the reason these two dark-skinned groups had too many
`criminals' could *not* be racism in the white community. It must,
therefore, be something particular to those sub-groups, something not
evident in `jews' and `asians'. What might that be? One casts about. A
criminal bent, or fecklessness, or learned victimization, or...?
I assume that in fact you did not have skin color in mind as a *genetic
causative* agent, except though some kind of second-order `liberal
victimhood' imposed for historical reasons on those with dark skin. The
whites' ancestors were rotten to them, today's whites feel rotten about
that, and tell them so, and make it profitable for them to internalize this
view of themselves as victims, this rots their moral fiber and makes them
liable to crime, etc.
Why doesn't this dynamic also apply to `jews and asians'? Because their
cultures are intrinsically made of sterner stuff, perhaps? It can't be
because people with black skin have been differentially treated especially
like shit by white racists, since you've told us this isn't so. This is
such a bizarre assertion that I called it a-historical, and I stand by
that. Is it racist? Not by intention, I'm sure.
Damien Broderick
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