Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 15:51:22 -0500 (EST) From: bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Rakesh Bhandari)
It seems to me that America's compulsive racialization continues obscure to minorities and 'whites' alike the class determinants of health and other inequalities. It would not surprise me that even most blacks think that 'black on black' homicide and 'inner city' drug use account for the six year difference in 'racial' life expectancy. But according to Melvin Konner, most of the deficit is actually explained by cardiovascular disease that specially afflicts blue collar and poorer sections of the working class (no doubt racism itself greatly exacerbates the psycho social stress to which the most degraded and impoverished workers are subject). Yet as Vincente Navarro has long noted(including in a fine book for Monthly Review Press), 'it is unlikely that by concentrating solely on race differentials that we will ever be able to understand why our health indicators for minorities are getting worse." So because mortality is often not reported by class, it is difficult to determine the causes of widening racial differentials.
The reliance of race as a variable in health statistics of course also reifies white identity while 'deemphasising the class structure of American soceity and (making) it appear that the differences are genetic (and pan-racial) and therefore not a function of social and economic inequality or racism." (George Armelagos and Alan H Goodman in their contribution Building a New Biocultural Synthesis, ed. Alan Goodman and Thomas Leatherman).
By the way, this volume has an excellent discussion by Debra Martin of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act that Camille Paglia pooh-poohed as a racialized assault on the academic freedom of bioarchaeologists. Martin discusses the dialogic process that some archaeologists were motivated to take with the living descendents of the Southwest Indian peoples whose ancestors they had studied for decades (including quite a bit of craniometry in the early stages). In some cases, interesting new research agendas have been formed; For example, Martins detail thorough and painstaking bioarchaeological work on the hitherto understudied health impacts of colonization (including a detailed investigation of the changes in diet that had led to obesity and innumerable problems); also important studies have been undertaken of neglected aspects of gender domination in pre colonial societies that have served to illuminate contemporary problems. There has probably also been a destructive undermining of important research through NAGPRA, US PL 101-601. But both Martin and Goodman show in this volume that the ethical questions and dialogical processes that have been prompted by the law have often been salubrious. As Martin puts it: " a critical look at the bioarchaeological work done prior to NAGPRA legislation demonstrates a body of data detached from social realities of the time and unable to address real problems in health and health care."
So the reality is a quite bit more complicated that Paglia or the WSJ would have it. Towards the end of objective multicultural knowledge it is important to attend to the racism and imperialism of one's own.
And there that was that really funny WSJ editorial by Tamara Jacoby a few weeks ago in which she insists that Jesse Helms' opposition to Moseley Braun's ambassadorial appointment need not have been racially motivated. This is true enough. There are plenty of reasonable questions one could have put to this crook. But who can honestly doubt that racism played some part in Helms' own twisted thinking process? It seems that it has become a mark of sophistication in this country to doubt any claim of racism (or orientalism)--even on the part of Jesse Helms!
best, rakesh