Re: OT

On Feb 19, 7:16 pm, "Just Walkin'" <kensh...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 19, 12:30 pm, Pilgrim <mcisr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:



On Feb 19, 12:38 pm, "Just Walkin'" <kensh...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Feb 19, 10:36 am, Pilgrim <mcisr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Claiming that sexism has no economic factor involved it is is just
downright wrong. Men have been building their financial success off
the drudgework and emotional succor of women for millennia. This is
precisely why sexism is so ingrained and why men are so resistent to
help us overcome it. It's just so romantic.

I never said that sexism has no economic factor; I said that my use of
literary forms referencing gender are not derived or directed at
economic or politically determinant roles.

"If you will
note, any perceived or presumed gender baiting out of this quarter
usually consists of good natured pokes at biologically determinant
roles, not economically or politically determinant ones, and are
generally drawn from literary sources as a point of reference rather
than derision. For example, I do not subscribe to this
selbstarstellung-like idea of androgenaeity, that there are no
differences between men and women."

I'll have to parse this one out for you, I guess.

Exaggerating so that it's clear:

What you are saying is that it's ok to perpetuate the idea that the
vengeance of women supercedes to the level of the worst possible form
of raging punishment (hell) the (rational and justified) response of a
male and everything else, because the emotionality of the hysterical
woman, stereotyped as caring only for the acceptance or rejection by a
man (her wrath is triggered by his "scorn", and is different from the
wrath triggered within men, though they may stalk and murder) and that
this stereotype has nothing to do with the economic nor the political
reality that women find themselves in. It's a "good natured" poke
(nice word choice, btw) at a biological difference between the sexes
and because it is a literary reference it is sophisticated, cultured
and acceptable.

I don't have any idea of what you are talking about. Sounds nasty
though.

It is nasty, Just Walkin'. By using the phrase you used, you
connected Clinton to the age old charge of over emotionality and
hysterics that have been used to dismiss women instead of taking them
seriously. Shame on you.

Clinton actually had a point about the nature of Caucuses. Instead of
arguing on the ISSUE, you used a phrase that serves only to dismiss
her as a hysterical woman.


I hear many black people saying that white people don't get to define
racism in our culture, the same is true for men in regard to sexism.

That may be, but the biggest burden for fighting racism falls on white
people, just as the biggest burden for fighting sexism falls on men. I
mean those of us who are affected need to fight it in ourselves and in
each other.

Very true.


"Racism" is a form of xenophobia, something that existed a long time
before capitalism. I can find racial references in the Bible and any
number of ancient texts. Bourgeois society did not invent it. It is
not a recent phenomenon and it has existed in all cultures that I can
think of. The current form we, as Americans, demonstrate is, of
course our very own and did not exist until our culture existed and
nurtured it.

Racism did not become part of a codified system of economic
exploitation until the colonial era. Although trafficking in slaves is
as old as antiquity, the systematic subjugation of one race by another
as an engine of economic growth did not occur until the material needs
of colonists required labor power to develop resources beyond that of
their own meager numbers. It did not become a psychological condition
or sociological issue until after this system of both trade and
subsequent domination had been put in place. I refer you to Fanon,
DuBois and Davis as credible sources of this historical process.

You're talking about modern and a very American form of racism. I
realize that this form has specific qualities that reflect it's time
and place. "Race" and "racism", however, is a social construct built
on specific differences and it is not limited to slave trades, though
that has indeed been part of the modern, post-Industrial
manifestation, nor it is it uniquely American, something that seems
rather obvious to me, but I'll cut you some slack and not mention
Nazis.

I'm sure I have access to this because I'm at a University, but you
can google any number of key words and get the information. I found
this through "racism antiquity", but the Spanish Inquisition was also
a key era of development of racist ideology.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_world_history/v016/16.2shaw.html

"Given the intrinsic historical importance of the idea of racism and
its virulent Nachleben in European and world history, it is surprising
that this is the first serious scholarly work to confront the problem
of race and racism in Greco-Roman antiquity. The author rightly
rejects the few existing works--for example those by Nicholas Sherwin-
White, Racial Prejudice in Imperial Rome (Cambridge, 1967), and Yves
Dauge, Le Barbare: Recherches sur la conception romaine de la barbarie
et de la civilisation (Brussels, 1981)--as having little that is
worthwhile to contribute to an understanding of the problem. There
have been, it is true, a host of recent works in ancient history on
the modish subject of ethnicity. But Isaac's work is not another
discourse on difference. It is, as he puts it, a history of hate (p.
50). He argues that most modern work on race, even by eminent scholars
such as George Fredrickson and Michael Banton, has labored under the
combined misconceptions of modernizing definitions of race and a
faulty knowledge of the ancient evidence on racism. Isaac therefore
begins his investigation with a lengthy introduction in which he
attempts to formulate definitions that clearly separate "race" and
"racism" from other kinds of classifications of human groups, like
popular prejudices, cultural biases, and ethnic stereotyping.

