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I would like to recommend the following book to anyone who is interested in studies of whiteness. The book and the blurb are by the author, Steve Martinot. In my view, this book crosses boundaries and presents a very readable account of "whiteness." ************* ANNOUNCING The publication of my latest book "The Machinery of Whiteness: studies in the structures of racialization in the US" by Steve Martinot >From Temple University Press The book's focus is a description of the cultural structures of racialization in the US. Though the concept that race is a social construct has gained increasing acceptance, I argue that this is insufficient. We also need to describe in cultural detail the structures that are socially constructed as "race." Rather than think of "race" as an existent, I interpret it as a social activity, something that one group of people (whites) does to others whom they racialize for their own (white) social and identity purposes. The structures whereby these social activities are promulgated include not only the institutionalities of discrimination, instrumentalization, and segregation, but the cultural scripting of the performance of whiteness by which white people manifest their racialized identities, and enact their membership in the white social framework. To apprehend the cultural structures underlying both white institutionality and the panoply of racialized identities, I examine the social and institutional forms racialization takes in different periods of US history, and extract structural commonalities from their differences. These commonalities become elements signifying the operations of an underlying cultural structure. The purpose of plumbing the depths of this cultural structure in the US is not only to explain how it is that the cultural cohesion of whiteness and white supremacy continually reasserts itself against democratizing movements that, throughout US history, have attempted to controvert its social and political power (such as abolitionism or the civil rights movements), but to render those underlying structures discernible so that we can be proactive rather than simply reactive against them. To this end, I examine (among other things) the instrumentalization of women for the processes of social racialization, the use of prison industries and different historical forms of a police-prison complex, the racialization of class structures, the function of the US political party system in the overall process of racialization, and the existence and character of white populism. ________________________________________________ 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
