The Languages of Racial Loyalty

by Steve Martinot

In the Fall '92 issue of the APA Newsletter, Stephen Nathanson responds to an earlier article by Paul Gomberg, in an ongoing debate on the relative demerits of racism and patriotism.[1] The two disagree on an important issue; viz. whether racism or patriotism have morally permissible forms. Gomberg argues that racism and patriotism are both indefensible; Nathanson takes issue with this, vindicating a moderate patriotism, or national loyalty, and in the process affirming a parallel racial loyalty that for him is both non-racist and moral. If Gomberg uses racism's currency in political discourse to make points against patriotism, he does so within the language of moral universalism, and moral defensibility. Nathanson focuses on the more fundamental question of racial community and preference, but employs a criteriological argument to do so.

I would like to suggest that both the language of moral universalism, and the logic of criteria, are morally indefensible with respect to racism. There are three logical problems involved. First, the operation of racism is not independent of moral universalism; moral universalism is implicated in the constitution of race itself. Second, a criteriological argument about race or race loyalty assumes a parity between races which pretends that race has an objective reality. And third, a notion of parity between races is historically unintelligible, suggesting that its assumption continues the structure of racism.

The issues Nathanson addresses originally ensue from an argument advanced by Alasdair MacIntyre that moral universalism and patriotism cancel each other; one has to choose. Nathanson attempts to describe a moderate patriotism that is a compromise between the two.[2] He distinguishes moderate patriotism from extreme (chauvinist) patriotism in that the latter does not hesitate to violate the sovereignty of another nation in pursuit of nationalist goals, while the former pursues patriotic goals within a moral framework that is, at least in intent, universalist. Gomberg argues that Nathanson's moderate patriotism reduces to either extreme chauvinist patriotism or non-patriotic moral universalism in the foreseeable cases where conflict and compromise between nations become an issue, and concludes that if only extreme patriotism is definable, patriotism remains morally indistinguishable from racism.

Nathanson reads Gomberg as arguing by analogy (I don't think Gomberg does); viz. that the moral indefensibility of racism implies that of patriotism. Nathanson apprehends it as analogic in the process of presenting the inverse analogy; viz. that a defensible moderate patriotism implies a comparable racial position. For him, there is a moderate racial loyalty that is morally defensible (he gives the example of Martin Luther King), and an extreme (chauvinist) racial loyalty parallel to extreme patriotism. And he concludes analogically that moderate patriotism can also be considered morally defensible. His discussion of racism seems to reflect the distinction Anthony Appiah makes between intrinsic and extrinsic racism: the first is a general moral approbation toward members of one's own race (essentially, ethnocentrism), and the second is a general moral disapprobation toward members of other races (derogatory prejudice).[3]

Appiah does not assume parity between races; he is dealing with racism, with the propositional modes of racial prejudice, the ways in which disparity is declared. But Nathanson assumes that there is parity on the issue of race.

It is a mistake to call moderate racial loyalty a form of racism because racism involves not just a sense of positive connection with one's own group but also a negative attitude toward members of other races. Racism necessarily involves a belief in the superiority and inferiority of various groups. ... Racists believe in the superiority of their own race, and seek its dominance over others ... [moderate racial loyalists] would recognize and respect the rights of members of other races. (APA,10)

Nathanson is being egalitarian; race loyalty attaches to any race in the same way, and can be moderate or extreme for all. It is a criteriological argument, and which race one belongs to is not a question. For Nathanson, there are races; and whatever their characteristics, one can have loyalty to one's own, and disparage others, as a general aspect of membership. And one can "seek dominance" over others, as if that weren't already the very condition of race. This parity is essential for moral universalism to be relevant to the question.

