Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 11:33:12 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Explaining race as a "social construct."


At 10:54 AM 10/23/97 -0500, Doug Henwood wrote:
>But on a topic
>like race, we hear a million times that the ruling class encourages racism
>to divide the working class, but typically such claims are not fleshed out
>with an analysis of just how those things happen, and how real individuals
>come to hold racist beliefs. I'm not saying that there hasn't been good
>work done along these lines - just that it's too easy to fall back on
>concepts like "false consciousness" (stoked, of course, by the ruling
>class) that absolve one of the duty of explanation. Maybe I've been reading
>too much Foucault, but there really does seem to be a need for a serious
>Marxian micropolitics of just how these institutions and beliefs are
>invented, perpetrated, and maintained.

Well, I agree with this, and I hope my riposte to Rakesh is not misinterpreted 
so as to conform to the stance you are criticizing.  My point is that I
disavow the putative naturalness of race as a basis for social distinctions
(except that, given the basis of physiognomic distinctions in geographic
isolation, the first contact between differing groups involves a politics of
dealing with the unfamiliar and out-groups in general).  If race takes on a
life of its own, that can only be because those distinctions are socially
reinforced, but that social reinforcement is not merely the effect of
difference in se, but in a social differentiating value that has accrued to
that difference that maintains those distinctions for reasons that go deeper
than the difference itself, i.e. hierarchies of social inequality,
competition for resources, etc.

When I was in high school, all the white liberals did their best to lie to me 
about the causes of racial strife, even as my school almost went up in
flames the day after MLK was assassinated.  They had two explanations, none
of which were historical or socio-economic.  (1) The problem is linguistic:
we all are prejudiced because "black" has negative connotations, "black
sheep", "black magic", etc.  (2) Race is a natural bone of contention.  I
always denied both.  I recognized (1) as complete bullshit from the git-go,
though people still believe it today.  But I vociferously and publicly
denied (2), and for that I was laughed at as an idealist.  The good
liberals, who did nothing to educate anybody about anything except to repeat
homilies that prejudice is bad, saying nothing about institutional racism,
promulgated the racist assumption that difference itself is the cause of
prejudice and strife, just the mere fact of difference.  Naive and innocent
as I was, I knew this was crap, but I lacked the ability to articulate my
point of view.  Dumb-ass English teachers: no wonder I hate English professors.



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