well, i didn't make any claims in that direction, did i? i was drawing on something ange said awhile ago about predicting new forms of racialization.
i seriously doubt that anti black racism can easily go away precisely because of the marking out of physical characteristics.
>Kelley, I also think it is dangerous to refer to such pseudo realities as
>the changing racial composition of the country--I am a bit stunned to see
>you invoke its existence.
well you could be quite right that it does not exist. i think you're wrong and will be proven wrong as to what constitutes racial, ethnic identity and how anti black racism manifests itself in the states. i like to make bets, any suggestions?
i think there are good reasons to think it is bound to change, just as it has changed in the past century. i've not read the material in quite some time but there were several reports on the rise in interracial/inter-ethnic couplings. when the Census Bureau was testing the waters for changing the race/ethnicity categories there were some interesting projections. they did so, precisely because there was enough talk of examining this issue. and, given that it would be very expensive to make these changes, it wasn't a decision undertaken lightly. perhaps someone could find or has this material, as well as the critiques. my memory certainly needs some freshening up and dusting off w/ regard to this issue. it was a hot topic at my uni where we were in the process of hiring someone who'd done some controversial research in that area. but, as i said, for the life of me i cannot recall details. probably cause i took my area comps at the time and was a wee bit distracted to say the least rakesh!
>This is an eugenicist, typological discourse
>which attempts to break down a seemingly homogeneous populations into two
>or more forms (or races) each with its own Gaussian distribution in
>relevant characteristics; that is the first step to enlisting methods of
>artificial selection to ensure that the more viable of the forms (or races)
>grows at the expense of the other even if the latter is more fecund. It is
>out of eugenicist discourse that concepts such as the "racial composition"
>of the population have arisen; eugenicists understand selection not working
>so much on the mean and the dispersion of a homogeneous population but
>through the growth of one race or type or form over another. Of course this
>suggests the anti darwinian nature of eugenicist discourse.
rakesh, dearest, this is NOT what i was doing, nor what i was advocating. i've been consistently arguing for a social constructionist analysis of race, of its contingent and shifting character--though clearly recognizing that it is institutionalized in such systematic and systemic ways that we cannot change it 'in any way we please'. i hope this is enough for you to get my drift. i hate to type out mini-treastises in which i need to spell everything out, particularly since i've typed about this many many times here.
simply because race/ethnicity has no bio/gen/phys basis, it does not follow that categorizing for the purposes of social research is automatically invoking a eugenicist discourse. some people make this argument, i know. i don't agree.
census data, as you know, is largely based on self report, unless the person doesn't know and the census takers assign the category. i'm sure somewhere in that vast warehouse of data they've actually got figures on how often it happens that someone refuses to answer the question or doesn't know.
furthermore, that census data is integral to our system of political representation reveals how it is part and parcel of the process of making race categories real in the negative way you point to and yet, at the same time, real in a positive way you ignore. political interests have a stake in maintaining that reality and not necessarily in the interest of some gaussian distribution schema. many interest groups have a stake because they receive gov't benefits from their census counts. this is why the census bureau's proposed changes in ethnic/racial categories were so contentious. once someone declares themselves other, multiethnic, or check of sev'l boxes, etc the numbers of recognized racial/ethnic categories will decrease and so will what little political power/benefits accrue to those groups. [also why big scandal over the summer about undercounting in poor communities where census takers simply refused to go.
fucking great huh? cause this has consequences for the distribution of federal/state resources]
don't mean to sound pedantic i'm sure you know all this stuff. but, as you know, an intense issue and necess. to be clear.
i also have a friend doing research on black teen pregnancy. she's taken a keen interest in the phenom. of young black women who seek to have children fathered by white men -- a practice which is apparently a variant of what eli anderson documents in _Streetwise_ in his chapter on 'sex codes and family life' where he addresses "sex: the game and the dream." here, young black women lack access to meaningful employment and grow up in a world which values maternity as an important attribute of female identity. as a result, when their dreams of conentional marriage and family are dashed, they find a rich source of identity in motherhood and sometimes compete to have children by the best looking man.
i know this account may well be seen as racist. i don't believe it is and i hope you'll consult anderson's study and others so you can see that it's not presented this way at all. furthermore, just to deflect the inevitable concerns, when i teach this material i also include similar accounts of same phenom among rural whites (in my home town where teen preg rate is the highest in the state) and among whites in deindustrializing working/lowermiddle class suburbs. the unit is always entitled: 'it's the economy stupid" anderson's work is founded on the same argument. again, i hope i don't have to spell this out. i'm not stereotyping here in the least.
ahywho, my friend has discovered that her findings aren't not unique. of course, this is not a happy reason for changing sexual mores and sanctions against interracial/ethnic dating/procreation, but it appears to exist nonetheless and it will certainly change things in the next century. i have no doubt similar things are happening among other ethnic groups
this is anecdotal but i see plenty of similar change taking place. it's not dramatic or revolutionary but it's markedly different from twenty years ago. that is, interracial couplings are much more widespread and acceptable. this may well be because i've lived in poor communities most of my adult life, i'm not sure. even in predominantly poor white communities in upstate new york it was evident to me that those attitudes had changed significantly since my high school daze and those of my step children in the late 80s, early 90s [ex hubby was much older & i had three step sons].
now i live in a low income (whites are a minority) neighborhood and it is clearly evident at the block parties that interracial families and couplings are very common. no, it's not an uncontentious phenomena as evidenced in a class i taught on this topic, but precisely because it appears to be a source of such of contention indicates to me that the sanctions against such couplings are breaking down. as with all such phenom., debate errupts precisely when the norms are shifting, changing and no longer taken-for-granted.
to connect this to what i typed earlier re changing forms of racialization:
it would be my guess that one likely result of this, if these projections are accurate and my claims about changing mores are true, is that we might see racialization marked differently based on already existing hierarchies/divisions among blacks: lightness of skin and other physical features, claims to other than black heritage [big around here is laying claim to native american heritage], slave ancestry, immigrant from africa (within which there are still more divisions, for ex uganda v. s. africa), carribean ancestry. the last two are marked based on speech patterns (as well as claims about cultural differences affected by different histories of oppression/exploitation) and are, as you must know, a source of bitter contention at times. thus, it is not about anti black racism disappearing but taking on new forms.
i do not mean to reify false gaussian classifications when i speak of changing racial/ethnic compositions, but to speak to the liklihood that the face of racism is bound to change as the target it seeks out changes for various reasons. interracial/ethnic families are but one example. i might have spoken of immigration as doug points out with his example of Yale's acceptance of Africans but not African Americans
kelley