On 2/26/07, Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Adolph Reed says that whiteness studies - and I say this as a big fan
of Roediger's work (e.g. <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/
Radio.html#050811>) - has no implication for practical politics other
than urging white people to become wiggers. Anyone else have some
more fruitful suggestions?
Doug
Yeah, Adolph Reed is dead wrong. The implication that Roediger's work
has for practical politics is to, first of all, explain why there is
no appreciable socialist working class politics in the US (white
working men came to define themselves primarily in terms of
"whiteness" and gender). I say whiteness rather than race because
under the terms of whiteness only non-whites have a race. No, it's not
logical but don't insist on logic when dealing with pathology.
Secondly, it is specifically the *contradictions* in the construction
of whiteness that can be used to politically oppose its effects. The
black-face minstrel show offers the most vivid illustration of both
those contradictions and potential strategies. Black face involved
both derisive parody and envious imitation. It was not just a way of
demeaning African-Americans but also a way of participating
vicariously in cultural practicess that were in some respects taboo.
The beatnik and hippy phenomena were also rife with such vicarious
participation and emulation.
I would argue that such forms of expression are essentially protests
against industrial rationalization and thus have served as a symbolic
surrogate for an effective working-class political movement. To put it
another way, they are "aesthetizations of politics" displacing
political action onto a symbolic field where its threat to capitalism
is neutralized.
Practical politics requires understanding precisely what it is about
industrial rationalization that working people find so objectionable,
yet feel compelled to mask their protest behind projections. To make a
long story short, it (the objection) is very much about pace,
intensity, duration, reciprocity within and control over labour
processes both inside and out of the wage economy. And it is only
incidentally and secondarily about distribution of the fruits of those
processes, whereas much left politics follows the bourgeois lead in
focusing precisely on the secondary issue of distribution as if it
were the whole game.
--
Sandwichman
