[Marxism] Notes on David Brion Davis' review

[Rakesh Bhandari]

>You're wrong.

I would prefer the counter argument first, Andrew!

I don't see how you are answering my argument. What you misleadingly 
call the post bellum American racial caste structure, reproduced 
today even through color blind decisions, was brought about through 
racism as I have defined and differentiated it from other ideologies 
of inequality.

Mark thinks that I have conflated racism with only one expression of 
it--scientific racism. But I think racism is a scientistic doctrine 
built on conceptions of the inheritance of a germinal (separated from 
somatic) substance that were not available to earlier thinkers.

Earlier prejudice  combined religious intolerance, cultural and 
aesthetic hubris, and biblical exegesis. But it was not racism. We 
shouldn't let our anti racist activism distort our understanding of 
the past, for the unintended effect is only to make racism (and anti 
black racism) seem more durable and ingrained in the human psyche 
than it actually is. For personal and political reasons, I find that 
intolerable. 


Now your argument seems to be that racism and colorblindness are both 
forms of racism and that only consciousness critical of racism past 
and present, institutional and cultural, is not racist.

Racism is thus for you any belief or practice which reproduces 
intentionally or not the racist organization of social life.

But that doesn't make sense to me.

Economic decisions (technological rationalization, reduction of 
public employment, outsourcing) which are not made for racist reasons 
and would be made even if they did not have disproportionately bad 
effects on racialized minorities are mischaracterized as racist even 
if they do have disproportionately bad effects on minorities and 
thereby reproduce what you (misleadingly and vaguely) call the racial 
caste structure. I agree with Andrew Sayer in his Moral Economy of 
Class.

This inflation of racism eliminates analysis of the multiple forces 
out of which outcomes are produced. Your definition of racism is 
suited for single interest political organizing but not analysis.

Now to prove that racism is mind independent you imply that the worst 
racists are not the racists but the exponents of what you call "race 
neutrality ideology".

I had already referred to color blind racism.

In support of this you say:


>  A person need not be any more conscious of "belief of the
>intergenerational transmission of a postulated germinal substance and
>belief in the deep 'genetic' differences between groups of people" to
>reproduce the caste structure than a person need be conscious of a
>"belief in the relation to the means of production determines one's
>class" to reproduce the class. 

>Racism is an objective social practice,
sometimes manifest in consciousness, other times not. 

>That is, race
discrimination does not depend on race prejudice.


>Segmentation by race
>is real, whether you recognize people by their skin color, hair texture,
and so forth, or not. 

And I leave aside (I thought) the widely discredited ideas that the 
caste system was racial and that the American apartheid was or is a 
caste system. Again distinctions are important.


You don't actually give any concrete examples of what you mean here.

How is race discrimination effected without race prejudice?

Is a color blind person, a person blind to the history of color 
racism discriminating  against minorities if he unprejudicially 
treats all loan and school and job applications alike independently 
of race?

But this was the point I was making. I called it color blind racism, 
though it would be more accurate to call it color blind 
discrimination. 


But you don't deny that the (say) residential segregation which can 
now be reproduced often through colorblind lending and real estate 
brokering could only have been brought on in the first place by 
active racism explicit in forced ghettoization.

So even in your formulation racism remains at root a mind dependent 
reality, a system predicated  on explicitly racist belief.

And one who in his blindness to racist history does not take into 
account the history of occupational apartheid and forced 
ghettoization does not often or likely remain race neutral but is 
predisposed to make sense of contemporary "racial inequality" 
probably unconsciously in racist terms.

The problem is simply not colorblindness; the problem is in the main 
racism as I have defined it. Even if people loudly say that they 
reject it.


  For example, the roll back of affirmative action in California was 
not color blind or race neutral; it was motivated by an unconscious 
and conscious racist belief to run minorities out of higher 
education, not by a colorblind desire to terminate unfair access to 
universities as enjoyed by the children of alumni and wealthy donors.

The fight against affirmative action is only on the surface driven by 
colorblindness. Racism as I have defined it and race prejudice are 
still the primary problems, not colorblindness.

And, please, colorblindness is not in itself racism. 

In every aspect of every interaction with any racialized minority are 
you never blind to their so called race? Are you always conscious of 
it and do you encourage them always to be conscious of their race in 
every interaction with you?

That would be frightening. 

Rakesh