File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1995/95-03-31.000, message 273


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!



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