[lbo-talk] Are Conservatives Racist?

// ravi ravi at platosbeard.org
Sat Aug 20 13:33:30 PDT 2011


On Aug 20, 2011, at 12:19 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Aug 20, 2011, at 11:06 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
>> beats me. you didn't answer my question. why do you and others here care about the practical politics of anti-racism?
>
> Because people love to go, "that's racist!" (inspiring the name of a funny band), but they can't go beyond that.
>

But they do. Which is the point of Joe’s example. I sense that nobody, including Adolph Reed, wants to take to the street or whatever with calls for “justice” and “equality” while refusing steadfastly to explain where the injustice and equality lies (or why). Reed’s clever use of superlative in “over-specifying the mechanism” doesn’t brush away the point that such specification is really the __practical__ carrying out of a programme, built around an understanding of inequality that builds solidarity within a plurality of grievances.

I don’t know of a thing called “generic racism”. Well, actually I do - it’s [the basis of] the righteous lament from white people that black comedians poking fun at white people. “Why is that not racism?” they ask, as if being mocked is equivalent to being set upon and murdered for sport (happened a week ago to some black worker in a auto-rental parking lot). Per Reed, however, is it the case that a guy getting beaten to death based on his race and driven over for additional kicks is really better seen as a matter of inequality? Or if it can’t be (if not in this case, then in the case of a white cop humiliating a successful black Harvard professor (*)), then perhaps it’s just an isolated crime (as conservatives jump to say every time such things occur). Calling it ‘racism’ is a superficial and useless “over specification”.

The questions to Reed are: inequality of what? and on the basis of what?

The implication is that knowing the answers to these questions are important, especially when it comes to practical matters.

—ravi

(*) Raymond Arsenault, writing in the New York Times, actually went the whole hog and argued that the Gates business was in fact proof that class trumped race. Gates, he wrote, told the cop “you don’t know who you are messing with” to impress upon the police officer his class superiority. Gates, and Obama, learnt the reality of relationships in short order.


> On this, I worship at the altar of Adolph Reed:
>
> http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Antiracism.html
>
>> The contemporary discourse of “antiracism” is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality—whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of “racism”— over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And, no, neither “overcoming racism” nor “rejecting whiteness” qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the “revolution” or urging God’s heavenly intervention. If organizing a rally against racism seems at present to be a more substantive political act than attending a prayer vigil for world peace, that’s only because contemporary antiracist activists understand themselves to be employing the same tactics and pursuing the same ends as their predecessors in the period of high insurgency in the struggle against racial segregation.
>>
>> This view, however, is mistaken. The postwar activism that reached its crescendo in the South as the “civil rights movement” wasn’t a movement against a generic “racism;” it was specifically and explicitly directed toward full citizenship rights for black Americans and against the system of racial segregation that defined a specific regime of explicitly racial subordination in the South. The 1940s March on Washington Movement was also directed against specific targets, like employment discrimination in defense production. Black Power era and post-Black Power era struggles similarly focused on combating specific inequalities and pursuing specific goals like the effective exercise of voting rights and specific programs of redistribution.
>>
>> Clarity lost
>>
>> Whether or not one considers those goals correct or appropriate, they were clear and strategic in a way that “antiracism” simply is not. Sure, those earlier struggles relied on a discourse of racial justice, but their targets were concrete and strategic. It is only in a period of political demobilization that the historical specificities of those struggles have become smoothed out of sight in a romantic idealism that homogenizes them into timeless abstractions like “the black liberation movement”—an entity that, like Brigadoon, sporadically appears and returns impelled by its own logic.
>>
>> Ironically, as the basis for a politics, antiracism seems to reflect, several generations downstream, the victory of the postwar psychologists in depoliticizing the critique of racial injustice by shifting its focus from the social structures that generate and reproduce racial inequality to an ultimately individual, and ahistorical, domain of “prejudice” or “intolerance.” (No doubt this shift was partly aided by political imperatives associated with the Cold War and domestic anticommunism.) Beryl Satter’s recent book on the racialized political economy of “contract buying” in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America, is a good illustration of how these processes worked; Robert Self’s book on Oakland since the 1930s, American Babylon, is another. Both make abundantly clear the role of the real estate industry in creating and recreating housing segregation and ghettoization.
>
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