Must capitalism be racist?

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Dec 30 11:10:03 PST 1999


Doug:
>> >Peace of mind, of a sort. As in, "I may have a crappy job and not a
>> >pot to piss in, but at least I'm not black!"
>>
>>This feeling of racial compensation may still remain, but post-affirmative
>>action racists argue, "You have a crappy job because you are not black,
>>because unqualified blacks got special rights that you don't have."
>
>Which is not unrelated to the other part of the racist formula,
>emphasized by Roediger, that the despised group is having more fun.
>You don't have to be a Freudian (though it helps) to see jealousy
>lurking in white racist discourse about black sexuality, for example.

More accurately, a sense of material disadvantage and victimization. The feeling used to be, as Roediger argues, that while blacks might not have money and rights, they got more "primitive" enjoyment (= sex, the body, "carefree" nature, etc.) that "we" were asked to renounce. Now, the post-affirmative action argument is that it is whites who are disenfranchized, robbed of money and rights, because unqualified blacks are favored and given "special rights." White male workers are represented in racist discourse as _the_ victim: the victim of reverse discrimination, the victim of black "guilt-tripping," the victim of the "liberal elite" who force white workers to live and work with blacks while themselves avoiding the same "burden," etc. Racism is said not to exist, except the "racism of blacks against whites" and the "racism of political correctness that says whites oppress blacks."

Post-affirmative action racism has affected (very loosely defined) leftist discourse as well, and conflicts emerged between leftists who criticize post-affirmative action racism and those who end up collaborating with it: "abolitionists" like Roediger versus proponents of "white trash studies" like Annalee Newitz; the Black Radical Congress versus William J. Wilson, etc. who think only color-blind universalist arguments would do; and so on.

Yoshie



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