Re: [Marxism] Black Commentator: Another Side to Race and Immigration

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Nestor's perceptive comments hit the nail right on the head. Racialization
in the U.S. works like it did under South African Apartheid because the
United States was the original, Apartheid the copy. Apartheid South Africa
was a white colonial-settler regime, and usually the word "minority" is put
in there next to white. 

One question to think about is, what difference does it make if the
adjective is "majority"? In what ways does that change aspects of the
regime? In what ways doesn't it?

*  *  *

A second aspect of Nestor's --and Bill Fletcher's-- comments to think about.
American racism has its origins in the genocide against indigenous people
and the enslavement of Black people. 

But it also has its present in the division of the world between a handful
of imperialist nations and a big majority of colonial and semicolonial
countries. The two are intimately interrelated. 

Historically, I think the revolutionary Marxist movement in the advanced
capitalist countries has viewed the rise of (modern) imperialism around 1900
as marking a break from earlier industrial free-market capitalism. More
emphasis, I think, should be placed on the CONTINUITY. 

"Industrial" capitalism (the capitalism of Western Europe and especially
Britain in the 1800's) was not just based on the "primitive" or "previous"
accumulation, which consisted mostly of looting the rest of the world, but
also on racial/national oppression and exploitation (the most obvious
example that comes immediately to my mind is the origin of the cotton
processed by English textile plants).

"Underdevelopment" is not something that "happened" because certain "races"
and places were late off the starting blocks in the race to industrialize.
It was something done TO those races and places, both which prevented their
own industrial development and was a precondition for the development of the
other. 

The division of the world between "white" exploiting nations (including
Japan) and the Third World did not ARISE with what we call imperialism; it
CULMINATED with imperialism.

Further, what we call "imperialism" encompasses two distinct epochs with
somewhat different dynamics. First, the (roughly) half-century characterized
by direct colonization and wars between the imperialist states over colonial
empires; and second, the decades after WWII characterized by the common
exploitation (albeit with senior and junior partners in this) of the Third
World, now overwhelmingly constituted as semicolonial countries and not
direct colonies, characterized by a drive by the imperialist camp to
maintain the subjugation of the semicolonial world as a whole, and which
gives rise to repeated wars and interventions, especially by the United
States, which functions as managing director of the firm Imperialism, Inc.

This generalized, permanent drive against the peoples and nations of the
Third World engenders and promotes a generalized and intensified "racist"
attitude towards ALL Third World people not just as inferior but as enemy
"races" or populations.

*  *  *

WITHIN the United States the "white-ization" of Irish, Jewish, and other
pre-1920 European immigrants needs to be thought about and researched more
carefully, especially in relation to class. Specifically, I think the theses
needs to be explored that the mass labor upsurges of the Debsian era and the
1930's were centered among what I'll call the "off-white" sections of the
population, i.e., non-English immigrants and their descendants who were
viewed as inferior by the dominant WASP sector of the population. 

Please note that I am not asserting this was the case; I do not know. I also
know, for example, that there were very large earlier Irish and German
immigrations (in the mid-1800's) and don't know to what degree any sort of
identity remained among them (some, at least, among the Irish I believe
because of Ireland's colonial status and the continuing waves of immigration
from Ireland to the U.S. which continue to this day) nor what social layers
they were concentrated in.

One thing is for sure about the post-WWII "whitening" or Jews, Italians and
so on. It was intimately interconnected with class and the unions. The deal
was ascension of white workers into the "middle class" in exchange for a
free hand by the bosses in the South and Southwest, i.e., two different
social and legal regimes in relation to unionization, and this was
completely racialized. And part of the way that works is blindness to
whiteness at work, so much so that you can tell that to long-time radical or
socialist labor activists today, that the implicit deal reached between the
CIO unions and the bourgeoisie was a sell-out of Black and Latino workers,
and these activists will quite sincerely deny it.  

*  *  *

Another factor to keep in mind is that the post-WWII "whitening" of the
"ethnics" was meant --at least by the cultural/ideological elite-- to
include Latinos, at least the ones who weren't recgnizably Black or
indigenous. 

This is the clear and unmistakable social pecking order subtext of West Side
Story, as well as the implicit message of the most popular TV series in the
medium's first decade, I Love Lucy, in which a Cuban band leader (whose
nationality became Mexican right after the revolution) was married to an
all-American redhead.

It was also the message of the Disney-produced Zorro, where that Latino
Robin Hood of the (soon to be) American West was played by the son of
Sicilian immigrants (Armand Joseph Catalano) who had changed his name to
"Guy Williams" so he could pass as a "fully white" person. It was one of the
highest-rated TV series of its day, but was put on ice by Disney after two
seasons due to a legal dispute with ABC over ownership rights.

(It tells you something about how things have evolved that if you search for
Zorro on the edonkey/emule file sharing network, you will find most Spanish,
Italian and French versions of this and subsequent Zorro incarnations.

(As for Guy Williams himself, he went on to great success in the Lost in
Space series, only to be upstaged by Bill Mummy and the Robot. But
Williams's career really went into the dumps afterwards. He was an outspoken
critic of the Vietnam War, a supporter of the civil rights movement and
abortion rights and believed to have been essentially blacklisted as "too
controversial." In the mid-70's he retired to Argentina, and died there in
1989.)

The push for (European-descended) Latinos being considered just one more
white ethnic group did not work, for a variety of reasons, central among
them that Latin America is clearly and unambiguously part of the Third
World, not the imperialist world.





________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism