[Marxism] Notes on David Brion Davis' review

[Rakesh Bhandari]

>Rakesh, all you have to do is stop ignoring the counterargument.


I made an attempt to speak to your arguments, Andrew.  You are not 
cutting and responding to my posts point by point.

>   I said you were wrong and then layed it out for you, just as I did 
>in my previous posts.  You have provided nothing in return except 
>repeating your assertion reducing racism to the ideological side of 
>scientific racialism.

I did nothing but repeat myself in the last post? This is manifestly untrue.



>    Your conceptualization leaves out most of the reality of racism.


What reality of racism have I left out, Andrew? Where have I seemed 
oblivious to the reality of racism? Please clarify. And why should we 
define racism so broadly that it includes non racist actions which 
have disproportionately bad impacts on racialized peoples, religious 
intolerance and the Curse of Ham? I think this creates a false sense 
of the durability of racism.

You now emphasize that colorblind decisions if they allow in some way 
for the reproduction of what you misleadingly and vaguely call a 
racial caste society are in fact racist.

I challenge this idea.

Your inflated definition of racism creates analytical problems--it 
eliminates analysis of the multiple forces out of which outcomes are 
produced. You are not cutting and responding to my actual arguments.

As I noted, 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.

Your inflated definition of racism is suited for single interest 
political organizing but not analysis of complex reality.

Moreover, colorblindness is not itself racism; indeed not to be 
colorblind at the appropriate points in social relations would be 
racist.

To be sure--and as I noted before you in this 
discussion--colorblindness can indeed reproduce in the inequalities 
caused by racism in the past, and as I underlined colorblindness or 
blindness to the history of racism easily turns into at least 
unconsciously racist understandings of continuing so called racial 
inequality which is left unremedied.

Racism as the scientistic doctrine I have defined remains a graver 
problem than simple color blindness, and depends in fact on belief, 
however inarticulate or unconscious.

Moreover, racism as I have defined is not (as I once thought) an 
ideology based on visible and somatic difference. There can be simple 
class racism based on the belief in inherited natural inequality via 
the transmission of some postulated germinal substance. Lewontin has 
long made this argument, and I think he is correct. In this way, 
racism is less an ideology of what is visible than what is invisible 
to the naked eye.


>Pretending like I didn't explain my position won't fly.

I asked for clarifications of your position. What did I say that came 
across as such pretending?



>   This isn't a chat room.

????



>  Unless you have something new to say, it's time to move on. 


???? Are you sure that's the reason you want to move on???

Rakesh



>Sincerely, Andrew