Reflection Latinx

Racial Formation in the United States Racial Formation in the United States is appearing here in an entirely new edition, 20 years

since its last publication. Authors Michael Omi and Howard Winant have maintained the

structure and vision of their classic work, but have completely revised and rewritten every

chapter. The ambitious purpose of the book remains the same: to develop a theory of race

and racism adequate to their complexity, historical depth, and ongoing political impor-

tance. Racial Formation explains how concepts of race are created and transformed, how

race shapes U.S. society, and how it permeates both identities and institutions. Some of

the contemporary themes that Omi and Winant discuss are: the steady journey of the U.S.

toward a majority nonwhite population, the creativity and political legacy of post-World

War II anti-racism, the linkage between colorblind racial ideology and neoliberalism, the

new racial genomics, the emergence of “implicit bias” accounts of race, the rise of a mass

immigrants rights movement, the achievement of race/class/gender intersectionality

theories, and the election and reelection of a black president of the United States.

In Part I the authors review and critique the main theories of race—the ethnicity-, class-,

and nation-based paradigms—examining the main contemporary trends and limits in

racial theory. In Part II they off er their own advanced theory of racial formation, placing

the racialized body much more front and center in the analysis, without diminishing in

any way their commitment to a social constructionist account of race. Omi and Winant

argue that throughout U.S. history race has provided a “template” for patterns of inequal-

ity, marginalization, and diff erence; this is a new claim for their book. In their view no

other social confl ict—not class, not sex/gender, not colonialism or imperialism—can ever

be understood without taking race into account.

The new Part III treats U.S. racial history up to 2013. Omi and Winant look anew at the radi-

cal challenge presented by the black movement in the post-World War II years. They stress

the movement’s alliances (and sometimes confl icts) with other racial justice, gender justice,

and anti-imperialist movements. They argue that because it virtually reinvented U.S. poli-

tics and greatly expanded the horizons of democracy and equality, its containment became

the top priority of the U.S. power structure. Part III therefore treats the dynamics of racial

reaction at greater length than did earlier editions of Racial Formation, exploring not only

the Nixon, Reagan, and Bushes’ years in power, but also the accommodations of Clinton and

Obama to colorblind racial ideology and to the regime of neoliberalism.

Omi and Winant continue to see race as a fundamental organizing principle of social life, one

that deeply structures politics, economics, and culture in the United States. They rethink

race as intersectional, ubiquitous, and unstable, continually operating at the crossroads of

social structure and identity. Because race is socially constructed and historically confl ictual,

it is continually being made and remade in everyday life. Race is constantly in formation.

Test questions and a range of additional instructor support materials, prepared by Cameron

Lippard, Associate Professor of Sociology at Appalachian State University, are available on a

password-protected website, www.routledge.com/cw/omi to faculty and administrative

staff who have been approved to request Review Copies by Routledge.

Titles of Related Interest from Routledge

Middle Class Meltdown in America: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies

Kevin T. Leicht and Scott T. Fitzgerald

Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism

Patricia Hill Collins

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

Patricia Hill Collins

Race, Law, and American Society: 1607–Present, Second Edition

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall

The Nation and Its Peoples: Citizens, Denizens, Migrants

Edited by John S.W. Park and Shannon Gleeson

Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations, Third Edition

Joe Feagin

The Enduring Color Line in U.S. Athletics

Krystal Beamon and Chris Messer

The Pains of Mass Imprisonment

Benjamin Fleury-Steiner and Jamie Longazel

Racial Formation in the United States

Third Edition

MICHAEL OMI AND HOWARD WINANT

Test questions and a range of additional instructor support materials, prepared by Cameron

Lippard, Associate Professor of Sociology at Appalachian State University, are available on a

password-protected website, www.routledge.com/cw/omi to faculty and administrative staff

who have been approved to request Review Copies by Routledge.

Third edition published 2015

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2015 Michael Omi & Howard Winant

The right of Michael Omi and Howard Winant to be identified as authors of this work has been

asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents

Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any

form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,

including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without

permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and

are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

First edition published by Routledge 1986

Second edition published by Routledge 1994

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Omi, Michael.

Racial formation in the United States / by Michael Omi & Howard Winant. — Third edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. United States--Race relations. 2. United States—Social

conditions—1960–1980. 3. United States—Social conditions—1980– I. Winant, Howard.

II. Title.

E184.A1O46 2014

305.800973—dc23

2014002651

ISBN: 978-0-415-52098-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-52031-7 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-07680-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Ehrhardt MT

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

v

Author Biographies vi

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Racial Formation in the United States 1

PART I

Paradigms of Race: Ethnicity, Class, and Nation 19

chapter 1 Ethnicity 21

chapter 2 Class 53

chapter 3 Nation 75

PART II

Racial Formation 103

chapter 4 The Theory of Racial Formation 105

chapter 5 Racial Politics and the Racial State 137

PART III

Racial Politics Since World War II 159

chapter 6 The Great Transformation 161

chapter 7 Racial Reaction: Containment and Rearticulation 185

chapter 8 Colorblindness, Neoliberalism, and Obama 211

Conclusion: The Contrarieties of Race 245

Works Cited 271

Index 315

Contents

Michael Omi is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Associate Director of

the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California,

Berkeley.

Howard Winant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa

Barbara. Winant is the founding director of the University of California Center for

New Racial Studies (UCCNRS), a MultiCampus Research Program Initiative.

Author Biographies

vi

vii

This book has been a long time coming. It has been nearly 30 years since the initial

publication of Racial Formation in the United States (1986), and 20 years since the

appearance of the second edition (1994). Over the years, much has changed and much

has remained the same in the overall patterns, structures, discourses, and individual/

collective experiences of race and racism in the United States. Legally sanctioned

forms of racial discrimination may have receded, but racial inequality and racial

injustice have stubbornly persisted. In many ways racism has proliferated, adopted

new guises, and deepened. Continuity and change are also apparent in racial theory:

how race and racism are recognized, defi ned, and narrated keeps changing too. Racial

politics, both state-based and experiential, have shifted as new understandings of race

and racism are applied in the public sphere and in everyday life. Given the continuing

instability of the concept of race and the uncertainty and anxiety about its meaning,

a reworking and restatement of the racial formation perspective was long overdue.

But what should be retained from the earlier editions of Racial Formation? What

ideas required further elaboration, what should be revised, and what updating was

needed in order to account for new and emergent issues of racial theory and politics?

We deliberated deeply, read widely, and argued passionately with one another about

these questions as we prepared this third edition of the book.

