Date: Mon, 26 Aug 1996 03:52:19 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Race



>Rakesh is in the same irresponsible boat. He hasn't had
>anything to say about MIM posts for a long time, and no doubt
>missed that we already said Albanian whites are oppressed
>and exploited. He missed that we favor the national struggle
>of Irish whites. So how does he get off calling MIM's analysis
>racial? It is only by laziness. We carefully distinguished
>between racial and national and someone in Ethnic Studies
>should do the same.

 So....a whitey is a whitey; only in certain social relations does he
become Mr. Charlie.

If only these errors about race were confined to MIM...

Now, MIM, the very fact that you can't help  calling these various PEOPLE
(Irish, Serbians and then that whole amalgamation of North Americans--
Germans, Jews, Italians,etc. ) "whites" indicates that   you have assumed
the coherence  of their ("white") racial identity; have implicitly set the
heritability among these "whites" at zero; and thus attributed the
variability among them to their location in differential cultural and
national contexts.

 You are simply saying that the "whites", though found in different social
positions elsewhere and even sometimes in antagonistic relations among
"themselves",  come to form an oppressor nation in the context of American
social relations.  As has been pointed out, you are not defining whites by
such objective social markers as propertylessness or exploitation because
there are too many "whites" who share said negative characteristics with
"blacks" and too many minorities who are free of  said misfortunes and thus
would be counted as white if you were indeed not using a pseudo-genetic
definition of this category.

To counter the charge that MIM is racist organization, perhaps it will
counter that its definition of whiteness  hinges only on the
self-identification of people as whites. As we have seen, whiteness cannot
be said to have what they would call a political economic basis.  Now how
and why people think of themselves as white is very interesting indeed; MIM
has had nothing to say here. Of course  that people  have to check such a
box from an early age on--in my case, until recently, it was "other" of
course--and that experts produce life statistics in terms of race, then
propagated by pseudo-militants, plays no small part in why people would
come think of themselves as white (or some other race) and then engage in
the very pro white behavior which is then taken as proof of the real,
albeit of course social,  existence  of white people whose racially
exclusivist behavior is then taken to prove that they are not a
revolutionary vehicle at this time.

 All this amounts to saying though is that *those* people who think of
themselves as white and their interests as white-based do not conceive of
themselves as in class based revolutionary terms.  So MIM's North American
agenda is based on nothing but a tautology.   It does not amount to a proof
that other so called whites are not a revolutionary vehicle; nor does it
consitute a proof that "whites" do not share with "blacks" the same
objective situation.  Moreover, it still needs to be decided why and how
people come to think of themselves as white, all the better to dissolve
such identity.

MIM should note that Murray and Herrnstein also validate their racial
categories on the basis of peoples' self-identification, which of course
does not even translate to their consent, irrelevant anyway, to the idea
that they do in fact belong to races genetically distinct enough to
account, however partially, for the social differences which emerge from
their classification into races for the purposes of  comparative study.
Moreover,  one cannot substitute the analysis of molecular biology, as
indicated below, for the unscientific self-conceptions of people who are
forced to define themselves in racial terms and whose life chances are
continuously described by experts, technocrats and MIM in terms of racial
categories.

 In short, MIM has  sustained the reification of race. MIM seems not to
understand how close its world view is to Shockley's.  It is not its
"principled" anti-racism that alienates people;   MIM is simply an affront
to  all of us who happen to hold humanity ultimately and fundamentally to
be ONE.

 After all, the strongest basis  upon which to build an argument that race
simply cannot control the inheritance of any trait tied to its definition
is the truth that race is not a meaningful biological category in the first
place.  Before anywhere else, this is where antiracism must begin; the
biological incoherence of racial classification must be understood first of
all,all its implications fully grasped and the naturalization of race
fought in all further work on the topic.

Surprisingly in my Ph.D. program in ethnic studies we spend simply NO time
reviewing the biological evidence against race. MIM claims to reject the
concept of  "race" but then claims that "whites are not a revolutionary
vehicle" (ugh!).

 In actual fact of course there is no basis for coherently dividing the
population into such races (for example, the characters required to so
classify the population do not vary concordantly).

There is basically no greater genetic difference within races than among
them: so what sense does it make to divide them for the purposes of
determining the relationship between race and intelligence (again assuming
we could agree on the definition of this concept).    Also, it makes little
sense to entertain the possibility of deep racial differences based on
variation in a single gene (sickle cell for example).   As a concrete
example, we now know that it makes no more biological sense to  classify
Hungarians and Finns in different races as it does blacks and whites.  (See
John Vandermeer's *Reconstructing Biology* for a brief, clearly argued
presentation from which the above has been gleaned or the work of Richard
Lewontin, *Not In Our Genes*.)

MIM has actually foregone the real scientific basis upon which to make a
case against claims on the public purse by those calling for continued
fascist research into race-based differences in intelligence (itself of
course a problematic concept).   As UC Berkeley Sociology Prof Troy Duster
has pointed out, almost all those arguing for racial explanations of social
inequality are not molecular biologists;  Herrnstein is a psychologist and
Murray a political scientist, for example.

Rakesh




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