Date: Sun, 10 Aug 97 16:06:53 EDT
From: boddhisatva <kbevans-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Race as Collective Representation







		Rakesh,


	It seems to me that you are nearing a conclusion that race is
objective but not rational.  I think that one could turn this around and
conclude that race is subjective and rational.  Look, for example at the
difference between black Carribean immigrants to the US and native black
Americans.  There is a clear socio-economic advantage among the
immigrants.  Conservatives, of course, use this as evidence that
(objective) blackness is not the disadvantage that liberals say it is. The
better interpretation may be that blackness is not experienced in the same
way, even by blacks.  While it is rational to make some sort of
"collective distinction" that corresponds roughly with what we call race,
the experience of it is based on one's subjective understanding of that
distinction. If I understand the distinction between black and white to be
a trifling few genetic alleles, and you understand it to be hundreds of
years of history (hypothetically), we may both be defining a "collective
distinction"  rationally, and may even include most of the same people in
our distinction, but acting when acting on the basis of our subjective
understanding we could behave very differently.  Furthermore, when
interpreting the actions of others who appear to be acting on the basis of
this collective distinction, we could come to quite different conclusions. 
Since we could not know what understanding of race others have (since it
is subjective) we would almost inevitably project our understanding of the
collective distinction called race onto them. 


	
	Given this, one thing seems clear but it makes another very muddy. 
It seems clear that making all of our understandings of race as uniformly
close to the objective truth as possible ( I'll call that truth, for the
purposes of argument, those trifling alleles) would go a long way towards
separating collective distinction from racism.  What is very unclear is
what we would then call all those rational understandings of collective
distinctions, if not "race".  "Ethnicity" is a loaded word and makes the
false comparison between the immigrant and the descendants of slaves (who
are original settles by any standard).  "Culture" is, on the other hand,
less provocative, but muddier and still separates what should not be
separated. "Facet" is about the only one I can come up with and it is
woefully inadequate, although it conveys the correct idea of different
sides of a whole society. 



	Perhaps the problem is that there is so much fundamental
irrationality in our understanding of race that coming to some mild and
rational understanding of collective distinction is impossible. 





	peace






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