Gordon Fitch wrote:
> In the same way, the innumerable forms of institutionalized
> oppression we observe appear to be connected to, to be an
> expression of, class war. These phenomena exhibit both
> simplicity and complexity at the same time.
Just *because* these forms of oppression are (not just appear to be) *connected*, they must NOT be *identified*, as Dennis does. One of the weaknesses of the term "sexism" for the ideology of male supremacy is that, modelled as it was on the existent term, racism, it tends to *identify* two things that need to be related, connected, but to do so we must clearly understand that they are *not* the same.
In the United States "racism" means the *ideology* of white supremacy -- and white supremacy exists first of all as the oppression of *black* Americans. Thus when we talk (as we must) of the effects of racism on Latinos or Inuit or Chinese we need to keep in mind that this is not an independent oppression or ideology but is a manifestation of the core social relationship of black oppression.
There is enough difficulty in analyzing any of these various oppressions without hopelessly confusing the task by simple-minded identifications of quite different (though connected) social relations.
Carrol
P.S. In the early 19th century various social subordinations (e.g. of women) that had been, up to that time, 'simply' elements in a universal hierarchy or (of Jews) a religious distinction tended to become "biologized" -- given a biological rationale. (Volume 1 of *Black Athena* deals with this in the case of Jews; Laqueur's *Making Sex* deals with it in the case of women.) It is at that time, also, that the rationale for slavery became "racial." The very category of "race" owes its existence primarily to the institution of black slavery in a social order whose ideology proclaimed human equality. The Irish had been subject to "racial" oppression for centuries (and spoken of just as were/are blacks in America) without ever being classified as a "race."