Achieving Blackness
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Achieving Blackness

Race, Black Nationalism, and Afrocentrism in the Twentieth Century

Algernon Austin

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eBook - ePub

Achieving Blackness

Race, Black Nationalism, and Afrocentrism in the Twentieth Century

Algernon Austin

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About This Book

Achieving Blackness offers an important examination of the complexities of race and ethnicity in the context of black nationalist movements in the United States. By examining the rise of the Nation of Islam, the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the “Afrocentric era” of the 1980s through 1990s Austin shows how theories of race have shaped ideas about the meaning of “Blackness” within different time periods of the twentieth-century. Achieving Blackness provides both a fascinating history of Blackness and a theoretically challenging understanding of race and ethnicity.

Austin traces how Blackness was defined by cultural ideas, social practices and shared identities as well as shaped in response to the social and historical conditions at different moments in American history. Analyzing black public opinion on black nationalism and its relationship with class, Austin challenges the commonly held assumption that black nationalism is a lower class phenomenon. In a refreshing and final move, he makes a compelling argument for rethinking contemporary theories of race away from the current fascination with physical difference, which he contends sweeps race back to its misconceived biological underpinnings. Achieving Blackness is a wonderful contribution to the sociology of race and African American Studies.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2006
ISBN
9780814769928

1

Making Races

I’ve heard that most people in Kizimkazi [on the East African island of Zanzibar] claim to be Persian. . . . To me the people look about as Persian as Mike Tyson.
When I was growing up, we used to say, “If you’re light you’re alright, if you’re brown get down, if you’re black get back.” It’s taken my people fifty years to move from Negro to Black to African American. I wonder how long it will take the Swahili to call themselves African.
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
In the PBS documentary series, Wonders of the African World, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who heads the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, is perplexed and disturbed by many of the people he meets along the Swahili coast of East Africa. Many Swahili claim an Arab or Persian identity. To Gates, these people are racially confused and ashamed to acknowledge the blackness that is written on their faces. He informs the Swahili he encounters that “if you came with me back home to Boston, Americans would say that you just look African to them,” and not Persian or Arabian.1
Are the Swahili racially confused and self-hating, or is Gates simply confused about what race is? Different societies have defined blackness differently. We could turn the tables on Gates and imagine a black person from Africa or Latin America questioning Gates on his classification of Du Bois as black. To someone from Brazil, Du Bois’s relatively light complexion, hair texture, and facial features (not to mention his French and Dutch ancestry, education, and refined manners)2 would exclude him from blackness. In Brazil, Du Bois would be classified as a mulatto or, because of his class background, possibly as white. He would definitely not be classified as black. It is easy to imagine a Brazilian interviewer wondering how long it would take Gates to realize that Du Bois did not look like Mike Tyson.3
Gates has written theoretically on race and is a leader in the field of African American Studies.4 He is among the most prominent scholars who argue that race is socially constructed. Gates’s comments on the people of Zanzibar are illustrative of important problems in the current scholarly thinking about race. Although there is an almost universal consensus among academics that “race is socially constructed,”5 there is a lack of consensus over what “socially constructed” actually means. For some, social constructionism derives from poststructuralist theory; for others, it emerges from new insights in the study of human genetics; and for yet others, it is based on basic sociological theory.6 This lack of clarity over what social constructionism means leads scholars to vacillate between constructionist positions and biologically reductionist ones.
This book is a sociohistorical examination of blackness in the United States. To understand how blackness can vary by social context and over time despite the fact that the physical appearance of blacks for the most part does not change, one needs to understand what race is and how it is socially created. The understanding of the social construction of race articulated here is based on basic sociological theory. Sociologists have long argued that people’s beliefs and understandings shape human behavior. This statement is merely a specification of how and why cultural ideas matter in studying social life. Collective human behavior is what produces the human-made reality that is society.
