Racial Subjects

Writing on Race in America

David Theo Goldberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317958642
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Racial Subjects heralds the next wave of writing about race and moves discussions about race forward as few other books recently have. Arguing that racism is best understood as exclusionary relations of power rather than simply as hateful expressions, David Theo Goldberg analyzes contemporary expressions of race and racism. He engages political economy, culture, and everyday material life against a background analysis of profound demographic shifts and changing class formation and relations. Issues covered in Racial Subjects include the history of changing racial categories over the last two hundred years of U.S. census taking, multiculturalism, the experience of being racially mixed, the rise of new black public intellectuals, race and the law in the wake of the O. J. Simpson verdict, relations between blacks and Jews, and affirmative action.

1

INTRODUCTION:

THE RACIAL FABRIC

Between January 1995 and October 1996 over one hundred largely black churches throughout the American South were set alight in arson attacks. Little notice was paid publicly or politically until a widely publicized arrest on June 10, 1996, for a fire set a few days earlier in Charlotte, North Carolina. A white girl of thirteen from a wealthy suburb neighboring the church admitted sole responsibility. At the time of her arrest the local police declared that the fire she had started was unrelated to any other, and that she had not been racially motivated but was a “seriously disturbed” girl involved in teenage satanic activity. The same day two black churches were set alight in Greenville, Texas. Three men—two white, one Hispanic according to reports—were questioned and released for lack of evidence. Greenville has been the heart of Texan Klan activity historically; twenty years ago a sign welcoming people to town read “Home of the blackest land and the whitest people.”

President Clinton finally moved the spate of fires to the center of national attention, declaring them the work of “racial hatred” Indeed, the fires seemed to be shades of the South in the sixties: black citizens repeatedly under attack, apathy among nonblack citizens, denial of racism by at least one local police force, overzealous FBI agents stereotypically pursuing church members as culprits, belated public commitment, and an apology by a president. There may have been no racial motivation in the Charlotte case, but the lack of concern about almost thirty fires previous to that one may have suggested to a teenager disturbed enough to want to torch a church that black in this case is better. As it turned out, a few days after the teenager’s arrest, a Charlotte police representative admitted that the teenager “harbors … anti-African American beliefs.” Law enforcement failed to understand the complex dimensions of racial configuration, reflecting a broader social failure to comprehend the complexity of racial matters.

On May 8, 1996, the South African Parliament voted to adopt a new constitution, among the most progressive in the world, thus finally bringing apartheid to a formal close. A day later, F. W. de Klerk, former South African President and then Deputy President in the government of national unity, announced that he and the Nationalist Party he headed were withdrawing from the government. They planned to fashion a robust opposition party in South Africa’s fledgling democracy. Within a day the South African stock market lost 1.5 percent of its value. In recent history, South Africa has revealed to America that race crosses borders and oceans even as it is transformed by that crossing. South Africa’s experience suggests that the global frame in which race operates today, in the United States as elsewhere, needs to be reconceived. Why does the peaceful resignation of the former scion of South African political life—to form a democratic opposition in a transformed, a “new,” society—cause such consternation in its capital markets?

The answer is all about race. Whites, for all of their former sins, are seen in South Africa, as in the United States, as the guarantors of stability and political rationality, of peacefulness and law and order; blacks represent just the opposite. So whites removing themselves from direct power suggests to rational self-interested investors that there will be a slide into contentiousness and chaos, into instability and insecurity. If the church arsons seem like racism as usual, the South African political economy signals its new form.

The church burnings symbolize—and actualize—contemporary conditions of black-white relations in America. White anxieties about uselessness, social dismissal and alienation, economic vulnerability, social decline, black advancement, and equal opportunity are expressed variously. For example, white religious groups are beginning to stress the rash of suspicious fires at white churches throughout the country, while two black men have been charged in the arson of a black community church the men had been contracted to restore in a town called, ironically, Whiteville. At the extreme, whites’ anxieties are expressed by attacking a welfare state perceived as “black,” in concerns over a public culture increasingly dominated by blackness, and in a resentful politics charging reverse discrimination. Thus, the “new” American racism is not unlike, and not unrelated to, the deregulated market-driven racism of the South African case. In both, longstanding and questionable presumptions about white rationality and black irrationality combine to produce painful personal and socioeconomic consequences. White greed and fear are hardly rational motives, dominated as they are by racist stereotypes. An unmitigated drive to profit mixed with paranoia frames stock market, cultural, and political practices in the United

States as in South Africa. The racialized results read like business as usual.

