Introduction: The ghosts of ontology
Race became a ghost the day after all the signs came down; the day after "White only" or "Colored only" disappeared; the day after no one any longer said, "we don't serve Negroes here"; the day after no black person answered a want ad and was told, "sorry, we're not hiring right now"; the day after no black person had to pay a higher mortgage rate than whites; the day after no police officer looked at the color of the driver before stopping him/her; the day after the laws used exclusively in black communities were taken off the books; the day after both college enrollments and prison inmate populations reflected the racial percentages of the states they served. In other words, the signs haven't been taken down. New Orleans, in the wake of the government's use of a storm emergency, signifies that most of them are still up.
Instead, race became a non-ghost when the court system narcissistically complimented itself on being colorblind. Race became a non-ghost when state governments refused to require police to report the race of a traffic stop or "probable cause" action. (Arrest records contain this information, but arrest records have come to presume guilt.) Race became a non-ghost when derogatory terms were busted back to "slurs," as if they simply signified rather than serving as means of assault. Race has always been a mask, draped over the faces of those whites who act frightened, or hostile, or contemptuous depending on which script from the structure of racialization they are reading.
To philosophize race means it is neither non-ghost nor mask. During the Jim Crow era, a number of thinkers addressed the question of whether race existed as a biological division of the human species (as delineated by 18th century naturalists); they demonstrated that the concept was biologically vacuous, demographically illusory, morally criminal, and politically corrupt.[1] After the great war against fascism, a mass political movement finally assaulted the dehumanization imposed by the Jim Crow signs.
Yet today, the philosophy still has to be done. Leonard Harris compiles a volume in which he places objectivist and constructivist accounts of race and racism in juxtaposition. Robert Bernasconi compiles the signal texts on race from the last 200 years. Lucius Outlaw compiles essays on race and philosophy. Critical Race theory discusses the meaning of "social construct." Lawrence Blum wants to reserve "racism" as a moral term. Anne Stubblefield responds by arguing that this is quite insufficient politically, or historically—and thus, morally. All of them, 30 years after the Civil Rights movement, are driven by the question, how do we get those damned signs taken down.[2]
Why would so many theorizations appear now? Perhaps it is because the signs themselves became ghosts that not only still haunt us, but continue to dominate social and political policy. It requires some serious thought to live in a world dominated by the ghosts of Jim Crow, of forced labor and debt servitude and chain-gangs lurking in a prison industry—and by the ghosts of movements for liberation as well; it requires new conceptual lenses to see what this world is now made of.
Objectivism and constructivism
Harris organizes his book as a forum on the important question of what it means that "race" is a "social construct." The issues are its reality—a biological vs. a social reality—and what "social reality" means in the first place. Two schools of thought have emerged, called constructivism and objectivism, that for Harris are irreconcilable. Harris gives the following definitions. For the objectivist, races are natural divisions in the human species based on some inherent objective trait (biological, psychological, geographical). The objectivist "can believe that there are groups, such as races, which exist independent of cultural and social ideas ... [and] can consider racial groups as objective causal agents, that is, [that] race causes groups to exist." (Harris,18) The constructivist, on the other hand, "does not believe that groups exist independent of cultural or social ideas, ... [and] can believe that races are constructed causal agents." (Harris,19) That is, races are "unnatural," culturally specific, and based on self-description and "malleable" social psychology.
In Harris's definitions, there is a strange cohabitation of ambiguity and the "absolute." He phrases the fundamental or definitive moment of both objectivism and constructivism in terms of possibility—that they "can believe" what they do, suggesting that they don't necessarily have to. Furthermore, those beliefs are tied (or not) only to "ideas" (as an absolute domain), obviating their possible production by overarching historico-social "factors"—factors that might also have produced those "ideas." Harris attributes to constructivism the belief that human facts are "absolutely" dependent on contingent cultural ideas, bestowing on the process (of construction) a rigidity or inflexibility. Instead, fluidity is attributed to objectivism. For Harris, objectivism "can argue [has choice in how it approaches things] that the uses of racial categories are justified because they refer to objective realities"; whereas constructivists believe "the use of racial categories is never justified" referentially [that is, Harris grants them no choice in the matter]. Absoluteness appears on the side of constructivism, while tactics and strategies pertain to objectivism. (Harris,443) Harris admits he is (dare I say "constructs himself as"?) a "moderate" objectivist. (Harris,442)
Objectivism and constructivism confront each other irreconcilably across the act of reference to race. As Anna Stubblefield demonstrates, this was the tenor of the debate between Kwame Anthony Appiah and Lucius Outlaw.[3] Appiah is an objectivist who argues that race does not exist, and thus no real reference can be made to race as such; Outlaw is a constructivist who argues that reference to races as constructed is real. In their irreconcilability across issues of morality, philosophy, and culture, the objectivist and constructivist positions are reminiscent of the old materialism-idealism split; either race exists materially, or it is only an idea. One has "real" being, and the other is absolutely contingent. What the materialism-idealism split provides is the convenience of a clean-cut division (despite the dual chicken-egg accusations each has always levied at the other).
