extemporally (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
extemporally) wrote2011-06-28 07:37 pm
extemporally) wrote2011-06-28 07:37 pm
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booktalk: the social justice edition.
I have just got back from spending the night in a beachfront chalet with a couple of old acquaintances from high school, and I stopped by the library on the way home. I liked the library bit the best. \o/
Racism: A Very Short Introduction, by Ali Rattansi.
This is how you write a chronological treatment of a topical subject: you show why it's important to get context. Rattansi talks about how race is a social construct that's grown out of some very specific historical circumstances without undermining the reality of race, and discusses nationalism and scientific racism as well as institutional racism (and the weaknesses of that idea) and "cultural" racisms - the last in the sense that he argues "cultural differences" is often used to justify contemporary bigotry, and that it's both disingenuous and important in the sense that we can't exactly talk about race without also discussing culture if we want to move beyond a colour-blind approach - and it is EXACTLY what I've been trying to say about race and culture.
On the frailty of racial categorisation:
-- this is borne out by a couple of old cartoons that portray the Irish as apelike (with very differently shaped heads from their Anglo counterparts), in much the same way as the facial and bodily proportions of black people had been.
Also, the book isn't quite as explicit as I would have liked it to be in terms of addressing how our history is racist, our intellectuals are racist, our everything is racist - hey, how come when I was taking my A Levels in Philosophy no one ever pointed out that Hume and Kant were racist? (... I just realised that that rant probably made no sense. But basically, he discusses Hume and Kant's inclinations to "evaluating the moral and intellectual worth of different peoples classified especially by skin colour" under a section called 'Blackness, sexuality, and aesthetics'. Which is... a personal choice I don't quite agree with. If I had been writing this book, I would have made the personal choice of including it under a section called, 'Western philosophy, Western intellectualism, and the fundamental racism thereof'. But, you know!)
There were only two bits in this book I didn't like beyond that:
Ummm I find that really disingenuous. Firstly, the biological non-existence of race doesn't mean that concepts of race and racism have no currency in cultural discourse. THAT IS JUST WHAT MAKES RACISM SO RIDICULOUS. Also, "few people now admit to being racist" doesn't mean racism isn't a problem. On the contrary it makes correcting racist behaviours even more difficult??? I think these are both really obvious points to make, I'm sorry, and they're not points the author would disagree with, but I think that that's what makes the paragraph all the more irritating because it sounds a bit like he's setting up a straw man argument.
The second bit I didn't like:
Well, Rattansi, if only a 'modicum' of analytical ability is required how come you got to publish it in a book and everything? I don't know - I haven't read the 1992 publication, but I would say, of course it's an oversimplification, it's... a phrase with three actual words and mathematical symbols. But that doesn't disguise the fact that it's an extremely useful formula that directs our attention to where it matters; in the sense that we stop looking at individuated cases of racism and start examining the underlying power structures ('institutionalised racism' is another key phrase he has a problem with - as far as I can tell, his main rebuttal is 'it's more complicated than that, we have to look at gender and class too' - and well, duh. IT IS ALWAYS MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT). And he doesn't discuss it any more other than to direct you to that other thing he wrote; whereas I think that you could easily have a field day with the fact that the equation renders (sometimes fractious) inter-minority race relations invisible; and that's a more interesting problem than the meaningless claim of 'oversimplification'!
Other than that, though, this book is really pretty good. Here, have a couple more quotes:
&:
In sum: I would recommend this book. On the other hand, there is something about these Very Short Introductions that have made me wary about the series in general; perhaps it is the fact that I picked books on subjects I already know something (though not most things, and definitely not everything) about, which let me assess them critically and in some cases also disagree with fundamentally, if I'd picked a book on (say) World Music or The Celts I'd have no choice but to swallow what was being said wholesale, and it disturbs me to think of someone's impression of feminism being based on what was written in the Very Short Introduction on it (which I reviewed, uh, very scathingly here).
Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, by Owen Jones.
OH MAN THIS IS THE FIRST BOOK I HAVE READ ON CLASS HATRED. Jones talks about a lot of things, like the portrayal of the working class in the media (and the class privilege that journalists, as a whole, have), the failure of politicians (especially New Labour) to uphold the interests of the working class, the 'we're all middle class now' myth, and how that contradicts (another working class myth perpetuated by politicians) 'Broken Britain', and the perceived conflict between the white working class and their newcomer immigrant counterparts - and how that ties into the popular depiction of the white working class as lazy/racist. (For - in case the use of the word 'chav' hadn't made it abundantly clear - this book is about the specifically white working class: Jones argues, and I think I would argue, a whole other set of perceptions surround the non-white working classes, and in general I have no problem with that.) It is, despite its flaws, a tremendously interesting and illuminating book.
