'Racist' America

Racism
For a while i've argued the term 'racism' is overused, and therefore trivialised. There are two levels of intergroup negativity that are not manifestations of racism:

1) Common prejudice. This is best defined as 'heterophobia'. It is the near universal tendancy for human societies to emotively fear strangers and foreigners.

2) The next stage of heterophobia is 'contestant enmity'. This in where heterophobic sentiment is rationalised.

Racism is when emotion and reason are combined into specific actions and practices. It is the creation of an artificial social order, ultimately by either attempting to remove the offending group from society, or exterminating them.

America
This year a book which shows the true meaning of racism, 'Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II', won the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction.

http://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385722702/ref=pe_37420_11885880_as_img_4/

This is an extraordinary book. It raises questions that apply not only to the period 1886 - 1950, but to present day America (see the very last quote below).

Here is a selection of comments and summaries from reviewers:

"Wall Street Journal bureau chief Blackmon gives a groundbreaking and disturbing account of a sordid chapter in American history—the lease (essentially the sale) of convicts to commercial interests between the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th. Usually, the criminal offense was loosely defined vagrancy or even changing employers without permission. The initial sentence was brutal enough; the actual penalty, reserved almost exclusively for black men, was a form of slavery in one of hundreds of forced labor camps operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small time entrepreneurs and provincial farmers."

"Using trumped up charges or minor charges with extreme penalties requiring extended jail or prison terms, blacks were incarcerated and their terms leased out to mines, farms, logging companies and a variety of industries. Due to the financial rewards gained by arresting Sheriffs, Judges and Justices of the Peace, blacks were rounded up many times on false charges to merely increase the earning of those involved. The saddest history is the extreme treatment given to prisoners leased out or whose fines were paid by the owners of industry or property who maintained the prisoners until there "time" was complete although often extended. Working in horrible conditions, long days, 6 days a week, poorly fed, poorly housed and often severely beaten; blacks died by the score and were buried in unmarked graves."

"Who won the Civil War? If you mean militarily, then of course there is no question but that the North won the war. However, if you mean who won the hearts, minds and souls of white America, then it is equally clear from the evidence that unfolded over the next one hundred years, that the winner was the South. For the North, "ending slavery" was just a pretext to gain control over the lucrative cotton markets and gain hegemony over the South, and do so at the time cotton drove the international economy in the same way that oil drives it today. However, it was the South that kept its eye on the ball. Unlike the North, the South was un-conflicted about the full meaning and importance of slavery: Southerners knew at a deep level that slavery was not only the lynch pen of the Southern way of life, it was the existential process that defined what it meant to be a white man in America. This author makes it as clear that since the South's victory, wherever the South goes, the North is sure and soon to follow."

"Immediately after the Civil War and up until about 1950, in most cities of the South, black men without jobs, could be capriciously swept off the streets and hauled into court, fined, and given lengthy jail sentences. Rules that required a prisoner to "work off his fine," meant that even light sentences often became in-determinant and thus unpredictably long ones. The same is true today, where the sentencing guidelines are used capriciously to mete out much harsher sentences to blacks than to white. For instance, in a sentencing guideline of 10 to life, evidence shows that whites overwhelmingly are released towards the lower end and blacks towards the higher end of these guidelines. As this book notes, by 1900, the South's judicial system had been completely reconfigured to make coercion of blacks comply with traditional American social rules all of which were forged in the 300 years of slavery."

"I would have been much happier if the author had made an attempt to show the "all but linear (and very stable) connection" across time between the arrest and incarceration rates then -- which in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama and Florida, constantly hovered around 25% -- and the almost exact NATIONAL rates today. This in my view (as well as that of a handful of sociologists) could not be only a mere coincident, but more likely due to deep structure social reasons and causes that did indeed grow out of America's culture of "structural racism," which inevitably, one way or another, gets mapped back to slavery."

Interesting, i think perhaps in places like NZ where the meaning of racism has been stretched a fair way it is easy to forget the degree to which true racism can go to.

Seems quite daunting reading that...

However while on topic, I also think the term "racism" has become an overused and loaded term. I tend to differentiate between cultural intolerance and racism. I think a lot of people merge the two together, when they can be mutually exclusive.