Why would a clean-cut division be necessary or desirable, and for whom? There are constructivists who argue that though race is socially constructed, it is not simply an idea; rather, it is produced by a complex process of economic, cultural, and social evolution in response to real historical factors.[4] Under Harris's definitions, the question of the "real" materials out of which race was constructed, including structures and operations of power, could not be asked. Such a question would imply an underlying objective reality to which racial entities as constructed would make real reference. Harris: "constructivists deny that races can exist as natural or objective entities." (Harris,20) Perhaps the objectivists have to cleanly dissociate themselves from constructivism in order to define (against Appiah (Harris,267)) what "real reference" would mean. But then, the real issue is reference, and not race. Objectivists argue that race has to exist as a real referent to serve a social purpose, while some constructivists argue that the definition and constitution of races is already the social purpose (materially) to be served.
There is a possibility that if we add history and historicity to this thought-complex about race, things will get out of hand. But let’s do it anyway. We live in a culture (the US) in which whiteness and white supremacy are not simply ideas produced by this culture; they are the very bedrock and foundation of its political, economic, social, and cultural structures.[5] That's the real problem. How do we navigate between the real absence of a sense of justice under white hegemony, and the implicit (when not overt) demand for justice within the philosophizations of race under consideration here? The history of colonialist conquest of the Americas is a history of whites constructing race and racial identities for themselves. By imposing racial definitions on Africans and Native Americans, the objective of whites was to engender "fundamental" differences between themselves and the Africans and Native Americans. In producing this relationality, whites act like objectivists, producing Africans and Native Americans as real groups in otherness, attributing transcendental and transhistorical values to a real "us-not-them" paradigm, to which their imposed dehumanization on the "them" gave "objective" testimony. Nevertheless, in their arrogated self-superiorization by these means, their objectivist perspective was only something they constructed for themselves. On the other side, Africans and Native Americans discovered themselves having been constructed as objective groups by colonialist occupation—objectivist despite themselves (in their need for psychic survival and defense), and constructivist against themselves (seeing themselves made into conquered and victimized people).
The constructivists would say that race was not something discovered among people (for instance, among people colonized by Europeans); the objectivists would say that when Europeans discovered the difference, what they were looking at was race. When European colonialists then defined race (the constructivists would say "invented", and the objectivists would add "referentially" to that) to legitimate their theft of land and kidnapping of people for forced labor, they did so from a position of power. "Racialization" amounted to a complex socio-political act in the interests of power. How can race exist if it was invented-or-discovered as a socio-political strategy? How can race not exist if that strategy has had the effect of enslaving, killing, segregating, criminalizing, and robbing millions in the name of race? Which is the ghost of which?
In Harris's definition of constructivism, races are contingent on self-description, or their own construction of a cultural and communal cohesion and coherence. (Harris,19) And objectivists see races discovering themselves, as it were, objectively as races. But historically it is the other way around. In their colonialist operations, Europeans "discovered" others, and thus discovered themselves as objectively white through their self-definition as different from those others. When they racialized those others as non-white, they constructed themselves as "objectively" superior by imposing an objective sub-personhood (socially and economically) on those others, whose discovery constituted the primary act of construction of their own (white) objectivity.[6]
The idea that the term "race" could be without a referent is only possible by discarding and discounting the power relationships generative of the historical objects placed in relation as races. Today, looking back, we can see 17th century white objectivism as constructivist, while (some of) those who had been constructed as objective despite themselves (Africans and Native Americans made Negro and Indian) reconstruct themselves as alternately objective races in order to stand in opposition to that former white constructivism. Historically, the construction of race as idea and social categorization has been at the hands of a constructing power or racializer (and not self-descriptive) while an objective sense of race has occurred (as both oppressive and in resistance) through self-description.
