Why "Racism = Prejudice + Power" Is The Wrong Way to Approach the Problems of Racism

Critical Race Theory is a popular pass-time among my comrades on the radical left who ascribe to various positions within the broad political ideology of identity politics. Since I'm a Marxist, or at least a Marxian, it's largely been something I've ignored. This is because for the most part it has appeared, looking in from outside the social circles where this particular family of ideas have currency, to be little more than a self-serving rhetorical tactic of petit-bourgeois academics seeking, out of narcissism, to claim for themselves and certain of their peers some of the political capital owed to the working class and won by them through hard graft during the civil rights movements of the fifties and sixties. The basic tactic as I see it is that Theorist A looks on the problems of some segment of the proletariat to whom he is peripherally related via an essentialized category established by historical capitalist precedent and Theorist A claims that rather than the disadvantages owing to oppressive economic structures, the actual oppressive structure is something else which is specifically in place to target whatever group Theorist A can make a case for his or her own membership of. This move is then co-opted by non-members of the cohort as a further disenfranchisement of the proper class consciousness, and all turned on its head as a condescending way to tell working class folks that they're really the oppressors in society, rather than the victims of the Capital that has been so kind to the afforementioned theorists in their cozy endowed fellowships and well funded "activist" groups, funded primarily by the tax breaks given to capital so that it can spend more of itself extracting surplus labor from the workforce. No One Is Innocent. But I digress.

Middle-Aged White Women

At the BEA panel on Granta's new fiction issue, Sherman Alexie voiced the following observation: "All of us are writing for college-educated middle-aged white women".

Well, I know I'M not writing for college-educated middle-aged white women, and I think that the writers I tend to like aren't either (at least, I'm certainly not a middle-aged white woman). And if literary fiction in general, or Granta in specific is aimed at that demo, then that may explain why the so many lit fic writers I've been finding recently haven't been doing anything for me. We need more writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem and David Mitchell to keep us guys reading.

(And while I liked Sherman Alexie's Diary of a Part-Time Indian, it wasn't the kind of book that made me want to read his entire backlog, you know?)

BEA Panel on Chinese Publishing

Twitter posts made by me during the BEA Panel on Chinese Publishing, information related by Hou Xiaoqiang, CEO Shanda Literature — SNDA.com — one of the largest Chinese publishers.

  • novelists in china post their books online, get book deals and sell 3 million copies. 3 million!
  • all the young authors in china get their start on the web now
  • people dont have credit cards in china, so cell phones allow publishers to collect money
  • chinese online books take off from the internet and news and current memes to create work
  • 1/10 of online book is free, then every 1000 characters cost 3 cents
  • in china over 200,000 titles are published each year
  • 1/3 of chinese bestsellers are about young, urban life
  • publishers do not market to small towns in china because its all pirated books there

Some thoughts about this: When asked if these popular Chinese books would be translated into English, Mr. Hou said that they were not "international books" and their stories "aren't that good", which answer I found frustrating, as someone incredibly curious about Chinese popular literature and not the incessant march of dreary books about the Cultural Revolution which seem to mark the bulk of Chinese translations to English.

Also, it occurred to me later: if the books in small towns are all pirated copies, that probably means that they're not marketed toward them; books that might primarily appeal to rural areas simply don't get published because, even though there might be a demand, there's simply no profit. That's something to think about.

Ebook Readers at BEA

The Cool-Er eReader:

The BeBook Reader:

There are four ebook reader company's with booths here at the BookExpo of America. Amazon with the Kindle, Sony with the Sony Reader, Hanlin Endless Ideas with the BEBook, and CoolReaders with the Cool-Er eReader. Most interesting are the developments of the BEBook Reader and the Cool-Er which are both marketing inexpensive competitors to their Sony and Amazon rivals. The BEBook reader will, by the end of June, come out with a $200 reader and Cool-Er's device, to ship in early June, costs $250. Both are smaller and lighter than the Kindle or Sony Reader (the BEBook quite a bit smaller). They both load books connected to a computer, like the Sony Reader, but with a $30 upgrade the BEBook device has an add-on for a 3G card, which you can then use with a dataplan from T-Mobile (and perhaps soon other providers as well). However, unlike the Kindle, the BEBook does not have a built-in keyboard, so in order to search for a book or navigate to a website, one must laboriously use arrow keys to choose letters from a keyboard. BEBook is also coming out with their BEBook 2, a touchscreen device that will also have the ability to access the Internet via a dataplan. Both the BEBook and the Cool-Er eReader read PDF and ePub formatted ebooks, making them friendly to third-party book sources, just as the Sony Reader does and the Kindle does not. Interestingly, the BEBook does not have its own dedicated ebook store, so all ebooks for it are third-party, however it can read encrypted (DRM'd) MobiPocket (PRC) files, giving them access to the massive eReader.com store (see Edit 2 below). The Cool-Er reader only reads unencrypted MobiPocket ebooks and the Sony Reader and Kindle both don't read them at all.

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