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first off, what smooth wrote above is spot on. you could lay an image of institutional structures over it and be on your way to something of a starting point for a conversation about the central manifestation of structural racism in the united states directed against african-americans. you could generate another, parallel narrative to talk about the treatments meted out to native americans. to my mind, if you want to talk about racism, you are talking about histories that intertwine both with each other and with the institutional configurations that shape the present. and there is no running away from that history. the same would obtain if you were to talk about the histories of racism in france--which operate in different ways, manifest in different ways, but which are still forms of racism.
racism is typically organized in tandem with signifiers that shape how the "We" is staged and understood. i see nationalism as hinging on fiarly crude distinctions between inside and outside, and so as not only a kind of collective mental disorder but also as a fundamental enabling condition for racists everywhere.
now to head off the seemingly inevitable response, nationalism is not *only* and enabling condition for racism---but it is, in any situation, *also* an enabling condition---because it justifies the construction of institutionalized exclusions by giving them a way to make sense by way how nation defines the "we" which presupposes a "them" that is both outside and inside the arbitrary lines of a map that define the (capitalist) nation-state.
from this viewpoint, questions of discrimination and their reverse in questions of affinity based on race become surface repetitions of structural problems. it makes little sense to make the conservative move and try to separate present from past and then shift to abstracting racism from contexts in order to dilute the problem through sequences of superficial generalities. but this seems like a parlor game for some falk--what about this? what about this?---that i don't really find worth the trouble to play, simply because to get to it--to start playing---you have to perform the operations i just outlined, which more or less guarantee that you aren't and can't say anything interesting.
you can get worked up, but that's it.
so the main argument is that you cannot separate discrimination for racism AND that you cannot separate racism from it's histories---so that the bizarre-o post-bakke decision games that the right likes to play instead of talking in a serious manner about a structural problem within the united states---which condoleeza rice called "the american birth defect" (i will probably never quote her again) are nothing more than playing with memes in the shallow end of the pool.
aside: the email that paq pasted is amazing. what fucking planet does the writer live on?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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