Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

and no, the point isn’t to ransack his text for incriminating evidence. the point is to explicate the entire damn argument, instead of extracting out of it the one thing you agree with and discarding the rest as if there is no fucking connection between the two!

i don’t think you rescue ideas from a book by leaving everything else intact. you rescue the idea by criticizing what is problematic. because, you might think you are lfiting the baby out of its dirty disposable diaper, but you’re not. the shitty diaper is still hanging off baby and rubbing all over you!

the point would be to take issue and argue with what you don’t agree with in michaels’s text. if he takes what he says seriously — that he likes listening to objections to his work — then I assume that he happens to think criticisms make his work stronger.

and i seriously doubt someone who writes books entired “against this” and “against that” and “the trouble with…”, and that someone who write polemic which by definition is hostile to its opponents, that you are some shrinking little violet that can’t stand the criticism. i’m sure he does just fine.

i doubt anything i say will ever reach his earballs, and i also doubt he’s going to change his mind no matter who has criticized him. he’s spent a lifetime making these arguments. nothing some broad on the internet has to say is going to sway him. and i’m pretty sure nothing that anyone of stature says to him will sway him.

but in the meantime, it sure has been fish-barrel-smoking gun with WBM!

I think the point of contention — why people hear him say that society is post-racist or that somehow racism isn’t a problem — is that Michaels keeps insisting that the egregious aspects of racism ended with Jim Crow. He makes this really clear below when he references Jim Crow Labor, early 20th century at least three times. When Jim Crow ended is the basis cut off point for him. And, of course, he says that in the book as well.

If you do not understand that he thinks that biological racism is what matters _most_, then this will feel like a big dismissal of the kinds of racism that seem to go on today, yes? If you believe as he does, though, then you think it is less than useless to dignify claims about cultural racism by examining the process and practices of racism understood as a social construction. He has attacked social constructionist accounts of race, right?

For Michaels, sure, racism exists. Sure, maybe there’s institutionalized racism. But the point is that talking in those terms, you have already lost the battle with neoliberalism. So, the best thing to do is stop talking in those terms. Stop worrying about the social and cultural construction of race and, as Reed says, whether Bill Cosby and Oprah are racists, and get on with the job of eradicating economic inequality. We’ll be a lot better off.

That is what it is all about in his Manichean world. If Reed sees a Manichean world among antiracists, Michaels solution is to flip it over and reproduce it the other way.

oh, and btw, i got bored with it so i stopped about 3-4 min before the end.

http://shout.lbo-talk.org:8000/content/lbo/RadioArchive/2009/09_10_03.pls

“there is no such thing as race. race is a mistake. what there is instead … there certainly is racism and racism, as it turns out, doesn’t require racists. and there are lots of people who believe in races, they believe in the inherent logic of the social constructionist position or they still believe, more plausibly, but equally incorrectly in some (garbled) part of your body that there is something that tells you what race you belong to. but in fact no one i think really argues at this point that there is any such, anything that does the work we want that the word or the concept of race to do for us. that makes it all the more striking, i believe, that we are really committed to dividing our society up and understanding things along racial lines particularly at a time when a plausible alternative would be to understand our society along social lines that is to say along class lines.

michaels — there are 2 things about it. one is that the whole topic of diversity begins to become central in the late 1970s which roughly coincides with neo-liberalism.

people are very very attached to our success with antiracism and equally attached to the idea we have much more to do.
but (antiracism and antisexism) they don’t today consist in a contribution to left politics.

…

in general, the args that i’ve made… are met with a great deal of distrust and anger. i think part of that is is that the commitment to racial injustice is very very intense in American life.

michaels discusses the liberal group that complained that blacks were overrepresented as clients of welfare programs.

the minute you pose the issue that way, you are immediately within the framework of neoliberalism.

the problem of skin color is completely secondary to that issue (the issue being poverty)

Doug: what about thinking about race as an amplifier? (paraphrase)

well i think i’m not quite sure what you mean by it (amplifier) i do think that at certain moments because of the obvious brutal injustices of racism that antiracism has been a powerful force for correcting inequalities of all kinds. but i think it tremendously obscures problems. (paraphrase: he’s talking about obscuring the overrepresentation of blacks at bottom and whites at top; but we’d not be better off if it was all proportional)

part of the problem we have is that we have come ourselves to think of this very fundamental issue of economic inequality as if it were, itself, a racial issue as if we could really end racism and really end sexism then in fact we would have solved that problem. but in fact we wouldn’t have made the slightest progress toward solving and indeed we are not making any effort to solve it insofar as we’re committed to a simply racist or a simply anti-sexist agenda.

shag: could it be that the notion that most people who are poor are black is a reflection of racism and not because of any commitment to diversity and antiracism?

on david roediger and richard seymour’s argument:

well it, david roediger’s work would take a long time and while there may be some things about it that i don’t understand but i’d also say that there are things I do understand and disagree with. but i would say that there is actually not a lot of controversy over the important role that racism has played in American capitalism. we all agree that throughout the 19th century certainly and through much of the 20th century that racism was crucial. whether it was, indeed, one of the roles it played was just as dividing the working class, but that was by no means the only role it played in producing a certain kind of labor force. that is, beginning with slaves and then culminating with jim crow labor was absolutely fundamental for the kinds of capitalist organizations and structures that were developed in the u.s. at first in the colonial period and then throughout the nineteenth century.

but it doesn’t follow from that that that there is a logical relation between capitalism and racism and one of the real problems with a lot of the work that’s done today is that it really very much takes the 18th and 19th century century as if historical precedent somehow is kind of ongoing as if the things that were happening in the 19th and early 20th century are still happening now. and indeed as if capitalism were still working the same way.

at this point it’s ludicrous to think that actually the primary point of racism is to divide the working class. indeed, the very concept of the white and black working class is kind of problematic right now. right now, in fact, antiracism is more useful than racism is. it’s no accident that every single major corp in this country has a vast human resources department the great portion of which is devoted to protecting and defending and promoting diversity.

(michaels says, to paraphrase, that it’s not just a u.s. thing. he’s been working on the issue in france and uk in the last three years)

he thinks there is a sociological law.

that has society becomes, in today’s world, as western neoliberal societies become more unequal, they also become more committed to diversity. so that the rise of the discourse of diversity in the last five years is extraordinary and its in every case accompanied by larger and larger at least in the uk vast discrepancies in wealth, vast inequalities. i just think that’s completely backwards in fact what it does is it reifies a certain notion of what cap is and reifies a certain notion of what racism must do.

individual atoms question doug asked.

shag: the reason why it greases the wheels of capitalism is this:

“what you want is people who can do the best job for the least money.”

antiracism makes people accept the least amount of money for their hard work.

shag: I think that’s interesting. How would Doug and Michaels show that having a proportional representation of oppressed groups in the workforce is something that makes people be less demanding about their paychecks. that is, how to it contribute to people working for the least amount of money, unquestioningly?

doug and michaels talk about the extraordinary self-righteousness on the left:

Michaels: what race does for people on the left is turn politics into a kind of ethics for them. so they have a tremendous commitment to thinking of themselves as ethically superior to their opponents because their opponents are not simply people who support a different political construction, a very different political system, they are not people who are committed to the free market, they are people who are also racist. so we spend an incredible amount of time on the left trying to make sure our enemies aren’t just people who have strong ideological differences with us but are also bad people. i not only just think that is a complete waste of time and intellectual energy but it is also deeply misleading. it helps us misrecognize them.

(paraphrase: geo bush wasn’t a racist, we spent too much time trying to prove he was, and it was time completely wasted.)