The Politics of Race

African Americans and the Political System

Theodore Rueter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781563245640
• eBook ISBN: 9781315286358
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A study of the relationship between race and American politics, organised around the institutions and processes of American government. It includes readings by individuals like Bill Clinton, Charles Hamilton, and Carol Swain, across a wide variety of ideological perspectives.

Part II Cultural Politics and Political Ideology

DOI: 10.4324/9781315286372-5

Many scholars and activists have argued that race is a critical element in the formation of political ideology.

The first reading, "Postmodern Racial Politics in the United States: Difference and Inequality," by Howard Winant, a sociologist at Temple University, was originally published in Socialist Review, a radical journal. Winant asserts that "the contemporary United States faces a pervasive crisis of race" and that American citizens are more conflicted over race than over "any other social or political issue." The American "'race problem'" has generated "ferocious antagonisms" between slaves and masters, natives and settlers, new immigrants and established residents, low-wage workers and higher-wage workers.

Winant analyzes the racial discourse of four groups: the Far Right, the New Right, neoconservatives, and radical democrats. For each group, race is linked to a comprehensive political and cultural agenda.

The first group, the Far Right, is opposed to affirmative action and immigration. Some members of the Far Right openly advocate white supremacy. This perspective, represented by David Duke of Louisiana, a former candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, maintains that whites are victims of racial inequality.

Winant then analyzes the racial rhetoric of the New Right. This group, epitomized by Pat Buchanan, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996, asserts that minority rights are a threat to "traditional American values." The New Right uses such racial code words as busing, quotas, welfare, and "English only."

Winant also examines the racial views of the neoconservative movement. Neoconservatives believe in universalism, democracy, egalitarianism, individualism, and assimilation. They fear that the continuing efforts of minorities to stress racial differences threaten these values.

Finally, Winant discusses his own perspective, radical democracy. He states that "radical democratic discourse acknowledges the permanence of racial difference in U.S. society," and. that "racial themes have marked and molded U.S. economic life, political processes, and cultural frameworks since colonial times." He is optimistic that political ideology and public policy will increasingly see poverty as a class-based issue, rather than a race-based issue, since racially inclusive policies are more likely to attract public support.

The next reading, "Malcolm X and the Revival of Black Nationalism," is by Michael Eric Dyson, professor of American civilization at Brown University. The article originally appeared in Tikkun, a bimonthly journal of liberal Jewish thought. Dyson is author of Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism (1993), which includes discussions of rap music, black preaching, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, novelist Toni Morrison, and black supremacist Leonard Jeffries.

In this selection, Dyson argues that the cultural renaissance of Malcolm X is the result of black America's "search for a secure and empowering racial identity." Dyson criticizes black nationalists for ignoring the importance of class and gender. He contends that an alternative strategy, "bourgeois liberal integrationism," has failed to bring the black masses "within striking distance of prosperity." Dyson proposes a third course, democratic socialism, Which would promote the redistribution of power and income.

The next reading is entitled "False Prophet; The Rise of Louis Farrakhan." The author, Adolph Reed Jr., is professor of political science at Northwestern University. He examines the biography and philosophy of Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, one of the nation's fastest-growing religious sects. Farrakhan favors economic self-reliance, separate schools, and the formation of an independent state. Reed has called Farrakhan "a talented demagogue" who "mingles banalities, half-truths, distortions, and falsehoods to buttress simplistic and wacky theories."

There is a strong similarity between the views of Louis Farrakhan and those of Leonard Jeffries, chairman of the Department of Black Studies at the City University of New York. Jeffries, a black supremacist, contends that Jews and Italians have conspired to denigrate blacks in films. He also maintains that African "sun people" are intellectually and morally superior to European "ice people."

The final reading in this part, "The New Black Conservatives" by Theodore Rueter, examines the backgrounds of eight prominent black conservatives: Clarence Thomas, Stephen Carter, Alan Keyes, Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, and Robert Woodson. It also explores their views on affirmative action, education, housing, immigration, economic policy, welfare dependency, and "victimization." In addition, the reading discusses political attitudes within black America, the status of black conservative politicians, and various explanations for the rise of black conservatism.

4 Postmodern Racial Politics in the United States: Difference and Inequality

DOI: 10.4324/9781315286372-6

Howard Winant

Let me begin with a controversial claim: the contemporary United States faces a pervasive crisis of race, a crisis no less severe than those of the past. The origins of the crisis are not particularly obscure: the cultural and political meaning of race, its significance in shaping the social structure, and its experiential or existential dimensions all remain profoundly unresolved as the United States approaches the end of the twentieth century. As a result, the society as a whole and the population as individuals suffer from confusion and anxiety about the issue (or complex of issues) we call race.

