economic stats (as if people mattered)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>  >[CLIP]  but i just wanted
>>  >to point out that "polish" doesn't mean "white".
>>  >
>>  >kelley
>>
>>  You mean as often as blacks, Latinos, and even Arabs get stopped &
>>  harassed?
>
>Manning Marable, speaking in Chicago a few years ago, said that in the
>1980s when there was a heavy Irish migration to Boston, that these Irish
>got on the boat in Liverpool as Irish and got off the boat in Boston as
>whites. His argument was that these immigrants *could* have united with
>the Haitian immigrants who were fighting anti-immigrant conditions at the
>time but *chose* the opportunistic route of uniting with whites as whites
>rather than with immigrants as immigrants.
>
>The cops will at one time or another harass anyone. You should have seen
>the side of my blond blue-eyed son 12 years ago after he had run and made
>a grandfatherly old white cop chase him. But such examples while they
>illuminate what cops are, merely obscure racial oppression and ought not
>even be mentioned when the topic is cops and blacks.
>
>Carrol

There are two wings of "whiteness studies": the Race Traitor wing 
(Noel Ignatiev, David Roediger, etc.) & the obscurantist wing 
(represented here by Kelley).  While Rakesh (probably correctly) used 
to argue that both wings are reformist, vainly hoping for an 
anti-racist Keynesian revival of social democracy, there is a virtue 
in the Race Traitor wing: they do not use the idea of "whiteness as 
social construction" in an effort not to think too hard about racial 
profiling, police brutality, etc. & how they have affected blacks & 
Latinos.  It is nonsense to argue that Polish-Americans get stopped & 
harassed by cops as often as blacks, Latinos, & Arabs do.

Yoshie