1. Initial Reaction: I agree with Mr. Jones’ observation that whiteness was created only recently in the history of the United States. I agree in part with his hope of “the possibilities … for a new Americanness based on shared values (to emerge).” I believe that it is in their best interest for working class Americans to collectively work against being exploited by capitalist systems. I do not believe that blackness is “an artificial racial category.” I do not believe “that the whiteness as a racial construct was designed by the rich in order to ensure that working-class people remain in constant competition with each other.” I believe it was more to keep blacks in their place vis a vis all whites. The nobility of the colonial aristocracy, they believed, was enough to keep the low status whites in their place. I liked several aspects of Mr. Jones’ article, but the Marxist tendencies made my back hairs stand on end. As I said earlier, I support the labor movement as a necessity to ameliorate the inherent abuses of the profit motive, but I am fundamentally opposed to the basic ideas of socialism.
2. Previous thoughts: I remember reading Time Inc.’s Life Nature Library – Evolution, as a child. It has a section on races, and identifies five main racial groups in humans: Mongoloid, Negroid, Caucasoid, Australoid, and Capoloid. It states, “People today like to emphasize the oneness of man as though no racial division really existed. In actual fact, man is united in one species, but is racially divided into more than 30 subgroupings which are distinct from each other in genetic type and in details of physical appearance. … Naturally individuals differ within groups, but what sets a group apart is that the majority inherent genetic characteristics peculiar to the group.” (174) World Book Encyclopedia identifies three races: Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid and states, “A race is made up of persons who have a fairly definite combination of distinguishing physical traits which is handed on from parents to children.” My own personal observation of the world confirms these ideas. There are different groups of people with different outward physical appearances based on who their parents were. I would be surprised if our second child we are expecting this November is black, or has red hair, or grows to be 7 feet tall. There is at least one African tribe that I am aware of where the majority of its people grow to be 6 – 7 feet tall. A child from this tribe might, through poor nutrition, not reach its genetic potential to be very tall, but a member of a pygmy tribe, even with excellent nutrition and vitamin supplements, might never grow over 4 feet. The genetic potential simply isn’t there. It is impossible to deny racial genetic effects on the appearance of human beings and remain logically believable. Yet many people deny that there are racial genetic differences in intelligence. This area, which is not as easy to define as skin color, facial features or height, is of course extremely controversial. I think that it is ignorant to declare that all human beings have exactly the same intellectual potential, or that intelligence is soley a factor of environment. Most teachers would admit that during their career they have encountered some students who were more intelligent than others, even though they had similar environments. This does not address the question of whether racial groups, as a whole, have any genetic traits for a certain level of intelligence, or whether all racial groups have equal distributions of possible intelligence. For me, the jury is still out. Philosophically I want to believe that all races have the same potential to be as intelligent as any other, but is that the actual reality? I may really want to believe that I am not infected with the HIV virus, but if I deny indications that I am simply because I do not want to believe them, I am risking death. I may also want to believe that my daughter is not using inhalents, but ignoring empty glue bags in her room won’t help her at all. Similarly, denying information that might show that there are inherent racial differences in intelligence out of a wish that every race be equal in that manner can be harmful to actual knowledge, which to me is more important than proving something that I want to believe, but which might not actually be true. We readily acknowledge racial differences in intelligence in animals that we have selectively bred for thousands of years, like dogs and horses. Why are we so reluctant to entertain this possibility in humans? Some breeds of dogs are more intelligent than others. Rotweilers and German shepherds are demonstrably more intelligent than lap dogs because they were selectively bred to be that way. Work horses and show horses have different physical and mental capabilities. Some people are openly declaring that human races do have different levels of intelligence, for example in The Bell Curve. Kevin MacDonald, in A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, argues that the Jewish people has selectively bred for intelligence for millenia. Some African Americans recognize the effect that the selective breeding of some slave owners has had on their race, in Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, Stacey Logan asks Mr. Morrison how come he’s so big and strong. Mr. Morrison tells about slave owners breeding for size and strength. This line of thought could also be used to explain a lower intelligence in