Ecumenism/'Identity Politics'/'Single-Issue Movements'(Re:religion)

Kenneth Mostern kmostern at utk.edu
Mon Jun 8 05:59:22 PDT 1998


Jonathan,

I promise this is it on this thread for me:

(1) Black people, except those most thoroughly interpollated by white supremacy, don't fantasize about white people coming to their rescue; they fantasize about offing police officers. Please read your own words. Beatty's fantasy is a white fantasy - the fantasy of the "good" white, but a white fantasy nonetheless.

(2) You don't have to "renounce white privilege" unless you're white; that's why whites who do so are permanently placed differently from blacks (and get no sympathy from blacks when, having renounced, we then act all hurt for being the victims of racism).

(3) My whole point is that one can "be self-critical" and never do anything political about race any time you're not putting on a show. The labor movement is one of several places to do anti-racist political work.

(4) I have no idea what you mean by "evidence", but in the US case the Irish are an example that the order is structured by skin privilege such that it becomes possible for them to become white. In Europe, they are the victims of colonialism and, in Northern Ireland, apartheid, which only proves that Northern Ireland, however its structured (and I'm no expert), is not the US. There is, you are correct, someplace where apartheid is not structured by skin-color.

(5) You didn't say Euro-Americans have never written anything that challenges white supremacy; if you bothered to reread the paragraph I was responding to you would have remembered that you took the time to inform me that we have, apparently assuming I didn't know, and needed to be told.

(6) I have no idea what "trapped terminably" means, but that Jim Crow is structured as a system of psychological political power by skin-color recognitions is clear everywhere in Du Bois from the first pages of Souls on. Still Dusk of Dawn is the key text for it. In addition to my article, see Brackette Williams' piece, also in Cultural Critique, somewhat earlier.

You don't seem to understand that "skin-color recognition" refers to the mirror stage, and is utterly arbitrary with regard to biology. As Wiegman discusses at length, in another book of race theory I recommend (American Anatomies), Foucault's whole point is that western knowledge since the 17th century has been structure by the visible.

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