On the specifics of his American historical analysis, he seems true when he says that especially in the early 1900's the "tawnier" Europeans were discriminated against on the basis of racist ideology, and now that has changed.
He may agree too that at the beginning of the 1900's there was a racial hierarchy among the "inferior" races such that the "tawny" Europeans were "above" Black people , Indigenous people and Chinese people - people of color. Black people were the "colored" people though.
Did or does this hierarchy among the "inferiiors" make any difference in how we struggle to end racism and capitalism ? I can't remember how this thread started or why we are inspecting this history.
Let me offer a hypothesis: Racism against Africans is integral to CAPTIALISM through its entire HISTORICAL existence and vice versa. The African slavery was a critical aspect of the socalled primitive accumulation of ALL capitalism , not just U.S. It played a special role in the origin of capitalism. In 1998, when the other racisms against "other" whites has faded, as Jim says, Anti-African racism is roaring and remains a without-which-not of American capitalism. The end of U.S. capitalism (which will be pretty much the same or the knell of the end of all capitalism, given the centrality of the American state to all neo-imperialism) is almost identical with the end of U.S. anti-Black racism.
Also, it should be noted that racism against other peoples of color has not at all abated as has the racism against "tawny" Europeans. Anti-hispanic and Asian racism is epidemic, in part it is prejudice against the current generation of "immigrants", although it is an outrage to term Mexicans moving to Texas , Calif. and the southwest "foreign immigration". It is a form of internal migration. Even American history makes it clear that the U.S. southwest is Mexican and indigenous peoples' land.
Charles Brown
>>> Jim heartfield <Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> 05/29 9:12 AM >>>
Apart from the many excellent and informative posts on the Invention of
the White Race, I have one underlying quibble with an argument that
appears again and again. Tom Condit makes it most explicit in tracing
racism back to Columbus and beyond.
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