Whoa Andy!

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

. And ALL the
>discussions of American racial prejudice that I recall lately have
>included a snotty crack by you about our interest with race stemming from
>middle-class obsessions/guilt, etc.  I do not think thinking about race is
>a sign of my bourgeois naivete, nor would I presume to climb onto a
>British list about a British author and commence screaming about how the
>things that matter to the people on this list were symptomatic of their
>banality.  

Andrew Dinn is someone who has contributed a great deal to this
list and, through maintaining the Pynchon List Server Archive he
provides us all with an invaluable service. He also seems interesting,
funny and very perceptive. But I disagree with his pigeon-hole-ing
of "American obsesions" and "guilt". For in GB we share the very same
guilt, and, at least in my part of the world, the obsesions of an ethnicly
diverse, racialy divided nation. Saying "there is a smaller proportional
difference between white and non-white incomes here than in the US"
(as John Major keeps reminding us from Westminster---but he's not
going for a walk-about in Brixton, his old turf, is he?) cuts zero slack
with me. 

AS IF London didn't suffer from massive race obsessions and crazyness
and stupidity! And no Englishman or Scotsman was ever a naive bourgeois!

I'm afraid we British are so very good at creating a box for ourselves called
"America," and filling it with a lot of stuff we are afriad of in ourselves,
stuff which is authentically our own, and then dismissing it as "other," 
 belonging to our "messed up American cousins." 

In the country I live in, race and cultural tensions replaced class (or
formed a 
complex nexus with it) some time ago as our greatest cultural concern. 
In the pub or in the classroom, Race, personal and national identity are at
the centre of the contemporary British debate.  

Eric Alan Weinstein
Centre For English Studies
University Of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk