Discussion like this are great. To faciliate discussions, it is good when questions are asked. However, when questions are not answered by the people they are diected to, then I thnk there is very little to be gained. There have been some good questins asked here, but a failure by some to provide an answer.

Hi Poirot,

Yes, as William Thomas wrote back in the twenties, something may not be real but if people believe it to be real, it can have real consequences. A 'situation' can take on a life of its own.

'Race' is not a valid concept. But many people believe it is real, and act on those beliefs. So this imaginary concept actually does have consequences - for example, discrimination based on 'race', leading to racist policies like Apartheid in South Africa, segregation and discrimination in pre-1960s US, and including 'adapted curriculum' all over the colonial world and in Australia and NZ, almost up the present day.

So a belief in 'race' can have effects, consequences - but the question is whether or not, say, Aboriginal people should let it drag them down, and whether or not they can use its baneful effects as an excuse for not trying to prevail over it. Nobody has to be a victim.

To use another example, witches: As I understand it, the last witch to be burned alive in Europe died in Hungary in 1929 (if she was a young girl, she could have still been alive today).

Traditional 'cultures' usually include some very backward ideas, such as the power of witches to cast spells etc. Today, most of us don't believe in such things, or in the power of witchcraft, except in remote communities. But back then, in peasant Hungary, people did.

So they believed that the only way to rid themselves of this threat was to destroy the woman believed responsible. [After all, most traditional 'cultures' are strongly anti-women, believing them to be unclean, dangerous, of the Devil, etc.] So the poor girl was burnt alive: a false belief certainly did have real consequences.

But - Jay - you can't work backwards from effects or consequences, to 'prove' that there is such a thing as 'race'. Or witches either :)

Cheers,

Joe

Joe,
Racial segregation is only a negative from an Anti Racist point of view and Anti Racists are a tiny minority of the population.
"Racist" Apartheid South Africa imprisoned black Men at a rate of about 800 per 100,000, and this was in a time when that nation was fighting a brutal internal war against the bloodthirsty Communist insurgents of the ANC and SWAPO.
Since the ANC takeover the incarceration rate of Black men has moved to over 900 in the last few years and we all know the murder rate, road toll, rapes, robberies and fraud have all gone vertical on the charts.

Liberal, tolerant U.S.A in 2006 imprisoned Black Men at a rate of almost 5,000 per 100,000.

Who has the better record from an anti Racist point of view?

A bit of a non sequitur, Jay.

There are so many other factors involved in differential incarceration rates (employment, education/skills, location, 'culture', sentencing systems) that you can't really conclude from one to the other.

Racial segregation was an evil, even if the 'Left' these days see it as the only way to save traditional Aboriginal culture, i.e. by requiring Aboriginal people to stay out in the sticks, not venture into urban areas, which are after all the proper domain of white people, not to seek employment (so bourgeois), not to get any decent sort of education (so assimilationist) - in other words, to live short, but pure, culture-oriented lives.

On those criteria, I am proud to be a thorough assimilationist :)

Cheers,

Joe

>>Racial segregation is only a negative from an Anti Racist point of view and Anti Racists are a tiny minority of the population.<<

Really? Do you think the Warsaw Ghetto was just fine and dandy? Do you think most of the population think the Warsaw Ghetto was just fine and dandy?

I'm with Joe: because of the 'racism of low expectations' Aboriginals have made their own ghettoes. That's never a good thing.

Cheers,

Tony

Poirot

You asked me -- "Would you deny that the social partition of blacks from whites in America in the past or Apartheid in South Africa were driven by connotations of racial superiority and inferiority by those who were running the respective shows?....and protest against such social manipulation in these instances turned out to be not so futile in the long run."

In response to the first sentence - NO, I would not deny that "connotations of racial superiority and inferiority" drove the despotic actions of Apartheid -- WHICH WAS WRONG. However, it was not the deluded connotations (fictions in the mind's of white leaders) that the just protest railed against - it railed against the open and very empirically describable despotic actions of the fear driven white minority. Mandela, in fact, finally realised that treating his white oppressors as 'evil' and to be despised only made matters worse. He became so loving, kind and gentle to his guards at the Robben Island prison that they couldn't stand it and they had to keep changing his guards for fear they one of them may end up releasing him. His actions towards President F. W. de Klerk were so 'non-aggressive' that even de Klerk finally gave in. So, no, I don't agree that engaging in 'war' against 'racism' brought the end to Apartheid - it was 'joining with' the enemy, and seeing 'him' and deluded and fearful, rather than fighting against 'the enemy' that finally won the day, and even many of the fear driven white people who had previously supported Apartheid.