A History of Race and Power

[deutsey]

Haas Institute director john a. powell began his speech Wednesday night with an unexpected analogy.

“Race is a little bit like gravity,” he told more than 100 audience members at Berkeley’s St. John’s Presbyterian Church, who were gathered that evening to hear powell talk as part of a lecture series hosted by Bay Area radio station KPFA. “We’re all affected by it, but we don’t really understand it,” he said. “Race is incredibly complicated and even the experts struggle with it.”

SNIP

Race, powell said, is both culturally malleable and socially constructed by and for the benefit of elites. He began his historical journey through American race relations before the Civil Rights Movement, before Jim Crow, and even before America’s founding. Instead, powell rooted his racial history with the early American colonies, specifically with Bacon’s Rebellion, a revolt led by white indentured servants who desired a greater portion of the colonial pie.

Threatened by the growing alliance between these European indentured servants and enslaved Africans, who likely recognized the similarities of their economic and social interests, colonial elites developed a new class, a white “middle stratum” who were given privileges and power over the black slaves. This white middle-class could only look from afar at the elites — an early “divide and conquer” strategy that remains deeply ingrained in America’s racial psyche today. Although race has evolved since then, notably with the addition of new racial groups and mixed race individuals, manifestations of these “slave patrollers” remain today, as is evident in Ferguson, MO, where a virtually all-white police force patrols a majority-black community.

A recording of the entire talk is here:

https://soundcloud.com/haasinstitute/john-powell-kpfa-evening-dialogue-ferguson

[Igel]

1. Race is just another group boundary.

And as such it's socially constructed. It's a bit malleable. It's also deniable: It's possible to make the perception of race go away. (Unlike sex, which, it seems, cannot be made to go away or is at least a lot harder to mitigate.)

But it's no different from other group boundaries. It's just that in the US we have a limited perspective and unreasonable insistence on some boundaries being hugely important now because the culture says that they're hugely important. Conditions often change faster than contexts; contexts can be variable but culture tends to not accommodate variation in context.

Those group boundaries can be used by elites. And in the US, often were. But not always. It's just that as race and class struggles interact in the US, it's convenient to perceive them as lining up rather well. They don't. The edges are ragged. They're different things, with elites that aren't always racist and non-elites who are, cutting right across race boundaries. That interferes with the narrative we need, though, so this gets ignored and the data collapsed and vetted to show that race is (only really) used by elites to manipulate everybody else.

It's also based on reasonable inferences drawn from allele distributions for easily observed traits. But we can't really say that, can we?

I've never met an advocate who was a good researcher in the same field. (Unless it was an advocate for the integrity of research protocols. Not sure about them.)

[Octafish]

2. ''Race...is both culturally malleable and socially constructed by and for the benefit of elites.''

Mr. powell is profound.

Thank you, deutsey!

[Uncle Joe]

3. Kicked and recommended for keen observation.

Thanks for the thread, deutsey.