Date: Thu, 16 Mar 1995 21:48:47 -0800 From: Tom Condit <tomcondit-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: Determination Hmmmm, .... I'm certainly enjoying this discussion, although I haven't read most of the authors people are citing. I want to make a brief comment on one aspect of the discussion. Kenny Mostern says, in a post of 16 March, "race really is nothing more than skin color and features, and that the reason they are determining of social being is not because of anything biological but because of the cultural arbitrary: in the U.S., they do." I don't think "race ... is nothing more than skin color and features." Race is, in fact, whatever it's socially determined to be in a given society ... It has little or no basis in material reality. The very concept didn't exist prior to the African slave trade and the age of imperialism. Some societies (apartheid South Africa, antebellum Louisiana) elaborate endless racial categories. Others essentially ignore them. Let me give a specific example of race as a social construct. Kenny Mostern lives in Berkeley, so if he want to he can turn on KPFA radio (94.1 FM) on Saturday mornings and listen to the Johnny Otis Show. Otis was one of the pioneers of rhythm and blues and a major figure in African-American cultural history. Sometimes he has other old bluesmen on the show and they reminisce about the old days, and the difference between the status of Black musicians (like them) and white musicians in the 1940s. The interesting thing about all this is that if race is defined by skin color and facial features, Johnny Otis is "white". He is the son of a Greek storeowner in predominately black West Berkeley in the 1930s. He was part of the "black" crowd in his neighborhood grade school and junior high school. When he entered high school, he was informed by the principal that he had to be "white" now. He deferred, continued to run with his same crowd, and became "black". He was (and is) accepted by other black musicians as black. Now that doesn't mean I can walk to West Berkeley with my blue eyes and tell people I'm black (although Walter White, long-time leader of the NAACP, had eyes as blue as mine). It means that whether Otis was black or white was determined by the social consciousness of his peers and himself, and not by skin color or facial features. Tom Condit --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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