The concept of race as applied to humans has long been discredited by anthropologists. And yet it is not possible to discuss issues like the high rates of incarceration of black men, or the better medical treatment received by whites, purely in class terms. At the same time, immigration, DNA testing, intermarriage and other phenomenon have made the lived experience of racial categories more complex for many people. Changing attitudes have also made racial categories less useful as a basis for political action.
For anyone who is interested in how academics have attempted to deal with the dilemmas of theorizing race in the contemporary world, this recent Monthly Review article by David Roediger is must reading. In “The Retreat from Race and Class”, Roediger focuses on four works. Three from around 2000: Paul Gilroy’s book, Against Race, “Race Over” written by Orlando Patterson in The New Replubic (link for those with library access), and Bourdieu and Wacquant’s article, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason“, as well as the more recent (2004) After Race by Darder and Torres. All of these works are very critical of contemporary racial discourse, and Roediger takes them each to task for failing to adequately address the problems of what he calls “white supremacy.”
Roediger’s review is too short to provide much insight into such a complex literature, but it does provide a great set of references for further exploration, such as in this passage where he responds to After Race:
Insofar as Fields, Darder, Torres, and others contend that inattention to class distorts inquiry into all inequalities in the United States, they are exactly right. However, the strategy of banking on the retreat from race to solve that problem is a highly dubious one. It leads to an extremely embattled tone and to ignoring the most exciting work building on materialist insights. From Cheryl Harris’s brilliant studies of whiteness as property, to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s research on racial systems, to somewhat older South African scholarship on racial capitalism, to Lisa Lowe’s important observations on race, universality, and labor at the start of Immigrant Acts, much work seeks to revive the class question by bringing racism and class together more systematically. But you would not know it from After Race.
While I’ve read some of the older stuff, such as Adam’s classic on South Africa, Modernizing Racial Domination, I’ve been negligent at keeping up with this literature, and am happy to have an informed guide to current debates. And while the idea of “teaching the controversy” might have been appropriated by ID advocates, I do find that such debates make for an excellent teaching tool.
I would also like to see more discussion about race in the liberal blogsphere, which is generally good on labor and gender issues, but strangely silent when it comes to race.
(via Political Theory Daily)
UPDATE: In looking for some of these citations online, I came across this excellent site on “Race, Racism and the Law” by Vernellia R. Randall.
If race is not really race in a physical sense, then what?
One particular element I think over looked is the mental work to recognize other people. One can interview someone with face blindness to get how much ‘recognizing’ a face has to do with social connection. That perhaps face blindness points at how central the face is to racism. Hence the race is primarily the recognition of the face.
Secondly, racism accompanies language distinctions as well. There is a strong connection between language and the face as well. What happens with language is how social ties are shaped. So for example, a racist cuts off and refuses to listen to say an African American then excludes them from goods and services, then both language and the face recognition are central tools in the building of the structure.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
Race is physical in the same sense New Jersey is physical — there are things ‘in the worlds’ that we label race and New Jersey. But these are arbitrary and conventional — that is to say, cultural — categories. Thus everything apprehended by humans is both ‘real’ and ‘symbolic’.
There is nothing writ in the order of the universe that dictates that the patch of ground between the Delaware river and the Atlantic be called New Jersey. If there were, then when the first Englishmen who arrived there would have got off the boat and said ‘hmmm… this must be New Jersey.’ Similarly, human beings are not naturally divisible into a small number of discrete groups called ‘races’. Although they most certainly can and are CULTURALLY divided into a small number of discrete groups constantly.
Or at least that’s classical anthropological critique of the race concept.
Rex writes;
Although they most certainly can and are CULTURALLY divided into a small number of discrete groups constantly.
Doyle;
Well culture can be what tools one uses. I don’t think Racist are anchored to who carries a screwdriver. Also racism seems to me to be a product of the nation state. Antagonisms between groups predate racism. Their non racist antagonisms would have been a dynamic of another era of social organization.