This interweaving of these terms is not a dialectic; it has no synthesis. At best, it is the operation of a hermeneutic circle, or what Merleau-Ponty calls a chiasmus—each is the foundation of the other. In dismantling the boundary between the two ("irreconcilable") positions, one does not dispense with anything. Instead, one arrives at the following dual recognition: it is difficult to see how one cannot be a constructivist, and at the same time, it is difficult to see how one cannot be an objectivist.
How can one not be a constructivist in the face of the central (white-generated) distinction that a white woman can give birth to a black child, but a black woman cannot give birth to a white child? Or rather, a single black foreparent will make a person black, while a single white foreparent will not make a person white. And by using this descent paradigm as an example, I am not reducing the complexity of race to this, but rather allowing biology to undermine its own use through its own conceptual force. Real biology admits of no such non-parities; both non-parity and parity are purely conceptual. What this paradigm demonstrates is that a "purity condition" is (has been, must be) presumed by whites to define whiteness. It is a negative purity principle, both in turning exclusion into substance, and defining whiteness by what it is not. Such a purity principle holds for no other race. Only white self-definition requires it in order to exteriorize other races, and define differences among them (breaking the many continuous spectra of traits that the concept of race claims as its elements) by defining itself as the primary difference. The white (negative) purity condition is the ineluctible necessity for the definition of race. It is the epistemic center of whiteness as a culture. It chains the original definition of race to the white point of view it makes possible.[7]
With no referent in biology, non-parity or (negative) purity emerge only as adjuncts to coloniality; they antedate Linneaus, Gobineau, Kant, and Jim Crow, as well as the various racializations of Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, etc., undertaken in the name of race. It is a colonization that lives on in the epistemology founded on non-parity and negative purity as its primary principles. Since a purity condition exists by definition only, as does non-parity, together they expel biology from the domain of definition of race, even while basing that definition on an "instrumentalized" biological function (parentage or ancestry). Conceptual instrumentalization and real objectivity are often not free from being confused with each other. Neither negative purity nor non-parity have any source in their object (people of different colors). They have only to do with a specific knower, a white one.
In other words, if race exists by definition (of a white negative purity condition dependent on what it is not), then its domain of existence is only the act of definition, the power to define, which then most essentially depends upon the power to impose that definition on others. (This is the question of interest, and race is always, though rarely spoken of as a question of interest.) In other words, whiteness itself is defined across a relation of imposition. It is a violent imposition; a violence that hides in the normative procedures that white identity has assumed for itself. Internalizing that power to impose, and depending on its negative purity principle, whiteness necessarily finds those on whom it has imposed its racializations to reside at the very core of its own identity[8 ]and self-understanding. Its dependency on them is absolute.
The epistemology of whiteness, the definition of race and the power to define through violence do not form a basis for enslavement and segregation, but their collective mask. For some constructivists, the imposition of that mask is the objectivity of race. Race begins with power, and never stops making reference back to that power, which Clevis Headley calls "epistemic imperialism." (Harris,89) It is not that whiteness is the center of all discourses of race, but rather that the historical structures of racialization (of oppression, land-seizure, and forced labor) and the imposition of a social categorization on those racialized is the ineluctible center of whiteness and white identity.
Nevertheless, here we are, centering our discussion on whites, albeit on the imperialism and racism of EuroAmerican societies. So much concerning race and racism is from the white point of view. One of the politically significant aspects of an objectivist viewpoint, for black thinkers, is that it provides an understanding of race from elsewhere than a white point of view—not as a compensatory mechanism, but as a form of oppositionality. It argues for a solidity to black (or brown, or indigenous, or Asian) being that escapes and contests the white construction of blackness (or of "natives," or of Asians, etc.). Black objectivism and white (supremacist) objectivism are incommensurable, since white objectivism defines black people as deviating from the white account of agency and subjectivity while black objectivism understands and encounters black people as agents and subjects for themselves, irrevocably.
