On treating Racism as an incurable disease.

[Carrol Cox]

The sophisticated rationales for racism in the United States tend to
differ over time. *Currently* the most sophisticated apology is the
position that racism has *always* been with us, that racism stems from the
very nature of humans. So in a way, the "scientific" argument that blacks
are inferior has been replaced with the "scientific" argument that whites
are incurably racist.

In either case race is taken outside of history.

All efforts to replace historical explanations of various oppressive or
exploitative features of the world are, ultimately, reactionary.

Everyone admits (I believe) that something fundamentally new happened in
the late 18th and early 19th centuries: the invention of *biologically*
based race. Why are people so damned anxious to subordinate that fact to
some alleged racism that goes back and back and back. The hierarchical
assumptions of pre-capitalist tributary societies were fundamentally
different and had a fundamentally different historical base than do the
various attempts of the last 200 years to establish some sort of
"scientific" rationale for oppression and exploitation.

Carrol