The center though of what people do to create ‘racism’ would be in my view, face and language. The recognition of someone and the language connection found the rest of the processes of racism.
For example, take German racism toward Jews, the propagation of the racist content depended upon how the Nazi used the media to communicate their ideas. A language related mental work. They harped on how to ‘recognize’ jews. A face based element. Take away a few of those elements and their racism would failed?
I would propose that racism is a mental work process dependent upon face recognition and language. A mental work process in which the face and language shape ‘racism’ and create the means to structure racist divisions in society.
Another example, obviously blind people can’t see the face so they can’t form the racist attitudes via face recognition, but language can carry the mental constructs to them. Whereas for Autistic persons one wonders if their inability around language and facial connection demonstrates how racism is dependent upon the face and language.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
Doyle,
It is true that all theories of race depend on the fact that humans have eyes with which to see, but the fact that races are divided up quite differently in different countries makes such observations quite useless for understanding how racial categories actually work. If you read the above mentioned debates you would see that in Brazil the theories of who is white and who is black work quite differently than they do in the US. For one thing, in the US you are considered black no matter how white your skin is, as long as you have black ancestors. In Brazil, however, skin color is much more important. Such differences have a lot to do with how slavery was institutionalized in large planation colonies like those run by the Portugese, and the smaller-plantations that were the norm in the US. This is to say we understand much more about “race” in the two countries if we understand the history of slavery than if we understand how people recognize faces!
Kerim writes;
This is to say we understand much more about “race” in the two countries if we understand the history of slavery than if we understand how people recognize faces!
Doyle;
No doubt the history of slavery is important in determining who was the slave. We tend when thinking of racism in the U.S. to see it as ‘black and white’, rather than as racism appears in nation states as how groups recognize each other. Color itself matters little in terms of racism. Only those parts of human beings that estabilish social ties matter. Emotions, recognition, language to be specific.
The value of bringing the face into the definition of racism allows us to realistically define what human beings actually use to make racism work. The face is a communication channel in which words and emotions are produced. If we define a group by how the group members recognize and feel about group members we then know the processes by which racism is implemented.
For example, when Jewish children were hidden in German Christian households during WWII that effectively made face based processes of social group identification founder. This does work for a whole group because unlike children adults have a much wider network of connections that can’t be dropped as easily.
As to your point about knowing history, absolutely knowing history illuminates what I am saying. Knowing how the legalities were imposed in the U.S. to differenciate chattel slaves from bonded Europeans shows how text based systems of communication (the legal system) take advantage of everyday contact structures to impose rigid boundaries between groups. It allows us to understand what sorts of communication tools were built upon group formation to create racist divisions amongst people.
Instead of looking at kinship structure one could measure how well people ‘know’ each other. What is ‘knowing’ another person? The purpose is to get away from how family stucture obscures group formation that nation states facilitate. Hence gives a foundation to explain why large scale groups utilize hatred and anger to create super groups too large to know one and the other but coherent enough to practice large scale racism.
thanks,
Doyle
[Is it okay for a sociologist to comment here? hehe]
I think that race-class tension is incredibly productive intellectually, but I also worry that Roediger isn’t taking Orlando Patterson’s critique serious enough (I haven’t read the New Republic piece, but have recently re-read his critique of the way liberals talk about race in The Ordeal of Integration. The problem is that as we have tried to underscore the social construction of race, we have inadvertantly recreated the category of race.
In American culture (and in most pluralistic democracies), old racist social structures actually produced racial ethnicities. That is to say, because of the different and subordinated experiences of African Americans in the antebellum south and under Jim Crow, there necessarily emerged a different culture(s) (how could there not have?). The result, then, was African American ethnicity(ies) that were marked by old (constructed) racial boundaries. A similar process I believe is currently underway with Mexican immigrants who are coalescing into a “Latino” ethnicity, and who construct the ethnic boundaries in racial terms (although this is extremely difficult to do, given that latinos range from white to black to chicano to Indio).
