rm ([personal profile] rm) wrote2009-03-31 10:26 am

"scarce" resources, college and sexism

And then there's this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/23britz.html

It's the sort of thing that makes it hard for me to imagine any world in which women, at least as a group, don't always lose.

via [livejournal.com profile] rackmount

Re: ...

[identity profile] springheel-jack.livejournal.com 2009-03-31 05:36 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, they didn't get flamed, but they certainly got disagreed-with. Perhaps that is a function of their tone - yours has been to advance loaded questions in the hopes of getting someone to overcommit, which is the kind of shabby gambit that draws fire. But that's as may be - I'm not the right person to ask about what other people said or didn't say, because I'm not those other people. (Relatedly - I'm not calling you dumb per se. I'm saying you're playing dumb, carefully avoiding saying what you really think, advancing fallacious questions and couching your own replies in weasel words, which is to say, conversing in bad faith.)

Regarding your second paragraph, I'm afraid the point you're making is not clear to me.

...

[identity profile] keith418.livejournal.com 2009-03-31 05:38 pm (UTC)(link)
I guess I'll have to live with that.

Re: ...

[identity profile] magnetgirl.livejournal.com 2009-04-01 10:01 pm (UTC)(link)
Just wanted to say-really well-stated throughout this thread. I need to learn to debate in this fashion!

Uphold The Market!

[identity profile] keith418.livejournal.com 2009-04-03 07:54 pm (UTC)(link)
"The central debates about race in America today are no longer debates between racism and antiracism. Rather, the debate today is between two kinds of antiracism. One, identified with multiculturalism and the left, urges us to respect and preserve the differences between blacks and whites and Native Americans and Jews and whomever. It gives poor people identities and, turning them into black people or Latinos or women, insists on regarding their problems as effects of discrimination and intolerance. The other, identified with the right, regards the respect for racial difference as itself a form of discrimination and insists that the only identity that matters (the one we should be respecting) is 'American identity.'


"The problem with this debate is that, from the standpoint of economic inequality, it doesn’t matter which side you’re on and it doesn’t matter who wins. Either way, economic inequality is absolutely untouched. The dream of a world free of prejudice, the dream of a world where identities (whether American of hyphenated American) are not discriminated against, is as foundational to the right as it is to the left. And the dream is completely compatible with (is, actually, essential to) the dream of a fully free and efficient market. Here's where the concept of neoliberalism - the idea of the free market as the essential mechanism of social justice - is genuinely clarifying. A society free not only of racism but of sexism and heterosexism is a neoliberal utopia where all the irrelevant grounds for inequality (your identity) have been eliminated and whatever inequalities are left are therefore legitimated. Thus, when it comes to antiracism, the left is more like a police force for, than an alternative to, the right. Its commitment to rooting out the residual prejudices that too many of us no doubt continue to harbor deep inside is a tacit commitment to the efficiency of the market. And it commitment to the idea that the victims of social injustice today are the victims of racism, sexism, and heterosexism (the victims of discrimination rather than exploitation, of intolerance rather than of oppression, or of oppression in the form of intolerance) is a commitment to the essential justice of the market. The preferred crimes of neoliberals are always hate crimes; when our favorite victims are the victims of prejudice, we are all neoliberals."

- Walter Benn Michaels