but the idea of "race" did and, indeed, was even used to imagine (and explain) the differences between men and women, too.
>because the word did not exist then. we are reading a lot back into the
>past when we use terms that arose out of fairly modern social
>circumstances to characterise historical relations.
good lard, dennis doesn't have to believe that they are a different race, just like you, dennis or i don't have to believe that blacks or whites are a different race. what matters is that social institutions and practices still subtly operate as if they are. figuring out just how that works, and disentangling racializing institutions and practices from gendered and class oppressive practices is extraordinarily difficult. it can be done, for analytical purposes, but it is a mistake to think that they operate absent the effects of the others. they are the instument-effects of one another.
the "new" racism: very few people in this country think that blacks are a different race in the sense that their behavior, beliefs, cultural practices are the way they are because of some bio, phys, genetic basis. indeed, far more people will tell you that men and women are different and those differences are rooted in bio, phys, genetic bases than they will admit to thinking that about blacks or asians or latinos.
but despite that, we still have structural racism, a difficult thing to grasp--difficult enough that you have people running about maintaining that they can simple think differently about race (like matt cramer did here recently) and that somehow will wipe away racism. the attitude is that racism and racialization are all about how we think. it is an idealist, platonic, individualist ontology/epistemology which imagines that ideas precede and are determinative of action, as if we are beings capable of extracting ourselves from the social world in which we live and thinking real hard to change things.
well, you and i and dennis know that it won't happen like that. what i do know is that some group *will* be racialized if we ever manage to create institutions and practices that don't racialize blacks in distinct ways. iow, i can imagine a capitalist world in which blackness is no longer a mark/er of difference that legitimates super-exploitation and oppression and, instead, some other set of racialized physical traits will become the proxy for marking people with the status of deserving their position in life. i can imagine a world, for ex, in which genetic testing marks people out on the basis of the results of those tests, that those genetic test results might just cut across the racialized lines we see today, and that those people will be the marked caste--deserving of their fate in life because they are genetically doomed.
(worth noting here of course that the new racism racializes, as you know, by using black skin as a marker of supposed character traits, habits, culture that doom people to be poor, etc -- yes? so, it's seen as a choice. similarly, in the south and in rural areas of the norht (US) white trash are considered a kind of distinct race of genetic inferiors who were inbred and, thus, incapable of living a proper white life. i know you don't believe me and don't want to hear it and people like carrol and yoshie are deeply threatened by it, but nonetheless, it's out there.
again, i'm not making an equivalence, just pointing out that racializing beliefs and practices exist with a vengeance where people think they can get away with it. the stigma attached to thinking of and publicly characterizing white trash in this way is no where near as strong as the stigma attached to saying the same about blacks. none of this means that there is an equivalence, just that the stigma as made racialization a far more complex process and has been driven "underground".
similarly, elsewhere, at another list, where people are deeply committed to the notion of " merit" and the idea that there are genetic bases to intelligence and that there is the possibility of creating life on another planet, racializing beliefs are rampant such that people regularly advocate the annihilation of people who can't vote properly or who can't figure out how to unsubscribe from a list. sure, it's hyperbole, but i'd say that reading the literatures written by people who subscribe to this world view that it's not complete hyperbole unattached from any basis in reality. this is because these folks have an individualist explanation for what is wrong with society: that individual will and belief can be mobilized to change the world. and when that fails to happen, they need to explain why people don't wake up and smell the coffee and do "the right thing". what can explain the "sheeple" status? well, their answer, obviously, is that those "sheeple" were born that way and only an elite few get it. those leaders should be anointed and lead or they she be shorn of the burden they bear: that is, those sheeple should be corralled and subdued so they stop causing problems OR they should simply be eradicated OR they should, in ayn randian fashion, plant themselves on another planet, o brave new world.
like it or not, the above is a form of racialization. it is insisting that there is a physical basis for "bad behavior". speaking of race in terms that fail to capture that process is problematic, i think.
so, we need to conceptualize racialization differently than we do. the specifics of how to do so are elusive, difficult to articulate