To further complicate matters, as much as racism is alive and well today, recent sociological work (see especially Dalton Conley’s Being Black, Living in the Red) seems to indicate that ongoing inequalities do not derive from race per se, but rather from structural barriers preventing poor people from accumulating wealth.
I would not advocate a dismissal of the category of race for social/cultural analysis; but I do wonder what our ultimate ends are. Patterson asks, if our goal is to eliminate racism, is the way we talk about race actually undermining our (liberal) ends?
If Roediger isn’t taking Patterson’s arguments seriously enough, he doesn’t even come close to dealing with Gilroy’s (admittedly quite complex) intervention. For some interesting reviews (including some that raise similar points, though from a bit more sophisticated position) and Gilroy’s response, see the symposium in the journal Ethnicities: http://etn.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/2/4/539 (unfortunately not free access)
I think that in many ways in the academy, we are stuck in a 1960s way of dealing with race; when empirically, things have really changed culturally and socially over the past 40 years. We know that racism is bad, and we know that race isn’t biological in the ways people used to think it is, and we want respect for ethnic differences. For me I’m stuck on this as an pedagogical issue (my own research only touches on race peripherally).
My experience as a professor in california is that my students “do race” differently and are often baffled by the way I talk about race because it doesn’t match their very ecclectic and racially mixed youth cultures (CA is now less than 50% white and half of all immigrants to the US live in CA). That isn’t to say that racism doesn’t still exist, but that its social construction and its structures of stratification (how’s that for sociological jargon?) work differently now than they have in the past. In CA, white folks (whatever that means, other than pale-skinned people) are the most likely to marry outside their race/ethnicity and have the most porous ethnic boundares. Again, not to say there aren’t white racists in CA, just that, again, racism and race as a category of cultural identity looks different here, especially among younger people.
I have no answers here, but I would really like to see some academics account for the changes that have occured in the generations (X and “millenial”) who grew up in a world of Sesame Street and no legal segregation where ‘racism’ was socially unacceptable. It’d also be interesting to test Patterson’s assertion that the way people in the humanities and social sciences teach race actually ends up reproducing racism rather than solving it. Again, I have no answers. But as a teacher who teaches an introductory course on American diversity, this is a pressing pedagogical issue.
Thanks djm for the Gilroy info. I’ll look it up. Hopefully my university has a subscription so I can see the journal online.
cheers
Thanks for the link! As I said as such a short piece, it is more useful as a round-up of these debates than a critical intervention into them. As for as my own position goes, take a look at this earlier post.
Ormsbee,
I teach “Gender, Race, and Class” and have faced a lot of the issues you raise here. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that while my students consciously reject the possibility of racism in their own lives, when we start talking about privilege and unconscious racism a lot of them see plenty of examples of racism in their own ways of thinking and acting. I think you’re right that we have to look well beyond legal structures and social structures that just plainly do not exist anymore — there are no racial covenants in real estate anymore, for example — and begin to account for the very real and exceedingly hard to grasp structures of thought and feeling that continue to perpetuate a world that looks very much as if those legal and social structures *were* still in place — e.g. our schools are becoming more, not less, segregated, in spite of the lack of legally sanctioned barriers.
And I admit, I’m as baffled by this as you are. Although we are still ruled largely by folks who came up during the era of segregation, openly racist language and behavior is deeply frowned upon in most circles. So where are our the post-Jim Crow generations picking up their racism? How is racism reproducing itself in the absence of formal structures to perpetuate it? A lot of the work out there still applies, of course, but one thing I’ve noticed in teaching this is how much of the good work we have is historical in nature, either promary sources like WEB DuBOis or Richard Wright writing about their lives or secondary sources like Roediger writing about the historical development of the idea of “race”. These are good sources, especially when students begin to see continuities between today and Richard Wright’s day, but they don’t shed much light on the functioning of race in today’s world.
I would be careful linking to Vernellia Randall’s website if you care at all about your own or your blog’s credibility. This woman is considered an extremist in the field and should not be respected.
Oh no! An extremist? Really? Maybe I should notify David Horowitz?