Racial Formation has been our intellectual “home” for decades. So we initially

saw this revision as a “home remodeling” project. Our visions of what we wanted

to do initially clashed. Scale was a big issue. One of us saw the project as a modest

renovation. Imagining the chapters as rooms, he wanted simply to update each room,

freshen the paint, rearrange the furniture, and bring in some new pieces to comple-

ment the revised décor. The other author wanted to knock down the walls, change the

plumbing and electrical work, install new windows and insulation, and perhaps shore

up the foundation.

The final product represents a synthesis of both our desires and plans. Because so

much had changed over the two decades since the second edition of Racial Formation,

a lot more than remodeling was required. The steady journey of the United States

towards a majority nonwhite population, the ongoing evisceration of the political

legacy of the early post-World War II civil rights movement, the initiation of the

“war on terror” with its attendant Islamophobia, the rise of a mass immigrants rights

movement, the formulation of race/class/gender “intersectionality” theories, and

the election and reelection of a black president of the United States were some of the

Preface and Acknowledgments

viii p r e f a c e a n d a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

many new racial conditions we had to address. While the house of Racial Formation

was still standing, while its theoretical foundation was still intact, the home was very

out-of-date and old-fashioned. The book needed reconstruction, although its basic

design remained quite elegant.

In this new edition we have kept the book’s structure intact: It begins with a

critique of existing racial theories, proceeds to offer our own new theory, and then

applies our theory to recent political developments and prevailing U.S. racial dynam-

ics. While we have maintained the original design of our home, we have radically

revised and rewritten each chapter.

We believe that the original book’s core formulations have stood up quite well

over the years. But much of its early content has not aged like fine wine. Many of the

empirical materials and examples of racial politics referenced in the previous editions

are now dated and have been removed. We have tried to provide current empirical

reference points as far as possible, knowing full well that these too will be super-

seded. Race is unstable, flexible, and subject to constant conflict and reinvention.

Rather than seeing the present moment—whatever moment that is—as distilling the

longue durée of racial politics, we in the United States should recognize that we live

in history. Especially in this country there is a desire for instant solutions for prob-

lems, even for deep-seated conflicts: Just add boiling water, just heat and serve. If

the bad news is that there are no quick fixes for structural racism, the good news

is that we live in history. We built this society over historical time; we can rebuild it

as well.

While our theory has been highly generative, it has drawn a good deal of criticism

too. We are grateful for that; we have learned from our critics that parts of our analysis

were cryptic and opaque, and that there were significant gaps in our coverage. Our

discussion of the prevailing paradigms of racial theory in Part I required a substantial

makeover to engage more recent literature and to sharpen analytic distinctions both

within and among different paradigms.

The core theory of racial formation in Part II has elicited both praise and criti-

cism. In this version of Racial Formation, we place the racial body—the phenomic/

corporeal/“ocular” dimensions of racialization—much more front and center, with-

out diminishing in any way our commitment to the social construction of race. The

body was largely undertheorized in our earlier accounts.

We argue that race has been a master category, a kind of template for patterns

of inequality, marginalization, and difference throughout U.S. history. This is a new

claim for us. We are not suggesting that race has been primordial or primary, or that

it has operated as some sort of “fundamental contradiction.” Rather we are empha-

sizing its ubiquity: its presence and importance. We are noting that no other social

conflict—not class, not sex/gender, not colonialism or imperialism—can ever be

understood independently of it.

Speaking of racial history, in the previous edition of our book, Part III ended at

the dawn of the Clinton era. Obviously, much has transpired since the early 1990s.

p r e f a c e a n d a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s ix

The new Part III treats U.S. racial history up to 2013, extending into the Obama

period. We have expanded our account of The Great Transformation, the rising

phase of the political trajectory of race. We look anew at the civil rights movement and

the black power movement (brown power, red power, and yellow power movements

too). We focus greater attention on the radical threat these movements posed to the

despotic regime of the United States, notably as they combined with “second-wave”

feminism, the anti-imperialist movement that began with opposition to the Vietnam

war, and the dawning LGBT movement.

We have argued that the U.S. racial regime is fundamentally despotic; radical

challenges to it occur only rarely. The post-World War II political trajectory of race

that preoccupies this book was only the second such challenge in U.S. history; the

first full-scale confrontation with racial despotism, of course, came a century earlier

with the Civil War and Reconstruction. From the vantage point of the 21st century

we can see that the political trajectory of race that we study in this book consists of

a vital and radical democratic interruption of U.S. racial despotism, followed by an

extended racial reaction. The all-too-brief Great Transformation, we argue, set in

motion permanent political and cultural shifts that 40 years of racial reaction have

been required to control. And those radical challenges have still not been controlled.

They remain disruptive, transformative, explosive.

The black movement inspired a tremendous democratic upsurge, not only in the

United States but all around the world. Part III has been extended to treat at greater

length the racial reaction that returned to power in about 1970. To make sense of

these immense political effects, we focus intensively in Part III—and throughout the

book—on the racial ideology of colorblindness: on its genealogy and ascendance to

hegemonic status in the United States. Colorblindness is today the prevailing mode

of racial “common sense.” We make a number of key claims about it; one of our

main arguments is that colorblindness is a component, an enabler so to speak, of

neoliberalism, the hegemonic economic project of our time. But we do not disparage

colorblindness in every way. While we roundly criticize colorblind racial ideology, we

also note its aspirational qualities and potential for rearticulation.

We made a lot of changes in this edition, but our overall purpose and vision remain

the same. We want to provide an account of how concepts of race are created and trans-

formed, how they become the focus of political conflict, and how they come to shape

and permeate both identities and institutions. Without some notion of the socially con-

structed meaning of race, it is hard to grasp the way racial identity is assigned and

assumed, or to perceive the deeply embedded racial dimensions of everyday experi-

ence. Similarly, without an awareness that the concept of race is subject to permanent

political contestation, it is difficult to recognize the enduring role race plays in shaping

social structure—in establishing and reproducing social inequalities, and in organizing

political initiatives and state action across the entire U.S. body politic.

The concept of racial formation that we first advanced in the 1980s was a reaction

to the dominant modes of theorizing about race in both mainstream social science and

x p r e f a c e a n d a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

left anti-racist politics. In many ways the post-World War II social science disciplines

still reproduced white supremacist assumptions. This led them to conceptualize race

and racism as aberrant and anomalous in U.S. society, rather than as constitutive

elements of the nation-state, foundational ideas about the nature of the American

people, and lineaments of the limited democracy that operated in every U.S. institu-

tion, public and private. In prevailing social science research, race was conceptualized

and operationalized in a fixed and static manner that failed to recognize the changing

meaning of race over historical time and in varied social settings. Race was under-

stood much too simply: as an independent variable that was correlated with other

variables to assess the scope and degree of economic inequality, health disparities, res-

idential segregation, or incarceration rates. Could one effectively analyze patterns of

residential segregation, to take one example, without considering the racial categories

that were utilized and encoded in research, in public documents, in legal decisions

and how they changed over time and place? Didn’t one have to ask not only how race

shaped segregation, but how segregation reciprocally shaped race? Didn’t one have

to examine how segregation invested racial categories with content and meaning?

