Wednesday, September 26, 2007

clarification of Dei's point:

When I said that "...Dei's form of racism, involved his naming of the category "Whiteness" and then applying it to every White person as being something that every White person participates in "deliberately," whether they want to or not..."
I meant more that he names a category "Whiteness," then assigns certain values, practices, and modes of being that go along BY NATURE of WHITENESS, then assigns those values, practices, and modes of being (in his view, being racist) to every single person to whom one could assign the category "White." It sounds like racism to me when anyone starts discussing patterns of behaviour based on the natural dispostion (resulting from a specific position) of race, regardless of what race is being analyzed.
Maybe I am naive in thinking that another route is available to us in countering racism. But to me, to fight racism with more ideas about what a specific race confers on people "of that race" is to perpetuate distinctions and value systems based on race. I don't know how we can, as a "human" race, make racism history, but I really hope that we do.

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