Desiring Whiteness

A Lacanian Analysis of Race

Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134738601
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Desiring Whiteness provides a compelling new interpretation of how we understand race. Race is often seen to be a social construction. Nevertheless, we continue to deploy race thinking in our everyday life as a way of telling people apart visually. How do subjects become raced? Is it common sense to read bodies as racially marked? Employing Lacan's theories of the subject and sexual difference, Seshadri-Crooks explores how the discourse of race parallels that of sexual difference in making racial identity a fundamental component of our thinking. Through close readings of literary and film texts, Seshardi-Crooks also investigates whether race is a system of difference equally determined by Whiteness. She argues that it is in relation to Whiteness that systems of racial classification are organized, endowing it with a power to shape human difference.

Chapter 1
Deciphering Whiteness

We have counted four human races under which all the manifold variations of this genus are supposed to [be] conceived. But all deviations need nevertheless a stem genus; and either we must declare it now extinct, or else we must seek among those extant the one which we can best compare to the stem-genus…. That portion of the earth between the 31st and 52nd parallels in the Old World…is rightly held to be that in which the most happy mixture of influences of the colder and hotter regions and also the greatest wealth of earthly creatures is encountered; where man too must have departed the least from his original formation…. Here, to be sure we find white inhabitants.

(Kant, “On the different races of man,” Eze edn: 47–8)

Just talking about race means that it will always be there in residue.

(Guillaumin 1995:105)

In June of 1995, the New York Times reported the “anguish” of a Dutch couple who had to confront the fact that one of their twin boys, conceived through in vitro fertilization, was “black.” The University Hospital at Utrecht, which was responsible for inflicting this “anguish,” called it a “deeply regrettable mistake”; they surmised that a technician had used a none-too-clean pipette in performing the procedure. The parents at first denied that “something about Koen was different.” Unlike his twin brother Teun, Koen got darker as the weeks went by, which induced the parents to visit a gynecologist and then to undergo a DNA test. The test results confirmed that Koen’s father was a “black man” from Aruba. For the parents, the news apparently was “devastating.” According to the New York Times:

They started sessions with a psychotherapist to deal with what the father called their “bewilderment and pain,” and the questions that kept spinning around in their heads. How would they tell their son that he was not meant to exist, that he was born because of a technical error? Would they treat the children differently? The parents say they worry about discrimination and that Koen will have fewer chances than his brother. “Let’s be honest, dark people have less opportunity to get a decent job in our society,” the father told Het Parool [the Amsterdam newspaper]. “They have less chance to borrow at a bank.”

(New York Times, 28 June 1995: A3)

A year later in a television interview, the parents expressed similar sentiments and agreed that if the “mistake” had been made with a “white” man’s sperm, they probably would not have noticed that there was “something different” about Koen at all. In other words, there would have been no mistake. I cite this “case” in detail as it seems exemplary of the way race¹ works in modern societies, and also because it points to some of the lacunae in contemporary discussions of race and the ways in which the terms of the argument have been formulated.

Most contemporary debates over the definition of cultural identities and psychical identifications, whether racial, ethnic or sexual, seem to lapse invariably into the opposition between biological essence and social construction. Where race is concerned, however, the opposition, when examined closely, is more over the terms of the debate—i.e. the deployment of the term “race” itself—than over ontological considerations. Few if any liberally inclined persons today will hold that “race,” as it was theorized in the nineteenth century, as a concept referring to the aspirations and abilities of a homogeneous group, is an inherited biological essence. In fact, the scientific bases of race have been thoroughly discredited, as have the philosophical, to the point that race is now considered a “folk” belief.² However, this has not meant the disappearance of race from science.³ It persists, for instance, in medical literature as a means to map the demography of diseases and symptoms. But, if one applies some pressure to the medical category of race, one discovers that it has none of the cultural valence associated with “race”; rather, it is a diffused concept that refers mostly to “human diversity” not group essence.⁴ Race is also frequently equated nowadays with the term “phenotype” as an acceptable term to denote what are supposedly “gross morphological differences,” or (irrelevant visible marks of skin color, hair texture and bone structure. Nevertheless, despite (or perhaps because of) the scientific evisceration of race as meaningful, and the narrowing of its reference to mere bodily signifiers with no signifieds, or meanings, race has never been more reified as a factor of cultural identity. As a concept it is acknowledged to matter in ever more important ways as it continues to influence social legislation. In our unexamined effort to perpetuate race as meaningful, the debate over hereditary race has today been displaced onto questions of identity politics. Should the term race be conceived as a neutral concept designating “human diversity,” which is therefore worth salvaging for its emancipatory power? Can or should race be separated from its history of racist practice and doctrine? Can group identity organized along the lines of racial difference ever overcome the pernicious exclusivism endemic to the concept? Among the most vocal figures representing the two sides of this debate within the academy in the US today are Anthony Appiah and David Goldberg.

