Wednesday, February 19, 2003

Going deeper

Eric Muller has a somewhat gentler and more thoughtful response to CPO Sparkey's nonsense at Is That Legal?:
So of course, Sparkey, race today plays an open role in policy debates and in public discussion and in popular culture in ways that were either very new or not yet existent in the early 1940s. But it is just wrong to say that racial issues were just “on a slow simmer” (Sparkey’s words) at that time, and that race did not play an important—and overt—role in public discussion and debate.

This is the underlying point I was trying to make when I said that CPO Sparkey's contention that race wasn't a major topic in the 1940s was laughable. But of course, Muller expresses it very well and clearly. There's a good deal more, of course. Go read it.

Finally, I owe both CPO Sparkey and Sgt. Stryker an apology for originally posting my criticism as though they were the same person; in fact, Sparkey is just one of the people who posts at Stryker's blog. My bad. I'm still a bit new at the blogging game and have tended to assume every blog is authored by one person, as this one is. Of course, I stand by the remainder of the post.

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