>You cannot have racism (or conventional sorts of
>anti-racism for that matter) without a belief in race.
Not sure I'm happy with this. When I taught at a couple of elite liberal arts colleges, the students used a cute li'l taxonomy of characteristics, behaviors, tastes, habits, and attitudes displayed by hicks and white trash. Lest you think this was youthful ignorance talking, these attitudes expressed themselves among the faculty, though in a much more subtle way.
The college students identified habits and attitudes that marked the bodies and beings of white trash and hicks. They clearly believed themselves superior to both groups, though they were willing to mark a distinction between hicks and white trash. White trash had only themselves to blame: they failed to even try to become something other than WT. Of course, what they should strive for was to be more like my students and their families.
According to my students, WT failed because they seemed to take a perverse pride in bad dye jobs, acid washed jeans, big hair, greasy skin, ugly clothes, camaros and trans ams. Hicks were good hearted souls who tried hard, they just couldn't help it. Hicks would probably never be anything but poor for they could never overcome their lack of knowledge, social connections, backward social values, and just plain inability to fit in. But, they were laudable because they at least tried to fit in, however ineptly.
I also don't think racism has to have an overt claim that one race is superior to another/others. I don't know that it even has to subscribe to a belief in the existence of races. Surely, my students didn't think WT and hicks were of another race.
I don't know very many people who think men are superior to women and would probably find more people who think women are superior to men (indeed, George Gilder and those like him often argue women are superior to men). And yet, sexism works just fine without any ideological claims to the superiority of one gender over another.
I think that, just because racism carried with it a biological component at one point, it doesn't necessarily follow that racism still operates the same way. Maybe we should call it something else, as Grant suggests. But, the one thing it's useful for, it seems to me, is that it is about identifying _racializing processes_(it's a process, not a product! :). Racializing processes are about marking bodies and we can understand that marking as being very far removed from the actual appearance of those bodies.
slip sliding along the signifying chain.....
oh, and angela had some interesting things to say about racialization a few years ago. wondering what you think: http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/1999/1999-May/008352.html
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/1999/1999-May/009439.html
I rejected what Ange was saying at first, but the more I've thought about it and read further, the more it seems a better direction for dealing with these issues.
Kelley
Kelley