Can we connect philosophy with racism?

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
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Can we connect philosophy with racism?

In Antebellum South the white man would not work for anyone because he considered laboring for hire made him no better than the black slave and his superiority to the black man was essential to his self-esteem. There was no labor class in the Antebellum South. The slaves did the labor but the slave was a capital investment just like a horse or oxen. Here was a total society without a laboring class.

What were some of the effects of no free labor in the South? The most important factor I suspect was that the ordinary white man felt any labor was beneath his dignity. This lack of ‘free labor’ led to many of the characteristics of the Southern man and woman that probably is a factor today in the still distinctive character of the Southerner.

I think that the wheel might be a useful analogy for understanding the mind of the South. The spokes of the wheel represent the essential components of all societies–economy, law and culture. The hub to which all spokes focus is labor. The Antebellum South revolved around slave labor.

Classical Athenians “believed that to render any form of service, especially the physical, to another man in return for money, even if only for a short time, was a form of slavery, and unacceptable to a free man”.

Ideology universalizes, absolutises, and reifies (makes an object of) abstract concepts. The ideological group converts its concrete experiences and its abstract concepts into universal standards (a form of philosophy?) for the whole society.

A society like our own, in which there exists free labor that “sells” its skills, capacities, and activities to another, must find a means of defining humans in such a way that such individuals can still feel like complete and free individuals even though they sell part of them self to another.

[b]How does a society define the human essence in such a way that the individual “sells” only that which is alienable to him or her while maintaining the essence of a free individual?

“In order to say that his freedom is not compromised when his abilities, skills, and activities are placed at another man’s disposal, he had to be defined in the barest possible manner.”

If a person’s skills, capacities, and activities are alienable to her what is his essence that may be considered to be unalienable? Capitalism, wherein labor is commodified and thus faces this problem, has located the human essence as being the capacity for freedom of choice and will.

“The individual was, above all, an agent. As long as he was not physically overpowered, hypnotized, or otherwise deprived of his powers of choice and will, his actions were uniquely his, and therefore his sole responsibility. It did not matter how painful his alternatives were, how much his character had been distorted by his background and upbringing and how much his capacities of choice and will were debilitated by his circumstances.”

This description seems much like what we Americans now use to assuage our guilt when consciously considering the death and dismemberment, physical and mental (PTSD), of our soldiers serving, dying, and being fragmented in our war in Iraq and Afghanistan.[/b]

Quotes from Marx’s Theory of Ideology by Bhikhu Parekh

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the difference is that, in capitalism, people must define themseleves.

however, in the long run, people become too lazy and incompetent to be bothered, preferring instead to be defined by another. hence the slide into gross materialism, mindless consumerism, corporatism and collectivism.

and racism is a biological mandate converted and used by social forces of stratification and hierarchy for increased power over man. racism is only justified in the base animalistic sense, and would be rejected by any free intelligent individual, showing (by virtue of all the racism in the world) how far we still have to go even to move through and out of the childhood phase of evolution. we are all still children, evolutionarily— or rather, base animals… just with sophisticated vocal chords and heads full of delusions and dreams.

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Capitalism is a system of production and consumption that is dependent upon produced goods that are for exchange with the goal of accumulating profit in that exchange. Before capitalism modes of production were designed to facilitate consumption directly without exchange.

When capitalism first appeared “it required a specific set of social conditions in order to grow and flourish, for example, personal freedom, the formal equality of all men, the alienability of labor and the means of production, the separation of the civil society and the state, a more or less centralized state, a body of clearly defined general rules, and a more or less absolute right to property.”

Capitalism is a social theory that requires citizens to believe certain things about them self. When these things are hidden from consciousness then that theory becomes an ideology.

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capitalism only needs one to act AS IF one believes in these “things” or aspects of self/society. and in fact, it does not even need that. capitalism requires a monetary system i.e. a governmental structure, but in place of one barter may be used (far less efficient). gold and other precious metals will suffice in the absence of monetary units.

those requirements of capitalism that you mention are not ideological. they BECOME ideological over time, i agree; but fundamentally they are social structure, administrative structure, economic structure. physical/systemic conditions predicating capitalist economics need not be ideological in nature. that they become so over time says nothing about capitalism itself, and everything about human nature itself… man works to establish a political system in opposition to a previous one deemed insufficient; over time man forgets why he established the system to begin with, he becomes lazy, weak, feminine. at this point it is the precursors or pillars of civilization which go from active to passive form, i.e. they become ideologically internalized, subconscious unquestioned mandates of a religious type. once politics assumes this form, capitalism (or any other economic system of relatively-fixed conditions/rules) becomes a sham, an illusion, a surface gloss over the rotting insides of society itself.

without strong (i.e. active/masculine) codes/rules/structures, society cannot survive. these codes/rules/structures start out strong necessarily, as they are resistance to another social organization from which one is fleeing… but over time, as resistance decreases and apathy/comfort set in, they become internalized, forgotten, idealized.

the ideologization of capitalist principles represents the beginning of the end for capitalism itself, and subsequently of the society within which capitalism is founded-- for a political organization cannot exist without its economic structure, and an economic organization cannot exist without its political structure. when one begins to fall, the other is first idealized to “keep up appearances” (not the least of which in the mind of the individual and also, to that effect, as media image)… but once one truly falls, i.e. it is eaten by corruption from the inside out, the other is not far behind.

