Bill worries that I have rescinded into racism myself, that I have turned "white" into an inherently oppressive category. Bill can do this only by distorting what he quotes and ignoring most of the rest (where I mention such things as divide and rule strategies, though Bill reminds me in an uncharacteristically dogmatic Marxist fashion not to forget the ruling class!). What I wrote is that the state by enumerating the population in racial categories and thus engaging in racial "kind-making" has turned whites into a potential minority (that is, there is not really a deficit or surplus of any race; such things are created in and through representation and discourse) and that by doing so, it may have encouraged racially paranoid and defensive reactions. The puzzle I was trying to figure out was why Prop 209 in California. Is it because whites understand themselves here in California as an impending minority. I don't think this is a good answer exactly because it points to inherently racist behavior. Instead of simply blaming "whites" for this reaction or treating whites as an inherently oppressive people, I was trying to suggest that such paranoia, though real (is this a racist accusation?), may be the result in part of racial kind making by the state. So Bill while I am sympathetic to your insistence that we not treat white as an inherently oppressive category, I would hope that this doesn't mean it is inherently racist to refer to a white political backlash even if an attempt is made to explain it as a) a possible consequence of the way the STATE enumerates people, b)as incited by the RULING CLASS as part of a divide and rule strategy, and c)as a form of DISCRIMINATION encouraged by one group of workers as education parity is reached and work deskilled, that is as an attempt to maintain the racialization of the division of labor. This last condition does point to the competition inherent in the condition of wage labor and the possible discriminatory use of unions to protect jobs for a favored group or "race." But I wouldn't expect a dogmatic Marxist like you to be critical of unions. Of course ultimately the answer to this problem would have to be the abolition of wage labor, not the timid utopia of affirmative action. Moreover, I hope that your attempt to ensure that I don't engage in reverse racism (quite the paranoia nowadays, by the way) doesn't serve as a barrier or isn't meant as a barrier to a honest study of how widespread racist attitudes, racial superstitions, and racial hatreds are today. Of course, you could point me to Dinesh D'Souza's *The End of Racism*, the work ironically enough that insists on the validity of the system of racial classification in order to explain the inheritance of traits such as intelligence. Rakesh
