QUOTE(mipadi @ Nov 9 2009, 06:04 PM)
I haven't backtracked at all. In my post which you initially referenced, I clearly mention both racism and classism. The history of racism and the history of classism, in the United States, is tightly interwoven, such that's it's virtually impossible to separate the two. Yes, there are very poor white people, and yes, there are very rich black people, but historically, class is closely linked to race. Look at the South post-Reconstruction: once racial laws were "abolished", lawmakers used class-target laws in order to implement racist policies legally (poll taxes, for example). Furthermore, the term "white male landowner" is virtually synonymous with the aristocracy; it's more a classist term than a racist term, but the fact that it has both connotations is just an example of how race and class are intertwined in the history of the US.
Your backtracking is a matter of speculatory intent, first by saying they explicitly want a certain race in power (be that as it may that it happens to coincide with rich people; it just makes the racial component that much more irrelevant) and then saying they don't necessarily care specifically about race because it merely comes with the territory of classism, and
then going back on that so that now it apparently isn't "accidental" after all because they use that correlation to their intended advantage.
We can very easily separate the two when it comes to human aim and purpose. You are not racist by being "elitist", "classist", etc. anymore than you're antisemitic for opposing Israel just because the prelude to a Jewish state has had a historically discriminatory attachment.
QUOTE(mipadi @ Nov 9 2009, 06:04 PM)
True -- but in this context, that's just a nice soundbite. Corporatism, racism, and classism are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, corporatism can be thought of as just another case of classism.
Mutually exclusive? You couldn't have missed the "there are racial hierarchies that exist within said classes" bit because you quoted it yourself, so I'm not sure where that's coming from. Correlation does not imply causation. And of course corporatism is classism. That was the point in discerning between actual racism and being a corporate whore. By logical extension, everyone opposing the public option in health care reform (including Democrats) isn't merely catering to the insurance companies writing them checks, they're secretly racist.
QUOTE(mipadi @ Nov 9 2009, 06:04 PM)
It's not irrelevant, as class and race are closely linked in American politics and American society. This is a consequence of America's long history with both classist and racial issues. You could trace it back to its heart and see which came first, but the two are so closely linked now that it's hard to analyze one outside the context of the other. That's not to say they're indistinguishable, just that they relate closely to one another.
The issue is not whether race and class are historically related, and that being the case doesn't mean one automatically assumes the other or else white nationalists wouldn't defend lower class whites getting shafted when immigrants take up job space.