>2. if you can't do justice to it, why should anyone else be able to? i'm
>not sure why you responded to kirsten, i guess. was it a criticism? an
>elaboration? wondering, not being snitty.
Dear Kelley,
I honestly appreciated Kirsten's info about this site. There seems to be an important debate about whether being a member of a racialized group can be said to be the cause of outcomes. To play around with Wesley Salmon's terminology, membership in that group not only gives one a greater statistical liklihood of experiencing certain outcomes; it is also *in some sense* causally relevant in being subjected to some specified outcomes. Fields' critics take her to be denying that membership in a racialised group can be causally efficacious ("it's really minorities' overrepresentation in the working class that explains their disproportionate....")when all she is really saying--to the extent that she is speaking about such questions and not the specific historical question discussed in my last post--is that the power of race to act in terms of, say, an independent variable has to itself been explained. Ultimately race cannot be the explanans; it must be the explanadum (I forgot the Latin terms).
She is making a deeper point as well. She is arguing that the conceptual scheme of US racial ideology, though absurd and contradictory (e.g., a black woman can't have a white baby, but a white woman can have a black one), was actually indispensible to the reproduction of complex social relations of 19th century America (Marx made the same kind of argument about the conceptual scheme embodied in the everday categories of bourgeois life--see Paul Mattick, Jr, *Social Knowledge* and "Theory as Critique" in *New Investigations in Marx's Method*, ed. Fred Moseley and Martha Campbell and parts of Terrel Carver's *Postmodern Marx*). So she is not a simple materialist versus an idealist or a class fetishist over a critical race theorist. These are simple labelling categories that do us no good in trying to understand her complex argument. I was being snitty about the resort to such simple labelling by some of the discussants at the site kindly recommended by Kirsten.
Now I haven't read her piece in years, but that's how I remember what Fields was getting at.
Why did I react? I hear her too often dismissed as an orthodox Marxist in the same way that I hear Adolph Reed written off as a labor fetishist. It becomes impossible to really discuss what they are actually saying.
yours, rakesh