Nathanson recognizes that blacks have been a specially oppressed group, "that has needed special attention;" and he reasons that morally the promotion of white social interests would not command the same justification as black social interests. But affirmative action, which is designed to offer opportunity, does so within a white point of view, while for a "minority" point of view it also doubles the problem by locking into place the language of discrimination (even in opposition). That is, institutionalized affirmative action does not recognize its own institutionalization and reification of the language of racial discrimination, and thus its own opening of new institutionalized arenas of discrimination, even in the process of attempting to rectify the effects of racial discrimination. Though affirmative action is created to "stop the special oppression," to pay "special attention" to the effects of racial discrimination, it does not pay attention to the other "special attention to blackness" that has been the condition for discrimination, exclusion, marginalization, redlining, etc. from the beginning, and which continues long after Jim Crow has been repealed. "Special attention" is an antinomy that cannot be contained within Nathanson's criteriology of racial loyalty; and neither could that criteriology understand that the antinomy itself is not a call to end affirmative action.

The limits of universalism are contained in the nature of universality. Any universalism, including moral universalism, sets a standard, a definition of the universal, for which an outside, a possible violation of the standard, is implicitly assumed to exist. It is the idea of a universal human, of the universally human, that permits, and indeed engenders, the notion of the subhuman, the Other, the being without rights, or without claims to humanity, the one who can be subjected to enslavement, or denigration, because s/he doesn't "measure up." Jesse Taylor, in the same issue of the APA Newsletter, refers to just this process in reminding us that the initial decision on the part of Europeans to enslave Africans contained the implication that they could also be excluded from the realm of the human.[4] To eliminate "measure," or standard, and thus exclusion, cancels the basis for the universal in question -- indeed, for any universal other than that of difference itself (difference becomes the universal in question). The oppressions and derogations of racism, and the preferentiality of race loyalty, are both based on a notion of universalism and its exterior, its "outside." Universalism, like racism, is always hegemonic. If the boundary surrounding what constitutes the non-subhuman is different for moral universalism, patriotism, and racism, the operation of establishing it is the same.

Nathanson defines moderate racial loyalty in the benign terms of preference, invoking the positive feelings of choice and desire. To prefer one's own nation over another, one's own era over others, is a sign of being "well-adjusted." But nations, eras, and racial groups are given, precisely through one's givenness to them (collectively). Such preference only names the refusal to refuse the given, or to transcend it; i.e. it names the refusal of that realm in which all one's other choices lie. Preference becomes a euphemism for acceptance; and it metaphorizes a vast arena of exclusion, both for oneself and of others (those outside the group one is given (to)). Nathanson's criteriology of group loyalty does not pertain to its givenness, but to its acceptance; how the group is given is not addressed. Thus, it transforms acceptance and refusal, or preference and exclusion, into a standard.[5] That is, it transforms preference, as an effect of the given, into one of the sources of givenness. In other words, criteriology does not work for racial groups because the existence of racial groups to which to be loyal contains relations between them that are ignored by the criteria. It must invent a parity upon which to ground itself. But if there is no parity within a racially structured situation, then the criteriology becomes part of the generation of the racial situation.

Let us look at some of the real assymmetries involved. The first, of course, is of what calls race into existence. I will not rehearse the argument, advanced by Ashley Montagu among others, that there is no biological basis on which race can be defined.[6] Its central thesis is that the main human traits used to characterize racial features occur in continuous spectra of variation, with no natural divisions -- and no two traits are necessarily found together, although contingent configurations of traits exist as given geographical realities.[7] If a spectrum (such as skin shade) has been divided, that division is always arbitrary, and accomplished through an attribution of meanings to the distinction produced. A blatant example is the infamous New Orleans "brown paper bag" test.[8] Those meanings involve exclusion (and denigration), because they are not a question of biology or belief, but of definition and enactment. A priori definition produces a disparity between the definer and the defined; it already contains a sense of superiority and inferiority. If race exists, it is through such operations. Where the disparity of racism is in the meaning given (inferiority/ superiority), the disparity of race (and its loyalties) is in the givenness of the meaning (definer/ defined; dominator/ dominated).

