Re: Criticizing Cornel

>>>>> "msf22" == msf22  <[email protected]> writes:

  msf22> Mr. Clark, i was just wondering if you could expound on your
  msf22> assertion that most if not all white americans past their
  msf22> early teens are racist.  what do you mean by racist, and what
  msf22> socialization are you referring to specifically.

Sure, I'd be happy to do so.

First, I grant that this paragraph I wrote isn't *super* clear...

  msf22> "However, since you seem so concerned with my views, I will
  msf22> say that I think Bush *is* a racist, if for no other reason
  msf22> -- and there are other reasons, perhaps many of them -- than
  msf22> that he's White, and I think that most, if not *all* White
  msf22> Americans, over, say, the age of 13 or 14, are racist (or
  msf22> have been socialized to be, and it's very rare for a person
  msf22> individually to resist that process), unless they've
  msf22> otherwise rigorously and reflectively worked to rid
  msf22> themselves, insofar as possible, of racist beliefs,
  msf22> attitudes, values, and political commitments."

Okay, here's what I meant. (And mostly here I'm just trying to make
clear to myself what I meant and mostly just following Marilyn Frye's
*The Politics of Reality*.)

By racism I mean something like systematic social, political, and
economic oppression of a racially-identified social group. By racist I
mean a moral agent which passively or actively supports that system of
oppression.[1]

Such systematic social oppression often (always? must? can?) implies
an ideology of the supremacy of the oppressing racially-identified
group, which itself implies (or is implied by?) an ideology of the
inferiority of the oppressed racially-identified group.

Such oppression is created and maintained and extended by the social
expression of these complementary ideologies and by the practices such
ideologies allow and demand. These practices run the gamut from formal
(i.e., primarily legal) exclusion and subjugation to cultural bias,
prejudice, stereotype, oppressive myth-making, to terrorism and
violence.

The point of a system of racial oppression, historically, but also
conceptually (I think...), is to provide the oppressing
racially-identified group[2] with social, economic, political, and
cultural *benefit* or privilege. In other words, the point is *POWER*.

From the standpoint of morality, of course, social privilege arising
from massive, systematic harm to the oppressed racially-identified
group is unwarranted and unjust.[3]

In any social order that is systematically oppressive, the *ideal*
arrangement is for the members of the oppressed *and* the oppressing
groups -- if the system is to be stable and so is to secure and
distribute the privileges which are its entire point -- should be
convinced that the social order is *natural*, which means
unobjectionable, unchangeable. Which means that the causes and
determinants of systematic oppression are to be made as socially
invisible as is possible. (As I said in a recent interview, and here
I'm really just making a point of Marilyn Frye's in a different way
(by using terms Bernard Boxill uses explicitly), if you can convince a
person you've enslaved that she is a *natural* slave, you probably
won't need to whip or beat or rape or shackle her. Unless you just get
off on that sort of thing; i.e., do it not out of necessity but out of
desire.)

And thus the process of socialization -- or: the process by which
human infants are turned into functioning members of the social order
into which they are borne and by which they are educated -- ideally
will impart not only various constellations of value and belief, but
it will teach, perhaps only by implication, members of both groups how
they are to act and think so as to fit themselves, so as to be fitted,
into the various social institutions which together constitute society
as such. And by socializing people in this way, society reproduces the
social institutions, the ideologies and practices, that constitute the
oppressive social order.

I've just distinguished the process of socialization into two parts,
psychological and institutional, but that is, I suspect, mostly an
artificial distinction. Which is only to say that the socialization
process just is one unified field of person-formation, in the proper
sense, by which the psychological beliefs and attitudes which are
necessary to *function* within institutions are inculcated into
individuals, and the institutions within which such beliefs and
attitudes make any sense at all are perpetuated and reproduced.

In my view, then, any member of the racially-identified oppressing
group is racist insofar as, whether passively or actively, she
supports the existing, that is, systematically oppressive and unjust
social order. And so the various ways of being a racist moral agent
(whether individual or institution, though there are some differences
I can't untease here) in that sense exist along a *spectrum*, which
runs from the passive acceptance of unwarranted privilege to active
support, maintenance, extension of the unjust, oppressive social order
and the institutions which constitute it.

Ok, to answer your very specific questions explicitly (though I think
the answers are pretty clear from what I just said): 

    - which socialization process am I talking about? 

The only one there is, of course. In other words, that's just, as I
understand things, how societies, whether just or unjust, oppressive
or egalitarian, *work*. Things are not as static as I've made them
seem, of course. At some point oppressed groups fight back, come to a
conscious awareness of their situation, begin to counter-socialize,
themselves and others, etc, etc.

As for the bit about 'early teens', that was simply my very awkward
way of trying to indicate an approximate general point at which most
people have been mostly socialized.

Finally, as with *any* socialization, racist socialization can be
unlearned and resisted, but resistance is very difficult since we
control our beliefs and attitudes (what psychologically make us fit to
exist w/in social institutions) far more than we control the
unwarranted but perhaps now un*wanted* privilege which an unjust,
oppressive social order confers.

I hope that helps. Thanks for asking, by the way, as Bijan and I were
talking about these issues on IRC today, and I keep pretending that
I'm going to try to write a book about all of this, which will mean I
need to do this kind of work anyway.

Best,
Kendall Clark

Footnotes: 

[1] I may need to say "supports plus *benefits* from..." here. My
initial thought is that that doesn't need to be said explicitly
because it's implied by the nature of social privilege in a
systematically oppressive social order. That is, there are not likely
to be (though whether this is really an empirical or conceptual claim,
I'm not sure) any members of the racially-identified oppressing group
who have not benefited in *any* way.

[2] The existence of further unjust social arrangement *within* the
dominant, racially-identified group is a separate issue. 

[3] Justice, John Rawls says, is the first virtue of a social order,
just like truth is the first virtue of a system of thought. Social
orders are made up, in part, of social institutions, which are made up
of individuals. Justice is or ought to be a virtue of social orders
*and* their moral agents.