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The war on language continues. Today the word of the week is “racism.” I popped off an essay on racism over the weekend. It wasn’t anything I considered especially insightful or ground-breaking, just a reminder that racism is primarily defined as:
“A belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.”
I pointed out that it doesn’t matter how sincerely you believe it, or how convinced you are that your belief is backed up by personal experience or science. It doesn’t matter how good your diction is, how much you liked the movie Mississippi Burning, or how assiduously you avoid using the “N” word or wearing white hoods or brown shirts. If you believe the above, even if you defend it by offering cites from The Bell Curve with a Boston accent, you are a racist.
Not rocket science. Not even basic bottle-rocket construction. And since I posted it to liberal websites, I expected maybe a few chuckles and a tepid compliment or two, but not much more.
The outrage! The horror! Oh, oh, oh, that icky “R” word! I should be ashamed! I was the one who was the bigot. What about all those white people who are afraid of walking through black neighborhoods? What about the Hispanics? What about the disabled? What about obnoxious black people who play their music too loud and wear baggy pants? What about black anti-Semitism? Black people can be racist too! Did I ever think of that? Huh? Well, did I?
A couple of helpful souls told me that the whole issue could be solved by avoiding those awful “R” words and thinking up something else. That way, people wouldn’t get all upset and the lines of communication would stay open. In fact, let’s get rid of the whole concept of “race” altogether! Don’t use it in any form at all.
Okay everybody, listen up, let’s all agree to not use words like “race” or “racist” or “racism,” or for that matter, “white” or “black!” Why, within a year or two (a decade, tops) the entire concept of race will fade from our collective consciousness and peace and brotherhood would reign forevermore on this earth!
The word I suggest is “Igglepop.” It’s neutral, it’s cheerful, it’s unthreatening. For instance, if someone announces that, as much as it pains them to say so, and while there are certainly exceptions among their black friends, the simple fact is that science shows people of African descent to have an unchangeable and significant intellectual deficit when compared to Europeans, they won’t be upset by being called a “racist.”
Instead, they’ll be called “Igglepopians,” a brand spanking new word that doesn’t conjure up images from the Nazi or the Jim Crow era, which really would be awfully unfair because people just don’t wear their hair like that anymore. The lines of communication would stay open, and they could proudly affirm that they are not “racists” advocating “racism” but “Igglepopians” advocating “Igglepop.” They could even put it in the title of books without their main sales being conducted at gun shows or the Stormfront website. I picture a thousand blossoms blooming: How I Became an Igglepopian, In Defense of Igglepop, Igglepop and Reason, The Myth of the 21st Century…
And if some bigoted person said “Hey, that’s racism,” everyone could laughingly set them straight. “Racism” is a long dead twentieth-century, pre-911 phenomenon that often proved to have a deceptive veneer of benevolent paternalism overlaying a foundation of violence and sometimes, even genocide. “Igglepop” would not have that kind of history.
Pretty soon, “racism” will be no more. In its place will be the truly new form of thinking known as “Igglepop.”
The only problem I foresee is that as new paradigms like “Igglepop” become widespread and put into practice, other new words have to be invented.
We’ll have to come up with some new word for “discrimination.”
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Pamela Troy
http://paft.livejournal.com/
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Pamela, all you'd do is
Pamela, all you'd do is delay the argument until folks could copy/paste "Igglepop" into their arguments in place of "racism." And, since discrimination is the natural outgrowth of racism, you might want to use "Igglepoop" as the new "neutral" word for it.
We Should Just Chuck the Whole Concept of Race
We need to chuck the entire concept of race. It's not based in scientific fact but is instead a social construct along lines such as gender and class. All humans alive today are descended from Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve. Y-chromosomal Adam lived in Africa about 60 - 90 thousand years ago while Mitochondrial Eve lived in Africa 140 thousand years ago. It is also been shown that their is more genetic diversity within one "race" than between the "races". The differences are just skin deep. The Aryan skinhead and Barack Obama are cousins. The Arab and the Hebrew are brothers.
If we lived in a world
where rational thought reigned, your ideas would be widespread. But as the advertising men and the salesmen all know, it's emotions that rule human behavior by and large. Men and women act like animals. Emotions rule. They can easily be herded.
The very difficult trick is to somehow remove emotions from the concept of race. Then every man would see the wisdom in what you have written.
Racism or....?
Racism, especially in Western society has a close cousin, that of the superiority of one's cultural ideology. If one is a First Nation (Native American) then one is only truly accepted if one becomes assimilated into the dominant culture and accept the superiority of their ideology. Thus we see cultural differences slowly melded into a clone of capitalist mindset. Rather than a respect for the earth as its stewards...there is a desire to profit from it regardless of the cost, rather than holding one's eleders in high esteem, they are ridiculed...and rather than supporting indigenous people's worldwide who are fighting for their rights...instead joining the US military and machine gunning them.
_______"I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It's never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting "Forward, brave comrades!" you'll see he's the one behind the bloody big rock and the one wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!"
People are not subtle enough
People are not subtle enough in their understanding. We get all 'addled up' over specific themes like 'racism' or 'sexism' and have not enough background or merit for the understanding of the thing itself. I have to use a word to describe 'that thing itself' and so I shall choose 'elitism'--the assumption we make that our minds grasp of a situation is automatically correct even though littered with only knowledge of our prejudice, fueled by insecurities and fears.
Let me give a personal example from my life of what I mean: Years ago, I was at the lake, playing with my daughter who was about 10 or 11, and also one of her young friends, a girl same age. We were 'horsing about', specifically I was taking them onto my own clasped hands, their feet, and hoisting them up and out onto the water's surface to make a big splash. I made the completely harmless comment saying to them: 'Oh you girls are getting heavy'. Meaning I was getting tired, my arms were tiring. I said this to them in perfectly good spirits, we were having FUN. A lady came up and reproached me saying: 'You shouldn't call those girls that, don't you know you're setting up fears of obesity?' She was filled with her own marginal thoughts of sexism and, what I have just named 'elitism'.
Hope someone reads this and it helps.
And if someone says 'Oh, you should have just said "My arms are getting tired."', then I've failed to them in making my point. But maybe somebody else will understand.
Pamela, your writings bring
Pamela, your writings bring a great deal of solice, comfort, and relief to this left coast Nor Cal 60's Wild Child.
I thought all the shit I grew up learning from my parents, and the hippies, was gone passe. And I was fearing the 'sposed godlovin 23% war racist war mongerin bastids were winnin.
They ain't. But SOME white people are real scared.
Course, they've been spooked all along, since they lost the Civil War.
And they don't all live in the South, anymore, either.
Aryans, skinheads, and the like.
Are everywhere, fighting and dying to keep their white status in the dominant. Only, it's all slippin away.
Great post Ma'am. Thank you for sayin it.