Everyday Practice of Race in America

Ambiguous Privilege

Utz McKnight

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136978210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An original contribution to political theory and cultural studies this work argues for a reinterpretation of how race is described in US society. McKnight develops a line of reasoning to explain how we accommodate racial categories in a period when it has become important to adopt anti-racist formal instruments in much of our daily lives.

The discussion ranges over a wide theoretical landscape, bringing to bear the insights of Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Michel Foucault, Cornel West and others to the dilemmas represented by the continuing social practice of race. The book lays the theoretical foundation for a politics of critical race practice, it provides insight into why we have sought the legal and formal institutional solutions to racism that have developed since the 1960s, and then describes why these are inadequate to addressing the new practices of racism in society. The work seeks to leave the reader with a sense of possibility, not pessimism; and demonstrates how specific arguments about racial subjection may allow for changing how we live and thereby improve the impact race continues to have in our lives.

By developing a new way to critically study how race persists in dominating society, the book provides readers with an understanding of how race is socially constructed today, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of political theory, American politics and race & ethnic politics

Chapter 1
Representation

Class ambiguity and racial subjectivity

Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?—In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?—Or is the use its life?

(Wittgenstein 1967: Sec 432)

At about ten o’clock the Jumbotrons began showing the performers on stage at the Inauguration. This took the minds of everyone standing in that cold January morning off the bitter wind whipping through the crowd. My 14-year-old had been standing, waiting since seven a.m., as dawn slowly crept over the horizon. For the people on the Mall something unique was taking place. That day America’s first Black president was going to be sworn into office. The narratives of those in attendance echoed one another as they described the unprecedented sense of shared joy and the civility that came from a common sense of satisfaction and success. Everyone was happy; of the huge crowd attending the event, not a single person was arrested. This is an unusual story in today’s America. What happened to race politics on that day?

The election of Barack Obama as the first Black president of the United States was possible because there is a particular logic to how race is used in this society. Today a Black person can literally stand for the elimination of race socially. To elect Obama as president is the ultimate act of a politics of representation. Under the guise of accepting Blacks into White society with new practices of inclusion, it has become possible to assert that race is no longer an important value in the US. As I will argue in the chapters that follow, the inclusion of some Blacks is used to subordinate others. This inclusion is based on the need to eliminate not the use of race, but to eliminate the ability to argue that racism is still being practiced.

With Obama’s election it has become even more important to develop a theory of race in the everyday. What follows is an effort in a tradition that Wendy Brown invokes very nicely with the following statement, “In some partial fashion, theory makes an object of everyday life and practices – and in that very gesture divests those practices of their everydayness, their lived and practical quality” (Brown 2001: 122). What is going on in the social journey from slavery to segregation to representation? Why does race persist as a value in so many areas of life in the US? What can be done to challenge how we use race today? In chapter one I take up these questions by briefly addressing the tradition amongst Marxist scholars of describing race as an epiphenomenon of class relations in society. Chapter two develops a theory of race within a Wittgensteinian framework. Arguing that race is a specific social interpretation of the problem of Other minds implicates us in a politics where the description of subjectivities, institutions, and everyday practices is central. Chapters three and four unpack the everyday use of racial objectivity and conversion. Distinguishing between the reproduction and refusal of racial practices, chapter five considers what it means to turn away from using race in the US today. The book concludes in chapter six by expanding on the argument for a critical racial subjectivity.

Introduction

Our definition of justice depends on the value we place on the differences between groups. If the idea of race has importance for many in a society or is a main description of differences between persons, then it clearly has value. Injustice will then be defined based on what we as a society feel is a fair way to use race, and not merely whether the concept of race itself has value. It is this description of “fair use” that is constantly under contention in popular debates about racism.

A legacy of the Civil Rights Movement is the popular assumption that there is a larger social project or narrative that desires the eventual erasure of race as a concept of value between persons. At the same time, there is no evidence that this social project is in fact supported by even a small proportion of the population. Since we use it every day, how should we determine the value of race as a social practice, and what theoretical approach should we use to make its description less onerous?

It is frustrating that to be Black is to be hyper-visible, always present, and at the same moment to have no means of acknowledging the use of race as a social value. Race continues to define who we are today. At seminars, in classrooms, on primetime television shows, on blogs, in church services, in coffee shops and book stores, in gatherings designed to discuss race and racism, and at local grocery stores, it is obvious that we continue to use race to differentiate between people. Yet, we are trapped by a conception of race that misses the location of its practice time and again.

We need a theory that accounts for the personal acknowledgement of race as a social practice, a theory that would show us how to refuse distinctions of racial difference between persons. This book is an attempt to create such a theory.

