Actually, I think W.E.B. DuBois made the argument quite some time ago that the legacy of slavery was one of the primary reasons that socialism made so little headway in America.

Point of clarification - Thomas Frank wrote What's the Matter with Kansas and Larry Bartels wrote What's the Matter with What's the Matter with Kansas

Is your point that there is something particular about racism or would your point be true of any form of bigotry? If the latter where has there not been intense bigotry? For example the former Yugoslavia saw ethnic cleansing and violent division based on religion.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Krugman's right but he's wrong, because he's elevating a secondary cause to a primary one.

Racism is an aspect of the quest for male honor in an individualistic society whose male members cannot locate their status-striving in the acts of protecting and advancing large extended families -- that is, they're Americans, not Europeans.

In order for lower class males to achieve status in America, a status which could otherwise be proved by wealth, their societies must recognize them as situated above and rightfully ruling other people, namely, women and children, And because of our particular history of slavery, North and South, we can throw into the mix of those to be ruled, African-Americans.

Racism may be an expression of the demand for status, but it is the demand for status that is foremost. When the Democratic Party signaled its support for the rights of women, children, and blacks, it undermined the status of white working men. It "Stiffed" them.

In the end anti-Progressivism -- why America isn't Europe -- is bound up with the fear of loss of status.

But tacit appeals to racial politics – often taking the form of tall stories about welfare cheats, culminating in the Cadillac-driving welfare queen -- were, in fact, a staple of Reagan’s political career

It depends what you mean by economics. To briefly skim over the subject:

"Racism" is really just a form of tribalism which is for the most part a subset of economics. I realize I'm blurring traditional definitions a bit, but it's important to look past these superficial distinctions. A more meaningful distinction might be spiritual and material, with spiritualism roughly defined as the ability to cultivate happiness, and materialism defined as an essential means to that end.

Even going back to prehistoric man or ape ancestors, the tribe (or race or ethnicity or whatever) is essentially a group which shares genetic material, culture, and the ability to utilize resources, to procreate, thrive, and be happy. That is largely dependent on in the material sense such as resources, land, services, and cultural homogeneity for the most part useful towards the increased efficiency of above said material goals. Does that fall under the broad definition of economics? Of course.

The actual differences between what are traditionally considered economics and culture, or what could be considered the material vs the spiritual, or the external vs the internal , are subtle and often blurry.

Asceticism, which is specifically to forego material pleasure and cultivate inner joy is perhaps the only truly "spiritual" pursuit. and even then it's really just an internal calibration in regards to material needs.

Even compassion in a spiritual sense has an element of reciprocal altruism which raises group efficiency in materialistic regards and is thusly in part economic.

Racism is almost entirely a product of economics. When you ask a person what they dislike about another "race" it invariably gets down to tertiary economic considerations.

Lenin, thou shoulds't be living at this hour / kozmik hath need of thee.

Thank you Kozmik, you made my point.
Why Kozmik is not anti-semite, but Reagan is racist?

Wordworth didn't write of Lenin, and your misquote of him still isn't impressive. A child, or even a computer program designed to recycle quotations, could do the same.

Do you have anything intelligent to say, or are you just going to keep playing random word association?

davai --

Krugman didn't say Reagan was a racist -- and certainly, didn't say it in the words you quoted.

Krugman accused Reagan of playing the racial card, of being a race baiter.  While much of Reagan's race baiting was presented in code, most Americans have no trouble decoding the code.

If Reagan's to be accused of anything, it's that his lust for power overwhelmed his moral sense. 

Krugman just made a very important and nuanced post. Race and other divisive issues are like fault lines in social cohesion. Consequently race is a weak points anyone may attack if they seek to divide and conquer the opposition. Even if thier politcal goals and motivation actually have little or nothing to do with race.

Conservatives exploit race and cultural issues to indirectly attack economic policy. Social economic policy by nature requires cohesion, trust, and hope culturally. Race is the weak point to fracture and instill cynicism and mistrust.

Conservatives are against New Deal type reforms for purely economic reasons. They have long exploited race and other divisions for political gain. It's really the oldest dirty trick in the book: divide and conquer, and the dehumanization of one's political opponents.

In Europe race issues are currently being exploited for the same goals by economic conservatives. For example, take French Algerians, many of whom were promised citizenship in WWII by fighting for French Liberation. In fact, many were denied citizenship and/or pensions for military service, ghettoized, and treated as second class citizens. France made good in some regards, but also defaulted on many of their promises to Algerians, giving rise to the present problems.

