Brandon's original post can be found here
When reading this post I thought of an analogy that had been bugging me since I started looking for colleges. There are so many Black Student Unions, which are fine, but a White Students Union would clearly be racist.
I don't know if this fully explains it, but the logic behind oppressed groups banding together shares the logic of the classical Marxist proletariat organizing itself against its opporessor. However in the case of the proletariat the oppressors are just thrown off and cease to exist. If you attempt to do the same thing with race or gender you will never be able to achieve the same sort of result.
I fear that there are at least two competing logic in the politics of race. One is integration, where the cultures of the different race communities do not have to dissolve but cannot be separate. The second, more dominant, is the new separate but equal, except this time around it is not institutionally supported by racist government policy but by the way the black and white communities segregating themselves from each other mutually. It fits in very well with rhetoric of multiculturalism, which the listener understands as multiple separate cultures living together. I think the logic of the second is driving black student unions, and the logic of separation and difference might explain certain strains of feminism.
Actually, I was considering mentioning this in the post. I was thinking that on this campus there are several minority groups, the Black Student Union, Latin American Society, and the Asian Club are examples. As you pointed out, this sort of mindset is only promoting segregation, it is only allowing people to pretend that race is something that actually exists.
ReplyDeleteIt's easy to pretend that everyone has equal rights when the minorities have the ability to congregate together. It's like saying "look minorities are equal because they have a minority organisation. Okay, no racism here." It seems like this sort of segregation is excellent at sustaining the racism. Minorities get to group together and complain about majorities, even though nothing is actually done about those problems, because they are gathering together, excluding majorities, in order to complain about majorities.
Actually, it just occurred to me that this is not necessarily a problem with minorities; it might be that this was intentionally set up to continue racism and sexism. This sort of separation makes people happy because it is marking the distinction between groups it is not changing anything in reality. So essentially, because this is recognizing the distinction between groups, people are satisfied.
ReplyDeleteAs I mentioned before, it occurred to me that there is also a Christian fellowship on campus. If we tried to start a Muslim Fellowship called al-qelbu (the dog) there would be crazy dissension. Basically, all these clubs and organizations stand to continue and strengthen societal issue under the shroud of progress.