Naomi Zack, in the previous issue of the APA Newsletter, explains the assymmetry of race parentage.[9] One black foreparent in N (some arbitrary finite number) previous generations is sufficient to classify a person as black. White ancestors are racially cancelled by the single presence of a black foreparent, while black ancestors are not racially cancelled by the single presence of a white foreparent. In pointing out this assymmetry -- in which "white" is defined only as "pure white," against "black" defined as both "pure black" and any mixture in N previous generations -- Zack is also revealing the meaning of race to be this very disparity, the arbitrarity of this division of a continuous spectrum. Race, and racial purity, have one meaning for the definer (the white, those for whom purity is the distinction), and another meaning for those from whom that first meaning is to be withheld (the defined). (Racial "purity" is not an ideal for whites, but a necessary concomitant to their enactment of definition, a condition that valorizes both their domination and their concept of race.) This disparity reaffirms that race is not a biological reality, but a socially-generated discursive structure. In effect, racism is the source of what is called race, in which the definition of criteria provide a content. Racial groups, if contingent upon social discourse, have no biological basis other than the biologism that names certain racializing social relations.[10]

If race is without pre-discursive "objective" existence, it cannot be dealt with empirically; it is a more complex socio-cultural phenemonon. Race exists, but inseparably from the racism that produced it. It can thus only be addressed through and in terms of the racist discursive structure that calls it into existence. As a discourse, racism generalizes a subordinate group's members (and it is this act that in turn generalizes the dominant group's members) in spite of the fact that people present themselves as individuals. It substitutes itself for experience of the others as persons by providing biologically coded pre-knowledge of them, and thus obviates the possibility of such experience (what Appiah calls the "cognitive incapacity" of racist thinking (AR,6)). As a vast process of racialization -- of both white and non-white groups -- racism is the cancellation of the possibility of interpersonal experience between racialized groups. Such a cancellation is unintelligible to a criteriological notion of racial loyalty; and one could say that criteriological parity is posited to pretend such experience is possible. Black and white people (and by now it should be obvious that these are social designations, and not colors per se, though they are social designations that have been inscribed upon bodies under the mask of "color") can relate to each other, but to the extent they do, experience is filtered, shunted, and shut off through the very existence of those designations. There is no way to return to the individual whose identity has been generalized by those designations without either reifying the generalization, or ignoring the effect of the designation upon the person, and thus truncating the person.

Though both white and non-white are racialized by this process, and internalize definitions imposed at the hands (and force) of racism, there is obviously a disparity in participation in this process. No group has ever defined itself as subordinate or inferior. Those subjected to racializing hierarchy were not party to the terms imposed upon them. Racial characteristics (continually reinscribed as biological), and hence race itself, are gratuitous, senseless, and invented (and, it must be reiterated, invented by whites, in Europe, for white use). This senselessness and gratuitousness is what Jews faced at the hands of anti-semitism in Europe, and which Kafka began to represent as the absurd in the situations of his novels. It is in terms of differential participation in the terms of racialization that pride in the groups thus racialized cannot be the same for white and non-white. The difference between insouciance and survival in the face of the absurd and its terror as violence must inhabit any consciousness of efforts to throw off the racial hierarchy, a difference whose understanding Nathanson's notion of "race loyalty" obviates.

Race is born as hierarchy and hegemony; and by definition, there is never parity in a hierarchy. Those who dominate within it live this hierarchy in terms of a choice to continue their domination -- a choice of how to continue it, or what their level of participation or complicity will be. Those dominated hierarchically are given a different choice of whether to acquiesce or rebel against their domination. Their complicity with their domination only reflects an attempt (too often vain) to live with it, as opposed to an effort to throw it off. It is in this sense that in Nathanson's criteria (see note 2), the phrase "one's own" not only has different meanings for different groups, it ideologizes the notion of race differently for different groups. These cannot be criteria if they are not even commonly descriptive, or interpretive. Dominator and dominated live within different languages, and apprehend their choices and possibilities in entirely different terms, without parity. This is not an explanation of the cultural differences that inhabit the differences called "racial;" but it describes the milieu in which those cultural differences are produced.

