[PEN-L:3530] Re: Re: racism

[Bill Burgess <burgess@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello angela,

Thank your for elaborating your points. You wrote about the usual
'rational' arguments against racism:

>these ways of addressing racism only take for those who
>are relatively powerful, who do not attach themselves to racism as a
>way of recovering or explaining to themselves their own 'loss', their
>own lack of social power.

I don't accept this. I can't give you numbers, but my observation is that
'relatively powerful' people have a hard time giving up racist attitudes
because they only have liberal logic to rely on - meanwhile the bourgeoisie
directly benefits from racism. Working and oppressed people find often find
themselves side by side in struggle, and arguments about how racism weakens
and divides our struggles not only make sense in the abstract, they accord
with every-day experience.

Your account of racism seems to assume that its real base is among working
people rather than the 'relatively powerful', and that it is rooted in
individual psychology rather than capitalist social relations. If so, I
don't see any way to overcome racism; perhaps I simply refuse to be that
pessimistic. Is there a ready-made psychoanalalytic explanation for
socialist optimism?

You said, about my question about whether explaining the fear of castration
or discussing the phallus really helps combat racist attitudes by white
workers:

>i don't know if it works becuase it is not a prominent part of
>anti-racist practice.  i do know that to talk openly about racism as a
>form of enjoyment is to break with a moralising and enlightened
>approach which has consistently worked to deny the pertinence of
>desire within racism.  these ways of appproaching the issure here have
>been taken as simply another attempt (usually figured as an attempt by
>'the elites') to deny 'the ordinary bloke' their capacity for
>enjoyement - as another threat.  they merely seek to affirm 'the
>ordinary bloke's' social impotence; which i would think is not how a
>marxist politics would wish to proceed.

I appreciate that racism has not been erradicated, and we all have to ask
if our understanding of it, and our strategy against it, are adequate. But
I still see no evidence of any great "pertinence of desire". Sorry to be
blunt, but I think this is almost inevitably an elite approach. It is
stupid to assume that psychoanalytical issues have no importance, and we
certainly need abstract theories, specialized vocabularies, and so on. But
the reason the "desire" theory of racism is not a prominent part of
anti-racist practice is because it doesn't make any sense at either the
immediate level or in more theoretical terms. And it is not as if this is a
brand new idea - it has had the better part of this century to win support.

Someone wrote that Cuba has done more to erradicate racism than any other
country. I agree, and in a couple of trips to Cuba I have never heard
anyone  explain that they made little progress on fighting racism until
they adopted a psychoanalytical strategy. Instead, what I heard from Black
Cubans was how they volunteered to fight South Africa when it invaded
Angola, and their pride in having been part of the first black army to
defeat the white racist apartheid regime in a major battle, at Cuito
Cunavale (sp?), which opened the road to the liberation of Namibia and
South Africa.

Another example that comes to mind is the Civil Rights movement in the
United States. Again, without denying there may be some merit to
psychoanalytical insights I don't think they played any role in defeating
Jim Crow segregation. In Canada, there is news coverage of Native struggles
every day; a couple of decades ago it was the silence of the grave. Racism
remains a central problem but let's not forget the progress that has been
made and how it happened.

Bill Burgess