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

[Alan Rudy]

Keerist, what a staggeringly inaccurate, close-minded, and unkind reading of
my note... talk about guilt by association.  Where oh where was there a
dichotomy expressed anywhere in my note? Do you know the empirically
substantive resesasrch and literature on anti-essentialism?  Have you a
sense how folks who've been through don't have these ridiculous exchanges
because they're stance is fundamentally beyond the ideas and politics of the
discreteness much less the dichotomous nature of any of these concerns?

Doug's got real battles he's fighting, others do too, and the problem is
that they are battling people who essentialize race, just as radfems
frequently essentilize sex, or anarchists essentialize domination,
nationalists essentialize tradition, etc.  My stance is, admittedly, a
metacritique and its the metacritique that offers the way out of this
stupid, repetitive and increasingly uninteresting conversation.  (And, no,
I'm not saying that Reed's an essentialist nor that the problems caused by
"anti-racists" are BS... how could that not be clear at this point?!)

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 8:36 AM, brad bauerly <bbauerly at gmail.com> wrote:


> >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.
>
> Ah, the all too academically familiar essentialist tasty bunny.  As Reed
> says "Apostles of antiracism  frequently can’t hear this sort of statement,
> because in their exceedingly simplistic version of the nexus of race and
> injustice there can be only the Manichean dichotomy of those who admit
> racism’s existence and those who deny it. There can be only Todd Gitlin
> (the
> sociologist and former SDS leader who has become, both fairly and as
> caricature, the symbol of a “class-first” line) and their own heroic,
> truth-telling selves, and whoever is not the latter must be the former.
> Thus
> the logic of straining to assign guilt by association substitutes for
> argument."  It is either all-in anti-essentialism or essentialism.  This
> logic ends discussion by (self) ascribing an ethical power to the person
> who can assign the essentialist argument against any view not their own.
>  So
> lets not just shift the discussion from anti-racism to anti-essentialism.
> That gets us no where.
>
> Brad
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> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

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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