<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><FONT SIZE=3>Justin writes:
<BR><BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">OK, so how do you account for very widespread racism among white workers?
<BR>The beliefs are false, since African Americans are not inferior to white
<BR>people. The holding of these beliefs is caused by systematic social
<BR>interests, as well as springing from the frustrations of working class
<BR>life. False, systematically distorted belief is ideology is my book. What
<BR>do you think, Leo? --jks
<BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BR>
<BR>I think that it is a conceptual mistake to take the wide variety of race
<BR>conscious and race based discourses, and collapse them into some unified
<BR>field we then call racism. It is this type of reductionism, I am sure you
<BR>would agree, Justin, which leads to the entirely unjustifiable condemnation
<BR>of race conscious affirmative action as racist. There is a need to make a
<BR>number of important distinctions here.
<BR>
<BR>My point was that given a racially divided society, it is entirely
<BR>reasonable, in terms of instrumental rationality and pure calculation, for
<BR>workers of different races to recognize that they have interests as white
<BR>workers, African-American workers, Asian-American workers, Latino/a workers,
<BR>etc. This necessarily implies discourses of race, but it does not lead
<BR>inevitably to the type of racist discourses you identify above.
<BR>
<BR>For example, as a white worker, I can recognize that the schools in
<BR>neighborhoods and communities in my city which have significant numbers of
<BR>white students, whether they be white working class or more integrated middle
<BR>class schools with a significant white component, are academically better
<BR>than schools in neighborhoods or communities which are predominantly
<BR>populated by students of color. Looking at the prospects for making all
<BR>schools quality schools regardless of their neighborhood and racial make-up,
<BR>and the likelihood that will take place in the short run, I may decide, in
<BR>what is a race conscious way, to send my children to the 'white' schools. I
<BR>may even end up moving to a more racially segregated neighborhood to achieve
<BR>that end. Nothing in the set of choices I make requires me to accept a
<BR>Hernstein and Murray _Bell Curve_ argument about the intellectual inferiority
<BR>of people of color, or indeed, to have any particular understanding about why
<BR>the schools divide in such a way, along racial lines. I could even have a
<BR>very radical analysis of that phenomenon, and still decide that I was going
<BR>to send my children to the school where they would receive the better quality
<BR>education, because the act of sending them to a 'non-white' school would harm
<BR>my children without doing anything to change the schools for the better. I
<BR>could even be an African-American parent with the capacity to send my child
<BR>to one of those 'white' schools, and do so, without accepting for a minute
<BR>that there was something superior about the intelligence of white folks.
<BR>
<BR>The question of why significant numbers of white people -- not simply white
<BR>workers, who are no more racist than the white population as a whole --
<BR>embrace racist discourses of white superiority and the inferiority of people
<BR>of color has, I think, a rather complicated answer. Although these discourses
<BR>of racial superiority and inferiority are certainly "false" in the way you
<BR>describe it above, indeed, although the very categories of race are
<BR>unscientifically "false" in that sense, I don't think that type of objection
<BR>takes us very far, or tells us very much of what we need to know. As a
<BR>category, 'false consciusness' does nothing but make those who wield it feel
<BR>confident that they possess the truth.
<BR>
<BR>Take the racist stereotype that African-American men have exceptionally large
<BR>glans. One could, of course, set out to demonstrate its falsity. But it would
<BR>be absurdly beside the point to be doing random [blind?] studies of the size
<BR>[flacid? erect?] of glans among different racial types. Surely what we need
<BR>to figure out is what it is about the intersection of race and sex, and the
<BR>ways in which racist discourse rests upon the dehumanization and the
<BR>beastilizing of people of color, that leads to the rise of such stereotypes.
<BR>And when you consider how the stereotype operates inversely with respect to
<BR>Asian men, you begin to recognize that there is something pretty complex
<BR>going on.
<BR>
<BR>At the very best, such racist discourse has a quite remote connection to
<BR>relations of economic exploitation. I don't accept that there is "systemic
<BR>social interests" in the way you lay it out above at the root of the racist
<BR>discourses of sexuality. But when you examine something like the history of
<BR>lynching in the US, it is clearly a very central part of the phenomenon of
<BR>racism.
<BR>
<BR>All in all, a pretty difficult nut to crack -- and 'false consciousness' is
<BR>not the way to get to the kernel.
<BR>
<BR>Leo Casey
<BR>United Federation of Teachers
<BR>260 Park Avenue South
<BR>New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
<BR>
<BR>Power concedes nothing without a demand.
<BR>It never has, and it never will.
<BR>If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
<BR>Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
<BR>want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
<BR>lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
<BR><P ALIGN=CENTER>-- Frederick Douglass --
<BR>
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