> > All of the above would be helpful, but no replacement for legally
> > mandated proportional representation.
>
>Well getting that will be every bit as difficult as eliminating racism and
>sexism! And it doesn't follow that getting PR will get rid of r/s; look at
>Europe, plenty of racism/sexism over there that I can see.
I don't mean proportional representation as an electoral political device. I mean representation that is race-proportionate, gender-proportionate, etc. in education, employment, political offices, etc. Such quotas are currently illegal in the USA, but it should be part of our long-term political agenda & certainly part of any socialist society if we get around to constructing one, I believe.
>You miss my point or do you deny that race is like phlogiston.
Race, like phlogiston, might one day become consigned to the dustbin of history, but it would not be possible to work toward such a future if we behaved _as if_ race had been _already_ in the dustbin of history. Why make it easy for neo-conservatives to argue that we should adopt a "color-blind" approach, judge "individuals" by the "content of their characters," etc.?
>Hell let's go further;
>why call it abortion, why call it a fetus; playing the radical contingency of
>all "settled" namings of the social is too easy. That's what I think we can do
>with race and gender; do the Foucault on folks, defamiliarize them with those
>"stable" "meanings" they've internalized. A variant of the William Burroughs
>line "don't let the cop inside [your head]".
Foucault never said we could simply "unsettle 'namings' of the social" _just like that_.
You seem to be arguing for a voluntarist solution based upon a nominalist understanding of what is social.
Would you say that a black man would find it easier to catch a cab by holding a placard that said "race is a social construction," "it is all in your head," "this is not a black man," etc.? You wouldn't, would you? It might make for an interesting street theater a la Duchamp, but it can't be a viable strategy for the abolition of racism.
> > Why not the "final say" if the category of women is as meaningless as
>> that of angels as you argue? Why treat men and women differently at
> > all?
>
>Well hell, let's do what Whiskers does and just have the courage to ditch all
>"rights" discourse! Why believe in difference?
We can't abolish "'rights' discourse" by fiats, individual changes in individual beliefs, etc. Read Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Program," Lenin's "The State and Revolution," etc.
With or without rights, though, it is a fact that men don't need abortion in the same way that women do, so we can't treat them with formal equality, ignoring different needs. We can't treat the able-bodied & the disabled with formal equality either; there must be different treatments -- special accommodations for the disabled -- if the disabled are to gain substantial, not merely formal, equality.
>So you yearn for the day and society in which the terms race and
>gender and the
>nefarious forms of behavior those categories give rise to no longer exist, but
>can't take the first step and say they don't refer and let us not
>take the time
>to point out to our fellow citizens that racism exists even though
>race doesn't
>in the same was religious belief does yet god doesn't and that we shouldn't be
>racist or religious believers precisely because race and god don't exist.
You can say so to everyone all day long, but so? The first step, instead, is to _analyze what material conditions give rise to racism, sexism, etc. & categories used through them_ and to _try to abolish them_ (and it is _in this process_ that ideas count some),
Yoshie