The current solutions for confronting racism are social recipes that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, social pressures not to speak of Blacks in essentialist or stereotypical fashion, not to use racial slurs and make racial jokes, and to avoid openly discriminatory behavior were all norms developed during this time. The idea of Whiteness as privilege and a corresponding social strategy of speaking of race as a social construction instead of as a natural human difference became common. These discourses were designed to establish culpability, to make people question why they used race the way that they did. As strategies they appealed to a larger social value of anti-racism that, except with respect to traditional forms of hate speech and violence, did not exist. What should have been the beginning of a social project to eliminate the use of race in society stopped at the point where it began to challenge the social basis for a racial hierarchy. We need to take up that challenge today by addressing the politics of representation and partial inclusion that define how we use race ordinarily.

The study of race as a political issue is often dismissed as a sociological problem. This sociological perspective describes race as an issue of material inequalities, thereby eschewing the need for a more complex theoretical discussion. This perspective assumes that the existing institutional framework for anti-racist practices in society will correct for inequalities over time. I do not agree. Instead we need to account for how race is socially reproduced.

An important caveat to the idea that race is Black and White must be kept in mind as the argument unfolds in the chapters that follow. We cannot conflate the experiences of Asian Americans and other non-Whites as diverse groups in America with those of an equally heterogeneous group of African Americans. At the same time we should reconcile ourselves to a wealth of similarities in how race works for everyone at the level of subjection. Therefore, even though I am going to talk about Whites and Blacks, there is another series of arguments to be made.

People often argue that race is immediately social. That moment when one child refuses to play with another because he or she has been warned not to do so by a parent or teacher, the slur tried out on the playground, these and many other events are often used to define how we first perceive race in our everyday lives. The classic example is that given by DuBois, who first realizes the impact of race when a young woman refuses to accept his greeting card at school (DuBois 2004).

These events accumulate and form patterns that individuals can, if they choose to, attach to the idea of race. Like DuBois and the young woman, we begin to define specific events as evidence of race, as a definitive part of who we are as racial subjects in the society. But these social interactions are not the only type of racial descriptions in our society, even if they are the most important source for the norms we depend on to describe the advent of race everyday. The explanation for how housing segregation, job disparities, police surveillance, and poverty exist in society provides another source of education about race.

A description of racism that only focuses on the social as a description of how people react to the supposed races of those around them, provides a false sense of the impact of race in society, and by itself is incoherent. Any answer to a child’s first question in response to this social rejection by others, a question often not even expressed for fear of further stigmatization, quickly becomes a description of all of those material relationships that define the importance of race in our society. The impact on the child of the statement of rejection is found in the realization by him or her, even if often poorly articulated by the parent or friend at the time, of the role of race as an idea in determining the relationships the child is to develop with complex material and social factors in our society. Such a definition, of why a child should avoid contact with certain people or finds him or herself rejected by others through racial slurs or avoidance behavior, depends for its coherence on something outside of the immediate social interaction. In that moment we are introducing or reinforcing the material description of race.

Race is not merely a handshake or the rejection of a card; it is the collection of all events wherein it can be made to have value. The reluctance of the other person, defined by the possible transgression of a social norm regarding the social contact between racial groups, defines the social character of race in the moment. But if legally defined discriminatory behaviors are not readily apparent, how should we determine if race is present in the practice in question?

When the location of race is ambiguous, when it “feels” like race but there is no proof, we default to other categories of legal discrimination, and often begin to speak of class politics. In doing this we concede the description of what race is to the law and its implementation, even when we know that this definition is a result not of a comprehensive politics of race, but instead a partial, unstable definition arising from a series of reconciliations with specific interest groups, elected officials, and institutional practices in the society. Even the definition of race as found in hate speech and acts of violence is unfortunately fungible. So why do we accept the popular definition of race at the very moment that its description in our everyday experience is challenged by an event? Another possibility is to argue for a structuralist answer. Yet, often this structuralist perspective implicitly concedes that race is a manifestation of class relationships. A central argument in this book is that race can not be reduced to class.

I consider throughout the chapters how we can use political theory to address race as an idea. We need to consider what Wittgenstein and Foucault have to offer a critical race theory. To provide a context for the argument I begin in this chapter with a description of the work of Stuart Hall, Michael Omi, Howard Winant, and Charles Mills.

It may be that some people are unable, due to the place of race in their own lives, to come to terms with their own presence within its reinvention. It is so important to avoid being labeled a racist, someone who invariably ascribes to racialist categories of human types, that race can only easily be discussed with the caveat that the idea of categories or types of persons is always kept in question. Even the idea of a racist is a form of typology that must be avoided.