But (here I am just listing, because I've got no time to type out all the quotes!):
1) The section on trade unions and economic policy just turned me off, because - okay. I know that economics in general involves lots of numbers, and specifics are generally integral to whether or not state intervention in markets are going to work. From my point of view, that's generally why most discussions on economics (especially layperson discussions without numbers) tend to be pointless because you can't tell when policies will be successful until you've done the hard maths. So when Owen Jones digressed into a paragraph about inflation and union pay claims and excessive credit growth, I pretty much just turned off because I felt like that wasn't the point, kind of?
2) His kneejerk defence of The Spirit Level - Jones basically quotes a British politician who calls it 'bullshit', and it's all supposed to make it come off as very unfavourable and everything, except that I haven't read The Spirit Level (which uses 'irrefutable' (really? I wouldn't know!) statistics to 'show that the more unequal a society is, the more social problems it has - once again, it's not a premise I necessarily disagree with, and in fact would be inclined to agree with, except that I WOULDN'T KNOW), and it's just.... basically really biased.
3) "The BNP has made the most of this disastrous redefinition of white working-class people as, effectively, another marginalised ethnic minority. 'Treating the white working class as a new ethnic group only does the BNP a massive favour,' says anthropologist Dr Gillian Evans, 'and so does not talking about a multi-racial working class.'" - I find that this runs contrary to my experience, actually, in the sense that my uni's access efforts are predominantly class-based and directed, but aside from that - I feel it's a controversial enough statement that more could have been done to explain/justify it. How, what, when? etc.
In conclusion: this is a really good and important book, I just wish it had been better and more sensitively-written in parts - come to think of it, the bit about 'liberal understandings of inequality being predominantly understood through the prism of race' made me squirm, too, in the sense that I think there are interesting things to be said about class AND race; class IN CONJUNCTION WITH gender -- Essex girls! why doesn't anyone talk about how class-based the derision of Essex girls and fake tan and bedazzled eyelashes is! -- (etc). I don't think it's a zero-sum game at all.
Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter | Feminism: A Very Short Introduction, by Margaret Waters | A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin | Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean | Sons of the Yellow Emperor, by Lynn Pan | Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, by Katharine Quarmby | Tipping The Velvet, by Sarah Waters | Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro | The Lantern Bearers, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Silver Branch, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli | Brick Lane, by Monica Ali | The Savage Detectives, by Robert Bolano | Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell | Cat On A Hot-Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams | Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson | The Moon By Night, by Madeleine L'Engle | To Live, by Yu Hua | Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer | The Next Competitor, by K.P. Kincaid | Raffles Place Ragtime, by Phillip Jeyaretnam | Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, by Frances Mayes | Mao's Last Dancer, by Li Cunxin | Marie, Dancing, by Carolyn Meyer | Man Walks Into A Room, by Nicole Krauss | How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby
Racism: A Very Short Introduction, by Ali Rattansi.
This is how you write a chronological treatment of a topical subject: you show why it's important to get context. Rattansi talks about how race is a social construct that's grown out of some very specific historical circumstances without undermining the reality of race, and discusses nationalism and scientific racism as well as institutional racism (and the weaknesses of that idea) and "cultural" racisms - the last in the sense that he argues "cultural differences" is often used to justify contemporary bigotry, and that it's both disingenuous and important in the sense that we can't exactly talk about race without also discussing culture if we want to move beyond a colour-blind approach - and it is EXACTLY what I've been trying to say about race and culture.
On the frailty of racial categorisation:
To complicate matters even more, it is worth remembering that historically there has been an ambiguity surrouding Jewish 'whitness' which still persists to some degree. As we will see, the 'whiteness' of Jews, especially in the USA, as of the Italians and the Irish too, has actually been gradually achieved in the 20th century as part of a social and political process of inclusion. As 'Semites', Jews were often regarded as not belonging to white races, while it was not uncommon in the 19th century for the English and Americans to regard the Irish as 'black', and for Italians to have an ambiguous status between white and black in the USA.
