Race as an artifact of the racist's mind

tryptych

waiting for a time
Over at Lenin's Tomb there's continual mention of this idea - that "race" or "races" do not exist anywhere but only as an artefact in the racist's mind. Lenin seems reluctant to go into the details of the theory - could any one of you intelligent chaps break it down for me or link me to some reading?
 
funnily enough I come across a guy who sounds just like the projected racist in that piece...

...dude called me a lying racist bastard but failed to prove it yet by putting it out there gave the trolls some fodder to gnash on. End point i wind up getting banned

IMO it is rarely about race issues, it is about culture and people often confuse the two and start crying racist when they aren't...

...by acknowledging race you are in effect buying into racism

there are no races only cultures and in terms of cultural superiority it's survival of the fittest which is what colonialist settlers thought when engaging polynesian culture...

"my culture is better than yours so yours needs to be wiped out and assimilated"

...w'ell see who's still laughing after we've polynized everyone
 

milkandhoney

Well-known member
from what i understand, people studying the human genome have proven that 'race' is a biologically meaningless concept and only accounts for aesthetic differences between people - only something like 1% of variation between individuals can be attributed to race. so the idea that people with different skin colour differ in anything other than their different skin colour is completely wrong

having said that there are different trends for certain genes occurring more or less frequently different ethnic groups, but not such that there's any significant distinction between them. hence that controversy last year over making drugs especially for african americans..
 

ripley

Well-known member
I'd just like to point out that just because things are constructed doesn't mean they have no power.

so even though race doesn't exist in a biological sense, that fact doesn't necessarily help us deal with entrenched racism in society.
 

sherief

Generic Human
There is of course a difference, however, between recognizing that race 'does not exist' and acting as if it were not a social problematic. The socially constructed does indeed have existence, but only as a re-presentational excess. I would say not that race is an artifact of the racist's mind--although clever wordplay and true in one sense, it does not adress the robustness of racism in its effects and propagation. Also, to call race(ism) an artifact implies that it once was but is not now except in the mind of the racist


Instead, I think that race is the production of a supposedly biological distinction used to advance a political agenda (e.g. the beginnings of anthropology, phrenology, eugenics). It has continued by the continual creation of divisions based in (generally dubious) emprical studies. I think this is why the science, even as it recognizes the vacuousness of race, is a dubious grounds for purporting its death; one one hand it may be disputed, but on the other there will always be the phenotypic differences--though our genes may be the same, there will be those who will always compare by degrees.

Thus, we are in some way forced to consider race, but if we do we must recognize it as a strategic/political concept (of course one that maps in most cases over the socioeconomic). In this sense, we may use race to describe particular sites of struggle or opression (by totally abandoning race we lose this capacity of discernment). However, at all points these struggles, though they may be located in specific racial opression, must exceed the racial categories (which are necessarily overdetermined). I think this was very visible in the American Civil Rights movement--despite its incompleteness, at its most productive and effective moments it channeled through the racial struggle an existential struggle for recognition.
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I suppose then I tend to agree, I just felt the earlier formulation was lacking. The bad side to the maintainence of race, even in the political context, is when race becomes not just the site but the means of struggle, as this simply proliferates racial division and social inequality...(Latinos vs. Blacks in many US cities struggling for the same jobs begin to oppose one another instead of recognizing the greater problem at hand...etc...)
 

zhao

there are no accidents
milkandhoney said:
'race' is a biologically meaningless concept and only accounts for aesthetic differences between people - only something like 1% of variation between individuals can be attributed to race. so the idea that people with different skin colour differ in anything other than their different skin colour is completely wrong


but Pigmies are usually smaller and more agile than Caucasoids. Negroids are usually better runners than Mongoloids. and Mongoloids are better at making fried rice than anyone else. just kidding. (I'm Chinese so I can make fun of my own race so don't get excited)

sorry for stupid post but it's all I've time for :p
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
HELL_SD said:
IMO it is rarely about race issues, it is about culture and people often confuse the two and start crying racist when they aren't...

...by acknowledging race you are in effect buying into racism

this is the most nonsensical, dangerous point of view i have ever come across.
different experience needs to be acknowledged and, to the degree that anyone can understand another's experience, understood.
saying "there is no race" is like saying "there is no class", "there is no sexuality" etc.
are you seriously saying that the BNP council seat victories, the casual prejudice so many people are exposed to on a daily basis, the disparity of opportunity available to young black males, the ludicrously out-of-proportion percentage of this same grouping in in jail as opposed to their white counterparts and so on, ad nauseum, mean nothing because race "doesn't exist"?
of course they don't mean anything to you if you can actually make a choice to refuse to acknowledge race (which i don't believe you honestly can), but many people are not afforded that impractical, academic luxury. their faces are ground into this "construct" every day, thus making it very real
however well-meant, this is head-burying foolishness and it's always worth remembering, as ripley pointed out, that plenty of things are constructed (the empire state building for instance) but you're not going to deny their presence, importance, significance and reality.
anyone who really thinks like this needs to put the books down,, get out into the real world and talk to normal people a lot, lot more.
 