Extended discussion is still needed to plumb the depths of how this underlying disparity effects areas such as civil rights, equal opportunity, etc. Briefly, civil rights is a social factor for most whites, something to take socially for granted, while for "minority" people, it remains a political issue within a juridical field. It is not that whites and blacks have rights to varying degrees; rights inhabit entirely different domains of social existence for each. In such terms, what has been called black nationalist "racism" (for instance) has been misnamed. As a political counter-stance, a response to hegemony, rather than the social stance of a group that can take its self-expression for granted, or "seek" hegemony for itself, it cannot be "racism." It exists within an entirely different arena from the power of social hierarchy at stake in white racism. Similarly, equal opportunity remains a fictional possibility. For a racially structured society, a black person competing with whites is not a competitor who is black, but a black person who is competing, one who has stepped, yet cannot step, out of the racializing situation -- a step that will too often be used by whites to patronize, ridicule, trip, or worse, all within the parameters of competition itself. But even without that, the necessity to focus on the opportunity disparity as a problem maintains the discursive source of the disparity against itself. Color difference (which creates the "color" it is about) remains one of the central meanings of the situation.

"We" might add, finally, that the notion of 'we' is disparate as well. When whites speak of 'we', they do so in terms of being white, without necessarily concerning themselves with the non-white (or so they think); the white, as definer, already defines itself as the universal (the problem with which I have anticipated in the orthography given the first word in this paragraph). Other racialized groups, on the other hand, live an imposed difference that has become indistinguishable from an awareness of being a people, an awareness given every day in what is both systematic and gratuitous in the imposition, and becomes the mark, the sign, of one's being. The construction of an identity through a 'we' of difference will find little opportunity to escape that imposition, and the involvement of the "white" at every level. This was a point made long ago by Grier and Cobbs in their book "Black Rage."[11] For a "non-white" person, the white is there, because the white is the reason there is a necessity to construct a "non-white" 'we' in the first place.

This is part of what Jesse Taylor referred to as "the injury problem" (APA,17): an awareness not only of what is faced on a quotidien level, of the damage done through segregation and violence, but the awareness that there is no recourse, no escape, no vengeance that will undo that damage -- an inherent aspect of the racializing situation, precisely because it is gratuitous. There will have been no purification, no resanctification, no recleansing of one's community or one's being from the corruption incurred at the unavoidable other's (white) incorporation into daily life. For the non-white, there can be no "racial loyalty" that does not have some "white" in it. This is part of what W.E.B. DuBois refers to as double consciousness: "always looking at oneself through the eyes of others," because of the inability to become non-black in an America that rejects blacks, or to become non-American in a community that has always been excluded by America.[12] Whites have the luxury of ignoring the injury problem; and they do not have the luxury of knowing it. To assume parity in this is to forget the disparity between double consciousness and non-consciousness. Attempts to dissolve the hierarchy cannot afford to give up that double consciousness, but must build on it; while nothing can be built on non-consciousness.

The question I would like to conclude with is that of the white identity structure represented by this system of disparities. What does the structure of white racialization imply about being white? If race is a discursive structure, one understands oneself as white through an identification within a particular discourse, through an acceptance of what has been said about being white. "White" becomes a signifier. But it becomes a signifier only in relation to another sign, another color that has also already been rendered a signifier. Other colors must be made to signify in order that white can be a signifier. One can be white only by having defined the non-white.[13] The non-white is defined in order for the white to define itself as white. It is what Ralph Ellison allegorized in Invisible Man in the Liberty Paint Co. scene; the white paint needed the right kind of black substance in it to be the proper kind of white. To put the wrong kind of black substance in it would produce a paint that wouldn't "cover." For white people, identity centers itself elsewhere, in an other; it depends upon something external to itself. This is the reason white people are so obsessed with the racialized other, why racism finds a foothold again and again, even among those who see themselves as anti-racist. The non-white becomes at once nemesis, obsession, and self. This is the stupifying nature of racist thought for the "white mind," another aspect of what Appiah calls "cognitive incapacity."

