Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Jan 15, 2010, at 4:36 AM, Joseph Catron wrote:
>
> > Do any of us really believe that it's possible to be non-racist
> > within a certain social relationship, or racist outside of it?
>
> Bingo. But extracting some abstract, essentialist state of mind from
> those social relations is the essence of the whole "anti-racist" POV.
> Then, having reified it, you fight it. How you fight it, though, is
> never really clear.
This is a fairly good statement of the general set of questions. The central question, then, is how do racists come to mount anti-racist struggles.
Plural. There is no Anti-Racist Struggle and cannot be, but only a gathering of particular struggles in particular palces. Persons who in some sense are (and often would admit to being) "racist" joing struggles around some particular issue: like an annual Christmas parade with (always) a white santa, and the whole damn police department is called out to keep one man (black) and a little girl (white) from joingin that parade so they have to walk along behind it at a distance, with the police "escort" leading them. Thousands of episodes such as that, punctuated by 'big events' (both planned,as with Rosa Parks, and unplanned, as with the Watts riot which was so crucial an episode in the development of the decade.
Edgar Hoover was actually rather insightful when he claimed you could recognize Communists because they were _comfortable_ with Black people. It is very possible for a white person to sincerely oppose racism while being in varying degrees "uncomfortable" with Blacks -- even being anti-racist _because_ of that discomvort. But finding themselves engaged in such particular struggles, they find that discomfort dissolving. We are in the domain of Marx's "revolutionizing practice."
So there is no need to extract any essentialist state of mind. Such essences are beside the point.
Carrol