When people, whether black or white, say that assimilation and integration are ideal approaches to ameliorating or ending racism, what do they mean by assimilation and integration?
Do they mean that white individual will abandon white values and beliefs and join black culture and society? Of course not. They mean that black individuals will reject black values and beliefs and join with white culture and society.
Why does assimilation and integration run in this direction and not the other? The answer to this we're all supposed to know without being told: that white society is the normative, indeed superior cultural and societal order. Black cultural values and beliefs and societal practices are manifestly inferior. One merely needs to observe the way black people - with a few exceptions, of course - live and behave. Whites have so much and blacks have so little. That proves the former is better than the latter.
Thus it follows that black individuals, in order to live a good and decent life, must give up their culture and social ways to fit with the values and normative expectations of white culture and society. The goal is an ostensibly colorblind society wherein all nonwhites become white, not a raceless society where whiteness has been abolished. In other words, it is self-evident that white culture and society are functional and normal, whereas black culture and society is dysfunctional and abnormal, therefore the former must cancel out the latter.
But is this claim - that white culture is superior to black culture - really true? Who attempted to exterminate the native populations of North America and rounded up the survivors and interred them on reservations? Who enslaved Africans and built a civilization on their backs? Who lynched black people? Who established apartheid and herded blacks into ghettos? Who builds the prisons that house a disproportionate number of blacks? Who writes the laws that target blacks?
The black man who advocates assimilation and integration, who wants to live in the white community, says that he wants to be judged as an individual, that his race doesn't matter. But blacks will never be white for the simple fact that white society emerged from the context of domination and oppression of black and other darker-skinned minorities. Blacks will therefore always be subordinated to the norms and ideals of whiteness.
Blacks and whites can truly only live in the context of a nonracist society when whiteness is abolished, when neither blacks nor whites live according to the norms and values of white society. It means that the history of white people has to be devalued and the alleged goodness and rightness of that history rejected. Whites have to be race traitors.
Do they mean that white individual will abandon white values and beliefs and join black culture and society? Of course not. They mean that black individuals will reject black values and beliefs and join with white culture and society.
Why does assimilation and integration run in this direction and not the other? The answer to this we're all supposed to know without being told: that white society is the normative, indeed superior cultural and societal order. Black cultural values and beliefs and societal practices are manifestly inferior. One merely needs to observe the way black people - with a few exceptions, of course - live and behave. Whites have so much and blacks have so little. That proves the former is better than the latter.
Thus it follows that black individuals, in order to live a good and decent life, must give up their culture and social ways to fit with the values and normative expectations of white culture and society. The goal is an ostensibly colorblind society wherein all nonwhites become white, not a raceless society where whiteness has been abolished. In other words, it is self-evident that white culture and society are functional and normal, whereas black culture and society is dysfunctional and abnormal, therefore the former must cancel out the latter.
But is this claim - that white culture is superior to black culture - really true? Who attempted to exterminate the native populations of North America and rounded up the survivors and interred them on reservations? Who enslaved Africans and built a civilization on their backs? Who lynched black people? Who established apartheid and herded blacks into ghettos? Who builds the prisons that house a disproportionate number of blacks? Who writes the laws that target blacks?
The black man who advocates assimilation and integration, who wants to live in the white community, says that he wants to be judged as an individual, that his race doesn't matter. But blacks will never be white for the simple fact that white society emerged from the context of domination and oppression of black and other darker-skinned minorities. Blacks will therefore always be subordinated to the norms and ideals of whiteness.
Blacks and whites can truly only live in the context of a nonracist society when whiteness is abolished, when neither blacks nor whites live according to the norms and values of white society. It means that the history of white people has to be devalued and the alleged goodness and rightness of that history rejected. Whites have to be race traitors.
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