Doug:
> >Hmm, but if a racial category was invented in the process of oppression,
> then >how is accepting that category negating it? Looks to me more like a
> perverse >reinforcement. The negation would be to reject racial
> categorization altogether.
>
I am coming off my summer trip to friends and family, so I am a bit behind here and my responses are belated.
There is a dialectical relationship here, but one of the articulation of the universal and particular that is a lot more complex than has been presented by the simple minded formulations of oppressor nation [bad guy]/oppressed nation [good guy] which have been bandied about here recently on the subject of Israel and Zionism. From the days of the slave trade, European and North American imperialism relied upon ethnic contention among Africans to pursue its objectives, using one group to enslave the other. A pan-African consciousness and identity first developed out of the struggle against European and North American imperialism, and in various ways, bears the imprint of its birth. Note here, as one example of this dialectic, the ways in which African nationalist movements have had to adopt the language of the colonizing power, such as Portuguese in Mozambique, as their official language, because it was the only national [universal] language, and the use of an African language would have meant the privileging of one African ethnic group over another. A study of the language issue in South Africa, and how the ANC has attempted to address it in the field of education, for example, would give one a good grounding on the complexity of the issue, and the ways in which it is impossible to transcend the imperial/colonial experience in the sense of simply stepping outside of it ["we will no longer consider ourselves in the context of our race or nationality"].
The Marxian formulation which Doug's quotes, that the workingman "has no country," is utopian in the sense that it postulates that capacity to step outside of all [national] particularity and have an unmediated human universality. Where liberalism assumes the deracinated individual of unmediated humanity as the starting point of its political philosophy [the individual in the state of nature who crafts the social contract], this Marxian formulation just calls upon him to reject the false consciousness of his particularity, and embrace that unmediated humanity. It doesn't work. Don't forget that it was in South Africa where that famous phrase was coined: "White workers of the world unite!"
The trick, from my point of view, is how to articulate the particularity in which we find ourselves with wider notions of universality, a political project which Martin Luther King managed so masterfully in the civil rights movement. That is why I have troubles with this Marxian formulation, and Doug's embrace of it.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20010814/dea7ceac/attachment.htm>