> jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net wrote:
>
>> > Nathan Newman wrote:
>>
>>> >
>>> > > Doug-- there's been plenty of opportunities for Menendez to
>>> promote racial
>>> > profiling and attacks on Arabs over the last few years. Somehow
>>> Menendez has
>>> > skipped many other opportunities to do so, but chose to focus on
>>> the UAE's
>>> > purchase of the ports. If he he such a racist, why did he pass
>>> on all those
>>> > other opportunities.
>>
>>
>>> Because in the individualized psychological sense he is NOT racist,
>>> but
>>> like all the other motherfuckers who make up the DP leadership and
>>> elected officials he is perfectly willing to utilize the structural
>>> racism deep in u.s. life for opportunistic purposes. I can't believe
>>> that Nathan can't see what is happening here.
>>>
>>> More evidencd that we hamper the struggle against racism by using the
>>> word so often to describe individualized feelings. The DP is a racist
>>> institution, though most of the people who make it up at all levels
>>> are
>>> not personally "racist."
>>>
>>> Carrol
>>
>>
>> But the word applies to individualized feelings. The word isn't being
>> mis-used.
>
>
> This fits into Carrol's habit of looking at Historical forces without
> any acutal sense of human agency. So we have institutional racism -
> but individual racism isn't worth talking about, or isn't possible to
> talk about.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
Doug,
Look at it this way: trying to understand racism by analyzing the individual psychological processes of the privileged group is tantamount to trying to understand capitalism by analyzing the individual psychological processes of capitalists. It just doesn't get you very far. --The data from many social psychological studies are clear on this: racist attitudes are typically the dependent variable, not the independent variable. Shifts in social relations and practices lead to attitude changes far more often than vice versa. Thus if the goals are understanding the causes of racism and creating interventions to undermine racism, deep analysis of individual psychological processes is an ineffective strategy.
Miles