"Abolitionism" vs. "White Trash Studies" (was Re: Must capitalism be racist?)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Doug:
>>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
>
>I don't see how Roediger and Newitz are necessarily in conflict,
>since they both involve the study of how the white race was created
>and perpetuates itself. Please elaborate.

Read, for instance, the following criticism of "whiteness studies" by Noel
Ignatiev, for instance: "The Point Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To To
Abolish It" (at
<http://www.postfun.com/racetraitor/features/thepoint.html>).  Ignatiev
says: "Now that White Studies has become an academic industry, with its own
dissertation mill, conference, publications, and no doubt soon its junior
faculty, it is time for the abolitionists to declare where they stand in
relation to it.  Abolitionism is first of all a political project: the
abolitionists study whiteness in order to abolish it.  Various commentators
have stated that their aim is to identify and preserve a positive white
identity.  Abolitionists deny the existence of a positive white identity."
On the other hand, Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray write in "Introduction" to
_White Trash: Race and Class in America" (NY: Routledge, 1997): "Unlike
many white people, white trash have the potential to perform the work of
racial self-recognition and self-consciousness that bell hooks has found
absent in dominant forms of whiteness; possibly, one might argue, it is
more difficult for white trash to Other others....It is our wish that
'white trash,' and _White Trash_, start to lay the groundwork for a form of
white identity that is comfortable in multiculturalism, and with which
multiculturalism is comfortable as well" (5).  The contrast is clear.
While Rakesh would probably fault not just the latter but the former for
their reformism and Keynesianism, I'd have to say that abolitionists are
more clearheaded than cult studs for "white trash studies."  Besides, the
latter is severely afflicted with the Weber-like obsession with status and
privilege, which occludes the Marxist conception of class.

Yoshie

P.S.  Just because you contributed an article to _White Trash_ doesn't mean
that you have to defend the untenable conceptions of race and class offered
by its editors, Doug.