[Marxism] Notes on David Brion Davis' review

[Rakesh Bhandari]

Andrew Austin wrote:

>Of course it's my own writing, Rakesh.
>
>I operate from realist approaches to racism that don't sacrifice the
>intersubjective and formative dimension.

The problem of course is the kind of reality race itself has.



>  "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."


But this definition of racism does not specify why over time  and in 
what ways these groups remain essentially different? I cannot agree 
with this!



>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.


many things are that.



>>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.

I don't understand how racism can be mind independent! Races surely 
were not how nature was carved at the joints before our minds got 
involved!



>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.

Then every society perhaps even including so called hunter gatherer 
society was racist.

I am still not clear on what you mean by racism.

Yours, Rakesh



>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