Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias
2012; Routledge; Volume: 36; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/01419870.2012.715177
ISSN1466-4356
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The Thomas theorem states: ‘If men (sic) define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Thomas and Thomas Citation1928, pp. 571–2). 2. The claim that whiteness is no more than an effort to distinguish oneself or one's group from blackness or indeed ‘otherness’ of any sort seems quite simplistic to us. On a practical basis, whites often ally with racially defined minorities without renouncing their whiteness. Feagin and Elias agree that race is a socially constructed concept; in other words it has relational and interdependent qualities. Racial identities are not either/or matters, not closed concepts that must be upheld in a reactionary fashion or disavowed in a comprehensive act of renunciation. All racial identities are deeply ‘hybridized’; they are not ‘sutured’; they remain open to re-articulation. As Robert Farris Thompson (Citation1995, p. 429) said: ‘To be white in America is to be very black. If you don't know how black you are, you don't know how American you are.’ 3. We note that Feagin has co-authored or co-edited two recent books on these subjects: Chou and Feagin (Citation2008); Cobas, Duany and Feagin (Citation2009). Note: Omi and Winant blurbed both of these books. 4. The phrase is Dave Roediger's (Citation2006); he uses it mainly in respect to earlier waves of immigration. 5. Our reference here is to The Matrix film series, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, and in a lesser role, Cornel West.
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