> On Sep 29, 2011, at 4:55 AM, Julio Huato wrote:
>
> > How about Latinos? Are they supposed to abandon their struggle
> > against their specific forms of oppression, because the various forms
> > in which their oppression manifests itself shifts historically --
> > yesterday it was their territorial dispossession, now it is their
> > legal status, tomorrow their focus may be on something else?
>
> I don't see how anything I've said - or Adolph, whom I mostly channelling -
> would suggest abandoning anything. How are these examples even relevant? You
> fight the colonizer (who isn't colonizing you because of your "race" -
> that's a story he typically makes up after the fact - but because he wants
> your land, labor, and resources). You fight the immigration cops because no
> human should be illegal. What does adding race to this accomplish? What does
> race even mean in this context? (Hispanics, as the U.S. government
> statisticians always say, may be of any race.) How is an Argentine of
> Italian extraction the same "race" as a Mexican? A Mexican with a lot of
> Indian blood the same "race" as Carlos Salinas?
>
> Doug
>
>
As I said in my last note, and I agree with you that Adolph doesn't suggest
abandoning anything like this, your point is spot on at the level of
objective meta-analysis. The key for me is that it is not me/us who're
adding race in order to accomplish something. Race, in all its
pseudoscientific and ethnobiological horsepoopery, has already been added,
made a key component of legitimation and reinforced by dominant ideological
misreadings and material sedimentations of what's really going on. The
constituencies being mobilized - and this was Robert Wood's argument - in
order to be coherently mobilized often have to address, internally, how the
embedded character of the history of race, racism and race-blindness are
problematic parts of collective interaction... part of the class struggle
then becomes directly addressing the ways race has and is used to forestall
class struggle. You've worked through this, Adolph has worked through this,
I think Robert and Ravi and I have worked through this large, large numbers
of people potentially worth collaborating with have not. Anti-racism isn't
out front and alone, as in Wise's case or that of pomo/neoliberal
multiculturalists but that doesn't mean race and racism aren't issues that
need to be directly engaged in order to attack colonialism, the
illegalization of humanity, etc.