Here's the rest for any who are interested to continue....
King, apparently, couldn’t find the time or inclination to look into these matters and so manages to see them as establishing a basis for the jury’s conviction and, apparently, for condemning or at least strongly cautioning all teen sexual energy. Marcus’ proclivity for necking and fondling and his spreading his legs had NOTHING to do with the Jury’s decision in May, 2003. To take Marcus’ case as exemplary of the benefits of chastity is tantamount to suggesting that a dandy solution to teen pregnancy is castration.
King’s and Wooten’s and Hummer’s varying levels of foolishness and perfidy are only part of the issue, really. The Op-Ed pages of every newspaper in the United States, with a handful of exceptions, are tables where at least half the seats of honor belong to reactionary and occasionally explicitly fascist boobs whose handiworks a high school sophomore debater could dismantle while doing her geometry homework. What is vastly more disturbing is that so infrequently---practically never outside of three or four ‘national’ papers and a few odd journalistic waystations like the “Anniston Star”---do real analysis and criticism of established views and practices have the opportunity to find an audience.
Thus, AJC’s ‘balance’, vis-a-vis this quartet of intellectual hacks and/or semi-sophisticated bigots, was a decent but highly moralistic and generalized column by Cynthia Tucker---perhaps she counted double on the scales, for the likes of Wooten, since she is Black, as well as a liberal supposedly---along with a fine piece of legal diplomacy on the part of Marcus’ pro-bono appeals lawyer, David Balser. He assiduously avoided context, social analysis, or references to history, doing what law school teaches all good lawyers, stick close to your winning strategy and don’t say anything too controversial.
The upshot of all of this in my estimation, and what would be the most interesting and time-consuming to prove, is that various social and political networks, organizations, and loosely affiliated individuals looked aghast at the social revolution that the Jone/Dixon biracial family-of-opportunity was threatening. If White working folk and Black working folk actually started to relate to each other as Christians---not to mention fellow humans, and cousins---how could the tipping point of social leverage remain under the control of the powers that be, the alliances and predilections of which all grew out of and depended now on sometimes subtle and sometimes explicit expressions of White Supremacy? The answer is that such social power would no longer be sustainable.
Put simply, a politics of divide and conquer has always been the first choice of rulers who represented a different social class than the people under their control. Today, such a mechanism may be the only method for rulers to remain the hoi-polloi elite jet set they desire to retain. To divert this extremely powerful political possibility, that lives inside of Marcus’ case, toward a desecration of human sexuality would be a triple tragedy: once for the lost lesson of power-through-unity; twice through the promise of mayhem which will result, like sunrise from dawn, from an attack on our species’ deeply ingrained sensual and erotic nature; and third, for misleading Marcus again, away from the learning and power his struggle represents, into monumentally stupid conclusions about himself, men, and life.
A DIVERSION, DEAR READER
Initially, the main point of this note was to show the wrongheadedness and dangerous lack of clarity or science in the constructions of ‘race’, ‘racism’, and ‘racist’. By example, if in no other way, this essay about Marcus Dixon’s travails illustrates how to talk about color and prejudice without using the unscientific and foolhardy ideas of different ‘races of man.’ Most folks use such terms loosely and mean well, like all of us, whatever their personal opinions are.
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This all came up for me when a profoundly beautiful essay posted a while back, a potent mix of honest guts and incredible transformation, all fueled by the magic elixir of love and experience. Thanks are due from everybody on earth to this fellow. I am proud to be part of the species, or race, that can produce John Gelliland’s eloquence and honesty and heartfelt common sense. I ask everyone, who makes the effort to wade through this argument of mine here, to reread Gelliland’s gorgeous piece of work. Only this time, instead of saying racism, look at how well the conept of White supremacy or White superiority fits instead of the terms we automatically apply. This is what John G. describes, when he dissects the problem as he lived it.
In any case, nonetheless, and in spite of how unpopular this opinion is going to be, I HAVE to disagree that “RACISM” and “RACISTS” are the problem in any of these matters, or in the case of Marcus Dixon, about which I spoke at length above. The logic of this position is simple. Essentially, along with Roger Ehrlich’s small masterpiece, “The Race Bomb,” I argue that we are all one race. Biologically, this is irrefutable.
I STATE HERE, UNEQUIVOCALLY, ALL OF THE FOLLOWING POINTS: THAT I ABHOR ALL BIGOTRY; THAT I AFFIRM THE NEED FOR REPARATIONS FOR THE DESCENDANTS OF FORMER SLAVES; THAT WHITE SUPREMACY IS AS PERNICIOUS, STUPID, AND SUICIDAL AS MALE SUPREMACY; THAT MORE, TRULY ‘AFFIRMATIVE, ACTION’ AGAINST THE CAUSES OF COLOR DISPARITIES NEEDS TO BE OUR POLICY AS A PEOPLE; THAT SOCIALLY, THE CAUSES OF ALL PEOPLE WHO SEEK PEACE AND PROSPERITY FOR HUMANITY ARE ONE CAUSE.
