Anti-racism is thus an aspect of a pervasive social. cultural. and even conceptual transformation. It has come far and fast because of the rapid. Growth of the conditions upon which it depends. The most dramatic changes were in the ’60s. when the civil rights movement was felt to discredit existing society. But they had been long in preparation and have continued since. Public recognition of the transcendent has collapsed; in the United States courts even make it illegal.
The churches themselves have abandoned
Transcendence in favor of this-worldly concerns. first and foremost anti-racism. Cheap transportation and electronic communications have powerfully enhanced globalization. The enormous growth of government social expenditures since the. Second World War shows the centralization and bureaucratization of social life. Family forms and the relation between the sexes have become too indefinite for reliance. And children are now raised by a combination of electronic entertainment and government functionaries.
Each of us today is constantly confronted
Electronically and in print with a heterogeneous assortment of persons and things chosen by media functionaries. We look at things not from the standpoint of job function email list our own concrete experience or the historical experience of our people but from an artificial universal standpoint constructed by television. From that standpoint the articulated distinctions that constitute social order become a pointless jumble; in particular. the social functions of ethnicity vanish from sight. and it appears a source of conflict and chaos within a system functioning on wholly different principles.
The appearance is illusory since all
Societies depend on common delivering an authentic story to their audience email example understandings and moral habits that need the support of ethnicity. It is nonetheless fundamental to the view of things presented by those recognized as experts. whose concern is with rational central control. and by the mass media. whose flattening of all distinctions and variations would make any suggestion of ethnic hierarchy insupportably categorical. In a world that seems at once featureless and fragmented it appears necessary to impose a simple and uniform order by force. Anti-racism is one consequence.
It is flawed in principle. and to perfect it is to sms to data sharpen its contradictions to the point of incoherence. Some contradictions are obvious on the surface. Should a black person be treated as a black person or not? Both possibilities are thought racist. Other contradictions go deeper. The social rationalization of which anti-racism is a part destroys the prerational ties upon which social coherence and function depend.