There is much commonality with blacks in Ameirca after WWII coming home to a segregated society and second class status, after fighting and sacrificing for American values of liberty. A clear contradiction and betrayal.

On a side note, having said that, some cultural fault lines are so frail they don't even need conservatives to attack them before crumbling apart from their own weight. For example, take EJ Graff's plea for transgendered fashion acceptance in the workplace as an example of an issue which is inherently weak and divisive. It just saps the strength of popular movements towards equality and civil rights by muddying the waters and over reaching. Which ultimately helps the opponents of civil rights.

Another bizarre example is the manifest racism and imperial behavior of hardline conservative war mongering Jews, people like Podhoretz. He's an amoral imperialist, to the bone, if ever there was one. Yet, he shamelessly exploits the holocaust and the victimization of Jews to rationalize the ghetto of Palestine and seizure of lands. His real motivation is just good old greed and cruelty, and he's so cynical he shamelessly exploits Jewish victimization and promotes anti-Arabic antisemitism at the same time.

Did Reagan ever talk of the white welfare queen?
Did Reagan ever talk of the Black welfare queen?
Are you saying that nobody ever cheat on welfare benefits?

You are confusing the social basis for racism with its use in politics by politicians to get out the vote.

To this very day the most powerful political threat in the South is the fear of a slave revolt. That long ago was attached to the race and the dark skin of the slaves, and with the end of slavery the political threat carried over to the free negroes (thus segregation) and continues to be the strongest reason for hatred of Southern poor people (because most white Southerners assume that African-American and poor are the same people.

Welfare is considered support to lazy shiftless Black people and something the deciding block of voters will not vote for. Don't forget, the largest Church denomination in the South is the Southern Baptist Convention. They did not admit that slavery was wrong until sometime in the last twenty years. The Bible justified slavery, and that made it right. That's not tribalism. That's racism.

All of your discussion of the sociology of racism does not trump the history of the fear of a slave revolt. Politically it is not about social status. It is fear of the negro.

Krugman has it right.

Aren't both the Jews and the Arabs considered Semites?

Sorry, Paul Krugman.

"I'm arguing that if he is racist than you, W/M and many more people are antisemites."Did you flunk Logic 101?

No kidding. Davai is synonymous with non-sequitur and logical fallacy. I'm concerned he may go into seizures if we continue.

It's also rather pathetic SPHealy is uprating that goof simply because he doesn't like me. Geeze. Lemmings, birds of a feather, inbreeding, and darwin awards, all come to mind for some reason...

I love humanity. That doesn't imply I have great affection for unreasonable arguments and your childish behavior, including that last post.

You, as an individual, are moronic at least in relation to your views stated here. I leave open the possibility you may do wonderful deeds elsewhere I'm unaware of and can't speak to. But here, your arguments, they are moronic in their childlike simplicity, irrationality, and zealous identity politics.

I love humanity

I think he's referring specifically to fundamentalist wingnuts. Obviously not all evangelicals, which includes a lot of Protestants and even some Catholics, are wingnuts.

Also, it's in part the burden of the quiet, modest, virtuous, dignified, and sane Christians to reclaim the title. while it may go against their nature to some extent, necessity requires they remind people, in words and deeds, of their existence and that Christendom hasn't been overrun with paint chip eating fundamentalist wackos. Because, from a standpoint of power and influence, it looks that way sometimes.

People have to take responsibility for their own to an extent.

Since when did you qualify to speak for "most American Jews?"

Even TPMC has many Jewish contributors whose opinions are in direct contradiction to your ignorant wingnuttery. Guys like Podhoretz are on the outs with everyone, including Jews.

I agree with the last paragraph. The abyss calls out to the abyss.

I'm not only speak for huge majority of American Jews I'm also speak for huge majority of Americans. There is no Presidential candidate in this race who reflects your views.

Re: It has been my experience that there is a very high correlation between the level of "piety" in religious folks -- Catholics in particular -- and their Wingnuttiess.

I would amend this in a very important way: it isn't the truly pious who are nutty-- it's those who want to appear to be truly pious, who wear their religion on their sleeve to show it off to the all the world. The exact same mindset Jesus condemned so harshly in the Pharisees, who were the "Religious Right" of his day. Truly pious people generally do not make a parade of their piety, they simply live it, not show it off.