And thus, it is also difficult to understand how an anti-racist person would not be objectivist. Albert Mosley argues for understanding the worldwide emergence, conjunction, alliance, and ideal of Africans in commonality as a single heroic vision of an anti-colonialist African race.[9] It is this vision that informed DuBois's thinking, and his identification of a common African continent-wide, Atlantic-wide, and worldwide unity. That vast African presence in the world, standing forth from being the primary victim of European colonialism, and aware of itself as such, began to bring to solidarist fruition, during DuBois's last years, processes he had helped to initiate. Its unity resided in common descent, history, memory, and condition of having suffered the same "disaster and insult." For DuBois, it forms a common "kinship" for all the "children of Africa," and to which he pays homage and honor in proclaiming his membership. Not only a sense of an "anti-colonialist race" in which to politically reflect itself, this common kinship also emerged in recognition of the implacability of the enemy, from the torture and apartheid starvation from Algeria to South Africa, to the police brutality and police occupation of black communities in US cities. The struggles against Jim Crow in the US, the Negritude movement in Europe, the national liberation revolutions after WWII, presented a global entity, a melding together of those who had been scattered and dragged to the far corners of the colonialist system.[10]
To this, Mosley adds a meditation on African philosophy, as reflective of an inherent psychology and world-view. (Mosley,84) For him, the rise of an Africanist consciousness is not the same thing as an African consciousness. Where African solidarity engendered a political existence as a racial group in motion, it nevertheless reflected an underlying Africanist origin that had never been undone by transport or redefinition. African people could recognize each other as a people of common descent because they had all been told the same thing about the way they looked. And they turned the way they looked into the way they looked at each other, a commonality of past and future. Between the worldwide common descent that DuBois celebrated, and the sense of Africanist consciousness that threads its way through traditional African thinking, more than a social construction emerges. It was a sense of descent that transcended politics, embracing both those who stepped too far ahead and those who opportunistically betrayed the process of liberation through corruption.
It was to this anti-colonialist race of Africanity that DuBois turned as a source of opposition to the enemy's implacability. Yet, oscillating back and forth between the raciality of blackness and the politics of blackness [between Dusk of Dawn and Dark Princess, for instance], he is himself the prime example of the difficulty of living a clean objectivist and constructivist disjunction. (Mosley,75)
The attempt at disjuction appears stranger still with respect to Native Americans in the US, who argue among themselves about who should be included in their societies—in part in response to federal legal intervention imposing new definitions.[11] Is membership to be decided in terms of who can trace parentage and bloodline, or rather who can live the life and walk the walk? At what objectivist cut-off point does the percentage of "Indian blood" cease to be Indian blood. At what constructivist point does the maxim, "if one can live like us, walk the world like us, think like us, take strength and heart from our ceremonies like us, and love the world like us, then such a one is one of us," cease to be sufficient? During the 18th century, there were many European settlers who went and lived the indigenous life, and found it more to their liking than that of the Puritan colonies.[12] By the 19th century, however, the white settler mentality had become too consolidated, too rigid and unopposable, as Herman Melville suggests at the end of his novel, "Typee." Today, many indigenous persons (some as light as any white person) have said to whites, "we are not like you, and we live a life that you could not live, and could never understand." Part of that is the hardship of living and maintaining a tradition in the face of white US genocidal assaults on that life. What part is objectivist if it changes with history? And what part is constructivist if it changes history itself? Both sides have adherents, as does the community of black thinkers and philosophers. As Mosley points out, the split that occurred between Senghor and Cesaire in the Negritude movement during the 1930s was over this disparity. (Mosley,77)
I am not trying to build a bridge between these positions. It is not needed. Their historical inseparability as chiasmic is the very mother of their separation in the first place. But in light of the difficulty in maintaining the irreconcilability that Harris postulates, all this suggests that objectivism and constructivism are more properly understood as belief systems, rather than philosophical schools. That is, they are forms of political praxis. Belief approaches the world with a choice of lens in hand, through which to view experience and history, rather than question experience and history as a way of arriving at a lens. A belief system is the spectre that remains after analysis has rendered existence an inert object. This is not to diminish the involvement of objectivism and constructivism in doing the rethinking demanded by the post-Civil-Rights situation in the US. The Civil Rights movements, in contesting the power of death (that is the unavoidable context here), thought they had wrought irrevocable changes. But after watching the Civil Rights movement itself become a ghost, and then confronting the non-ghost of race as it has appeared in colorblindness, unrecorded profiling, and a prison industry, one faces the necessity for a new critique to articulate the referent that lurks in this intricate socio-political interstice. The power of death remains the life of power. The ghost of ontology points to what fills the space between objectivism and constructivism: political power. The categories of race that the power to define deploys do not just refer to generational descent, but are immersed in biology or genetics, which it then uses as its language. Biology, constructivism, genetics, cultural solidarity, inherent psychology and poverty all become the rhetoric of a structure of power that, in its power to define and impose its definitions as cultural norms, creates those norms as objective.
