Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.
--Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, 1984 quoted in Cornel West, Race Matters, 1994, Vintage Books, p. 93.
--Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, 1984 quoted in Cornel West, Race Matters, 1994, Vintage Books, p. 93.
1 comment:
Cart before the horse, I think. We don't find people different because we want to use them. We use people because we find them different. It's true that we cultivate mechanisms to establish and maintain our ignorance of the other, shared space and shared experience generally establish empathy. I do not think there is a conspiracy in the West to keep people "different." There's no back-room meeting about how we can best keep majority and minority groups apart from one another. As is the case with most progressivism, I think the battle is not fought against rational actors, but against the irrational, baser aspects of collective human nature.
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