At 4/23/2012 5:02:40 PM, charleslb wrote:At 4/23/2012 3:53:59 PM, mongeese wrote:
I never claimed that it did. The inequality was created before racism was essentially abolished, but remained even after the "socioeconomic vacuum" was established. The society without racism still had racial disparity, deconstructing your point entirely.
Once again, in the real world persistent and consistent racial disparities and inequities are part and parcel of racism, of its definition
Incorrect, by demonstration. While capitalism does not fix economic inequality, it also does not exacerbate them; it is indeed color-blind. The racial disparity you see today is merely a continuation of the racial disparity of the past, although it is also true that through capitalism, everyone has improved their standard of living so that measuring things by "disparity" is purely pessimistic.
and reality.
Incorrect, but not by my thought experiment, which assumed full capitalism, and not our current crony fake.
That is, racism is a vicious circle of racialist mental attitudes and systemic socioeconomic injustices feeding into, reinforcing, and perpetuating each other.
I've demonstrated before that this is not the result of the free market.
But you insist on continuing to try to postulate the possibility of the existence of racial inequality as something other than a factor of such a vicious socioeconomic circle, lest your precious capitalist system be defined and invalidated by it. Oh well, libertarians do have their ideological imperatives.
I've already listed the factors before, none of which are capitalism, and I'll quickly refute them.
Private ownership existed long before racism, including the years millenia ago in which you claim racism essentially didn't exist. I've already listed the primary originators of racism: slavery, religious intolerance, war propoganda, and affirmative action. Any instance of racism in history, I believe, can be traced back to one of these four factors.
Let me work backwards through your list of causes of racism. Firstly, affirmative action? It's actually quite absurdist to charge affirmative action with being a form of or promoting racism. This is merely a bit of trying to turn the tables on progressives, and misdirected angry-white-man and conservative ressentiment. In actuality, affirmative action combats discrimination, it's supposed racist nature is just something certain minds read into it.
In an ideal world, that would be true, but this world is far from ideal.
http://www.economist.com...
Next, as for war and its propaganda, well, historically speaking, being culturally superior to and more civilized than your foe, or closer to God than him, has often been used as a justification for aggression, but not the racialist belief in his biological inferiority, that's more of a modern thing.
Does the discrimination against Germans prevalent thorughout American during the World Wars not count as racism? How about the discrimination against the Japanese placed in internment camps?
Also, warfare and the subjugation of defeated peoples that it led to often didn't result in their consignment to the status of inferiors, and certainly not racial inferiors. Again, that's more of a modern thing. You know, a modern, capitalist-era thing.
This was actually a bit more complicated. Slaveowners in America had to make their slave-ownership compatible with Christian morality and equality, and the solution was to designate slaves to a lower caste of humanity, essentially.
And religion as a cause of racism? Well, this might sound plausible if you're one of those modern secular-minded folks who's quite cynical about organized religion; however, Christianity and the Church, before the advent of modern racism, was actually a force for human unity, so to speak. It was the goal of the church, after all, to bring the entire population of the planet into the fold. This in fact often led Christians to transcend race; as it still sometimes does, for example when missionaries from lily-white Middle America venture off to bring the Gospel to the peoples of the Dark Continent or some other racially and culturally foreign land.
I was actually referring more to anti-Semitism and the Inquisition. The examples you give did not at all inspire racism.
No, once again, it wasn't until the modern era's white-supremacist zeitgeist that Christianity was turned to the dark side of racism. And what pray tell was the origin of, the motivation for the development of a white-supremacist zeitgeist? Could it perchance have been the inequities and injustices of our economic system?!
As I mentioned before, it was a combination of factors in the new America, including conflicting moral codes and a sudden association between slave status and skin color. Neither of those are the free market.
Finally, let's briefly touch on slavery. Well, certainly slavery factored into racism in a major way, but slavery was not a stand-alone evil system, it was a part of the bigger picture of evil, a bigger inequalitarian system that has evolved into modern capitalism and that perpetuates social and racial injustice.
Modern capitalism is most certainly not slavery.
But what about your point about the private ownership of property predating racism by quite a bit. Certainly this is true, but it hardly makes private property out to be benign. No, to paraphrase Britney Spears, private property's not that innocent. Indeed, human equality and freedom took an immediate hit from the invention of the bad ole institution of private property,
Freedom and prosperity greatly increased, and trying to preserve equality would be commiting the zero-sum fallacy.
and it didn't take long for it to lead to slavery.
Slavery actually originated with the more communistic hunter-gatherer societies.
And then down the line when a socioeconomic system that was all about the ruthless private overaccumulation of wealth (i.e., capitalism, if you really need me to name names) came into being, well, racial and social-Darwinian concepts became serviceable for rationalizing the subjection of other human beings to a servile state and status. In other words, and to be quite explicit, private property and capitalism are the root of the modern form of social and racial inequality that we're familiar with under our capitalist form of life.
I believe I've pointed out numerous times why a businessman would not attribute his success to his race, although you've never responded to those points.
Not so. A racist commune can kick members of certain races out without any economic factors.
Your error here is that you're imputing the same injustice-facilitating power structure, motives, ethos, and behavior to communist society that you're familiar with under capitalism.
Your error here is that you're assuming that humanity will magically turn into selfless egalitarians overnight if capitalism were replaced with socialism. Even in hunter-gatherer societies, tribes enslaved each other.
Classism, I admit, can exist, although it doesn't develop in the way that you think it does.
Oh, you don't think that classism results from economic inequality?!
I never denied that, but you overestimate its extent and effects.
Racism, as I've explained before, remains completely illogical under those circumstances.
See? You never respond to this point.
If you refuse to entertain the thought experiment, how can you choose to accept or refute it?
It's refuted by its own abject unrealism.
The thought experiment met all parameters necessary for its conclusion to be used in a logical syllogism. What more do you want?