Power constructs, and what it constructs takes on
the aura of fact.
Its ability to do that is what makes it power.[13]
Redefinition means to construct an alternate power, in order that what
one then defined and constructed would likewise take on the aura of
fact. This is the power inherent in oppositional social movements. If
constructivism validates itself across the contradictions in objective
factors (the descent paradigm), objectivism validates itself in the
self-construction of its own alternate power as a movement to render
itself and its issues objective.
White anti-racist constructivism
Alongside black or brown anti-racist objectivisms, there are also white and black anti-racist constructivisms. Outlaw and Locke provide two versions. Anna Stubblefield presents a third. She begins with the history of the colonialist invention of race and whiteness, and how it places whiteness and white supremacy, its power and its power to define, at the core of all cultural and political thinking in the US, even unto white anti-racist projects. (Stubblefield,152) Thus, the focus of her anti-racist thinking is how to programmatize a sense of white people taking responsibility for themselves, and ending their complicity in racism and white supremacy. For her, the implicit implacability of power, in its many modes of driving racist oppression, is an ineluctable fact.
There are other white anti-racist constructivists who choose to ignore the question of power; and in so doing, betray themselves. One such is Lawrence Blum. Blum has written a book with the ironic title, "I'm Not a Racist, But...". In this book, he addresses racism as a moral wrong among people, and works backward from that to the question of whether race is a referent for it or not, eventually getting to historical questions toward the end. He argues that "race" as objective fact doesn't exist, while racialized groups, as social facts, do exist.
Blacks, whites, Asians, and Native Americans have been treated as if they were races. This makes them racialized groups, but not races; for there are no races. This is not merely a shift in terminology. Racialization does not, but race does, imply inherent characteristics, a virtually unbridgeable moral, experiential, and cognitive gulf among racial groups, and a hierarchy of worth. (Blum,162)
Blum is here instructing people to the benefits of thinking in terms of "racialized groups," rather than in terms of "races." But Blum doesn't say why the presence of inherent characteristics (races) necessarily has moral, experiential, and cognitive concomitants. He enumerates concomitants, but doesn't say why they produce "unbridgeable" differences. And it is axiomatic for him that a "hierarchy of worth" is manifest only in the case of "inherent" differences, as if non-parity inhabited inherency, biological or otherwise.
"If there are no races," he continues, "then any racial solidarity presuming them is without foundation. Based on a falsehood, [belief or reliance on races] lends itself to ... moral distortions." (Blum,169) The moral distortions he sees as "inherent" in race and not in racialized groups include "exaggerations of social difference and moral distance, stereotyping, intra-group commonalities that displace commonalities across groups, and a privileging of racial identity," which includes the ability of each race to be racist toward others." (Blum,169) Because races are not socially constructed while racialized groups are, it is races that become separatist and alienated while racialized groups necessarily form without unbridgeable differences of experience.[14]
He is not rejecting black or Native consciousness, nor the solidarity that is its life force. For him, "black consciousness can be based not on race but on racialized identity." But it seems to make a difference to him whether black people identify with a black consciousness and a black identity through contingent groupness or with a racial community in resistance that makes reference to itself as a race. Is not the latter in direct opposition to racialization by white supremacy? Does it not require a counter-construction of a "racial group (objectively) in resistance" (making objective reference to "race") to respond to having been formerly "constructed" as a "racialized group (constructively) in subordination" by white supremacy? Is there not a politics of opposition contained within the interface between objectivism and constructivism that cannot be ignored?