The long time fear of a slave revolt in the South caused the institutionalization of fear of Black people. For example, there is a reason why the South has the most pro-military culture in the nation. That's because every college in the South included military training for young men as part of its curriculum. Why? Fear of the slave revolt.

Everyone knew the slave revolt could happen. It had happened in Haiti in 1791.

When slavery was effectively eliminated in 1865 the legal status of "slave" was eliminated, but the culture that had grown up around the traditions of slavery was not. It didn't take long after the end of Reconstruction for the new methods (see my earlier message) of repression to be put into place. Slavery had ended, but the fear had not.

It is those post-slavery methods of social, legal and terroristic repression the we call racism, and as the experiences in the town of Jena, LA have shown very recently, the remnants of those traditions of repression remain with us yet. They are based in the fear of a slave revolt that began with the introduction of Black slaves into the Southern U.S., and they have long outlasted the actual institution of slavery itself.

I should think this is obvious to every thinking American, but I guess it isn't discussed in detail much. That, and a lot of Americans simply don't want to face the blot of slavery and racism on American history. It certainly must cause a lot of cognitive dissonance to those who believe in American Exceptionalism.

Most of what you wrote is correct (meaning that I agree) but racism in America seems to be different from straight tribalism.

Racism did not create slavery, instead slavery created racism. The ability of the African slaves to survive the diseases the Europeans conquerers brought from the old world let the Africans live and work the fields in the lands surrounding the Caribbean. That created slavery. That also created the triangular trade route. So why were Africans better slaves than the natives?

West Africans had had long association with Europeans and were immune to most of the diseases that were killing off the natives in the Caribbean. So the Blacks made much better slaves than did the natives. At the same time, the sugar crop from the Caribbean was becoming the first great trade product, one that would lead to the industrial revolution.

Those Caribbean slaves - identified by their skin color - were assigned the lowest social class. In the 15th century in Portugal, where African slaves were imported to grow sugar, there was no skin-color barrier to prevent them from assimilating with the Portuguese, so that the Portuguese are estimated now to be about 40% of African descent. That's what happens in the absence of racism.

[I find it interesting that the African slaves were dehumanized by the Caribbean sugar trade much as the industrial workers were later dehumanized by the Factory system of the Industrial Revolution. Mass standardized products controlled by a plantation owner or a factory owner created mass standardized (another term for dehumanized) pools of labor. Why did this not happen to the African slaves in Portugal? My bet is that the absence of long distance shipping to move the labor to the fields and the crops to the markets has a lot to do with it.]

In the Caribbean, the fear of slave revolts became associated with the fear of skin which was colored Black. That led to the repression of those with Black skins.

Even after slavery ended that repression with its associated ghettoization continued. It was accompanied by restrictions on job and education opportunities (because the fear of Blacks revolting never went away), which in turn created a lower class of Black skinned people who were looked down on because of the color of their skin. The judgment that they were inferior was justified by their poverty and lack of education.

The elimination of their status as slaves (in which they were property owned by a person) did not remove the stigma of the Black skin and their language differences, poverty, and lack of education. The category of slave was eliminated, but the racism that slavery had created remains.

The frightening Black-skinned people were repressed after slavery by a combination of segregation laws, laws preventing them from getting government jobs above janitor, failure to fund Black schools adequately, the social refusal to grant employment other than menial labor, and voter repression. When these were threatened by an occasional brave soul, the powers that be used either police repression or KKK type terrorism to keep them under control. All of these remained until the 1960's and 1970's, and the terrorism and police repression still happen. That's racism.

That was not tribalism. Tribalism is what the Irish, German, Czech, Polish and Italian immigrants faced when they came to the U.S. Once they learned Midwestern English and attended Harvard, they were Americans just like the rest of us.

The difference is that African-Americans were determined to be inferior because of the color of their skins. Their language differences, poverty and separation all demonstrated the "truth" of that inferiority. So it was perfectly proper to keep them ghettoized, away from the better funded public schools with good teachers, and it was proper to limit the jobs they could even apply for. In addition, even successful Blacks were steered away from buying property in good neighborhoods (which, since the schools are funded by property taxes, had the good schools) and they were even steered to ghettoized rental properties. Still are, based on recent research into rental practices.

