james m blaut <70671.2032@CompuServe.COM> ee cummingsly asks:
>We note from David Lloyd-Jones's new posting that he doesn't believe that
>instituional racism exists -- or am I misreading?
>
Mark Twain was once asked whether he believed in the Bible, to which he
replied "Of course I do. I have one in my hotel room."
"Institutional racism" I saw invented before my very eyes, mainly by
Kathleen Brown of the Black Panthers -- and of course the epigones and
parlour pinks -- first when I read about it in the Bay Guardian in maybe
late 1968, and then a couple of weeks later when I caught her seminal speech
at the Fillmore East in New York.
Structuralism was in the air, a quiet whisper of the constructionist,
substractionist, formationalist, minimalist, earth-art, and, naturally,
deconstructionist hurricane yet to come.
* * *
Now obviously there are some racist organizations, though they are few and
far between. The German National Socialist Party would be one, though it
would be difficult to stick the label on most other Fascist organizations.
"Apartheit," if one considered it an institution, rather than, say, a body
of rhetoric, would certainly be a racist institution.
The Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa was certainly a racist
organization for a generation or two, though it has redeemed itself quite
smartly. The labour unions on South Africa -- with the honourable exception
of those dominated by the Communist Party -- were generally racist
organizations in the period 1920 to 1960 or so.
* * *
I think it is important to look at seminal examples like the Birmingham,
Alabamba, US Steel strike of 1935 to see what they mean. In that strike US
Steel used black scabs in an attempt to break the USWA. There are later
examples of large -- and in some sense "white" -- corporations hiring blacks
as strikebreakers, particularly in the 1939-41 years, while the black voters
there were were largely Republican, and industry was gearing up, in part
through Canada, for WWII.
Does this make capitalism racist as an institution? Does this even make US
capitalism racist in any institutional sense?
Is it a racist act for a capitalist organization to hire black workers
preferentially over white, as US Steel did in Birmingham?
And is it an "institutional racist" act, or just a matter of convenience?
And whose ox is gored?
( In passing let it be said that the United Steelworkers of America, unlike
many other unions, have a superb record in supporting both civil rights and
employment equity: they have, uh, generously, identified the company, rather
than the scabs as being the source of all evil. Games-theoreticians next,
puh-leeze...)
* * *
It is an elementary exercise in microeconomics to demonstrate that dividing
a market can lead to increased profits for the supplier to the market that
has been divided. Intel sells at high prices first, then drops prices as
the faster ones come along: different buyers have different payoff matrices,
so it makes sense for many people to buy early and high, even though they
know the price will go down later.
Some people skip gaily from this fact to the assertion that there are
institutions which gain by pitting person against person, group against
group, and hence race against race.
The fallacy in this parallel is this: the successive cohortes of purchasers
from Intel are in no way pitted against each other, though they may raise a
glass in a wry curse of Andy Groves' brass balls. The ones last in line --
myself, e.g. -- know that we will get it later at a lower price because our
marginal productivity is lower.
* * *
What, then, of slavery? Was not slavery an institution, a racist one, and
one which painted all its descendant institutions -- like, fer instance, the
US of A -- with its own institutional racism? This, I think, would be a
fair statement of Kathleen Brown's very eloquent, and quite plausible,
originating proposition.
The answer is a pretty little theory murdered by nasty lurking facts.
In Tanach, the "Old Testament," all the writing on the subject assumes a
Hebrew slave of a Hebrew owner. I believe that the US record, when it is
examined, will show that most American slave-owners conducted themselves on
Biblical lines. There were certainly many and horrible exeptions; I doubt
that they were the rule. Bob Moses, who was for many years a Catholic Worker
worker, recently reconverted to the Judaism of his grandparents, who were
slaves of one of the very few Jewish American slave owners.
Slavery continues today. A sideshow on the Sudanese government's genocidal
war against its own south is the continuation of slave raiding by commercial
traders based in Khartoum and outside the country. This business has been
reduced not by Saudi Arabia's adherence to the UN anti-slavery protocol of
1956, (which I think they got around to ratifying in 1984 or some damn
thing) nor by anyone's actual objections.
The cheapness of Philipina and Thai "indentured employees" has rendered the
trade less profitable than in the past.
This, however, was not my main point. My main point on Southern Sudanese
slaves, mostly in the past but a few today, and the Philipinas and the Thai,
is this: they are happy to be "slaves." Slavery is generally better than
the alternative.
( There is room for investigation, discussion, and debate on the huge
numbers of deaths attributed to the Middle Passage and the - it doesn't have
a word in English that I know of -- trans-Sahara tromp. Certainly if the
death rates are as high as is generally said, both the British and the
Arabs, not two groups known for lack of commerical acumen, were lax in their
inventory control.)
And race doesn't really enter into it.
An aside: boxing fans will remember Bundini Brown's remark at the
magnificent Rumble in the Jungle: "Thank God my granddaddy caught the
freedom expresss."
I have one last comment on all of this slavery stuff from a personal point
of view. I oppose slavery as I oppose heirarchy -- and the whining,
demeaning, daily life people are forced to submit to in their corporations,
schools, whatever. At the same time I have been a secretary, a wholly
self-immolating role, (to the excellent John Dixon of Washington D.C.), and
he taught me much; I am, I hope, his supporter in every way to this day
thirty years later.
I have a great-aunt by marriage who in fact was a slave. This always gives
my partner five good minutes at Passover. She entered slavery in Egypt as a
teen, and in her twenties she simply walked out -- my guess, based on the
average IQ of the family, being that she thought her "owners" were a bunch
of indolent twits.
She walked up the Nile, south, for a couple thou K, set herself up in
business, and.. well stay tuned. We're still multiplying. Her latest
grand-nephew, Deng Alun Lloyd-Jones, is expected about August 9. She has
nephews who have been world Judo champion, professors of medicine at three
or four different universities in Europe, a Chemistry prof in Botswana,....
etc. That tall, thin, black guy you see at Princeton, Yale, or Berkeley --
he's one of us. (Just the tall ones. Anybody under maybe 6'1" is merely
some American black professor. Is that a racist remark?)
* * *
There. It's Friday afternoon, I have had three beers while writing this, I
have tried to be fair to everybody, and I think that "institutional racism"
is a crock.
If you want to be more extreme: I have never met a bigoted red-neck asshole
who was really a racist.
I think this is only partly because of what is shown by genetic studies,
that the majority of Southerners and something like 40% of Americans have
been "touched with the tar brush." The genuine knowledge that all people
have within them -- and which is reflected in our institutions, from
Bielderberg to the Great Peoples' Hall, and every beer hall everywhere, is
"We're all pretty much the same."
* * *
Everybody with the first clue recognises it. Most of our institutions
recognise it.
People who think otherwise, and people who think other people think
otherwise, are jussa buncha genetic sourpusses. Or maybe they din't get
tenure.
-dlj.