According to Appiah (1992), any invocation of racial identity, even when it claims to be a “socio-historical” notion, and open to affiliations, etc., is always biologically grounded. In “Illusions of race” Appiah examines Du Bois’ categorization of human races and his claim that the “Negro” race, “generally of common blood and language,” has a special message for the world. Appiah rightly characterizes Du Bois’ supposedly culturalist definition of race as produced in and as a dialectical opposition that invariably relies on the scientific or biological view which it contests. Delving into contemporary biological literature on “race,” Appiah further elucidates the speciousness of genetic theories of racial difference.⁵ Separating the “visible morphological characteristics of skin, hair, and bone” (1992:35) from inherited “characterological” traits supposedly coded in genes, Appiah is at pains to disarticulate appearance, conceived as pure contingency, from destiny— pathological or political. “The truth,” Appiah concludes,

is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us…. Talk of race is particularly distressing for those of us who take culture seriously. For, when 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 metonym for culture, and it does so only at the price of biologizing what is culture, ideology.

(Appiah 1992:45)

Thus, for Appiah, invocations of racial belonging, whether Anglo-Saxon or African, are always false if not dangerous, insofar as they are grounded in an implicit biologism that is scientifically untenable. But Appiah’s examination of the gene theory of races, to prove that so-called racial characteristics (such as aesthetics, aspirations, potentialities) are not heritable, overlooks an important point. Discrediting the scientific validity of race based on the relative invariability of genetic characteristics among so-called racial populations cannot in itself obliterate race or scientific interest in it. For as Colette Guillaumin suggests, scientific racial theory fixes on various localities of the body at different times, deploying signifiers that map the body according to convenience: “Rooted at first in the body or the blood, this ideology later shifted to the brain and nervous system, and has now taken refuge in the genetic and chromosome potential” (1995:63). And at present that too has given way after The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1996) to the measurement of IQ. In other words, arguing with science is only to displace race onto another locus of scientific investigation. Insofar as race is perpetuated as a meaningful category in our language, science will continue to furnish explanations of it. Arguing with race is at some level always a futile activity. As Guillaumin says with regard to such exorcising gestures: “Negations are not recognized as such by our unconscious mental processes. From this point of view, a fact affirmed and a fact denied exist to exactly the same degree, and remain equally present in our affective and intellectual associative networks” (1995:105). It is precisely this unconscious resiliency of race that invites psychoanalytic exploration.

For Goldberg (1993), on the other hand, race is not necessarily a biological phenomenon. It is a virtually “empty concept” that articulates group identity for the sake of exclusion and inclusion and can overlap with any number of discourses on community, including ethnicity and nation. “Race has been able, in and through its intersections with other forms of group identity, to cover over the increasing anonymity of mass social relations in modernity” (1993:81). Thus Goldberg insists that race must be grasped as a historically fluid concept that signifies differently according to the historical and material interests of the time. For him a key question is whether

any generally abstract characterization approaching definition can be given to the concept of race. It should be obvious from all I have said that race cannot be a static, fixed entity, indeed, is not an entity in any objective sense at all. I am tempted to say that race is whatever anyone in using that term or its cognates conceives of collective social relations. It is, in this sense, any group designation one ascribes of oneself as such (that is, as race, or under the sign) or which is so ascribed by others. Its meanings, as its forces, are always illocutionary.

