[lbo-talk] Adolph Reed on the limits of antiracism

[Alan Rudy]

Chuck, I think there are two groups of "anti-racists" that're being referred
to.  The first are the anti-racist multiculturalists in universities, places
like WBAI/KPFA and some movements.  These're folks who start and end their
politics with race... think of the feminists who insist that "feminism was
the first oppression" and everything else is secondary, tertiary, etc...
think of Murray Bookchin's origin story that bullshit shamanist claims made
by old folks that they could dominate nature in the face of new-found
scarcities which might lead the young to not feed or honor the old was the
first form of domination and everything after that is just another form of
domination... think of Communists who are pretty darned good on race, sex,
gender and sexuality but find all of them to be of a status subordinate to
and effectively separate from class.  Its all variants of "your stuff is
important but secondary so we'll deal with it later thank you very much".

The other folks are the corporate committed-to-diversity crowd, wherever
they reside... who are kinda the inverse of that former group.  The former
group always starts and usually ends (in this case) with race, that latter
can start pretty much anywhere and doesn't care where it ends so long it is
diverse, multisomethingal, intersectional and profitable.

Obviously, the two groups can overlap in the administration of any number of
liberal institutions...

The problem I had reading the passages about historical specificity and
contemporary vaguery was a sense of how to proceed when the contradictory
successes of the past mean that the specificities of the past - including
the capacity to believe and more or less act as if the particular classes,
races, ethnicitities, sexes, and/or sexualities of the past were coherent -
appears to no longer hold.  It seems like the idea is this: if we can't be
specific about something other than class then we need to revert to class.
The problem being that class - esp. class in and of itself - isn't a
relation, condition, phenomena, experience or identity around which too many
folks are rallying these days for, seemingly, a whole host of material and
semiotic reasons.  If we need a specific class politics then we pretty
quickly find ourselves back in the world of British Cultural Studies, trying
to understand what makes all these folks with other-ascribed and
self-ascribed racial, reproductive, ethnic, sexual, religious, etc
realities, folks who "objectively" have "real" "material" similarities find
it so difficult to see their similar class conditions... and we're pretty
much back where we started.

It seems pretty obvious to me that what we're dancing around is the problem
of essentialism in any and all of its forms (any anthropologists in the
house?) and so long as we end up insisting on either the basic primacy of
the essence of our concern relative to others' or on the secondary
superstructuralism of the false essences of others, we're not able to do any
good work.  Sure other people do it, and it quite properly drives us nuts,
but the key is not to speak their language - its a trap.  If the goal is
specificity, but it is important - as Chuck noted - to have some kind of
dynamic core organizational capacity then its more important for us to find
a different way to take this stuff seriously than it is for us to focus so
much on what's wrong with their views (among other things, its so obvious
what's wrong with their views, even if they're pretty difficulty to beat
back in any number of settings.)

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 9:15 PM, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:


>
> So, an honest question who are these anti-racists? Give me some names
> that I might recognize these evil anti-Marxists. I've never been to an
> anti-racist rally for example.
>
> ... SNIP ...
>
> At the end of the article, I am still not sure who Reed is addressing. I
> have to suppose a `diverse bourgeoisie' who wants to believe we are
> passed all that. But who here on LBO believes we are passed anything?
> Just exactly who here was fooled by the rainbow coalition Bush cabinet?
>
> ...