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>> I don’t know of a thing called “generic racism”.
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> Adolph's context makes it pretty clear what he meant:
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>> 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.
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In the above, Reed says what *isn’t* a generic racism. But he doesn’t say what *is*. Modern anti-racism is targeted towards specific targets as well, from what I can tell: end the occupation, stop the settlements, recognise an independent state, fund public schools, end drug laws that differentially punish the same “crime”, etc. If I send money to a “generic anti-racist organisation” it is because I know they take specific anti-racist actions. I write a lot of shit in my spare time on my blog propounding on this or that injustice. Nobody would or should fund me! Once in a while people might gather and march with slogans such as “End Racism”, but I have always taken that to be a call to end particular practices and conditions, and the term “racism” is used as a practical matter - because “End Racism” or “That’s Racist” abstracts or defines the injustice at a usable level.
What Reed also doesn’t tell us is if the “civil rights movement” included segments within, identified as “black liberation” or “women’s liberation”. I am guessing they did. And if I guessed right, the question is if Reed thinks those identifications were meaningless, or if he thinks they no longer apply.
Sometimes the specific manifestations (e.g: racial segregation) are not visible except in the data. Outcome differences might correlate with race even when adjusted for income or other metrics. What does one call this result? Or the cause of it?
Further, it is one thing to say that racism is structural. I would agree with that. Especially in terms of implementation. But as Joanna and others pointed out earlier (perhaps in a different thread) to deny the existence and importance of the ideas in the minds of people seems over-theoreticism and against the grain of successful civil rights movements, which often had explicit goals of changing the minds of people.
> I.e., a specific set of laws and practices, as opposed to the attitudinal stuff that so many PC anti-racists condemn.
But targeting attitudes is part of the process of tackling racist laws and practices, at least by one view. Perhaps that’s what some are arguing about here (or at least Reed is), but that’s not central to my positions above.
> Why the confusion about something so obvious? Does it have something to do with what Adolph said a couple of grafs down:
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>> My position is—and I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this bluntly, yet to no avail, in response to those in blissful thrall of the comforting Manicheanism—that of course racism persists, in all the disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and “attitudes” that are characteristically lumped together under that rubric, but from the standpoint of trying to figure out how to combat even what most of us would agree is racial inequality and injustice, that acknowledgement and $2.25 will get me a ride on the subway. It doesn’t lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as racism.
This seems to be mostly an intellectual beef. After all people do identify racism, protest against it, try to counter it, so on. That they choose to do so under that rubric seems to demonstrate that it works and it is useful. What is left then is an intellectual/theoretical objection that this is bad taxonomy, perhaps false consciousness… positions, if my depiction is true, that are worthy of theoretical debate.
But what this has to do with the “practical politics” mentioned by the OP is where I am confused. As I wrote earlier, I am guessing I do not understand the term correctly. I am willing to let it rest, at this stage,
—ravi
As an aside, it might be worth confessing that I am not a big believer in the so called "naturalistic fallacy” (at least in strong form). The “is”es impact the “ought”s in many different ways. IMHO.