Chris Niles posted:
>I basically agree with you on this point. That said, i don't think
>Doug missed the point, only that his point needs to be significantly
>qualified. i think it is true that in a very nasty, very competitive
>society, white men are indeed unwilling to give up gender and "race"
>priviledges. Their are still social, economic and poltical benefits,
>ranging from petty to significant to tremendous, accorded white men.
>The problem is that increasingly, white male priviledge, especially
>for poor and "middle-class" white men, is less about what you get
>and more about what does NOT happen to you.
Actually, for the majority of white men, perhaps, being white has
always been a matter of what is _not supposed to_ happen to you. The
metaphor of "wage slavery" captures this ambivalence: a white man is
_not supposed to_ be a slave, but capitalism does _enslave him to a
paradoxical freedom_: free from the means of production; free from
lifetime & heritable personal subjection to the master class; and
free to go bankrupt, become unemployed, and starve. In contrast, it
took _a very long time after the emergence of capitalism_ for blacks,
women, etc. to achieve this paradoxical freedom of wage labor; and
many women & people of color in the world have not gained even this
minimum bourgeois freedom.
>The nature of alienation from self--which is what being "white" is
>all about, not to mention being a white prole--is that depending on
>the social and historical circumstances, white men are sometimes
>more conscious of thier priviledge and sometimes less so. The
>"racist"/"not-racist" paradigm that the left uses to understand
>these people is analytically impoverished and, therefore, useless in
>any effort to build a movement against the tendendy that both
>victimizes them and that they represent.
White men who are racist think that the root cause of alienation lies
not in the aforementioned paradoxical freedom of capitalism but in
the marginalized & oppressed who either have only recently &
precariously attained the freedom essential to capitalism (women,
blacks, etc. in rich nations) or have yet to do so (illegal aliens in
rich nations; the impoverished masses on the periphery; etc.); racist
white men think that we -- not capitalism -- are the source of his
woes, without understanding that we have it even worse than them
under capitalism. White men who are not racist know what the real
cause of alienation is.
Yoshie
