January race paradoxes

From: Phil Graham (p.graham@qut.edu.au)
Date: Wed Jan 05 2000 - 05:02:06 PST


Happy new year xmca,

All the best for the new year. I greatly enjoyed Leigh Star's paper. It
presents the "left" (whatever that might mean these days) with a few
challenges that I am happy to explore, the most significant of which
pertains, I think, to racial identity politics.

Clearly Leigh's paper shows that race is an untenable category for
sociological theorising, not to mention social engineering of the type
addressed in the chapter (and its supposedly "objective" basis). On the
other hand, it shows that race, as a reified construct, is inherently
oppressive and can't be ignored! What to do?

My family is an excellent example of the paradoxes that the chapter
reveals. My mother's family was terrified that the Germans would win WWII.
They have Jewish ancestry, as well as Spanish, Irish, and English. Most of
them would not have passed the phrenological nose and skull measuring tests
devised by the Nazis. My father's family have Jewish, Scottish, Irish, and
Aboriginal roots. My children's mother is the fair-skinned daughter of a
very dark-skinned Fijian woman who also has German and Danish in her family
line, and a New Zealand Irish man. She is ostracised by her mother for
being "white trash", the only fair-skinned child of nine siblings. My kids?
Matt: "aryan" through and through, blond hair, blue eyes; Zara has brown
hair, brown eyes, and brown skin. A cousin had twins that made the NZ
papers. One was a dark brown, fuzzy-haired girl; the other a pale-skinned,
blue-eyed, blond-haired boy.

Race is not a valid category, yet "left" and "right" deploy the concept
with equally pernicious and condescending effects, I think. I'm glad to see
it being debunked in such a convincing manner.

That still leaves the problem of what to do about something that has no
validity, but which remains the basis for policies, "positive" and
negative; in other words, something which is, for all intents and purposes,
a socially real difference, acted out socially in a many-sided way.

Race needs to be reframed in its cultural and historical contexts. That is
to say, in terms of how it comes to be perceived, historically, as a
significant difference. How do we argue for and against stupid generalities
using examples [?], especially when any such examples necessarily show
themselves to be stupid and loaded with vested interests, which is what
Leigh shows quite clearly. Language groups seem to me to becoming more the
focus than race (as the footnotes referring to US census categories imply).

I'd really like to see more of the book to see where it goes and comes
from. I also think that the eugenics displayed in the categorisations is
more than "mild". Have you seen the "digital divide" by the US department
of commerce? It uses the same US census categories. Law ... they're legal
definitions of social inequality based on faulty premises.

Congrats, Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker. It's a pity that we have to have
such horrendous social engineering projects that force us to study the
damned question. The technocrats legitimise all this categorisation by
leaning on "the increasing mobility of people ... ", and all the rest of
the globalisation crap, but people have always been mobile, always
oppressed the other. Marx has a fair bit to say about the implicit origins
of ethnic devaluation in the Grundrisse (pp. 483-514 of my 1973 version).
What it boils down to is that conquered people are seen as part of the
natural resources of the land, like so many animals. The reverse also holds
true: those of us who are treated as "human resources" (a technocratic sine
qua non) are immediately perceived as conquered, as something to be
harnessed, managed, and/or disposed of.

I look forward to further discussion.

Regards,
Phil
Phil Graham
p.graham@qut.edu.au
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html



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