race racism sexism assimilation annihilation or?

~*~

In a
'marxian' analysis
of both race & racism,
B. has argued that 'racism'
has two dissymmetrical
aspects.

On
the one hand,
it constitutes a dominating community
with practices,
discursive & otherwise,
that are
"articulated around stigmata of otherness
[name, skin colour, religeous
practices]."

It
also constitutes, however,
"the way in which,
as a mirror image,
individuals & collectives
that are prey
to racism
[its 'objects]
find themselves constrained
to see themselves
as acommunity."

B.
further argues
that destruction of racism
implies
the "internal decomposition of the community
created by racism,"
by which he means
the dominating community,
as is clear
from his analogy
to the overcoming of sexism
which will involve
"the break-up of the community
of 'males'."

This is, however,
for me the crucial point,
for the question is
obviously:

If overcoming sexism
involves the breaking up
of the community of males,
does it necessarily imply
the breaking up
of the community
of females?

And
does this, then,
not entail a breaking up of community,
tout court?

Putting it
another way,
are we not simply reinscribing the One
once more
in such a formulation,
once more imposing a
coercive
universal?

On
the other hand,
if indeed
the very existence
of the dominant group
is dependent on domination,
if identity is
always formed
in a master-slave relationship,
is perhaps
the price
not too
high?

What I wish
to struggle for theoretically
is a notion of identity
in which there are
only slaves but no masters,
that is,
an alternative
to the model of selfdetermination,
which is,
after all,
in itself a western,
imperialistic imposition
on the rest of
the world.

I propose Diaspora
- to be sure,
an idealized Diaspora
generalized from those situations
in Jewish history
when Jews were both relatively free
from persecution
and yet
constituted
by strong identity,
those situations,
moreover,
within which promethean Jewish creativity
was not antithetical to,
indeed synergistic with,
a general cultural activity -
as a theoretical
and historical model
to replace
national
self-determination!

Another way
of making the same point
would be to insist
that there are material and social conditions
in which cultural identity and difference
will not produce even
what B. has called
"differential racism,"
that is,
a "racism whose dominant theme
is not biological heredity
but the insurmountability of cultural differences,
a racism which,
at first sight,
does not postulate
the superiority of certain groups or peoples
in relation to others
but 'only' the harmfulness
of abolishing frontiers,
the incompatibility of life-styles
and traditions."

I do not think,
moreover, that such possibilities
are merely utopian.

I would certainly claim
that there have been historical situations
in which they obtained, to be sure,
without perfect success
in this radically imperfect
world.

The solution
of political Zionism,
Jewish state hegemony,
except insofar as it represented
an emergency
and temporary rescue operation,
seems to me the subversion of Jewish culture
and not its culmination,
in that it represents
the substitution of a European,
western cultural-political formation
for a traditional
Jewish one
that has been based on
a sharing - at best -
of political power
with others
and which takes on
entirely other meanings
when combined
with political
hegemony.

~