Re: Nationalism, African-American and Quebecois

[dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx (Doug Henwood)]

At 9:11 PM 10/21/95, LeoCasey@xxxxxxx wrote [about me]:

>If I do not read him incorrectly, I think that he would return to a
>basically Debsian socialist view which subsumes African-American oppression
>within a general class exploitation. By contrast, I would like to expand the
>repertoire of analytical concepts so that we could understand race as a
>distinct social form not reducible to class or to nationality.

You read me incorrectly. I've said over & over again here that racism is
real and not reducible to pure class relations (though, as Adolph Reed as
put it, class and race help form each other in America - so I'd temper the
use of the word "distinct"). I think it's politically important to
emphasize class issues as a way of getting white, black, and all other
shades of workers to transcend their racial differences and fight a common
exploiter. Doing that requires all parties to confront racial hostilities;
denying them does no one any good. But I'm stubbornly opposed to anything
that magnifies racial divides, and I think black nationalism and the petty
capitalism of the NOI do exactly that. So too "Afrocentric" education,
which is no more defensible than "Eurocentric" education.

I understand that it's different when a dominant group calls for separate
but equal than when an oppressed group does. But both calls are
fundamentally offensive; in my Utopia, people of all colors, temperaments,
sexes, and erotic preferences will live together in peace. I don't see how
separatism of any kind today can be placed in service of confluence
tomorrow.

But we shouldn't forget that a lot of racial oppression is mixed with class
oppression. Blacks have suffered disproportionally from union-busting and
deindustrialization, despite the chic post-Marxist line that unions and
industry were bastions of white male privilege. (I was told exactly that by
the feminist economist Nancy Folbre.) The war on the welfare state is a mix
of class and race war. Again, a warning against making class and race (and
gender and nation) into "distinct" categories.

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
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