I'm not sure this example helps Charles' argument. The Union's rejection of slavery was precisely a rejection of the (legal) category of slave. It did not introduce positive discrimination against plantation owners, but abolished them outright (abolished them as slave-owners that is).
>Black people would be glad to dispense with racial categorization, but the
>racists will have to do it first.
>
Well, I agree with that.
By analogy with the class struggle, (or Marx on the Jewish question), the proper goal is not to entrench the position of the working class but to abolish it - and the means to do that is to abolish the conditions that create it as a subjugated class.
In message <3B6AE21D.2C93E21 at ilstu.edu>, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
writes
>
>The black community (politically defined within that community but in
>response to growing repression from "outside") has no choice but to
>define itself as the black community. The bulk of non-blacks in the
>United States don't now give a fuck about what happens to blacks, and
>those who do give a fuck can't in practice do much except in
>collaboration with the black community raising hell. Giving orders to
>the Black Community from outside (as Rakesh tried to do and as you seem
>about to do) or raising sophisticated epistemological doubts about what
>the black community is certainly does not help.
All of this assumes a homogenous black community, which might have had some meaning in the 1970s, but hardly applies today. Carrol's fiery rhetoric seems worlds away from the multitude of responses of people of colour to their conditions.
As to whether white people 'give a fuck' about black people, I would have said that they were creepily preoccupied with black people, certainly as far as American culture indicates. -- James Heartfield