> 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.
Who, apart from certain Black nationalists, says this?
> 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.
I don't understand why my argument that Othello, the play, written in the high early modern period, displays or at least plays with some stereotypes that, as someone on the list put it, are soon to become hegemonic, while still acknowledging (my argument, not the play), that the stereotypes are different in among other things being nonbiologized, provokes this response. We have jistorical continuitoes and discontinuities, for heaven's sake.
--jks