On the term "Race Relations," from
Barbara Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,"
"Perhaps msot intellectually debilitating of all is a third assumption: namely, that any situation involving people of European descent and people of African descent automatically falls under the heading "race relations." Argument by definition and tautology thereby replaces argument by analysis in anything to do with people of African descent. Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a
system of race relations--as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco. One historian has gone so far as to call slavery "the
ultimate segregator." He does not ask why Europeans seeking the "ultimate" method of segregating Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa. No one dreams of analysing the struggle of the English against the Irish as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the
English developed for suppressing the "barbarous" Irish later served nearly word for word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and indigenous American Indians. Nor does anyone dream of analysing serfdom in Russia as primarily a problem in race relations, even though the Russian
nobility invented fictions of their innate, natural superiority over the
serfs as preposterous as any devised by American racists"
As a practical matter, the term "race relations" suggests two independent agents, and hence supports the absurdities of "reverse racism." If "racism" is defined as the ideology which legitimizes white supremacy and the oppression of blacks, then these absurdities are at least brought out rhetorically. It also helps answer the question of whether blacks who beat up whites are acting in a racist manner.
In any case I think the habit of not using the phrase "race relations" is a good habit to develop.
Carrol