1
RACEâTHE SLIDING SIGNIFIER
IN THESE THREE lectures I will try to bring to bear on questions of race, ethnicity, nations, and diaspora some thinking that tries not to replicate what distinguished African American scholars could do but offers a view from another part of the black Atlantic world, setting the issues in a wider, global context. I want to reflect on the nature of cultural difference as it is constructed in a variety of discourses. I ought to say from the outset that Iâll use the word discourse perhaps ad nauseam, yet by it I mean not a set of textual pyrotechnics but rather an overall view of human conduct as always meaningful. As we set out to ask what it means to rethink cultural difference in discursive terms, discourse should be understood as that which gives human practice and institutions meaning, that which enables us to make sense of the world, and hence that which makes human practices meaningful practices that belong to history precisely because they signify in the way they mark out human differences. I want to submit the three terms of cultural difference at stake in the title of my lecturesârace, ethnicity, nationâto a discursive-genealogical analysis in light of certain political and theoretical concerns, and to also use each term to complicate and unsettle the others a little.
In this first lecture, I want to return, at what you might think is a late stage in the game, to the question of what we might mean by saying that race is a cultural and historical, not biological, factâthat race is a discursive construct, a sliding signifier. Though such statements have almost acquired the status of a canonical orthodoxy in some advanced circles, critics and theorists do not always mean the same thing or draw the same conceptual and political inferences from it. The idea that race is discursively constructed has not, in my experience, done very effectively the work of unhinging and dislodging commonsense assumptionsâways of talking about, making sense of, or calculating for the great, untidy, âdirtyâ world of everyday life outside the academy. Nor have its dislocating effects on political mobilization or on the assessment of the strategies of antiracist politics been adequately charted.
I refer to âraceâ here as one of those major or master concepts (the masculine form is deliberate) that organize the great classificatory systems of difference that operate in human societies. Race, in this sense, is the centerpiece of a hierarchical system that produces differences. These are differences, moreover, of which W. E. B. Du Bois once said, in 1897, that âsubtle, delicate and elusive though they may be ⊠[they] have silently but definitively separated men into groups.â1 To say it is one of the great classificatory systems of meaning is to put it neutrally. However, I do this not because I wish in any way to downplay the horrendous human and historical consequences that have followed from the application of this racialized classifying system to social life and to individual men and women, but because I want to insist that, hateful as racism may be as a historical fact, it is nevertheless also a system of meaning, a way of organizing and meaningfully classifying the world. Thus any attempt to contest racism or to diminish its human and social effects depends on understanding how exactly this system of meaning works, and why the classificatory order it represents has so powerful a hold on the human imagination.
To put it crudely, the discursive conception of raceâas the central term organizing the great classificatory systems of difference in modern human historyârecognizes that all attempts to ground the concept scientifically, all efforts to fix the idea of race foundationally on biological, physiological, or genetic grounds, have been shown to be untenable. We must therefore contemplate âsubstituting a socio-historical and cultural definition of âraceâ for the biological one,â as the philosopher Anthony Appiah put it in his renowned and elegantly argued essay, âThe Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,â in the landmark issue of Critical Inquiry, â âRace,â Writing, and Difference,â edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.2 In my remarks that follow I want to explore this proposition further. As we know, human genetic variability between populations that are normally assigned to a racial category is not significantly greater than variability within such populations. What Du Bois, in his essay âThe Conservation of Races,â called âthe grosser physical differences of color, hair and bone,â although âclearly defined to the eye of the Historian and Sociologistâ3âa phrase to which I will returnâare, on the one hand, poorly correlated with genetic differences scientifically defined, and are, on the other, impossible to correlate significantly with cultural, social, intellectual, or cognitive characteristics, which means that such âgrosser physical differencesâ are subject to extraordinary variation within any one family, let alone any of the so-called family of races.
