>>> dhenwood at panix.com 08/07/01 03:55PM >>>
Nothing idealist about it. "Race" is produced through social practices and perpetuated through them, and also through ideology, language, symbols. Those are pretty tenacious things - they're how we see the world. As evidence of their tenacity, people who want to fight racism often repeat the racial categories, only with different valorizations, rather than trying to undo them.
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CB: This is the issue discussed earlier on this thread. The thing is to undo the racist _social relations_. The categories are not the main thing. Undoing the categories is misplaced emphasis. In fact, it may be that the categories must be retained and repeated in order to most effectively undo the actual social relations.
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Capitalism isn't natural - it's a social construction. Money isn't natural - it too is a social construction. But they're pretty powerful little fuckers, aren't they?
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CB: Yes, but it may be important to keep repeating the category "capitalism" in order to destroy its social relation. That is rather than rejecting the category of "capitalism", we retain the category of "capitalism" in order to have a clear target of what we are aiming to deconstruct. The category capitalism will then whither away when there are no real social relations left corresponding to it. This would be a materialist approach.
Similarly, we don't reject the category of race, but use it to destroy racist social relations.