Asking these questions led us to interrogate the race concept itself and to think about

its socially constructed nature.

On the political left, we were critical of the assumptions that guided Marxist anal-

yses of race in the 1970s and 1980s—both social-democratic and Marxist-Leninist,

both sectarian and humanist. In Marxist approaches race was seen as epiphenomenal

to class and class relations. Racism was understood as a form of “false consciousness,”

an ideology and practice utilized by the capitalist class to sow discontent among work-

ers, to create artificial divisions within the working class, and prevent the emergence

of unified class-consciousness and organization. In such arguments, the independent

role of race was never considered. Also on the left, we were critical of nationalist

positions of various types: notably pan-/diasporic accounts and internal colonialism

theories. Such approaches tended to ignore or homogenize variations within racially

identified groups and categories, to disparage the racial hybridity that is so wide-

spread in the United States, and to import their political programs (many Marxists

did this too) from elsewhere, notably the anti-imperial movements of the global South

and East.

Parting with both mainstream social science and left political theorizing about

race, we tried to imagine it as a fundamental principle of social organization—one

that deeply structured polity, economy, culture, and society in the United States.

Central to this was to see race as a legitimate and autonomous social concept that

needed to be critically engaged in its own right. Then and now, we emphasize the

fundamental instability of the race concept. Race, we claim, operates in the space

of intersections, at the crossroads where social structure and experience meet. It is

socially constructed and historically fluid. It is continuingly being made and remade

in everyday life. Race is continually in formation.

p r e f a c e a n d a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s xi

Our concept of racial formation also developed in relationship to political struggles.

Both of us were engaged and transformed by struggles of the new social movements

of the 1960s and 1970s: the black power movement and other movements of color, the

“second-wave” feminist movement and queer movement, the anti-war movement, the

insurgent labor movement, the student movement, and the struggles for ethnic stud-

ies on university campuses. These new social movements expanded and deepened the

very meaning of politics in the United States. What we term “the politicization of the

social” was articulated in these political spaces and times. Though it is sometimes dis-

paraged as “identity politics,” we affirm that designation and support that current. We

recognize that, messy and processual as this politicization of the social is, it goes much

deeper than the mainstream definition of politics as who gets what, when, and how. It

is not outside the social structures of violence, injustice, inequality, and stigmatization;

indeed it is deeply and more self-consciously embedded within those structures. The

politicization of the social, developed and led by the black movement in the post-World

War II United States, is the application to current conditions of the radical pragmatism

developed by John Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and C.L.R. James, and in our time by

Cornel West, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others. Drawing upon categories

of difference and marginalization, this emergent politics represents a shift toward the

radical democracy we so desperately need today.

Our concept of racial formation has also been forged in struggle with each other.

We wouldn’t have it any other way. The work before you is the product of the intense

discussion and argument, endless rewriting, and compromise that a deep and loving

collaboration requires. After more than 30 years of working together, we are so aware

of each other’s idiosyncrasies that we can often complete each other’s sentences. Ours

is an enduring, productive, and at times challenging relationship. We continue to

enjoy the rare privilege of working together, of questioning each other and ourselves

as deeply as we know how to do in the process of arduous intellectual labor. Over

the years, we have more and more learned to respect, trust, depend on, and love

one another. We are very grateful for our friendship, and appreciate the chance to

acknowledge it here.

There are, of course, others whom we want to thank. The substantive changes

made in this revised edition have been motivated not only by contemporary events

and crises that have profoundly shaped the meaning of race, but by the work of race

scholars and activists seeking to understand the protean nature of race and racism. We

have learned a great deal from their ideas and political practice and have incorporated

their insights, and their vision of social justice, throughout this revised edition. We

are particularly indebted to those whose work has deepened, extended, and at times

critically challenged our concept of racial formation. They have creatively engaged

the theory and, in so doing, advanced new ways of thinking about race and opposing

racism in all their multiple manifestations and dimensions. While no list of all those

who have helped us can ever be complete, we would like to offer our thanks to:

xii p r e f a c e a n d a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Bob Blauner Daniel Martinez HoSang

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Moon-Kie Jung

Devon Carbado Terence Keel

Gary Delgado Oneka LaBennett

Mitch Duneier Marc Mauer

Troy Duster Jonathan Okamura

Hardy Frye Gary Y. Okihiro

Evelyn Nakano Glenn John S.W. Park

Ramón Gutiérrez Andrew Penner

Michael Hanchard john a. powell

Cheryl Harris Laura Pulido

Lane Ryo Hirabayashi

David Montejano Dana Y. Takagi

David Roediger Yasuko Takezawa

Debbie Rogow France Winddance Twine

Steve Rutter Geoff Ward

Aliya Saperstein Gabriel Winant

Nikhil Pal Singh Dianne Yamashiro-Omi

We’d particularly like to thank Cameron Lippard at Appalachian State University

for producing a broad range of instructor support materials for this third edition,

available to instructors on our book’s password protected website. We also wish to

thank the following, who provided many thoughtful comments and suggestions to

Routledge, based on their use of our second edition in their teaching:

Eric Ishiwata Colorado State University

Rhacel Parreńas University of Southern California

Daryl Maeda University of Colorado

Tony Roshan Samara George Mason University

Lisa Brush University of Pittsburgh

Crystal Parikh New York University

Nina Banks Bucknell University

Rudy Busto University of California, Santa Barbara

Ruby Mendenhall University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Lisa Tessman Binghamton University

Jennifer Ho University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Emily S. Lee California State University, Fullerton

Laura Barraclough Kalamazoo College

p r e f a c e a n d a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s xiii

Miguel Ceballos University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Eric Boehme Dension University

Matthew Hughey University of Connecticut

Nancy López University of New Mexico

Darrel Allan Wanzer University of North Texas

Clement Lai Cornell University

Johnson Cheu Michigan State University

Karthick Ramakrishnan University of California, Riverside

Michael Jerryson Eckerd College

Joyce Bell University of Pittsburgh

Niambi M. Carter Purdue University

Christopher James Perez University of Maryland

Gniesha Y. Dinwiddie University of Maryland

Jessica Vasquez University of Oregon

Eric Love Dickinson College

Derrick M. Bryan University of Alabama

Phoebe Godfrey University of Connecticut

Sujani K. Reddy Amherst College

David Embrick Loyola University, Chicago

Amy Sueyoshi San Francisco State University

Tanya Golash-Boza University of California, Merced

Derek Martin Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

Jeff rey Langstraat University of North Dakota

Ronald Nerio City University of New York, Graduate Center

Arthur Scarritt Boise State University

Sophia Wallace Rutgers

Eric Fure-Slocum St. Olaf College

Michael Omi

Howard Winant

This page intentionally left blank

1

Mic Check! Mic Check!

