Call and response
Posted by GSR in Essays 0 comment(s)In responding to these insightful and suggestive readings of The Threat of Race, I take up the most pressing themes common to the various interventions rather than discussing each reading discretely.
Racism’s sadism, sadism’s racism
Susan Giroux reveals with characteristic incisiveness that, especially in the US context, racial neoliberalism has operated on sadistic impulse and with sadistic effect. This impulse is largely submerged, even repressed, though it materializes cruelly at key moments to reimpose order and control considered to be slipping out of hand. Giroux links this impulse to a longer historical trajectory of sovereign authority, critically evidenced by the Marquis de Sade with regard to the revolutionary Enlightenment. She suggests that this reach for unbridled and brutal sovereignty represents a little stressed strand in critical theories of modern governmentality. It is a strand returning with disturbing if variable repetition and force throughout modernity’s history, though always potentially available. Racial neoliberalism, she argues, drawing compellingly on Sadean analysis, has sewn together in the name of civilization a ‘modern state machinery . . . predicated on punishment and war’, a divinely ordained if secularized technology of violence, and an erotics of expressed responsibility for and moral superiority over all others by imposing upon them a homogeneously defined conception of right that is at once a will to power.
Giroux here draws implicitly on recent work around sovereignty, most notably concerning the corpus of Carl Schmitt. But she is extending the recent critical interest in Schmitt’s account of sovereignty in two little noticed novel and crucial directions. First, Giroux ties the modern order of sovereignty to its explicitly sadistic potentiality, always capable of being invoked, of the sort Sade had so trenchantly recognized in his prison manuscript. This is a welcome extension of the line of argument in The Threat of Race. It makes clear that neoliberalism emphasizes the vicious strands of modernity’s fabric of governmentality. While repeatedly rationalized away as anomaly, Abu Ghraib nevertheless manifests one significant thread in modernity’s constitutive logic of rule.
Second, Giroux draws out explicitly Threat’s point that this strand of sadistic viciousness embedded in modernity’s ruling logic is made possible only on the basis of modernity’s racial architecture. That racial constitution has ordered modernity’s self-making in various if denied ways has made it repeatedly possible—both in the sense of producing subjects and rationalizing their ill treatment—to subject some to viciousness at the hands of and for the sake of elevating others. But the Sadean point is that viciousness is not just materially instrumental; it is fuelled also by the pure pleasure, the erotics, inherent in expressing—in being able to express—subordinating power. The two modes of repression—that erotically sourced within and that instrumental to the self, the Other of others—turn out to be constitutively connected.
Along these lines, then, I argue in The Threat of Race that racial terror and death have been aided under neoliberalizing conditions by the quieting, even the evaporation, of an explicit racial register in state-making. Peter Wade takes up exactly this point.
The ‘silencing’ of race
For Wade, the basic thesis of my book is that ‘neoliberalism silences race, while invigorating racist oppressions’. While partly getting at the argument advanced, this formulation actually misses something central to the line of analysis. It is not that race is simply silenced, if silenced at all. It is shifted to less formal domains for the most part, embedded in structures, without being explicitly named, where it is more difficult to identify, more ambivalently related to, more ambiguous. Or to insist, as Wade does, that this silencing erases race is to miss a different sense of ‘silencing’ than the one Wade emphasizes. For Wade silencing seems clearly and explicitly to mean absence. But ‘silencing’ also suggests quieting even as the condition persists. Indeed, the ‘silencing’ can proliferate the condition, pervading undetected by a broader public.
So Wade’s reading mischaracterizes, if not more deeply misconceives (somewhat), what I have in mind. In the book, I rarely speak of absence or presence of race or indeed of racism. And when I do it is always carefully contextualized. There may be half a dozen explicit invocations of the notion of ‘absence’ regarding race throughout the book. Hardly the stuff on which a thesis would be built. Rather, and consistent with a longstanding trajectory in my corpus of work,1 my point is about invisibility. That’s a very different register than absence or indeed presence.
Invisibility suggests a hidden dimension, sometimes unknowing or inadvertent but more than likely planned, or at least ordered, structurally arranged, deeply embedded. So, institutionally, it is not that race has been made ‘absent’ but that its presence has been rendered invisible and silenced (save to the sensitive eye and ear), purged of explicit terms of reference. The condition remains even where the terms of characterization and analysis, of condemnation (or for that matter of praise), of address and redress, have been removed. That there are no terms by which to mark it suggests that there is no condition to mark; but it doesn’t rid the social of the condition even where the terms of target have been dimmed or quieted. One is simply reduced to casting about in the silent dark.
Wade seems to admit the very point at issue here, acknowledging ‘the persistence and indeed re-emergence of race in Latin America, despite the reluctance to use the term openly and to prefer references to “culture” and “ethnicity”’. That Wade misconceives my position is revealed by his claiming, rightly, that ‘race can only remain alive because the categories and concepts have not actually been erased, although they may have been removed from specific institutional levels and governmental instances’.
The point is well articulated, not as a criticism of The Threat of Race but, with one key qualification, indeed as the book’s view. ‘Buried alive’ is not erasure but repression, not absence but continued if unseen presence. That presence may have shifted from explicit state institutions to privatized expression, though that does not imply complete erasure. To trace those shifts historically across different racial regions and time zones was exactly the task I set myself in the book. Wade cites as critical evidence of the non-silencing of racial categories a series of examples about IVF clinics where women as well as policy statements explicitly or implicitly invoke racial categories as grounds for genetic matches or choice of surrogate mothers. That the statements are the official documents of state-funded but nevertheless ‘independent regulators’—whether agencies or care-providers—indicates the obfuscatory messiness in actual practices of neoliberalizing privatization. These examples then largely evidence not counters to my argument, as Wade would have it, but indications of the sort of suggestive shift from state required imposition to increasingly privatized (though still deeply shaped and ordered) choice that I indicate is a dominant pattern of racial neoliberalism.
There is a crucial point of distinction in our positions here though, revealed in Wade’s qualification to this point about erasure and absence. He adds: ‘If the categories and concepts had truly been erased, there could be no racism. It would be a different kind of oppression.’ Even in the more extreme case, however, complete erasure of concepts need not necessarily entail that the oppression has morphed from racism to some other kind. Institutional or structural racisms have long revealed the embedding of profoundly reproduced exclusions or discriminations in favour of members of exactly those population groups once marked explicitly by the racist terms now erased. The mark of racism is not only or simply whether explicitly racial categories pick out populations discriminated against. It is also whether populations historically discriminated against continue to suffer the ongoing patterns of those historical discreditations and their impacts no matter that the terms to reference them have been made to evaporate. It is as much the material conditions and effects of discreditation as the modes of (quieted, even purged, but implicitly lingering) reference that count as racism. That’s the very issue: how to identify racisms when their terms of account—both of identification and documentation, of expression and critical intervention—have been rendered invisible?
Nature’s racial culture/ culture’s racial nature
Wade’s interesting critical remarks regarding the interfacing of nature and culture with respect to racial histories are helpful in getting clearer about this question. Nature and culture, he insists, ‘blend into one another’. Racial articulation always configures ‘nature–culture hybrids’. Put in this way, racial reference always inscribes naturalizing implication, if not explication, even where cultural expression is most overt. As Wade recognizes, I agree with this, though he seems to object to my relative stress on one over the other as the dominant or driving determination at different times and places. The struggle for hegemony between cultural racisms and racial historicism, on one side, and biological racisms and racial naturalism, on the other, dominated the second half of the nineteenth century, with different expressive impact in different regions.2 I have spelled out at some length these shifting stresses on racial naturalism and historicism across space–time compressions in The Racial State.3
This pulls the point of distinction into sharper focus. The contrast I draw between dominant modes of racial conception and order across historical periods is not per se that between the biologistic and the cultural. It is, more broadly and insistently, that between the ‘naturalizing’ and the ‘historicizing’. Wade reduces my distinction to the more usual one between biology and culture—I confess, my formulation may sometimes encourage it—and this reduction causes the sorts of difficulties and conundrums he stresses. The contrast between the naturalistic and historicizing may look and sound like that between the biologistic and the cultural. But I intend the former to cut across the latter, to do the sort of work of assemblage and co-articulation for which Wade calls. Naturalizing tendencies can and have applied historically to claims of cultural distinction, hardening them into givens precisely of ‘cultural nature’ (or natural/naturalized culture). And this is exactly how race has operated at the interface. Likewise, there are strands of racial thinking—of insisting on racial difference—that nevertheless historicize the biological, that stress the possibility of natural advancement over time from more to less ‘primitive’, from less to more ‘advanced’ modes of social being. Social Darwinism may be just such a case in point. Racial naturalism and racial historicism, in short, regulate thinking as they structure the social, each coming to dominate at different space–times while constantly in elastic tension with each other.
To come back, in light of these comments, to Wade’s point about ‘silencing’ race. By the silencing of race Wade takes me to mean ‘the disappearance of its own name’ (race), ‘evaporation of an explicit discourse of racialized biology’ and ‘erasure of state institutionalizations of racial categories’. All this he thinks at least misleading, or simply inaccurate, given—as he puts it—that institutional overtness of racial categorization has been the exception rather than the rule of racial thinking.
As should be obvious from my remarks above, Wade mischaracterizes my position to be insisting on a straight linear temporal displacement from overtness to silencing or evaporation of biologized racial conception. I repeatedly point out that naturalisms and historicisms interface, play off each other both by taking distance from and by outwardly rejecting claims identified with the other. At different moments in the history of racial thinking one comes to dominate the other in social arrangement and stress, emphasis and hegemony without eclipsing or more deeply destroying the other. The repressed returns, becomes more emphatic, even more dominating. And of course there are moments of hybridity, of confusion, of mixing and mashing up of conceptual terms and commitments, creating a garbled but none the less popular mode of racial expression, as we are witnessing regarding the Obama phenomenon in the United States today. So to say the institutional overtness of racial categorization is the exception rather than the rule, as Wade does, itself is unhelpfully to mischaracterize a much more complex, mixed (up) social history.
Knowing race, recognizing racism
The broader and, I think, more pressing question this line of critical interrogation opens up concerns how exactly to identify racisms, on my account. The question is most readily evidenced concerning the enigmatic and perhaps anomalous condition of ‘racisms without racism’ I ascribe to the extremes of contemporary neoliberalism in the closing pages of the book.
How first do we know race? I would say that, as with pretty much all tacit knowledge, it is habituated, socially inculcated in us through time, handed down through family, schooling and social and political culture. So much so that it becomes intuition, habitus, what Wade at one place hints at as ‘second nature’. We know ‘race’, as Wittgenstein might have said, through its use, through our use of the term, the references and the associated values, valuations, the practices prompted by what in the book I call presumptive filiation and designated non-belonging.
But the question concerns the slightly different if related order of identification not of race but of racism. Wade emphasizes two criteria key to such identification. The first concerns marking as racial phenotypic characteristics considered to identify presumptive filiation. The second is some reference to enduring categories of race. We know race, he says, ‘not by its name, but by its recurrent reference to specific categories of people and specific types of nature–culture hybridizations’. This, however, obviously is to reduce identification of racism to that of race. Here Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s reflections are very helpful.
Drawing on the work of the late George Fredrickson,4 Maldonado-Torres addresses the question in the context of spelling out the distinction between ethnic prejudice and racism. Ethnic prejudice refers to specific ideas people hold about groups that render them more or less sophisticated. The conceptual contrast between an ethnic group and a race, however, is that the former has at least the presumptive possibility of transforming itself to acquire the level of sophistication of their fiercest critics. Ethnic groups, on this account, are capable of development in the ways racial groups are thought fixed by nature. Maldonado-Torres properly points out that this makes Fredrickson’s conception of ethnic prejudice much like my conception of racial historicism. By extension, as he indicates, this only magnifies the question about what makes racial historicism racial exactly.
The distinction between ethnocentrism and racism, as I’ve pointed out at length elsewhere,5 is not purely conceptual. It will depend on the embedded social fabric historically contexualized, prevailing traditions of referential terms and assumptions, not least regarding the formation of social groups, social attitudes and materializations about inclusion and exclusion, political expediency about expendability and discardability, and so on.
Understood in light of the pragmatics of these factors, racial historicism is not simply discrimination or a negative attitude towards someone because of supposed culturally distinct behaviour, values or attitudes. Nor is it simply about prejudging another on such generally conceived prejudicial grounds concerning the group to which the discriminated is taken to belong. Racial historicism is based on a conception that a group, broadly and long considered to constitute a racial group, is presumed less well developed in intellectual and cultural capacities than those emanating from regions supposedly representing more appealing capacities and habits. The group is taken to have coalesced from the fragments of heterogeneous dispersals in some distant past into a supposedly geographically bound coherence, with attendant physical traits and cultural habits. Those making such judgements tend overwhelmingly to consider themselves members of the group now (self-)judged to be better developed.
So racial historicism is more specific in its claims than generalized ethnocentrism: it is not mere dismissal or put-down associated with cultural belonging. Rather, it is a claim about (non-)inheritance of developed cultural capacity over the long haul; and it is about the tying of cultural capacity to heritable characterological traits (developed as habits not only biologically conceived but tied to heritable phenotypes) considered by many to be racial.
Dismissing Obama as a Muslim on its own seems to be ethnic prejudice; dismissing him as ‘an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug’ is racist.6 The former is ethnic prejudice (absent any further indication) in presuming that in the mark of cultural difference there is something tainted, unacceptable, off-putting about being a Muslim, about Muslim character and culture as such. It presumes either more broadly that it is not a good thing to be a Muslim or more narrowly that Muslims don’t properly belong in (and to) the country in which such a claim is being made (in this case the United States, but one could experience such a claim almost anywhere in Europe, or perhaps anywhere where European languages dominate). It is a slight to Muslims as such, imputing at least implicitly that Muslim culture is somehow wanting. It doesn’t help to deny that Obama is a Muslim, for that simply reinforces or leaves untouched the implicit insult, as though the grounds on which the insult stands is firm. This latter consideration reveals both how close ethnic prejudice can come to racism and how racism operates often (but not only) as a sort of exaggerated form.
Racial historicism, then, is racial—or dismissively racist actually—in virtue of being linked to a long historical tradition of dismissing the capacity, moral or intellectual, of people based on their imputed group membership as racial precisely because the group character itself is thrown in question. Obama is not just an Indonesian Muslim (he is neither, as it turns out, though it matters little to the claim). He has turned into a ‘welfare thug’. Whatever this is meant to mean literally, it is intended to resonate racially while denying any racial invocation.