(ibid.)

When using “race,” Goldberg suggests, we must be clear about which signification we are employing. Quite predictably, Goldberg criticizes Appiah’s view (that all references to race are always grounded in a covert biologism) as being too narrow and thus as overlooking race’s productive aspect as a discourse of power (1993:86).

Classification, valuation, and ordering are processes central to racial creation and construction. The ordering at stake need not be hierarchical but must at least identify difference; and the valuation need not claim superiority, for all it must minimally sustain is a criterion of inclusion and exclusion.

(1993:87)

For Goldberg, race can be logically separated from racism, that is, from its legacy of racist practice. He writes:

Race has been conceptually well-placed to characterize freedom’s routes, to channel freedom’s mobility, and so to thrive in this age of ambiguity,for as I have made clear it is by nature (insofar as it has one) a concept virtually vacuous in its own right. Its virtual conceptual emptiness allows it parasitically to map its signification of naturalized differences onto prevailing social views…to articulate and extend racialized exclusions…. This prevailing historical legacy of thinking racially does not necessitate that any conceptual use of or appeal to race to characterize social circumstance is inherently unjustifiable…. What distinguishes a racist from a non-racist appeal to the category of race is the use into which the categorization enters, the exclusions it sustains, prompts, promotes, and extends…. Though race has tended historically to define conditions of oppression, it could, under a culturalist interpretation… be the site of a counterassualt, a ground of field for launching liberatory projects or from which to expand freedom(s) and open up emancipatory spaces.

(Goldberg 1993:210–11)

Goldberg’s insistence on the emptiness of the concept of race is at first glance refreshing, in that the vacuity seems to account for the inexhaustible capacity of race to reproduce itself. However, by suggesting that “race is whatever anyone in using that term or its cognates” means by it, and that it is any “group designation” ascribed by oneself or by others, he elevates the term to a universal generality that evacuates it of its linguistic specificity. His view that cognates of “race,” for instance, mean the same thing as “race,” completely elides the hegemony of linguistic categories. It renders languages wholly commensurate with one another, and hypostasizes race itself as a “natural” element of difference that languages name in various ways. Goldberg’s overtly Foucauldian emphasis on the productivity of race may appear potentially useful. However, his focus on the socio-historical formation of “racialized discourse,” which refers to race as “meaning different things at different times,” combined with his inattention to the specificity of language, is problematic. It serves to undermine his project, which is to argue for the political nature of “race.” By universalizing race, Goldberg in effect conflates the Foucauldian notion of power itself with race as the effect and cause of discourse, thus making it impossible to pose the question of the historicity of “race.” There is first the sociolinguistic counter-argument, also a historicist one, that we must take seriously. As Guillaumin and others have argued, the concept of race is specific to Europe and was invented in the late eighteenth to nineteenth century. Goldberg courts the danger of reifying race by universalizing it as the governing epistemological paradigm, when he ascribes racial thinking to groups that conceive their identities on the basis of other terminologies of difference (Guillaumin 1995:61). Moreover, by separating race from racism and attempting to deliver it to a culturalist reinterpretation, Goldberg reproduces the very problems of biologism that Appiah critiques with reference to Du Bois. But even more importantly, by abstracting the concept from its historical or linguistic practice, Goldberg dislodges race from any mooring in history or language, thus rendering it, in effect, a catch-all term for difference as such. Why race should be salvaged as the only term that can offer emancipatory possibilities despite its execrable history is never clear.