It is strange to think of social difference or intra-group commonalities as in themselves moral, whether distorted or not. Morality implies the existence of agency in inter-group or inter-personal attitudes, of agential attitudes with respect to other persons. Group autonomy, solidarity, and identity are necessary preconditions for group agency. Is autonomy greater for a group that appropriates itself as objective, or as one that only finds itself a "racialized group" as given? In addition, Blum presents these separations (e.g. exaggerations of social difference) as without alternative for races, and thus unchosen. He admits difference of degree but not of kind. To posit them as not therefore chosen is to constitute a form of determinism (for races but not for racialized groups). An alternative could be a strong sense of autonomy upon which a racial group could stand. And in fact, autonomy would facilitate and prioritize a dialogic paradigm toward other groups rather than the fear, insularity, and distance to which Blum condemns them (given that participant autonomy is the necessary condition for dialogue). Blum does not envision a sense of racial group autonomy since races don't exist for him; nevertheless, in the absence of any such alternative, his sense of racial "behavior" becomes more than simply "moral distortions."
What appears to be ignored is that each racialized group must also be constructed with different experiences, moralities and cognitive relations to the world. Their very construction as racialized groups would constitute their central experience, at the core of their cognitive relation to the social world. If their racialization is at the center of their experience and cognitions, then what objective factor renders their experiential and moral differences necessarily bridgeable? Indeed, if objective "races" do not undergo the "experience" of racialization because they already exist as races, then from where comes the unbridgeable gulf between them? It would seem that Blum has placed "unbridgeability" in the wrong category.
But to contrast the two in this fashion raises the question, who does the racializing in the case of racialized groups? And who produces the hierarchy in the case of races? Objectivism can escape these questions by positing the possibility of a dialogic between autonomous objective races; but constructivism must answer them. Blum leaves the identification of "racializers" out. In the US, both historically and in the present, flaunting the non-ghost of race, the ghosts of the signs that never really came down, the on-going violence of prison and profiling, whites are the racializers. Racialized groups of color would have similar experiences and cognitive relations (in their confrontations with whites and white supremacy) that would be commonly incommensurable with white experiences and cognitions as racializers. For any constructivism, the primary unbridgeable moral gulf would be between the racializers and the racialized. This difference would constitute a primary "inherency" characteristic in Blum's paradigm of racialized groups—though he assumes there are none.
Blum is instructing people of color to look at themselves not as races but as racialized groups. But on what basis should they trade one form of inherency for another? After all, if black people chose to see themselves as a race, and Chicanos chose to resist their racialization through an ethnic territorial identification (Aztlán), for both to see themselves as "racialized groups" would violate and sunder their specific historicity. The moral value of Blum's argument would contradict itself.
In omitting the racializer, as well as the contemporary history of racialized group formation, and in spreading the ability to be racist evenly among all, Blum has placed his "racialized groups" on a horizontal plane, without ongoing hierarchy. Hierarchy is left to the objectivist domain of "races." Indeed, Blum's goal is a race-neutral account of racism. "My goal of an adequate account of racism is entirely antithetical to race-based attachments to definitions of "racism." (Blum,35) That is, either he wishes to abstract the definition of racism from who does the defining, or he wants to escape the "race-based" by arbitrarily shifting to racialized groups, which ostensibly don't have a racializer. But once the racializer is included in the latter possibility, it becomes another vertical power-generated hierarchy, and it matters who does the defining.
Nevertheless, Blum is subtle about how he omits the question of who does the racializing. "American society structured into its institutions and norms of group interaction the idea that whites were a superior and more worthy 'race' ... [and] all 'nonwhites' were inferior or deficient." (Blum,147) "American society"?? That couldn't have included the vast black population slaving on agrobusinesses called plantations who, in some areas, constituted the majority, could it? Would they have participated in such a travesty?