There is now a century-long tradition of identifying welfare recipients not only as undeserving. That insinuation is already attached to the working or poor classes. The welfare recipient, uppermost in the mind of the accuser, is black. And Blacks on the take are thugs, corrupt destroyers of public good while using state agency for their self-aggrandisement.7 The lack of historical development—of character, of behaviour, of capacity to conduct oneself properly in society—is racially indexed without having to be named as such. But when named, the social problems are a product of this lack of development. Blacks are not only thugs engaging in thuggery; they are the new bullies on the block. Blacks in control of the state produce Obama the welfare thug, strong-arming poor Whites with one arm while the other hand is in the state till. On welfare, as all Blacks are presumed to be, made possible by his state thuggery at the expense of poor hard-working tax-ripped-off white folks. Race drips from every pixel of this picture.
Implicitly pervading the racial picture here are racially imputed but deniable degradations. The combination of racial imputation (corrupt welfare cheat and sovereign bully) with degradation demanding dismissal, whether literal or symbolic (‘thug’), effects the transformation of this racial characterization into racist demeanour. The transformation is possible precisely because history has made the links, connecting the dots in the ‘logic’—the ratiocination—of anyone for whom the relevant desire, and major and minor premises are considered connected. Racism, in short, is more often than not a mode of ‘practical reasoning’.
Racial coloniality
Israel no doubt embeds both naturalizing and historicizing elements in its racial characterization and oppression of Palestinians. In any case, this in turn raises the issue of Israeli specificity regarding the racial condition constitutive of its state-making, the central critical point Abu El-Haj presses. The Israeli state, she insists, is not only (self-regardingly) neoliberal but also a colonial occupier of Palestine’s territories. The West Bank and Gaza are ‘postcolonies by colonial design’. They signal not just apartheid or apartheid-like conditions but colonies of Israel.
There is no doubt something to both sides of this. The Occupied Territories embody conditions in many ways awfully similar to apartheid South Africa, as I point out in the book. And conditions of coloniality prevail: the arrogant freedom to settle, international criticism be damned, almost wherever and whenever Israelis determine; limited local self-government overseen by an all-controlling militarized Israeli regime setting conditions even for what local self-government does and does not have local jurisdiction over; the control by the Israelis of all strategic elements, including points of access, flows of people, goods, services, access of resources, outsiders, journalists and so on. So I agree, in part, with Abu El-Haj.
But only in part, for in the book I was suggesting that, with regard to Palestine, Israel had created a novel structure of oppression, one building on elements that preceded it, including elements both colonial and apartheid in structure and repressive expression. Building on these forms racial palestinianization nevertheless crafts a mode of racial rule not quite seen before. And it is for this reason that I hesitate to name it as ‘colonial’ (or ‘apartheid’). At the basis of this new modality of racial rule is the conception, as I say, taking off from Eyal Weizman’s insight,8 of a permanent temporariness, a virtuality, that may be embedded in potentia both in colonial and apartheid conditions but in neither is it quite actualized or even obvious. With racial palestinianization, this virtuality entails that it literally can be made into anything, filled almost as the ruler pleases, moulded pretty much to its whims. The qualifying delimitations to these possibilities of virtuality are a function only of external pressures—the world is watching, if tepidly for the most part, concerned about the excesses—and local resistances.
That said, virtuality means the territory can be claimed, settled or unsettled, destabilized in the name of stability, destroyed in the name of building a democracy, opened up or closed down whenever suiting dominant interests in the moment or as a response to longer term calculations. So, not simply coloniality or apartheid, or reducible to either (even as it builds on significant founding elements of both). Racial palestinianization elaborates a logic of virtuality, of permanent temporariness, of almost endless possibility (of which certain impossibilities are at least nominally composite) that, I have argued, is made possible, rendered even conceivable, by ‘virtue’ of its compositional raciality. Israel–Palestine, in short, represents more clearly than anywhere else to date the politics and logics of govern-mental virtuality, of pure virtualization.9
Perhaps racial palestinianization actualizes in whatever materializing ways it deems fit the virtuality that was always already potentially there, without even conscious recognition, in the colonial condition itself. Or perhaps it is the actualization of the colonial present, of colonialism in the present. Either way, I want to insist that racial palestinianization today represents something new in its conditions, not simply the colonialism from the past transplanted to Palestine.
So this is not an ‘ambivalence about the Zionist project’. For one, my discussion of Israel’s founding in the context of anticolonial independence movements of the time was not with a view to legitimation so much as pointing to a historical contemporaneity along with a recourse at the time to a legitimating rhetorical invocation. After all, Jews in Palestine—can they at least historically be called Palestinian Jews or Jewish Palestinians?—explicitly justified their resistance to British presence as an anticolonial struggle. The critical compulsion nevertheless to recognize Israel’s right to exist in order to claim the right to criticize the Israeli state, which Abu El-Haj perceptively identifies while confessing to doing herself, has become for progressive critics also a rhetorical strategy: explicitly recognize Israel’s right to exist so one’s legitimate criticisms of Israeli oppression cannot be dismissed as engaging the worst sort of antisemitism. Abu El-Haj rightly worries whether the ambivalence towards Israel that this recognition suggests entails the discounting of any ensuing critique as a consequence.
The worry is well taken. Insistence on Israel’s right to exist, as Abu El-Haj suggests, has become a political showstopper. End of conversation. Even if you proceed to a criticism of the Israeli government—perhaps especially if you do—you have thrown in your face the acid that you deny the right to exist to Israel, if not to Jews more generically. So, to get a hearing, to clear the space for political critique, the existential claim becomes (self-)imposingly necessitated. Abu El-Haj nevertheless reveals the political cost of giving in to this command: recognizing Israel’s right to existence entails at once (as she puts it) ‘ratifying [Palestinians’] own dispossession’. Brian Klug reminds us not only that such insistence was not always so but that it also does ‘the cause of peace’ (as Abba Eban once put it for very different reasons) no service.10
Two thoughts follow. First, in light of these comments, the recognized right to exist can be read in a qualified, more politically critical way. It can be pushed as the right of all people living in ‘greater Israel’, in historical Palestine, to exist so long as the existence of anyone or any part is not predicated on the demise of others, most notably those most directly and persistently subjugated by the state. And second, it follows that in expressing the right to exist one need not necessarily be committing to the right to exist in current political form or endorsing any other particular political form. One can pose it as the question concerning what state that existence should properly—justifiably—assume and work to actualize for all the state’s inhabitants in the state’s more extensive territorial reach. That was the strategy I sought to adopt in the book.
Similarly, Abu El-Haj partly misreads my remarks about suicide bombers in her nevertheless characteristically insightful critical analysis of motivations. We cannot know the motivations of the suicide bomber, she says, as they are multiple, varied, calculated and not simply, only or even ever (?) the irrational prompt of (mere) passion and anger. I take her compelling point that citizens have long been called upon to sacrifice—and sacrifice themselves, their very lives—for the sake of the nation. Countless conscriptions, wars and national service programmes attest to this. She is right, then, to read the suicide bomber in terms of considerations like social sacrifice and their implications.
So I agree that it makes most sense to comprehend suicide bombing in general as a ‘weapon of the weak’, both calculated in many ways and yet lashing out with invariably implosive political impact. And yet Abu El-Haj’s criticism that my characterization of suicide bombing is driven by emotive prompts such as passion, anger and frustration rests on the claim that my causal account is unidimensional. She chides me for assuming the very sort of irrationality so characteristic of Israeli representations of Palestinians. She may, however, be a touch too quick here. Emotionally prompted or even motivated responses preclude neither the assumption that suicide bombing is a militarized tactic of the weak nor that those so driven engage in careful rational deliberation. As Aristotle’s doctrine of practical reasoning makes clear, affective motivation readily and regularly initiates the calculations and ratiocinations leading from affect to action. Long influenced by Aristotle’s account of practical deliberation and praxis, it is precisely this account of practical reasoning I had in mind.
Racial neoliberalism
Finally, these considerations concerning the character of Israel’s oppressiveness draw into focus various critical remarks about my central line of argument regarding racial neoliberalism and its scope of application. There are two principal lines of analysis to which to respond here. The first concerns what the ‘racial’ specifically fuels regarding the condition of ‘racial neoliberalism’. The second concerns whether neoliberalism’s ‘erasure’ or ‘silencing’ of race is as characteristic as I am supposed to argue.
So, first, in modernity’s conflicted, often contradictory sociality, what exactly is it that the ‘racial’ in ‘racial neoliberalism’ makes possible? How exactly is the sort of endemic sadistic viciousness associated with strands of neoliberalism racially fuelled?
Drawing on Hannah Arendt, Susan Giroux usefully points out that ‘annihilation’—and one could generalize to viciousness towards others more broadly—depends on ‘forceful separation, partitioning and sequestration’, on what Arendt theorizes as ‘isolation’. The isolation is both material and conceptual, metaphoric, symbolic. People are set apart: in neighbourhoods, schools, recreation sites, in jobs and opportunities, in hospitals and cemeteries, across cities, regions, countries. But this material isolation, separation, partitioning and sequestration are predicated on notional divisions and distinctions, on setting people apart in conception, on the basis of pre-selected differences. And while modernity’s driving distinctions underpinning insidious differentiation have been varied, race has figured among the most prevailing, pernicious, persistent and destructively productive. Sadistic viciousness has been so readily a force of modern modes of governmentality precisely because, in significant part, the isolating distantiation race makes possible has been so forcefully a feature of its rulership.
The privatizing individualization central to the logic of contemporary neoliberalism adds a distinctive fold in this social fabric, as I argue in Threat. In shifting the force of explicit racial power from the formally public realm to the more racially slippery and evasive private one, the state can safely deny any racial predication while the legacy of material partitions, divisions and separations persist, now unmarked by formal racial distinction. And the radical individualization neoliberalism is committed to absolutizing extends racially materialized division, now circulated as private preference. The racially symbolic political attacks on Obama—monkey, Kenyan, Muslim, Indonesian, welfare thug, pimp, witchdoctor, liar, fascist (Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe), communist (Nelson Mandela), terrorist, dictator, corrupt etc.—evidences this shift to privatized racial dismissal. Free, at last, to be as code-word racist as individual preferences warrant, with sometimes deadly threat: threats to Obama have increased 400 fold over his predecessor, including a recent Facebook ‘poll’ asking ‘Would you like to see Obama killed’ and neighbourhood political posters in Arizona defaced with ‘Kill Obama’.
Use of racial codes—implicitly explicit, explicitly implicit—has proliferated with the privileging of individualized preference schemes. As racial reference largely has been purged from explicit governmental expression in favour of private individualized preference expression, privately expressed racist sentiment and sensibility have been protected even when ‘privately’ expressed by public political figures. Individuals committed to expressing racially predicated distinctions in coded terms of the sort witnessed with regard to Obama have found little restriction, if not outright encouragement. The ‘birther’ movement that would have Obama born in Kenya and consequently unqualified for the presidency because not conceivably ‘American’ (enough) has been egged on vocally by Republican members of Congress. Most would deny any racist intent or animus, even as they would hardly think to mobilize these claims against a white president, no matter how liberal. Berlusconi’s repeated references to Obama as ‘tanned’ suggest this racial coding is hardly limited to American sensibility and soil. Say what you want, so long as you are not speaking for the state.
Such coded terms, ambiguous or nebulous, make it more difficult to pin racist claims or commitments to those expressing them. The codes are the pass key to a social club predicated on racial commitment when its identification is made slippery, more or less impossible to label. At the extreme anything can be done in its name because it has no name in the name of which anything is done. The perfect ghostly presence passing through the social, the odourless poison polluting sociality, suffocating any possibility of a postracialism unmarked by its terms. A congressman blurting out ‘You lie!’ at President Obama before a nationally televised address to Congress vehemently denied that he harboured any racial animus (this from one promoting the Confederate flag as the state symbol of South Carolina). And yet one can’t help but wonder whether the President’s blackness disposed Joe Wilson to the sense of presidential corruption, and to the liberty to disrespect him so loudly and publicly, blurring public political representation into the expression of ‘private’ outrage.
The second line of critical consideration concerning neoliberalism takes up its impact in tamping down racially explicit state policies and programmes. Wade thinks I fail to recognize fully that contemporary mestizaje formations across Latin America have enabled the forging of ‘plebeian’ counters to ‘rejection of blackness or indigenousness and the pursuit of whiteness’. Such counters, Wade insists, while ambivalent, are not about ‘euro-mimesis’ but hold out the promise of ‘racial democracy’ predicated on unpredictable heterogeneity. Wade admits that this possibility exists side by side with the ‘exclusive and hierarchical’ determinations of mestizo formations I reference in the book. He nevertheless stresses the ways in which Latin American governments in the past half-decade or so have legally recognized claims—regarding land, university admission, employment anti-discrimination measures and the like—explicitly in the name and to the benefit of Blacks and the indigenous.
Embedded in Wade’s critique is a more general point addressed by others. Can neoliberalism be made to account for the disparate racial conditions across the sorts of regions I discuss in the book, or are the variations bound to undercut the scope of the more general claims I make regarding racial neoliberalism? Both Peter Wade and Kelly Gillespie in their respective contexts and historically thick regional formations point to critical counter-traditions prompted or enabled to some degree by racial expression or arrangement. Following Charles Hale, Wade calls this, in the Latin American cases, ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’; for Gillespie, it is more complexly tied to a resistant tradition of South African anti-apartheid and post-apartheid nonracialism. And Nadia Abu El-Haj also questions the applicability of neoliberal arrangement to the Palestinian Occupied Territories while conceding its force within the boundaries of Israel. For Wade, then, neoliberalism has led in Latin America not to the evaporation of racial reference but in some ways to its state emphasis in redressing historical inequities. For Gillespie, nonracialism is not so much the burying of unaddressed racisms as a serious effort to turn back their historical reach. And though the Israeli state today may be self-regardingly a neoliberal state, what, Abu El-Haj asks, ‘makes Israeli rule over its Palestinian subjects neoliberal?’ with regard to ‘its’ Occupied Territories.
Building on others, Wade insists that neoliberal multiculturalism reveals the contradictory modes of contemporary Latin American state-making that purges race from some elements of state management while stressing the necessity of programmatic address in others, like affirmative action or land redistribution programmes. Wade admits the impacts to date are limited. But he sees the multicultural—by which he seems to mean racially indexed—component as running partly counter to my argument that neoliberalism erodes state-based race-explicit programmes while making it more difficult to identify and address non-state or privatized expressions of racism.
Gillespie of course is right that a racially inflected commitment to national(ist) configuration pervades at least twentieth-century South African history, the thread sewing together dominant social self-conception across the pre-, high and post-apartheid moments. She reads even the Freedom Charter in the 1950s and the ANC post-apartheid embrace of its principal themes as committed to this vision of South Africa made up of racially constituted, more or less discrete national groupings (though I think both are somewhat more ambivalent on this question than Gillespie allows). Apartheid’s aftermath is still marked, if less assertively, by apartheid’s long conceptual reach. As Gillespie points out, South Africa has had a long tradition, even pre-dating official apartheid, of liberal pluralist race relations. More recently, racial secularization remains more than inflected by the theology of racial terms and conception, even while resisting it.11 Multiracialism, Gillespie concludes, is far more the dominant reality of South African history than the sort of nonracialism I insist on discussing critically as the commitment to which neoliberalism leads. Nonracialism accordingly appeared mainly in the tradition of the Unity Movement, serving more radically as a truly constitutional break from this dominant trajectory of raciality.
