1

RACE—THE SLIDING SIGNIFIER

IN THESE THREE lectures I will try to bring to bear on questions of race, ethnicity, nations, and diaspora some thinking that tries not to replicate what distinguished African American scholars could do but offers a view from another part of the black Atlantic world, setting the issues in a wider, global context. I want to reflect on the nature of cultural difference as it is constructed in a variety of discourses. I ought to say from the outset that I’ll use the word discourse perhaps ad nauseam, yet by it I mean not a set of textual pyrotechnics but rather an overall view of human conduct as always meaningful. As we set out to ask what it means to rethink cultural difference in discursive terms, discourse should be understood as that which gives human practice and institutions meaning, that which enables us to make sense of the world, and hence that which makes human practices meaningful practices that belong to history precisely because they signify in the way they mark out human differences. I want to submit the three terms of cultural difference at stake in the title of my lectures—race, ethnicity, nation—to a discursive-genealogical analysis in light of certain political and theoretical concerns, and to also use each term to complicate and unsettle the others a little.
In this first lecture, I want to return, at what you might think is a late stage in the game, to the question of what we might mean by saying that race is a cultural and historical, not biological, fact—that race is a discursive construct, a sliding signifier. Though such statements have almost acquired the status of a canonical orthodoxy in some advanced circles, critics and theorists do not always mean the same thing or draw the same conceptual and political inferences from it. The idea that race is discursively constructed has not, in my experience, done very effectively the work of unhinging and dislodging commonsense assumptions—ways of talking about, making sense of, or calculating for the great, untidy, “dirty” world of everyday life outside the academy. Nor have its dislocating effects on political mobilization or on the assessment of the strategies of antiracist politics been adequately charted.
I refer to “race” here as one of those major or master concepts (the masculine form is deliberate) that organize the great classificatory systems of difference that operate in human societies. Race, in this sense, is the centerpiece of a hierarchical system that produces differences. These are differences, moreover, of which W. E. B. Du Bois once said, in 1897, that “subtle, delicate and elusive though they may be … [they] have silently but definitively separated men into groups.”1 To say it is one of the great classificatory systems of meaning is to put it neutrally. However, I do this not because I wish in any way to downplay the horrendous human and historical consequences that have followed from the application of this racialized classifying system to social life and to individual men and women, but because I want to insist that, hateful as racism may be as a historical fact, it is nevertheless also a system of meaning, a way of organizing and meaningfully classifying the world. Thus any attempt to contest racism or to diminish its human and social effects depends on understanding how exactly this system of meaning works, and why the classificatory order it represents has so powerful a hold on the human imagination.
To put it crudely, the discursive conception of race—as the central term organizing the great classificatory systems of difference in modern human history—recognizes that all attempts to ground the concept scientifically, all efforts to fix the idea of race foundationally on biological, physiological, or genetic grounds, have been shown to be untenable. We must therefore contemplate “substituting a socio-historical and cultural definition of ‘race’ for the biological one,” as the philosopher Anthony Appiah put it in his renowned and elegantly argued essay, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” in the landmark issue of Critical Inquiry, “ ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference,” edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.2 In my remarks that follow I want to explore this proposition further. As we know, human genetic variability between populations that are normally assigned to a racial category is not significantly greater than variability within such populations. What Du Bois, in his essay “The Conservation of Races,” called “the grosser physical differences of color, hair and bone,” although “clearly defined to the eye of the Historian and Sociologist”3—a phrase to which I will return—are, on the one hand, poorly correlated with genetic differences scientifically defined, and are, on the other, impossible to correlate significantly with cultural, social, intellectual, or cognitive characteristics, which means that such “grosser physical differences” are subject to extraordinary variation within any one family, let alone any of the so-called family of races.