The Irish back east climbed out of the immigrant status by becoming cops and firemen. Blacks, because of their skin color, were forbidden to even apply for those jobs.

The restrictions applied to Black people created less successful people, and that lack of success was used to justify not allowing people with Black skin to even try the jobs that would let them improve themselves. That's not tribalism. That's racism.

And it is unique to America. It should be no surprise that the South Africans adopted the South Carolina segregation laws in the late 1940's when they were crafting Apartheid. South Africa consists of thirteen different major tribes, two of which (Boer and English) are white. Apartheid, however, was based on skin color. That's racism, and they learned how to do it from America who was the leader in the field.

And the real proof that it is racism is that those whose skin was light enough to pass for White simply blended into American society so that we have for the most part never known who they were.

True, and those are good examples. Though you could find similar progressions throughout history so I don't think they're so unique.

Also, to be fair and not cast things in black and white (glass houses and all that) the North also looted the hell out of the South after the civil war with the carpet baggers and all. And the North was hardly motivated by pure altruism.

The North was a post agrarian society that could well afford to move past simple agrarian forced labor, (and many would say institute more sinister means of economic servitude by financial means) and it also stood to profit greatly by the economic upheaval an emancipation would bring to the South.

One can argue the more enlightened and industrial North deserved to profit at the loss of the more backwards South... however, then you're essentially endorsing predatory behavior on a mass scale, which kind of ruins the whole moral argument.

A more ideal solution would have avoided war if possible, and certainly not loot the South, which also hurt blacks.

If possible it would have been better to end slavery by accelerating Southern development to the point where it was no longer viable, and letting Southerners abandon it willingly. Afterall, the British and French did so with much less strife. And some say the South was closer than many people realize.

But, ancient history and all. Ending Apartheid in South Africa was handled much better.

"Most of the public has no idea who Podhoretz is."I remember him well from the Vietnam era. His views were moronic then also.

As usual, I mostly agree with you in what you write. Reconstruction was to a great extent a Yankee post-battle looting party, and slavery certainly could have been ended without a civil war. It probably would have been, but few people even recognized the characteristics of the Industrial Revolution that were occurring around them, let alone understood them well enough to be able to sit back and say "Hey! A slave work force is just flat uneconomic. It will disappear soon because of the inevitable laws of Economics" [Note - I use that phrase more as a joke than anything else. Inevitable is not a word sensibly used in historical processes, and economic processes where it might seem reasonable will inevitably be swamped by history.]

My focus was on the unique characteristics of American racism. I think that American racism IS unique, in that the social attitudes and the mechanisms behind those attitudes are direct outgrowths of the strange European expansion over the last 500 years, and the accompanying development of the industrial revolution.

The two things are closely linked. The small group of northern European maritime cultures, existing in geography too broken up by water to be centrally controlled by a land power, developed sailing vessels and guns and trade organizations which drove them out to sea in a paroxysm of trade, piracy, exploration and ultimately conquest in a manner never before seen in history.

As part of the exploration and conquest, they created markets that demanded mass produced goods, of which sugar was the first. Since the North American natives died off from the diseases brought with the conquerors, they had to bring in a labor force, so they modified the old slave traditions. Slaves were previously used as servants or, in the case of the Janissaries, as soldiers. As servants they were treated much like family. There was, however, the tradition of using galley slaves, generally as punishment.

It was the use of slaves as agricultural labor under galley slave conditions on mass farms designed to produce for distant markets which was unusual about north American slavery.

At first it probably wasn't much different from serfdom as agricultural labor, but feudal masters encouraged the serfs to raise families. Slavery turned the people into a commodity like cattle. I would imagine that to make a business out of selecting, buy, breeding, and selling people recognized as human beings would be a lot harder if you considered them human beings. So the slaves were dehumanized.

Since the labor they performed was stoop agricultural labor under conditions that severely shortened their lives to produce a product for a distant market, they were not permitted to form self-regulating communities as serfs were.

Then, as I have discussed earlier, they were always considered enemies who were likely to revolt if given the slightest opportunity. The negative power of this belief is seen every day as we read how dangerous the Muslims are, and how they should be deported because of their religion. We can recognize a persons religion from the symbols and clothing they wear, but how much worse is this attitude when we can recognize a slave by the (unchangeable) color of his skin?

Then compound this attitude with the fact that their labor creates your business. They are an every day threat, and not just a threat but a dehumanized threat, living right next to you, on whom you depend for literally everything. You have to have them, and you're scared to death of them. Clearly control and segregations become the top issues to deal with.

