I enjoyed the New
Ethnicities piece as it adds to the laundry list of reasons why concepts
like race and ethnicity are social constructions and are, therefore, flexible and
ever changing. Hall points out that people are going to have to change the way
they view certain ethnicities to fix our new understanding of what it means to
be a certain ethnicity. I believe this is an interesting argument. I would be
interested in considering how this may relate/translate to the US (Hall applies
it to the UK).
In
Hall's 1986 piece, he speaks on how Gramsci believed that groups, as we
understand them, should never be assumed to be official groups, no matter their
similarities (14). I couldn't help but think that's why the revolution, as Marx
conceptualizes it, hasn't happened. He believes that being a part of the
working class and experiencing alienation is enough to unite the working class,
but he failed to account for "passive revolutions" (which can be seen
as bourgeoisie revolution) and the creation of bourgeoisie partners (i.e.,
managers, white working class, etc..…). To the point of passive revolutions,
how can we, as scholars, effectively apply this concept to analyze modern-day
socio-political movements? Furthermore, how does recognizing passive revolutions
challenge conventional understandings of class struggle and revolution within
Marxist framework?
This
isn't a question, but I do want to point out that Gramschi's Hegemony, Civil Society, and Separation of Powers helped me think about an idea that I have been
trying to think through in my thesis. I found that networks, in
order to enact counter framing, would try to humanize the victim. While
humanizing the victim helps viewers realize how wrong or immoral the officers
were in killing the victims, there were times when pundit and guest comments imply
that the victims did not deserve to die because they were "good
Blacks"—i.e., innocent of any crime—instead of the killings being unjust
regardless of innocence. I would also like to point out that this is another
issue with the "right or wrong" way that we tend to talk about police
shootings. We are at this impasse because cops think they are morally correct
in their actions, and others think they are morally incorrect. While I agree
the cops are in the wrong, when we speak about it this way, it makes it super
easy to go to the victim and ask if they were morally in the right or wrong. I
think this thought shows how connected civil society (consent) is to the State
(coercion). The connection seems obvious in hindsight, but reading Gramsci made
me think about it more.
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