I have a feeling that other bloggers will see this as a quaint issue — theoretically rich, intellectually stimulating, but practically irrelevant. I don’t blame them, but I’m going to write about it anyway.
For the past 6 months or so, I’ve been reading a lot of critical race theory and critical whiteness studies. The field is quite varied, politically rich, and I haven’t gotten bored yet, so I must be onto something good.
One of the pre-eminent theorists in the field is Paul Gilroy. He’s a British academic who’s written about race and immigration in Britain. I’m reading a lot about racist violence at the moment, so his work is exceptionally relevant.
But he has this annoying habit of putting the term race into inverted commas whenever he uses it. He doesn’t do this often for racial and never for racist, but he uses it more prevalently for race.
For quite a while I wasn’t sure why it bothered me. Gilroy seeks to disrupt the biologically essentialist assumptions that accrue around the term, and I’d be an idiot to disagree with his agenda in doing that. I have no attachment to an essentialist notion of race.
But in drawing attention to the word itself, Gilroy is treating it like biological essentialism is inherent in the term. It forecloses the possibility of any other definition of race.
In the first place, I think that the role of the biomedical sciences in constructing racial definitions has been overemphasised. European colonisation was a set of social relations, not just an ideological project. There was material impetus for colonial expansion, colonial violence, and colonial racism as much as it was all a projection of the white European ideological frame onto the rest of the world. Critiques of the (ir)rationality of racial classification systems treat these systems as if they were purely ideological, as if there was no material impetus for the social structures and changes wrought by colonialism.
Dalton Conley, in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness puts it like this:
Early modern conceptions of the white race–in fact of all races–stemmed from confrontation with and domination of peoples outside the European sphere.
(p. 25; emphasis mine)
In other words, the nature of social relations produced the definitions that people used to understand, classify, and regulate their social life. I believe it was an eighteenth-century philosopher by the name of Karl Marx who first said it in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.
… But my bitterness about the ‘cultural turn’ in social sciences, and the glib dismissive treatment that Marxism gets, is a rant for another time.So Gilroy’s criteria for technical sociological terms is a little different than that of Marx. Theoretical disagreement, let’s move on.
… Or not. Gilroy says in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack that:
‘race’ is nothing special, a virtual reality given meaning only by the fact that racism endures
I think this view erases the structural reality of race and racism. Britain’s present racial minorities didn’t give up their ties to the colonial machinery when they migrated — their migration was part of the postcolonial process, and their presence in Britain today is part of the structural re-alignment of Britain in its de-colonisation process. Their social position in Britain now is shaped by a political logic underwritten by history. You don’t just dismantle that by removing the visors of virtual reality!
Gilroy’s logic is tempting, because it alludes to a solution to the problem of racism. But the problem of racism is just the violent tip of the iceberg — the iceberg being the problem of global injustice.
Gilroy could be forgiven, because this book was published in 1987, while a lot of race theory was still being realised. But since the 1960s and 70s, when anti-discrimination measures were first instituted in wealthy white welfare states, attitudes and institutional logics have changed. There has been a backlash against the recognition of inequality, and the institution of measures to address it, a backlash commonly known as colourblindness.
Within the work of W.E.B. Du Bois there’s a strong sense that, although his society was vehemently racist, white liberals were at least committed to improving black Americans’ lot in life. Paternalistic and ultimately self-serving though it may have been, abolitionists and their political descendants were at least addressing the problems of race rather than sweeping them under the carpet.
Nowadays overt racism isn’t so mainstream. There are legislative measures in place to prevent the exclusion of racially marginal people. But these measures address the attitudinal elements of that exclusion, not its structural elements. As such, social relations being what they are, and determining consciousness, people get the impression that attitude is all there is to racism.
Common-sense notions of race and racism limit it to an attitude of biological inequality, but it’s an ideologically confused definition. Notions of race have always been a cipher for certain kinds of social relations, but they haven’t been the determinants of those relations. Gilroy’s limiting of what race can mean to the definitions received from pseudoscience limits his own ability to unravel those social relations.
