We need to start specifying which racism we're talking about!
While folks keep agreeing that there is no such trans-historical phenomena as race or racism many of the same folks keep writing as if that means the issue is cut-and-dried, as if its relationship to capitalism were cut-and-dried, as if the whole terrain is not wildly uneven, fundamentally contested and fraught with contradictions at and between individual agency, social institutions and political, eocnomic and cultural structures - as if THOSE three things could be straightforwardly differentiated.
The modern, capitalist - and it is both - variety of racism is a simultaneously amortized, scientized and biologized racism. THAT racism is specific to capitalism, other forms are different and while still existing under capitalism are not specific to it. However, capitalism is a contradictory thing I think someone once wrote and one of the contradictions of capitalism is that it keeps undermining its own seemingly stable conditions and categories. (Yeah, yeah, I know capitalism is not a subject, you know I mean.) This means, among other things, that race is a moving target, that racialization is executed differently depending on where and when it is practiced or resisted, that it is possible to simultaneously have a nation where there is an anti-racist and neoliberalized multicultural realm - mostly in discourse but only partially in practice - in some areas and, as partial continuity from the past and partial reaction to the present, a renewed reactionary racism in other realms - in discourse and practice - in other areas.
The dynamics between top-down, down-up and various horizontal engagements with various elements of received knowledge (or lack thereof) about difference, othering, race, sex and heteronormativity (among a raft of other things) is fundamentally unstable and the problem is that folks here - and Michaels - keep writing as if these relations, the contradictions and variability are in the slightest bit straightforward and universal... particularly in their relation to that staggeringly differentiated set of relations we call capitalism and/or modernity.
On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 10:29 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
> > On Oct 11, 2009, at 6:59 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> >
> > > My mother
> > > was a Michigan fruit farmer's daugher. Before the war their main labor
> > > force was white migrant southerners (always called "Arkies"). In a
> > > conversation with her once I discovered she believed that she could
> > > tell "southerners" by their appearance. She had in fact "racialized"
> white
> > > southerners.
> >
> > What's specifically capitalist about this? Haven't yokels always been
> > suspicious of the folks from over the hill?
> >
>
> Sigh. Nothing. It was merely illustrating the _possibility_ of shag's
> argument re "racializing." Racizlizing _is_ specific to capitalism,
> though obviously the human capacities that make capitalism possible are
> not specific to capitalism.
>
> I was responding to one of CD's off the wall rambles, which is probably
> a mistake.
>
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>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319