Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > > Does whiteness refer to ethnicity not race in whiteness studies? I > doubt it. Whiteness studies calls upon people to study the invention > of race, especially the invention of the white race, and learn about > how self-identification with that identity has served the ruling > class, against the interests of those who so identity. Among the most > notable theorists of this is Theodore W. Allen:
There is only one kind of racism -- white racism, the ideology which 'makes sense of' the oppression of blacks in a society supposedly grounded in the principle that all men [sic] are created equal. And u.s. history, including the present asm history, cannot be understood the dynamic of intra-class relations (and of class consciousness) of the u.s. working class. All this seems to me simply a given. It is what has to be accepted as the framework for discourse among u.s. leftists. But note. Dukakis was a presidential candidate. Jackson was a _black_ presidential candidate. Pynchon is a novelist. Morrison is a black novelist. It seriously distorts the nature of racism and efforts to combat it to regard whites as a race. Whites are just people, while blacks are black people. There is in fact only one race, the black race. And since race doesn't exist but is merely an ideological construction, and since laws against discrimination are grounded in the false assumption that race exists, everything gets royally fucked up. And whiteness studies with its assumption that whites are a race contributes to this general fucked-upness of u.s thought on race. Of course u.s. indifference to the bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki is grounded in racism. That shouldn't be a matter of debate either. I think indifference, incidentally, is a more accurate description than approval, and in fact underlines more clearly the horror. Carrol
