> i don't think it is very helpful to call what happens in japan "racism"
> unless you believe that the victims of social discrimination in japan
> constitute a different race from the larger japanese population.
Of course it's racism, just a more internalized version (sort of like the racism against Irish and Eastern European immigrants in 19th century America); Japan is also pretty exclusionary towards Korean and Chinese immigrants, of course.
> racialized identities mitigate against any meaningful evolution of
> culture and identity because they reinforce all forms of privilige,
> "white" and otherwise.
It's more complex than this, because the core of racialized identity is, in the age of capitalism, national identity or an identity-forming state apparatus of some sort (in the sense of something to rally around, as well as something to combat). The Vietnamese revolutionaries had to literally create a national culture in the midst of a civil war, for example; but this meant creating a political and cultural space which excluded certain other communities, e.g. the Chinese and the indigenous hill peoples.
-- Dennis