RE: [A-List] US elections 2004

["bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

Melvin, your comments are very thought provoking and more thought
through than many we hear on 'race' questions these days, and both of us
already know where we agree and where we don't on national-colonial
questions.  We are, in fact, quite close.

But just as 'negritude', to borrow a word from Fanon and others, has
been historically forged, and just as the African American people
emerged into history as a distinct people, so has whiteness been
historically-socially constructed and adapted - and not always
economistically.  Economism in unpacking race has been a huge pitfall
for white Marxists, who have themselves 'naturalized' whiteness, giving
it a kind of de facto normacy.  This is an indication, I think, of the
powerful ideological persistence of race, and we all know that ideology
asserts itself as a material force.  The white left has been content in
many cases to call for "black and white unite and fight" and such,
implicitly and sometimes explicitly claiming that socialism will
dispense with this 'race thing' (and this gender thing) once and for
all, because the material foundation of exploitation will be abolished,
and with it, the evil flower of racial ideology.  This mechanical
interpretation of base-superstructure flies directly in the face of
experience.  Race is far more powerful than that, far more compelling
than simple 'social necessity.'  The very construction of the US 'white'
working class, from its inception, has been racialized.

It is no accident that so many left formations are still dominated
overwhelmingly by white males, or that the inclusion of 'others' is so
often and so glaringly tokenistic.

Don't get me wrong.  It is clear that class formation is still an
essential subject for Marxists to understand, but I think we have erred
in trying to subsume race and gender into class at every juncture, and I
believe that has been an often unconscious exercise of 'white' male
hegemony.  Your arguments are certainly more historically grounded and
nuanced than that, but I believe there is a construction of 'whiteness'
and with it the construction of racial privilege.  I fought against this
when I was in the CP some time ago, because it was declared an official
deviation, but in defending that position, I eventually found it to be
untenable.

It is not a petit bourgeois deviation.  Denial is at the heart of white
working class racism - which remains endemic - and recognition of
'whiteness" as a social construction is key terrain for an important
ideological struggle.  It is not privilege that has to be understood
first, IMO, but whiteness, which has proven remarkably plastic - with
one unwaiverable 'value' at its core - Negrophobia.  This relates, I
think, directly to the colonial condition of African Americans, a
distinctly 'national' condition, in contrast to peoples oppressed by
more transient and opportunistic forms of discrimination, and in
contrast to the relation between dominant US society and indigenous
peoples, who were marked for (and continued to be marked for)
extermination.

Whiteness only began as anglo-american.  In the army special operations
community, I saw honorary whiteness conditionally bestowed on Latinos,
Pacific-Islanders, even West Asians, when they would conform in word and
deed to the Negrophobia that characterized that whole culture.  That
didn't just mean sharing contempt for Black soldiers and Black culture,
it meant conforming to "white' values and norms - values and norms that
are invisible because they are counted as somehow axiomatic - with all
else rendered deviant.  These norms constitute a whole epistemology -
one that is sought after from any variety of motivations as a condition
of assimilation.

Race and class, as Du Bois showed, is a complex dialectical dance.
White workers in the US have historically refused to confront
generalized exploitation at almost every turn, preferring to fight for
their 'vision' of evading the most rigorous forms of that exploitation,
for a racial division of labor that is at its heart colonial.

I think you know what my friend meant about voting for Nader, too.  I
assume that was rhetorical.  There is a real and immediate material
difference in the consequences for Black and white (and men and women)
of Republican rule (even if it asserts itself, as it did with Clinton,
through a ratcheting process).  At the very center of the Republican
ideological agenda is white male supremacy.  For the left to pretend
otherwise is, I think, a little disingenuous.  I may not agree with her
across the board, but her attitude is a real thing and part of the mass
political consciousness of African Americans.  So is 'white privilege.'

Forgive anything that doesn't hang together well here.  I'm nursing my
second cup of coffee.  What a way to start the day, eh?

Best,

Stan