Isaac contends--correctly in this reviewer's opinion--that racism was
not a creation of the nineteenth century. Some, of course, have
ventured earlier dates. In his famous lectures on race at the College
de [End Page 227] France in 1976, Foucault thought that the origins of
racial consciousness could be traced back to the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (Il faut défendre la société [Paris, 1997], pp.
57-74). It is nevertheless true that the words "race," "racialism,"
and "racism" did not occur with their modern meanings in English until
the first decades of the twentieth century (p. 25). It is also true
that the "factual" underpinnings of race were newly scientized in the
nineteenth century, especially by the science of biology. But it is
equally true that concepts fundamental to race and racism had a long
prehistory before this most recent modern phase in their existence.
The views of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza in The History and Geography of
Human Genes (Princeton, 1994) therefore seem close to Isaac's views on
the subject: "Racism has existed from time immemorial, but only in the
nineteenth century were there attempts to justify it on the basis of
scientific arguments" (p. 36, n. 84). Close, but not quite, since
Isaac persuasively argues that scientific ideas were already being
deployed to underpin concepts of race in Greco-Roman antiquity. He
further argues, as the title of his work indicates, that there was a
specific point in time when the components necessary to the creation
of a coherent ideology of race came together. Racism therefore did not
exist "from time immemorial." It was invented in the context of the
Greek city-state.

Having made these gains, however, the author perhaps concedes too much
to the skeptics by allowing that ancient racism might only be a "proto-
racism" (pp. 2, 36, and passim). His arguments and the evidence point
in the opposite direction: both sustain the presence of strong
concepts of race and racism in antiquity. What happened in the most
recent phase of their development was their legitimation in modern
scientific, usually biological, modes. Isaac, indeed, criticizes most
current social scientific definitions of race as constructed too
narrowly in a way that conveniently suits modern circumstances alone,
thereby creating a self-fulfilling field of what can and cannot be
counted as "race" and "racism" (pp. 17-21). Because of excessive
emphasis on biological elements or because they are far too devoted to
a single case (the American) and its set of factors (distinctive
somatic appearance, skin color), modern definitions simply mirror the
world that they are attempting to analyze. Isaac's own definition of
racism (pp. 34-35) is sufficiently specific and yet general enough to
encompass other racisms found in world history. It is cast in a mode
that includes modern biological racism, but also in a way that does
not exclude other historical types (pp. 23, 34-35): "An attitude
towards individuals and groups of peoples which posits a direct and
linear connection between physical and mental qualities. It therefore
attributes to those individuals and [End Page 228] groups of peoples
collective traits, physical, mental, and moral, which are constant and
unalterable by human will because they are caused by hereditary
factors or external influences, such as climate or geography."

In terms of evidence, Isaac limits his purview to mainstream literary
texts in Greek and Latin between the fifth century B.C.E. and the
third century c.e. Consequently, he has many omissions to explain. He
declines to use iconographic evidence on the basis that these data
require their own peculiar expertise (p. 2). There is nothing on the
categorization of blacks in the ancient Mediterranean (pp. 49-50), an
omission that, the author concedes, "will strike many readers as
eccentric." He admits his heavy dependence on value-laden literary
sources, but defends his extensive use of written texts with the
caveat that they will be taken only as reflections of contemporary
attitudes. Even with the omissions, the result is a huge study. As the
author correctly emphasizes, given the extent of the existing written
texts on the subject, his work easily could have been made much larger
still, doubled or tripled in size without much effort. For
convenience, it is divided into two parts. The first describes and
analyzes the nature of ancient ideas about race and racism that
produced a systematic hierarchy of "superior" and "inferior" human
beings. He then traces the links between these ideas and the hard
realities of conquest and imperial expansion. The second part is
devoted to a series of specific case studies that analyze the
attitudes of Greeks and Romans toward other ethnic groups in their
world: Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Syrians, Egyptians, Persians,
Gauls, Germans, and Jews--and also, not insignificantly, to each
other...."

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