Can we talk about race and racism? They are just as prevalent as ever, though

awareness of their presence is often suppressed. The racial present always needs to

be studied and explained anew. Race and racism remain central in our lives, but they

are changing too.

Let us introduce this book with the call- out “Mic Check!” a request to speak

that is commonly associated with the Occupy movement, but is actually a couple of

decades older than that. 1 This Introduction frames our major concerns in the book.

We adopt the term “Mic Check,” because we see our work as a call- out, a demand that

new attention be paid to the deepening crisis of race and racism in the contemporary

United States.

Way back in 1993, funkmaster George Clinton (our favorite Clinton), urged folks

to “Paint the White House Black” (Clinton 1993; see also Lusane 2011; Jeffries 2013).

A mere 15 years later in 2008, what was a once a hip- hop racial fantasy became a real-

ity with the election of Barack Obama.

In the immediate wake of the Obama victory, the claim that the United States was

now a “post- racial” society enjoyed popular dissemination and acceptance. The “fact

of blackness” in the White House was interpreted as resounding proof that the nation

was moving “beyond race.” That a black man 2 could be elected to the highest post in

the land was cited as a stunning testament to how far the nation had come in moving

beyond the discriminatory racial attitudes and exclusions of the past.

But lest we lapse into a comforting scenario of advancing progress towards the

eventual eclipse of racism, a bit of perspective is warranted. A reporter once told

Malcolm X that the passage of key pieces of civil right legislation was clear proof

that things were getting better for blacks. In response, Malcolm countered that it

did not show improvement to stick a knife nine inches into someone, pull it out six

inches, and call it progress. “But some people,” Malcolm observed, “don’t even want

to admit the knife is there” (Malcolm X, quoted in Lipsitz 1998, 46).

The “knife,” the weapon and wound of racial disadvantage and dispossession,

continues to be ignored today. Structural forms of racial inequality persist and in

many cases have deepened. Empirical studies on health care access, educational

opportunity, and incarceration rates demonstrate continuing inequalities along racial

lines. The Great Recession that began in 2008 and was rooted in the subprime home

Introduction: Racial Formation in the United States

2 i n t r o d u c t i o n

mortgage crisis had extensive racial dimensions. People of color were more than three

times as likely as whites to have subprime and high- cost loans. Such loans accounted

at one point for more than 55 percent of all black and Latin@ mortgages (Rogers

2008). The distribution of economic resources, the patterns of cultural consumption,

and the organization of residential space are all social processes in which race operates

as a fundamental organizing principle of inequality and difference. Americans may

have “painted the White House black,” but race remains a fundamental category of

(dis)empowerment in the United States. As a nation, we appear deeply unable to chal-

lenge or even address the significance of race in our own lives, as well as the enduring

forms of racism and the attitudes, policies, and practices that sustain them.

Persistent racial inequality and difference are rendered illegible in U.S. popular

political discourse. Many people in the United States believe that the goals of the

civil rights movement have been substantially achieved, that racial discrimination is

a thing of past, and that we are rapidly evolving into a truly colorblind society. “Race

thinking,” it is argued, no longer significantly informs our perceptions, shapes our

attitudes, and influences our individual, collective, and institutional practices. Indeed,

it is said that the most effective anti- racist consciousness, policy, and practice is simply

to ignore race. We are urged to see people as individuals only, not as persons or groups

whose identities or social positions have been shaped and organized by race.

After Obama’s January 27, 2010 State of the Union speech, MSNBC host Chris

Matthews said of the President, “He is post- racial, by all appearances. I forgot he was

black tonight for an hour” (Matthews 2010). But can anyone in the contemporary

United States really ever “forget” race? Can we actually suspend how we immediately

“see” and “read” people with whom we come into contact? Can we avoid categoriz-

ing people into existing racial categories? In short, can we actually transcend racial

distinctions and meanings as we navigate our institutional and everyday lives? As

Martha and the Vandellas once put it, “Got nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide”

(1965). The ubiquity of race is inescapable across nearly every social domain.

But race and racial meanings are neither stable nor consistent. Contradictions

abound today, as they have in the past. Most overt forms of racial discrimination have

been outlawed, but racial inequalities pervade every institutional setting. A professed

desire to be colorblind bumps up against the ubiquity of race consciousness, both

in political life and everyday life. Consider the problematic nature of racial identity

itself. The U.S. Census employs a system of racial classification, but many individuals

and groups cannot locate themselves within it. They cannot conveniently fit into any

of the designated racial categories. A person’s own sense of racial identity may differ

significantly from how other people see and categorize her/him. Some individuals

actively resist imposed categories by “performing” race in a subversive manner. A

white person, for example, might take on the linguistic patois and stylistic gait we

commonly associate with contemporary blackness. Over a person’s life course, they

may “switch” racial identities— or be transferred to a new racially defined group, as

a result of changes in state- based racial classification, the emergence of new group

definitions, or even a longing to claim a suppressed or long- abandoned identity, real

i n t r o d u c t i o n 3

or imagined. For example, since the 1960 Census, there has been a dramatic increase

in the American Indian population in the United States. (Passel 1996, 79). Such

an increase is not driven by actual growth, but by increased numbers of Americans

claiming Native identity.

Racial identity is a slippery thing. Given these many contradictions, how might

we begin to grasp the overall meaning of race in the United States? In this book we

discuss the centrality of race in the organization of political life in the United States. We

attempt to develop an overarching perspective on both race and racism in this coun-

try . Our hope is to provide a coherent conceptual framework by which we can grasp

the importance of race as a key category: of inequality, of difference/identity, and of

agency, both individual and collective. Such a framework also seeks to understand

racial change— how concepts and ideologies of race and racism evolve, transform,

and shift over historical time. We engage in a deep interrogation of racial theory,

both past and present. We try to understand and contextualize the race concept.

We explore how race has both informed and been informed by prevailing political

conflicts.

