Sillygism

Jim heartfield jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Tue Apr 27 16:05:14 PDT 1999


In message <v0401171db34bdbd88d53@[166.84.250.86]>, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>Jim heartfield wrote:
>
>>Carrol is a person
>>
>>Carrol lives in the United States
>>
>>Carrol is therefore permeated with racism?
>
>Insofar as you can't have race without racism, it's everywhere James. I
>can't speak for the rest of the world, but you can't live in the U.S. and
>not be embedded in a racialized social system.

Something that is true in all circumstances is immaterial. If racism really were an ever-present, permanent condition of all things, then it wouldn't make any sense to be against it.

I for one don't think that Carrol is a racist. My point is that the syllogism he lays out is false. That much is clear from the perverse conclusion that it gives. If racism were one uniform, undifferentiated precondition of everything in America (and on your expanded version) the rest of the world, then clearly it is unavoidable.

Funnily enough the Oxford Union is debating this very issue in its next debate. Speaking for the motion that racism is unavoidable is the leader of the British National Front, John Tyndall. Indeed, it is a common argument made by racists that racism is a natural hostility between people, that cannot be overturned by policy.

I take a rather different view. I don't see racism as eternal or an ever-present part of the human condition. I don't see racism as a uniform condition that embraces (or pervades) all Americans (or Britons, Europeans etc etc) irrespective of their social position. I do not see racism as a condition that has no internal contradictions, nor tendency towards its own supercession.

It strikes me as supremely lazy that one should just assume racism, and not seek to understand it in its particular modalities and historical limitations. Most of all it is just vacuous, a way of not really addressing it or confronting it. You say, let's assume racism. I say, no, let's not. It's not ordained by God or nature. It is not all powerful. It is possible to think outside of it and beyond it.

Lastly, as Carrol has often rightly said, there is no such thing as race - meaning there is no natural subdivision of the human species into races. There is only the social relation that is racism. And that social relation is neither eternal nor uniform. -- Jim heartfield



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list