i realize that you've been ill and not attending to all the posts. however, i did say quite early on "we are all racists" charles repeated insistence that i'm deploying racist arguments and that i'm denying racism is really quite annoying. it deserves a cheap shot in response because it is a cheap shot to begin with.
if you'd read one or two of my posts Carrol you would see that it is not the case that i either denied racism or said it was irrelevant.
the question of what i actually *do* is irrelevant on a list because here it is about what we say, unless of course you'd like me to post a daily journal of what I do and perhaps attach an annotated CV of my anti-racist activities.
furthermore, in a post to doug i explicitly outlined what i believe is my task as a marxist scholar which is where much of my activity takes place at this particular moment in my life. i took the position, one informed by Black feminist critiques of feminist thought, that whites ought to examine *whiteness* and the privileges it bestows--how it works, how it operates, how it is inscribed and reinscribed, and so forth. instead of doing ethnography which focuses on the marginalized, the powerless, the deviant, the poor, the outcast etc, i do critical ethnographies of how people in positions of power wield and maintain that power,how they make it appear naturally theirs, how they shore it up when threatened.
that is my political practice at this point in my life, i ask how *whiteness* and maleness and upper middle classness are constructed, deployed and maintained. i know i know, these questions are generally unimportant to you because you often believe we have the answers. perhaps. but i'm a social scientist and that's what i do. i worry about the empirical, not in an uncomplicated way, of course, because i do not believe that empirical 'facts' exist in a vacuum. nor do i believe they are the final arbiter of political disputes.
nonetheless, i do think they matter.
kelley