-- this is borne out by a couple of old cartoons that portray the Irish as apelike (with very differently shaped heads from their Anglo counterparts), in much the same way as the facial and bodily proportions of black people had been.
Also, the book isn't quite as explicit as I would have liked it to be in terms of addressing how our history is racist, our intellectuals are racist, our everything is racist - hey, how come when I was taking my A Levels in Philosophy no one ever pointed out that Hume and Kant were racist? (... I just realised that that rant probably made no sense. But basically, he discusses Hume and Kant's inclinations to "evaluating the moral and intellectual worth of different peoples classified especially by skin colour" under a section called 'Blackness, sexuality, and aesthetics'. Which is... a personal choice I don't quite agree with. If I had been writing this book, I would have made the personal choice of including it under a section called, 'Western philosophy, Western intellectualism, and the fundamental racism thereof'. But, you know!)
There were only two bits in this book I didn't like beyond that:
But if races do not really exist and have never existed, and few people now admit to being racist, what makes it possible for responsible researchers in the social sciences, journalists, politicians, and large numbers of ordinary citizens to claim that racism is still widespread in the contemporary world, especially in Europe and North America?
Ummm I find that really disingenuous. Firstly, the biological non-existence of race doesn't mean that concepts of race and racism have no currency in cultural discourse. THAT IS JUST WHAT MAKES RACISM SO RIDICULOUS. Also, "few people now admit to being racist" doesn't mean racism isn't a problem. On the contrary it makes correcting racist behaviours even more difficult??? I think these are both really obvious points to make, I'm sorry, and they're not points the author would disagree with, but I think that that's what makes the paragraph all the more irritating because it sounds a bit like he's setting up a straw man argument.
The second bit I didn't like:
In the period between the 1960s and 1980s, amongst a substantial proportion of white anti-racists in the USA and UK, it was common to define racism with the formula: 'Prejudice + Power = Racism'. But as I have shown in 'Race', Culture and Difference (1992), only a modicum of analytical ability is required to have a field day with the oversimplifications involved.
Well, Rattansi, if only a 'modicum' of analytical ability is required how come you got to publish it in a book and everything? I don't know - I haven't read the 1992 publication, but I would say, of course it's an oversimplification, it's... a phrase with three actual words and mathematical symbols. But that doesn't disguise the fact that it's an extremely useful formula that directs our attention to where it matters; in the sense that we stop looking at individuated cases of racism and start examining the underlying power structures ('institutionalised racism' is another key phrase he has a problem with - as far as I can tell, his main rebuttal is 'it's more complicated than that, we have to look at gender and class too' - and well, duh. IT IS ALWAYS MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT). And he doesn't discuss it any more other than to direct you to that other thing he wrote; whereas I think that you could easily have a field day with the fact that the equation renders (sometimes fractious) inter-minority race relations invisible; and that's a more interesting problem than the meaningless claim of 'oversimplification'!
Other than that, though, this book is really pretty good. Here, have a couple more quotes:
In practice, though, cultural demarcations are often drawn and used in a form that naturalises them by implying that they are more or less immutable. Thus the supposed avariciousness of Jews, the alleged aggressiveness of Africans and African Americans, the criminality of Afro-Caribbeans or the slyness of 'Orientals', become traits that are invariably attached to these groups over extremely long periods of time. The descriptions may then be drawn upon aa part of a common-sense vocabulary of stereotypes that blur any strict distinction between culture and biology.
&:
A major problem with both the 'common sense' and more academic versions of biologically deterministic and evolutionary views of social behaviour is that on their own they are unable to account for where group boundaries are drawn, and why. There is nothing 'natural' about nations and nation-states, for example. They only emerged in modern times. To claim a basic biological continuity between defence of national territory, generalised xenophobia or hostility to 'foreigners' and a 'natural' preference for 'one's own kind' is misleading. 'One's own kind' may turn out to be a group based on gender, colour, religion, occupation, street, neighbourhood, village, city, country, or large agglomerate of nations such as contained within 'Europe' or the European Union.
In sum: I would recommend this book. On the other hand, there is something about these Very Short Introductions that have made me wary about the series in general; perhaps it is the fact that I picked books on subjects I already know something (though not most things, and definitely not everything) about, which let me assess them critically and in some cases also disagree with fundamentally, if I'd picked a book on (say) World Music or The Celts I'd have no choice but to swallow what was being said wholesale, and it disturbs me to think of someone's impression of feminism being based on what was written in the Very Short Introduction on it (which I reviewed, uh, very scathingly here).
Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, by Owen Jones.
OH MAN THIS IS THE FIRST BOOK I HAVE READ ON CLASS HATRED. Jones talks about a lot of things, like the portrayal of the working class in the media (and the class privilege that journalists, as a whole, have), the failure of politicians (especially New Labour) to uphold the interests of the working class, the 'we're all middle class now' myth, and how that contradicts (another working class myth perpetuated by politicians) 'Broken Britain', and the perceived conflict between the white working class and their newcomer immigrant counterparts - and how that ties into the popular depiction of the white working class as lazy/racist. (For - in case the use of the word 'chav' hadn't made it abundantly clear - this book is about the specifically white working class: Jones argues, and I think I would argue, a whole other set of perceptions surround the non-white working classes, and in general I have no problem with that.) It is, despite its flaws, a tremendously interesting and illuminating book.
But (here I am just listing, because I've got no time to type out all the quotes!):
1) The section on trade unions and economic policy just turned me off, because - okay. I know that economics in general involves lots of numbers, and specifics are generally integral to whether or not state intervention in markets are going to work. From my point of view, that's generally why most discussions on economics (especially layperson discussions without numbers) tend to be pointless because you can't tell when policies will be successful until you've done the hard maths. So when Owen Jones digressed into a paragraph about inflation and union pay claims and excessive credit growth, I pretty much just turned off because I felt like that wasn't the point, kind of?
2) His kneejerk defence of The Spirit Level - Jones basically quotes a British politician who calls it 'bullshit', and it's all supposed to make it come off as very unfavourable and everything, except that I haven't read The Spirit Level (which uses 'irrefutable' (really? I wouldn't know!) statistics to 'show that the more unequal a society is, the more social problems it has - once again, it's not a premise I necessarily disagree with, and in fact would be inclined to agree with, except that I WOULDN'T KNOW), and it's just.... basically really biased.
3) "The BNP has made the most of this disastrous redefinition of white working-class people as, effectively, another marginalised ethnic minority. 'Treating the white working class as a new ethnic group only does the BNP a massive favour,' says anthropologist Dr Gillian Evans, 'and so does not talking about a multi-racial working class.'" - I find that this runs contrary to my experience, actually, in the sense that my uni's access efforts are predominantly class-based and directed, but aside from that - I feel it's a controversial enough statement that more could have been done to explain/justify it. How, what, when? etc.
In conclusion: this is a really good and important book, I just wish it had been better and more sensitively-written in parts - come to think of it, the bit about 'liberal understandings of inequality being predominantly understood through the prism of race' made me squirm, too, in the sense that I think there are interesting things to be said about class AND race; class IN CONJUNCTION WITH gender -- Essex girls! why doesn't anyone talk about how class-based the derision of Essex girls and fake tan and bedazzled eyelashes is! -- (etc). I don't think it's a zero-sum game at all.
Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter | Feminism: A Very Short Introduction, by Margaret Waters | A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin | Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean | Sons of the Yellow Emperor, by Lynn Pan | Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, by Katharine Quarmby | Tipping The Velvet, by Sarah Waters | Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro | The Lantern Bearers, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Silver Branch, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli | Brick Lane, by Monica Ali | The Savage Detectives, by Robert Bolano | Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell | Cat On A Hot-Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams | Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson | The Moon By Night, by Madeleine L'Engle | To Live, by Yu Hua | Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer | The Next Competitor, by K.P. Kincaid | Raffles Place Ragtime, by Phillip Jeyaretnam | Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, by Frances Mayes | Mao's Last Dancer, by Li Cunxin | Marie, Dancing, by Carolyn Meyer | Man Walks Into A Room, by Nicole Krauss | How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby
no subject
no subject
-gone case, by dave chua
-a madman's diary, by lu xun
-saraswati park, by anjali joseph
-rebecca, by daphne du maurier
-the souls of mixed folk: race, politics and aesthetics in the new millenium, by michele elam
-half and half: writers on growing up biracial and bicultural, edited by claudine chiawei o'hearn
-another day at the front: dispatches from the race war, by ishmael reed
-mr. mani, by a.b. yehoshua
-pomes all sizes, by jack kerouac
YAY SUMMER. \o/