Intervention
Thinking About Race

For people interested in the category of race, these have been an interesting couple of weeks. The summer that began with Henry Louis Gates’s arrest on suspicion of being an intruder in his own Cambridge home wound down with Joe Wilson’s “you lie” outburst and subsequent apotheosis as the truth-telling face of a can’t take-it-no-more far right. Whether you believe, with Jimmy Carter, that the interruption of a black president’s speech by a white South Carolinian congressman must have been motivated by racial resentment, or whether you, like the White House and the conservative commentariat, deem the episode more about partisan difference than racial difference, there’s no question that race is back on the table in what just a year ago was being touted by some as a postracial presidency. Sparked by the question of whether undocumented immigrants would be among those receiving benefits under health care reform, Wilson’s outburst channeled the summer’s slowly simmering tea-party chatter that when it comes right down to it, he (our President) is one of them---socialist, communist, fascist, Marxist, Nazi, foreign, and black. So there it is, our peculiar national specter, back again, out from the closet, daring us to call it dead. Race, and with it racism, keeps coming back, putting those of us who think and teach about it in the position of thinking harder.

Few would dispute that we have moved on from a biological understanding of race, but other constructs have replaced biology in the long historical process of giving the ghostly body of “race” some ontological solidity. What is it, after all—color, culture, class, community, or, as critics like Anthony Appiah and Paul Gilroy have forcefully argued, none of these but merely the most dangerous fiction in the world? World-systems theorists like Immanuel Wallerstein hold race to be “the expression, the promoter and the consequence of the geographical concentrations associated with the axial division of labour”—in other words, a structural category, intensified by the financialization of the globe under neoliberal capitalism. Others, like Gates or the philosopher David Theo Goldberg, have characterized race as a kind of social text, a changing, shifting signifier that has been consolidated, modified, rethought, and recalcified over some five hundred years of modernity, from the earliest biological theories of racial difference through the logics that underpinned slavery, colonialism, and apartheid through more contemporary forms of cultural racism or what Etienne Balibar has called, in a European context, “racism without races.”

That what seemed to be an era of American postracial politics turned so virulently racial in l’affaire Wilson tells us not simply that the white right has been nursing a grudge at its many losses, and not merely that there’s a groundswell of white middle class disaffection in this recession economy. All of the furor around the outburst, particularly that focused on whether it’s “about” race or “not about race” has distracted the conversation from the fact that racial divides are growing less because of some national inner Joe Wilson that’s reached a boiling point than because of a long history of corporate capitalism shaping American politics. The recession is disproportionately impacting people of color with sub-prime mortgages, low-wage and undocumented workers out of work, and, where I work at the University of California, the very possibility of access to affordable quality public education for a diverse body of talented students whose tuition is about to increase by 30% in the ever faster drive toward privatization.

I don’t mean to suggest that what we thought was about race is “really” about class; we’re too quick to epiphenomize race and see it as the shadow form of some other category that we’d do better to think. The debate around whether the Wilson episode was or wasn’t about race might just tell us something about race itself and how to think it. It’s not that race is either present or absent, that our politics are either racial or postracial, so much as that race is operative in a variety of guises and forms, a protean discourse, to use Goldberg’s term, whose very capacity to morph is evidence of how powerfully and pervasively it is embedded in our national, and global, culture of inequity. To identify race as a factor in an event like the Wilson outburst is not to reify race, that constructed, invented, and, yes, fictionally imagined category of human difference, as “real.” Still less is it to make race the sole explanation, the moving cause, of the event. Our job is not to turn to race to explain things but rather to explain race---how it’s been thought, what’s been done in its name, and how we can continue undo the sorry legacies of its history. And for that task, as Gates himself argued decades ago, literary criticism deserves a place at the table.


Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa and the Philosophy of Culture (1992); Etienne Balibar & Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (1991); Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey (1989); Paul Gilroy, Against Race (2000); David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (1993).

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