Racial and Ethnic Politics Notes

Defining Race and Racism

• Race: A concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.
• Racism: The state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

Race, Racism, and Economic Exploitation

• Manning Marable's perspective:
  • Advances in white freedom are often purchased by Black enslavement.
  • White affluence coexists with Black poverty.
  • White state and corporate power are partly a product of Black powerlessness.
  • Income mobility for the few is rooted in income statis for the many.
  • Capitalist development in the US has occurred because of, not in spite of, the brutal exploitation of Black workers and consumers (1983).

US Capitalism and the White Cross-Class Alliance

• Cross-class alliance: A political alliance between the capitalist class and a section of the working class.
  • Ensures social stability by reconciling political equality with economic exploitation.
• In the US:
  • Exercised through a system of white racial privilege and subordination, weakening class consciousness.
  • Is the foundation of US democracy.
• Du Bois's perspective:
  • White laborers received a low wage but were compensated by a public and psychological wage.
  • This had a great effect on their personal treatment and the deference shown to them (Black Reconstruction, 1935).

The Roots of Race and Racism in the US

• Racial formation: The sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.
• Racial dictatorship: The elimination of political power for most groups based on race.

The Roots of Race and Racism in the US

• Racial rule: A slow and uneven historical process in which hegemonic forms of racial rule came to supplant those based on coercion.
• Hegemony: The consolidation of rule in a society constituted by a combination of coercion and consent.
  • Ruling groups maintain popular systems of ideas and practices—education, the media, religion, folk wisdom—to advance their goals.

Types of Racial Discrimination

• De jure discrimination: Discrimination established by laws.
• De facto discrimination: Subtle forms of discrimination that exist without a legal basis.
• Disproportionate impact: The discriminatory effect of some policies, even if discrimination is not consciously intended.
• Racial profiling: The practice of singling out people based on physical features such as race or ethnicity.

Cycle of US Racial Politics

• US racial politics is an unstable equilibrium.
• Encoded in law.
• Organized through policy-making.
• Enforced by repressive apparatuses.
• Absorption.
• Insulation.