I want to make three observations, in passing, about this general position. First, it represents the now common and conventional wisdom among the great majority of scientists in the field. Second, this fact about human genetic variability has never prevented intense scholarly activity among a minority of scientists devoted to the attempt to prove that there is a correlation between racially categorized genetic characteristics and cultural performance—and such activity is once again in full flood today, powered by the rise of the new genome research. Third, I observe that, although the racializing implications of the continuing scientific effort to prove a correlation between, say, race and intelligence are vociferously opposed and condemned by many, including the liberal professions and most black people, nevertheless a great deal of what is routinely said by such groups among and about themselves is predicated precisely on some such assumption. Behind the idea that some social, political, moral, or aesthetic characteristic or phenomenon associated with black people can guarantee the rightness of a political strategy, the correctness of an attitude, or the value of a cultural production, we find the assumption that the truth of such a strategy or attitude or artwork is fixed by the racial characteristics of the participants involved. I deduce from this the awkward insight that diametrically opposed political positions can indeed be derived from the same philosophical foundations, and that although genetic explanations of social behavior are often denounced as racist, nevertheless we find that genetic, biological, and physiological definitions of race are alive and well in the commonsense discourse of us all. This is the paradox my lecture addresses.
The problem with moving to a sociohistorical or cultural conception of racial classification and identification from a genetic or biological one is, as Appiah clearly understood, what to do about the biological trace that remains in racialized discourse today. If I can briefly remind you of his complex and sophisticated argument, Appiah shows that Du Bois, who called his life story the “autobiography of a race concept,”4 took up positions in which he “came gradually, though never completely, to assimilate the unbiological nature of races.”5 In his 1897 text “The Conservation of Races,” Du Bois recognized that although the “subtle, delicate and elusive” differences that have separated humans into groups have sometimes “followed the natural cleavage of common blood, descent and physical peculiarities,” they have “at other times swept across and ignored these.” The division into races, which we persist in making, is, Du Bois says, something that “perhaps transcend[s] scientific definition.”6 Du Bois thus established early on that “ ‘race’ is not a scientific—that is, biological—concept,” but Appiah argues that this recognition by Du Bois only partially supersedes the biological, since “if he has fully transcended the scientific notion, what is the role of this talk about ‘blood’?” What else, Appiah asks, does “common blood” mean for Du Bois except something “dressed up with fancy craniometry, a dose of melanin, and some measure for hair curl, [which] is what the scientific notion amounts to”?7 Not only do I agree with this reading of Du Bois’s struggle with the race concept, but I also note how symptomatic it is of racial discourse per se that the physical or biological trace, having been shown out of the front door, tends to sidle around the edge of the veranda and climb back in through the pantry window!
As we follow Appiah’s analysis and turn to Du Bois’s Crisis article of 1911, “Races,” we find Du Bois moving decisively toward speaking “of civilizations where we now speak of races” when he adds that even “the physical characteristics, excluding the skin color … are to no small extent the direct result of the physical and social environment,” as well as being “too indefinite and elusive to serve as a basis for any rigid classification or division of human groups.”8 On the basis of this environmental or civilizational emphasis in his thinking, we find that by the time we get to Dusk of Dawn in 1940 Du Bois abandons the “scientific” definition in favor of what seems to be a very different argument altogether. Africans and people of African descent may share a common racial ancestry, Du Bois argues, and he says of himself and of his “ancestors going back a thousand years or more” that the “mark of their heritage is upon me in color and hair.” He then states, “These are obvious things, but of little meaning in themselves; only important as they stand for real and more subtle differences from other men.” This represents a critical shift of fundamental importance, for what does matter for Du Bois now, what constitutes the bond between African Americans like him and Africa, is the fact that “these ancestors of mine and their other descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory.” “The real essence of this kinship,” he concludes, “is its social heritage of slavery.”9 Physical characteristics of “color, hair and bone,” as he put it in 1897, which form “the physical bond,” are important for Du Bois in 1940 only insofar as they are a “mark” of heritage, with “color relatively unimportant save as a badge.” Or, to translate Du Bois into my terms, the “mark” and the “badge” are all-important because they signify, because they carry a certain meaning, because they are, in other words, signifiers of difference.