As the millennium closes we tend to live in sprawling cities, and these cities are related more and more not just to other cities in our nation-state but to other cities globally. (The economy of Los Angeles, for instance, ranks eleventh among the states in the United States, an indication of the growing power of global cities.) In modernist political economy, urban environments represented the mark of the modern, of industrialization and technological prowess, the pull off the land, and the nexus of migratory patterns set off, but hardly containable, under colonialism. In the postmodernizing political economy, the city is increasingly global, constituted by the flow of capital, economic and social, the crossroads of manifold and transnational mobilities. In that sense, the city conjures up dramatic dangers, offering a palette of once unimaginable possibilities.

These possibilities and problems have emerged out of postwar shifts in political economy; that is, in the mode of capital accumulation (as David Harvey demonstrates) that resulted from another technological revolution (being on-line increasingly symbolizes for the late 1990s, it seems, what mainlining or being on LSD did for the late 1960s). Attendant to these changes are less visible shifts in relations between capital and labor, economic and political power, and social self-determination and its relative loss. The shifting concerns about race, politics, and culture have to be read in the context of these structural transformations in the United States from a manufacturing economy to a service economy (global financial services at the high end, social services at the low); from a global power to a global partner; from a presumptive (indeed presumptuous), homogenous, military-industrial complex to a complicated, heterogenous, multicultural hybrid; and from a social order in which work was work and the rest leisure to one in which finding work that pays a living wage is work and play is big business, which we increasingly work to afford!

The past thirty years or so have witnessed the evisceration of the American working class, so much so that it’s not too extreme to think of the destruction as the outcome of a collusive and well-coordinated attack, especially during the 1980s. In the first half of the twentieth century, deep struggles occurred between capital and labor, commercial interests and strong unions. Labor’s power, such as it was, began to erode at the apex of the success of the Civil Rights Movement for reasons at least partly related to local racial dynamics, but also to international economic shifts. What emerged was the erosion not just of the power of the working class in the United States, but the erosion of the U.S. working class itself.

The traditional class formation of capital and labor has transformed: now we have a growing but still small body of the very (and increasingly) rich; an associated professional service class (doctors, lawyers, accountants, mutual fund executives); a middle class of technicians, managers, middle-level professionals, and academics most of whom find it harder to maintain their position in very competitive markets; and a fading working class and the (desperately) poor that includes those characterized as the underclass, the working poor, minimum-wage service workers, the retired working class, and the underemployed. The major manufacturing centers of urban America have watched their manufacturing bases dissipate: from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles— among other cities with significant if not majority non-WASP working-and middle-class populations-each lost approximately half a million manufacturing jobs. The U.S. working class, along with its associated labor “difficulties” has been moved offshore to other parts of the world where labor costs are cheap, where labor reproduction costs are minimal for U.S. capital (consisting for the most part of a now threatened foreign-aid budget), and where production can be moved elsewhere swiftly when labor “problems” are present. Nike, that quintessentially American company, leads the field in the global labor safari.

One indication of the demise of the traditional working class is that an increasing share of non-executive manufacturing positions that require some technological skill are being cornered by those with college degrees in engineering and the like. A sign of the tenuous condition of the middle class in America is that middle-level professional jobs requiring considerable skill (e.g., computer programming) likewise are beginning to be shipped offshore where both direct and reproductive costs are significantly smaller. From 1968 to 1994 the top 20 percent of American households increased their share of aggregate income from 40.5 percent to 46.9 percent, from roughly $74,000 to roughly $106,000, an increase of 44 percent after adjustments for inflation. The bottom 20 percent saw income increase by a meager $500 or 7 percent (roughly $7,200 to $7, 700). These class shifts from the prewar period to the present are exemplified by attendant shifts in electoral politics. Here “the new South” and “Reagan Democrats” have become the significant factors, alongside the supposed declining significance of the black vote.

