I agree with your analysis below. I appreciate the historical dimension you include.
Of course, the ruling class knows this is the key, so they are very militant about crushing the left or anyone else who seeks to broadcast the truth you summarize below. The powers-that-be are not about to let anti-racists obtain the means of mass communication and education sufficient to counter-brainwash the masses of white workers.
However, it has been achieved to a limited extent twice, roughly. In the Civil War 10's of thousands of whites risked and gave their lives for ending slavery. I know this wasn't the only goal, but it WAS a main goal of the North. Then the "civil rights"movement had support of masses of white people for a while. A main goal of Reaganism was to reverse the partial anti-racist consensus of the nation; and it succeeded with the reverse discrimination doctrine etc, especially using a new level of mass media mind control (no more Watergates or Viet Nam tv type coverage).
Persuading the majority of white workers of that racism is big trick on themselves is quite a Gordian knot.
Charles Brown
>>> steven r cohen <lomco at pipeline.com> 05/27 8:25 PM >>>
At 05:14 PM 5/27/98 -0500, you wrote:
>
I see this whole debate as essentially, if we
>could ever get it straightened out, bearing on how that burden [racism] is
to be
>born, and how enough of the white working class can move itself to bear
>it.
>
>Carrol
>
>
Virginia tobacco planters in the late 17th century noticed that importing African slaves was an effective way of mitigating the anger of free but poor, largely white, young, male Londoners who weren't going to share in the wealth of the colony as they had expected--mostly by making them an increasingly smaller part of the overall labor force. From that day on American capitalists have looked for ways --political, racial, social, economic, religious, psychosexual--to deflect, distort and otherwise diffuse the class anger of poor white freemen.
One way to "straighten" out the burden of racism in America is to demonstrate to this important part of the US working class that though a political attack on the propertied class in America would challenge many of their most habitual "feelings" about race and gender, it would also lead to more jobs, more education, cleaner, safer, better neighborhoods and so forth. Remember COMMON GROUND? It was the liberalism of suburban elites (and I suppose much else) that stood in the way of any real effort to get the working class folks in Charlestown to give integration a real try. Integration seemed like a forced gift from those least able to afford it to those who could never afford much of anything. If a "left" had existed that could have made it clear in Charlestown that real integration meant solving their daily problems along with the problems of blacks, because the resources to solve such deepseated problems would come from the power and resources of suburban elites who controlled integration policy, perhaps the story would have been quite different. As long as social development appears to come from elites who moralize about how the working poor--millions of whom are white, male and macho--must give way, while their own power and privilege remain serenely secure, racism will have great appeal in the US. I just don't see why the working poor would understand the good sense of "bearing the burden" of historical racism if their lives are made more difficult, while little else changes.. Without militant calls for jobs for all, minimum wages that support decent standards of living for all (guaranteed incomes of 30,000 for starters?) , health care for all, and an associated broadly-based political movement that can compel hefty progressive taxes on incomes, speculation and the like, white male workers are not likely in the main to "feel" the value of setting aside the most ancient of American customs. (And don't forget the internationalism that would be needed to keep capital from doing to us what it did to Mitterand in 1980.) A world with this kind of movement might just be the kind that would make a working-class white guy, who never cared much for any of this anyway, sit up and take a look, even have a converation with some smarty-pants about what it all means.
This is why the flaccid reformism of Rorty--and the professoriate--is so pathetic.
********************** Steven R. Cohen lomco at pipeline.com