For those of you who have taken off on "race" and
racism, might I suggest a couple of recent publications
that I've found interesting and useful. Might I also
suggest not discussing the issue much more on the wsn?
(Though, being pretty much a wsn voyeur rather than
participant, I guess I'm skating on thin ice here.)
Malcolm Gladwell, "The sports taboo: could it be that
Blacks excel at sports because they are black." _The
New Yorker Magazine_. May 19, 1997.
I have no idea what Gladwell's scholarly
credentials are. He indicates in the text that he is
African or West Indian Canadian and a former junior champion
middle distance runner, though. His discussion
concerns the role of culture, stratification,
"personality" (in a social psychological sense),
environment, and genetics. He asserts that to the
extent genetic differences are involved in "racial"
differences, it is probably not due to the
preponderence of "traits" within different "racial"
groups, but differences in the degree of genetic
variation across groups--that is, it's likely to be a
variance issue rather than a central tendency issue...
Interesting, but far from what wsn should be about, as
is much of the current discussion.
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, "Rethinking racism: toward a
structural interpretation." _The American Sociological
Review_, vol. 62 (June): 465-480.
"Because all kinds of racial matters have been
explained as a product of racism, I propose the more
general concept of _racialized social systems_ as the
starting point for an alternative framework. This term
refers to societies in which economic, political,
social and idoelogical levels are partially structured
by the placement of actors in racial categories or
races....(which are)...always socially rather than
biologically basesd. These systems are structured
partially by race because modern social systems
articulate two or more forms of hierarchical patterns"
(p. 469). "In my view, we can speak of racialized
orders only when a racial discourse is accompanied by
social relations of subordination and superordination
between the races. The available evidence suggests
that racialized social orders emerged after the
imperialist expansion of Europe to the New World and
Africa" (p. 473).
This is an interesting and useful article on racism.
It has an extensive list of references, though I was
disappointed to see too little attention to some of the
explicitly world-system "takes" on this. For example
the last sentence quoted above missed the chance to
link with Tom Hall's book on the Southwest.
Again, my vote is to discontinue the racial differences
exchange unless people really do think it illuminates
world-system processes, and if they do then be explicit
about how.