I want to make three observations, in passing, about this general position. First, it represents the now common and conventional wisdom among the great majority of scientists in the field. Second, this fact about human genetic variability has never prevented intense scholarly activity among a minority of scientists devoted to the attempt to prove that there is a correlation between racially categorized genetic characteristics and cultural performanceâand such activity is once again in full flood today, powered by the rise of the new genome research. Third, I observe that, although the racializing implications of the continuing scientific effort to prove a correlation between, say, race and intelligence are vociferously opposed and condemned by many, including the liberal professions and most black people, nevertheless a great deal of what is routinely said by such groups among and about themselves is predicated precisely on some such assumption. Behind the idea that some social, political, moral, or aesthetic characteristic or phenomenon associated with black people can guarantee the rightness of a political strategy, the correctness of an attitude, or the value of a cultural production, we find the assumption that the truth of such a strategy or attitude or artwork is fixed by the racial characteristics of the participants involved. I deduce from this the awkward insight that diametrically opposed political positions can indeed be derived from the same philosophical foundations, and that although genetic explanations of social behavior are often denounced as racist, nevertheless we find that genetic, biological, and physiological definitions of race are alive and well in the commonsense discourse of us all. This is the paradox my lecture addresses.
The problem with moving to a sociohistorical or cultural conception of racial classification and identification from a genetic or biological one is, as Appiah clearly understood, what to do about the biological trace that remains in racialized discourse today. If I can briefly remind you of his complex and sophisticated argument, Appiah shows that Du Bois, who called his life story the âautobiography of a race concept,â4 took up positions in which he âcame gradually, though never completely, to assimilate the unbiological nature of races.â5 In his 1897 text âThe Conservation of Races,â Du Bois recognized that although the âsubtle, delicate and elusiveâ differences that have separated humans into groups have sometimes âfollowed the natural cleavage of common blood, descent and physical peculiarities,â they have âat other times swept across and ignored these.â The division into races, which we persist in making, is, Du Bois says, something that âperhaps transcend[s] scientific definition.â6 Du Bois thus established early on that â âraceâ is not a scientificâthat is, biologicalâconcept,â but Appiah argues that this recognition by Du Bois only partially supersedes the biological, since âif he has fully transcended the scientific notion, what is the role of this talk about âbloodâ?â What else, Appiah asks, does âcommon bloodâ mean for Du Bois except something âdressed up with fancy craniometry, a dose of melanin, and some measure for hair curl, [which] is what the scientific notion amounts toâ?7 Not only do I agree with this reading of Du Boisâs struggle with the race concept, but I also note how symptomatic it is of racial discourse per se that the physical or biological trace, having been shown out of the front door, tends to sidle around the edge of the veranda and climb back in through the pantry window!
As we follow Appiahâs analysis and turn to Du Boisâs Crisis article of 1911, âRaces,â we find Du Bois moving decisively toward speaking âof civilizations where we now speak of racesâ when he adds that even âthe physical characteristics, excluding the skin color ⊠are to no small extent the direct result of the physical and social environment,â as well as being âtoo indefinite and elusive to serve as a basis for any rigid classification or division of human groups.â8 On the basis of this environmental or civilizational emphasis in his thinking, we find that by the time we get to Dusk of Dawn in 1940 Du Bois abandons the âscientificâ definition in favor of what seems to be a very different argument altogether. Africans and people of African descent may share a common racial ancestry, Du Bois argues, and he says of himself and of his âancestors going back a thousand years or moreâ that the âmark of their heritage is upon me in color and hair.â He then states, âThese are obvious things, but of little meaning in themselves; only important as they stand for real and more subtle differences from other men.â This represents a critical shift of fundamental importance, for what does matter for Du Bois now, what constitutes the bond between African Americans like him and Africa, is the fact that âthese ancestors of mine and their other descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory.â âThe real essence of this kinship,â he concludes, âis its social heritage of slavery.â9 Physical characteristics of âcolor, hair and bone,â as he put it in 1897, which form âthe physical bond,â are important for Du Bois in 1940 only insofar as they are a âmarkâ of heritage, with âcolor relatively unimportant save as a badge.â Or, to translate Du Bois into my terms, the âmarkâ and the âbadgeâ are all-important because they signify, because they carry a certain meaning, because they are, in other words, signifiers of difference.
