Citat - Ett retoriskt recept på en rasistisk manöver

The favourite strategy
is to find
a word or a concept
that seems
invulnerable to challenge
– law, equality, merit, neutrality –
and then to give it
a definition
that generates the desired outcome

Faced with the difficult task
of promoting
a white-supremacist agenda
in an age when
white supremacy
is no longer a respectable public pose
one hits upon the solution
of defining equality
as a relationship
between persons with no history -

No matter what disadvantages
that has previously been imposed upon someone
he or she is to be treated in exactly the same way
as those for whom advantage has been
an unquestioned entitlement

It is like alchemy or magic -
Now you see white supremacy
but, presto chango
it is given a new description
and now you see
‘equality for everyone’
with no change whatsoever in the practice or the outcome

You can only fight discrimination
– practices that disadvantage some groups –
with discrimination
– practices that disadvantage some other groups

This does not mean
that all discriminatory practices
are equal

All it means
is that one cannot condemn a practice
just for being discriminatory
since there are none that are not

Rather
one must consider
the effects of a practice
and attempt to calculate
as best as one can
the costs of either
allowing it to flourish
or moving
to curtail it

Any such calculation
will take into account
the history
into which a new practice
- always advertising itself as a reform -
would insert itself

ur: Stanley Fish (1994) There is no such thing as free speach and it's a good thing too s. 12 - 91