I guess I asked for it, asking Leo a question like this. Basically, you say, Leo, first, that there are lots of kinds of race-consciousness, not all of which are racist. Fair enough, but I was talking about the sort of attitudes that incude white workers to refer to African Americans by racial epithets, move out of neighborhoods that are integrating, fight busing, blame their problem on affirmative action, etc. Second, you say that racist ideologies may be rational, in that they serve group interests, say, by keeping white wages up at Black worker's expense. That is possible, although empirically controversial, and has been much discuused here. However, even if the false and distorted beliefs are rational in this sense, they are still false and distorted, not justified, that is, ideological. Third, you say that talking this way is not useful because there is no system underlying the distortion of people's beliefs that produces racist attitudes. Well, here we just differ. I am still a historical materialist. You are a postmodern radical democrat. That's a gap I don't thinkw e will bridge. --jks
>
>Justin writes:
> > OK, so how do you account for very widespread racism among white
>workers?
> > The beliefs are false, since African Americans are not inferior to white
> > people. The holding of these beliefs is caused by systematic social
> > interests, as well as springing from the frustrations of working class
> > life. False, systematically distorted belief is ideology is my book.
>What
> > do you think, Leo? --jks
> >
>
>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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