Exactly. And with or without Derrida, we'd all still be different.
>And in "meat world" it is the case that certain differences are
>identified by certain people as justification for the doling out of quite
>nasty punishments, like losing your head or your job or any chance of a
>viable economic future. We call this discrimination.
Discrimination, to me, means recognising a difference and making a choice.
I think discrimination is a necessary function of active, functioning human
minds. How would we cross the road if we couldn't discriminate between cars
and chickens, and discriminate between the correct and incorrect time time
to cross the road?
Repression and oppression is chopping heads off, firing, or excluding
persons from economic well-being based on their heterogenously defined
"difference". Unfortunately, it seems that repression and oppression knows
no difference except the difference it systematically _creates_ in carrying
out its campaign of social terror.
>Discrimination refers
>to a very vital set of relations and practices, and so shy would it be a
>problem for difference to be a "focus of attention"?
It would be a problem if it is classificatory and systematised. It would be
a problem for those who are defined, and consequently oppressed, as being
different _as a group_, by societally dominating persons perhaps, or by
privileged people who, themselves, feel they are in a position to say which
_group_ is "different" and what we should do for "them".
>For whom would looking
>at the mirror be a problem?
For people who feel guilty about what they do and what they are, I guess.
I'm waiting for a discourse that says: "Equality!"
Not, "equality for people like me". And most certainly _not_ for "equality
for people like _them_".
For instance, if difference is a natural state of being, as I believe it
is, who defines what constitutes a minority _group_? On what basis do we
classify _them_, or for that matter _us_? Inscribe this in doctrinaire
practices and you inscribe inequity.
Phil
a small minority
Phil Graham
pw.graham who-is-at student.qut.edu.au
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html