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From the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature

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

Date:
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Time:
7:00 PM - 9:30 PM
Event Type:
Meeting
Organizer/Author:
Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library
Email:
Phone:
510-595-7417
Address:
6501 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, CA 94609-1113
Location Details:
Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library
6501 Telegraph Ave. Oakland, CA 94609
(One block north of Alcatraz Ave.)

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
Added to the calendar on Sun, Jun 27, 2010 9:56AM

Comments (Hide Comments)
by ^
This "all whites are evil" theme and making racism the basis of the fascist, contrived "tea party" gangs, and alternatives to the capitalist Constitution are not Marxist; this is the same old bourgeois thinking that is nationalism. This is a class society and has been so since its inception, where maximization of profit, by definition unpaid labor, is the primary goal and law of this society. We now have lots of utterly reactionary mouthpieces of the capitalist class who happen to be of African descent: Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Condolezza Rice, Willie Brown, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and many more. They are just as reactionary as the white mouthpieces of the capitalist class. The fundamental aspect of American culture is the private profit system, which depends upon racism to keep the workingclass divided in order to pay labor as little as possible so as to maximize profits. The democracy routine is the sales pitch, the facade, which is removed when the ruling class resorts to fascism to keep the workingclass from eliminating the capitalist profit motive and establishing socialism. Socialists promote unity of the workingclass, not hatred of whites or hatred of blacks or any other color or nationality.
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