Re: [Marxism] white privilege vs white supremacy - please be more specific

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Allen's concern was almost entirely Caribbean and, if memory serves, he
touched on anything to do with the continental U.S. only in passing...maybe
a chapter or two.  There dozens of better sources for what was happening on
the mainland, which was different in several key respects....

I read bits of Allen's volumes on the making of the white race long ago and
made a point of going back and rereading them carefully a summer or so back.
Generations of scholars and activists, black and white, addressed this
question for over a century at the time of his writing, and his major
contribution was, I think, a synthesis of that work.

As to what people have made of Allen's work in applying its interpretation
of "whiteness," I think it's a very mixed bag, as should be expected.  I've
read some very accurate and provocative pieces, and some that have been just
off-the-wall overgeneralizations, applying a model to situations with little
real concern about whether it applied.  Indeed, this last bit might well be
built into the nature of an academic discipline focused primarily on drawing
models, laws and generalizations about human behavior based on the past....

Setting aside the inaccuracies of application, there are two underlying
shortcomings in this "tradition."  The first is the contradictory and
muddled model for how racism develops, which is more open-ended and liable
to be seen as a bottom-up rather than a top-down process.  The second is the
prescriptive formulation that whites need to repudiate their whiteness.  The
first tends to assume that class society and its standards reflect some kind
of collective democratic will, and the second tends to reduce fundamental
issues of social identity to mattes of individual choice.

In the end, though, the question we face is a political struggle against
racism and the power that sustains it.  If that's done, the rest is
terminology....  My objection is to any kind of terminology that serves as a
short-circuiting of a discussion of the substantive issues that really need
to be discussed and understood.

ML






________________________________________________
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