I speak as an Anglo (Southwest usage) man who has earned some of his living at places like the Commission on Human Relations (Pittsburgh mayor's office), Institute of Race Relations (London, Eng.) and Center for Black Studies (Wayne State U.). In the Civil Rights days I marched with the others and did things like interracial testing of public accommodations to determine if they discriminated. As a professor of sociology I taught a lot of "race relations" courses. This is only to say that I've been 'exposed' to the idea of race/ethnicity/nationality from the concrete perspective of establishment liberalism. And what did I learn?
I learned that affirmative action, civil rights laws, and 'race education' work in an historical period that's politically liberal, relatively affluent, with a militant integration/desegregation movement. I learned that the 'talented tenth' can be integrated into good jobs and executive positions and, with a strong labor movement, people of color can be organized. But I think much of this ended with the 60s. Civil rights liberalism had achieved its limited goals as more opportunities opened in nearly all institutions for the aggressive and/or lucky few. However, there's the objective fact that only so many can move up the class pyramid, regardless of 'good' times, leaving the rest at the varying-size bottom.
Along the way, I learned (mostly from activists and scholars of color)about capitalist-imperialist systems, and how racism is embedded in their very nature because they are economically stratified, often (usually) along lines of color, ethnicity, etc. that emerged historically, and are almost set in stone until resistance and uprisings occur from within. That's not very complicated conceptually; nor is a conceptual solution embracing some version of socialism. But there is a risk that an LBO thread on the topic of racism will explode into so many 'cultural-psychological-spiritual' offshoots that soon we'll start calling each other names because we'll never get to the nub of the problem or a hint of the solution. Saw that happen before various times. I vote that we talk radical economics and politics as applied to race, etc. (as well as women), and get back to some earlier analytical roots that too often are forgotten.
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