AA, colorblinding, and Ellinger

[SPOINTER@CCTR.UMKC.EDU]

I can't do the nifty line by line thing so I will try to reply as best I can.
The only argument I want to answer is the reinterpretation of your color-
blindness position.  You refer to my old pal Kale Ness's statement regarding
what being color-blind is all about.  In my opinion you make a dangerous
assumption and effectively make the point _for_ affirmative action.

You say that color-blind means we "_do_ see racial differences" but that
we don't let those differences cloud our judgement of people.  In short, you
say we should notice that people are racial distinct(a no-brainer) yet we
ignore those distinctions when it comes to judging people or making a
decission to hire, or maybe even when it comes to law.  Nice Idea.

Unfortunately, racism is part of our present reality.  It's engrained in our
world-view which means it's got a role in both the public and private sphere.
Like I said, the upper-classes are unwilling to surrender their position of
relative status at this point.  Your new interpretation of color-blindness
still eats all my arguments from before.(another no-brainer)  Reason?
Well, it's all fine and dandy if we decide to ignore the role race plays in
this world when it comes to making the choices and decissions that matter.
In a world without affirmative action that's what always will happen.  We can
predict confidently that, the private sphere escpecially, will use the race-
neutrality as a smokescreen to avoid scrutiny of covert acts of discrimination.
Race-neutrality takes the bite out of antidiscrimination principles.  Noticing
racial difference is not the same as race-consciousness.  A common barnyard
animal might notice a difference in skin color.  It takes a conscious, critical
individual to be aware of the role racial differences play in the day to day
operations of this world.  These perspectives are most important especially
to those least exposed to people different than themselves.  That's what
race-consciousness begins with and that is an argument in favor of affirmative
action that you ignored in my last post.  Pretending that we can at this
point adopt of position of race-neutrality is dangerous.  It hides behind
a white created myth of civil rights and Martin Luther King.  We're kidding
ourselves if we think we are ready to abandon pro-active andidiscrimination
measures and start engaging policy from a level playing surface when the
private sphere simply doesn't work that way.  The same goes for sexual
oreintation and gender.  You miss my point about freezing the racialized
present and dismiss it as an irrelevance and that's what's most frightening.
You must conceed that the world we live in today is not colorblind and is
racially stratified....we wouldn't have done affirmative action in the first
place if I was wrong.  Simply abondoning these principles and ignoring race
when it comes to making decissions freezes our progress in the present.  You
assert that this is impossible in the face of societal change via colorblind-
ness.  What?  I am saying race-neutrality is impossible right now, thus we
need to continue down the path of antidiscrimination law for the conceivable
future.  Untill you can prove that gender, racial, sexual, class, and ethnic
discrimination is vanishing you can't defend race-neutrality now.  

My point is that race-neutrality is a mythological moral requirement created
by the dominant classes as well as the more mainstream civil rights scholars
which has the potential to wreck the progress we have made and have the
potential to make with race-consciousness.  Race-neutrality allows us to
create a strawperson via policy masked as moral claims.  Hiding behind these
claims makes your position easy to defend.  Things like, "reverse-discrimination" are exactly what I am talking about.  These are cop outs.  If a white
person wants to claim they are equally disadvantaged by affirmative action
they are ignoring the degree to which people of color are disadvantaged in
our country.  It's a silly position used to protect a position of 
dominance.  But we've got lots of MLK quotes to support it, right?  This is
the dangerous mythology I am talking about.  Think about it.

....and then vote for civil rights!!!!!!!!!!!

slusher
-college.

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