Equal rights melting pot
The day after the 2012 presidential election, won narrowly by the Democratic Party’s candidate, notable (moderate) Republican punditry was absorbed in playing the race card (a card they had resented when played by Democrats), this time using the more acceptable term “demographic change,” noting that the white population is not what it once was, with increases in the “Hispanic” vote, the “African-American” vote, and the “Asian” vote. Hands were wrung that Romney did not choose Marco Rubio as his vice-presidential pick, assuming that more Republican “Hispanics” might have made the difference in a very close race. (See these blogs that directly address the notion of the “Hispanic vote”: https://clarespark.com/2012/06/21/the-hispanic-vote/, https://clarespark.com/2012/02/09/glee-goes-la-raza/. )
The YDS website has been devoted to charting the overt and subterranean notions that “race” is a scientifically valid way to sort out populations. Perhaps the majority of my blogs are devoted to exposing the socially constructed character of “race.” Why this emphasis of mine? Because the continual use of “race” not only is a mystification of class and gender (categories that are real), but it is an alarming echo of Hitler’s major difference from the rival fascisms in the interwar period: “Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer!” Neither Mussolini’s corporative state nor Franco’s clerical Fascism was völkisch.
Multiculturalism, the dominant ideology in progressive reformism, with its purported “inclusiveness,” operates on the same racialist assumptions as the more overtly völkisch Hitler approach. If you read the multiculturalists, you will see that “there is no truth,” nor any possibility for communication between races or ethnicities, for all knowledge is “local.” Even hip postmodernists hold to this wacky “historicist” viewpoint and warn us about “the pastness of the past,” the terra incognita where none dares venture. (See https://clarespark.com/2012/10/14/reality-and-the-left/.)
How to explain Rightists who pick up or dismiss “the race card” when deemed useful to their cause? Is it a paleo-conservative tic of the Patrick Buchanan type, or is it an uneducated copycat response to New Deal initiatives that dismissed “scientific history” for “cultural history”? (See https://clarespark.com/2011/06/16/the-antiquated-melting-pot/. )
In my view, such racialist policy recommendations abandon the examination of economic causes for voter choice. The “economic determinists” are viewed as either Marxists or as supply siders putting too much emphasis on free markets and education in economics. Indeed, they are seen, perversely, as Jewish troublemakers, agents perhaps of miscegenation and godless materialism.
It will be a Herculean cleanup to return us to a more rational politics.
Renaissance Hercules
The Clare Spark Blog 
[…] that people are confused or angered by anthropology, sociology, cultural accommodation and so on. As one of Clare’s commenters put it (emphases […]
Pingback by A bit of history about revisionism in American schools « Churchmouse Campanologist — December 6, 2012 @ 10:02 pm |
Fascinating thoughts on multiculturalism. It seems a form of sentimental mythmaking without even an Edith Hamilton version of rigor. I knew a serious anthropologist who had just returned from a year in a small Mexican village just south of Mexico City. He condemned the way it was approached in schools with oversimplifications by MacMillan or some other textbooks, the eating of quaint foods, and dressing up in gaily colored costumes. He suggested that very few people would choose refried beans over steak if they had a choice. But the minds of our 4th graders will be forever sullied with sentimental attitudes about the jolly peasants lolling about taking siestas.
Comment by Bill Lannon — November 12, 2012 @ 12:06 am |
[…] the last three blogs (https://clarespark.com/2012/11/07/capitalism-is-on-the-line/, https://clarespark.com/2012/11/08/the-demographic-change-explanation-is-racist/, https://clarespark.com/2012/11/08/the-magical-power-of-negroes-and-other-beautiful-people/) I […]
Pingback by “Race” and the problem of “inclusion” « YDS: The Clare Spark Blog — November 9, 2012 @ 7:46 pm |