[Marxism] Notes on David Brion Davis' review

[Rakesh Bhandari]

Racism as an ideology and a practice predates English slavery of
Africans.  Study the English colonization of Ireland.  Africans were
racialized as they were introduced into the British colonies in North
America.

Andrew

Hi Andrew,

I have read Theodore Allen's work and Audrey Smedley's defense of it. 
But Andrew please first define racism, for only then can we determine 
whether the English colonization of Ireland was racist as you claim. 
Smedley sees that colonization and its attendant ideology of savagery 
as an important precursor to racism but not (in my reading) as racism 
as such.

I have argued that racism is a naturalistic doctrine about 
putatively deep human group differences  which deep group differences 
are maintained through the intergenerational transmission of a 
postulated germinal substance.

Mark raises the important question of what is gained by such a 
definition of racism.

I think it underlines that racism is less a folk belief that a 
scientistic one.  Perhaps an implication or two for the science wars. 
The definition also undermines any simple view of cumulative human 
progress as man's most dangerous myth is late born indeed.


Rakesh