Sociology 621. Lecture 13 CLASS AND RACE March 5, 2008 I. The problem of laundry-list oppressions There is a tendency in some currents of radical theory to want to treat all forms of oppression symmetrically. One therefore frequently encounters lists of various sorts: sexism, racism, classism, ageism. In one sense this is a legitimate move: in terms of the lived experience and identity of people there is no a priori reason to regard any form of oppression as intrinsically “worse” than others, as more harmful than another. The oppression of people with handicaps can create harms as deep as class or gender. (When middle class kids asked in a survey whether they would prefer to be poor or be grossly obese without the possibility of losing weight, they say poor). Nevertheless, if the implication of the laundry list is that the specificities of the mechanisms of oppression are of secondary importance, or that all oppressions have the same explanatory importance for all problems, then I think this is a mistake. The task of a critical theory of class and race, then, is to understand the specificity of the causal interactions of these social relations. II. Understanding the Theoretical Specificity of Racial Oppression, racial domination, racial inequality 1. Methodological point: what do we mean by “theoretical specificity”? In the 2003 UN conference on Racism there was a resolution proposed by a number of delegations that “Zionism is a form of racism”. Many people regard this as an absurd statement; others regard it as capturing some underlying, deep theoretical unity between Zionism and other, more generally accepted forms of racism. The methodological problem of “specificity” involves providing a theoretical understanding of a particular form of social interaction so that we know when specific empirical cases should be treated as similar or different, as falling under the same broad category or not. This can be an arbitrary exercise in wordplay for political purposes, but can also be a more rigorous matter of figuring out how concepts fit together within theories. [This is basically the task laid out in the Old Sesame Street ditty: “one of these things are not like the others, one of these things just isn’t the same....”. There was a funny version of this I heard on BBC Radio 4 in a spoof about Bush. Bush was given four things: a mouse, a turtle, rabbit and a waffle iron and was asked which of these was not like the other. He called up the Sesame Street hotline to discuss the matter: Bush: “Well I think it is the turtle. It’s not like the others.”Lecture 13. Race & Class 2Kermit: “Mr. President, I think it is the waffle iron” Bush: “No, I don’t think it is the waffle iron. A waffle iron’s got a tail just like the bunny and the mouse. But the turtle doesn’t have a tail.” Kermit: “I think it is the waffle iron because it isn’t alive. The other three are alive.” Bush: “A waffle iron is alive. It smokes. You have to breathe to smoke.” Kermit: “Mr. President. It doesn’t really have a tail. That is called an electric cord with a plug on the end. You put it in the wall socket.” Bush: “Well, you can put a little mouse’s tail in a wall socket to. I bet it would smoke then also.” Kermit: “Anyway, a turtle also has a tail, you just can’t see it under the shell” Bush: “You’re joking, a little turtle really has a tail?” Kermit: “Yes, under the shell” Bush: “Well then, that doesn’t count because you can’t put it in a socket.”] Defining the theoretical specificity of racial oppression involves three sorts of tasks: 1. Specifying what is the abstract category within which “racism” would count as one specific type. This requires developing a real theory of this more abstract category. 2. Within this abstract category, specifying what distinguishes racism as a specific sub-type. 3. Figuring out which historically concrete forms of oppression are instances of racial oppression, which are not, which have some aspects of racial oppression, etc. 2. The problem of “Essentialism” There is one more important methodological complication in this sort of classification exercise: the theoretical specificity of a particular concept or category depends upon how it figures in some theoretical problem or question. To argue that a particular category has a particular definition irrespective of its theoretical purpose is, for some people, the sin of “essentialism”, but more often it is just sloppy thinking. Two things should be classified together if it is the case that they identify the same kind of casual process within some social phenomenon under investigation. It may turn out when you push this that some commonsense, everyday distinctions dissolve, and other things which look very similar “on the surface” may in fact be very different. This also means that for different theoretical purposes different kinds of conceptual lines of demarcation and aggregation need to be drawn. Ultimately the issue, of course, is not so much which of these get the tag “racial oppression” – there may be historical and linguistic (if not theoretical) reasons to use this label quite narrowly – but rather how we understand the conceptual space within which racial domination/oppression is located. This is tough work and fraught with political passion in the case of racism and racial oppression.Lecture 13. Race & Class 33. The Abstract Category within which “race” is an instance Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel have an interesting proposal for how we should think of the conceptual category within which racial division is a specific example. The more abstract category is “communal identity”. The basic idea is this: at the very core of social life is the idea of “community” – the circle of people with which one regularly cooperates and feels bonds of trust and solidarity, the circle of people that provide the basic building blocks of social interaction and reciprocity. “Communal identity” refers to the criteria one uses to decide what sorts of people fall into this category of “community” and what sorts do not. One can have multiple communal identities in this sense, and the various kinds of community in which one’s life is embedded can have a shifting, fluid and potentially contradictory character. Defined in this way, community and communal identity need