Then you have these dehumanized people - these slaves - in a mercantile society in which status is largely based on how much money you have. As you look around you, you see white skinned people with money, and black-skinned people who are property themselves, so that they have no money. The society is run primarily by wealthy merchants who need their captive labor force,so they offer very few ways to a slave to buy his way out of slavery.

I think this was a unique experiment in history. Some of the characteristics of North American slavery can be found in almost all pre-industrial societies, but the interaction of slavery with a developing market-based society did create something different. It created a society in which the blacker your skin is, the less socially acceptable you are, no matter what else you have to offer. It also created a society in which it is considered important to protect society from the constant threat of Black people, so they are repressed.

We are coming out of this. But it is a slow process. Like all social progress, conservatives will fight it all the way. That's because, by definition, a conservative is one who refuses to accept social change.

To play with your metaphor a little, I think you have the wrong patch of woods. There are large elements of tribalism in racism, but the thing that makes the racism in America distinct is the way African slavery was associated with the rather startling and strange expansion of Europeans out of Europe onto the world stage, where they conquered the seas and created the world's first long-distance mass markets.

Before I explain, first I disagree that race is an arbitrary construct. I think the term you mean is irrelevant. Race itself is clearly something real. It is neither nonexistent, nor is it something which is assigned to a person using some arbitrary algorithm like a throw of the dice. But it is real but it is still nothing more than skin color, probably evolved for proper creation of Vitamin D, and abandoned by evolutionary forces for tribes of humans who moved north into Europe and Asia 50,000 to 40,000 years ago.

But the possession of black skin has been assigned a large number of meanings that are not, in reality, connected to it. Skin color does not connect to superiority or inferiority as a human being or in ability to think and learn, or to criminality or violence, or to develop extended and powerful societies. Racism is the assumption that skin color indicates that a person has those negative characteristics.

Tribalism also can be used to predict negative characteristics, but socially individuals can be allowed to join another tribe and become "one of us." In America immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Poland and a number of other nations were discriminated against on a tribal basis. But America is probably the first society in which social class depends on income rather then the reverse, and in which the middle class (so indicated by income) is the dominant class.

What I have tried to describe elsewhere is a society in which the assumption that a person with dark skin is likely to be inferior, uneducated and violent has been used to justify repressive social and legal practices which restrict people with black skins to the lower, non-middle class status. Then the fact that most Black skinned people remain in the lower class without achieving middle class status is used as a justification for the very repressive methods which keep them there. That is racism, not tribalism.

The distinction between this form of discrimination and straight up tribalism has been caused, as I mentioned, by the expansion of the Europeans out of Europe into control of all the worlds oceans. Along with this came the world's first international mass markets - sugar from the Caribbean first followed by cotton and tea from Asia.

Those new mass markets (and the unique organizational and financial adaptations they caused) created a demand for large amounts of unskilled labor in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, the diseases the Europeans brought to the new world tended to kill off the native potential workers. I haven't seen it written anywhere, but I feel reasonably certain that the Portuguese colonies on the West coast of Africa and the Arab caravans across the Sahara would have brought the diseases from Europe that the New World natives had no defenses to. So the Africans were an much better labor force than the natives.

Slavery has existed as long as humans have. But generally it was either a punishment for criminal activity or it was the result of being on the losing side of a war. The kinds of repression techniques used on African slaves in the Caribbean basin were not organized on a mass scale. That's why the African slaves imported by the Portuguese during the 15th century as sugar cane labor were assimilated into Portuguese society so that now it is estimated that about the Portuguese are about 40% African descent. Those slaves became part of the Portuguese tribe. What was different about the slaves in the Caribbean basin?

The answer is pre-industrialism and the industrial age. The mass market for sugar demanded factory sugar farms, so the labor force was treated a lot like factory workers. They were dehumanized, repressed, and since the farm owners needed their labor (there was a high death rate) they were given few ways to leave their slave status, either them or their children.

Caribbean agricultural slavery was different from feudal serfdom. Serfs were legally tied to their land, but they were allowed their own families and their own communities. They also did not have the very dehumanizing experience of the Middle Passage, the slave markets, or the breeding pens. Nor were slaves normally treated legally as property, like cattle. Traditionally slaves and serfs had some protections from mistreatment under the law.

