Summary Of Jodi Byrd's Critique Of Blauner

Jodi Byrd in her critique of Blauner’s internal colonial model. Blauner asserts that although Black people aren’t under the classic conditions of colonialism they still are subjugated to internal colonialism.Byrd through her examination of Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma’s 2007 vote to disenfranchise approximately 2,800 Cherokee Freedmen and how theories of internal colonialism or other similar models erase American Indigenous groups. Blauner constructs his theory mainly thinking about it in black and white. Indigenous groups suffered expulsion and genocide and unlike Black Americans were colonized on their own land.”Part of what has made internal colonialism appealing as a model to describe the economic and political inequities that develop within a state is that it is
largely a spatial model that stretches not only to incorporate uneven access to resources, markets and exchanges, but also accounts for emergent”
“Blauner asserts that white colonization of blacks in urban centres functions as a process of racism-as internal-colonialism that retains features of the classic form centring on land, natural resources and sovereignty. Because both forms, according to Blauner, ‘developed out of a similar balance of technological, cultural and power relations, a common process of social oppression characterized the racial patterns in the two contexts despite the variation in political and social structure’” For Byrd the internal colonialism model fails because it continues to erase indigenous people because its model was constructed to explain black oppression.
Another critic of Blauner internal colonial model was Tomas Almaguer. Almaguer like Byrd questions Blauner by using Chicanos as an example of a group not regarded in the internal colonial model. "Mexicanos are not outsiders but are, in fact, an indigenous people of the land in question." During the 1960s and 1970s, Chicanos/as fought for political representation, labor rights, social programs, and access to education. These struggles were undertaken by diverse Chicano/a communities, including land grantees, farm workers, students, and barrio organizers.” Blauner uses the internal colonial model in order to explain the situation of African Americans but for Mexicans colonization was real. The area which today is the American Southwest was originally indigenous land colonized by the Spanish and then later by the United States. The colonialism model fails to work on groups such as Mexicans and Native Americans.

Bonanich’s split labor market theory was an economic model that in many ways works with conjunction with the internal colonial model. Like Edna Bonanich ,Michael Reich focuses on class conflict. Michael Reich in “the Political- Economic Effects of Racism” argues that white workers benefit from discrimination but specifically benefits rich white workers and employers while hurting poor whites.Reich states that the group(s) that ultimately benefits from racism are rich white employers and employees does that mean “whiteness” is a product of capitalism, Reich states that the ultimate goal in society is to maximize profits. Therefore high wages are exploited in order to turn a higher profit.This creates tensions between weaken the bargaining power of the working class, often by attempting to split it along racial lines, (3) promote prejudices, (4) segregate the black community, (5) ensure that the elite benefit from the creation of stereotypes and racial prejudices against the black community.

Both Bonanich and Reich explain how class foments ethnic and racial tensions. This disregards how racism works outside of race.For Marxism the enemy or the problem is capitalism and the solution would be for workers to unite against ‘capitalism’. what prevents black and white workers from uniting is not as Bonanich states white workers have a material interest in racism but doesn’t explain the origins of white workers’ racism.
Gramsci used the term hegemony to denote the predominance of one social class over others (e.g. bourgeois hegemony). This represents not only political and economic control, but also the ability of the dominant class to project its own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it accept it as 'common sense' and 'natural' .Subaltern is the social group who are socially, politically, and geographically outside of the hegemonic power structure of the colony and of the colonial homeland. In describing "history told from below", the term subaltern derived from Antonio Gramsci's work on cultural hegemony, which identified the social groups who are excluded from a society's established structures for political representation, the means by which people have a voice in their society.

Wilderson’s argument centers on Gramasci’s take on Marxism and points out the absence of black lives in relation to marxism.Is Wilderson stating that the position of the black (slave) undermines Gramsci’s argument.Gramsci basically talks about cultural hegemony.
Cultural hegemony is “the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society”.
Marxism states that through the “free” market one is free to sell one’s work/labor but this is inapplicable to black bodies who are “slaves” and obviously slaves are unable to own themselves therefore Gramsci's argument erases black bodies and places them outside of the free market. This idea that because of white supremacy black individuals are not free are not capable of “selling” their labor. Marxism and class oriented theories reduce black existence to the working class when in reality this doesn’t fully encapsulate the experience the black people experience under white supremacist capitalist society. This falls in line with Blauner and his theory of internal colonialism the black community is subjugated by the US which is a (neo)colonialist power and within the internal society blacks are subjugated
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Both Gramsci ,Tomas Almaguer and Wilderson although using Marxism to explain class/economics model don’t assume that race is solely based on the economic.

Bonilla-Silva in Rethinking Racism essentially argues for the study or rae within sociology to be done from the viewpoint of racialization. “I suggest that racism should be studied from the viewpoint of racialization. I contend that after a society becomes racialized,racialization develops a life of its own.20 Although it interacts with class and gender structurations in the social system, it becomes an organizing principle of social relations in itself.”Race operates within and outside factors such as class and race. Many of the sociologists especially Marxist sociologists regarded race as either a product of class or a product of labor when actuality race exists outside of these factors. “Although all racialized social systems are hierarchical, the particular character of the hierarchy, and thus of the racial structure, is variable. For example, domination of Blacks in the United States was achieved through dictatorial means during slavery, but in the post-civil rights period this domination has been hegemonic (Omi and Winant 1994; Winant 1994).9 Similarly, the racial practices and mechanisms that have kept Blacks subordinated changed from overt and eminently racist to covert and indirectly racist (Bonilla-Silva and Lewis 1997).”(Page 470) Bonilla-Silva explains how for blacks in the U.S. there has been a transition from slavery to a more “hegemonic” or less obvious state of racism. This can be seen as similar at least in this aspect to Blauner's colonial model in which he states that internal colonialism is a more overt form of colonialism occurring within a nation’s borders. Bonilla-Silva states that the base and superstructure are racialized. As stated before one of the critiques about Marxism is its disregard for race. In classical Marxism, the base which is labor ,labor divisions and the relationship as employer and employee, is primarily economic. Race is not acknowledged. Bonanich and Reich look at the relationship between the base and superstructure by stating seeing the base as “class” and the superstructure as “race”. For them class informs race and race relations. Both classical Marxism(Gramsci) and Bonanich and Reich view the base in economic term that subsequently influences or produce the superstructure.Bonilla-Silva contrasts this by saying that race affects the base and the superstructure. “the more general concept of racialized social systems as the starting point for an alternative framework. This term refers to societies in which economic, political, social and ideological levels are partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories or races” (Bonilla-Silva 1997, p. 469)

Discussing structural and power/class theories one can see the difference between the different theories. Power/Class theories especially those from Marxist Sociologists who focus on labor systems within society and placed the relationship between the base and superstructure. These theories