Re: Staggering Death rate for black pregnant women

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Andy wrote:
>>What's not so easy is figure out why people like you, Wojtek, are bent on
>>denying reality. Denying a reality contributes to perpetuating that
>>reality--a reality that is as much about privilege as it is about
>>disadvantage. I used to be at a complete loss as to how you could
>>completely miss the racial stratification the United States. I understood
>>then that your extreme subjectivism served as a philosophical blinder
>>preventing your from seeing structure. You are, after all, a pretty clever
>>idealist. But then you turn around and contradict your social
>>constructionism by noting class stratification in terms seemingly grasping
>>of its proper ontological status. Now I am not so sure of your idealism.
>>You cherry pick your ontologies too obviously these days; the
>>inconsistency is revealing. Increasingly I believe you *do* see the deep
>>racial stratification of our society, but deny it for ideological
>>purposes.
>>
>>So what's your game, man? What's the motive?

You know, Andy -- Wojtek doesn't care, one way or another, about a proper
way of locating racism in scientific social analysis.  His interest lies in
rehabilitating economism plain and simple, for which purpose he may, as you
note, argue from whatever view of reality if it suits him (i.e. to define
racism out of existence or significance).  I feel it perfectly fine that
Wojtek (as an individual) subscribes to the Debs-like economism.

Mark Pittenger wrote in _American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought,
1870-1920_ (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993):

*****  Debs dismissed the Negro question as one more facet of working-class
exploitation: "The class struggle is colorless...We have nothing special to
offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races."
(179)   *****

Wojtek just needs to go ahead and say so.

In any case, what he says hardly matters, to us or to anyone (black, white,
yellow, red, rainbow).  He's just a liberal professor who seldom gets off
his ass (exactly that favorite put-down of his), and it's a good thing too
that he is (for otherwise he might do some damage to the Left).

Yoshie