The sociologist William I. Thomas argues, “If men define situations as real then they will be real in their consequences [for men’s behavior].”7 For example, if I believe that baby formula is better for my baby than breast milk, I will provide baby formula for my baby. But if I believe that breast milk is better for my baby than formula, I will provide breast milk. As American beliefs on this issue have changed, social practices have changed accordingly. Breast-feeding declined with the marketing of baby formula and then increased, following the growing awareness of the benefits of breast milk. The reality of how Americans fed their newborns changed.8 Baby formula sales were affected. Breast pumps were created. People’s changing beliefs had a real and clearly visible impact on social life.
As this example illustrates, on one level it does not matter whether the beliefs are true or false. It does not matter whether formula or breast milk is better for children, because people’s behavior follows what they believe to be true. When people believed, incorrectly, that formula was better for babies, they relied increasingly on formula. False ideas can be as effective in shaping people’s behavior as true ones.
The sociologist Herbert Blumer makes a similar but slightly different point about cultural ideas and behavior. Blumer states, “Human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them.” Blumer and his students also pay attention to how people can learn to view things negatively or positively through their socialization.9 For example, in some time periods in some societies, it has been deemed inappropriate and sometimes even illegal for a woman to breast-feed in public. At other times or in other societies, a woman breast-feeding in public would elicit no response, positive or negative, from others.10 In one society, people are offended by public breast-feeding; in another, people are indifferent. The act of breast-feeding is the same but people’s reactions to it depend on the meanings that breast-feeding has for them. Again, cultural ideas shape social behavior.
The sociologist Oliver C. Cox provides an eloquent application of these basic sociological principles to racial relations. He states, “For the sociologist a race may be thought of as simply any group of people that is generally believed to be, and generally accepted as, a race.”11 He continues:
Here is detail enough, since the sociologist is interested in social interaction. Thus, if a man looks white, although, say in America, he is everywhere called a Negro, he is, then, a Negro American. If, on the other hand, a man of identical physical appearance is recognized everywhere in Cuba as a white man, then he is a white Cuban. The sociologist is interested in what meanings and definitions a society gives to certain social phenomena and situations.12
In other words, it is ultimately the shared meanings and definitions that create race—not biology. If some of the Swahili are defined in their society as members of an Arab race, then they are Arabs. Their physical appearance is irrelevant. Social definitions have social consequences. For part of Zanzibar’s history, all the elites were Arabs, Muslims segregated themselves from non-Muslims, and Africans could be enslaved by Arabs. Class and status were determined by these social definitions, not by physical appearance.13
Although scholars now agree that race is socially constructed, the idea that biology or physical appearance determines race—as opposed to shared meanings and definitions—is still quite common. The most common definition of a racial group, or more precisely a racial category,14 is a category of people who are defined as racially different based on physical differences in appearance. Richard Schaefer defines a “racial group” as “those minorities and the corresponding majorities that are classified according to obvious physical differences.”15 In their popular work on the social construction of race, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, Michael Omi and Howard Winant describe race as a concept “referring to different types of human bodies” and “invok[ing] biologically based human characteristics (so-called ‘phenotypes’).”16 In their comparative study of identity construction, Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann define race “as a human group defined by itself or others as distinct by virtue of perceived common physical characteristics that are held to be inherent.”17 All these authors take a social constructionist position on race, yet all their definitions of race rest on biology.18 However, biology is not socially constructed. Shared meanings and definitions are. To begin to understand the problems with these definitions of race, we need to see clearly that shared meanings and definitions determine racial relations, not differences in physical appearance.

