>Messsage du 30/11/2000 19:46
>De : <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>A : <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>, <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Copie à :
>Objet : Re: The Color of Money
>
> At 08:07 PM 11/29/00 +0200, Christopher B. Hajib-Niles wrote:
> >so i guess you do believe that the victis of social discrimination in
> >japan constitute a different race? if they do, what racial group would you
> >assign them to? (do you think that the english can be racist against the
> >french, or the germans, or the serbians? why or why not?) also, neither
> >irish or eastern european immigrants in 19th century america accused
> >anti-immigrant americans of "racism"
>
> but the idea of "race" did and, indeed, was even used to imagine (and
> explain) the differences between men and women, too.
yes, of course it was...
>
> >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.
exactly my point. what i am saying is that "racism" is a term that assumes race as real--the dictionary and ommon usage, if not necessarily baroque left discourse, confirms this--not as a social construct. when we confuse reality for social constructs, we creat confused analysis. the irish were not despised by the english race, the irish were despised by englishman who BELEIVED the irish comprised a different, lower race. africans were not despised by a race of europeans, they were despised by europeans who BELIEVED them to be of a lower racial order. we should not be basing our politics on the assumtions of the enemy but vigorously attacking those assumptions DIRECTLY. to attack "racism" is to do nothing more than attack a by product of the assumtion that human beings can be neatly slotted into different racial categories. you might get some temporary benefits from that (and we have) but nothing permanent. if one desires to rid the society of all those things that could be ch! aracterized as "racist" one must attack the the "white race", the most destructive expression of modern racialism, as part of a broader anti-racialism.
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.
i never said that i thought that they did, nor do i. is there somewhere where i implied this?
>
> 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.
well, here's the problem: generally speaking, white folks are in transition on this matter. since the civil rights movement, most white folks have moved away from the most overt foolishness having to do with linking culture to biology. most of them know that doing that is not a good thing. the problem is they are not entirely clear as to why it is a bad thing to do, which is exactly what you would expect given our schools, corporate media, political shenanigans, etc. (most folks aren't clear on what going on in this country; why should white folk be clear on race?). so most white folks are in a sort-of racial never-never land: kinda wanna do the right thing, but don't know exactly what the right thing is so the right thing becomes whatever seems to kinda make sense from one day to the next. so they get pulled in all kinds of directions by all kinds of people with different ideas on rac: one day they are groovin' on the bell curve because they have noticed that black kids don't!
do as well as white kids on standard test and the theory seems to explain why, the next day they are vaguely disturbed upset because somebody at work called blacks lazy.
there is no new racism, there is just a new kind of white folk who are dangerous in somewhat less obvious ways then they used to be, and who, if the the idea of the white race is not exposed for the dangerous bullshit that it is, could possibly revert back to many of the habits of the old white folk. in fact, many of them alreacy have.
> but despite that, we still have structural racism, a
we have structural whiteism, or structural white privilidge...or a government that tends to be pro-white and anti-black.
difficult thing to
> grasp
not at all, unless one is either brainwashed or chooses to be willfuly blind, which is very often the case with white folk in this country when it comes to racial matters.
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.
yes that's possible
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
>
many legit points here but i don't think the specifics are difficult to articulate at all, just challenging to just about everybody who cares about freedom and justice. it will take courage for serious white agitators to develop an anti-white politics and it will take courage for black folk to develop a politics that is about liberating them from contradictions of blackness. and it will take courage for the non/wanna be-white agitators to escape the contradictions of their conditions, too.
chris niles
>
>