As a corollary, one could say that to identify oneself as white is to invoke the entire structure of racist and racializing definition. White self-identification cannot escape the racism central to that identity. And this implies that, in a fundamental sense, one cannot identify oneself as white, and be anti-racist at the same time. To be anti-racist implies that one must have already discarded one's self-identification as white. And this constitutes the central ontological problem of any consideration of "racial loyalty" with respect to whites.

In other words, heretofore, white anti-racism and anti-racist activism has generally concerned itself with the wrong person (and this too is a function of hierarchy). The problem is not that whites must learn to see non-whites as equal, or not non-white, or not Other. Those aspects immanent in the construction of whiteness. The problem of racism is that whites must stop seeing whites as white. And the centrality of this appears even in Nathanson's criteriological language. Though he is searching for the benign and moral within the situation of race and nation, he reasons in terms that assume manipulations of the world, that assume a form of control (that reflect the realm of the definer). For instance, in response to Gomberg's invocation of the empoverishment of colonialized areas, Nathanson says: "[Gomberg's] utilitarian argument ... is difficult to evaluate because we do not know what would happen if we were to loosen or undermine special connections. We might move from patriotism to absolute egotism rather than to universalism." (APA,10) But the "connection" to which he refers is with people who are to be bound or let go in this decision. People become instruments in a socio-political game. Nathanson's logic shifts effortlessly from the realm of moral policy to the assumed power of universalist utilitarianism, to a "what-would-happen-if-we-were-to." To think in this kind of syntax is to continue the colonialist or racializing paradigm. It reveals how a thought experiment substitutes itself for thought about an issue, because dialogue between the people at stake in the issue is obviated by the generality of the experiment, and its historical amnesia.

The central dilemma for whites who oppose racism is the fact that they are white; the fact that they too have been racialized, given a racial being, but for whom non-participation is only another form of participation. The moral indefensibility of the language of moral universalism, or the logic of criteria, lies in the assumption and preservation of the definition of "white" at the source of the problem addressed. For whites, a mode of de-racialized identitylessness (in the sense of identification, rather than self, though the two are inseparable) must be invented in order to de-invent participation in race and racism.

None of this should be construed as implying that black people, or Latinos, or any other group, should not feel group loyalty; what it means is that notions of group loyalty are different, and specific to each group, and are always both other than race loyalty and racialized group loyalty. What is not possible, under this description, is for a "minority" (I persist in including quote marks to iterate the "white" perspective contained in the term) group, no matter how exclusionary, antipathetic, or condemnatory toward whites, to be racist. Even relations between "minority" groups in the US, which at times has involved attempts at coalition and at others mutual exclusions, derogations, and moments of socio-cultural hierarchization (and is too complicated, and of a different discursive agenda, to discuss here), occur in a context of white racism, upon which they depend for their meanings.

Lest I be misunderstood, let me hasten to add that white de-racialization is not an answer to the problem; it is only a step. It goes without saying, of course, that to think whites will abandon their white identity, just because it is pointed out that it is established on false pretenses, is somewhat utopian. But I articulate this necessity as a way of indicating the direction in which we need to apply ourselves. And even if, by some miracle, all white people lost their sense of themselves as white, and "color" became meaningless for them, non-signifying, simply a variation in human beings to be appreciated for its esthetic qualities, rather than as a political weapon, it would take a long time before subjected racialized people would believe it, and a longer time before the effects of the prior time, when some people thought of themselves as white, and looked at others as non-white, would be dispersed and archived.