The Complexity of Making Races

In July 1999, Benjamin “August” Smith went on a violent rampage, shooting six Orthodox Jews, five black men, and two Asian men. In August that same year, Burford O. Furrow, Jr., shot five people at a Los Angeles Jewish community center. Richard Baumhammers’s rampage in April 2000 left a Jewish woman, three Asian men, and one black man dead. Baumhammers wounded another Asian man. He interrupted his killing spree twice to vandalize two synagogues. In April 2001, Leo Felton and Erica Chase were arrested for planning to destroy the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Felton was also reported to be planning to assassinate Rev. Jesse Jackson, Steven Spielberg, and other famous blacks and Jews. Felton and Chase were convicted in 2002 of planning to incite a “racial holy war.”19 All these violent individuals were white supremacists and they all had ties to white supremacist organizations. They all considered Jews to be nonwhites. In their quest for a racially pure and white America, they were willing to kill blacks, Asians, and Jews.20
If one accepts a biological conception of race one must define the actions of white supremacists against blacks and Asians as sociologically different phenomena from their actions against Jews. Their actions toward Jews would have to be defined as “ethnic relations”—behavior motivated by cultural difference—while their actions toward blacks and Asians would be seen as examples of racial relations because of a difference in physical appearance. It is not uncommon for scholars to make this type of distinction. For example, Stephen Cornell and Douglass Hartmann deny the claim made by Hutus and Tutsis in Central Africa that their conflict is racial. Although Cornell and Hartmann cite evidence that the groups believe each other to be different races and to be physically different, they insist that the conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis “is ethnic rather than racial” because “outside observers have found these [physical] stereotypes difficult to confirm.”21 Richard Schaefer writes,
The Jewish people are not physically differentiated from non-Jews. True, many people believe they can tell a Jew from a non-Jew, but actual distinguishing physical traits are absent. . . . The wide range of variation among Jews makes it inaccurate to speak of a “Jewish race” in a physical sense.22
Schaefer concludes that Jews are an ethnic group because “Jews share cultural traits, not physical features.”23 Therefore, the white supremacists’ attacks on Jews are ethnic relations, not racial relations.
Many white supremacist organizations, however, define Jews as non-white.24 The white supremacists discussed above were clearly willing to treat Jews as they treated other nonwhites. Cox’s view that a racial group is whatever group is defined as such gives us a more accurate understanding of the motivation and behavior of white supremacists. This view would also give us a better understanding of relations among the Tutsis and non-Tutsis in Central Africa. In Congo, for example, however similar in appearance Tutsis may be to the rest of the population, they are seen as racially different. For example, although the Congolese parliament member Enoch Ruberangabo and his ancestors have been in the Congo for over a century, he is still not accepted by many Congolese as Congolese because he is a Tutsi. Over 80 percent of Congolese say that Tutsis cannot be Congolese. Many quote the saying, “Even if a log lies in a river for one hundred years, it doesn’t become a crocodile.” Many Congolese do not accept Tutsis no matter how much the Tutsis self-identify as Congolese.25 The difference that is constructed is racial, not cultural.
As with non-Tutsis in the Congo, for white supremacists in the United States the difference that they perceive between whites and Jews is racial, not cultural. White supremacists despise ultraorthodox Jews as well as highly assimilated Jews. If anything, they despise culturally assimilated Jews more than other Jews because they see Jewish participation in mainstream organizations as evidence of Jewish plots to take over or corrupt the country.26
The belief in racial difference can exist even when there is no difference in physical appearance. If a group believes Jews to be a separate and evil race, they will treat Jews as a separate and evil race. If Hutus and Tutsis believe each other to be separate and evil races, great violence between the groups becomes possible. Hutus and Tutsis have been killing each other since the 1950s.27 Physical appearance does not determine whether or not a group is believed to be racially different. People’s behavior is shaped by their beliefs, not by physical appearance.

Racial Categorization

A close examination of how we place people into racial categories reveals the importance of meanings and definitions in making race. It is common for people to say that race is skin color, but in fact we do not decide people’s race by the color of their skin. Skin color plays a small and inconsistent part in racial categorization. First, skin color is only one aspect of physical appearance. Hair texture, the shape of eyes, noses, and lips, and facial structure are all important parts of physical appearance used in racial categorization. Second, even when one examines all aspects of physical appearance, one sees that it is used inconsistently. In the United States, there are at least four different types of criteria used for racial categorization: physical appearance, ancestry, geography, and racialized conceptions of culture. An examination of the 2000 Census racial categories and how people classify themse...

Table of contents