Both Doug and Carrol are correct. It will take persuading individuals to change things , but they will have to be socially and class conscious and motivated individuals, if they are to be persuaded to be militantly anti-racist.
Yes, class conscious means an individual worker who sees past their immediate , individual advantage to their larger class disadvantage. Class consciousness is a premise to effective anti-racist consciousness. That's not easy, as many posts on this thread point to.
The mission for list members, if they choose to accept, is to crack this gaggle. You will be members of the New John Brown Brigade.
Charles
From: Doug Henwood
Carrol Cox wrote:
>You are operating from radically individualistic premises. Everyone
>knows this (or ought to), and of course even more egregious cases exist.
>But this tells us _nothing_ about what racism does to the working class
>_as a class_. It has been shown over and over again that the greater the
>spread in wages, socialservices, education, etc. between white and black
>workers, the worse off _both_ groups are in comparison with areas in
>which the spread is less.
>
>The question of why a given individual white worker "profits" from
>racism and the question of why large numbers of white workers support
>racist policies have NO RELATION whatever to the quite separate question
>of whether white workers as a whole _objectively_ suffer from or profit
>from racism. It is pretty clear that white workers _as a whole_ suffer
>seriously from the effects of white supremacy and structural racism.
You run right into your old lack of agency problem, and end up reifying racism and discrimination. When employers read resumes and discriminate against black names, or discriminate against black applicants in interviews, that's an instance of the material social relation that constitutes racism. And while you can argue all you want about how this works out on the macro level, for an individual white worker, the advantages of the set-up are pretty obvious, in a particular instance.
Doug