>Whiteness is not merely white folks' (often unacknowledged) racial
>consciousness; it's a means by which the ruling class organizes _consent_
>of whites to not only subordination of other races but to intensification
>of _their own exploitation_.
Ian Hacking has referred to dynamic nominalism (which Appiah picks up on); Bourdieu has a theory of how systems of classification become entrenched (which overlaps with Nelson Goodman's ideas about the entrenchment of categories). Leaving this to the side for now, I'll just ask the question of what effect the compulsive racial classification of data has on white racial consciousness (how does racial classification, however it has become entrenched through a dialectic of official categorizations and common sense usages, come to induce the racialized behavior and real racialized effects which reinforce the 'obviousness' of racialized categories?)
The census has whites becoming a minority in California of which they are reminded in myriad ways; does this have anything to with peoples' consciousness of themselves as a new white minority and the politics of white backlash associated therewith?
Statistics on, eg, death by heart disease or infant mortality are often kept by or reported in terms of race, not class, though in the former case the gap between blue and white collar workers is greater than than between blacks and whites (suggesting the over-representation of blacks among unskilled, blue collar workers accounts more for the racial gap than the racial gap accounts for the collar gap, as Vincente Navarro has suggested). The racialization of the data then does make it seem that white workers have more in common with their 'betters' than with black workers of the same collar (our data practices also tend to militate against the class consciousness of labor in another way as we tend to report income distribution in terms of income quintiles instead of in terms of categories such as landowners, capitalists, managers/supervisers/, proletarians--so that conspires too against recognition of the working class as a class, leaving us with race as the only group identity which does not seem to be an artefact of data collection--no one can think of him/herself as belonging to an income quintile group).
Perhaps then it is not whiteness per se but racial and income quintile classification that helps explain racial identification and organization of consent. Look at the periodic article in the NTY on racial gaps in health statistics and note the glaring absence of sustained discussion of the class dynamics. I've cut out a few.
There's a six times higher rate of domestic homicide among blacks than among whites, but once one controls for domestic household over-crowding the gap disappears. Yet the racialization of data convinced a high ranking govt official to focus the Violence Initiative on the genetics of blacks--lobotomies for urban black male youth.
Take the racialized IQ gap. Genovese has noted that while he is comforted to know that whites got that standard deviation on blacks, he would not be happy to know how low Sicilians are on the white food chain. The comfort and superiority 'whites' feel vis-a-vis 'blacks' would be undermined by the cessation of the racial classification of test score data (that racialization also justifies statistical discrimination against blacks which can become a self fufilling prophesy through cumulative causation); after all, it is well known that Southern rural whites have scored lower than urban Northern blacks on Army performance tests.
There are good reasons of course not to terminate the social scientific practice of classifying data racially, as recommended by Yehudi Webster, for it would only deprive us of the tool by which to measure the effects of continued discrimination--the kind of work done by Patrick Mason in the latest issue of *Challenge* for example.
But the Thernstroms, D'Souzas and others are convinced that the gap between the unskilled and the very poor and the rest has grown because so many inferior minorities with their bad habits and possible congenital defects are concentrated in their ranks. That's why they love to racialize data; they think race explains how bad things are--those blacks and Mexicans are just ill-adapted for a skill intensive world (another big time myth--see Howell, Palley, Galbraith) and are being left behind; as a result the very poor and the unskilled among whom racialized minorities are concentrated are growing more unequal everyday.
Of course racism only explains why minorities are concentrated among the unskilled or the very poor; not why their conditions are deteriorating or stagnating in ever more grotesque fashion. That's to be put at the door of the historic crisis of capitalism. The reactionaries and the activists--who share bourgeois horizons--don't want to understand the class dynamics and crisis tendencies and capitalist limits on the mixed economy which have polarized the country and in doing so have accentuated racial inequality because of the non fortuituous concentration of minorities among the most vulnerable sections of the proletariat.
I think many racial activists simply don't want to face the coming storm. They hope that if they can get white people to think reasonably about social policy and be less bothered about being in a coalition with blacks, good social democratic leaders can emerge and fix things up again (fantasies of an Amerigo Jospin). It's as if they think that if they could more whites to be against welfare reform, Clinton will have to reverse himself (as if the Reagan assault began with white approval in the first place) or the Democrats will nominate someone who can feel our pain better next time (Thomas Ferguson does a good job of disabusing people of this illusion). Scratch an abolish a whitey activist and you'll get a good social democrat. Hardly radical.
I have decided to play the role of class dogmatist here (others will think that I have simply confessed to what they knew all along--I am a white identified marxist). I argue that whatever benefit derives from 'racial' knowledge cannot be segregated from the contribution racial classification in official and social scientific makes to the materialization and the entrenchment of white racial consciousness--the very problems of which we had set out to discover the scope and depth.
Now see if someone can do a better job of proving me wrong (and believe I am all ears) than the name calling Michael E used in his last post.
best, rakesh