The trouble with that approach, it seems to me is that it dehistoricises the race question, as if race were always the same conflict at all times. This, it seems to me, is to make the mistake that sees racism purely in psychological terms as the animosity of one racial group for another. Any kind of hostility becomes racism and all racism become much of a muchness.
But my original point was that there is a changing dynamic to race thinking wherein not only the targets of racial thinking change over time, but also the original racial identification changes in distinctive historial periods. So, the hostility towards the Irish/Jewish/Italians restend on an elite racial identity that was WASP. Today radicals often ridicule racism as a WASP prejudice - but actually it is not it is a white prejudice, because the original identification of the core group has changed as th prejudice has changed to focus exclusively on Blacks.
Those who make the mind-numbing point that blacks have always been the target of racism are missing the point. Today blacks are the principle targt of racism, but in the past Jews, Italians, East Europeans and Irish were also targeted. A change has taken place.
In his book The Meaning of Race (Macmillan, 1996) Kenan Malik points out that racial ideas in Britain were directed not at what we would recognise as distinctive races, but at the working poor who were considered a 'race apart', as surely as if they were of another nationality.
Insisting that racism is always the same comes close to suggesting that it is a natural part of the human condition, as I see it. That has always been an apologetic idea, as if to argue that racism will always be with us, so there is nothing that you can do about it. -- Jim heartfield