Even if, as I think, the resistance history of nonracialism in South Africa is more varied than Gillespie insists, she may be right that the tradition identified with the South African Unity Movement cannot be ‘folded into neoliberalism, or even liberalism’. Nevertheless, the sort of nonracialism and its tradition of radical political activism she wants admirably to keep alive cannot escape the taint of the presiding paradox of race: any effective critical response or resistance to racism must resort in some way to racial categories as an instrument of recognizability and a political tactic of antiracist address. Gillespie acknowledges this regarding the Unity Movement, which invoked race ‘as a short-term tactic’ in combatting racism. To fail to do so would disable recognition of racism for what it is. And yet, once invoked, this tends to reify the very terms that are the grounds for discriminatory injustice. No recognition without the terms; but the terms themselves reify raciality as a mark of the social, polluting the body politic, extending divisiveness, mistrust, exclusion. The one demand necessitates extension of the other, in both directions.
Important as it is to keep the tradition of radical nonracial political unitarianism alive in the South African context, as elsewhere, I’m afraid it doesn’t magically escape the paradox. The distinction Gillespie draws between tactic, strategy and principle with regard to invoking race is importantly useful, in this as in other applications. A principled nonracialism, as the Unity Movement rightly insisted, should do no more in deploying race than to turn to it as a decidedly short-term tactic, always qualified, always insistent that the terms of racial invocation—Black, White, Coloured, mestizaje etc.—should be foregone whenever possible in favour of less divisive, more critically incorporative, more deeply politically and materially mobilizing formations such as ‘the exploited’, ‘the precarious’, the ‘socially abandoned’. But also in favour of trans-categorical formations that encourage what Angela Davis has stressed as coalition politics. Neville Alexander’s suggestion, however, that racial categories such as ‘black’ and ‘white’ in the South African context should be replaced by the more inclusive one of ‘African’ highlights the trap of racially infused histories. ‘African’ resounds with racially charged history, identified overwhelmingly in racisms’ long historical imagination with debilitating racial resonance. As too does Wade’s all too casual recourse to ‘racial democracy’, which, in the Latin American context, as he would know as well as anyone, drips with histories of lopsided racially privileging presumption. The sour taste of race has a way of souring even the most transformative of instrumental and architectural efforts.
This latter point poses the issue more broadly. Any terms of social class that assume their reference in societies deeply marked by racial histories will more or less implicitly be marked by the bruise of racial significance. This is so not just for terms historically identified with racial geographies such as ‘African’, but for any class terms, whether traditional ones like ‘bourgeoisie’ or ‘proletariat’, or more recent variations such as ‘the precarious’, ‘the disposable’ or ‘the exploited’. One of Stuart Hall’s key lessons for us has been that class is the modality through which race or gender is inscribed and prescribed, race the modality through which class and gender likewise composed.12 The paradox of race within the historical formations of racially configured societies and orders is pretty much pervasive.
So I am not averse to deploying ‘different tradition(s) of nonracialism’. But no such tradition, so far as I can see, escapes the paradox because the paradox may be contemporarily inescapable. Obama’s postracialism is learning this with considerable pain to its project. The paradox is constitutive of racial conception and its materializations. Or, even more deeply, of social conception and ordering once race historically has taken hold of it. Like heart disease it leaves more or less undetected scar tissue in its wake, easily overlooked but once detected by the doctor sticking to the medical record like a pre-existing condition to insurability. While I am generally averse to invoking metaphors like ‘cancer’ or social illness to characterize racism—they often obscure as much as they reveal—the case of cancer is revelatory in at least this regard: one never is quite sure that a cure catches all or whether things are just lying in remission, socially suppressed for the moment but breaking out when least expected. The metaphor of disease, more broadly, at least draws attention to the dis-ease racial categories pretty much invariably conjure in social circumstances of consequence.
The most effective response may be to deploy race mindful of the distinction between tactic, strategy and principle Gillespie usefully elaborates. But a merely tactical invocation places one squarely at risk of racial reification, if not as constitutively or inescapably as strategic or principled exercises of racial politics, nevertheless beguilingly so. The paradox is persistent in an extended sense: invoke the terms tactically and risk the reification; refuse its invocation and the conditions the terms reference remain unaddressed, festering and possibly replicating.
The debate over racial tactics itself prompts possible extension of the debilities with which racial reference is associated, however minimally. As Neville Alexander puts it, in one of the quotes Gillespie cites, Xhosa should sometimes be left to speak alone, in their own vernacular, cursing Whites if they want, dreaming about chasing them into the sea. Even as a vanguard party seeks to educate them about the impolitic implications. There may indeed be no other way, but romancing the stone certainly is no guarantee that the terms tactically invoked and the sentiments to which they invariably attach don’t linger. That’s what the vernacular will do. A pragmatics of a racially invocative antiracism especially in the face of official denial of state racialities is all a progressive politics has to work with. Recognize the paradox ever mindful of critically addressing its frames of reference and implications.
Sometimes this will mean standing inside, embracing, turning inside out the terms of debilitation, as Frantz Fanon has shown. At other times it will entail explicitly rejecting the terms of reference as much as the associated sentiments. The difficulty, of course, is that satire can devolve into parody, irony into farce. In hewing closely to the terms being called into question, parody and farce can quickly cement in place those very terms and their social conditions of referentiality that are being held up to humour. The ambiguity in the notion of ‘humour’ itself should give pause here.
Gillespie calls in her conclusion neither for denial nor embrace regarding race. She appeals, rather, for articulating ‘a set of future-oriented principles that allow for radical experimentation in the present, that reject the often compromising terms of presentism’. This was exactly the sort of engagement I was floating in reflecting on racial irrelevance. Steve Biko pointed to an endpoint of ‘a true humanity’, what Fanon called ‘humanism’ in stark contrast with ‘racialization’. This would be unachievable through a nonracialism leaving untouched the historically engendered structural relations of power racially inscribed across all dimensions, whether political, economic, legal, cultural, interpersonal, psychic, gendered. For Biko, racial liberalism and, on my argument by extension, racial neoliberalism fail by design to take on these structural relations of power for which racial arrangements of the kind I discuss in the book stand. Quite the contrary, they extend them by rendering them less identifiable and visible, more slippery, less tangible.
That said, Abu El-Haj’s question to which I responded earlier regarding my supposed neoliberalizing of the Israeli occupation becomes especially pressing. That response reveals something more general also regarding the criticisms advanced by Wade and Gillespie. Each is right to insist on the regionally contextualized specificities with which they are concerned. But that too was the point of my discussing specific racial regionalizations in the book. My mode was not to assume the applicability of racial neoliberalism and then to find it no matter the regional distinctions. Rather, it was to pursue the regional specificities and their relations and relational prompts in each instance so as to consider, in the book’s closing chapter, whether it would be possible to draw an abstractly common logic from the generalizations across the differences. Both South Africa and many Latin American states continue today to use historically racial categories to redress the legacy of social racisms. Israel continues to deny assertively it ever discriminated in the past in ways it would necessitate to redress by invoking the terms of race now. Yet, as Wade concedes regarding Latin America, the scope of racially indexed redress is delimited and the effects marginal, the assertive rhetoric of complaint notwithstanding. The stress on mixture, of an unremarkable blurring of racial distinction and division remains the dominant commitment.
As I emphasize, however, racial mixture is only one of two dominant strands of contemporary racial neoliberalism. So I nowhere claim that, with regard to the Occupied Territories, Israel of late—or ever—has made anything of personal preference in housing or educational discrimination. The trajectory of my argument should make clear that I concur Israel has always been about racial domination in the name of racial denial, only that now the racial denial is insistent, explicit, even furious. No ambivalence here. There no doubt are considerable connections of continuity from Israel’s founding to its current condition. These structural relations of racially fashioned, fuelled and facilitating power are amply exemplified in the case of Israel and ‘its’ Occupied Territories, as Abu El-Haj reminds us. Yet this does not undercut the shifts I have sought to identify in the name of neoliberalism. I still want to insist that since the 1980s the emphatic, persistent and pretty much uninterrupted necropolitical violence Israel has unleashed regarding Palestinians fully represents the second strand of neoliberal racial governmentality. Where mixture is seen to fail—or more strongly is insistently made to fail, repeatedly—violence is the recourse, if not the default position of state racial order. Israel, I argue, is the poster child of this position. So neoliberalism racially advanced involves not the diminishing of state force but at least in part its shifting of resources and priorities to support repressive modes of state rule.
Racial neoliberalism, in short, keeps race socially alive where its explicit expression and social force have been displaced from the formal regulation of governmental rule. Where the sociality of racial mixture fails to maintain the status quo of more or less sustained white privilege, racial neoliberalism extends voice to the consequent social hypochondria and the privatization of responsive violence. Racial neoliberalism represents resistance to states seen to be insufficiently protective or restorative of lost privilege, to those now supposedly representing the interests of the once racially dispossessed, or to those (failed or rogue or aspiring) states insufficiently deferential to racially dominant state orders.
In closing, then, it remains to say that there is no more authors can ask for than to have their work read carefully, the ideas taken seriously and struggled with rigorously. Even—perhaps especially—where it makes evident critical disagreements, shortcomings, oversights and over-reaching. To be granted the gift of five such engaged critical readings is far more than I could have hoped. So I want to thank warmly Nadia Abu El-Haj, Kelly Gillespie, Susan Giroux, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Peter Wade for their time, effort and, above all, for the thoughtfulness, insight and seriousness they have each extended the arguments in the book.
This article appeared in the Feburary 2010 issue of Patters of Prejudice.
Sade's revenge: racial neoliberalism and the sovereignty of negation
Susan Searls Giroux
Racial palestinianization and the Janus-faced nature of the Israeli state
Nadia Abu El-Haj
The presence and absence of race
Peter Wade
Reclaiming nonracialism: reading The Threat of Race from South Africa
Kelly Gillespie
The time and space of race: reflections on David Theo Goldberg's interrelational and comparative methodology
Nelson Maldonado-Torres
Call and response
David Theo Goldberg
Notes
1 See David Theo Goldberg, ‘In/visibility and super/vision: Fanon on race, veils, and the discourses of resistance’, in Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renée T. White (eds), Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1996), 179–200.
2 David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neolberalism (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 269.
3 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2002).
4 George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2002).
5 David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell 1993), ch. 5.
6 Mark Williams quoted in Nicholas Graham, ‘“Tea Party” leader melts down on CNN: “Obama is an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug’, Huffington Post (online), 15 September 2009, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/15/tea-party-leader-melts-do_n_286933.html (viewed 16 November 2009).
7 On his radio show on 15 September 2009, Rush Limbaugh was railing against Obama at the same moment as introducing a sociality in which black kids literally were laughing while watching ‘their kin’ beating up white kids.
8 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso 2007).
9 A conversation with Diren Valayden helped me to clarify this point in my own thinking.
10 Brian Klug, ‘Was es bedeutet zu sagen, Israel habe ein Existenzrecht’, in Sophia Deeg and Hermann Dierkes (eds), Bedingungslos für Israel? nur bedingt für Menschen- und Völkerrecht? Positionen und Aktionen jenseits deutscher Befindlichkeiten (Cologne: Neuer ISP Verlag 2010)
11 Goldberg, The Threat of Race, chs 8, 9.
12 Stuart Hall, ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance’, in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO 1980), 305–45.
Monday, January 5, 2009FINAL DEATH-BLOW TO THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION? by David Theo Goldberg
Posted by GSR in 2 comment(s)If anyone really thought the two-state solution for Israel-Palestine was a viable one, the logic underscoring the ongoing devastation in Gaza should put that to rest. Every missile fired and rocket launched, every mounting death and destroyed home or business, mosque, school, or (potentially) hospital, is a blow to a corpse already rotting. The idea is being buried along with the dead.
What is taking place in Gaza today is less about security than it is a political calculus concerning pending Israeli elections. It is certainly not about safety—more Israelis have been killed by rockets since the bombing began than in the past year; and Israeli rocket deaths in the past week have made up more than a quarter of such deaths since Hamas began the practice of launching home made rockets into southern Israel.
This is not the first time local electoral politics have dictated military action. If the ground invasion Israel launched today into Gaza manages to wipe away rocket launching facilities, they will only be replaced, once again, by suicide missions. Hamas has already dialed up that response. Indeed, such logics and counter-logics have become predictable staples of domestic politics in Israel.
The Gaza attacks today are about redemption and reaffirmation. But redemption and reaffirmation purchased with the deadly coin of repression. Redemption in the Israeli electorate’s eyes for the failures of Gaza. Reaffirmation for the Israeli public of its sense of power in the region, tarnished so badly by the failures in Lebanon. Israeli politics, once more, are being played out over the lives and deaths of Palestinians. Sharon’s shadow continues to fall far across the landscape.
Debates, such as they are, about a two-state solution are a distraction. Israel has given no indication beyond soft rhetoric that it has any intention (ever?) of enabling a viable, sovereign, economically and politically independent Palestinian state, centered either in the West Bank or Gaza, hostile or peaceful. Landlocked, the West Bank would have to depend either on foreign countries (including Israel) or on an increasingly distant Gaza for its lifeline to a world beyond Israeli constraint. The legacy of relying on foreign countries, of course, is one of dependence and economic control, not self-determination and political viability.
Neither Gaza nor the West Bank now has the viable infrastructure of a sovereign state: no international airport or working port of its own, no viable rail system, no economic base on which to build. No highway grid that is not completely controlled by Israel. Gaza has a coastline on one side useful only to the Israeli navy to launch sea assaults. All of the territories’ natural assets above or below ground (land, water, air) Israel does or can command—open or close, confiscate or even destroy--at whim. Institutions, whether governing or administrative buildings, schools and colleges, even hospitals become strategic targets of Israeli repression and control as soon as they exhibit any political or indeed self-sustaining economic promise.
One could go further. There is no viable sovereign state one can point to in recent history that has emerged from, has survived and sustained itself, between two land masses set apart by a more powerful sovereign state between it that has been hostile from the outset to its very existence. And the hostility of which has been predicated on seeing their respective peoples as constitutively, constitutionally—which is also to say, racially—distinct.
Israel has been a racial state from the moment it appeared as a gleam in the eye of its principal dreamers. Herzl used the language of race explicitly, and not just because it was the coinage of the day. The very terms of racial logic were built into his argument, as they have been explicitly or implicitly into many of Israel’s leaders and protagonists since (for an elaboration of the argument, see Chapter Four of The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)).