In Caribbean slavery, the slave plantation owners WERE the law, and (particularly after a few slave revolts like the one in Haiti in 1791) the slaves had no rights at all. To prevent slave revolts, the Caribbean slaves were not allowed to create any community of their own, or even to establish their own families without owner control. That, and the dehumanization that accompanied their history and their legal classification as property rather than as human beings, together with the absolute need the owners had for the slave workforce, mean that the most repressive possible techniques were used to hold these slaves down.

Has there ever been a regime of total repression for as large a group of easily identified people ever before in world history? I doubt it. And it wasn't tribalism. It was mass market demand for sugar and later cotton that perpetuated this regime for so long. It became a social system, exactly like factory work became a social system when the true Industrial Age developed.

But unlike the oppressed factory workers, the slaves carried a badge that showed their slave status everywhere they went. That badge is the black skin. When the legal status of slaves was changed from property to human beings, the institutions of repression and the fear of people with Black skin long outlasted the mere change in legal status to human being. People with black skins may have been deemed human, but their black skins indicated that they were inferior, violent and just barely human. So a whole new regime of repressive techniques were developed. Those included segregation, legal restrictions against getting middle class government jobs, social restrictions against being hired for middle class jobs, and voter repression. These legal restrictions were accompanied by poorly funded schools (why waste good white tax money teaching inferior human beings) and legal restrictions against going to white schools. For the "uppity" Negroes who tried to rise out of their class, there was always the KKK to practice the repressive terror tactics they were so good at.

Today racism is not a tribal issue. It is a social class issue. Middle class people are known for their greater education and for their reliability. They live in a society in which violence and theft are severely frowned upon, and the police are there to prevent or punish violence and to protect the life and property of the middle class and the wealthy from the lower class.

Those same police are also there to repress the violent tendencies assumed to exist in people with Black skins. They have the same beliefs about the likelihood of violence, criminal behavior and general unreliability from Black skinned people as the rest of American society does. Even the Black cops do. Perhaps you have heard of the "paper bag" test? Among many Blacks, a Black person whose skin is lighter than the color of a grocery store paper bag has higher status than one whose skin is darker than that. That's not tribalism. It's racism.

I could go into the different ways the criminal justice system treats black and white teenagers, both of whom are not yet trained to assimilate into the middle class. It is documented that the schools punish black teenagers harder than white ones.

See the story of the black girl in Paris, TX who shoved a hall monitor and was sent to juvenile court where she was sent to juvenile jail for the six years until she reached age 18. White kids are handled informally at the school. Or the entire Jena, LA situation where justice for Black kids in harsher than that for White kids. Or the disparity in mandatory sentences between possession of Powder cocaine, a white drug, and crack cocaine, a Black drug. White teenagers who get into trouble (and all teenagers do) are handled informally. Black teenagers are handled formally for the same offenses. Then if either kid has a run-in with the law, the DA will look at the records. White kid - no record of infractions. Black kid - problems on the record. So the DA goes for a felony for the Black kid and for lower level for the White kid. Then the judge looks at the same records and gives the Black kid a longer sentence than the white kid. These distinctions are documented, and I am sure that Jeralyn Merrit over at TalkLeft could direct you to the studies. That set of distinctions based on the widely accepted social assumptions of what a person's black skin means is a distinction based on race, not tribalism.

My point is that tribalism can be overcome by individuals, or at least by families, and the different "tribes" assimilated into a single tribe. All it takes is cultural assimilation. But when the separation is tied to skin color rather than to cultural symbols, then the groups have a much harder time assimilating into one group. Racism is a set of assumptions that our society has about people with Black skins, and since so many (White and Black) in society act on those assumptions, they often become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Those distinctions are racist rather than being tribalism, and the form of racism here in America is unique because of the way Europe colonized the Americas and because of the interactions of race-based slavery with Mercantilism and the Industrial Revolution.

The Irish tribe and the Italian tribes were each assimilated in about two or three generations, so that we have had two Presidents of Irish descent, and now have a credible candidate who is clearly Italian (if the Italians will claim him.) We have passed three hundred years with the Africans and are still having problems getting the two tribes assimilated. But so many fewer problems than we had just sixty years ago. That's a lot of progress. But racism appears to be a harder nut to crack than tribalism is.

Have you talked to Krugman and Speilberg?

Yes, but you;re not most folks. ;) My point remains that most people have never heard of him.

