[lbo-talk] Are Conservatives Racist?

[Miles Jackson]

SA wrote:
> 
> So in your view, the fight for racial equality would be helped if 
> intra-left debates involved people more freely accusing each other of 
> holding racist positions.
> 
> I guess this is an empirical question. But I shudder to think of what 
> the experiment would look like.

It is true that "racist" is often thrown around in everyday life as an 
insult.  However, that doesn't impose any limits of the possible 
definitions of the word as used in social theory and analysis.  If we 
analyze racism as a social formation and identify specific 
characteristics of the social world that supporting that social 
formation,  the fact that we're using the term differently than people 
in everyday life is irrelevant.  It's okay that a word has a different 
meanings in different contexts!

Miles