There have been concerns about the current round of devastation expressed—by the UN and EU, by the US government and the like—but mainstream outrage at the carnage has been muted at most. Once again petitions and public expressions of condemnation have begun to circulate, though important as they are it remains unclear what larger effect, immediate or longer term, they might have. We are certainly far from anything like a global anti-apartheid movement.
For every Israeli citizen killed, there have now been more than 100 Gazans and mounting daily, a quarter of whom have been non-militant civilians on conservative UN counts. Where the unqualified condemnation by political leaders of the repression, of the ongoing restrictions and violations of the most basic of human rights that Israel continues daily to conduct?
It is amazing the slippage from outright rejection expressed not so long ago of “an eye for any eye” as a viable moral calculus (and still circulated when it comes to some other parts of the world) to pretty much wanton silence when the Israeli state so blatantly and repeatedly violates even that maxim. Sarkozy has been about the only at least Western state head to date to call Israeli reaction to the rocket attacks “disproportionate.”
Many of us have been buoyed in many ways by Barack Obama's election. His administration promises a vast improvement in general over the past eight years. Yet it remains dismaying that he has proved so far reticent to condemn or at least admonish Israel even while justifiably critical of Hamas. That he is on record as saying that if his daughters were threatened by rocket attacks he too would want to strike back gives pause at the one-sidedness of the comprehension: if it's okay for one side to retaliate to threat of possible death surely the weight of Palestinian suffering under Israeli destruction meets the measure many times over.
And yet that logic on both sides leads only to the incessant carnage we now witness.
Israel’s onslaught in Gaza is far worse than it was in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, as bad as that was. Lebanon is a sovereign country. During the attacks targeted people in the south could move, even out of the target zones. They were much more dispersed. Those engaged in resistance to Lebanon’s invasion were better equipped, probably better trained, certainly better nourished, and knowing the landscape better than the invaders.
Gaza lacks any political power certainly with respect to the world beyond its fences, and besides appealing morally to the conscience of that world. People cannot move, they are concentrated, with relatively few resources, much easier hits by overhead aggression in a space lacking any anti-aircraft defense.
The dissembling rationalizations of Israeli government spokespeople mimic the Bush administration’s wanton distortions of the Iraqi invasion. Our war is not with the Palestinian people but with the Hamas terrorists. We do not target civilians but Hamas places its military operations in the midst of populous cities, using civilians as human shields. We have opened crossings into Gaza allowing convoys of food and medicine to reach civilians. How humane. As an ambulance tending to the wounded is bombed, schools and colleges considered rocket factories blown up, Gaza residents reduced to one meal of bread and basics a day, to digging tunnels to smuggle in basic goods from Egypt. More truthfully, the Israeli Defense Minister declared at the outset, “This is our shock and awe.” We all know what came of that logic in Iraq.
Gaza, in short, is a prison camp, a holding pen, a concentration camp. What, exactly, are the significant differences from the Warsaw Ghetto at the time of its encirclement, besides the identity of its residents (see David Lloyd’s “Gaza and the Ghetto” http://www.racewire.org/archives/2009/01/why_gaza_matters_to_us_1.html)? Gaza is not a colony, not a separate state, but a racially predicated object of repressive administration, of racial governmentality.
The current decimation of Gaza, then, needs to be understood not simply as another one-time intervention as Israeli elections approach, but as part of a longer, ongoing strategy to make impossible the emergence of a Palestinian state, now or perhaps ever. Hamas, born a pawn of Israeli politics, has become a partner of sorts in this end-game, caught up as much in this (il)logic of impossibility as it traps the population it was elected to represent in repeated cycles of devastation. Fatah, seeming to outgrow that logic at least for the moment, now seems equally caught in the illusion of the two-state solution.
As many have pointed out, there is--there has to be--at least another way not predicated on violence and counter-violence, not on the right of might but the power of right(s).
So, looking forward, are we talking in the case of Israel-Palestine—of its prospects politically, economically, culturally, constitutionally (I pointedly use the singular here)—of a the possibility, the horizon, of a single cohering state, or of two or three racial states? I am suggesting that the two-state conception on the ground has splintered almost inevitably into the three-state one, in the ceaseless spiral of divide and conquer, destroy and control. The two-state solution is a pipe dream exploded every so often beneath the logics of bombs and bombast, rockets and retaliation, repression and resistance. They give rise to nothing but grief and grievance for all on both sides of the manufactured divide.
What is left is a choice—if the freedom to choose is even a possibility here—between three states and one: On one side, Israel, the Fatah West Bank, the Hamas Gaza, the very distinctions ethnoracially and religiously predicated, endlessly divided and divisive, destructive and dashing dreams. If Gaza is a concentration camp, the West Bank is more akin to a repressive colony, settlers and all. On the other side of choice is to be found a single state, predicated on human engagement with each other, messy to be sure, fraught at least at the outset. But with a chance for each and all to participate fully beyond ethnoracial identification and repression(and yes, the same argument would apply elsewhere).
Another pipe dream, castles in the desert sand? Perhaps. Yet this is a hope, in a time hope has been rekindled as a strategy for political mobilization, far better than the bankruptcy of bombs, bombast, endless burials, and the advancement of ethnoracially profiled prospects for some built on the bitterness of futile futures for the rest.
A single state for Israelis and Palestinians may be the idea that now needs serious collective consideration, the hope and horizon to reach for.
A COUNTRY FORMERLY KNOWN AS AFRICA By David Theo Goldberg
Posted by GSR in 3 comment(s)In preparing for one of her infamous interviews during the US presidential campaign, Sarah Palin apparently revealed that she thought Africa a country. To be fair, she couldn’t name the countries in North America either (Alaska? Russia?), nor—perhaps more happily—those covered by NAFTA (New Mexico? California?). She is reported to have asked her handlers whether South Africa was a region of the country of Africa.
This supposedly quirky and idiosyncratic ignorance of a small-minded candidate, nominated for high office pretty much overwhelmingly for political expediency, nevertheless reveals something larger about a range of tensions in the political fabric of America.
As Barack Obama’s momentous electoral triumph became evident on Tuesday evening, the world—not just America but most anyone paying attention almost anywhere—broke into spontaneous celebration. From the sprawling throngs of supporters and well-wishers in Grant Park, Chicago (site just 40 years ago of a dramatically different if not altogether unrelated kind of democratic undoing) to the country’s other mega-cities, coast-to coast. Time Square to Union Square, Rockies to Gulf, Minneapolis to New Orleans. From his father’s homeland of Kenya to Africa’s Little America in Liberia or oil-rich Nigeria, from de-colonized Cape Town to Cairo. From the cities flung clear across Europe to the Far East, Brazil to Beijing and Shanghai to Sydney; from the Middle East to Manila, India to the West Indies.
These spontaneous celebrations in witnessing a world-historical event--the closing of the Civil Rights circle, the rewriting of the book on American slavery, Martin Luther King’s dream no longer fully deferred--were as much collective sigh of relief as victory celebration. The world had been waiting to exhale—from eight excrutiatingly endless years of arrogance and incompetence, a politics of make believe and compulsion, raw aggression and naked power, self-regarding faith and imperializing politics, visions and hubris. The celebrations, tears of joy and apprehension, in city parks and town squares wherever thinking people sought to gather, was as much then a response to bringing closure on the Bush world as it was joy at Obama’s ascension. It was, in short, a moment of pure catharsis.
Considered against this backdrop, there was a striking contrast between the 250,000 swelling crowd sprawled across Grant Park into the streets of downtown Chicago and the barely 3,000 despondent invite-only die-hards at John McCain’s concession gathering at the famous Biltmore in Phoenix, Arizona. This contrast reveals something much more significant about the world represented by McCain-Palin and that projected by the Obama vision.
Like the crowds that came to McCain-Palin rallies, the somber gathering at the toney Biltmore, built by Frank Lloyd Wright to service America’s social elite seeking relief from the depths of frozen winters, was overwhelmingly white. Indeed blond. Nary a face of color to be found beneath the wintry suntans and plastic surgeries. The likes of Joe the Plumber, who on a usual day might be found on the hotel grounds only fixing pipes after 120 degree days or frosty nights, was scarce to be seen.
Grant Park, by contrast, had faces hailing from every continent, arms linked together, flesh pressed hard against each other, tears and face-splitting smiles not even waiting to take turns. This was hybrid America true to its historical making, Obama’s “mutt” make-up rocking to the groove in the public square. Poor and rich, black and white and brown and every conceivable shade of color betwixt, between, and beyond. Matched in Times Square and Santa Monica, Trafalgar Square and a town hall in Japan’s Obama, Cairo and Kenya, Ramallah and Tel Aviv, even Bagram and Baghdad.
The broader message was palpable. America is the world writ small, the global America writ large. Plato’s resonance across the ages. Not exceptional, above. But one of. A part, not apart. Heterogeneous and messy, engaged and interactive, example not exceptional. The culture of Rambo and the Terminator, torture and terror, is on notice. The pull of the metro outrunning the retro (Obama prevailed in states home to 11 of America’s 15 largest cities). Mutts of the world unite.
The country formerly known as Africa, birthplace of the human even for those who still insist on origins reduced to Adam’s throbbing rib. Even the humanity of those too caught up in their own little worlds to know that “Adam’s rib” was really birthed in real time elsewhere. If Palin’s impetuousness is born of this ignorance, Obama’s wisdom and sober judgment are his inheritance from this long-boiling hybrid cauldron of human strife and suffering.
“I am a redneck and proud of it,” Palin reiterated at repeated election stops, fueling frothing Rambo wannabes in too tall Stetsons desperate to contain their Hooters horniness before her Neiman Marcus sexiness. Talking of his campaign, by contrast, Obama’s subtle self-deprecation appreciated that “It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generations apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth.” (Obama Election Night Speech)
A different kind of coalition politics than the forcefully coerced one “of the willing.” This a coalition represented by the patchwork quilt in Grant Park, all corners of the world, those as much used to the kitchen as the board room, the shop floor as the hard wood floor. Thirteen percent more women voted for Obama as for McCain, even as men were fairly evenly split between them. And those younger than 30 voted for him almost 2-1.
That a black man could get elected President by appealing to such a broadbrush coalition has led the tired old colorblinders to push once again for a completely individualized color-blind polity. The Thernstroms, for instance, immediately called for an end to “racial gerrymandering” of political districts, reading Obama’s success as a mandate for “color-blind voting.” (“Racial Gerrymandering is Unnecessary,” Wall Street Journal). This reduces racial registers once again to the surface of individualized preference schemes, belittling the enormous supererogatory effort necessitated by black candidates facing political, educational, or employment considerations, and reduces the value added of coalitional political organizing to hyper-individualized political instrumentality. This election gave the lie to that latter mode too.
Philomena Essed quipped to me a week or two before this momentous election that black men historically have always been called to clean up after the mess-making of white men, of The Man, just as women still get to clean up on a daily basis. Women, it could be said of this historical moment, came to make common cause with black folk. And a little revolution—quiet, bloodless, dignified, digitally and socially networked—was afoot.
If Bill Clinton could lay some claim to being America’s first black President, then celebration of Obama’s election most everywhere around the world in a sense, perhaps metaphorical, has marked him as the first global president. Not in an imperial or messianic sense, as Judith Butler has perhaps justifiably worried about, but aspirationally. (“Uncritical Exuberance?”) He is one who, looked to for leadership, has a mandate to bring together dispirited and fractured worlds, to rally the conflicted to reach accord, the downtrodden and the over-compensated to the realization that we inhabit common ground, the condition of one causally connected to that of the other. The Effective Facilitator. Not the Great Dictator, as Republican congressmen repeatedly kvetch about. (Georgia Congresswoman Warns of Obama Dictatorship) Effective facilitation entails getting principals to find ways to act together, for each others’ sake, and not just instrumentally, self-interestedly. That’s the sense of sacrifice to which Obama continuously alludes. A great weight to be borne, to be sure, but an opportunity to help re-make inhabited worlds in more appealing, less dispirited, divisive, more aspiring ways.
Barack Obama’s comfort, if he has any facing these trying times, is to know that the goodwill and support he has earned globally and locally are as much resource as comfort, as much generative fuel as support base in setting out and seeking to institute an appealing agenda genuinely and expansively speaking—reaching--to collective wellbeing.
That’s the difference us mutts of the world are counting on.
Irvine, California
November 2008
PRESIDENTIAL RACE by David Theo Goldberg
Posted by GSR in Essays 5 comment(s)Barack Obama’s candidacy for the American Presidency has proved that racism in America is pretty much a thing of the past. Whether or not he wins, a black man has broken the barrier of racism in American politics. His candidacy has proven how inconsequential racism has become in a land long scarred by it. If a black man can rise to the nation’s highest office and can occupy the most powerful position in the world, racism can be no more than the sometime pernicious, occasionally violent but decidedly intermittent expressions of misguided individuals. The deep commitment to freedom of expression means that the country will just have to put up with these anomalies. It is the price to be paid for America’s unstinting commitment to liberty.
Or so mainstream political pundits would have it. And perhaps America’s Main Street too.
Underpinning this position is the presumption, sometimes a charge, that any invocation of race is wrong. Whether to signal differentiated experiences, to explain pernicious treatment, or to indicate unfair burdens borne, invoking race is considered a wrong worse than the experiences, treatment, or burdens themselves. Expression, it seems, is free so long as hewing to the prescribed script. Some, it turns out, are freer than others. And that freedom still very much tracks racially.
To keep insisting that Obama introduced race into the presidential campaign by saying he doesn’t look like past presidents on America’s paper currency is to keep introjecting race into the campaign. It is to keep reminding the electorate that Barack Obama is black, “not like us,” different than “we” are used to, a “risky choice.” And to do so in the guise of insisting that in this polity one should not now publicly speak of race by naming it; race can only be spoken for the most part by indirection. That Obama is black introduces race into the campaign; which is another way of saying that in America a serious black presidential contender still inevitably makes race a factor. Just as an all-white field would but only silently, without mentioning it, making it a non-thought.
Why should this surprise? One of George W. Bush’s Republican Convention Committees had three joint honorary chairs, each representing America’s major minorities (blacks, Hispanics, women). This at a party convention the racial minority delegates for which comprised less than 5 percent of the total. The point, of course, was to attract “target of opportunity” votes. For a polity in which race and gender are to make no preferential distinction, they clearly have remained compelling variables in the political calculus. It may be illegitimate to name race; but the denial is at once to re-affirm its tentacled hold. Perhaps the very point of the persistent denial.
In a neoliberal political economy fueled by insistent and far-reaching privatizations, radically deregulated financial practices, and their attendant individualizations—of property, of services, and indeed of permissible pernicious expression—explicit racial invocation in the public sphere or related to governmental practice is beyond the pale, impermissible. Freedom of expression protects private use of racial differentiation so long as no government purpose, interest, or resources are in play. It’s not that racial registers are ended, as a consequence, whether segregated housing or differential hiring practices, race-coded data collection or plain old epithets, provided they are outside of governmental reach as either fiscal or regulatory determinants. The Threat of Race spells out this logic and its implications in considerable detail.
