Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!houxm!ihnp4!zehntel!dual!amd!decwrl!decvax!cca!ima!ism780b!jim From: jim@ism780b.UUCP Newsgroups: net.singles Subject: Re: Re: what the big deal is Message-ID: <47@ism780b.UUCP> Date: Wed, 8-Aug-84 00:27:01 EDT Article-I.D.: ism780b.47 Posted: Wed Aug 8 00:27:01 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 4-Aug-84 01:10:58 EDT Lines: 44 Nf-ID: #R:wjvax:-13100:ism780b:28100009:000:2417 Nf-From: ism780b!jim Jul 30 10:56:00 1984 > In order to oppress a group in a democracy, at least one of the following > conditions must hold: > > (1) The group is a minority. > > (2) The group does not have voting rights. This is simply nonsense. White men control what candidates are available. White men control the huge amount of money spent on campaigns. White men control the media. White men control the assassins' bullets. White men control the laws and institutions which make many women too poor and ignorant to understand or appreciate the potential power of voting or the real positions of politicians. White men control the police and courts and the way they react to men beating women who have been trained by white men as to their goals and responsibilities in a marraige. White men control the awareness in society of the incidence of incestual rape and its traumatic effects on the personalities of women. (In the above, consider "white men" to be a symbol for the current structure of power and institutions in our society; none of these things is true only of white men or of all white men. The roles and attitudes of white men are a product of that structure, and individual white men must be dealt with as individuals, just as with anyone else.) It is perfectly possible to oppress the individuals of a group by splitting the group, misrepresenting the interests of the group, preventing the group from acting as a group, etc. etc. It is not voting rights that are essential, it is effective power. You cannot blame an individual woman for not having achieved her goals when it requires acts of all women, unless you believe a) she is guilty of all the failures of women merely because she is a woman and b) women have failed because of something inherent in being a woman, rather than social, institutional, and power factors which are apparently too complex for you to understand. Believing that blacks, women, and other groups with a disproportionally small amount of effective power are that way independent of history and societal structure is the core of racism and bigotry. This means that racism and bigotry themselves stem from ignorance and societal structure. The South does not have a gene pool with a disproportionate concentration of the bigotry gene. As someone on this net once said: Consider any group; if you were a member of that group, you would be that way too. -- Jim Balter (ima!jim)