Book Party! "The Machinery of Whiteness" by Steve Martinot

Wednesday July 7th, 2010
7:00 PM
Book Party! "The Machinery of Whiteness" by Steve Martinot

"The Machinery of Whiteness" by Steve Martinot: a reading and discussion of this just-published book. The basic premise of this book is that the most fundamental aspect and groundwork of the culture of the US is not democracy but white supremacy and the hierarchy that whiteness has constructed for itself. It is from this groundwork that a white populism such as the Tea Party or the anti-affirmative action movement arises, whenever the hegemony of whiteness is threatened by democracy or a sense of equality and justice. This book examines the structures of racialization that form this foundation. It underlies the US political system, its social processes, its class relations, its cultural norms. These structures of racialization, the white supremacy and white racialized identity that it generates, have survived many confrontations by reactive anti-racist movements that have attempted to end the hegemony, the oppressions and dehumanizations of racism. The book examines how whiteness and white supremacy have defeated those movements, and describes the contours and inner dynamics of the structures of racialization, in order to enable pro-active struggle against them. The book operates at four levels. 1- it goes beyond the idea of race being a social construct to begin to describe the structures that had been constructed. 2- it sets up a pro-democratic ethical framework from which to both analyze and judge the cultural norms of racialization, as the necessary antithesis to the weight of whiteness and the cultural solidarity and allegiance responsible for its coherence. 3- it describes the specific material social structures by which society is continually reracialized in the present, such as the "two party system" and the "police-prison complex" and links them to their historical antecedents, to the moments of 17th century invention and subsequent development of the concept of race itself. 4- it argues that whiteness and white supremacy in the US constitute a form of state that is neither adjunct to the Constitutional state nor parallel to it, while being inseparable from it.
Location: NPML 6501 Telegraph Ave. Oakland, CA 94609