[PEN-L:3683] Re: Race as a "construct"

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Race is a politicaleconomic category. It was socio-historically constructed in capitalism based in part on pseudobiology, after an earlier role in theology. The bourgeois doctrine that "all men are created equal" had to be amended by a doctrine of the inhumanity of non-European peoples to rationalize colonialism and slavery.  Skin color, hair texture and facial features are genetically determined in part, but they do not correlate with "humanity" "soulfulness", morality, "savagery", criminality, or intelligence, et al., as racists have asserted for hundreds of years. False correlation of these categories has covered up the role of racist slavery and colonialism as the "chief momenta" in the original or "primitive" accumulation of ALL of capitalism, and the necessary role of racism in the continuation of U.S. and other capitalisms and imperialisms.


Charles Brown

Detroit

>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx> 02/21/99 02:19PM >>>
Barbara Smith said:

>Q: What do you think about the postmodern idea of
>race as a construct?
>
>A: Oh, please. Only people who have never been the
>victims of racism could cook that up. Yeah, race is
>a construct -- it was constructed by white people in
>order to keep a system of power alive and well. Sure
>it's a construct -- a construct that runs the
>highest and lowest levels of the US economy. What
>does race as a construct mean to James Byrd Jr.?
>What does it mean to me when someone tries to run me
>off the road in Watertown, Massachusetts, as they
>did years ago, because they see a black in a car on
>what they think of as their turf? Only people who
>have not experienced dead-on racial hatred and
>violence can play with "race" in that way. To me it
>is nothing to play with.
>
>[From an interview in the February 1999 Boston Phoenix]

If race isn't a (social) construct, what is it? Biological?

Doug