Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > Michael Perelman wrote: > >It is just that ethnicities make conflict more likely -- > > What is 'ethnicity'? What's the difference between it and 'race'? Between > it and 'nationality'? I'm not sure myself about "ethnicity," but I would suggest that discussion of either ethnicity or nationality might more easily cross national lines than does discussion of 'race,' which I think has a different valence in almost every nation. I claim to know nothing about racism in nations other than the U.S., but I think it is crucially important to recognize that in the U.S. *no* situation is uncolored by racism: the black person (black man? black woman?) is *always* present in one way or another in u.s. society and culture, and this has been the case at least since the publication of those troublesome words about "all men are created equal" in the Declaration -- a statement which introduced an impossibly wrenching contradiction into all hierarchical relationships, but above all into the oppression and exploitation of blacks, first under slavery and then under various forms of segregation and ghettoization. Not one black person, to my memory, appears in the collected fiction of Henry James, but no author's works are so permeated by the spectre of blackness. That is, the most important fact re any given page in his work is that no black person is there. This was also part of my queries some months ago re *Buffy*. Tony Morrison is very good on this, no matter how bad some of her politics may be. Incidentally, endless empirical arguments about whether a given event does or does not show racist elements obscure rather than reveal the centrality of racism in U.S. life. Carrol P.S. Try reading the *Portrait of a Lady* or *Wings of the Dove* asking yourself what would happen if there were as many American Blacks involved as there are Italians? (I say this even though I learned to read by reading James, and maugre his politics and his racism cannot but love every page of him. When one once learns to love a writer, no "facts" can change that.)