Since the late stages of the Reagan administration, the U.S. economy has shifted from its traditional dependence on housing construction and on real estate investment. After the stock market plunge in October 1987, the value of housing stock dropped significantly, following on the heels of its sharp inflation in value in the early 1980s. Confidence in housing and real estate waned as investments deflated dramatically (tied to changes in the tax code that precluded deduction for owning a second home). These and falling interest rates prompted acceleration of investment in the stock market. The anonymity of stock ownership distanced investors from the plight of the corporation’s workers. It thus accelerated alienation from and lack of empathetic interest in the plight of working class and poorer citizens. Stockholdings were considered a profit making venture, to be bought and sold according to fluctuations in the market only. Indeed, stocks are rarely held long enough to warrant a lasting interest in the lives—the working and living conditions—of the faceless players who produce wealth. By contrast, interest soared in those fronting the organization. Little resistance faced massive increases in chief executive compensation packages, now totaling more than $20 million per annum and in the most notorious instances accounting for 200 percent more than the annual compensation of the corporation workforce. Chief executives take credit for corporate well-being, happy to see corporate profits grow by an average of 13 percent per annum and to watch their stock value soar, but they are quick to request worker givebacks to achieve their profitable ends and to blame worker inadequacy or intransigence when profits drop and stock values plummet. It is this alienation effect—prompted by the shift from investment in housing stock to the faceless stock market, and coupled with the recent programmatic dismantling of welfare assistance stretching back to the New Deal—that has exacerbated the growing income gap in the United States and the increased vulnerability and erosion of the working class. It has had dramatic effects on the prospects for black citizens, aiding the rise of at least part of the black bourgeoisie while braking the prospects of the black poor and working class. Advertising, aimed overwhelmingly at the middle class, intensifies the experience of alienation through its stereotypical representations.

Unlike traditional immigrants, African Americans are the only group members who, in fashioning a middle class, have been forced to face the coterminous configuration of a lumpen class, a graduation and degradation of simultaneous sorts. It’s as if the consolidation of a substantial black middle class has been constrained by the weighted handicap of their “brothers” and “sisters,” a pulling back as there is a surging forward, an informal (and so supposedly unobjectionable) restriction on Abel for the plight of Cain.

More visible than such structural dynamics—indeed, helping to hide them from view—are deepening racial divides. Race seems to be tearing our social fabric. It is everywhere—on the street and at work, on the radio and television, in just about every magazine and at the movies, at schools and colleges, in the playground and on the playing field. And, of course, it’s on the internet. A month or so ago I happened upon a public policy discussion list engaged in a heated exchange about the virtues and vices of affirmative action. One discussant, signing off under the pseudonym “John Knight,” insisted upon attributing to affirmative action what he perceived as the decline of the United States over the past thirty years. Affirmative action, our beleaguered Renaissance man insisted, has been the cause of soaring divorce rates, declining SAT scores, depressed wages, debilitated worker productivity and competitiveness, and job loss to the tiger economies of Southeast Asia and the hungry economies of the developing world. That’s quite a burden to bear. Race not only matters; at times it seems to be all that does.

Race has become a touchstone. Sewn over the centuries into the seams of the social fabric, the idea of race (or, really, the ideas, for they are multiple) furnishes the terms around and through which a complex of social hopes, fears, anxieties, resentments, aspirations, self-elevations, and identities gets to be articulated. It’s not that race, for instance, is isomorphic with class, nor simply that class is articulated as race. Rather, classes themselves are now racially fractured. Racial configurations cut across class, rendering even intraclass alignments ambiguous, ambivalent, and anxious. This social fracturing makes any policy consideration concerning race, especially policies that are racially explicit, fraught with the difficulties of fervent commitment and equally fervent denial. Such policies become difficult to negotiate, compromising to defend, and apparently easy to denounce but not so easy to renounce. The racial considerations attendant on any social issue—the racial dimensions and determinations of it, when explicit and overt—obscure most other considerations; and the racial formulation or effects of a policy drown out any other articulation or implication. These difficulties are further magnified by the variability of ethnoracial reference, the slipperiness of racial formation and reference, and (yet) by the overarching reduction of racial complexity to white and black, if not by whites tending to equate race with “the black condition.”

