**** Perhaps msot intellectually debilitating of all is a third assumption: namely, that any situation involving people of European descent and people of African descent automatically falls under the heading "race relations." Argument by definition and tautology thereby replaces argument by analysis in anything to do with people of African descent. Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations--as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco. One historian has gone so far as to call slavery "the ultimate segregator." He does not ask why Europeans seeking the "ultimate" method of segregating Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa. No one dreams of analysing the struggle of the English against the Irish as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the English developed for suppressing the "barbarous" Irish later served nearly word for word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and indigenous American Indians. Nor does anyone dream of analysing serfdom in Russia as primarily a problem in race relations, even though the Russian nobility invented fictions of their innate, natural superiority over the serfs as preposterous as any devised by American racists.
"Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," NLR, May/June 1990. ********
Everyone is for better racial "relations"; they have a stupid little festival in Bloomington/Normal every year called "Not in Our Town." Its first occurrence was at the time when large numbers of black churches were being burned around the nation, and was supposed to indicate that "we" did not do such things. It has now become a celebration of "multi-cultural" whatever, and is supposed to indicate the dedication of Bloomington/Normal to "better racial relations," although it is only through lack of opportunity, not intent, that the Normal Police Department fails to equal the record of the Philadelphia, LA, or NYC police departments. In all the discussion each year around "NIOT" no one has ever mentioned the long-established practice of the Bloomington PD of going out of its way to have a police record of every black male older than 12.
As handy a shorthand as "race relations" may be, I think it would be a good idea to abandon the prhase.
One might also suggest that the phrase "Israeli-Palestinian relations" is an aggressively racist usage. The point is not to improve relations there, or achieve peace. The point is to stop the criminal aggression and daily atrocities committed by the Israeli state and the Settlers.
Carrol