MikeNovack wrote:Your ridiculous hyperbole is disgusting. The non-depiction of people of color where people of color present is their objection, not a demand that they be depicted where absent.
AND YOU KNOW THIS.
Phyllo wrote:You are mistaken.
Black actors (and other races) now play white people.
The social issues referred to here are tough to sort through. It is certainly true beyond all doubt that up to the 1950s and 1960s that the Black race in America was marginalized and excluded. What is very hard for the North to face, though it was the engine of abolition is that, strangely, Blacks in the South were, in an excluded manner, still
included in a more encompassing social system.
There existed Southern apartheid and yet the Black race was in their own land and culture where they had roots and a position in the social system. When Blacks went north to escape the constraints of Southern apartheid and for work, they found in the North a more intense attitude of exclusion that was quite brutal and alienating.
This is one of the embedded hypocrisies of America. It can best be expressed by reference to Abraham Lincoln’s attitude toward the Black race of which many (most?) are not aware. Lincoln was adamantly opposed to the notion of slavery of man by man. His commitment had a Biblical intensity. His was a absolute commitment to the idea that human bondage was evil.
And yet he held these opinions:
"I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races ... I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."
Now, you may be able to imagine the soul-twisting irony that there is a religious monument to Lincoln in the Nation’s capital that is a place of civic-spiritual pilgrimage. Lincoln worked for
years behind the scenes attempting to set up a plan by which the Black race would be expelled from America’s soil to either Africa or Central America (the East end of Panama was considered).
In America’s ‘civil religion’ certain Stories are told. These Stories have a function even though they are not quite true. The mythology presents the notion of Lincoln as an intrepid activist for the sacred rights of man, but it was not really (quite) like this. The North conquered and occupied the South and as I said the South was the North’s first neo-imperial project of attempted “nation building” and the imposition of norms.
The North
more simply understood could not tolerate a sister-nation in control of the significantly developed South with enormous agricultural production and also controlling the mouth of the Mississippi. It is easier for we moderns to grasp cynical national motives so from our perspectives of realism we can grasp “hypocritical motives” and the need for “propagandistic narratives” — i.e. the mythological stories of America’s civil religion.
Now, you have to understand (as you visualize the Northern power), that the effort to remake the South was to a significant extent to destroy it. You can think of America’s more recent actions in say Iraq and Afghanistan to illustrate potentially this dynamic. And in this context you must understand “resistance” by the Southern population to this project of invasion and domination. It is not hard to understand that all peoples, under all circumstances, will always resist and oppose domination. In the context of the “reconstruction project” a will to resist reconstruction developed. Pathological to a degree, but certainly predictable and “all-too-human”.
Now, why go into all this? What possible reason? There are good reasons! To examine the fundamental currents that define America, these
explain America. You have to understand the motive behind the eventual creation of America as ‘multicultural nation’ under the aegis of a
driven Northern power-system. This is where Americanism develops a sharp pointedness and America shows itself as driven by the sword of assumed righteousness. Just as the conquest and domination of the South was early Northern America’s righteous project, but really a project of mixed motives, so must the evolution of the Northern power be understood.
Now, in our present, and developing as a corporate-governmental project defined by national corporatism in the 1980s and 1990s, America’s Multiculturalism project has matured to the point where alternatives are inconceivable. Any hesitation, any resistance, any doubt, is interpreted and defined not only as antidemocratic but as a manifestation of retrogressive evil. The State in this sense has defined Laws that oppose any objection to its “project”.
It is in this sense that Bowdens “grammar of self-intolerance” can better be understood. I did not say accepted (nor instituted) but only better understood.
