aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Monday, May 21, 2007
Race in America: don’t use a hammer on a screw
I’ll get to Bruce Bawer’s appearance on Bill Moyers’ Journal later, for now I’m smitten with Melissa Harris-Lacewell who said many things we all should listen to. Among them this:
“What I’m suggesting is we are experiencing a new form of racial inequality. We could think of Jim Crow as a nail. And the protest against Jim Crow were a hammer. And a hammer is an extremely effective tool when you’re dealing with a nail. Contemporary racial inequality is structural. It’s undercover. It is connected with also with sort of black achievement which is also going on at the same time. Contemporary racial inequality is a screw, and if you take a hammer and start pounding on a screw, you just end up with a mess which means we have to live with the fact that a new generation is going to have to innovate a screwdriver to deal with the new problem. And that screwdriver might not look anything like the hammer. And we can’t keep yelling at them to use a hammer for a new problem.”
