For a while we had a fellow here insisting the 'white race' needed to be 'abolished.' But if the black 'race' is ineradicable, if only for defensive and justifiable reasons, then so too is the white race. You can't have one without the other. If the category of race necessarily transcends individuals then everybody is in a race, if not two or three.
People say race is socially constituted (to which I agree) as if that made it somewhat less real. But social relations are as real as anything else, maybe more so. (sidenote to YF--that's why monetary policy is 'real' too.)
I've believe self-determination of a nation or people is a justifiable and sometimes indispensable concept. But to make sense there needs to be some roughly identifiable nation in question, with some common geography and experience. "Common" means a relative lack of others. There are lots of black folks in D.C., you couldn't classify it as part of a black nation unless you sliced off everything west of Rock Creek Park. Otherwise it's two nations -- Africans and Chardonayistas, plus a small enclave, call if Salvadoria, that is oppressed by both (n.b. the confusion between 'oppressor' and oppressed nations).
Alternatively, there are constructive responses to racism that need not raise the issue of nationhood. When these things get mixed up you get some of the weirdness that has come out in this thread.
mbs
Charles Brown wrote:
>CB: Is Doug proposing that the _legal_category of race be rejected ?
>But why would he propose this to Black or other racially oppressed
>groups ? Black people do not have the power to obliterate or reject
>the _legal_category. Black people don't have the power to change the
>law, do they ?
I'm not proposing it to anyone specifically - I'm proposing it to everyone.
Doug