Racist actions serious? Sure. Racist ideas? NO.

mike salovesh (T20MXS1@MVS.CSO.NIU.EDU)
Thu, 10 Nov 1994 22:26:00 CST

Okay, for all people named "Dean", I take it all back. Would you
let me say Vice President for Academic Affairs instead? (I might
prefer "Provost", but I can already hear the complaints from the
Military Police at the Provost Marshal General's School at Fort
Gordon, Georgia.)

All right, the crap was only taken seriously by a few wild-eyed
Brownshirts following a crazy guy with a short mustache named--
what was it now?--Adolf Schicklegruber. And some nuts, supported
by then-Governor Earl Warren, who moved 100,000 people of
Japanese descent into so-called War Relocation Centers because they
--because they did--because it was--well, dammit, they were JAPS!
Who cares if most of them were US citizens? Japs ain't got rights!
And a few sociopaths who got fun out of lynching their relatives
and neighbors because of the color of their skin took racist
nonsense seriously, too. Not to mention the Ukranians who killed
lots of my relatives for the Nazis during WWII. Clearly only a
misguided and uneducated minority in the Ukraine, too. And some
obviously un-American subversives who used to JimCrow me, either
when my skin got temporarily dark (I got lots of melanin, and I
tan DARK) or when I lived at "black addresses" or held "black
jobs"or just hung out with black friends in Chicago. But it's
crazy to take racist IDEAS seriously. They're just plain dumb.

I don't take Rushton's crap, per se, or Herrnstein and Murray's
crap, per se, seriously. It's crap, after all. What I DO take
seriously is the social and psychological pathology of those who
swallow that crap whole. Even more serious is their threat to
you and me.

Of course, after the overwhelming passage of Prop 187's attempt to
institutionalize racism in California I know you have to take the
racists seriously. You just can't take their IDEAS seriously.
They are so wrong they couldn't be wronger.

mike salovesh <SALOVESH@NIU.EDU>