The fact is their political opinions are a lot closer grouped than you are to any of them. If their views are grouped like our solar system, your views are somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy.

Einstein, MJ, Speilberg, and Josh (among countless other Jews) are all against the militancy you advocate. They're all against your sort of hardliner support for Israeli military action, settlement expansions, collective punishment of Palestinians and Syrians, etc. All them them support Israel only conditionally, including it's right to exist, but not to behave in many of the ways it does.

For example, Israel's recent incursion into Lebbanon by war mongers, wasn't popular even in Israel. Aggression against Iran is unpopular in Israel. The kooks in the settlements are unpopular in Israel.

I know you've been brainwashed to think you're representative of a large number of Jews and that your whole world view rests on that assumption. Unfortunately, the facts say otherwise.

You are in fact a small militant fringe. A small fringe even among Jews.

And as Berkowitz points out, you're also a fraud and coward who is actually an Israeli ex-pat with a compulsive need to compensate by armchair quarterbacking your extreme militarism, to a degree which isn't even popular in Israel.

Riiight. Give it a rest Davai. Take some laps around the basement to get the blood flowing.

Kozmik, don't be a sore loser. If you have no response, don't respond.

Inevitable is not a word sensibly used in historical processes

Quite the opposite.

In fact, should we ever meet aliens from another planet, if their planet is much like ours, their history will be much like ours as well. Barring externalities like meteoroid impacts, it's all been inevitable.

Again, you're really missing the big picture.

We've evolved to move into different niches and exploit new opportunities dictated by natural law and the environment. We're still following the same rules as microbes, whether we realize it or not. Including our most spiritual traits like empathy and altruism. Those are just smart survival strategies for smart critters.

When the first cells of life emerged it was inevitable (barring some wholly external catastrophe like a meteorite impact) that some would start consuming others and you'd have the first predators.

It was inevitable that some would form multicellular organisms if life continued to thrive.

It was inevitable they would compete for scarce resources.

It was inevitable that some creatures would take root and harvest the sun for energy, that some would be mobile and eat the plants, that others would eat the creatures who eat the plants, some would burrow and some climb and some fly to exploit different niches. It's inevitable some creatures would develop intelligence and technology.

It was inevitable some of those intelligent multicellular creatures would form small tribe groups like wolf packs, and gradually those tribes would grow into political "bodies" of nations, and those bodies would compete, and inevitably some would "eat" each other in war and slavery and genocide.

It was inevitable as we eventually gained the technology and capability to form a larger and more efficient political "body" and stop literally killing and eating each other (which is relatively terribly inefficient) and replace that with abstract systems of rules (morality) specialization (sub-tribes) and abstract competition such as markets, sports, dating, SAT scores, etc (good old natural selection.)

And so on.

Slavery was no less inevitable than predatory animals. They're the same. That's all slavery is: a smart social animal's form of predation. That's why every culture has "invented" it at some point.

Similarly, it was inevitable that indentured people of European decent would be assimilated before people of African decent. They were already half way in the tribe to begin with.

Similarly, it's inevitable that as American blacks assimilate more, those who thrive on tribalism, such as predatory minded reactionaries (colonials, imperialists, etc), will seek out new enemies to justify aggression against them and exploit them and their resources. Presently the reactionaries have Hispanics, Arabs, and poor Asians queued up.

And it's inevitable that some less intelligent people will take the approach "better them than I" while others will realize the foolishness of it all, and gradually we'll all shift to the latter.

It's all inevitable on the large scale barring some catastrophe, like a meteoroid impact or nuclear war. Our entire evolution is an inevitable fractal in nature. It's all a big Kabuki really, and we all just have to play our part.

And it's inevitable some people will find that horrific, because some people, whether predatory or altruistic, have inherited those traits biologically or through early social imprinting, so those issues appear outside reason, and even mystical to them.

Specially, if it's far away place 10 miles from the capital.

But even the tacit appeals to race are losing their effectiveness. And that’s why I think the movement conservative era is just about over.

There's still one area where segregationist attitudes continue well-entrenched: education. Hence, appeals so based will continue to be effective.

But it's not entirely a conservative issue, it seems that few liberals are willing to fight for integrated education anymore, despite much evidence to it's effectiveness.

A suggestion: anyone who wants to understand the legacy of segregation and who has not read "Caste and Class in a Southern Town" should do so.