Mr. Carp,
You say, “I don’t believe that my Wespeak exuded hatred.” For your sake, I want to believe you. Perhaps popular culture has brainwashed you, or perhaps you mean well but express yourself very poorly. However, your circumstances and intentions don’t matter insofar as you have published words for general consumption; your Wespeaks reveal and propound an extensive, self-rationalized racist ideology. As a young person looking with some uncertainty toward the future of human society, I am deeply frightened by your hatred. I proceed, however, from the hope that you do not know how fundamentally this hatred undergirds your speech; I point out a few examples to you now for your benefit.
In the first paragraph of your defense in Friday’s issue, you defend your generalization that “many, many, MANY” Muslims are radicals by equating the generalization about Muslims with the generalization “Wesleyan students are liberal.” In other words, we should accept your generalization because it covers most cases. Similarly, you deny that your generalization applies to “ALL Muslims” or to “every Muslim;” implying “most Muslims” and “many Muslims.” You have accused the majority of Muslims of being terrorists! Do you understand how vast and varied a group of peoples you’ve condemned? And how very, very, VERY few of their members engage in terrorist activity? The magnitude of your exaggeration here represents nothing short of a willful disavowal of reality.
In your second paragraph, you define racism as “the belief that one’s inherent worth and value comes [sic] solely from the color in one’s skin,” and then you use ‘racism’ and ‘prejudice’ interchangeably. Allow me to disillusion you: prejudice is personal intolerance, whereas racism is subscription by members of the dominant society (in our society, Whites) to a system of racial stratification and subordination that invokes biology to justify its existence. In our time, this has meant—and continues to mean—that Whites racialize peoples of color as Other and disenfranchise them, while pretending that the subordinate peoples are naturally so. In other words, although racism can be expressed in a prejudice (e.g., a White person assumes that a Black person is a football player), individual prejudices cannot account for the mass unemployment, incarceration, and disenfranchisement faced by peoples of color in America today, for instance. I know very little about your personal prejudices (you might dislike anyone who wears a turban, voted for Kerry, or isn’t a Scandinavian); however, your words convey your racism—i.e., the extent to which you subscribe to the White racist ideology. Your incorrect definition of ‘racism’ may derive from ignorance; nevertheless, it represents an attempt to paint racism as a personal fault, an individual problem, whereas an honest look at our social system reveals a racial dictatorship miserably stratified into White and Other.
In your third paragraph, you blame Islam itself for the radicals’ views and actions: “How has Islam managed to pervert these people, but not so many others?” You cannot answer this question because it proceeds from an incorrect assumption. Continuing to contrive a fundamental connection between Islam and terrorism, you declare that most terrorists are Muslim (“all [sic] of these monsters are primarily Muslim”), ignoring myriad non-Muslim terrorist groups worldwid—including groups in the United States. To pretend that most terrorists are Muslim represents, once again, a disavowal of reality in order to secure a biological justification for the asymmetries of our racialized society, whereby Whites are naturally rational and virtuous, and peoples of color are naturally savage. That you hurl such categorical epithets—“savage, bloodthirsty barbaric animals;” “monsters;” and “primitive”—at so many people deeply frightens me.
In your fourth paragraph, you state that institutionalized American slavery—the cold-hearted commodification of human bodies and the accompanying formation of a racist ideology which we still grapple with today—can be justified “in the context of the time period.” You ascribe this horrific system of racial subordination to forces beyond Whites’ control—slavery just “happened.” This repudiation of responsibility is yet another attempt to characterize Whites as virtuous and peoples of color as savages: American slavery couldn’t possibly be Whites’ fault, because Whites are virtuous; on the other hand, Muslim terrorists are savages. Your trivialization of African and African-American experiences in America is shameful and offensive. Moreover, there’s no reason to stack American slavery up against worldwide terrorism; instead, consider how White enslavement of Africans helped racially stratify American society, how White Americans express the racist ideology used to justify the stratification through imperialism abroad to this day, and how this U.S. imperialism motivates the formation of the ideologies behind (non-U.S.) terrorism.
In conclusion, I refer you to the many thoughtful and admirably restrained responses to your Wespeaks. They are not misinterpretations of you by people on whom “[your] point was lost.” Their authors understand only too well the racist ideology which undergirds your speech; read their responses carefully and then examine your diction, with its sweeping absolutes and dehumanizing epithet—“evil;” “barbaric savages;” “primitive;” “animals;” “absurd;” “all;” “tyrants.” Please, don’t let your reaction consist of another self-defense. Seriously consider whether your ideas (as you’ve expressed them) reflect the White racist ideology.
Reading suggestions: “Racial Formation in the United States” (Michael Omi & Howard Winant); “Globalization and Racialization” (Manning Marable).
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