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Are your “Southern man and woman” anything more than negative stereotypes? Don’t you mean Southern “white” man and woman? Does the “Southerner” really have a “distinctive character.” Does the “South” really have a “mind?” Are your supposed observations anything more than convenient generalizations that break down when one takes a closer look at the particulars of actual situations? I suspect as much. I don’t think you can support your categories as being more than fictions you use to think about the people of a region of the USA. I mean how does Mississippi stack up against Florida or Virginia versus Texas on your scale of what constitutes the distinctive Southern character? Can your comparisons really hold up? Do you have data to support your thesis?

Oh and by the way, is there any racism in the North? If so, is there more or less than in the South? How do you account for it? How do you measure it exactly?

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Freedom can be defined by the ability to choose. The individual sells skills he chose to acquire, while maintaining the capacity to no longer allow the “buyer” of the skills the usage of his abilities. Anyone posesses the ability to go off the map, live in the wild as man was intended pre civilization. You are as free as you want yourself to be, you can choose imprisonment, you can choose suicide. We are more a slave to our will then anything else.

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I have been a self-actualizing self-learner for more than 25 years. It began to develop into a hobby in 1980 while reading a book on the Vietnam Civil War when I decided that to understand this civil war in Vietnam I must understand our own Civil War in the United States.

I have since that time read many books about this important part of our history. The most enlightening book that best answered my questions was the book “The Mind of the South” by W.J. Cash. Cash says-- “With an intense individualism, which the frontier atmosphere put into the man of the South also comes violence and an idealistic, hedonistic romanticism. This romanticism is also fueled by the South conflict with the Yankee. Violence manifests itself in mob action, such as lynching, and private dealings.”

One question that developed early in my reading was why the ordinary white citizen of the South was such a good soldier, superior to the Union soldier. Why did the ordinary southern man fight so valiantly to preserve slavery when he was not a slaveholder himself? This valiant southerner fought with very little comfort and support from the Confederacy because the Confederacy was a financially poor institution. The rebel soldier often did not even have shoes. The rebel soldier often had to find food on his own. Very little in the form of supplies were provided to the rebel army.

I have over the years discovered answers to my questions. One particular aspect of this situation, which I had not considered, was how the fact of slave labor in a culture affects the culture totally. In the South there was no free labor. Slaves did virtually all labor. The effect of this reality determined to a great extent the nature of the society.

The white man would not work for anyone because he considered laboring for hire made him no better than the black slave and his superiority to the black man was essential to his self-esteem. There was no labor class in the antebellum south. The slaves did the labor but the slave was a capital investment just like a horse or oxen. Here was a total society without a laboring class.

What were some of the effects of no free labor in the South? The most important factor I suspect was that the ordinary white man felt any labor was beneath his dignity. This lack of ‘free labor’ led to many of the characteristics of the Southern man and woman that probably is a factor today in the character of the Southerner.

I think that the wheel might be a useful analogy for understanding the mind of the South. The spokes of the wheel represent the essential components of all societies–economy, law and culture. The hub to which all spokes focus is slavery. The antebellum South revolved around slavery.

This area of the United States developed as any frontier area in the US during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The climate and the circumstance of the cotton gin invention led to the evolution of a society that never lost its frontier characteristic while becoming an agricultural economy dependent almost totally upon cotton.

The economy was cotton and the power controlling the society was the cotton plantation. Early in the nineteenth century South Carolina plantation owners gained complete political control of the entire state and these plantation owners became the core that moved the eleven Southern states to emulate the South Carolina system. By the 1820s the South Carolina plantation politicians determined their goal to be separation from the Union if the Union failed to allow the expansion of slavery into the developing land as the nation moved West and new states began to join the Union.

There were three basic economic classes—plantation owners, yeomen farmers and poor whites. I do not include slaves as an economic class—they were basically capital (objects) just as horses and oxen are capital. The plantation owners controlled the wealth and power in their particular areas and banded together to control the wealth and political power in a region of state.

The yeomen and poor white were primarily subsistence farmers. Some of the yeomen had a few slaves but by and large the vast majority of slaves worked the large plantations. The plantations owned the good land leaving the less desirable land for the yeomen and poor white. Basically population ringed the best lands of the plantation with each succeeding lower rung in the economic ladder existing on less and less productive land.

There was somewhat of a heterogeneous mixture of relatives occupying each economic sector. The plantation owner was related by blood to many of the citizens in the area. There was not a great sense of hierarchy in class sensitivities because of the interrelated blood relationships. This fact also made it easier for the plantation owners to exercise their power over the community.

All classes recognized the importance of slavery to the whole society. While the yeoman and poor white did not, in most cases, own slaves they were as dependent on slavery as was the owner of slaves. For the yeoman and the poor white their self-esteem depended upon their sense of superiority to the slave. For these reasons the laws and the culture took the same attitude toward the importance of slavery, as did the plantation owners.