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Books by Clarence J. Munford
Production relations, class and Black liberation: A
Marxist perspective in Afro-American studies
(1978)
The Black Ordeal of Slavery and Slave Trading in the
French West Indies 1625-1715
(1991)
Race
and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21st
Century (1996)
Race
and Civilization: The Rebirth of Black Centrality
(2003)
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The
Benefits of Whiteness
in America's Hierarchical Society
By Clarence J. Munford Race as a concept has two aspects. There is
a gene-based physical aspect to its status as a historical
artifact. In fact, the latter stands on the former. The physical
aspect has to do with somatotype, that is, body type or corporal
traits. The chief indicator of race in Western social formations
is physical appearance resulting from the interaction between
inherited genes and the physical and social environment. The
term for these observable traits is phenotype, with attention
usually concentrating
on the morphology of skin, hair, and facial features.
From New England to the southern plantation
colonies, a crucible formed in which emigrant Europeans of
different nationalities were naturalized as American whites.
Brewed in this historical vat was the USA's white nation. A
dynamic process of whitening crystallized. A fiery mold arose on
America's soil, in which a white racial identity took shape as
distinct from the previous European national identities---fiery
in the sense that it entailed the flames of slavery and
humiliation for Africans, and immolation of the entire race of
Native Americans.
In America, pre-bellum Southern “poor
white trash” and other pre-proletarian white toilers, the
white middle class and white workers all moved on a convergent
course with slaveholder and post-bellum capitalist interests
from the genocide of Native Americans to the enslavement,
segregation, super-exploitation and national oppression of
African Americans. Of course, the white ruling elite benefited
much more than ordinary white folks, but the disparity in the
benefits from racial discrimination is not the issue here.
Whether a Western Hemisphere society is
bi-racial or multi-racial, the norm is the privileged status,
and in the United States the norm is white. Everyone white is
privileged to some extent, and the white working poor are white.
The benefits are real for both sides, for white workers as well
as for the white business class.
The 12 to 15 percent of white Americans who
are anti-racist are not the issue, nor do they bear the blame
for racism, nor, unfortunately, have white anti-racists had the
clout at any time in the twentieth century to nullify white
supremacy. International race-class has subsumed traditional
class divisions.
White America constantly reinvents itself
in a socio-historical process in which many different Caucasian
ethnic groups, most of them directly from Europe, fuse, and
transform into something "white." These neophytes put
on a specifically American socio-cultural and political coating,
distancing them from their European allegiances: for example,
Italian immigrants become Italian-Americans, the hyphenated
phenomenon, and finally indistinctly white Americans with
Italian-sounding surnames and Catholic denominational
affiliation.
Whiteness in the United States has always
operated according to a hierarchical selection in which
Anglo-Saxon and Aryan Nordic nationalities were the preferred
raw material, favored over "lesser" Caucasian breeds,
such as Southern Europeans, Slavs, Hispanics, Jews, and such like.
Source: Dr. Munford's series -- TO CHANGE
OUR WORLD FIRST UNDERSTAND OUR WORLD * * * *
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updated 11 June 2008 |