Racial Theory

Race and racism in the United States have been shaped by a centuries- long confl ict

between white domination and resistance by people of color. Theories of race and

racism have necessarily been molded by the same relationships. Informed to a large

extent by the needs of dominant groups who required the nation- state they were

building to be both organized and intelligible for the purposes of rule, 3 racial theory

for years served mainly the interests of the powerful— white settlers, slave owners,

colonial and later national elites. Entire systems of rule— labor and political regimes

among others— had to be organized, structured, regulated, and explained. The con-

cept of race, developing unevenly in the Americas from the arrival of Europeans in

the Western Hemisphere down to the present, has served as a fundamental organiz-

ing principle of the social system. Practices of distinguishing among human beings

according to their corporeal characteristics became linked to systems of control

exploitation, and resistance.

Since race and racism involve violence, oppression, exploitation, and indignity,

they also generate movements of resistance and theories of resistance. The necessity

to comprehend and explain the modern world extended beyond the oppressors to the

oppressed, who sought to understand the calamities that had befallen them through

conquest, kidnapping, mass murder, enslavement, exclusion, and genocide. While

early resistance- based theories of race have largely been suppressed and hidden, the

past is being excavated and examined in new and greater detail. We now have a large

number of slave narratives to draw upon, for example. Recent work in African and

Spanish colonial history, as well as work on indigenous and Arabic texts produced in

the Americas, has increased our awareness of early resistance- based accounts of what

we would now call race and racism. 4

4 i n t r o d u c t i o n

Despite the enormous legacy and volume of racial theory, the concept of race

remains poorly understood and inadequately explained. This is true not only in

everyday life but also in the social sciences, the humanities, law, medicine, and the

biological sciences. Because race operates as a “common- sense” concept, a basic com-

ponent of social cognition, identity, and socialization, everyone considers herself/

himself an expert on the subject. Race seems obvious and in some ways superficial.

What is there to explain? Race appears to be a given attribute, an ordinary “social

fact.” That one has a racial identity is thus no more problematic, no more worthy of

interpretation, than that one has a head upon one’s shoulders. That’s just the way it is.

But when asked what race means, what the significance is of being black, white,

brown, red, or yellow, difficulties rapidly set in. Over the ages these categories’ mean-

ings have varied a great deal: They have carried religious, scientific, political, and

cultural weight. Race has been understood as a sign of God’s pleasure or displeasure,

as an indicator of evolutionary development, as a key to intelligence, and as a signifier

in human geography, among many other things. Concepts of race have conformed to

the exigencies of time and place. In rising empires, the imperatives of conquest have

shaped ideas about racial hierarchy, with portrayals of the strong and superior occu-

piers contrasted with the weak and inferior natives. In periods of social dislocation

and economic decline, race has come to mark those groups who signify corruption

and dilution of the national spirit and purpose. When secularism and scientism have

contended against religious dogma, efforts to classify, categorize, and rank human-

ity along racial lines have come to the fore. Today, we reject many (though not all) of

the earlier incarnations, understandings, and uses of the race concept. Indeed, in the

contemporary United States it is frequently claimed that race has become meaning-

less, that it is an outdated idea, a throwback to earlier, benighted times, an empty

signifier at best. No wonder confusion reigns.

Race and the Social Sciences

Attention to race has risen and fallen in the social sciences, driven once again by

racial “common sense.” The great social theorists of the 19th- century, towering fi g-

ures such as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber,

were all consumed with analyzing the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and

interpreting the dynamic forces shaping modern (i.e., 19th- century European) soci-

ety. Although they shared this central intellectual concern, these thinkers could not

agree on which structural relationships were the most important factors explaining

the rise of that modern, capitalist society, with its “rational- legal” form of authority

and complex division of labor. What they could agree upon, though, was the belief

that racial and ethnic social bonds, divisions, and confl icts were remnants of a pre-

industrial order that would decline in signifi cance in the modern period. 5 Marx and

Engels, for example, predicted that as society split up into two great, antagonistic

classes, social distinctions such as race and ethnicity would decrease in importance.

i n t r o d u c t i o n 5

In fairness to Marx and Engels, they did consider race in their discussion of

“primitive accumulation,” the launching- phase of modern capitalism. Marx writes:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and

entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the con-

quest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for

the commercial hunting of blackskins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of

capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of prim-

itive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European

nations with the globe for a theater. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands

from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is

still going on in the opium wars with China.

(1967, 351)

Furthermore, in their support of the abolitionist cause they linked race to the working-

class movement, both in Britain and the United States; Marx famously asserted in

Capital that “labor cannot emancipate itself in a white skin where in a black skin it is

branded” (1967, 329). Writing somewhat later, Weber and Durkheim were much less

cognizant of the complexities of race. 6

The “founding fathers” of American sociology (men such as Albion Small, Wil-

liam Graham Sumner, and Edward A. Ross) were explicitly concerned with racial

hierarchy and racial classification, which they saw in terms of evolutionary theory. 7

Social science was shaped, not only by the European founding fathers, but also by the

Social Darwinist currents of the period. As did virtually all the early figures, these

men adhered to the unquestioned white supremacy of their time. Their work contrib-

uted, sometimes inadvertently but often by intention, to the racist hysteria of the late

19th and early 20th centuries. The epoch of the emergence of modern social science

in the United States coincided with a sustained period of racial reaction, marked by

the institutionalization of Jim Crow in the South, the success of the movement for

Asian exclusion, and the rise of eugenics. Especially in this atmosphere, adherence

to biologistic perspectives on race severely limited innovation and social scientific

interest in this field. 8

As nearly every race- oriented U.S. social scientist pursued the chimera of “natu-

ral” racial hierarchy, a small number of scholars, almost all of them black, challenged

mainstream (i.e., white) conceptions of race, and implicitly racism as well, although

that term did not yet exist. Led by the protean intellectual and activist W.E.B. Du

Bois, such scholars as Alain Locke, Kelly Miller, William Monroe Trotter, Anna Julia

Cooper, and others created a social science of race and racism, refusing and refuting

the biologistic racism of their white contemporaries. These writers and activists were

largely denied entrance to the whites- only universities of the time. Based in histori-

cally black colleges and universities like Howard, Atlanta (now Clark- Atlanta), and

Fisk and active in community- based institutions and organizations, these people were

the true intellectual leaders of their time, at least in respect to racial theory. Although

6 i n t r o d u c t i o n

there were some minor lapses here and there, their work was premised on then radical

understandings of the meaning of equality, political and social rights, and on a com-

mitment to a fully democratic and racially inclusive U.S. society. 9 Besides breaking

new ground in racial theory, Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study virtu-

ally invented modern, empirically grounded sociology in the United States as well

(Du Bois 1998 [1899]).

