I suspect that a lot of Americans have a pretty strong sense that America is a white nation. The English, or British, or whatever they are--the fact that we can't say tells us something--are actually doing surpringly well in developing a multicultural sense of a new nationhood. This may have to dow ith being an ex-colonial power.
Class is a different story: although socially constituted it is not socially constituted the way race is. It depends on objective relations of production. There is nothing objective like that corresponding to race. The objectivity of race is wholly intersubjective. However, if you have not heard Marxists talk about the subjective side of class, from Marx on, you haven't been listening. I recommend E.P. Thompson's The Making of English Working Class, for starters. By the way. it was you, not me, who introduced the word "mystical" into the discussion: I referred rather to the objective nature of race as intersubjective.
As far as "speaking"--orally--about freeom, yeah, I have hears lots of white folk do it. Jack Greenberg, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, comes to mind. Joe Slovo of the SACP. Gunter Grass. Heinrich Boll. Petra Kelly. E.P. Thompson--you should have heard the man! Then there were a lot of people fighting against the Stalinist regimes, however their fates turned out later: Adam Micnick, even Walensa, back when; Havel. So you have to tune your ears a bit.
I don't think we should ignore the Ayran Nations and the Nazi skinheads--indeed, I have rather more to fear from them than many, since the target Jews in particular. But I also don't think that people are buying what they are selling, not here. East Germany, Russia, I'm more worried,a lthough I don't think they will come within howling distnce of taking over the state.
--jks
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