Barbara Fields:
***** When virtually the whole of a society, including supposedly thoughtful, educated, intelligent persons, commits itself to belief in propositions that collapse into absurdity upon the slightest examination, the reason is not hallucination or delusion or even simple hypocrisy; rather, it is ideology. And ideology is impossible for anyone to analyse rationally who remains trapped on its terrain.[11] That is why race still proves so hard for historians to deal with historically, rather than in terms of metaphysics, religion or socio- (that is, pseudo-) biology.
11. A well-known historian once illustrated this fact for me in the very act of denying it. Challenging me for having made a statement to the same effect in an earlier essay (Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in _Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward_, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, New York, 1982), he declared: "Someone could accept the evidence that there is a racial disparity in IQ and still believe in integration." Well-intentioned, but trapped in racial ideology, he cannot bring himself to question the scientific status of race itself, let alone IQ. Nor, although an accomplished user of statistical methods, can he perceive the fallacy of statistical studies claiming to have eliminated the social determinants of intelligence and isolated the genetic ones, while perforce using social criteria -- there are no others -- to assign subjects to their proper "race" in the first place. ******
Social criteria (not any physical qualities) define "the black community." (That is why there are white-skinned blacks and black-skinned whites.) But those social criteria can be of two kinds. One "black community" is _politically created_ by the black liberation struggle. It comes into and goes out of existence as blacks define it by their conscious activity. Fields also catches this up beautifully:
*****It was not Afro-Americans, furthermore, who needed a racial explanation; it was not they who invented themselves as a race. Euro-Americans resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining Afro-Americans as a race; Afro-Americans resolved the contradiction more straightforwardly by calling for the abolition of slavery. From the era of the American, French and Haitian revolutions on, they claimed liberty as theirs by natural right. [38] They did not originate the large nineteenth-century literature purporting to prove their biological inferiority, nor, by and large, did they accept it. Vocabulary can be very deceptive. Both Afro- and Euro-Americans used the words that today denote race, but they did not understand those words the same way. Afro-Americans understood the reason for their enslavement to be, as Frederick Douglass put it, "not _color_, but _crime_." Afro-Americans invented themselves, not as a race, but as a nation. They were not troubled, as modern scholars often are, by the use of racial vocabulary to express their sense of nationality. Afro-American soldiers who petitioned on behalf of "These poor nation of colour" and "we Poore Nation of a Colered rast [race]" saw nothing incongruous about the language. Racial ideology in its radical American form is the ideology to be expected in a society in which enslavement stands as an exception to a radically defined liberty so commonplace that no great effort of imagination is required to take it for granted. It is the ideology proper to a "free" society in which enslaved descendants of Africans are an anomalous exception.***
"Black Community" (like "African American" or "Blacks" or "Negroes") is a social and political, _not_ a physical, fact. So those who have denied or questioned the existence of "The Black Community" are quite correct.
By racists (or by anti-racists who succumb, like the professor Fields quotes above, to racial ideology) "the black community" includes Powell or Rice. It is the ideology of racism (whether spoken by Afro-Americans or Euro-Americans) that creates a "community" that is somehow responsible for its members. The late fink columnist, Mike Royko, on numerous times tried to balance "white crimes" (particularly police brutality) against this or that dramatic crime committed by some black man in some other state. Because X (a "black man") shot a cop in Florida, a Chicago cop who beat the hell out of some youth from the projects was somehow more "understandable." "You guys do it too, you know." There was a highly revealing episode 30 years ago when we were participating in the defense of the "Pontiac Brothers" (accused of murdering a guard). Several relatives of Pontiac guards showed up at a forum we sponsored on the ISU campus. I don't remember the exact quote, but what one woman said pretty directly was, "They got one of us, so we've got to get some of 'them.'" It was quite clear that it made no difference to her who had actually shot the guard, as long as some black convicts -- _any_ black convicts -- were punished for it.
Every time either European Americans or African Americans are spoken of as coherent groups, having any sort of group identity, racist ideology (the belief in the existence of race) is being reconfirmed.
John Thornton wrote:
>
>
> >2) Do whites benefit from their discrimination? (Though whites clearly
> >discriminate, and minorities are clearly worse off as a result, it's not
> >clear that whites are consequently better off in absolute terms as a
> >result.)
> >
> >-- Luke
>
> No I'm not making that error. The answer to #2 is yes, whites benefit from
> discriminating against people of color. Is society better off? No, but
> whites are. We can disagree about this if you wish but disagreeing is not
> the same thing as being mistaken.
Clearly _some_ whites _some_ times in _some_ situations benefit from racial discrimination. But the statement that "whites benefit" is either incoherent or it considers whites as a whole as having some kind of group identity. Of course Luke (incorrectly) uses the same general label, "whites." But whites do _not_ exist as such. European Americans have no more and no less reality _as a collective_ than do African Americans as a collective.
Fields again:
***** The creators and re-creators of race include as well a young woman who chuckled appreciatively when her four-year-old boy, upon being asked whether a young friend whose exploit he was recounting was black, answered: 'No; he's brown.' The young woman's benevolent laughter was for the innocence of youth, too soon corrupted. But for all its benevolence, her laughter hastened the corruption whose inevitability she laments, for it taught the little boy that his empirical description was cute but inappropriate. It enacted for him, in a way that hand-me-down stereotypes never could, the truth that physical description follows race, not the other way around. Of just such small, innocuous and constantly repeated rituals, often undertaken with the best of motives, is race reborn every day. Evil may result as well from good as from ill intentions. That is the fallibility and tragedy of human history-or, to use a different vocabulary, its dialectic. Nothing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualize it to fit our own terrain. If race lives on today, it can do so only because we continue to create and re-create it in our social life, continue to verify it, and thus continue to need a social vocabulary that will allow us to make sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but of what we ourselves choose to do now.* *****
The ideology of "white-skin privilege," the ideology of "whites" as whites-in-general "profiting" from racism merely recapitualtes the ideological foundatins of that racism.
There is no black community except in so far as blacks _create_ and _recreate_ that community for social/political purposes or as (unintentional) racists recapitulate it in their rhetoric.
"Euro-Americans resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining Afro-Americans as a race," Fields writes in my first quotation from her above; Euro-Americans are resolving the contradiction between liberty and the objective oppression of black people by defining Afro-Americans as "the black community" which is responsible for its own. But to repeat. There is no way except social criteria to know who is and is not in that community. Skin color simply doesn't define any actual collective.
Carrol