Endnotes

1. "Is Patriotism Like Racism;" APA Newsletter, vol 91, #2 (1992). Hereafter APA. Paul Gomberg's article, "Patriotism is Like Racism," appeared in Ethics, vol. 101 (1990): 144-50.

2. Alasdair MacIntyre, "Is Patriotism a Virtue?"; Lindley Lecture, Univ. of Kansas Philosophy Dept. Lawrence, 1984. Nathanson's reply appeared in Ethics vol 99 (1989): 535-52. For Nathanson, both patriotism and racism can be understood in terms of preference: a priority for association with one's group, whether family, community, race or nation. He gives "racial loyalty" the following attributes: "1) a special affection for one's own race; 2) a sense of personal identification with one's race; 3) a special concern for the well-being of one's race; and 4) a willingness to make sacrifices to aid or protect one's race."

3. Kwame Anthony Appiah; "The Anatomy of Racism," (cited by Nathanson) in David Theo Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1990). Hereafter AR.

4. Jesse Taylor; "Toward a Philosophy of Recovery: a Prolegmonon to Any Future African American Ethic;" APA,15.

5. This is why socialists have been considered by "patriots" to have broken ranks with the nation, to have turned against the nation. The nature of patriotism (and racism) is to hide a given acceptance, which in turn hides a refusal of choice, of alternative, of imagination, behind "preference." 

6. Ashley Montagu; The Concept of Race (London: Collier, 1970). See also several of the other articles in David Theo Goldberg, ed., op cit..

7. How can genetics play a role in race? Genetics only determines that offspring will look something like the parents. It is not involved in the differences people see between themselves, nor the meaning they give those differences -- and it is not involved in the differences between species except to the extent it renders mating and breeding impossible. The idea that hierarchy is not something inherent in biology, but only in the meanings we give it, is something the environmentalists have been trying to put forth for a while.

8. The "brown paper bag" test was used by clubs and caberets to determine who was to be admitted. A brown paper bag was tacked to the door; those who were lighter than the bag were admitted, and those darker were refused. Thus, a banal industrial artifact became an arbiter of a central socio-political dimension of a nation.

9. Naomi Zack; "An Autobiographical View of Mixed Race and Deracination," APA Newsletter, vol 91, #1 (Spring 1992): 6-10.

10. For interesting accounts of the discursivity of race itself, see Christian Delacampagne; "Racism and the West: from Praxis to Logos;" in Goldberg (op.cit.); and bell hooks; Yearning: Race Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990); esp. Chap. 6. 

11. William H. Grier and Price M. Cobb; Black Rage (New York: Basic Books, 1968).

12. W.E. Burghardt DuBois; The Souls of Black Folk (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1961); p. 16ff.

13. James Baldwin is one of the foremost thinkers who attempted to grasp the identity-stakes for whites in the significations of race and racism; see The Fire Next Time (N.Y.: Dell, 1963): pp. 20ff, 62ff, 95ff, for instance. Also, cf. bell hooks; Black Looks (Boston: South End Press, 1992); esp. chap. 11. Frantz Fanon speaks about the meanings imposed and reimposed upon African ("black") skin by colonialism, but for him, the colonialists are already white, already produced by their own invisible production of Africans as black (and invisible). Cf. Fanon, Frantz; Black Skin, White Masks (N.Y.: Grove Press, 1967); esp. chap. 4. An interesting example of the process I am describing is to be found in Christopher Columbus' Diaries, as edited and amended by Las Casas. Columbus had originally expected to encounter Asians upon landfall. He, as well as Las Casas, begins to reunderstand himself as a project through his continual narrativization of the Arawak people (in Cuba). He recounts a "nature" for them that he could not possibly know, because he was ignorant of their language; and by relating to them as characters in those invented narrativizations, he effectively redefines himself, his voyage, his identity, his "superiority," and his increasing violence. Cf. The voyage of Christopher Columbus: Columbus' Journal; trans. John Cummins (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991).