While both Appiah and Goldberg offer persuasive analyses of the (academic) discourse of race, as representatives of what are now entrenched positions on the race term, they fail to confront the fact that racial practice is not fully covered by racial theory. There is a hiatus between racial theory and practice in that the two can function quite independently of each other. Thus to proceed as if an engagement with racial theory were to undermine the foundations of racial practice is to misrecognize the structure of the discourse of race. Etienne Balibar suggests that we regard “shifts in doctrine and language [in race theory] as relatively incidental matters,” given the fact that from the point of view of the victims of racist practice, “these justifications simply lead to the same old acts” (Balibar 1991:18). This does not mean that race theory is irrelevant, or that we must focus entirely on racism and racist practice at the cost of ignoring its more institutionalized forms. Rather, as a first step, we must begin to recognize the double-edged aspect of the rhetoric of race, where so-called theory and practice do not always coincide to produce the effect of causality. The inadequacy of critical race theory with reference to practice is most evident in relation to cases such as that of little Koen, with which I began. Interestingly, what is precisely at play in this case is nature and culture, or biology and the social problems of inclusion and exclusion that Appiah and Goldberg focus on respectively. For instance, given Appiah’s view that race evaporates with the exposure of race’s scientific or genetic fallibility, it is, interestingly enough, genetics itself which is at the heart of this little racial “mistake.” In his argument with the Dutch-African-American philosopher W.E.B.Du Bois, Appiah demonstrates that race cannot be invoked, except through a specious use of genetics, to define the destiny of a so-called people, or to delineate group aspirations. However, what Koen as a Dutch-Afro-Caribbean child seems to represent is precisely the relation between genes and destiny. At one level, we may say that at the age of eight months, he has already been disqualified to borrow at a bank. But more seriously, the irony of this particular case is that genetic theory here does not serve to discredit racial identity; rather, the DNA test establishes Koen as “black” boy (though born of a “white” mother). Admittedly, Koen’s parents are not suggesting that Koen is inherently incapable of borrowing at a bank, and neither is the DNA test a verification of race as much as of paternity; identity and destiny here are socially interpreted rather than genetically determined. However, the issue remains that destiny is not uncorrelated to genetics. And no amount of argumentation disarticulating the two will do away with the fact that because something is inherited as “race,” your life is predetermined for you. As the Dutch parents testify, most of us continue to harbor deep-seated notions of racial inheritance, despite its scientific untenability simply due to genetic theory’s claims to heritabilty as such. Some of us, as committed social constructionists, may perhaps disclaim this notion because science tells us that the relation between genes and racial identity and destiny is not one of simple predication. DNA tests can establish parentage, but they cannot establish a trans-historical racial identity. Nevertheless, the DNA test in this case does determine Koen’s racial identity (and his non-creditworthiness), though not directly. The relation between genes and identity/destiny is no longer one of predication but implication. The notion of race as genetic inheritance can continue to be entertained when mediated by kinship relations: Koen’s father is a “black man” from Aruba. It is a question, it seems of the signifier, of the Name of the Father, which imparts not only sexual and familial identity, but also racial. Thus the signifier establishes race at the same moment that genetics establishes kinship, and it is this synchrony that enables the simultaneous articulation of genes and identity/ destiny, though not causally. None of this alters the fact that the bottom line in both arguments, whether that of predication or articulation, is of genetic inheritance. Thus I would affirm Appiah’s argument that race is inextricably linked to inheritance. If we reduce the position of Du Bois and that of Koen’s father into simple propositions, we see their logical similarity: “Black people (because they are born ‘black’) have an inherently valuable message for the world” (as this message is a factor of their racial inheritance); and “Black people (because they are born ‘black’) will always be poor” (which is a factor of their social inheritance based on their racial identity). Both statements leave intact the implication of race as inheritance and destiny. However, my skepticism is directed not at the contents of Appiah’s argument but at its utility. Appiah’s impulse to undermine race by interrogating its scientific grounds is academically valuable, but it does not address the way in which race recoups inheritance through other rhetorical means, such as articulation with kinship and recourse to visibility. It seems that, given the power of the notion of heritability as such, no amount of disputation with racial theory can dislodge the association one makes of race with inheritance. Race will continue to be articulated with kinship, with ethnicity, with culture, in ways that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Key to lacan’s works
• Introduction on looking
• Chapter 1: Deciphering whiteness
• Chapter 2: The object of whiteness
• Chapter 3: Whiteness and the elephant joke
• Chapter 4: Looking alike or the ethics of suture
• Chapter 5: What’s in a name? love and knowledge beyond identity in “Recitatif”
• Chapter 6: Discolorations
• Notes
• Bibliography