Electoral Dilemmas Re: Color of Anarchism

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Jan 5 09:48:57 PST 2003


Chip Berlet wrote:


>My working definition of racism is:
>
>"Racism is an ideology that elevates the social construction of racial
>difference to a primary place in human relations, and assumes a hierarchy.
>It was developed to claim superiority of White people over people of color
>based on the false idea that race is a fixed and immutable essentialist
>reality. Racism + discrimination + power/privilege = racial oppression. The
>overwhelmingly hegemonic form of racism in the U.S. is White supremacy, but
>other forms exist in other countries. Racism can exist anecdotally in
>oppressed groups, sometimes as a backlash response to the oppression."

What do you make of what Balibar & Zizek call neo-racism, which replaces racial hierarchy with racial separateness - drawing perversely on multiculti notions of diversity and autonomy? I.e., no one's better than anyone else, but the races just weren't meant to live together?

Doug



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