[lbo-talk] Are Conservatives Racist?

[Alan Rudy]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 11:05 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
>  On Aug 19, 2011, at 10:55 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> > I saw it in the context of the larger thread's focus on how to engage
> race
> > - which CC didn't make explicit, but I see where you were coming from.
>
> Also, a point that Adolph Reed makes often, and one that Seth implicitly
> makes in his Jacobin piece, is that racism isn't what it used to be. Seth's
> article lists some "attitudes" held by conservatives towards black people.
> They're noxious, but they're a long way from Jim Crow and lynch mobs. As
> Adolph argues, back in the day, one fought actual racist laws. Fighting a
> set of attitudes is a different ball of wax. But a lot of left rhetoric
> around race doesn't acknowledge this.
>
> Doug
>
>
Racism, as a social problem, isn't what it used to be, that's true… and it
is true that racism's expression as inter-racial violence and formal law is
the most clear expression of that change (except, perhaps, for the rise in
the number of inter-racial couples [a term that, of course, assumes the idea
of race and racial singularity in our histories actually makes sense.])

At the same time, my understanding of racism's not being what it used to be
focuses more on the ways that racism has become so differentiated on the one
hand and increasingly interpersonally invisible on the other.  While there
are racist assumptions and actions embedded in the lives and interactions of
most of my students, the vast majority of them engage in infinitely softer
interpersonal racism than their parents and grandparents.  What they
struggle most to understand, however, is that as interpersonal racism has
become softer the uneven and disproportionate racial consequences of
neoliberal social policy has become harder and harder.

Reed is right, it is a much clearer project to fight lynching, restrictive
covenants, Jim Crow, etc. but that doesn't mean in the slightest that what
is or needs to be fought is attitudes rather than legislated policy or
bureaucratically ossified practices (black farmers still get shafted
relative to white ones by the USDA even though there's no formal element to
that shafting [Shaft reference intentional if after the fact].)  Of course,
in this less obvious realm, the discrete character of racial relative to
class oppression is harder to see as the two are more integrated while
simultaneously being more invisible but totally NOT about the racial
attitudes of individuals.

I'd expect we're pretty close to agreement on this… at least I hope so.