Only in the 1920s did mainstream sociology even begin to catch up to these pio-

neering black efforts. Led by Robert E. Park, the “Chicago School of Sociology”

began after World War I to rework social scientific approaches to race, and eventually

reinvented much of the wheel that Du Bois had created two decades earlier. Park had

earlier been a publicist and ghost- writer for Booker T. Washington; in his later years

he taught at Fisk, having been invited there by Charles S. Johnson, a former student

and major sociologist of race in his own right (Johnson 1996 [1934]), who had become

the university’s president.

Park and other progressive white thinkers largely succeeded in mainstream-

ing a socially grounded, if not political, concept of race, and countering the racial

biologism that had dominated racial theory in an unbroken fashion throughout U.S.

history. Chicago sociology would shape the dominant theoretical and methodological

assumptions about race for the greater part of the 20th century and beyond. That

black scholars could not have achieved this result is a bitter but obvious truth that

speaks directly to their marginalization in the field. Just as black popular music—

blues and jazz— could only gain popular currency when white musicians played it,

black racial theory could only begin to make headway in the “mainstream” social

sciences when reframed and advanced by white scholars. 10

Chicago School racial theory still left a lot to be desired. It was deterministic and

resolutely apolitical. Park’s “race- relations cycle,” for example, still widely regarded

as one of the most important contributions to the field, understood its subject as

moving through four stages— contact, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation—

leaving such matters as collective action and political agency out of the picture, and

postulating assimilation (presumably into whiteness) as the positive end- state of “race

relations.” Park proposed the cycle as a theoretical law of historical development, a

way of analyzing group relations and assessing a “minority” group’s progress along

a fixed continuum. 11

Beginning with Park’s concepts, a set of assumptions have gradually come to

characterize the field and serve as guides for social scientists investigating the nature

of race in the United States. Blauner discusses these assumptions as follows:

First, the view that racial and ethnic groups are neither central nor persistent

elements of modern societies. Second, the idea that racism and racial oppres-

sion are not independent dynamic forces but are ultimately reducible to other

causal determinants, usually economic or psychological. Third, the position

that the most important aspects of racism are the attitudes and prejudices

i n t r o d u c t i o n 7

of Americans. And, finally, the so- called immigrant analogy, the assumption,

critical in contemporary thought, that there are no essential long- term dif-

ferences— in relation to the larger society— between the third world or racial

minorities and the European ethnic groups.

(2001 [1972], 2; emphasis original)

These assumptions are as much political as they are theoretical. They neglect both

the institutional and ideological nature of race in America, and the systematic

entrenchment of racial dynamics in such spheres as education, art, social policy,

law, religion, and science. They focus attention on race as an irrational construct, a

product of individual “attitudes and prejudices” rather than a social structure deeply

rooted, not only in ideas and beliefs, but also in institutions, fundamental patterns of

inequality, social geography, and the exercise of political power. 12 Such assumptions

make it impossible to grasp the specifi city of racism and racial confl ict in the United

States. They lead the analyst toward evolutionary models that optimistically predict

the gradual absorption of racially identifi ed groups into the (implicitly white) main-

stream of American political, economic, and cultural life. 13 Racial theories based on

these assumptions— launched in the 1920s and reaching down to the present— reveal

as much about the prevailing state of racial politics and racial ideology when they were

produced as they do about the nature of race relations.

The Trajectory of Racial Politics

At any given moment, we are in a particular phase of the trajectory of racial politics.

Our idea of trajectory refers to a political process, in which rising phases of mobiliza-

tion are followed by declining phases. From the long- run standpoint, the trajectory

of racial politics is a process of “cumulative and cyclical development” 14 taking place

over centuries: the longue durée. To consider seriously the depth and variety of racial

rule and of resistance to it is to contemplate the genealogy of race and racism (Mar-

tinot 2002) in the United States and on a global scale. Over the centuries, we see

North America as a terrain both for populating (with settlers) and depopulating (the

removal and genocide of the original inhabitants). Over the centuries, we see the

United States as both a key part of the slavery system and as a locus for abolitionism

and “abolition democracy” (Du Bois). Over the centuries, we see the United States

as— always and simultaneously— an anticolonial and colonial nation- state.

While past racial atrocities are now commonly acknowledged, optimistic observ-

ers of our nation’s recent history offer a vision of a society trying to live up to

democratic and egalitarian principles by slowly extending and applying them to the

gnawing issues of race. We are in the midst, so it is claimed, of a period of enlightened

progress— an unfolding drama of racial incorporation that will not be thwarted or

reversed. A truly colorblind society, it is argued, will eventually emerge. How did we

get to this point and where might we be headed?

8 i n t r o d u c t i o n

A cursory glance at American history reveals that far from being colorblind, the

United States has always been an extremely race- conscious nation. From the very

inception of the republic to the present moment, race has been a profound deter-

minant of one’s political rights, one’s location in the labor market, and indeed one’s

sense of identity. The hallmark of this history has been racism. While groups  of

color have been treated differently, all can bear witness to the tragic consequences of

racial oppression. The United States has confronted each group with a unique form

of despotism and degradation. The examples are familiar: Native Americans faced

removal and genocide, blacks were subjected to racial slavery and Jim Crow, Latin@s

were invaded and colonized, and Asians faced exclusion. 15 While the ethos of equal-

ity has been invoked quite frequently, this has usually served merely to justify blatant

inequality and mistreatment.

Recent U.S. racial history has followed a more complex and contradictory path.

The country has experienced successive waves of racial turbulence and quiescence.

Political challenges to the U.S. racial regime have been followed by containment of such

challenges, sometimes through reform and sometimes through repression. Reforms

that were supposed to diminish the depth and extent of racism have undoubtedly

had some positive effects, but overall they have produced contradictory, even ironic

results. Racial injustice and racial inequality, exclusion, violence, and neglect, are all

so deeply rooted in the nation that just reducing them “moderately”— while presum-

ably preferable to exacerbating them or treating them with “benign neglect”— may

itself have baleful consequences. Inadequate and vulnerable civil rights measures,

after all, have also served to ratify and reinvigorate the underlying racial regime. 16

By the 1960s, because of the upheavals and challenges that developed during and

after World War II, race occupied the center stage of American politics in a manner

unprecedented since the Civil War era a century earlier. Civil rights struggles and ghetto

revolts, as well as controversies over state policies of reform and repression, highlighted

a period of intense conflict in which the meaning of race was fiercely politically con-

tested. Civil rights laws and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 enfranchised millions whose

democratic rights had long been denied. Congress also sought to curtail discrimina-

tion in the labor and housing markets. A long- overdue reform in U.S. immigration

law (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) laid the foundation for the massive

demographic shifts that were to follow over the next decades. However limited some of

these legislative and judicial reforms would turn out to be, the decade saw the greatest

expansion of democratic rights in the nation’s history. As virtually all observers agree,

the political and policy- oriented transformations of the 1960s were driven by massive

popular mobilization, notably for civil rights and racial equality.

