Date: Sun, 19 Mar 1995 19:13:39 -0800 (PST) From: Kenny Mostern <kennym-AT-uclink2.berkeley.edu> Subject: Re: Determination I've been off the list a couple of days, so I'm just getting back to Andy's question. The racial system in the U.S., complete with the widest variety of enforcement mechanisms, insists that Black people are Black not based on anything in their consciousnesses--certainly you can't tell one "racial consciousness" from another on any grounds other than stated articulation, which are of course unrealiable grounds in the extreme--but by skin color. A white blues singer is not Black, but it simply a white blues singer. Note that "race" and "culture" are fundamentally different variables. Inasmuch as it makes sense to make such a statement, U.S. popular culture in its dominant form is extremely "African". That doesn't mean that producing, consuming or in any way living this culture makes one Black within the white supremacist system. Race really is defined as arbitrarily as all that. And race is a form of systematic oppression. For culture one is better off with "symbolic capital", which has forms that includes people of different racial groups. The point is white blues singers still have easier times geting housing than black blues singers. In 1995. The consequences of this, of course, are not that solidarity is impossible along racial lines--on the contrary--but that one can't stop reproducing the racial system by pretending its not there. But this is obvious to many of the people on this list, I think, however much the typical white liberal denies it these days. In the meantime, the arbitrary system has led to the most absurd kinds of racial arguments in both white and Black circles. There is no choice but for radicals to takes these arguments seriously, not because they are right, but because they are the dominant *material* conditions through which we work. (To understand what I mean by "arguments" being "material" would take us back to Williams, with whom I started.) Kenny Mostern UC-Berkeley Ethnic Studies Graduate Group Against: racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, militarism For: the truth--and the funk! --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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