That Suppressive Tool
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Writing was used as a
tool to suppress those deemed by a particular ethnic create as inferior. The
civilized world used the alphabet, or some other representative sign. Those who
could write were civilized. However, writing was oppressed like those so called
“inferior people”. In the western world prejudice and quarantine
has roots in colonial America's
antimiscengenation laws[1]. Racism and laws prohibiting generalized public interaction between black
and white colonists started in the 17th century. It was Winthrop Jordan's
classic study, White over Black, that explored travelers' first impressions
of Africans as heathen. Though
these images or stereotypes formed within a late-Renaissance imagination, a
mature racism was not apparent according to most interpretations. Rather, a
degraded image was defined by classic Western oppositions-divinity and sin,
good and evil- and black as evil was fixed upon vulnerable
Africans. Racism form
an ideology of unification as well as an imperative of settlement in the seventeenth
century nation state.
As the labor system in the south switched from indentured servants to black
slavery. The separation of European and African people became crucial in order
to sustain the institution of slavery to maintain slave societies requires antimiscengenation
sex statutes. The
creation of a labor class was necessary to solve the problem
of mulatto inheritance.
Although legislation subordinated black colonists and subdued class conflict it
divided the landless against each other as assemblies completed the transition toward racism and
created and American Republic. Thus racism shifts from the personal beliefs of colonists
to a basis for an entire economic system then to policy. Just as the
superiority of speech shifted from a simple representation of thought to the
very basis of truth.
This powerful
ethnocentrism controls the concept of writing which exists in a world where the
phoneticization (the representation of
speech in writing in a system where individual symbols reflect speech) of
writing must conceal, or disguise, its own history as its history is
manufactured. This history is the history of metaphysics, which since from
Plato to Heidegger, has always allotted the origin of truth in general to the
logos, reason, God. But this the history of truth has always been the
oppression of writing, and its segregation from "full" speech.
Science, which has
always operated through the philosophical concept of logic, has always
challenges the imperial reign of logos, reason, God, by gradually removing
aspects of speech from writing. Making writing much more nonphonetic. The
movement toward nonphonetic writing has always been contained in the logos.
More specifically, speech.
Writing must be allowed
to its own discourse on method. It must be allowed to describe the limits of
its field. The concepts of science and of writing are covertly, yet always
determined by a historico-metaphysical epoch. We merely glimpse the closure of
such an epoch. The science of writing is meaningful for us in terms of an
origin, a particular concept of the sign and particular concept of the
relationship between speech and writing.
It is true that an agent's
responsibility may be bracketed or reduced because of coercion. So then must
writings responsibility for the murder of speech. The act of murdering speech
was one writing was never aware of doing. Articulation and clarity of method
existed in speech prior to the so called birth of writing. In the case of a
threat, writings acquiescence may be excused because the threat caused a total
breakdown in her will (the ‘her’ being wriitng. Where there is coercion, the
one being coerced, the coerced one, is innocent. The victim acted reasonably
under the circumstances. The coercer is wrong for inducing the victim to act as
they otherwise would not have. When people are pushed to commit acts of
violence, by poverty, racism and violent Host tactics created to incite
violence then those people who, riot, or loot are simple not responsible.
Lower-class people are not free in a defacto sense of the word. Under the
letter of the law Lower-class people share the same rights as whites. This
means equality in the de jure sense. Women share this de jure equality to men.
However, as the evidence shows Lower-class people do not get fair treatment or
have equitable access to resources under the laws that they are supposedly
equal under. Lower-class people are not equal in practice, de facto.
Ultimately the powerful are at fault and
the powerless should be held accountable if they are inhibiting the
capabilities of others like them, but they are merely a symptom of a failed
state, as we continue to point fingers at the 'mob’.
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