It limits the ability of anti-racists to organise around racial issues, because it leaves the power to define race in the hands of people whose social position is supported by racism. It’s an evacuation of responsibility to re-shape categories of understanding so that their underpinnings are exposed and their liberatory potential is activated.
Even if you wanted to fix the definition of race in biological terms, where would you start that made sense? Biological racialism wasn’t uniform over time. At first, race was seen as a product of climate rather than biology. Then, as Darwinian Natural Selection overcame the Lamarckian theory of heredity, race was biologised. After that, the biology kept being revised as theories were raised and disproved time and again. And now geneticists have disproven that there is human racial differentiation on a genetic level (which is neither here nor there, apparently, because colonialism still exists, and evolutionary biologists still study population differentiation).
Tracing the development of these definitions, or making a big show of rejecting them wholesale, doesn’t help us deal with the idelogical codes used to refer to race in the present, either. In the wake of racial biology being discredited (at least as a source of state policy), there has been a proliferation of other terms used to refer to the social relations that bring about race. “Middle Eastern Appearance”, “culture”, and “ethnicity” are some popular ones.
At the same time as mentions of race are becoming hyper-politicised to the point of taboo, these more sociologically acceptable terms are becoming de-politicised. They’re becoming naturalised, in an ideological regime of spatio-cultural essentialism, which fixes social problems in a presentist locus of difference. Thus, there can be such things as “Australian values” and “Middle Eastern appearance” which can pass as having no racist connotations because they refer to nation and custom, rather than biology. Yet in all this there’s a denial of history, or the durability of the colonial relations that enable the people in power to make up these ridiculous notions in the first place.
Perhaps, to Gilroy, this is a good thing, because it’s a step in the direction of a common sociological understanding of social relations. I don’t know, cos I haven’t read his recent work. But his sentiments about what desirable race relations are like have been echoed by Ghassan Hage (probably Australia’s pre-eminent theorist in the field). Namely,
a liberating sense of the banality of inter-mixture and the subversive ordinariness of this country’s convivial cultures in which ‘race’ is stripped of meaning and racism just an after-effect of long gone imperial history
-There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack
To me, this is worrisome. It’s worrisome when someone tries to tell others what an anti-racist future ought to look like, and presents the alternative as empty, navel-gazing multiculturalism which reinforces post-biological essentialisms.
This is where I balk, because the problem of identity has been raised. Is identity about social position, or is it about the soul? How are we to manage the fact that it’s about both?
Attention, in this case, is a zero-sum game. I can give attention to my social being at the expense of the more spiritual aspects of identity; or I can focus on spirituality and ignore its social underpinnings. Certainly, these are the alternatives that Gilroy paints.
But I’m gonna reject both of them. ‘Banal’ intermixture won’t replace the revolutionary work of activism, and it won’t invigorate souls. At least, this has never been my experience.
Creating a hierarchy of oppressions with class at the top has never benefited me in my attempts to decolonise myself, or to understand justice. All it’s done is pave the way for white people to tell me that my issues don’t matter, or they’ll get solved along the way to the resolution of their own efforts. Denying the durability of white supremacy just allows white people to re-centralise whiteness and avoid dealing with the consequences of the racist social systems that benefit them.
And all of that is why I’m turned off Gilroy’s work, why his later books sat on my shelf for months and I didn’t read them. On the first page of After Empire I saw the inverted commas, and I balked. I couldn’t read much after that, and it’s taken me a while to unpack the reasons. But they are there.
I’ve found less banal, but more spiritually invigorating, modes of engaging through studying critical race theory and hearing from the activists who’ve crafted it. I’m trying to get an anti-racist group started on campus, and I’m scared. White socialist vampires are everywhere. But this is my consciousness talking back to the society that made it. I don’t know if that’ll be an exercise in spiritual triumph, or just plain old demoralisation again. But I can’t help but feel that doing anti-racist work is something important. That it’s my way of intervening in the unjust processes of the world, the world that made me, and changing them. Certainly, thataddresses identity, without being identitarian.
Maybe I’ll finish this thought later. It’s late, and I should sleep.
