Carrol
On 10/14/2011 5:12 PM, Nathan S. wrote:
> On 10/14/2011 05:41 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>> Let's factor this in in _any_ debate over "race" and the left. (1)
>> Unless a substantial number of Blacks are in any left movement, there
>> is no left movement. (2) Blacks in massive numbers are not going to
>> join a left movement that does not put the fight against racial
>> injustice very near the center of its program. (3) And regardless of
>> what a left movement's politics on "race" are, Blacks in the requisite
>> numbers are going to join only through a black organization (or
>> organizations) representing Black intgerests BUT also
>> regardingthemselves as an integral part of the total left.
>>
>> Left thinking that does not take these facts into consideration is not
>> left thinking.
>>
>> Carrol
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>
> Sascha Lilley recently did an interview with Amy Sonnie and James
> Tracey, and largely what I gathered was that the various white-oriented
> leftist movements especially among the working class were heavily
> involved with "racial" struggle. The Black Panthers, after all, were
> outspoken communists. Obviously there is a "continuing significance of
> race", but it would do us well to remember that Italians, Irish and Jews
> (and sometimes Scotch-Irish, save that they settled in remote enough
> areas to become dominant and normal) were initially held to be racially,
> i.e., bioculturally, inferior, especially after the late 19th century
> immigration to the States. Jews today in the US are usually "white" by
> someone else's categorization. But after blacks, Jews are still the
> leading target in the questionable FBI database on hate crimes IIRC.
>
> To give a tortuous demonstration of my point, Luis Wacquant (also
> interviewed on Lilley's show by the cohost IIRC) recently argued that
> the imprisonment wave in the United States is a heavily racialized
> phenomenon of state power in the Focaultian sense of "sovereign power"
> over the body (prison) and over family (kids without dads, though I want
> to be careful with that statement) with a strong element of economic
> discipline. He says in no uncertain terms that punishment is a clearly
> racialized phenomenon. Likewise Sonnie and Tracey suggests that the
> reactionary backlash by working-class whites was strongly motivated by
> race, and of course there's Calhoun and about two hundred years of
> scholarship obsessed with "race" and tracking down the One True Aryan
> Bloodline of Europe and the Mid-Atlantic American States or whatever.
> But Wacquant outlined several specific ways to address the prison
> problem, and *every* single one of them was a policy suggestion largely
> devoid of racial content (This recalls the fact I've seen cited in a
> number of places, that upon controlling for income in the prison
> population, whites are no longer over-represented. I have to question
> that data in light of other points, like Wacquant's on the lowering rate
> of violent white offenders actually incarcerated since the 1970s vs.
> increased reports of violent acts by whites). I guess this puts me on
> the Henwood/Reed part of the spectrum here. The things necessary to help
> blacks in the US are also going to help a large segment of people of
> different perceived skin tones, etc.
>
> None of this is to disagree with Carrol's points, but I would suggest
> that (3) is a lot like the '70s-era politics of leftist groupuscles
> separated by subjectivities in order to be effective--unless Carrol is
> suggesting that in a much more vernacular, i.e., everyday way, like how
> individuals in neighborhoods tend towards certain obvious class and race
> similarities, so whatever groups rise from them would be contingently
> homogeneous but not so out of theoretical necessity.
>
> Apologies for the name-dropping blather, neologisms and other
> poly-syllabic words.
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