There was a moment, a spark of recognition before the assassinations and

upheavals of 1968, when it was recognized that the accomplishments of the black

movement had opened up a broader prospect for radical democratic transformation

in the United States. The black movement at that moment was deeply torn between

radical and centrist currents; black power politics were particularly under attack: by

i n t r o d u c t i o n 9

the state, the right- wing, and the “moderates” as well. The “long hot summers,” the

restive ghettos across the country, were a particular target for attack. But at that point

the movement was still active and growing; the Black Panther Party was galvaniz-

ing the ghetto and its example was influencing Native American, Latin@, and Asian

American organizing as well. The Poor People’s Movement was being built by SCLC

and its allies, so a transracial movement of the poor was at least imaginable. Even at

the state level, adjustments to the new domestic balance of forces were underway:

The War on Poverty and the Great Society were promising redistribution as J. Edgar

Hoover was killing Panthers (Haas 2011). In the streets, the anti- war movement and

the developing “second- wave” feminist movement were coming into their own.

The spark of radical democratic hope was brief indeed. It was murdered with

Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis on April 4, 1968, with Robert F. Kennedy in Los

Angeles on the night of June 5, 1968, in Chicago at the Democratic Party convention

in late August of 1968, and in hundreds of other setbacks as well. Indeed, after King

was killed more than 100 cities went up in flames.

It seems reasonable to argue that the containment of the movement began with

those killings and riots and burnings. Still it required an extended process, a compre-

hensive reordering of U.S. political life, to block the advance of the black movement

and its allies toward greater equality and “participatory democracy.” We have expe-

rienced nearly half a century of reactionary racial politics since that peak moment in

the late 1960s.

Yet the movement has not been destroyed. Its accomplishments live on as a gift

from earlier generations of activists and thinkers to later ones. Yes, the reforms it

achieved have been largely neutralized by state- based reaction, by authoritarian

populist movements, and by colorblind racial hegemony as well. But racial reaction

could not destroy the increased awareness, the enhanced race consciousness, and

the profoundly politicized identities that sprang from the black movement and its

feminist, working- class, anti- imperialist, and queer allies. The epochal confronta-

tion between the post- World War II anti- racist movement— what we call the Great

Transformation— and the racial reaction that succeeded it, has generated a new type

of crisis in U.S. society.

“[C]risis,” Gramsci famously wrote, “consists precisely in the fact that the old

is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the

most varied kind come to pass” (1971, 276). Using the Gramscian formula, we sug-

gest that in the U.S. there has developed, during the extended declining phase of the

political trajectory of race, an enormous and chronic crisis. “Chronic” is not a word

usually associated with the term “crisis,” which usually signifies an acute problem,

not an extended one. But, as Dr. Dre reminds us, we have not yet emerged from this

ongoing pattern of racial contradiction, the chronic racial dilemma we are still in. It

is quite mind- boggling, when looked at as a whole: On the one hand, the old veri-

ties of established racism and white supremacy have been officially discredited, not

only in the United States but fairly comprehensively around the world. On the other

10 i n t r o d u c t i o n

hand, racially informed action and social organization, racial identity and race con-

sciousness, continue unchecked in nearly every aspect of social life! On the one hand,

the state (many states around the world) now claims to be colorblind, non- racialist,

racially democratic; while, on the other hand, in almost every case, those same states

need race to rule. Consider in the United States alone: race and electoral politics, race

and social control, race and legal order…

Why don’t our heads explode under the pressures of such cognitive dissonance?

Looking Forward in this Book

Despite all the upheaval we have experienced in recent years, the outcome of con-

temporary racial confl ict remains uncertain and unresolved. The continuing ebb and

fl ow of racial politics, and the intense contradictions it evokes, beg for a new inter-

pretation. This book developed from our desire to comprehend the centrality of race

in U.S. life and to understand how ideologies of race have changed over the past 50

years. Our discussion is divided into three parts. First, we survey how the concept of

race has been interpreted in the main currents of social scientifi c thought. Then, we

propose our own account of the race concept and racial politics. Finally, we trace how

ideologies of race have shifted over the past 50 years in order to discern the overall

political trajectory of race and racism in the present- day United States.

Now that we have introduced our approach and theoretical premises, we turn to

a brief chapter outline in the remaining part of this Introduction.

In Part I, Paradigms of Race: Ethnicity, Class, and Nation, we examine recent

racial theory in the United States. We argue that this theory is encompassed by three

paradigmatic approaches to race and racism— approaches based on the categories of

ethnicity, class, and nation. These approaches are paradigms, 17 in the sense that they

have particular core assumptions and highlight particular key issues and research

variables. Racial paradigms have implicit and explicit policy and political action ori-

entations; they also serve as guides for research and education about race and racism.

There are, of course, limitations to this approach. We do not suggest that these

three paradigms encompass all the racial theories generated during the period under

consideration, but we do think that they embrace the vast bulk of them and demar-

cate the major lines of debate. Specific theories, and the paradigms themselves, are

treated as ideal types: That is, our concept of paradigms is a distillation for the pur-

pose of analysis of complex and variegated theoretical arguments. A qualification to

our approach, therefore, is the recognition that often a specific viewpoint, concept,

or study cannot be neatly classified in one or the other paradigm. In many cases par-

ticular analyses of race— political, jurisprudential, or academic, say— which we locate

in one paradigm, contain arguments that resemble those suggested within another

paradigm. We discuss each of these main currents in racial theory, devoting a chap-

ter to each. While these theoretical approaches all contributed to our understanding

race in the United States, each was flawed in its own way, limited by its particular

i n t r o d u c t i o n 11

need to reduce race to a manifestation of some other, supposedly more fundamental,

sociopolitical concept. To overcome this reductionism is a key objective of our racial

formation approach.

Chapter 1 examines ethnicity theory— a perspective that arose in the post- World

War I years as an insurgent challenge to the religious doctrines and biologistic

accounts of race that prevailed at that time. From its initial efforts to explain the

social upheavals brought about by vast waves of immigration to the United States

around the turn of the 20th century, ethnicity theory focused on U.S. processes of

incorporation such as assimilation and cultural pluralism. The early concerns of eth-

nicity theory involved inclusion and its obstacles in respect to different European

immigrant groups. At this time, the acceptance and integration of Europeans was still

in doubt, while that of immigrants of color was highly restricted, and groups of color

were subject to overt discrimination.

