[Marxism] Notes on David Brion Davis' review

[Austin, Andrew]

Of course it's my own writing, Rakesh.

I operate from realist approaches to racism that don't sacrifice the
intersubjective and formative dimension. "Racism," writes Faye V.
Harrison, "must be understood to be a nexus of material relations within
which social and discursive practices perpetuate oppressive power
relations between populations presumed to be essentially different."
Following Harrison's lead, it is more accurate to conceptualize the
racial system as, along with its ideological dimensions, an objective
(or material) system of relations and interactions. Racism is not only a
mental event or a set of shared beliefs that structures behavior, but a
mind-independent social structure that imposes itself on human behavior.
Understanding how racial stratification works to divide human beings
into groups requires in-depth analysis of social relations as really
existing things. At the material level, then, racialized groups comprise
an objective hierarchically-organized social structure. Dialectically,
the ideological-cultural system reproduces the objective racial
hierarchy at the same time the racial hierarchy reproduces the
ideological-cultural system. Seeing race in this way returns analysis of
racism to the realism of historical materialism.  This is the concept of
racism with which I theorize this field of social reality.  Using this
concept, the summary I provided earlier rather clearly illustrates
racism in operation.

Andrew