> > Actually, for the majority of white men, perhaps, being white has
>> always been a matter of what is _not supposed to_ happen to you.
> > The metaphor of "wage slavery" captures this ambivalence: a white man is
> > _not supposed to_ be a slave, but capitalism does _enslave him to a
>> paradoxical freedom_: free from the means of production; free from
>> lifetime & heritable personal subjection to the master class; and
>> free to go bankrupt, become unemployed, and starve. In contrast, it
>> took _a very long time after the emergence of capitalism_ for blacks,
>> women, etc. to achieve this paradoxical freedom of wage labor; and
>> many women & people of color in the world have not gained even this
> > minimum bourgeois freedom.
>
>Of course. But that does not speak to the obvious fact that white
>men still get significant goodies from claiming their whiteness,
>such as better or unionized jobs or a relative pyscological ease
>with your person:
Relative goodies that go to whiteness can't be studied without looking at the segmented labor market; social & geographical segregation; cultural hierarchies (e.g., standard English vs. black English); wars on drugs & crimes; etc. at the same time.
That said, native-born white men today (if not in the past), on average, tend to be much less enthusiastic for unionized jobs than blacks, immigrants, etc. Many of them unfortunately feel that they can make it as individuals.
>Or to put it another way, i'm 34 years old and quite confident in my
>abilities but i am always consciouss of my blackness in an
>all-too-often unfortunate way. That's something that "white" boys
>don't really know about and CAN'T know about until they act
>publically and effectively against the white race in a way that will
>result in white folks making them feel quite black.
What you say above probably continues to be true, but I'd offer two qualification:
1. Increasingly, the young, gifted, & light-skinned black have been demanding a racial reclassification through the recognition of "biracial," "multi-racial," & other categories that deconstruct "blackness" defined by the one-drop rule (see, for instance, the website of Project Race, at <http://www.projectrace.com/hot_news.html>). I believe that this effort is in part rooted in social, cultural, & economic polarization of black communities (so much so that an increasing number of the Talented Tenth do not want to be race men & race women).
2. Post-civil-rights & post-affirmative-action racism, it seems to me, is a _backlash_ racism, in part stemming from whites' resentment against _having to be conscious about their whiteness_, which is a little different from the idea of whiteness as the unspoken but taken-for-granted norm.
> > White men who are racist think that the root cause of alienation lies
>> not in the aforementioned paradoxical freedom of capitalism but in
>> the marginalized & oppressed who either have only recently &
>> precariously attained the freedom essential to capitalism (women,
>> blacks, etc. in rich nations) or have yet to do so (illegal aliens in
>> rich nations; the impoverished masses on the periphery; etc.); racist
>> white men think that we -- not capitalism -- are the source of his
>> woes, without understanding that we have it even worse than them
>> under capitalism.
>
>Who is "we"?
Not-white, not-male, at a disadvantage compared to white men of the same class, strata, educational background, etc. I'm not speaking of the political "we" here.
> > White men who are not racist know what the real
>> cause of alienation is.
>
>My experience with the so-called left is that the vast majority of
>white men who constitute its ranks range from utterly clueless to
>deeply sensitized but quite significantly confused about race. I
>think you will find rough agreement about that among the so-called
>people of color agitators, certainly among blacks, though folks will
>disagree as to the reasons why...
Hmmmn. Is that the reason why you live in Paris? I hope you won't go to the extreme to which Ralph Ellison's _Invisible Man_ ("You were not hired [as a functionary] to think"), Richard Wright's _The God That Failed_ ("I Tried to Be a Communist"), etc. went. I believe you don't....
Anyhow, I say that white men who are not racist know what the real cause of alienation is, _but_ I don't think that white men who (think they) know what the real cause of alienation is are necessarily non-racist. So, perhaps there is no disagreement here.
Yoshie