you sure seemed to have when you begrudgingly acknowledged that you realized that race was socially constituted. must have misread. my apologies.
and no, i already lost my lunch. no more reading lob for me. the toothpicks are poking holes through my eyelids. :) (i miss doug)
>Read some more posts.
>I don't think anybody has said that.
>
>As to the first point, sheesh I have to disagree.
>Asians, Africans, and Europeans, for instance,
>can all be anti-semitic.
you obviously didn't get my first point. ethnocentrism or xenophobia isn't racism, but it can be part of racism. racism requires a great deal more. so, when my chinese friends have spoken to my classes they tell my US students that chinese think that Americans are barbaric (their words) for eating raw vegetables.
that's not necessarily racism
that wasn't my truck.
> In so being, they are
>not creating a 'dominant one.' A group of people
>--such as Israeli jews of widely disparate backgrounds--
>can harbor racist feeling towards others without any
>coherent racial idea of their own.
the social scientist's answer is to call this something other than racism.racist. but what i'm talking about is the attempt to specifically tie this to membership in a nation. and there i'm having a problem.
see Perry Anderson's Imagined Communities.
and, while it may not seem as if there is any coherence, that's precisely what i mean by "erasure". the process is one in which the coherence you're looking for is erased. there isn't any coherence to the organization of the raced group either, but it appears so and it appears so, in part, because the dominant ONE is ONE in its plurality and manyness.
in a sexist discourse, women are portrayed as all a like, while men have individuality and are unique. they can play a panoply of roles. ditto a racist discourse. in a heterosexist discourse, gays all have icky anal sex while hets supposedly have variety. ha ha ha. :)
the dominant group's coherence is erased. but what is that coherence. you are still trying to slip something in and that something you want to be based on culture, religion, etc. and i'm saying, if you really understood the socially constituted nature of race, then you wouldn't look for that coherence in those "things". look for it in notions of belongingness and membership in terms of ideas, etc. not in physical traits. not in religion. not even necessarily in culture proper.
your example here is the United States. Did people in the U.S. think of themselves as anything less than a multitude of individual, different others with different religions, beliefs, sub cultures, etc?
we became "Americans" while simultaneously creating the raced Other. We all thought we were different, unique and exciting too. But when push comes to shove, a coherent idea of what it means to be an American emerged. and, indeed, with a critical lens you could have seen it then and you can see it now in the various ways we are socialized.
>mbs