I’m serious, “Don’t get me started,” as a friend of mine used to say, shaking a cigarette in my face. I don’t know how else to say it: THE IDEAS OF RACE, RACISTS, AND RACISM (the three ‘R’s) ARE NOT FIT OBJECTS OF DISCUSSION, EXCEPT AS TO HOW TO RID SERIOUS DISCUSSION OF SOCIAL REFORM OF THEIR PRESENCE.
As with all the rest of my work, there’s more to come. I’ve already spoken at some length on this matter in a string that branched off of my school dress code article, and in relation to my piece about Kareem Bynum, and elsewhere. This issue---RACE---is in fact one of several critical areas of analysis the attitudes and approaches to which are at best absurd, mystical, mystifying, and obscurantist.
If we do not figure out how to begin to discuss such issues in a discipllined, logical, and principled way, our doom will be ugly and swift. That’s how it looks to this hombre anyway. I’m appointing myself a one-man correspondence committee, I suppose, but nobody else is setting the scene and moderating a conversation with the potential to lead to useful social action, at least as far as I can see.
To suggest that the social problem we experience are difficulties due to hatred among different ‘races’ inevitably has profoundly negative impacts, intellectually and practically. Many folks will see this distinction as semantics---race, culture, ethnicity, color all lead to similar basic conclusions. In this view, since ‘racism’ is the lingua franca of the current moment, it is the path of least resistance to accept that characterization and grapple substance instead of form. At least three powerful reasons exist, though, which militate in favor of rejecting ‘racism’ as both idea and terminology.
NUMBER ONE
The first reason, though quite potent, may convince practically no one. It is nonetheless indispensable for us to understand. Since the whole idea of ‘racism’ is based on a fiction, a lie, a WHITE SUPREMACIST fantasy at best, to see it as the object of our attention and view it as the subject for debate is ludicrously unscientific. To imagine a discussion of similar importance, conducted on the basis of euphemism, false premise, and misconception is unthinkable. It would be tantamount to talking about HIV as a gay disease(OR, IN A WAY RELATED TO THE ISSUE AT HAND, APPROACHING PREVENTION AS A MATTER OF ‘ABSTINENCE ONLY’), or about abortion as a woman’s issue exclusively. For the same reason, essentially, that the world does not need a policy and program about “Sugar”, the popular name for diabetes for a long time, we do not need policy, program, and discussion of “racism” any longer.
NUMBER TWO
The second reason, at first blush, seems similarly ‘didactic’ as the first, and in some ways the two notions have a very close relationship, like the connection between epistomology and astronomy, for example. The reader should bear with me, and not despair that the mere mincing of words is the point of this exercise, however; plenty of raw meat is coming. Stated simply, the problem with ‘the three R’s’ is that they are hopelessly ‘idealist’---they presume that ideas are the substance of, and originate, the material world.
Thinking about “racism” as merely an idea that we can change, like our opinion of the weather, leads us to all sorts of fallacies. We can ignore history and social causation, as just one example, because all we have to do is THINK more positively, be more tolerant, not be so judgemental. Precisely because of the real historical, political, and social ACTUALITIES that are behind our conception of color, equity, and other things, we cannot simply change our minds and have anything be different. Except by random happenstance, in other words, we will never solve a problem of which we haven’t a clue as to its concrete origins. Whatever is going on in relation to color and prejudice, it is much more than an idea based on scientific nonsense, and its alleviation will require much more than recently conceived notions of pluralism and such.
NUMBER THREE
The third problem I have with ‘race’ should be obvious. It has somewhere between little and no connection with our ancestors, with our real past, with our history. There are those among us---either treacherous killers or blithe fools---who would suggest we discard the past. For anyone who wants to guarantee a combination of human slavery, human slaughter, and the rule of the hyper rich as the best possible human future for which we might hope, abandoning history is fine advice. If the notion of murderous manipulators in charge of everything has little appeal to people, they need to study the past, how our forebears acted and reacted and bickered and loved and wandered so as to bring forth us.
Only by seeing such connections can we imaginatively and realistically hope to transform our lives in the present. Isaac Asimov, using historical science to show the idiocy of dividing science and technology, speaks lyrically to the problems with approaching our lives with flimsy and silly concepts. “Just as there is only one species of human being on earth, and all divisions into races, cultures, and nations are but man-made ways of obscuring that fundamental truth, so there is only one scientific endeavor on earth---the pursuit of knowledge and understanding---and all divisions into disciplines and levels of purity are but man-made ways of obscuring that fundamental truth.”
These pursuits, of knowledge and unity, are our tasks if we want to survive. As always, anyhow, “THAT’S MY STORY, AND I’M STICKING TO IT!!!”