A widespread view, especially among white Americans, is that racism would disappear if everyone simply ceased making (so much of) racial references. This vision strikes me as a contemporary version of those treatises on “the negro problem.” Just as there never was a “negro problem”—only problems that whites took upon themselves to have with blacks (D’Souza [1993, 551] still thinks there is “a black problem”)—so there is no “race problem,” only difficulties that blacks and whites project they will have with each other. It’s curious that racial referencing should become the dominant concern among whites at the moment whiteness ceases to be a racially invisible category. The discomfort with racial categorizing is not just with being identified as racially dominating; it is in being thrust into the glare of its own making. By rendering whiteness visible as a racial category, whiteness has been unveiled as increasingly irrelevant, as out of control in both senses. Whiteness thus becomes a victim of its own fabrication. Self-defined for many years as the residue of all the identities it took itself not to be, all those it excluded as abject, whiteness is now revealed as a leftover identity. And leftovers no longer sell in an economy of throwaways.

The conceptual and causal direction between race and racism, I suspect, runs mostly in the opposite direction. If, when, and as racism recedes (which is not to say that it is receding), race and racial reference will lose significance. I am not committed to the view that race can have no independent and sustainable value without racism. It is conceivable that it might, but I doubt so much would be made then of racial belonging. In any case, the conceptual relations between race and racism are more dialogical and dialectical than the baldness of the counterproposition would have them. The point, nevertheless, is that we should exert our social energies to contesting the power of racisms rather than in finding ourselves offended by racial (self-)identification.

In this volume of essays, I’m concerned to show how race is written into daily lives and experience in America, to demonstrate how it is a fabrication of and about the modern American subject. Throughout U.S. history, race has always been a central strand of state administration; a silent (and sometimes not so silent) barrier to kinship and adoptability; a condition of advancement and advantage, of power and privilege; and a mark of preference and improvement, of intellectual prowess and jury participation, of law’s empire and social injustice, of ethnic excludability and historical denial, of social invisibility and sociospatial segregation. It has been so whether explicitly invoked or silently, invisibly evoked. This is a reality that the U.S. Supreme Court has denied in rendering unconstitutional all newly created voting districts that effectively lack white majorities.

These essays are a mix of popular and theoretical reflections. My purpose is to render readily accessible theoretical analyses regarding racial subjects—key topics around and about race and the racializing of social subjects in America. I take the primary title, “Racial Subjects,” from the introductory chapter of my earlier, more sustained, and unapologetically theoretical book, Racist Culture (1993a), thus linking the more popular style and accessible themes of this collection of essays to the theoretical framework articulated in that earlier book.

Each essay in this volume was written independently of the others, though there should be an overall order and coherence to the book’s thematics. In the first essay, “Hate, or Power?” I argue against the conception of racism as hateful expressions, a view widespread throughout popular discourse, suggesting that racism is better understood as exclusionary relations of power. Having set this conceptual background, I trace the history of changing racial categories over two hundred years of U.S. census-taking in “Taking Stock: Counting by Race,” arguing that the state employ racial classification only to track historical discrimination. Relatedly, in “Made in the USA: Racial Mixing’n Matching,” I analyze the experience of and current interest in mixed race and the “one-drop” rule through the prism of Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet.” This is followed by reflections in “In/Visibility and Super/Vision: Fanon and Racial Formation” upon the social and philosophical twists of racial and (en)gendered invisibility by excavating their articulation in Frantz Fanon’s work.

The conceptual framework laid out in the first four essays orders my discussion in the following four essays of the dilemmas faced by the new black public intellectuals, focusing in particular on Cornel West (“Whither West? The Making of a Public Intellectual”); of race and the law in the wake of the O. J. Simpson trial (“A World of Difference: O. J.’s Jury and Racial Justice”); of relations between blacks and Jews (“Between Blacks and Jews”); and of affirmative action in the context of the tension ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The Racial Fabric
• 2. Hate, or Power?
• 3. Taking Stock: Counting by Race
• 4. Made in the USA: Racial Mixing’n Matching
• 5. In/Visibility and Super/Vision: Fanon and Racial Formation
• 6. Whither West? The Making of a Public Intellectual
• 7. Between Blacks and Jews
• 8. A World of Difference: O. J.’s Jury and Racial Justice
• 9. Crime and Preference in the Multicultural City
• 10. Wedded to Dixie: Dinesh D’Souza and the New Segregationism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index (by name)
• Index (by concept)