I can see my writing abilities are going to be stretched thin in the coming weeks and months…

In England it’s a lot like you mention, Melissa. It’s the white ‘chavs’ that are generally considered a blight upon society. Obviously, due to our ‘melting pot’ type culture, racism is very rare here — we’re more objective. We don’t care much about colour or nationality, but more about what damages society more — which is often the white yobs knifing old ladies and the like.

I think the problem is that it’s such a stickler, such a pivotal part of Western culture. As long as there’s one old guy hanging on to the ‘old world ideals’ of subjugated races, racism will continue. As long as there’s always someone to point their finger at you and call you a racist (for avoiding the 200lb black guy), racism will perpetuate.

It’s a tricky one…

Eleni: I’m not trying to say that Jefferson was doing any more than continuing what was obviously ‘contemporary culture’. But how else can these things change?

Imagine if he’d said ‘no! Black people will have the same rights as us!’ back then, as he drafted the Declaration. What do you think the world would be like today?

Same way someone decided blacks were akin to apes, it only really takes 1 or 2 key players to change the flow in the other direction. Now it’s so damn systemic that I don’t know how we can kick it. It would be like trying to get rid of religion, or money.

BUT if I’m doing that in response to someone who’s not white, it’s racist. WTF? It’s not, it’s size-ist. It’s racist of you to assume I’m being racist! Trust me, I grew up in an area where the white teens were very much the ones you wanted to avoid.

Also, I have to object to the idea that all the differences between people should be ignored, or pretended not to exist. As a boring vanilla-white American, I have always been jealous of the interesting cultural tidbits that other people get, and I don’t! As long as everyone has equality in the form of their opportunities and social jumping-off points, I’d rather we preserve the interesting differences. Down with homogeneity!

Of course, I can only say this because I have documented African, Native American, and Irish ancestors, each from the timeframes when they were decidedly uncool to hang out with. So I’m, like, a triple-persecuted minority myself.

Now, about the Declaration of Independence… Yes, Thomas Jefferson was a racist. I have little doubt that he had only white men in mind when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. But where in the Declaration of Independence are there words that suggest racism? I can glean sexism from the text (”all men are created equal”), but you need to understand the social order at the time and how that makes the words in the document hypocritical in order to find racism. If there is nothing inherently suggestive of white superiority in the text, how can you say the document is responsible for the beginnings of white supremacy? As you recognize, Thomas Jefferson didn’t come up with the idea himself; the ideas of white superiority were already well developed at the time. I would say that white supremacy had its roots reaching back at least to the time of the Conquistadors, when the Europeans were so successfully conquering and subjugating the rest of the world, they couldn’t help but conclude they must be better in some way. In any case, if the Declaration of Independence doesn’t preach white supremacy, and if those ideas were already well established at the time, I don’t see how you can make an argument that the Declaration of Independence is responsible for people of white skin being at the top of the food chain. Not unless the Declaration cites Dr. White.

If you want to blame white supremacy on America’s founding fathers, at least look at the Three-fifths compromise or something. Or find some way to make your argument make sense. Sorry if I have misunderstood you (though not so sorry if your writing was unclear enough that I misunderstood you

But there must be a reason we do it. It’s no good just observing that we do it… and that we must stop. We’ve known that for a long while now.

There are lots of little changes being made. Lots of people try to live their lives as ‘unracistly’ as they can. But is that enough? I suppose not.

I don’t think, though, that we need another Enlightenment– a titlot of good the first one did us– I think we need billions and trillions of little enlightenments. Mark Twain once said that change occurs at the edges, in the thousands of little interactions we have every day– with the teacher, the dentist, the cop, the neighbor– the head nods or the smiles, real or faux, effortless or forced, in the way in which we choose to treat all living beings around us. Because, really, it is a choice, a choice that we make a thousand times a day, and we are responsible for racism, you and me, through the choices that we make. Goddamn Newton and Jefferson and Washington and Lord fucking Nelson– we are responsible, and we must therefore be responsible, inwardly, for its own little destruction inside us, every moment of every day.

Tricky, eh?

All we can do is look to history, before the problem of racial prejudice existed (well, in the serious form that it takes today). Once upon a time race didn’t really matter. There were cultural reasons for not marrying outside your tribe — distance, language, etc — but it was never monstrous like it is in some parts of the world today.

Something changed, around 500 years ago. I haven’t researched the Far East, so I don’t know if they’ve always been that bigoted or if it’s something that appeared roughly the same time as the West.