I keep going back and forth on this thread, to do auntie White or not to do auntie White? I am not sure it needs yet another incarnation.
In an earlier post, Chris claimed the nazis enlisted the US race discourses. I think this is partly mistaken. If the nazis followed any lead beyond their own it was English and French nineteenth century biology and the social sciences, Gobineaux(?) for example. Their German predecessors also did a considerable amount of work in history, classics, and archaeology postulating Aryans as an indigenous european lost tribe.
One of the things that distinguishes the German context from the American, is that Aryanism was interlocked with an evolving nationalism and national identity. This cult of European and particularly German nationalism which was expressed as capital, industrial, intellectual and cultural competition, also focused on linguistics and philology and became a competition between virtual identities, national personae so to speak. Racism and racial divisions and discourses in the US functioned through slightly different modes and expressions. In the US, nationalism showed itself through the Indian wars for example and the appropriation of land from the Mexican Territories. This latter point somewhat illustrates Chris's contention that concepts of race fail to address a broader front, of something, call it whiteism for the moment.
While everybody here probably assumes that race is related to anti-semitism, sexism and other social pathologies, that relation hasn't been spelled out. And, there hasn't been much of a view given on how race is interwoven with developments in capitalism--beyond the obvious point that racial minorities end up in low paying jobs. Finally, it hasn't been shown how all these are related to the broad intellectual history of the west.
So here are some sketches and notes on all that. (BTW, I just read the Walter Benjamin post which is directly related.)
What unifies concepts like racism, anti-semitism, and sexism, and their particular destructive and pathological characteristics is they are all children of the Enlightenment---twisted children to be sure. Of course there were medieveal and ancient antecedents to all these constructions. But their predecessors were constructed differently and derived their justifications and conceptual fondation primarily from a religious cosmology.
Under the Enlightenment program, the pathological partitions and orderings of the social collective in a modern and secular world are attempts to provide a rational justification and hierarchy of both status and value for the construction of society--and more importantly reproduce an existing power elite: predominately white anglo-european males of wealth. Whence, derives their foundation in the Enlightenment and in the historical rise of the bourgeoisie. In other words the twisted ensemble are products of a broader scaled movement to rationalize the human world along the same lines that the physical sciences rationalized the material world. It is the drive to rationalize (aka enlighten, modernize, westernize, neo-liberalize etc) social, political and economic processes into law, institutions of government, and into a variety of less formally configured social relations that creates the structural links between this ensemble of pathologies and the development of capitalism and industrial states. More accurately, the socio-economic totality is interlocked and inter-related together in the dynamic processes of a living society. Nevertheless, in order to render an intelligible narrative, it is necessary to dis-engage the parts and examine them as if they were separable phenomenon.
For example, notice that the morally constructed good and bad attributes of African-Americans, are mirrored in what amount to production values, values that reflect the schema of capital, i.e. the presumed to be prodigious and natural capacities for labor and reproduction. (The Ballad of John Henry, steel driving man).
While this constructive interweave of capital and social value may not stand up to a thorough going empiricism, it is a rational construction nonetheless. In this particular sense of the rational, these constructions follow a mythological mode of reasonings which revolve within the obit of the grand Enlightenment project of modernity--or rather the meta-narrative mythology of western civilization. It is this meta-narrative mythology of western civilization that feeds all the nonsense that composes what we currently call neo-liberalism. All of the mythological narratives are obviously still with us, however, they are now translated into an arena of sociological and biological discourses which express the current mode of authentication and verification; to normalize the existing conditions of the political economy through a founding or `discovering' of them to be characteristic of the orderings in the biological world. Thus we have all the pseudo-empirical studies that show social, economic, and intellectual heirarchies and orders are a natural consequence of some biological base. The thread on math and IQ is an obvious example.
The US historical ground for many of these intellectual generalities can be found in post-civil war industrial development and Jim Crow. The point here is to follow the fact that Jim Crow laws are predominately state public accommodation legislation that accompanied the development of industrial towns, railroads, and other mass transportation and industrial public facilities. It is critical to realize that without the pre-civil war slave acts and plantation economies, there were few other institutional means to express a logic or rational ordering of race along `natural' lines. This doesn't mean that custom and social practice wasn't utilized, but these were not legal constructions, that is, formal institutions as such. Thus in the post-civil war, public space in the US was literally and legally constructed as the architecture of an industrializing capitalist and racist state. Thus, in the process of this architectual construction, orderings by race could then be viewed and again reproduced as a natural and rational order.
With the perforced removal of public accommodation laws and their architectural expression during the civil rights struggles, the arena and foundation of race logic and its rationalized/naturalized hierarchy of value was transformed. Like the political economy itself, the hierarchies of society in which economic classes conjoin with race and gender, were transferred and transported from their direct expressions in an industrial base, say as enforced differentiations of work and from obvious and concrete expressions as architecture and law, into all the more fluid systems of custom, culture, and social relations---like their mirror, the ever shifting values of capital all of these social/racial fluxions move from moment to moment in virtually all directions and yet their center of mass remains the same. In fact, of course this transformation amounts to a shift of emphasis, since obviously custom, culture and social relations are not new modes of expression. This transference or transformation is in effect a return of these forms to less concrete and less formal ground--much the same sort of ground as they had during re-construction and the than as yet incomplete industrialization.
The absence of an explicit legal framework, formal institutions and their most obvious architectural and industrial expressions as divisions of labor and separate public facilities has hardly checked the ever evolving system of socio-economic rationalization that continues development along the same traditional trajectories. The abstract trajectory of modernity and its rationalization of society as an hierarchical system of order that expresses the ideological schemata of capitalism continues on through less formally sanctioned means, which are nonetheless systematic. The same systemization continues to reproduce socio-economic deprivations, longer hours, lower pay, ever more tightly compacted living spaces, ever more lengthy commute distances, even thinner and more dissected educations, higher disease and infant mortality rates, shorter life spans, etc, etc. Thus, the same ratio-machinations of socio-economic and cultural processes reproduce more or less the same hierarchical conditions of class, race and gender with some shifting of relative numbers. In some sense this transference back into less formal means, call it the conditions of post-modernity, could be viewed as a turn of efficiency (progress?) since similar systematic results that once required more blunt and physical means, an industrial infrastructure, can now be achieve without the same costly material investiments. On the other hand, there is still the prison-industrial complex as a back up, just in case the virtual or postmodern panopticon fails.
So, this presents something of a question. To what extent does a discourse on the white race or whiteness relate to all the above? What is added? Don't we just reproduce yet another variant on race discourse pathology, instead of abolishing this complex altogether? Is whiteness understood to be the rationalizing process itself, something of the essence of the Enlightenment project of modernity---as were its social inventions: race, gender, and that primal font of all sociability, (Kelley's favorite) the nuclear family?
In other words were does the auntie White discourse position itself within this context?
Chuck Grimes