The Case of Structural Critique

Ta-Nehisi blogs:

So my beef with these guys is not that they make structural critique, it’s that they seem bound to a set of strategies that just haven’t gotten us anywhere. Again, I need to hear about something else besides Affirmative Action and a vague notion of social justice. And then I’d like to see it pitched in such a way that it makes the broader country see their own interest in our interest. That’s not merely crass politics–I actually believe that Jim Crow was ultimately bad for the broader country, not just for black people. I don’t think boom in prisons is a good thing for any American of any color.

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Supreme Court Decision Part I

Bloggers from around the blogosphere voice their concern and outrage over the Supreme Court’s recent ruling.

Christopher Bracey over at blackprof.com:

I’m sick and tired of having to respond to this silly argument. Given the prevailing disparities in health, wealth and society between blacks and whites, you have to be an idiot or a sophisticated bigot not to appreciate the difference between state action that excludes minorities and subordinates people on the basis or race, and state action designed to bring together people of all races. The voluntary – yes, voluntary – efforts by the local school boards in Seattle and Louisville fall into the latter category, and ought not be confused with the former. Whatever you may think about the virtues of diversity, it is abundantly clear that the motivation behind such a policy is light-years removed from the motivations of segregationists of years past.

Rick Perlstein writes:

Though call me crazy – when official municipal policy judges blacks as attempted murderers for the same actions whites commit without consequences, is it that hard to imagine that within Jena’s dual school system, the black schools might be less well taken care of? And that those same town fathers who claim they deliver equal justice to blacks and whites would claim these schools were equal, even if separate? That, as Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled with ringing finality in that decision Justice Roberts affects to so respect, “separate but equal,” when the separation is between a historically privileged race and a subaltern one, is inherently unequal?

Under Justice Roberts’s new ukase, we would never know. We wouldn’t be allowed to call Jena’s new schools “separate.” Because that would require counting how many students of each race attended them.

And we can’t do that. Because counting is racist. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

The Field Negro:

We all know by now that the Supremes in a very close decision (5-4) came down with a ruling yesterday, that in essence, invalidated programs in hundreds of public school districts all over the country. Programs that sought to maintain school by school diversity by using race as one of the factors to admissions to certain schools. The Seattle and Louisville School Districts had actually been victorious in lower Federal court, but…well you know some white folks weren’t going for that: “Honey it’s just not fair, why should those black kids get special treatment over our child just because they are black? This is not what Martin Luther King was talking about being judged by the content of their character. I spend good money on private tutors and I will be damned if I let some bureaucrat let my child miss out on a good education.”

Caste, Reservations, and a Divided India

Shivam Vij comments on the latest caste based violence in Rajasthan by quoting B.R. Ambedkar:

The literature of the Hindus is full of caste genealogies in which an attempt is made to give a noble origin to one caste and an ignoble origin to other castes. The Sahyadrikhand is a notorious instance of this class of literature. This anti-social spirit is not confined to caste alone. It has gone deeper and has poisoned the mutual relations of the sub-castes as well. In my province the Golak Brahmins, Deorukha Brahmins, Karada Brahmins, Palshe Brahmins and Chitpavan Brahmins, all claim to be subdivisions of the Brahmin Caste. But the anti-social spirit that prevails between them is quite as marked and quite as virulent as the anti-social spirit that prevails between them and other non-Brahmin castes. There is nothing strange in this. An antisocial spirit is found wherever one group has “interests of its own” which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is protection of what it has got. This antisocial spirit, this spirit of protecting its own interests is as much a marked feature of the different castes in their isolation from one another as it is of nations in their isolation.