This situation should not be surprising. We may be more afflicted with anxiety and uncertainty over race than we are over any other social or political issue. Racial conflict is the archetype of discord in North America, the primordial conflict which in many ways has structured all others. Time and time again what has been defined as "the race problem" has generated ferocious antagonisms: between slaves and masters, between natives and settlers, between new immigrants and established residents, and between workers divided by wage discrimination. Time and time again this "problem" has been thought resolved or supplanted by other supposedly more fundamental conflicts, only to blaze up anew. Tension and confusion in postwar racial politics and culture are merely the latest episode in this seemingly permanent drama.

In the years since World War II, however, United States society has undergone very rapid and dramatic racial transformations.* We first experienced a morally and politically compelling mobilization of racial minority movements, led by the black movement, in the 1950s and 1960s. This challenge, which some described as approaching revolutionary proportions, was followed immediately by an equally comprehensive wave of racial reaction in the 1970s and 1980s characterized by wholesale denial of the existence of racial inequality and injustice.

*A note on terminology: much of the literature on race addresses issues in purely black-white terms. Such a framework is clearly inadequate unless dictated by the specific content of a given study (e.g., an analysis of slavery). My practice is to refer to race in general. If, however, discussion is focused upon a particular group or intergroup relationship, I indicate this in the text.

Nor were these trends confined to any narrow political or cultural terrain. They enveloped U.S. society. Indeed, these racial crosscurrents, as I have argued elsewhere,¹ were the chief determinants of the postwar political order. They generated both the New Left and the New Right, lent order and strategy to the antiwar movement which spelled the end of the Pax Americana, and thoroughly restructured U.S. political life. They politicized the social, such that the issue of difference became a potential axis of political and cultural mobilization (for example in the women's movement).

The racial minority movements of the postwar period recomposed U.S. political institutions, particularly the state and parties. They thus made possible not only the reforms of the 1960s, but also the resurgence of conservative and indeed reactionary movements, policies, and party realignments which took shape in the late 1970s and 1980s. In respect to movements, the appearance of a series of right-wing social movements in the 1970s owed their origins to the "backlash" which had confronted the racial minority movements from the mid-1960s onward. In respect to policies, the cheerful rehabilitation of regressive incomes policies (the "supply-side"), the assault on abortion rights, the evisceration of civil rights enforcement, even the defense buildup, can all be related to postwar racial conflicts. In respect to parties, the confused and divided condition of the Democrats certainly has major racial overtones; while the Republican's cynical "southern strategy" based on "coded" racial appeals and its consequent successors, including the Bush campaign's obsession with black rapist Willie Horton, are the underlying factors in the Republican resurgence and the triumph of Reaganism.

What happens now? By all accounts the political pendulum is swinging back from right to center. Yet ominous trends remind us that racial conflict has not been domesticated. There are rumblings from a modernized Klan and a racist far right; impoverished slum dwellers, disproportionately composed of racial minorities, signify a social order in decline; and an ongoing social policy of neglect, whether benign or malign, suggests that racism has not been banished from high places.

On the analytical level, the work of the new right and neoconservative analysts,² which grounded the reactionary racial policy of the late 1970s and 1980s, is being challenged by a more liberal and activist policy approach.³ But overall, there is a notable absence of radical perspectives on race. Even radicals have been confused by the racial crosscurrents of the postwar period. We are now at a crisis point, however, at which further confusion would be dangerous. We need to develop a new perspective on race, one that recognizes the postmodern character of contemporary and future racial politics. Only such a radical perspective will be adequate to conceptualize the present racial situation in the United States, much less to imagine the future. The purpose of this essay is to provide the beginnings of such an interpretation.

Basing my approach on racial-formation theory, I interpret contemporary U.S. racial dynamics as a combination of cultural and structural relationships, inherently unstable and contested politically throughout society. Thus the meaning of race, the categories available for racialization of social groups, and the configuration of racial identities, both group and individual, I suggest, exemplify (though they do not exhaust) the cultural dimensions of racial dynamics in the forthcoming period. Structural relationships, on the other hand, might include (but should not be limited to) racial inequality and stratification, as well as the political articulation of race in movements, parties, and state institutions.

I think the postmodern perspective is a valid one with which to characterize the present. What is postmodern about racial dynamics? How do contemporary patterns differ from those of the preceding "modern" epoch during which biologistic views of race were effectively challenged both theoretically and practically?*

*For present purposes modernism in regard to race can be associated with the ethnicity paradigm, which for the first time systematically located racial meanings and identities on a social, rate than biological, terrain. The origins of this view can be...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• About the Contributors Page
• Preface Page
• I. Overview
• II. Cultural Politics and Political Ideology
• III. Interest Groups and Political Parties
• IV. Gender
• V. Congress
• VI. The Presidency
• VII. The Judicial System
• VIII. State and Urban Politics
• IX. Public Policy
• About the Editor