Appiah is certainly right to point out two important aspects of this shift in Du Boisâs thinking. First, as Du Bois himself observes, the later definitionââraceâ as badgeâtends to make the concept slip and slide. For, having been loosened from its physiological moorings, Du Bois says of the âsocial heritage of slaveryâ that it âbinds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas. It is this unity that draws me to Africa.â10 But, one is tempted to ask, which unity? Is it biological kinship or political affiliation that Du Bois is addressing? Second, as Appiah pithily remarks, if obvious physical qualities such as the âgrosser physical differences of color, hair and boneâ are now of âlittle meaning,â then Du Boisâs very mention of them in Dusk of Dawn marks, on the surface of his argument, the extent to which he still cannot quite escape the appeal of the earlier concept of race.11 To put the matter more generally, for it concerns something that affects the entire discourse of race to this day, the fact is that the biological remains as an active trace in Du Boisâs discourse even though it now functions, as Jacques Derrida would say, âunder erasure.â12 However, note how Appiah puts it when he argues that âsubstituting a sociohistorical conception of race for the biological one ⊠is simply to bury the biological conception below the surface, not to transcend it.â13 If true, this is a serious matter to which we should give urgent attention.
In a brief but bold conclusion, Appiah argues that the discursive or sociohistorical turn is doomed to fail since it cannot free itself of the biological trace that adheres to the concept of race when such a move is performed âunder Saussurean hegemony.â14 The crucial question at issue here is whether we have too easily come to think of meaning in a post-Saussurean manner as primarily a linguistic phenomenon, as something constituted by systems of difference that are purely internal to the formally structured rules of langue, the abstract ordering principles of language that Saussure distinguished from speech acts, or parole. If the problem amounts to a semiotic fall from grace, then the Saussureans must suppose that race is, as Appiah puts it, âlike all other concepts, constructed by metaphor and metonymy; it stands in, metonymically, for the Other; it bears the weight, metaphorically, of other kinds of difference.â For Appiah, even if the concept of race is a âstructure of oppositions,â then it is one âwhose realization is, at best, problematic, and at worst, impossible,â for the question is: what is the actual entity to which it refers? In response to this dilemma he concludes that âthe truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask âraceâ to do for us.â He continues, âWhere race worksâin places where âgross differencesâ of morphology are correlated with âsubtle differencesâ of temperament, belief, and intentionâit works as an attempt at a metonym for culture; and it does so only at the price of biologizing what is culture, or ideology.â Standing against the discursive turn, Appiah states, âWhat we miss through our obsession with the structure of relations of concepts is, simply, reality.â15 On this view, we should have the courage of our convictions and give race up altogether as a philosophically unacceptable way of talking.
Here, finally, at the end of a brilliant intervention, I find myself parting company with Appiahâs argument. I have, of course, no commitment whatsoever to defending race as a concept, least of all in its genetic, biological, or so-called scientific form. Nevertheless, I do not understand what is meant by saying that racial discourse, when conceptualized as a âstructure of oppositions,â cannot be ârealized.â Does this mean the discursive turn with regard to race has no purchase on the real world, has no effects âout thereâ beyond what he calls the âtext-world of the academy,â because it is only language, nothing but discourse? That because we cannot find a scientific referent for racial difference, it does not exist as a sociohistorical fact? What exactly is the nature of Appiahâs appeal to, âsimply, realityâ in light of his methodological preoccupation with a structure of relations analogous to langue, that is, language as a system of differences?
My argument is that this deconstructive moveâcounterposing the biological to the sociohistorical and, finding the biological-scientific conception of race unfounded and untenable, settling for the cultural and the hermeneuticâhas one still unfinished turn to complete. Scholars in the academy, Appiah suggests, have been too reluctant to share with their fellow citizens their inescapable conclusion, which is to advocate the ârepudiation of race as a term of difference.â16 If what he means by this is that race has no scientific foundations as an explanatory mechanism for accounting for social, cultural, economic, and cognitive differences between racially defined groups, then of course I agree. But we still have to explain why these racial classificatory systems persist, why so much of history has been organized within the shadow of their primordial binaries, and why, above all, everyday action and commonsense language and thoughtâas well as the larger structural systems of power that organize the distribution of wealth, resources, and knowledge differentially across societies and between groupsâall continue to operate with this apparently weak, unsubstantiated, untenable, nearly but not quite erased âbiologicalâ trace. Simply put, we still have to account for why race is so tenacious in human history, so impossible to dislodge.
Appiah undertakes his deconstruction like a true philosopher when he argues we should be concerned not just with âthe meaning of raceâ but with âthe truth of it.â17 To which one can only respond: since when has the discour...