renouncing whiteness

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>At 02:47 PM 11/22/00 -0500, Yoshie wrote:
>>>That prompted my
>>>agreement with Norman Finkelstein's thesis that US political discourse
>>>tends to be driven by grievance manufacturing industries controlled by
>  >>ethnic groups.
>  >>wojtek
>>
>  >Blame it on lawyers.  No grievance, no litigation.
>
>Why lawyers?  It is identity politics that I had in mind.  And the
>intellectual commodity producers who manufacture grievances as the means of
>reinforcing identities which form nice market niches for their products.
>wojtek

In this country, folks don't have a political party that represents 
-- or even claims to represent -- working-class interests (the Dems 
had always been a party of ethnic white votes, even before blacks 
switched from the Reps to the Dems); unions are small and weak; folks 
don't belong to cross-racial social institution outside work; etc. 
In this context, litigation has thrived as a substitute for achieving 
one's goals collectively in a political arena (party, union, social 
institution, etc.); and next to litigation, a kind of ethnic machine 
politics (= identity politics).

Yoshie