Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996 02:32:05 -0800
From: rakesh bhandari <djones@uclink.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: marxism@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
To: marxism@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Race I
Some of the work which I have been reading the last month for my dissertation.
Concept of Race
I am not mentioning here the classic studies of Winthrop Jordan, Michael Banton, Thomas Gosset and Stephen Jay Gould.
Raises the question of how and why the racialization of statistics emerged. With qualifications, argues for continued racialization. As I have indicated before, Yehudi Webster argues for cessation.
2. Colette Guillaumin, 1994. *Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology*. London: Routledge, .
"Guillaumin emphasizes that the allocation of individuals into racial [and sexual] categoreis can only occur once they have been socially constituted and naturalized. Once constituted, these categories must be identified; marks, arbitrary marks, will then be chosen. The choice of a signifier follows the establishment of social categories; and, as we will see, *it is precisely because there exists a social category that the signifier is operative*." (5)
3. Robert Miles, 1994. *Racism and 'race relations'. London: Routledge.
Buidling on arguments of above
4. Lucius Outlaw, "Toward a Critical Theory of Race." In David Theo Goldberg, ed. Anatomy of Racism. Minnesota, 1990
Building on the work of Omi and Winant, makes an often brilliant argument which dislodges "the concept of race from its place as provider of access to a self-evident, obvious, even ontologically *given* characteristic of humankind." (61) However, Outlaw then goes on to criticize traditional marxists for not recognizing "the lived experiences of *real* persons whose experiences are forged in life worlds in part constituted by self understandings that are in large measure 'racial,' no matter how 'scientifically' inadequate."
While this criticism of science may sound benign as a defense of black experience (and I would argue that it is not benign), it leaves us unarmed to argue against a white racial self-identification which can be no less a component of self-understanding--as the work of Roediger, Lott, Saxton and others has been attempting to demonstrate.
5. Ian Goldin. *Making Race: The Politics and Economics of Coloured Identity in South Africa*. London, 1987.
A very interesting study of how the politics of class has shaped the politics of identity.
6. Barbara Jeane Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America." New Left Review, 181.
This important essay has been subjected to very superficial criticism by even incisive commentators such as David Theo Goldberg and David Roediger. Fields argues that "Race explained why some people could rightly be denied what others took for granted: namely liberty, supposedly a self-evident gift of nature's God. But there was nothing to explain until most people could, in fact, take liberty for granted--as the indentured servants and disenfranchised freedmen of colonial America could not....Euro-Americans resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining Afro-Americans as a race...." (114)
Marx resolved the contradiction of course through a dialectic analysis in which he demonstrated the free wage laborer was actually (appearances notwithstanding) in the same social position as the slave vis-a-vis their masters and thus needed no explanation of the anamalous inferiority of the slave but rather needed to join with him in a Civil War.
7. David Theo Goldberg, 1994. *Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning*. London: Blackwell.
Note ineffective reply to Fields and Guillaumin. Attempts to show how racialized discourse required both the displacement of the premodern discursive order and epistemic transformations--it is these epistemic transformations (systems of taxonomy and classification) which Outlaw analyzes in terms of a evolutionist framework(see above).
Defends racial categories on the ground that "standing inside or assuming categories of oppression has proved, at least in part, liberating both in itself and as a means to material emancipation." (88) No real proof is offered for this claim, and he himself notes that the use of racial categories by academics and the state gives "foundation to the conclusion that the 'possible solutions' to the South African dilemma must be limited to producing 'constructive intergroup relations'." (153) Such limitation seems to me inimical to emancipation, material or otherwise.
Have not yet finished this often wordy, but very thought-provoking, book
8. Frank Furedi, 1993. The New Ideology of Imperialism. London: Pluto.
Fascinating discussion of the idea of 'white prestige.'
More later on this topic, including criticisms of the racial theory of caste in India (Romila Thapar and Morton Klass); a friend's dissertation on the construction of racial identities in the Dominican Republic after the 1937 massacre of Haitians; Lewis Gordon's new works on bad faith and Fanon; Lukacs' attempt to see racial theory and social darwinism as the culmination of the irrationalist counterrevolution he analyzed in *Destruction of Reason*.
R Bhandari
Ph.D. Candidate
Ethnic Studies
UC Berkeley