In the public sphere, it has followed, code words have come to rule, even as invoking race explicitly itself has been rendered as charged as racism, has come to be the prevailing condemnation of racism on the part of a conservative polity. It has become increasingly commonplace for whites to complain of victimization as much a consequence of affirmative action policies as of black crime and violence, or of high taxes to support welfare for the supposedly idle far more readily identified with people of color than with whites.
Consistent with this neoliberal disposition to racial denial and white claims to victimization, the McCain campaign has sought at every opportunity to adopt the stance of racial victim. And with the persistent, careful, and paternalistic—dare one say patriarchal—management of the Palin annunciation to the Vice-Presidential ticket, of sexist victimization also. Anyone, it turns out, can suffer racism and sexism, even the racially powerful, even white male senators running for the pinnacle of power. Standpoint epistemology reduces here to relativized victimhood. Claiming the position establishes the fact so long as one had the standing, the authority to claim in the first place. And standing, like authority, has been racially grounded as long as the socio-logics of race have been at work.
In fact, the present political season seems to have redrawn the map concerning racism and sexism. If the former is largely under control, the heated rhetoric of the campaign season seems to imply, sexism, the glass ceiling, and the social and economic burdens women bear remain huge hurdles. Saying anything critical of a well-placed, ambitious woman, this suggests, is to say something, well, off-color. Saying anything about a black man, by contrast, is fine so long as you don’t mention that he is black. Even while you wink or blink at it.
So the question that seems to circulate repetitiously is whether America is ready for a black President. The analogous question raised about whether a woman—this woman--is ready to be Commander-in-Chief no doubt would be deemed sexist. Note that the question about America’s openness on the face of it is about national disposition while that about Commander-in-Chief is about an individual’s preparedness. And yet their reception, they way the questions are read, is inverted: The issue of national disposition is quickly taken up as one of racially qualified preparedness on the part of the candidate; the issue of individual qualification devolves into a critical comment about gendered capacity. This, of course, is not to say that racism in the presidential primaries and campaign has been worse than the sexism; both have been abundant. It is, rather, to question the manipulative logic of their interaction.
If there is an answer to the question about whether Americans are ready for Barack Obama to lead them, it may seem from the polls (misleading as polls can be) that they are about half-ready. Which is to say about half are really open to it, or don’t give a damn about the barely hidden issue, and something approaching half the electorate are not.
Perhaps many of those who are not will say it is not about his race. That in part may be true; it is very hard to disarticulate. But during the primaries almost one-fifth of white voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia admitted race was a factor in their vote choice, and they were not opting for Obama (of course, one could reverse the argument regarding the African-American vote, as Obama himself has noted). The numbers are notoriously under-counted, given the reticence of voters these days to admit openly to racial preference.
A study conducted by Stanford University researchers for the Associated Press and Yahoo, just released, bears out how deep-seated these racial registers remain. (http://news.yahoo.com/page/election-2008-political-pulse-obama-race) The study is perhaps more reliable than most. Respondents were questioned on computers rather than face-to-face, a method the anonymity of which has a history of more likely eliciting accurate expressions of people’s views on sensitive subjects.
More than half the whites polled registered harsher senses of blacks than they did of whites. While 50 percent of white respondents at least sometimes have had sympathy for blacks, nearly half had never or rarely. Similarly, more than 30 percent of white respondents have never or rarely admired blacks. Nearly half the respondents characterized blacks as at least moderately violent, and 38 percent as lazy. (A pdf fie of the raw data from the Stanford study is included here.)
Lest one think that generally stated racial prejudice does not necessarily translate into bias against a particular person, the study also revealed that 47 percent characterized Obama as “inexperienced” while just 4 percent did McCain, 17 percent as “un-American” and just 2 percent did McCain, and only 29 percent “patriotic” while 61 percent did McCain. Just under 20 percent consider Obama’s religion “a reason not to vote for him,” perhaps a less surprising if still deeply disturbing fact considering that 14 percent still think he is a Muslim.
Statistical extrapolations from the data suggest that Obama’s support in the presidential election would be approximately 6 percent higher than any poll reveals but for white bias against blacks. The numbers hold even for registered Democrats. Similarly, Andrew Hacker projects that the “Bradley gap” or “the political price of being black” expressing the difference between those who say they will vote for a candidate and those who, because of race, actually will not, in Obama’s case is 7 percent (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21771). Anyone who still thinks race no longer signals privilege or handicap remains the proverbial ostrich.
John McCain brushed off a question about how he feels that a perhaps not inconsiderable number will vote for him because he is the white candidate by “rejecting the premise.” Resorting to the rationalization that there are a few bigoted outliers and there’s not much to do about them, he added (not very articulately) that there will always be “a small minority of every kind of opinions and views.” Which in the absence of an explicit rejection is to convey that he is quite at ease with receiving their vote.
Many not open to Obama may be better disposed to “the right” black man, to a “better” black candidate, just not one who seems not quite black enough but still too black; who may be Muslim even when he’s not (as though this too should matter as it does in a Christian country that supposedly doesn’t concern itself politically with religion); who is too elitist even when he grew up in modest circumstances and started as a community activist and his opponent is many times wealthier and out of touch with everyday working lives than he; who, as Brent Staples has pointed out, has in every public pronouncement painfully to choose his words especially carefully so as not to emphasize his blackness; who supposedly lacks experience even as his record oozes it and where experience seems in some to prompt corruption or flip-flopping or outright lies; and whose name is an anagram for Ackbar. Clearly not one of US.
At the Values Voter Summit in September, underwritten by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group, two well-known crusader-provocateurs were selling boxes of waffle mix adorned by a bug-eyed Aunt Jemima image of Obama. The top flap of the box featured Obama in a turban, accompanied by the slogan, “Point box towards Mecca for tastier waffles,” slighting in the process not just a presidential candidate but one-fifth of the world’s population too. The “collector’s item” was selling for $10 a box, appealing to the collector’s sensibility and testament to the entrepreneurial spirit (http://www.alternet.org/rights/98908/?page=entire). No race here? It has simply been suppressed from explicit public elevation into the untouchable realms of privately circulated expression and public innuendo.
Obama’s positions on key issues are now well known following eighteen months of scrutiny, three national addresses, more national television dates than anyone but the media cares for, a heavily publicized trip abroad, and daily press overage. And yet following just two weeks of national attention, just one national interview and a hands-off policy by her campaign handlers, America has been ready to declare Sarah Palin “one of us,” as John Ridley smartly put it in his blog, in a way Obama’s strangeness never could be.
What else could explain this difference, could explain the repeated insistence among whites interviewed that Obama plans to raise taxes on the middle class when he expressly plans to do just the opposite while Sarah Palin’s views are considered to be known with certitude even as she has repeatedly lied about almost every key commitment she has held and, like her boss, both lied about the lies and refuses to give any details on those commitments she has left open to doubt. The Pinocchio Pair. Or could explain that within a day of the political conventions, considered by the press to have made little difference in substance to persuading people one way or another, white men in particular (at least initially) were flocking to the Palin-McCain ticket? Nothing to do with the fact that the pale one is a good-looking, gun-toting, ass-kicking white woman, now could it? (Apply the same characterizations to a black woman and what do you get? A welfare queen? Jackie Brown? A radical? A revolutionary?)
A person with property is one with properties, with qualities. McCain is a man of his word even when he is blatantly bending the truth like Beckham’s penalty kick, a man so propertied he knows not which are his, a man of the property to forget everything but his formative experience in a foreign prison for a crime supposedly not of his own making (invading an alien country, a country full of threatening aliens). A prison which made of its surviving prisons men, unlike contemporary American prisons which breed violence, dependence, recidivism. A prison that reinforced his hitherto godless Christian faith, even if his narrative of resurrection was apparently lifted from Solzhenitsyn.
Obama, by contrast, has “weaknesses,” lacking the properties of powerful strength, of manly courage, of soldierly honor (even if McCain cannot define honor, all that counts is that he knows it when he sees it, and he sees it not in his opponent). He lacks experience, the capacity to lead, owns property only with the help of an indicted fraudster (in contrast with an heiress wife), has a half-brother living in a hut in a foreign place called Kenya (as opposed to a couple of denied siblings-in-law, both Democrats, living modestly while at least half or so of his thirteen properties and cars go unused). A man lacking quality.
Whites, white men especially, seem to trust Palin even as she misrepresents every one of her accomplishments or misdeeds. They find her authentically like them because she apparently is one of them. She even makes McCain more appealing, more one of the boys, a member of middle America. No matter that Palin holds views more extreme than most, and indeed than McCain himself, that the facts belie her rhetoric on every register: on taxing and spending, on deficits, on hiring and firing, on her national and international experience, on her governing achievements and their lack, on her claimed reforms and their apparent strong-arm, business-as-usual (ine)quality. And that election of the McCain-Palin ticket would result in justices so extreme that a woman’s right to choose would be in jeopardy, that deregulated financial markets at the heart of the current fiscal crisis would be extended if not enlarged, that executive power would remain as opaque as it has been the past eight years, that deficits would spiral (if her legacy in other offices is anything to go by), that America’s international reputation would continue to spiral downwards.
Palin, the colorfully pale one makes it possible for those who cannot bring themselves to vote for a black man not to. Even though it may be in their best political and economic and national interests to do so. While making it appear that they are not doing so on racial grounds. That they are doing so on any grounds but racial ones. That Palin was deemed instantaneously believable is deeply connected to the recognition of her national kinship; that Obama has struggled among many whites to register as credible is as deeply connected to the fact that he is not similarly recognized.
If the legacy of affirmative action is anything to go by, white women fare far better than black men in hiring, admissions to college, income scale, and promotions. In politics too, if levels of representation are the index. In the US, those in positions of power to effect hiring, admissions, promotions, and political access tend overwhelmingly to be white men. White men tend to be more at ease with those they take to be more like them racially than unlike them on traditionally gendered considerations. Familiarity is more often than not a function of imagined familiality. And familiality of a supposed familiarity that has deep if unstated racial resonances, that in short is racially indexed. These senses of familiarity and familiality may follow from feeling that they can exercise control more effectively, or that they relate better because women tend to look or act or emote more like the partners they tend to have.
A man of considerable dignity (even when resorting to his Chicago street cred politically honed instincts), Obama too has aspired, perhaps understandably, to reach--to be--“beyond race.” Only to be drawn rudely back, pushed and pulled from both ends into racial identification. “You are a black man, don’t go forgetting that now. No matter your white mother.” One drop, all it takes. The fist bump. Basketball, not once but twice a day. Sex education before your kids can read (must be in the genes). McCain’s most pernicious TV commercials invariably include images of an especially leering, sneering, menacing Obama, sometimes consorting with other black fraudsters, subtly coded reminders of Willie Brown and Jesse Jackson, if not also more disparagingly of Willie Horton and O.J. Simpson. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/19/itimei-new-mccain-attack_n_127670.html) Britney and Paris, America’s wayward daughters, beware.
Mixture, I argue in the book, is a principal neoliberal good, a virtue considered to fuel commercial intercourse. Mixed race, after all, is hip du jour. But too much of it might make a black man arrogant, think he has access to the highest echelons of power, “uppity” exactly, as Georgia Republican Congressman Lynn Westmoreland recently characterized Obama in a public interview. What Rush Limbaugh in all his considerable wisdom mockingly calls “a magical negro,” a “haf-rican.” If some doors of opportunity have opened, don’t go getting any big ideas now that you can move into the Big House. The White House.
What we find in the case of a politics of race, then, is an exacerbation of electoral politics generally. It is, namely, a world of make-believe. A politics of make-believe, a fantasy politics as a politics of forcing belief, is one that seeks to make the world (up) as a domain of epistemological investment, that sustains belief by ordering the parameters of possibility. The world of make believe is that in which journalists or autobiographers, financiers and realtors, politicians and presidents shape worlds to sustain credibility of the commitments they wish to project or for which they stand. “Fact enhancing fiction, and vice versa,” as a recent New York Times headline put it. These are not worlds that seek, or seek to establish, accuracy. They are not even deceptions, for that would presuppose a concern with veiling the touchstone of truth. Rather, they seek to entice into a state of belief, a world-making, so as to induce the securing of commitment by the polity to their positions for personal, pecuniary, or political profit.
Until the moment of recent economic meltdown, when they could no longer avoid it, the McCain campaign sought to evade any discussion of pressing issues. They sought to turn the election into a discussion of character, longstanding ground for racial insinuation, appealing to the sort of racial latency revealed in the Stanford study. Obama is not presidential, not really American or at least American enough, not American at least in ways presidents need to be. How could he be for his country above and before all if he has close kin in Kenya (country of conflict, turmoil, and the bombing of the American embassy), when he puts self-interest above or before national interest? When he was reared by a step-father who was an Indonesian Muslim? He is too intelligent, too intellectual, too thoughtful, too heady, too gracious. Too European (recall Berlin)? Well, in any case, too wordy, too preacherly. Too Jeremiah Wright. Too black!
As Drew Westen has pointed out (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/what-did-he-do-to-be-so-b_b_116658.html), a Republican ad in the 2006 Tennessee senatorial race, in which African-American candidate Harold Ford was the Democratic contender, asked “Who’s the Real Tennesean?” In a recent ad, a John McCain commercial circulates a similarly coded sensibility inflected with race: “The American president Americans have been waiting for.” You’re not American if you vote for the other guy, because the Other Guy is no American at all. You better believe it, before it’s too late. The Muslims are coming, the Muslims are coming.
In eschewing issues in favor of character, Republicans –always the high stakes rollers (Wall Street, circa September 2008)—thought they recognized a deep character trait of the American public. When things generally get bad, Americans seek distraction. Go shopping even if the credit is maxed out; after all, it’s easy enough to land a new card even in tight credit markets. Few if any questions asked. Suspend a campaign. Entertainment tonight. An evening with popcorn at the movies or in front of network tv’s sitcoms or American Idol, Survivor or Project Run(a)way.
Sarah Palin’s Vice-Presidential announcement turned the Republican convention into a beauty pageant. And it seemed for a moment a stroke of genius. The swift turnaround in opinion polls suggested McCain intuited something deep if cynical about the American public psyche. The opinion polls looked actually to become, well, Nielsen ratings. Palin was the show stopper. The pinup model. The cut-out photo-op could be foregone because the cut-out now was the real thing. Guy gets his gal and rides off on a horse into the sunset—to go moose hunting or at least chomp moose-burgers at the local Macdonalds. Or pimps her in a bare-it-all beauty contest at a Harley-Davidson shindig.
Pity the booty evaporated in the fading light of the American economic sunset. Not two weeks later half of America walked out of the movie or Hooters into the twilight of the Republican economic debacle, to watch the stock ticker twittering away the last vestiges of value in their pension plans. Make believe shattered into a nightmare of government bailouts in a heartbeat. Socialist corporatism turns out to be the flip side, the warranty, of neoliberal free marketeering. America’s principal creditor, Chinese neoliberalism, may indeed be the model (and not just economically). Can you hear the patriotism pin clanging as the global economy skids across the chips in the marble floor?