Since most situations do not allow for this continuous instability of subjection as a background condition, people avoid any discussion of race at all, even if everyone knows that it has an important social place in our lives. I think that race has been described within the academy and in popular conversation so as to inhibit its critical theoretical development. There are several discursive practices that obfuscate how race is still a real problem in the US. The first describes the institutional change that occurred in the 1960s as aporetic, as a disruption, a social revolution. The idea that over the course of a decade we moved from swearing at each other to living in harmony with one another is a very dangerous fiction. This perspective ignores the decades that it took to eliminate specific forms of overt racism as acceptable practices. In providing a watershed moment with which to redeem not only one’s own behavior, but also to cleanse the historical legacy of its value as a descriptor of who we are, the Civil Rights Movement has become a way to redeem Americans of racism.

The conflict over how race should be defined socially and institutionally in the US in the 1960s was over formal segregation in the law and the fear that eliminating formal barriers to social advancement would provide Blacks and Others with the opportunity to compete equally with Whites for resources in the society. It is true that the success of anti-segregation initiatives has led to social instruments that make it harder to reinforce a racial hierarchy in the US in specific areas. The prohibition on legal segregation did result in anti-discrimination laws and social stigma being associated with the open use of racial slurs and hate speech in everyday life. At the same time, eliminating legal segregation did not directly alter the definition of race that went into supporting the legal institutions in the first place.

The law is a product of the social norms of a community. It is wrong to say that a successful movement based on claims of due process and class action then creates immediate de facto changes in those practices that define the value of race. What about the activities of those individuals who, in opposition to those participating in the Civil Rights Movement, have resisted any change in its use? This is not to say that, overtime, law does not have a profound impact on the ability of people to reproduce narratives and discourses of race in society. To some extent it is possible to legislate equality. However, after the mid-1970s, the conflict over what race should mean every day in the US became in the first place about the limits of the law to determine social and institutional practices in society, and second whether it was possible to reinstitute legal segregation with the collapse of the Civil Rights Movement in the society.

It should be remembered that while the law is the final arbiter of social conflict, as the limit of sovereignty and the process of governmentality, its efficacy is located in the practices of enforcement and application. It is here, when anti-discrimination law was being implemented in local institutions, that the ambitions of the Civil Rights Movement to eliminate racism as a value of importance failed. Many would say that such were not its ambitions, that the movement sought merely to remove formal legal segregation and that its collective aim was still to uphold a description of racial difference in other areas of life.

If we think about it a bit, it is easy to see that such a perspective is contradictory. Either race is a value or it is not; there can be no partial acceptance of racial difference in society without this over time beginning to impact other areas. To say that race matters sometimes and not at others, or in some social and political practices but not everywhere, is to beg the important political question that the Civil Rights Movement did in fact seek to address that of why race matters at all. However, this idea of differential application, that race should be important sometimes, is how race is used in the US today; and as a result it retains central importance in our social lives. With class and gender, race is a primary form of differentiation for jobs, housing, education, and social status.

But if not in the law, where does race reproduce itself? Studying race allows us to consider the problem of the social, the middle ground between problems of governance where universality is the rule, and our private intimate relationships where little in particular is prohibited.

The material practice of race

To work on the problem of race we have to set aside the erroneous idea that the salience of race is merely a matter of belief, and accept that we can not hold ideas of race that are not formed by the relationships we have to material events and social processes around us. What creates the idea of race? The idea that we do not know what race is as a material practice, where it is constituted as a concept with social meaning should give us pause. The ordinary definition of race is that of phenotype, a categorization of the plastic of the human form, the human somatic features, where race is stamped for all to see. While the soma is definitely one place we need to look for a material description of race and its valuation, we also should consider the social practices that allow for us to have an awareness of phenotype in the first place. It is important to investigate the moment where it all of sudden matters that someone is darker of skin and differently featured in specific ways. In a very real sense, without these practices of materialization there would be no possibility of phenotype; it would be invisible to our perceptions and lack social coherence.

This fact is readily apparent if you ask someone to describe the phenotypal differences of persons outside of their immediate social practices, where there exist few if any social attachments to somatic differences between persons. To say “they all look the same to me” in that moment, is to reveal the absence of social practices that allow the person to sort past one or another somatic social value. The Other always looks the same. Individuals in a group seem similar since the social description of persons is at that level simply one of a single order of difference. Even if race describes an absolute difference between same and Other, today its use avoids reference to this simple di...

Table of contents

• Postcolonial Politics
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Representation
• Chapter 2 The everyday and ordinary
• Chapter 3 Cody’s, Foucault, and race
• Chapter 4 Working together
• Chapter 5 Walking the streets
• Chapter 6 Passing and mixing
• Bibliography
• Index