After The Hiatus

Well, now. I seem to have been away from this for a long time now.
I had just started to get some posts together to restart this blog, when Blogger became inaccessible for some unknown reason for over a week right at the start of this month. I haven't bothered with any of those posts - they are a bit old hat now.

Then, at the same time my old computer died and I had to build another one. The building was quite straightforward, what has took the time was getting all the software, my backed-up data and so on up and running on this shiny new beast.

I think I'm more or less ready now.

So, I'm starting again, here and featuring my comment on this:

Perhaps 'we' ought to consign this whole 19th Century notion of 'race' to the dustbin of history. Dividing people up for the superficial differences of skin tone and feature doesn't seem to have worked, does it?

When the left adopted ‘race’ as one of its causes, naturally it saw it as a collectivist problem with a collective solution. But, rather than wasting away – just as the state was supposed to do under communism - we find that race and race ‘differences’ become accented and entrenched through the systems set up for it like the whole race relations 'industry' we now have – just as the state apparatus became stronger and stronger under communism.

Rather than creating ‘equality’ it has ossified divisions, stereotyping people into ghettos. For example, black actors complain of only being offered the roles of pimp or drug dealer, Black writers complain of being condemned to only write of the ‘black experience’ and so on.

Why should a young black boy have all his options restricted to just ‘black role-models’ rather than from the whole of possibility that lies out there? In fact, why condemn everyone to this narrow, self-limiting, defeatist notion of the 'role-model' at all?

Beyond that, this notion of race has help to develop ‘victim’ culture where every failing can be excused as the fault of ‘the system’ which is biased against those of one particular race or another. It has become so successful at tapping liberal guilt that now others vying for power and influence such as ‘the Muslim community’ are trying to extend the victim status of race into religion.

Maybe the answer is not treating people as groups: white, black, Muslims Catholics, women, lesbians, or whatever, we should see them, treat them as individuals – not lock them in cages of created ‘identity’.

It is extracted from a longer blog post I was going to make on this subject before my recent computer/blogging problems. It is not all I want to say on the subject, see it more as a note of where my thoughts are on it at the moment than a finished peice. I've reposted it here more as a way of getting back into this blog.