Appiah is certainly right to point out two important aspects of this shift in Du Bois’s thinking. First, as Du Bois himself observes, the later definition—“race” as badge—tends to make the concept slip and slide. For, having been loosened from its physiological moorings, Du Bois says of the “social heritage of slavery” that it “binds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas. It is this unity that draws me to Africa.”10 But, one is tempted to ask, which unity? Is it biological kinship or political affiliation that Du Bois is addressing? Second, as Appiah pithily remarks, if obvious physical qualities such as the “grosser physical differences of color, hair and bone” are now of “little meaning,” then Du Bois’s very mention of them in Dusk of Dawn marks, on the surface of his argument, the extent to which he still cannot quite escape the appeal of the earlier concept of race.11 To put the matter more generally, for it concerns something that affects the entire discourse of race to this day, the fact is that the biological remains as an active trace in Du Bois’s discourse even though it now functions, as Jacques Derrida would say, “under erasure.”12 However, note how Appiah puts it when he argues that “substituting a sociohistorical conception of race for the biological one … is simply to bury the biological conception below the surface, not to transcend it.”13 If true, this is a serious matter to which we should give urgent attention.
In a brief but bold conclusion, Appiah argues that the discursive or sociohistorical turn is doomed to fail since it cannot free itself of the biological trace that adheres to the concept of race when such a move is performed “under Saussurean hegemony.”14 The crucial question at issue here is whether we have too easily come to think of meaning in a post-Saussurean manner as primarily a linguistic phenomenon, as something constituted by systems of difference that are purely internal to the formally structured rules of langue, the abstract ordering principles of language that Saussure distinguished from speech acts, or parole. If the problem amounts to a semiotic fall from grace, then the Saussureans must suppose that race is, as Appiah puts it, “like all other concepts, constructed by metaphor and metonymy; it stands in, metonymically, for the Other; it bears the weight, metaphorically, of other kinds of difference.” For Appiah, even if the concept of race is a “structure of oppositions,” then it is one “whose realization is, at best, problematic, and at worst, impossible,” for the question is: what is the actual entity to which it refers? In response to this dilemma he concludes that “the truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask ‘race’ to do for us.” He continues, “Where race works—in places where ‘gross differences’ of morphology are correlated with ‘subtle differences’ of temperament, belief, and intention—it works as an attempt at a metonym for culture; and it does so only at the price of biologizing what is culture, or ideology.” Standing against the discursive turn, Appiah states, “What we miss through our obsession with the structure of relations of concepts is, simply, reality.”15 On this view, we should have the courage of our convictions and give race up altogether as a philosophically unacceptable way of talking.
Here, finally, at the end of a brilliant intervention, I find myself parting company with Appiah’s argument. I have, of course, no commitment whatsoever to defending race as a concept, least of all in its genetic, biological, or so-called scientific form. Nevertheless, I do not understand what is meant by saying that racial discourse, when conceptualized as a “structure of oppositions,” cannot be “realized.” Does this mean the discursive turn with regard to race has no purchase on the real world, has no effects “out there” beyond what he calls the “text-world of the academy,” because it is only language, nothing but discourse? That because we cannot find a scientific referent for racial difference, it does not exist as a sociohistorical fact? What exactly is the nature of Appiah’s appeal to, “simply, reality” in light of his methodological preoccupation with a structure of relations analogous to langue, that is, language as a system of differences?
My argument is that this deconstructive move—counterposing the biological to the sociohistorical and, finding the biological-scientific conception of race unfounded and untenable, settling for the cultural and the hermeneutic—has one still unfinished turn to complete. Scholars in the academy, Appiah suggests, have been too reluctant to share with their fellow citizens their inescapable conclusion, which is to advocate the “repudiation of race as a term of difference.”16 If what he means by this is that race has no scientific foundations as an explanatory mechanism for accounting for social, cultural, economic, and cognitive differences between racially defined groups, then of course I agree. But we still have to explain why these racial classificatory systems persist, why so much of history has been organized within the shadow of their primordial binaries, and why, above all, everyday action and commonsense language and thought—as well as the larger structural systems of power that organize the distribution of wealth, resources, and knowledge differentially across societies and between groups—all continue to operate with this apparently weak, unsubstantiated, untenable, nearly but not quite erased “biological” trace. Simply put, we still have to account for why race is so tenacious in human history, so impossible to dislodge.
Appiah undertakes his deconstruction like a true philosopher when he argues we should be concerned not just with “the meaning of race” but with “the truth of it.”17 To which one can only respond: since when has the discour...