Through law, custom, and popular understanding and behavior, people of African descent were turned into the racial group "black. They were consigned to a subordinate place in society, ... Blacks by and large accepted racialism with regard to themselves and whites. (Blum,148)
Clearly, blacks don't form part of this "popular understanding." One could almost ignore his use of passive voice with respect to law and custom, deleting agential responsibility for it, except for the ease with which he shifts to an active voice when speaking of black acceptance. It makes his passive voice unignorable. And what is being ignored by the passive voice here is precisely who does the racializing, and the power relations involved. Include them and the horizontal plane he assumes disappears.[15]
But what does it mean to efface white responsibility for what whites have done to others? Blum informs all in general that "racial" solidarity is based on a falsehood, despite his having personally chosen the axiomatics upon which to arrive at that conclusion. He wants his conclusion to hold for everyone. But other constructivist accounts exist for which that sense of falsehood is not relevant (Outlaw's, for instance). Blum has taken the stance of the generalizer, the definer. He has also erased the cultural historicity of those for whom a "racial" solidarity provides a sense of being and power (DuBois, for instance). There is only one historicity to be invoked, that of the agentless "American society." Unfortunately, this is nothing but a white point of view, with its propensities to impose its generalizations and instruct others with respect to them. Blum's text becomes a case study of the idea that to desire a race-neutral account of racism, one must necessarily adopt a white perspective on it, and thus to fail to produce a race-neutral account.
Ultimately, white anti-racism has to be constructivist; it has to historicize its own white identity in order to stand against the structures of racialization that impose race even on anti-racist white persons in their whiteness. Should they think objectivism, it would not only give whiteness an adamant permanence, but it would confirm the white supremacy that produces racial categorizations. To identify with one’s whiteness and affirm that identification (different from simply recognizing that one has been racialized white by the structures of racialization) is to embrace the entire history of colonialism, enslavement, torture, and present day coloniality, imprisonment, impoverishment, and police rule, that have produced that whiteness that one embraces. This is the contradiction that racialization has foisted on whites who seek a just and thus necessarily anti-racist world.
But the ultimate test of white anti-racism, though not of its constructivism, is a refusal to generalize its thinking and positionality to those others who have been previously racialized by white supremacy, some of whom have chosen objectivism. Indeed, white anti-racist constructivism is closer to black objectivism; they stand antithetical to the white objectivism of coloniality across the interface of power.
This interweaving of objectivism and constructivism elucidates part of the mine-field upon which communication and conversation attempts to occur between whites and persons of color. In ordinary conversation, for equality to obtain, a black person often faces the necessity to autonomously re-racialize him/herself in order to throw off all vestiges of white-imposed racialization indexed in the appearance of his/her interlocutor; it is an appropriation of autonomous racial being to offset the desubjectification of subjection imposed by whiteness itself. But his/her white interlocutor would have to do the opposite, deracialize him/herself, in order to come out from behind the whiteness that had been given, a whiteness that would prevent his/her black interlocutor from being heard because already spoken for by that whiteness.[16] That is, a black person may seek to transcend the double consciousness DuBois identifies as resulting from white racist domination through self-racialization, while a white person must become someone unknown to him/herself both in order to hear the other and to see him/herself as the other sees him/her. For white persons to see themselves as others see them would mean adopting a form of inverse DuBoisian double consciousness.
1- Lilian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: Norton, 1949); Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race (Cleveland: World, 1964); Alain Locke, "The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture," in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1989), p. 187-199.
2- Leonard Harris, ed., Racism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999); Robert Bernasconi, Race (Malden: Blackwell, 2001); Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996); Lawrence Blum, I'm Not a Racist, But …: the Moral Quandry of Race (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2002); Anna Stubblefield, Ethics Along the Color Line (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2005).
3- Anna
Stubblefield is a constructivist who argues that race as
constructed is real, and for taking race into account as an important
moral principle. She begins with the history of the invention of race
and whiteness in the English colonies, and sustains throughout her
discussion the notion that whites and white identity are what have an
interest in maintaining race and racism, and thus constitute the core
of the problem. If the role of racism is to maintain a hierarchy with
respect to race, then it belongs to those who have an interest in doing
so. All racism, by implication, is then white racism. Others, beset by
that hierarchy, primarily have an interest in resisting it. She calls
upon white people to take responsibility for what whiteness and white
supremacy have done to others in the course of its colonialist
criminalities, and its distribution to white society of its unmerited
and ill-gotten gains.
4- Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race (New York: Doubleday, 1948); Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy; Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (New York: Verso, 1996); Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 2003); Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York : Routledge, 2003).
5- This is the central argument throughout Martinot, The Rule of Racialization. See also, Alexander Saxton’s The Indispensible Enemy (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975) and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), both of whom address the question from somewhat different perspectives.
