>
>
>
> 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.
yes, all of this is certainly true. it's ben a long time since i've read in this area so i can't be precise but i know that several writers have made it abudnantly clear that hitler and other nazi heavies were quite public in their admiration of american racial policy and american eugenics...
>
> One of the things that distinguishes the German context from the
> American, is that Aryanism was interlocked with an evolving
> nationalism and national identity.
as was very much the case in the states with whites in the early part of the 19th century, albeit in a different way...
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.
yes...
Racism and racial divisions
> and discourses in the US functioned through slightly different modes
> and expressions.
yes...
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.
the concept of "racism", not "race" but ok...
>
> While everybody here probably assumes that race is related to
> anti-semitism, sexism and other social pathologies, that relation
> hasn't been spelled out.
originally, this was discussion that pitted the anti-racism vs anti-whiteism, especially as it relates to organizing effectively against power, not a debate about race. maybe it became that because there are more academics on the list than agitators...
also: as is often the case when race comes up with a lot of white folks around, people start making sloppy associations about class, gender, largely, i think out of a certain defesivness...
And, there hasn't been much of a view given
> on how race is interwoven with developments in capitalism--
i made some general points a while back but ok...
i'll comment on the rest of your interesting discussion later...
chris niles
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
>
>
>
>