African Americans, as slave owners might selectively breed against intelligence. In John Jake’s North and South, a slave owner talks about having to sell “uppity niggers” south or even how it is sometimes better to let them escape so that they won’t stir up trouble among those who remain. A web page of a group that espouses such ideas, http://home.att.net/~nuenke/, cites identical twins adoption studies as showing that nature is much more important than nurture in determining intelligence, and that African Americans do have a low intelligence. They discount the theory that different races do poorly on IQ tests because of the cultural biases of the tests. I disagree with them on that point. However, I believe that the idea that all races are genetically equal in intelligence potential is a relatively new idea. The Declaration of Independence’s “all men are created equal” was extremely radical for its time. This brings us back to race and its use. Most Englishmen of 1776, would probably have agreed that “the English race is in all qualities superior to the degenerate French.” Of course they were using “race” as a cultural and national identity. The colonists thought of themselves as English, or French, or Dutch, rather than American, and in some areas of the U.S., some people still do, but at some point we just got too mixed up to keep track of it anymore, or to care, so we became “white”, based on being Caucasian. Mr. Jones’ is right when he says that we gave up our cultural identity to become white, and echoes Victor in the video “The Color of Fear” who says, “When you say you’re American you don’t know who you are. You gave up your heritage to become white.” I do believe that this “whiteness” was created to keep blacks from revolting, but I do not think that the powers that be decided in 1676 to create whiteness in order to more effectively oppress working class whites.
3. I mentioned a lot of previous reading in question 2. In last semester’s Education’s Place in Society with Dr. Leonardo, who is an avowed Marxist and openly admits to trying to convert students, virtually every class, regardless of its original topic, came around to a continuing debate of Marxism versus capitalism. He does acknowledge the other intersecting variables, race, gender, ethnicity, but for him the main one that supersedes all others is class. We beat that dead horse into dogfood a thousand times over in that class. It was frustrating, aggravating, and infuriating, but it was also illuminating on the issues of Marxism in America.
4. I lived and worked in a post-communist country, Hungary, for two years, 1992 – 1994. Before that I had worked in East Germany for a month just after its revolution, 1989. So I have had lots of personal experiences and personal conversations with people who have actually lived and breathed Marxism, as opposed to having just read and pondered Marxism. And I’ll tell you, “Marxism is @#$%^&&*!!!” Yes, it might be a nice little idea, but it just doesn’t work in reality. It is opposite to human nature. I don’t believe that pure, unrestrained capitalism is any better. I do believe that free market competition, with humanistic restraints, is capable of doing great good. I don’t believe that the U.S. society is in a very good position right now. I know that race issues are very much intertwined with class issues in the U.S. I believe that our tribal instincts make it very easy for us to be racially descriminative. I am not so sure that “racial awareness [will] give way to class awareness,” or how “possible [it is] that working people will unite regardless of color and that the great middle class will reach down to give its support to those who make our high standard of living possible.”
5. This issue is very important to my concept of teaching. Many aspects of critical pedagogy as espoused by Henry Giroux and Paulo Freire are attractive to me and I plan to use them in my classroom. The world, and U.S. society, is not perfect, and I believe that students can make a difference. However, I do not advocate a total restructuring of our capitalist economy, just modification to it. I know that some think capitalism is inherently oppressive and racist, and in many ways I totally agree with them, but the alternatives that have been offered, given my experience with communist systems, do not inspire me. It’s a messy place to be, in the middle of the road, but that's where I am.
6. It is another weight on the balance deciding the racial/intelligence question addressed in question 2. It does not decisively make the decision one way or the other. Definitely whiteness has been created. Given other alternate histories, we might be having this argument with the Irish in place of the African Americans. How would the race and culture variables be addressed differently in that argument from the one now on the table? When it all comes down to it, even if the question is definitively answered by some data in the future, my treatment of individual students will not change. I will treat each student based on who he or she is and his or her potential as he or she is in my class. Even if one racial group has an average IQ of 75 versus 103 for another, any one student in my class could be above or below that average, or could have more or less cultural capital and nurture, so to make decisions based on anything but what that particular student can demonstrate to me would be against the best interests of that student, which are for me of the utmost importance.