Make-believe just lost its holler.
In the race to be president the question to be pressed because it has been made so pressing is what race means to the presidency. Is race part of—even basic to—being presidential, so embedded in the image of what it means to be the American chief commander that it is the presumptive, the touchstone of sense-making, the truth of the polity? Race, of course, is concerned most obviously with look. But it has to do more deeply also with normative expectations about action, demeanor, diction; with assumptions about experience—where one has been in life, who one has consorted with, what can be expected of one. To be elected, a black man has to look less black, act more white, be more like Ike than Mike. But can a leopard change his spots? Or a white electorate forego for once its self-protecting but paranoid structural privilege, its structure of belief, its possessive investment?
Anyone who doubts that this structural privilege is cemented into the polity might consider the discounting of votes by people of color generally, black folk in particular. As Andrew Hacker reports, nationally 13 percent of black men are precluded from voting because now or previously incarcerated. In a swing state such as Virginia it is 20 percent, in solidly McCain Kentucky 24 percent. In Colorado, another closely contested state in this election, there is a proposition to ban affirmative action on the ballot, and this is likely to bring white Coloradans opposed to affirmative action to the polls in November. It also has a way, as Drew Westen remarks, of reducing Obama to an affirmative action candidate, not properly qualified for and so undeserving of the position. While it is likely all this would favor McCain, it is entirely possible of course that some whites opposed to affirmative action would still vote for Obama, and do so on the merits. Never too pessimistic that hope will prevail.
What makes race today less easy, less straightforward to negotiate is that none of this can be made publicly explicit, as I have been suggesting. It is coded so that privately expressed preferences—choices—are shaped by or predicated on its codes while any hint of public expression is disavowed. So that any hint of criticism or rejection of the reference is undercut and those insisting on it are made to seem foolish, extreme, misguided. Unpatriotic.
In the end, that America may not be ready to be led by Obama is turned into the rationalizing criticism that he is too inexperienced, too self-interested, too lightweight, not (yet) ready to lead America out of the fog of war, debt so deep from eight years of mismanagement it threatens to bankrupt the wealthiest nation on record. Back into a world so skeptical of current American arrogance it pines for him. That’s a great set of projected burdens and handicaps--of white privilege as Tim Wise puts it--to overcome (Time Wise, “This is Your Nation on White Privilege,” http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/this-your-nation-white-privilege). The weight of race.
And yet, no matter. Obama has managed a nearly $300m two year campaign. And, as he points out, he’s still standing, despite everything that’s been thrown at him. He has transformed not just the political stage but how politics is conducted, he has revolutionized the use of technology, brought more younger people than was thought possible into the political process, transformed how to think about the political instrumentalization of social networking technology (and not just for purely self-interested political purposes). Perhaps America’s youth is more mature than it is given credit for. He has faced down the Clinton family political machine, no mean feat, remained ultra cool under intense pressure, revealing a capacity for sound judgment in the face of the most withering of attacks. Indeed, he has for the most part sought the postracial ground in the face of decidedly racial constraints, doubts, innuendos, and character assassination. A whole lot more than one can say about the hazy, hot and humid rhetoric dripping from the sweaty pores of the opposition.
All this is not to say that black politicians, this black politician, cannot be criticized; quite the contrary. Obama has waffled, slipped, slid with best. He has been vague, but less so than his opponent. He has occasionally pandered to an imagined centrist electorate seeking votes that may be more readily garnered were he true to himself. In any case, one might be excused these days for thinking more generally that Charles Rangel spells his name “Wrangle.” Or that the credibility of the political system freezes over when a Congressman hides $90,000 in kickback funding in his home freezer. But let’s not forget that for every Rangel there’s a Ted Stevenson, for every William Jefferson a Duke Cunningham, for every Rezko a Keating. And for every Cynthia McKinney a Phil Gramm. If race is a factor here, there is equal opportunity blame to go around.
The larger point, rather, is that in engaging black candidates for most any status position in this society, people, politicians, and pundits should be (self-)critically mindful of the racial authority and its rationalizing stereotypes from or on which they advance their claims.
The Palin-McCain ticket (even McCain is suggesting, in jest of course, that Palin should replace him as the headliner) stands for a polity homogenous culturally as much as axiologically, ideologically as much as demographically. Witness the whiteness of their campaign events, the standardized script of their statements, not just the narrowness of their world view but the dismissive character of their sometimes contemptuous, disinterested, and uninformed view of the world (“I know Russia since I can see it from my rear window”). By contrast, Obama and running mate Biden represent an America made, historically as much as contemporarily, through a fabric of deep connection in and to the world, a comprehension of the thick, mutually informing ties within and across the global make-up.
If the former are for extending America’s insistent unilateralism and persistent administrative opacity, the latter reflect as they reflect upon the relative transparency and openness a commitment to freedom demands. The appeal of Obama’s candidacy is his openness to the heterogeneity of ideas, values, culture, and interests that make the world and this time so challenging, but also so engaging. The Pinocchio Pair, like the secretive strong-arms they are seeking to follow, sees the challenges as little more than threats—to security, to competitiveness, to the American way of life and wealth, and America as the MPs keeping order in a chaotic world. The OB duo are seeking at least to an encouraging degree to break with the fearful disposition to everything un-American (read non-American), appreciating that as goes the world so goes America and not just an arrogant projection of the vice versa.
A significant aspect to the difficulty Obama has faced in convincing perhaps a portion of already skeptical voters and a sometimes hostile media has had deeply to do with America’s morphing racial obsession. America is far from over it, quite the contrary. If we are to take seriously the challenges of establishing equitable conditions for living in a globally circuited polity as ethnoracially heterogenous and cosmopolitan as our wired world, these are the complex of considerations that should be alive to the political process in this presidential race.
Irvine, California
September 27, 2008
GRIST FOR THE MILL(S): THE POVERTY OF (SOME) PHILOSOPHY by David Theo Goldberg
Posted by GSR in Essays 0 comment(s)Two competing historical frames have marked thinking about race and the conceptualization of racism.
A dominant view among academic commentators takes racism to acquire its explicit modern expression only from the nineteenth century onwards. Advocates may acknowledge that a notion of race appears in literature and popular expression increasingly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But they deny that such expression amounts to the sort of explicit, sustained, and elaborated mode of racist expression so widely circulated in the nineteenth century.
Implicit in this view is a set of presumptions. First, racism is thought to acquire its character in and through the expanding scientific elaboration gathering steam throughout the nineteenth and into the first half of the twentieth centuries. Second, and relatedly, from the hindsight of twentieth century critical commentary, the nineteenth century “science” of racism is nothing more than pseudo-science. Its driving ideas are deemed misguided, fuzzy, built on pre-existing biases, inevitably contradictory. Racism, by extension, is inherently irrational, conceptually implosive, incoherent. And singular: it is taken to be nothing else at root than the rationalization of irrational prejudice.
The contrasting view takes a considerably longer tack. It starts by making more of the fact that the language of race—the term itself, the sorts of expressions that more recently have come to be identified with it, the variety of its substitute terms, the range of commitments it expresses, the array of principles and positions it has shaped, articulated, and represented—long precedes the nineteenth century. How long thickly are open questions, varying across proponents of this view.
Most commentators concede that race is a modern term, appearing in European languages explicitly only in the second half of the fifteenth century. Some nevertheless argue that, no matter the availability of the term to characterize population groups, the kind of thinking that later came to be associated with the notion long pre-dates its appearance: identification of population groups in terms of physical appearances, most notably skin color; preferential personal treatment of some group members on the basis of these traits or greater familiarity of members than with strangers to look or behave oddly, to exhibit weird customs and perverse habits. The term “racism,” after all, is coined only in the 1930s and nobody denies that the sort of phenomena later identified as racism had long existed. Why should it be any different for race?
There is no doubt that personal and social prejudice extensively pre-dates the modern world. But the pressing question here is how those biases and bigoted circulations become rationalized, what social sources and forces have prompted and sustained them. For those of us taking racial discourse and the thick notions of socially mobilized racisms to be characteristically modern phenomena--born of, shaped by and shaping the modern world from roughly the late fifteenth century onwards--race becomes not just increasingly thick in its articulation and elaboration. It no longer is simply or solely personal prejudice, individual bias, or religiously driven exclusion or repression.
From the late fifteenth century on, the apparatuses of the state and philosophical thought increasingly underpin racially articulated expression, of administrative practice and ultimately scientific thinking. Racially elaborated expressions are born out of and represent what are taken to be the highest and most compelling orders of modern modes of thinking. Race may have had earlier resonances, discursive precursors, hints of something larger yet to come. But without the state apparatus representing its terms, racial expression at most would have remained pretty much at the level of personal prejudice.
The modes of exclusion, discrimination, humiliation, and degradation race has enabled in its name, and the thickening articulation of racial conception with the psyche, sociality, and state formation are modern phenomena.
Here too there are presuppositions and implications at work. For one, racism is not singular but a set of ideas, conditions, and implications differing across time and from one place, one instance, to another, as I demonstrate in The Threat of Race. There is not just one transcendent form but many; there are (to use a terms critical race analysts have popularized) racisms. The meanings of the term and the character of the phenomena expressed in their name shift over time, and across the map, caught in the web of expressive conditions of local ecologies. Nineteenth century racism—the mode that comes to be so deeply identified with its scientific expression—is one, albeit assertive, even dominant strand of the set. Philip Rushton’s work or the undertaking to extend sociobiological explanation to purportedly racial distinction represent two more recent attempts to extend this tradition of scientific racism. Of course, all this is not to deny that there are also some conditions or characteristics general to or generalizable across racism “as such.”
There’s a deeper conceptual distinction cutting across this history of racial thought. In The Racial State (2002), I elaborate a key contrast in the modernizing history of racial conception between racial naturalism and racial historicism. Strains of both mark explicit racial conception from its earliest modern moments to our own time. The former dominates from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and the latter increasingly orders the racial out of the nineteenth and across the long twentieth century.
Racial naturalism is what I call the inherent inferiority set of claims many think exhaust racial understanding and elaboration. Racial naturalism takes those who are not European or of European descent (or more generally those not belonging to the racially conceived group making the claim) to be “naturally” less capable—in rational power, in capabilities that matter, in achievements, in social system, and so on—to those who are. These differentiated natural capacities may be considered God-given, or genetic, somehow conveyed in “the blood” or passed on inevitably in the social (or sociobiological) cultures in question. The point of their “naturalism” has more to do with the inevitability and lines of passage and inheritance than with their medium.
Racial historicism, by contrast, claims that those generally not belonging to the racially conceived group making the claim (most usually those who are not European or of European descent) are less mature than those who are, and that this relative immaturity has been produced by historical forces built up over time. It might be tempting to say that whereas racial naturalism is a claim about the hold of biology on developmental capacity, racial historicism is a claim about cultural facility developed over time. But this could be too simplistic, for just as naturalism no doubt could incorporate claims about culture and need not be reductively biologistic, so racial historicism could incorporate developmental claims about biology.
Sepulveda represented an early expression of racial naturalism; Las Casas, by contrast, was committed to racial historicism, at least regarding New World Indians. Similarly, Thomas Carlyle was clearly a naturalist in the sense I intend here, John Stuart Mill a principal (and principled) proponent of historicism, helping to shift the rhetorical dominance of naturalism towards historicism. The eugenicists of the late nineteenth century were obviously naturalists, early proponents of colorblindness such as Justice John Harlan at the end of the nineteenth century self-evidently historicists.
Colonial orders and racially repressive or relatively exclusionary regimes likewise were predicated on the distinction. Thus early Spanish and Portuguese colonists were explicit in their racial naturalism, as were Leopoldian Belgian colonizers in the Congo Free State, American “one-droppers,” Hitlerian ideologues, and apartheid apologists. By contrast, British missionaries, many European or European-American abolitionists, conservative anti-racialists, most early anthropologists, even African-American proto-black nationalists such as Edward Blyden and many proponents of area studies, development aid, and advancing global democracy (think Iraq) have resorted to some version or another of historicism in their invocation of racial difference, presumptive civilizational hierarchy and the presumptuous promise of progress.
Nevertheless, some contemporary commentators committed to restricting racism historically to the biologistic naturalism of the nineteenth century and its legacy deny that racial historicism is actually racist.
Georgios Varouxakis, in disagreeing explicitly with me, writes that
. . . Mill’s thought was indeed Euro-centric, and despite his efforts to be open-minded, he did show himself to be deplorably ignorant and prejudiced about non-European cultures, not least those of the Indian Peninsula. And his belief that a benevolent despotism was a legitimate mode of governing those he called “barbarians” (provided its aim be to “civilize” them and thereby prepare them for self-government) was paternalistic and based on assumptions that we cannot accept today. However, this does not render him a “racist.” I object to the terms “racist” and “racism” to designate all sorts of people and attitudes with which those who use the terms today disagree or which they find exclusionist or prejudiced, etc. There are plenty of more accurate terms to describe each of these attitudes. But “racism” should be reserved for attitudes of those who believed in the all-importance of biologically transmitted characteristics and in the existence and great significance of inherent traits that are there to stay with all the deterministic implications of such beliefs. This does not mean that there are no problems with attitudes like Mill’s or that he should not be criticized for his pronouncements on the non-European colonized peoples. . . we should not confuse these other reproachable attitudes with “racism,” thereby impeding the understanding of where the problem is in each case. [1, my emphasis.]
Similarly, Alan Ryan distinguishes between being “a racist” (not Mill, he likewise insists) and being “an imperialist” [2], as though one could not be both and that the one did not shore up the other. What histories are these folks reading? Ryan rests his claim on the fact that Mill thought that merely a different environment would lift Indians out of their “slavishness,” “indolence,” “and superstitiousness.” No concession is given to the fact that Indians were being conceived in terms of these readily racially circulated stereotypes in his day; the difference between seeing a group as biologically unsalvageable or environmentally upliftable, after all, is the very point of the distinction between racial naturalism and historicism. And in the same volume H.S. Jones chides me (he actually slips, uncorrected by the editors, into calling me“Goldstein,” oops, can’t tell one from another now can we) for the “postmodernist” and “postcolonial” view that “civilizing mission [sic] was imbued with racism.” [3] How shocking.
I am less concerned with whether someone like Mill himself was racist than with whether the sorts of views he represents, for which he stands, that he voices for a general public disposition are so. (I prefer not to call Mill “a racist,” concerned rather as I am with the general commitments of historical liberalism than with tired accusations about whether this or that thinker is a bad guy.) And it would have been nice had the editors of this volume, one of whom is my most vociferous critic on this score, extended to me the same courtesy of responding to essays critical of my contribution to the volume that they gave to my critics in previewing my essay they included.
