Date: Fri, 13 Jun 1997 18:22:42 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-TH: D'Souza Can Kiss My Brown Ass


Doug's inquiring mind wants to know:

>>Claude Steele
>Is this Shelby's brother by any chance? I seem to remember hearing
>something vaguely like that.

Shelby is indeed his brother. I think I have heard that they are two very
different people (for example, my brother loves Walrasian economics and
game theory). I think Shelby has joined Newt's army. When his "The Content
of Our Characters" came Out, Adolph Reed, jr. wrote the most delicious
review of it [The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in
America. (book reviews) Nation v252, n8 (March 4, 1991):274 (7 pages).],
seeing right through Shelby's transparent claim that he was some sort of
left-liberal in the tradition of Jesse Jackson and Leo Casey.

>Speaking of D'Souza (known to his college enemies as Distort D'Newza), I
>don't know his work or his personna at all. Does he trade on his own
>brown-ness, as a legitimation of right-wing thought?

Well, it seems to me that D'Souza is trapped. South Asians in the US have
often been touted as the most successful ethnic group. Of course Murray and
Herrnstein never mention this "anamoly" because we are so mongrelized that
we create all kinds of problems for the herditarian view (hey, build a
science of racial differences without a fifth of the world's population!)

Well, D'Souza doesn't seem comfortable invoking a biological explanation
either for Indian success relative to whites and everyone else (if that
were true, of course, he has probably weakened his children by reproducing
with Dixie, that's her name, kid you not); so Dinesh is left invoking the
awesome powers of culture, just as the model "Hindu" and "Confuscian"
groups are becoming ever more polarized from within (there is a reasonable
refutation of the Asian model minority idea in Bill Ong Hing, Making and
Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy).

Rakesh




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