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this is gonna sound cheesy as hell but, there's only one race... human !!!

...within that there are different cultures, ethnicities, classes and sexualities

what i'm saying is that the cultural divide is often percieved to be a racial divide and that the differences between cultures needs to be experienced/understood and personal judgments made on that rather than just by what colour your skin is or whether your eyes are double lidded or whatever

ethnologists when making racial groupings in the 19th century couldn't figure out if us polynesians were a different race or a subset of a particular race but if they'd asked us and listened to our traditions we could have told them we are hybrids of interbreeding peoples of a few nations crossing as waves back and forth across the pacific totally at the mercy of natural selection and survival of the fittest

but oh no, too busy telling us how savage and unchristian we were then subjugating us, removing tenets of culture like language, clothing, music, traditions, practises, protocols and values and subtituting them with their own then punishing us for dissenting and all the while stealing our lands using the power of words and alien laws

for what it's worth some of us don't even acknowledge the word polynesian cos it's not what we called ourselves it's what the colonial cultural supremacists called us, we just use it for expediency

race when it comes right down to it is just a word used to keep the powers that be in power by giving and taking power in the form of words, word sound power

we are all of the same race but my culture is different but equal to yours accept that and then lets move forward and may the strongest survive

and I don't really believe my point of view is the most dangerous you've come across, I mean it's not like I'm not strapping C4 to myself and blowing up innocents for refusing to acknowledge different religious or political points of view

that's gotta be more a dangerous point of view with regards to religion than me voicing my lone opinion on the net which in the general scheme of things amounts to pissing in the wind

and the empire state building is not part of my reality, it's presence, importance, contruction and significance mean as little to me as the twin towers did

BTW I don't know that many normal people cos as Michael Franti said "all the freaky people make the beauty of the world" and I know a lot more freaks than I do normal people

if anything i probably need to read more books than base my opinions on personal experiences
 

sherief

Generic Human
HELL_SD said:
this is gonna sound cheesy as hell but, there's only one race... human !!!

...within that there are different cultures, ethnicities, classes and sexualities

what i'm saying is that the cultural divide is often percieved to be a racial divide and that the differences between cultures needs to be experienced/understood and personal judgments made on that rather than just by what colour your skin is or whether your eyes are double lidded or whatever

This is problematic. Of course race is a horribly artifical category, but it exists in the social world to this day. Race is a classification which moreover has no determinate boundaries (Think of the 'one drop rule' among other things) but instead is constantly deployed in arbitrary fashion in order to section and divide for alternatively eugenicist, genocidal, and similar projects. I think that this sort of deployment is well described by Agamben with his idea of the biopolitical 'state of exception'; the law stands only insofar as it has the power to create its exceptions-- the supremacy of one race stands as long as it can differentiate itself from another, etc. This sort of exception has no 'real' basis (the biological determinations are largely fictions retroactively employed to support this kind of nonsense) but instead uses these bodily/cultural differences as the basis of political determination. Think of Agamben's pet example, how the concentration camps were in part made possible by the exception of the jews, handicapped, gypsies, etc., and their reduction to 'bare' life, they were expelled from the realm of the human and determined to be 'subhuman'...this of course has happened many times and to many degrees throughout history (Spain's history with native South Americans and Carribeans for another instance). 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.

Therefore, we must recognize that race is deeply embedded into the representational structures of our societies (and therefore any historico-political sequence), and act fully cognizant of its existence. Yet, as I hoped to hint at above, we cannot reduce race to some identity or treatment of reality, but instead as a political category that gives some ideation to the inexistent, excluded, or excepted. This, I think, is Badiou's position, that 'race' is little more than a crass inconsistency used to name those excluded from [political, social] existence and equality.

To bring back the original question of the post, yes, race is an artefact of the racist's mind, but it is not merely in his mind-this artifact must be treated as a reality, if only insofar as it determines the political situation. That being said, I emphasize that race then can only be a site of the beginnings of a political sequence, and that such a sequence must seek to first recognize but then efface race, a prescriptive universality that allows no room for this sort of representational, biopolitical racism.