Nonetheless, to reduce racism to the singularity of biologistic naturalism is completely arbitrary. Indeed, the likes of Varouxakis and Ryan offer not a single argument for this conceptual reduction other than to attribute to Mill a principled “antiracism” because of his “rejection of biological race.” An argument that is no more than the circularity of the claim that Mill can’t have been a (biological) racist because he rejected biological racism. And nothing else is racism because we say nothing else is. Which amounts to no more than to say we can call these sorts of Millian views a whole range of things, but please, pretty please, not racist.
Why not, exactly? If racism doesn’t include European paternalistic arrogance, a claim to lack of self-governance on the part of all those not European and autonomy on the part of all those who are, an Orientalist failure to seek comprehensive knowledge of those political and social cultures about which one quickly makes generalized pronouncements, the characterization of those not European as “barbarians” tout court, indolent, lazy, and superstitious, and a European duty to “educate and “civilize” them, then what exactly does it include?
Ask a person of African, Asian or indigenous American descent what they find especially pernicious about racist expression directed at them. The most compelling responses are not likely to be that they are being told that some of “their characteristic traits are biologically inherited” (this, after all, suggests Appiah’s notion of “racialism,” not racism [4]). They might even find such a claim appealing, depending on the traits in question. Rather, it is likely to be that claims about their relative inferiority or incapacity, inherent or developmental, especially in the absence of understanding their history, their cultural traditions, and the sorts of conditions they face are derogatory, demeaning, humiliating, dismissive. (Absent the terms “racism” or “racist” in the nineteenth century notwithstanding, the response 150 years ago from those subject to these views was likely to be little different).
It’s the humiliating, de-humanizing exclusions, stupid.
The pernicious implication of the derisive but knowing (or that ought to be known) put-down, the pernicious degradation, the self-promoting exclusions, all at least racially prompted or promoted, legitimated or rationalized. Not simply silly biologism. (That’s exactly why McCain’s ugly attacks, resting as they have on Obama’s “character,” “associations,” and imputations of affiliation, tend to the racist, even while racially silent. “That one.” Identified by being unnamed by one who knows your name all too well. Boy. Boy Friday. Friday. Their winking knowingness.)
Of course claims about biological inheritance can be deterministic, fixing in place, incapacitating. But they are not necessarily so. Racism, to press the point, is not one thing, not to be arbitrarily diminished in scope to suit a narrow philosophical agenda, to save a liberal hero or more broadly a cherished set of beliefs or “civilizational view” no matter how progressive in other respects. The historical record is littered with the embarrassment of generally “liberal” philosophers elaborating racist accounts or imputing generalized derogatory, racially implicit or explicit stereotypes of others, from Kant to Levinas, Mill to Levin, Locke to Sedgwick, Carlyle even to Camus. That said, their expressive racisms are not all of a piece, foundationally or expressively. Why should this surprise, given that their philosophical views vary so widely?
So, the heart of the dispute concerns the distinction between what I characterize as racial naturalism and racial historicism. A dispute, as I have argued at length in The Racial State and on which arguments I draw in The Threat of Race, far exceeds the mid-nineteenth century debate between Carlyle and Mill. True, in contrast with Carlyle, Mill seems positively progressive. But his progressivism embeds—yes, that word—stereotyping presumptions about racial otherness. That my critics all admit the stereotyping presumptions about otherness leads me to wonder, aloud, why exactly the resistance to naming it racism? It can’t just be that, as Varouxakis insists, there are more precise terms for non-inherent claims about pernicious prejudicial judgment. He offers none. And as I have said, imperialism hardly foregoes the fact that racisms were among its major props.
Citing Peter Mandler’s work approvingly, Jones even tries to downplay the strong hold concepts of race and nation exercised on nineteenth century English thought. The evidence (or counter-evidence) for this historical revisionism: according “exaggerated” emphasis to works by the likes of Robert Knox that were much less read at the time than critically assumed. [5] Well, not everyone was reading the likes of Knox, to be sure. But they sure were reading Fraser’s Magazine, listening to Sunday sermons, taking odious delight in exoticizing and derogatory travelogues, paying attention to politicians fulminating about the costs of white man’s burden and the civilizing mission, pasting their walls and advertizing their businesses with sambo-esque wallpaper and signage. Pears Soap wrappers, recall, sought to convey what cleansing power it would take to set oneself apart from the smelly and significantly less civilized. Benjamin Disraeli was not exaggerating in declaring, in 1847, that “All is race.”
Regarding my contrast between naturalism and historicism, Charles Mills (in a vocal reply to his critics) waves away “the significance of the distinction” by refusing any judgment of it himself, declaring that “it will have to be evaluated by historians of racism.” [6] Having left to “historians of racism” the judgment about whether there is a distinction between what I distinguish as “racial naturalism” and “racial historicism,” Mills then quickly insists he is able to accommodate the distinction by emphasizing that the naturalist is “the paradigmatic” but not the “only form” of racism. And yet, having resisted the weight of social science accounts of racism, he insists, nevertheless, that he is right that “on the level of mass consciousness . . . naturalism historically is the dominant form” [p. 251]. No historical evidence offered.
While more nuanced in his lately revised views than Varouxakis or Jones, Mills, however, likewise loses sight of the deeper thrust of my argument here, the historical movement between naturalism and historicism. It is not simply that the naturalist is paradigmatic for all time; each holds sway at different historical moments. The point is to attend to the shift in racial meanings, to the dominance of one kind of racial conception or another at different points in time, to the work each does in holding up racially conceived and tilted worlds. In taking the naturalist as paradigmatic of racist configuration as such, Mills belies the very possibility of any other conception becoming so under different socio-conceptual conditions. Historians of racism may have to settle whether the distinction has held at all; but on Mills’s account the historical record bows to the philosopher’s prescription regarding paradigmatic status. Some of us would call that self-serving.
Mills is similarly disingenuous in defending criticisms of his initial conception of “the racial contract.” Lately, Mills declares he had always intended that this concept represents a claim about philosophical normativity, not a social science claim about the existence of the historical record of racism driven by actual contractual agreements by whites globally. But Mills’s shift to thinking of the racial contract as a metaphor concerned principally with highlighting normative considerations of racial injustice largely overlooked in the social contract theory tradition is made only in the wake of withering criticism from a range of sources regarding his earlier assertions of a literalist historical reading of the racial contract. This is what I call Mills’s realist claim. He can say all he wants that I (and others) mistakenly criticize him for his (earlier) ”literalist reading of the racial contract.” His own words belie his refusal.
The fact of the matter is that in his first statement of the racial contract claim in the book of that title, to which I was responding, Mills does say explicitly in the first pages that “ . . . the Racial Contract is real.” [7, my emphasis, obviously). Not metaphorical, real. In case readers miss the point, he repeats it (p. 9). The “Racial Contract has the best claim to being an actual historical fact” [p. 20]. Mills indeed uses the term “metaphorical” in his first book, but to repudiate what he in fact intends by the Racial Contract: “. . . there is a series of acts . . .which collectively can be seen, not just metaphorically but close to literally, as its conceptual, juridical, and normative equivalent” [pp. 20-1, my emphasis].
That Mills insists on the metaphoricity of the racial contract, then, only emerges in later work, to his credit a shift in his view in relation to the criticism he received from me and others. But having shifted he cannot deny that he set out believing it literal. Indeed, Mills goes further, distancing himself from the normative claims of the Rawlsian corrective and siding explicitly with the classic social contractarians who sought “factually,” “descriptively, to explain the actual genesis of the society and the state, the way society is structured, the way the government functions, and people’s moral psychology.” [p. 8]
This is not a passing remark by Mills. He repeats himself again and again, to make sure readers get the point. The point in this first book is also pointedly aimed at the poverty of philosophical normativity for liberal philosophers like Rawls, exactly when it comes to racism, a point well taken but abandoned by Mills as he retreats into the coziness of normative philosophy to evade the howl of critique. “My aim is to adopt a nonideal contract . . . for understanding the inner logic of racial domination and how it structures the West and elsewhere . . [T]he notion of the Racial Contract might be more revealing of the real character of the world we are living in. . . .[I}t is crucial to understand what the original and continuing actually was and is so that we can correct for it in constructing the ideal ‘contract’. “ [p. 9, my emphases]
I could go on citing passage after passage. I only suggest here that the remainder of Mills first book be read in light of these passages cited to establish that in his first conception, the racial contract was intended literally as historical claim of fact.
For early Mills, his account more readily emulates Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality rather than Rawls’s Theory of Justice, as Mills himself explicitly emphasizes, as though conceding the point. No metaphor here. His concern with philosophical normativity, such as it is in this early work, is expressly to be built on the claim of revisionist facticity of the supposed racial contract. We are in the realm of the very social science Mills rejects in his later work to escape criticism from the likes of me. Not a bad thing to stand corrected, to be sure. But to deny what you explicitly said to begin with, hoping no one will notice or—worse—believing it yourself in order to make your critics look foolish is McCainianism of the most misleading kind.
So I rather doubt I missed Mills original point that subpersonhood was literally the result of a real contract, as he chides me for doing in his “Reply to Critics” [p. 252]. Here he claims that what he has always intended was “normative philosophical judgments about [subpersons’] ‘contractual’ moral inferiority” [p. 252, his emphasis]. This is certainly a more interesting claim than the one about a literally real contract. But even here I wonder what “contractual” adds to the insight. When McCain-Palin supporters harangue Barack Obama for being a “terrorist,” “Muslim” or Arab,” a “liar” or “untrustworthy” or that “he should be killed,” there seems little doubt that these are racially tinged if not charged, no matter that biological claims may not be in play, Mr Jones.
Mills is right, of course, that they are normative philosophical judgments. But contractual? They may operate “as if” there were some sort of implicit contractual agreement. Among whom, exactly? All those agreeing with the claims? All those present? Far from all whites, or all whites in America, or all white Republicans. Nor all white Christians, or even many.
Even if it were conceded that there is an implicit contract among all those agreeing with the claims, what does it add? It simply restates tautologically that those who agree agree (the heart of the contract, after all). It doesn’t add any ground to the normativity of the claim. If the set of persons making such racially charged claims is just one, the presumed normativity is no less, but in the absence of anything like a contract. The normativity is not extended by the fact of 100 or 1000 people contractually agreeing, even if the potential social force or violence may be. This suggests that a contract is more than merely agreeing. It is, in a sense, agreeing to agree. And that meta-agreeing would heighten the charge, ratchet it up, make it (more) threatening. But if this is right it requires the contract to be literal, not metaphorical, and I have been suggesting all along that the history of racisms can hardly be reduced to the singularity of contractual agreement, neither literal nor metaphorical.
What this line of counter-critique points to, then, is that the histories of racisms show a considerably more variegated and complex conception of racism historically conceived than any of my critics here—Varouxakis, Jones, or Mills--seem aware of, let alone acknowledge. None of this is to say I am unqualifiedly right on all points. Mills correctly points out that Kant considered “American peoples” more inferior than “Negroes.” I stand corrected, at least in part. For while Mills quotes Kant to this effect, there is at least another occasion where Kant conveys that he considers Negroes on crucial registers (“mental” and “moral character”) to occupy the bottom of the hierarchy. [10] Which just goes to show that the Enlightenment proponent of the force of Reason contradicted himself. It is not insignificant or surprising that such contradictory thinking should have been prompted around racial projection.
The larger question raised by this entire set of considerations, accordingly, concerns the historical reach of racial configuration. For Varouxakis and Ryan and Jones, not to mention Mendler, racism marks pretty much only nineteenth century England, and then at least for some not as much as commonly assumed. Phew, off the hook. It’s funny, racism has become pretty much the curse word of all curse words, to be evaded at all costs, not least to the historical record. Mills, by contrast, readily seems to agree that racism significantly predates the nineteenth century, though the implication of his insistence that naturalism is the historically dominant form suggests that racism (in the presumption of its singularity) at least recedes if not largely dissipates with the march of post-abolition, post-imperial, post-colonial, and post-civil rights time. There we clearly differ too, even as we might agree that race is a notion peculiarly modern in its explicitation and explication.
The Threat of Race seeks to elaborate not just how modern are the notion(s) of race and the perversely de-meaning social modalities thus prompted, perfected, and prevailed. But there are two additional concerns the book seeks in general to evidence. The first is to portray in considerable regional detail just how variable continues to be racial meaning and representation, the articulations and experiences of racisms across place and through time. And the second is precisely to consider in some detail how contemporary modes of racial expression and racist dehumanization and exclusion have been re-shaped and to a degree re-directed under and by the forces of neoliberalism.
I will leave more nuanced readers than those discussed here to assess how compelling this project turns out to be. The virtual pages of this website invite readers to join the critical conversation by posting your considered contributions and interventions to the site.
Irvine. October 12, 2008
REFERENCES
[1] Georgios Varouxakis, “Empire, Race, Euro-centrism: John Stuart Mill and is Critics,” in Utilitarianism and Empire, eds. Bart Schultz and Georgios Varouxakis (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), p. 144.
[2] Alan Ryan, “Introduction,” in J.S. Mill’s Encounter with India, eds. M.I. Moir, D.M. Peers, and L. Zastoupil (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 15-16. As cited in Varouxakis, p. 147.
[3] H.S. Jones, ”The Early Utilitarians, Race and Empire: The State of the Argument,” in Schultz and Varouxakis, p. 185.
[4] Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Racisms,” in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 4-5.
[5] Jones, p. 181.
[6] Charles Mills, “Reply to Critics,” in Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, Contract and Domination (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 251.
[7] Charles Mills, The Racial Contract, Cornell University Press, p. 4.
[8] Mills, The Racial Contract, pp. 4-5.
[9] Mills, The Racial Contract, pp. 4-5.
[10] Charles Mills, “Reply to Critics,” p. 254; Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (Berkeley: University of California press, 1960, pp. 111-114.
DIS-ARMING CHARM by David Theo Goldberg
Posted by GSR in Essays 0 comment(s)The Royal Belgium Museum for Central Africa (known in short as the Tervuren Museum after its location at the countryside edge of Brussels) has a century long history, about which I write critically in the pages of The Threat of Race (see pp. 169-75). Those pages are predicated on the basis of a visit to the Museum, its accompanying catalogs and commentary prior to 2005, when the Museum leadership began to rethink the design and representation of the institution in the wake of growing vocal criticism both locally, especially from Congolese Belgians, and internationally.
The institution has set out as a consequence to craft a “new” museum. “The aim of the restoration and renovation project,” a message at the entrance now greets visitors, “is to bring the Museum in line with the needs and requirements of the 21th [sic] century, but without affecting its charm.”
The charm! The charm!
This, of course, assumes that the Museum indeed has embodied charm. The heart of whiteness. It is a charm, if at all, appealing only to prevailing national sentiment deemed presumptively European, (not so) silently racially white. For those who or whose families had been so blatantly violated by the long and lingering legacy of vicious Belgian colonialism and neocolonialism in the Congo basin, charm is scarce a characterization that would jump innocently to mind.
