OK. Let's try to work on the assumptions first.
1. You can't talk meaningfully about race unless you're a member of a minority.
Absolutely disagree. If empathy is not possible, if it is not possible for us to understand the situation of the other, there is no hope. I mean, in this case, we can't even see that this so called "other" has been manufactured. We are accepting that manufacture as innate reality.
2. Everyone understands racism in a different way. We can't define it, so it's impossible to talk about it.
It plays out differently. But, at bottom we're talking about a conditioned response: a pre-judice (pre-judgement) based on a) conditioning and/or b) experience that has been produced by that same conditioning. The key thing here is to understand that it is a conditioned response (not inborn) and to understand its peculiar alchemy, which depends not only on identifying an evil or inadequate other but, in a deeper sense, on a notion that the other can be separated from the self...that there's such a thing as a "black man's problem" and a "white man's problem" and that these are not mutually involved. And deeper than that, that we are fundamentally divided by our competition for scarce goods; that there isn't enough for everybody.
3. What follows from my objection to 1 and 2 is that race does not determine whether one has anything valid to say about racism. A black man is just as much of a racist as a white man (and I'm not referring to "reverse-racism") inasmuch as his self-image has been as conditioned as that of the white man by a society that is fundamentally racist.
So, let's agree that racism is a conditioned response to the alleged other and let's agree the only credentials we need to carry on a discussion about racism is our interest in the subject and a shared sense of its signficance. I would argue that its signficance is such that it has defined U.S. political agenda/alignments/conservative drift for the last thirty years -- but in a new/improved/stealthy form.
As for where to start: I see three possible threads, there's Brad Mayer's reflections on the "Arab" as the new global jew (from his post today), offering Farenheit 9/11 as an example, Chuck Grimes' great synposis of the last thirty years (quoted below), or maybe we could just start by talking about how "invisible" and "coded" the new improved racism has become (also in Chuck's post) and how we can get around that. It is a new and different fight. It's not a fight about drinking fountains; it's a fight about the rights of felons, about racial profiling, about funding to schools, about the public good.
Joanna ________________________________________________________________
"Let's get the history straight first. Nixon pulled a significant part of white blue collar vote away from George Wallace and into the Republican party by using race as the subtext, as in `they' are stealing all your opportunities, your jobs, your women, your neighborhoods, your schools, turning your kids into drug addicts, criminals, and whores etc, etc, etc. Stop all that now, vote for Dick. And they did. With the Dixiecrats gone, the Democrats had to mobilize as much of the minority vote as possible, along with white liberals and this was just not enough to win nation wide elections. So, the Demos concentrated on moving some tiny fraction of the white center in their direction. As that brain-dead white center continuously move right so did the Demos, knowing full well their minority and liberal base had no place else to go. Meanwhile the Demos dropped most of the rhetoric about race and started coding it all to appeal to this white center while ratting out every institutional reform that backed up civil rights---so only those who wanted to see `progress', could. Those who didn't want to hear it or see it, didn't have to.
This race subtext has been turned into a virtual universe of rightwing codes that pit the white slightly advanced working class against the black, hispanic, and immigrant working class as a divide and conquer tactic for the bottom. Meanwhile it works the same racist magic at the white mid-management (suburban) level where it is even more important that work, housing, neighborhoods and schools remain as un-integrated and status conscious as possible. Here the message changes a little to emphasize tax cutting, pushing privatization of public services to divert the public coffers to business, dropping any all government regulatory systems (partly code for anti-affirmative action and anti-immigrant laws) and to hand over whatever is left of public trough as soon as possible.
In this code for working and lower middle class whites, Liberal elites means: integration, `quotas', affirmative action, bussing, welfare, soft on crime, unions. For the mid-manager-suburbanite crowd, Liberal means high taxes, government regulation, and so forth and so. If race is not the first sublevel of the subtext then it is second using some vague innuendo that means `privilaging' those who don't deserve it, i.e. the same un-mentioned dark hordes out there somewhere in the night... all death penalty cases waiting to happen...
What is communicated isn't words. It's the apparence and look of the rightwing and their Democratic wanna-bees who mumble something vague about America or since 9/11, blah, blah, blah... Nobody is listening to that. They are looking at the comic book caricature of a White guy, a very White guy. The only question is, how white is he? Really white, or really really white? What Reagan communicated was that he was White, really, really white and that's about all he communicated. So the right has been following that success story ever since.
These really, really whitewing guys all look the same. They have that funny looking 1962 haircut glued on top of their manly brow. They always wear suits. They have perfect white teeth and steel rim glasses. They pretend to never swear. They go to church, believe in God, and look like some old lady's nice middle aged nephew. They have two perfect children perfectly spaced and perfectly groomed who stand next to their perfect and adorable wife. They believe in small business, family farms, giant cars and trucks, football, country western music---they're down with the masses. They kiss babies. They are as phony as a three dollar bill and everybody knows it.
For the bottom they promise one thing: we will not let `you know who', starts with an `n' in your place, period. For the mid-level suburbanite, more of the same, plus tax cuts and some `free enterprise' scheme to milk the public cow---get in on the take while you can. Everybody knows this too. So the assholes get elected, regular as clock work. And absolutely nobody who votes for them will say a word---it is just understood.
The key that unlocks all the mysteries (including what's wrong with Kansas) to the rightwing political success is no mystery. It's just been coded and re-coded until any direct reference has virtually disappeared from the printed and spoken word---which ironically is typified by this article in its glaring omission."
Chuck Grimes, "What's the Matter With Kansas" at http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040614/013131.html