6- It took
the English colonies roughly a century to "construct" a
concept of race and their own whiteness. When the English arrived in
Jamestown, they did not see themselves culturally, socially, or
ontologically as white, though by the middle of the 17th century, some
used the term descriptively. They arrived with a
structure of allegiance, and a sense of supremacy imparted by their
Christianity. But the chromatic terms now associated with race had to
be transformed from being descriptive to functioning culturally as
racializing, from referring to personal appearance to referring to
social categorizations. Cf. Steve Martinot, The Rule of
Racialization. Chapter 1.
7- The Spanish invented the notion of "limpieza de sangre" in the interest of political purpose during their wars to ethnically cleanse Iberia of Arab influence and hegemony. For Spanish colonialism, purity came first before race, and was added to a sense of entitlement and supremacy inherent in their Christianity. Making no restrictions on mixed marriages, they constructed a hierarchy on both ethnic and economic grounds. Whiteness as a racial category (the modern concept of race) was invented in the English colonies.
8- On the generation of the white racialized identity through the other, see George Yancy, "W.E.B. Du Bois on Whiteness and the Pathology of Black Double Consciousness" in APA Newsletter, vol. 4(1), p. 10ff; also Martinot, The Rule of Racialization, ch 4.
9- Albert Mosley, "Negritude, Nationalism, and Nativism: Racists or Racialists?" in Leonard Harris, ed. Racism, p. 74-86.
10- Lewis
Gordon introduces a fascinating fact into the debate in
mentioning that some medicines, generally prescribable to whites for
certain illnesses, cannot be generally indicated for black people,
since some suffer adverse side effects from the same medicine. The
explanation is the greater variety of gene pools contained in what is
subsumed as "black" in its construction, both by the purity principle
for whiteness, and by the embrace of vastly different groups into the
Africanist race through their anti-colonialist solidarity. In George
Yancy, What White Looks Like (New York: Routledge, 2004), p.
192, note 21.
11- Eva Marie Garroute, Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native Americans (Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 2003).
12- Hector St John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p.214.
13- As
George Yancy says, speaking of the middle passage and its
devastations, "power produces; it produces reality." That is, what it
produces are the objects of its knowledge. [Yancy, What White Looks
Like, 114] What power produces as fact and truth, becomes
objective. Race and racism, as objective entities and as the products
of 500 years of colonialism, are manifestations of power. Constructed
by the power of coloniality, they become objective as central
organizing principles of the coloniality of power. Cf. Ramón
Grosfoguel, "World-Systems Analysis in the Context of Transmodernity,
Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality," in The Fernand Braudel
Center Review, vol. 29(2), 2006.
14- According to Blum, racism only requires an antipathy, and an intention to socially inferiorize the other for the purpose of self-superiorization on the basis of race. It has nothing to do with the power relations that engender racial categorization or hierarchy, whose manifestation constitutes racial oppression. Ostensibly, the "hierarchy" of values to which he refers will just go away if we stop thinking of races and start thinking of "racialized groups." Furthermore, in reducing "racism" to this minimalist level doesn't dispel the unfortunate conflicts that have in fact arisen between racialized groups—accusations of betrayal or opportunism between Latinos and blacks, for instance, or Native Americans and Chicanos in the southwest. These conflicts exist within the reality of common subjection to white coloniality. But they reflect a different dimension of political agency than morality; indeed, they represent the autonomy that makes agency, morality, and politics possible.
15- This skewed attitude appears often in Blum's text. He exemplifies black racism with a situation in a black high school in which a lone white student is harassed by black students because he is white. (Blum,37) On the other hand, if a white man tells an anti-black racist joke, and he doesn't know it is racist, then he is not being a racist in telling it. (Blum,17) Blum seems not to see that the luxury of ignoring a joke's racism and hurtfulness is inherent in white hegemony and domination. He skews the presumption of virtue to clearly favor white people.
16- Harris flirts with parity when he says that "liberation of any social race from oppression by racism requires ending the racial identity of the oppressor and the oppressed." (Harris,440) It definitely requires ending the racial identity of the oppressor. It only means ending the racial identity given the oppressed by the oppressor, but not the identity, which may be racial in the tradition it takes for itself, constituted by the oppressed as part of their own process of liberation. The first principle of anti-colonialism (and hence of anti-racism) is to guarantee the autonomy and sovereignty of the colonized.