sherief said:
Sure, race is bullshit, but you can't say that it doesn't exist, and you can't presume an empty space for the judgement of people's actions. Also, you run into the same problematic by determinations on sex/gender, culture, ethnicity (I exclude class because class is not an identity but a political category a priori); sovereign is he who defines the exception, and any such identification with race (or any attempt to ignore how sovereign power acts on race, etc.) leaves one open to the full force of this power.
Excellent post, Sherief. Just some quick, related points.
The wager of Marx is that there is but one fundamental antagonism ("class struggle") which overdetermines all others [race, ethnicity, gender constructions, etc] and which is as such the "concrete universal" of the entire field. The term "overdetermination" is here used in its precise Althusserian sense: it does not mean that class struggle is the ultimate referent and horizon of meaning of all other struggles; it means that class struggle [ ultimately with its socio-psychological origins in the early trauma of repression] is the
structuring principle which allows us to account for the very "inconsistent" plurality of ways in which other antagonisms can be articulated into "chains of equivalences." For example, feminist struggle can be articulated into a chain with progressive struggle for emancipation, or it can (and it certainly does) function as an ideological tool of the upper-middle classes to assert their superiority over the "patriarchal and intolerant" lower classes. And the point here is not only that the feminist struggle can be articulated in different ways with the class antagonism, but that class antagonism is as it were doubly inscribed here: it is the specific constellation of the class struggle itself which explains why the feminist struggle was appropriated by upper classes. (The same goes for racism: it is the dynamics of class struggle itself which explains why direct racism is strong among the lowest white workers.) Class struggle is here the "concrete universality" in the strict Hegelian sense: in relating to its otherness (other antagonisms), it relates to itself, i.e., it (over)determines the way it relates to other struggles.
sherief said:
The complement to this type of activity is the reappropriation of racist or derogatory terms by particular subcultures or suboordinated groups--blacks reappropriating 'nigger', women reappropriating 'cunt', etc.--the gesture is perhaps noble but dangerous and foolish even. On the one hand, this sort of reappropriation is exclusionary; only those within the group have the proper 'context' to use the word under its reappropriated meaning; on the other hand this merely reinforces to the outside what they allready believe, that blacks are niggers and women cunts--these terms are embedded and thus open these people up to more terror and domination...
I think that too is a complex and problematic issue. Just to take an example I'm very familiar with. In the US in the mid-19th century, following the Irish Famine and the exodus of large numbers of impoverished Irish to the US, both African Americans and Irish Americans quickly became equally part of the racially excluded. The then WASP-controlled police force gradually came to call their vehicles [then horse-driven carriages] by the term "paddywagon". But the name ultimately entered common usage following the New York Draft riots of 1863. The Irish at the time were the poorest people in the city. When the draft was implemented it had a provision for wealthier people to buy a waiver. The Irish rioted, the police regularly rounded them up, and the term Paddy Wagon entered popular discourse.
[ Aside: one can easily see how such class issues become displaced and depoliticised in popular culture, for instance, in a supposedly historical period drama film like Martin Scorsese's
Gangs of New York. Unlike the film's phantasmatic portrayal, the New York draft war did not lead to a war against power and class privilege, but rather it was displaced onto a much more ugly race war - the Irish redirecting their antagonism instead against blacks, pushing the latter almost overnight out of a vast range of formerly "protected" jobs. It was a significant historical event as it was the moment of the origin of Irish-American power, machine politics, and ethnic legitimacy (hardly touched on by Scorsese), all at the horrendous expense of the black community, an event comparable in significance to the moment of the ascendency of Jewish American power in the late-1940s, ironically, just following McCarthyism. ]
But when Irish-American power grew in the late-19th/early-20th centuries, with in many cases the Irish taking over US police forces, the term was kept, and indeed spread to Commonwealth countries. Look at many of the websites of police forces throughout the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc, to witness how the racist term has persisted.
Not that the English were immune from all of this, or anything:
From
Punch, 1848:
Six-foot Paddy, are you no bigger –
You whom cozening friars dish –
Mentally, than the poorest nigger
Grovelling before fetish?
You to Sambo I compare
Under superstition's rule
Prostrate like an abject fool.