>>> Carrol Cox
His key point (and any errors or stupidities on other points are
trivial) is that it is NOT a matter of "race relations" but of the
oppression of black people. Cf Barbara Jeanne Fields:
****Perhaps most intellectually debilitating of all is a third assumption: namely, that any situation involving people of European descent and people of African descent automatically falls under the heading "race relations." Argument by definition and tautology thereby replaces argument by analysis in anything to do with people of African descent. Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations -- as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco. One historian has gone so far as to call slavery "the ultimate segregator." He does not ask why Europeans seeking the "ultimate" method of segregating Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa. No one dreams of analysing the struggle of the English against the Irish as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the English developed for suppressing the "barbarous" Irish later served nearly word for word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and indigenous American Indians. Nor does anyone dream of analysing serfdom in Russia as primarily a problem in race relations, even though the Russian nobility invented fictions of their innate, natural superiority over the serfs as preposterous as any devised by American racists.****
The concept of "race relations" is probably the core ideological support of structural racism. The rejection of it and along with the idea of "unity" is primary in the attack on racism.
Carrol
^^^^^ CB: This is true, but as shown by many years of protesting "racism" and "oppression of Black people", including for example, Wright's sermon's made available to a wide , White public , most White people don't respond to such raw criticism.
Obama is demonstrating that many, many more Whites will at least participate in debates on race in response to more neutral rhetoric. In current the flashpoint around Wright and Ferraro, many more Whites than usual (in the media at least) are arguing against racism than from a position of defending Obama. These are people who don't usually argue so vigorously against racism. They support Obama in the first place because he is using neutral language on racism. There is a certain psychological complexity to this, several steps. I'm not so sure many of the Whites fighting racism in this context would do so if Obama hadn't taken a "soft" approach in the first place. First they get on "his side" in the campaign. Then they are motivated to oppose racism vigorously because they are defending Obama. I heard mainstream White journalists saying things I'd never heard them say before in relation to Ferraro and Wright.
Just a note on Ferraro. In '84, Black people voted 90% or more for Ferraro and Mondale over Reagan and Bush. Did Ferraro forget that ? If White people or just White women had voted 90% for Ferraro and Mondale like Black people did, they would have won. Ferraro's false statement about Obama having an advantage by being Black in order to hurt his campaign is made treacherous by this history.