You cannot then simply act as if race did not exist, speaking truth to power never happens in a vacuum, and the idea that you, the enlightened or concious person who does recognize the stupidity of race (I agree of course on this point), can simply change a social state by redefining terms is ultimately a positivistic idealism. 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'd love to see a world without race, but we can't simply speak it away
 

zhao

there are no accidents
what I was trying to say with my crude post above is that not only does race exist, but also very real, very clear, not only cultural, but genetic differences between the races.

the statement "race does not exist" sound very much like another, much more widespread, believed, and misunderstood statement - "all men were created equal" - which is simply not the case. (those who are shocked need to GROW UP) IMO what King meant was "all men should be treated equally".

a lengthy essay can and should be written about the implications, effects, and various interpretations of this statement, and how it has been used, who has used it, to what ends.

it seems to go hand in hand with the myth of "democracy" in America, and probably functions in similar ways - mystification, confusion, etc.
 

sherief

Generic Human
Sure confucius, race is genetically identifiable, as might be homosexuality. There's the new heart medication that only works on blacks; I don't think that anyone in particular is denying that what we call race has been justified by the singling out of particular (in truth almost insignificant, I mean for pete's sake we share something like 99.6% of our genome with chimps) genetic and physiological differences. But, let's look at an analogous situation, a friend of mine is apparently part of some 30% of the population for whom having bleu cheese and red wine in conjunction results in a horrible metallic taste in his mouth (I quote "its like chewing aluminum foil with fresh fillings and braces"). This is also a real, physical, physiological difference from the 70% of the population who doesn't have this genetic trait. So what? To the point to where these differences actually bear upon a clinical situation, they're fine [but even then, I think, they can be taken individually into consideration (with current technology) without even necessitating making racial generalizations].

When you start turning these individual differences, which really don't exist outside of a particular clinical situation, into categories, paradigms, or designations, you start buying into the racist's paradigm. Once the sectioning or division is made, I believe racism is an inevitability.

The phrase that "All men are created equal," which has most of its currency from Jefferson/Decralation of Independence, I think is in fact important. We cannot of course use this statement to peretend as if social inequalities do not exist, but, especially for its time, this is something of a monumental declaration. Such a statement has the desire, although it may have been poorly realized in the intervening time and taken on the character of yet another mystification, of destroying all these constructs that stand in the way of equality. We can take the statement even further, removing the gendering and whatnot, and assert that all subjects are created equal, or rather that all subjects posssess the capacity to seek justice and their own equality. This must of course be realized through difficult struggle, but I don't see any other possibility for real equality to flourish. We can't reduce it to a moral position, that people "should be treated" equal, because this assumes that we are simply propping up some subhuman class or whatever by "treating" them equal. No, we all must be equal, but we have to force our way into equality.
 
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zhao

there are no accidents
sherief said:
The phrase that "All men are created equal," which has most of its currency from Jefferson/Decralation of Independence


yeah that's what I meant... Jefferson... not King... :eek: :)
 

Padraig

Banned
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.

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[ 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.


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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.​

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Padraig

Banned
Sherief said:
... race is genetically identifiable, as might be homosexuality

Well, while I agree with your general point, I don't think that this is necessarily that straight-forward. Really, both race and sexual orientation are fundamentally cultural constructions eg. is there a gene or set of genes for heterosexuality, for bisexuality, for asexuality? Such questions are ridiculous and misplaced ... and fail to appreciate the complex inter-relationship between genetics and environment, between nature and culture, between bodily function and psychic identity.

Everyone has genetic differences [this is fundamental to evolutionary theory and healthy genetic multiplicity, unless people are suddenly again attracted to the degenerate, regressive idea of incest, popular among reactionary racists and the old aristocracy]. The issue is how such arbitrary differences are used/exploited as a pretext/justification for perpetuating purely material-based class differences.

And, in the era of the Human Genome Project, genetics are now as fragile and arbitrary as culture: the notion of someone being "genetically so" is largely irrelevant when everything increasingly becomes contingent. Just consider, for instance, transexuals, those whose psychic identity seemingly contradicts their purely biological identity: what do they do? Either mutilate their bodies through surgery so that it more properly "fits" with their psychic identity [increasingly the case] or confront their psychic fantasies and delusions [increasingly rare]? ===>A human doesn't need breasts to be feminine nor a penis to be masculine ... nor black to be a "nigger" nor white to be "white trash" ... The danger here, of course, is that genetics will be increasingly appropriated by [corporate] power and class privilege for purely racist, sexist, ageist, and other exclusionary ends.

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