I think that it is a conceptual mistake to take the wide variety of race conscious and race based discourses, and collapse them into some unified field we then call racism. It is this type of reductionism, I am sure you would agree, Justin, which leads to the entirely unjustifiable condemnation of race conscious affirmative action as racist. There is a need to make a number of important distinctions here.
My point was that given a racially divided society, it is entirely reasonable, in terms of instrumental rationality and pure calculation, for workers of different races to recognize that they have interests as white workers, African-American workers, Asian-American workers, Latino/a workers, etc. This necessarily implies discourses of race, but it does not lead inevitably to the type of racist discourses you identify above.
For example, as a white worker, I can recognize that the schools in neighborhoods and communities in my city which have significant numbers of white students, whether they be white working class or more integrated middle class schools with a significant white component, are academically better than schools in neighborhoods or communities which are predominantly populated by students of color. Looking at the prospects for making all schools quality schools regardless of their neighborhood and racial make-up, and the likelihood that will take place in the short run, I may decide, in what is a race conscious way, to send my children to the 'white' schools. I may even end up moving to a more racially segregated neighborhood to achieve that end. Nothing in the set of choices I make requires me to accept a Hernstein and Murray _Bell Curve_ argument about the intellectual inferiority of people of color, or indeed, to have any particular understanding about why the schools divide in such a way, along racial lines. I could even have a very radical analysis of that phenomenon, and still decide that I was going to send my children to the school where they would receive the better quality education, because the act of sending them to a 'non-white' school would harm my children without doing anything to change the schools for the better. I could even be an African-American parent with the capacity to send my child to one of those 'white' schools, and do so, without accepting for a minute that there was something superior about the intelligence of white folks.
The question of why significant numbers of white people -- not simply white workers, who are no more racist than the white population as a whole -- embrace racist discourses of white superiority and the inferiority of people of color has, I think, a rather complicated answer. Although these discourses of racial superiority and inferiority are certainly "false" in the way you describe it above, indeed, although the very categories of race are unscientifically "false" in that sense, I don't think that type of objection takes us very far, or tells us very much of what we need to know. As a category, 'false consciusness' does nothing but make those who wield it feel confident that they possess the truth.
Take the racist stereotype that African-American men have exceptionally large glans. One could, of course, set out to demonstrate its falsity. But it would be absurdly beside the point to be doing random [blind?] studies of the size [flacid? erect?] of glans among different racial types. Surely what we need to figure out is what it is about the intersection of race and sex, and the ways in which racist discourse rests upon the dehumanization and the beastilizing of people of color, that leads to the rise of such stereotypes. And when you consider how the stereotype operates inversely with respect to Asian men, you begin to recognize that there is something pretty complex going on.
At the very best, such racist discourse has a quite remote connection to relations of economic exploitation. I don't accept that there is "systemic social interests" in the way you lay it out above at the root of the racist discourses of sexuality. But when you examine something like the history of lynching in the US, it is clearly a very central part of the phenomenon of racism.
All in all, a pretty difficult nut to crack -- and 'false consciousness' is not the way to get to the kernel.
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 --
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