Chip Berlet wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Racism is an ideology that elevates the social construction of racial difference
> to a primary place in human relations. It can be used to rationalize the
> oppression of certain groups, but can exist in oppressed groups in response to
> the oppressors. Racism, as an ideology, is an idea, not an act.
>
> Racism + power = racial oppression
>
I am aware that racism is an idea (or rather a rather large complex of ideas, implicit & explicit), but ideas come from some place -- they do not drop from the sky. And that someplace is human activity: racism is a set of ideas which spontaneously emerge from a set of social relations in which a particular group (Blacks primarily in the U.S.) are subject to highly visible and continuous oppression -- they make that oppression intelligible to those who practice it.
This set of ideas is so different in quality, cause, and operation from the responses of an oppressed group to their (real or apparent) oppressors that I really think a separate name for it is useful. After all the U.S. state and the U.S. Supreme Court have been crushing affirmative action (for example) in the name of anti-racism.
The power to which racism attaches itself also comes from someplace. Racism and Power are not two platonic abstractions which descend from heaven and mate.
Carrol