On Jul 9, 2013, at 3:34 PM, "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> There is a severe problem of naming here. The word "Racism" only makes sense
> as referring to an ideology, and it is nonsense to speak of "figting" an
> ideology: one needs rather to destroy the material base of the ideology. But
> the "problem" of the "Color Line" remains as central to u.s. politics as it
> was when Du Bois wrote a century ago. It is NOT a "problem" of personal
> opinion or personal prejudice. Prejudice is what needs to be explained; it
> explains nothing.
Yup.
As Adolph Reed just wrote to me:
"For example, take the well-known argument about racial segmentation in New Deal programs. The stock antiracist version of the account stresses FDR's own racism or his willingness to capitulate to southern racists in excluding domestic and agricultural workers from social security coverage. That version of the story isn't so much wrong on its face as anachronistically incomplete in service to the objective of moral exposé. Southern congressmen wanted to preserve a low-wage labor force for their constituents; racism was part of the story -- which they no doubt believed, just as they believed themselves to be naturally superior to the majority of whites; that is what upper classes do and how they see themselves in the world -- that created and contained that labor force and showed up in many Ways, but it was seldom more than a step away from ruling class imperatives of one sort or another that had to do with political economy."
Or, as Barbara Fields said, slavery wasn't meant to produce white supremacy, it was meant to produce profits.
Doug