The Museum has now initiated a makeover, both of the architecture and of the exhibits. These “remarkable” renovations will leave the original main building, haunted by its history, largely intact if not untouched. In order “to bring the Museum into the 21st century,” the renovation will consist mainly of adding a car park and stand-alone reception entrance to the left, linked by an underground passageway and three new temporary exhibition spaces on the way to the old building. The original building will remain the home of the permanent collection of masks, colonial artifacts and African ecology (stuffed animals and fauna). The renovation is due to be completed in 2013 at a cost of more than E66m. It is unclear how much of a makeover the permanent collection will face. For a digital model of the planned renovation, see http://www.africamuseum.be/museum/renovation/museum/renovation/tomorrow/index_html.
In the meantime, the Museum has modestly reordered its permanent exhibits while the renovation is ongoing, in large part to be able to add temporary exhibits that are less fawning of the colonial record and a little less blind to its violence. In the resulting mess, the almost chaotic and cramped condition of exhibits today has rendered the exploitative and demeaning character of the original, pre-2005 displays a touch less conspicuous. There is a hint, but not more, of critical distance, if not self-reflection, altogether missing from the original, the addition of a single visibly Congolese Belgian commentary about the considerable collection of masks nevertheless reinforcing the renovatory white-wash.
The rotunda, taken as the old building’s architectural highlight, remains the interim Museum entrance. But it is now opened up by temporarily relocating the Museum shop, previously squeezed into a closeted corner of the rotunda (if rotundas can have corners), down to the end of the main hallway of “Central African ethnography” housing the extraordinary and haunting collection of masks from the Congo basin. [For a floor plan of the Museum’s layout, see http://www.africamuseum.be/museum/permanent.] The gold leaf statues about which I write in the book continue to circle the rotunda, their insidious inscriptions about Belgium bringing civilization and economic wellbeing to the Congo now only partly hidden from self-embarrassment where before they had been boldly proclaimed. The Museum website is more explicit. [http://www.africamuseum.be/museum/permanent/museum/permanent/permrotondeIt/] Including an image of one of the controversial statues, the Museum website comments that the statues generally
also emphasize the philanthropic intentions of the colonizers. They embody the salvational task of the European mission to bring the “benefits of civilization” to Africa.
White man’s burden, the European civilizing mission, it seems, is still rationalized as philanthropic duty. Salvation for whom, exactly, and in resurrectionary penance for what? The lingering political theology of race continues to conjure the saving of the European soul by civilizing those not yet.
This claim to introduce civilization to a place at Africa’s center considered otherwise to lack it continues to be circulated, though more quietly, through the Museum’s colonial exhibits. This is most evident in the permanent exhibit lauding the mercenary H.M Stanley, set to colonizing Central Africa in Leopold’s behalf, while at the same time inflating his self-aggrandizement. But it is there as well in the temporary and hastily thrown together exhibit on the era closing formal Belgian colonialism at the close of the 1950s.
One could be excused for thinking that the Museum’s declared shift to a more self-consciously critical concern with Belgian colonial history would nowhere be better reflected than in its permanent exhibit of H.M. Stanley’s role in the colonization of Central Africa. And yet while the website proclaims this a new exhibit, the material on display remains pretty much untouched, combining objects from what previously had been a couple of adjacent rooms into one. The Museum curators have chosen to overlay the originally exhibited material with transparencies stuck to the windows of the display cabinets listing mildly competing comments about Stanley’s legacy from different political subject-positions. The Museum thus seeks to position itself as a neutral observer of competing claims about Belgian colonial legacy, neither perpetrator nor critic.
“The way in which colonization is portrayed,” one such transparency declares, “varies with time and depends on those involved: back then it was shown in a flattering light, now it is regarded more critically.” Resorting to an exaggerated expression of historical relativism, the Museum now seeks to transform itself from colonial predator (how exactly did it come by all those masks, stepping on and over whose bodies in fact?) into dispassionate “neutral” observer of its own legacy, its raison d’etre, its “charming” voice of contemporary Belgian nationalism.
Indeed, there are subtle insinuations dotted throughout the exhibits that colonization and slavery were not just widely practiced at the time but more deeply a needed response to local incapacity. Belgian colonialism and slave practices accordingly were not anomalous and, like colonialism and slavery more generally, are considered to have been called for. The insinuation seems to be that they were necessary, a “reasoned” response to local incapacity.
What is shocking about this is less that it was the rampant rationalization of these conditions at the time; such rationalizations, after all, are well known to those familiar with the colonial record. What makes it so disturbing is that a major museum would shamelessly claim these rationalizations to be historically compelling still today. And to do so in the name of “bringing the Museum into the 21st century.”
Belgian enslavement, such as it was, is deemed by the Museum curators today as little different from world historical forces afoot at the time:
The slave trade in its Eastern, African, European, and American carnations, is a major trauma in the history of Africa. The trade in slaves destabilized Central Africa by depopulating it, by displacing fleeing populations, by unbalancing societies and normalizing violence. Colonization took hold in weakened regions.
No matter that by the time Belgian colonization began the world slave trade and slave-holding had pretty much been declared unacceptable by those societies taking themselves to be civilized. Nor mention either of the perpetrating forces by name; that slavery was at work in the East, in Africa, by Europeans and Americans means that Belgian enforcement of servitude was no different than that found to be at work everywhere. Slavery in Africa is imputed by the Museum, today as before 2005, to be largely driven by Arab slave traders. Colonization was not imposed; it “took hold.” And it was not an exerted insertion by forces exterior but gripped “weakened regions” as though the product of their own weakness.
Writing about the establishment of the Congo Free State, then, the Museum argues that
In its desire for expansion disguised as a civilizing mission, Leopold II personally creates, with Belgium’s consent, a new political, economic, and cultural entity in Central Africa known as the Congo Free State (C.F.S.). This new structure brings changes to African societies, although the former political and cultural legacies do manage to survive.
As a country without a mother-state and in the hands of an omnipotent sovereign, the C.F.S. enjoys the support of missions and private societies.
The civilizing and emancipatory slogans of the C.F.S. are in conflict with an economic policy which [sic] has disastrous effects in certain regions of the state.
Buried beneath the mild distance these comments seek to take from Belgian colonial heritage in the Congo basin are insinuations of more neutral structural forces at work, not to mention benefits of colonization for the colonized. It is economic policy, not the actions of Belgian boots on the ground, that is disastrous but then again only for parts of the Congo region, not for all its people. People in fact bear no mention, barren land and its lot for the taking. Colonization introduces changes to local society, but not wholescale change so not all is lost, how bad can it be? The C.F.S. enjoys—enjoys!—missionary support and private charitable intervention.
Where are the local voices here? Of that which cannot be spoken, of those determined incapable of speaking for themselves, pass over in silence.
There is acknowledgment of the embarrassment that the Museum’s Gallery of Remembrance, its hall of heroes, inscribes on its walls only the names of the 1500 plus Europeans fallen in the Congo basin in the name of Belgian colonial effort. But this too is blurred through the gauze of Euro-historical relativism. This was European practice at large, perhaps no more should be expected of Belgium:
The attentive visitor will not fail to notice that, at the time, no need was felt to question the Belgian presence in Central Africa. There was no mention of the Congolese victims, for instance. The viewpoint is exclusively European and concentrates on a few historical episodes. The underlying reality of colonial events was completely ignored.
At the time? 1934? The first mention of Congolese victims in the Museum, so far as the records of public display reveal, was 2005! And in the equation of Belgian with indigenous suffering, still no mention is made today of the fact that Congolese dead and maimed as a result of Belgian colonial adventure makes Belgian suffering seem like a walk in the park. Against whatever individual suffering must be measured the collective terror and its lingering trauma across 75 years of formal rule. Between 1885 and the inscription of the names on the wall in 1934, for every Belgian death in the Congo there were something like 7000 local deaths attributable to Belgian presence.
The Museum goes further, though, seeking to establish that Belgian legacy cannot be all that awful if the Congolese at the time of independence themselves “duly commemorated Belgians and other Europeans as well.” How badly history has treated poor Belgians! Indeed, how generous “we” have been. Look at all the aid “we” have provided, even in the face of insult, crisis, turmoil:
Despite the numerous crises between the two countries, Belgium provided significant aid up to its 1990 break in relations with President Mobutu. From 1960 to 1990, its cumulative aid amounted to E7.4b. During these 30 years, Belgium was Congo’s most important partner. Since the end of the 1990s, Belgium has worked to develop new means of partnership with Congo and Central Africa.
There remains one consistent thread through the Museum linking the present revisions to its even more troubled past. Despite its recent veneer of neutrality in its representation of Belgium’s violent history in Central Africa, the Museum remains overwhelmingly committed to whitewashing Belgian’s colonial legacy. Far from neutrality, it is concerned, now as then, at basis to put the best face on Belgium’s African adventures.
This is borne out too in the Museum’s temporary exhibit on the transitional period from Belgian colony to Congolese independence. A large black and very white photograph of Belgium’s former King Badouin dominates this exhibit. Photographed at his arrival to hand over power from the Belgians to a Congo asserting its independence much to the chagrin of the colonizers, he stands in full ceremonial military regalia. His starched white uniform drips with ribbons and medals, stiff white cap beaked in black. The solemn face of the colonizer, the uniform of empire, as if insisting on the pristine innocence of its whiteness. And as if to shield himself both from the horrors his country was seeking to leave buried alive and from the glare of his military suit, his eyes are completely unseen, covered by the darkest sunglasses the wealth of empire could acquire to cover up the occasion, to hold it at bay. NATO’s host. asserting absolute authority at the passing moment colonial power is ceded.
Horror, upon horror!
Congo’s liberating Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, on the other hand, is portrayed by the Museum as the enfant terrible, the dangerous revolutionary who would quickly pull the Congo and the region into chaos. At the handover ceremony on June 30, 1960, following Badouin’s rationalization of the colonial regime as good for the natives and an inanely “conciliatory” speech by Congolese President Joseph Kasa-Vubu, Lumumba (who had been excluded from speaking at the event) famously presented a scathing critique of Belgian colonial violence as Badouin and the Belgian dignitaries sat seething. The Museum, far from neutral, pithily reduces the traumatic events that would engulf the Congo in the period shortly to follow completely to Lumumba’s responsibility: “[Lumumba’s] tone,” the Museum genealogy of events puts it, “will be the destabilizing element.”
No matter that, for all his failings, within ten weeks Lumumba would be deposed in a coup by US- and Belgium-aided Mobutu, arrested and eventually tortured following his escape and re-arrest, marched off to a secluded spot in the dense bush of Katanga province. No trial necessary, there he would be summarily executed by a firing squad that included officers of the Belgian military and police whose bullets, it was finally apologetically acknowledged by the Belgian government in 2002, helped to kill Lumumba. The secret execution was attended by the Congo’s new President Tshombe.
Not a word of this in a Museum intent on insisting that Congolese demise over the thirty years the institution insists Belgium was so economically supportive was pretty much of Lumumba’s making. As if ten weeks of rule in the face of intense hostility, notwithstanding the man’s own limitations, could come close to trumping a century of colonial and neocolonial repression. If only Lumumba had happily extended exploitation postcolonially. all would have turned out happily . . .
So in the name of turning a new leaf the Museum neoliberally deepens the historical misrepresentation. Seeming to take away the terms of historical condemnation in the name of its acknowledgment, it enables the extension of a public denial no longer available to formal government expression. Face is saved as public history is rewritten. Race remains the out-there, the mark of Africa’s lack of civilization, as out of place in self-reference as speakable only in denial, in its silences, in reference to its colonial heritage, at home as historically.
Along related lines, then, there is a current exhibition, “Black is Beautiful,” in Amsterdam’s famed Nieuwe Kerk located at the Dam Square (http://www.blackisbeautifulamsterdam.nl) . The show includes some really interesting and revealing work reflecting on the history of representations of black people in Dutch art, from Rubens to Marlene Dumas. (There is an exhibit catalogue available, Black is Beautiful: Rubens to Dumas. Amsterdam: Waanders Publishers Zwolle, 2008.) The first more or less comprehensive show of its kind in the Netherlands, it is clearly more mindful than its Belgian counterpart in its self-consciousness about the figures of blackness in its national historical corpus. And yet at a more abstract level, the Amsterdam exhibit and the Tervuren Museum disturbingly continue to share a set of presumptions about the place and representation of black people in European social history and culture.
Like the Museum, “Black is Beautiful” adopts a supposedly neutral stance about the history it takes on, describing conditions at a distance, refusing for the most part much critical disposition to its own history other than to note some earlier misperceptions about stereotypes. Indeed, the very title of the exhibit and repetition of its theme throughout indicate a compensatory need to exaggerate, to borrow its cue from a forty year old set of struggles not least in face of the fact that while some of the work resonates the beauty of blackness, there is enough historical representation in the show to reflect the long legacy of stereotypic artistic representations of blackness as perniciously ugly. And, as Gary Schwartz points out in a thoughtful reflection on the exhibition, as much horrifying material is left out, from depictions of torturing black bodies to the inexcusable absence of any reference to Zwarte Piet (http://www.theartsfuse.com/2008/07/28/visual-arts-sanitizing-black-is-beautiful/)
In both institutional cases, then, the curatorial disposition is that of the presumptive whiteness of Europe and of blackness as its outside, the habitation of elsewhere. Black presence in Europe is considered exceptional, as non-belonging, as the proverbial outsider. Nowhere is there the understanding that blackness is constitutive of modern Europe, And not just as constitutive outside, its shadow, though that too. But also as its ground, a condition of the possibility of what it came to make of itself, from within. Like “the Moor and the Jew,” as I indicate in The Threat of Race, “the Black” makes modern Europe conceivable, a mirror at once reflective and distorting, revealing and concealing. And while the curators of both the Museum and the exhibit consulted with black advisors, in both instances black contributions are pretty marginal and minor, seemingly affirmations of the prevailing point of view. It remains instantaneously self-evident to any critical observer that in both cases these are white frames, representations of whiteness, a crease in the status quo perhaps, but the status quo solidified in place nonetheless.
The Tervuren Museum, it must be emphasized, remains far more pernicious than the oversights, framngs, and failings of the Amsterdam exhibition. The Museum’s message seems clear in its coding:
The major challenges facing the Museum at the start of the 21st century include: renovating and modernising the Museum, making the collections more accessible through digitalisation, carrying out research work aimed at sustainable development, undertaking closer cooperation with African partner institutions, enhancing the role of the Museum as an integral component of Belgium’s policy towards Africa and continuing to ensure its international influence.
The last word, as the first shot in its colonial policy dating back to the Wannsee conference in 1885, is “continuing to ensure [Belgium’s] international influence.” All else, including the repressive silences of racial reference today, is in service to that end. As it always was.