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Zinn and the New Left scholars writing in the wake of the civil rights movement--and under its influence--understood that central fact of race and racism in American history. This alone placed them light years ahead of Beard. And much better historical materialists.... ML Sorry, but the central fact of the American history that produced the characteristic American racist ideology was the quest for surplus profits from the North American lands in the face of a relative absence of labor power, a condition lasting until the 1890s. This fact brought forth, among other things, the institutionalization of chattel slavery along racially coded lines as imported from the Caribbean beginning in earnest from the 1670's onward. This would be a materialist approach to understanding the roots of American racism. While it is quite likely that the progressive historians did not grasp this, neither too does the subjectivist identity politics approach of the New Left school a la Zinn. Indeed I find the former still more more useful than the latter in grasping some of the key threads of that history. -Matt ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
