``...Class consciousness is a premise to effective anti-racist consciousness. That's not easy,..' Charles Brown
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No, it isn't, and of course it's also not the end of it either.
There is also the intellectual world of the New John Brown Brigade to deal with.
I am not sure how to approach this aspect of racism, but it is the most pernicious mode of all, built into the fabric of thought, law, institutional and bureaucratic procedures, performed as civic and social habit and almost invisible to all those people not effected by it----thankfully a group which is slowly moving from a majority to a minority.
There is some insight into these regions through of all things Derrida's tracts on Differance. It is a racism without race per se, it resides in Difference itself as Other. Class differences are part of it. But here the clearest way to `see' it, is through some mode like disability that is not race or class as such. For example unless you have tried to negotiate a regular city sidewalk and everyday errands in a wheelchair you will never notice the barriers. The barriers are part of the architectural concept of what a building, a city, or a state `is'. The same holds true for race, class, and difference in general in all the social, legal, political, economic and cultural constructs that compose the fabric of the US.
You simply can not see what I am trying to describe unless you have by chance lived within some constructed Differance. In the converse, it is part of what makes the US world, White---even though the US is very far from being White in any concrete sense like demography or history. At some point in the future either the US will become identical with itself in all of its concrete differences and become a place and people that are actualized differance, or the US will attempt to re-constitute itself through some magic of the mono-socio-cultural envelop into the White thing it pretends to be at the moment.
I think in order to perform this transformation toward Differance requires a kind of multiple mode identity where there is no `core' no simple, single, monolithic `identity' as such. Somehow you must be able to be multiple people, not as an act or as `passing', but as the heart of the matter so to speak. Not many people will understand what I am trying to describe, but if you live in multiple worlds you manage to integrate them in your mind simply as a consequence of living them as modes of being---with a certain reserved frame that finds and discovers homeomorphisms among differences. This isn't the same as making people into the same shape. Instead, it is finding certain concordances between different shapes. The differences are not lost in the process, they are explored so to speak for the shake of discovered difference. What is substituted for a fixed frame of reference with universal clocks and rods, is something like the Lorentz group---if anybody follows that. It has its own coherence and operates perfectly well. However, what is sacrificed is the privileged position of the local frame.
At its deepest level it is precisely what Strauss and others have thought was the worst threat of `modernity' and in their retrograde way how the US whitewing think and why they have appropriated people like Strauss as their mentors. But there are differences between the old relativity the `modernity' project and the new one, say the post-modernity project that I am thinking about. For one thing, differance remains more or less intact. There may be no need for a systematic equivalence between frames in quite the rigorous way that a mathematical metaphor demands. Differance is unerasable, non-equivalent in any context so the institutional mode must change from its monolithic presumptions of equivalence into a kind of loosely defined inclusion under a non-terminating negotiation---something like the process of solving a continued fraction. There is no teleos, no end product, no end point, no terminus, no resolution. It is more of a method or process than an architecture of forms. There is no single value that can obtained in the limit.
I am not sure any of this makes much sense, but that's the way I see an end to the old and the very old.
Almost everyone lives in multiple worlds anyway, so that I am not sure this is particularly news, but the depth or pervasive infusion of what amounts to a multiple and simultaneous collection of dialectic processes might be. In some sense it is as if Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind was run inside out and backward at the same time so that we do not arrive at the mind or the world at all, but only their interpenetrating phenomenological multiplicities. That is, more or less back to Derrida's interrogation of Differance.
Some how, something does arise that isn't a synthesis. I am not sure what it is. Perhaps it is nothing more sustainable than a fleeting moment of recognition. In any event, it doesn't have a particular form and seems to arise only from experience, from living in multiple worlds in which I or we as if these were an I are strangers to them all or in which we are as at home in one as we will ever be in any of them---which is to say, none of them at all.
``...That for many thousand years art's function was to depict the gods was a fact generally accepted in the past, if little dwelt upon. By a paradox of history it was left to the first agnostic culture that the world has known, when it resuscitated all other cultures, to recall to life their sacred works...'' From The Metamorphosis of the Gods, Andre Malraux.
CG