[Marxism] Notes on David Brion Davis' review

[Rakesh Bhandari]

>If you cannot understand how race is mind independent then you cannot
>understand how class is mind independent, Rakesh.  Race, like class and
>gender, is an objective social structure.  You don't think race is a
>figment of our imagination like Fields does, do you?  The reality racism
>has, Rakesh, is the reality of social structure operating on the
>physical and cultural segmentation of people based on
>socially-historically constructed essential differences in relation to
>phenotypical and culturally variable characteristics. The concept of
>racism and race that I use - combined with historical analysis -
>specifies why over time and in what ways groups remain essentially
>different

Andrew, racism is a specific kind of belief about why over time and 
in what way human groups remain essentially different. Racism is 
premised on the belief of the intergenerational transmission of a 
postulated germinal substance and belief in the deep 'genetic' 
differences between groups of people.

Active racism depends on conscious or unconscious racist belief, and 
ideas believed to be real are indeed real in their effects. But 
racism is not mind independent, though the past effects of racism are 
not eradicated by colorblindness in the present. For this reason, it 
makes sense to speak of colorblind racism.

But class exploitation does not depend on a belief in classes. Indeed 
class exploitation is achieved in bourgeois society by the real 
dissimulation of classes in the contractual relations of juridically 
equal bearer of rights.

Yet no part of social life is mind independent and perhaps neither is 
nature in light of quantum mechanics. 

I have given some reasons for distinguishing racism from the Islamic 
racialization of the Curse of Ham (I would think the significance of 
that clear enough in the present), religious intolerance, and the 
model of unilinear cultural development.

These do not seem to be important distinctions to you and Mark.

Oh well.



Yours, Rakesh


>AND why group identities are variable and change - such as the
>Irish and other previously nonwhite groups being redefined as white.
>This is precisely why racism "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" as Harrison puts it.