digloria at mindspring.com wrote:
> 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.
O.K. Perhaps. Probably. I have argued with Charles a couple times off list that he takes too empiricist a perspective on questions, and in those posts from this thread that I have read I have noticed a tendency of *all* parties to
get involved in an Icarian (or Daedaleian) plunge into a sea of empirical data ripped from any historical context and without historical analysis. References either way to "Naziism," for example, seemed quite ahistorical.
> that whites ought to examine
> *whiteness* and the privileges it bestows--how it works, how it operates,
> how it is inscribed and reinscribed,
This is a whole different debate, and I've never quite made up my mind on it. For certain kinds of somewhat narrowly focused cultural analysis (those which use "culture" in an Arnoldian sense -- i.e. "high culture"), the study of "whiteness" is of great importance. It's been many years since I've read any substantial criticism of the novels of James, but I suspect that a study of "whiteness" in those novels would be quite fruitful.
But as a *political* proposal, my top of the head response is that it stinks -- that it gets people involved in the deepest trap of capitalist ideology, that to change activity it is necessary to change people. I see the Theses on F as proto-marxist rather than marxist, but the remarks on *revolutionising practice* (whatever philosophic critique they may be subject to) are fundamental to marxism and to all progressive political thought and practice.
But I won't try to follow that up at present.
Carrol
digloria at mindspring.com wrote:
> >This kind
> >of
> >cheap irony and this kind of defensiveness and this kind of insistence
> >on dotting the empirical i's and crossing the empirical t's does not
> >look promising.
> >
> >Carrol
>
> 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