From the end of World War II through the 1960s, however, racial conditions

changed. The emphasis on incorporation was extended to the situation of blacks and

other groups of color who continued to be marginalized and excluded. Drawing anal-

ogies to the assimilation and integration of European immigrant groups, ethnicity

scholars were initially optimistic regarding the integration of blacks and other groups

of color. The rise in the late- 1960s and early- 1970s of radical social movements based

in communities of color caught ethnicity theorists by surprise. Movements rejected the

assimilationist and pluralist visions that were central to ethnicity theory by demand-

ing group recognition and political rights, resource redistribution, and broad cultural

transformation. In response to the perceived radical threat, ethnicity theorists moved

rightward, gravitating to neoconservative positions that emphasized individualism,

not “groupism,” and embracing colorblind racial policies and practices.

Chapter 2 considers class theories of race, accounts that afford primacy to eco-

nomic structures and processes. Class theories render race legible by examining

economic inequalities along racial lines. Within the broader class paradigm, we exam-

ine three general analytic orientations to race. We designate these as the market- ,

stratification- , and class conflict- based approaches. These three currents of the class

paradigm are grounded in different economic spheres: exchange relationships (mar-

kets), systems of distribution (stratification), and conflict over labor exploitation (in

Marxist terms, conflict over the “social relations of production”).

Efforts to interpret racial inequality as a consequence of economic relationships

obviously have an important role to play in understanding race as an overall phe-

nomenon. Yet these efforts uniformly fail to account for the role of race as a cause

of existing economic relationship. Both market- based and stratification- approaches

tend to detach economic life from social and political life. Class conflict theories (gen-

erally Marxist) admirably recognize race– class interaction more comprehensively,

but they still reduce race to a subset of labor- based conflict in which class trumps

race. While inequality is certainly an important dimension of race and racism, we

argue that race cannot simply be reduced to an economic matter. Politics, culture, and

12 i n t r o d u c t i o n

many other other social factors shape economic life as much as they are shaped by it;

these are all eminently racial matters.

Chapter 3 considers nation - based theories of race. These have their origins in

the imperial seizures of territory and the settler colonialism of the modern era. Since

the imperial dawn, the ideas of race and nation have been deeply connected through

concepts of peoplehood. Both as North American colonies of European empires, and

then as a nation- state of its own, the United States identified as white. This identi-

fication as a white nation remains visible in the associations with whiteness that are

visible across extensive historical time in such concepts as “the American people” and

in U.S. nationalism more generally.

The concept of peoplehood, however, did not operate only among the ruling

whites. It was present from the start among the racialized “others” as well. Africans

and their descendants, Native Americans, Latin@s and Caribeñ@s subject to conquest

and settlement, and immigrants who were not white (or not yet white) understood

their identity collectively in terms of peoplehood: For them, the concept was born out

of resistance. Many were drawn toward insurgent nationalisms, as the possibilities of

inclusion and full citizenship were consistently denied them. Thus nation- based con-

cepts of race became rooted, not only in the dominant group, but also in subordinate

ones. The production of racial otherness generated not only the mark of oppression

but also the mark of resistance. While the nation- based paradigm supplies a valuable

concept— peoplehood— to the overall corpus of racial theory, it is still reductionist

vis- à- vis race. Nation- based theories treat race as a mere manifestation of the pre-

sumptively deeper concept of “the nation,” and project “internal” colonial relations

of domination and resistance forward into the present.

In Part II, Racial Formation, we advance our own theory of racial formation,

departing from ethnicity- , class- , and nation- based understandings. We do not repu-

diate these paradigms across the board, but criticize their limitations and seek to

incorporate them in a larger, more realistic, and in our view more practically radical

account, based in our theory of racial formation.

In Chapter 4 , The Theory of Racial Formation, we stress that race is a social con-

struction and not a fixed, static category rooted in some notion of innate biological

differences. The construction of race and racial meanings can be understood as part

of a universal phenomenon of classifying people on the basis of real or imagined attri-

butes. We all engage in “making up people” (Hacking 2006, 1999) as a way to navigate

in the social world— to situate ourselves and others in the context of social hierarchies,

to discern friend from foe, and to provide a guide to social interactions with different

individuals and groups. Race is not unique as a category of difference. Gender, class,

age, nationality, and culture have all been invoked to capture, and in many cases explain,

difference. This process is not benign. It involves “othering,” which is used to jus-

tify subordinate status, unequal treatment, to structure oppression and exploitation in

numerous ways. It is important to note, on the flip side, that resistance to such oppres-

sive practices also involves the creation of social categories of difference.

i n t r o d u c t i o n 13

To say that race is socially constructed is to argue that it varies according to time

and place. Concepts and ideologies of race have shifted over historical time and differ

according to the sociohistorical conditions in which race is embedded. There are many

examples. Consider the Irish and the Jews, groups who were not considered racially

“white” earlier in the U.S. history, yet eventually became white (Ignatiev 1995; Brod-

kin 1998). 18 Consider Asian Americans, who have been popularly regarded as either a

“yellow peril” or a “model minority” depending on the historical period in question,

the configuration of racial hierarchy in the United States, and the prevailing tenor of

United States– Asia relations (Okihiro 1994; Jun 2011). Widening the scope beyond

the United States, it is apparent that what race means in different regional and national

settings is highly variable. What race means in Brazil, Japan, or in South Africa is dra-

matically different from what it means in the United States. This underscores the fact

that race is a fluid and flexible social concept (Fredrickson 1997).

While acknowledging the inherent instability and socially constructed character-

istics of race, we argue that there is a crucial corporeal dimension to the race- concept.

Race is ocular in an irreducible way. Human bodies are visually read, understood,

and narrated by means of symbolic meanings and associations. Phenotypic differ-

ences are not necessarily seen or understood in the same consistent manner across

time and place, but they are nevertheless operating in specific social settings. Not

because of any biologically based or essential difference among human beings across

such phonemic variables as “color” or “hair texture,” but because such sociohistori-

cal practices as conquest and enslavement classified human bodies for purposes of

domination— and because these same distinctions therefore became important for

resistance to domination as well— racial phenotypes such as black and white have

been constructed and encoded through the language of race. 19 We define this process

as racialization — the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified

relationship, social practice, or group.

We also advance the concept of racial projects to capture how racial formation

processes occur through a linkage between structure and representation. Racial proj-

ects are efforts to shape the ways in which human identities and social structures are

racially signified, and the reciprocal ways that racial meaning becomes embedded

in social structures. We see racial projects as building blocks in the racial formation

process; these projects are taking place all the time, whenever race is being invoked or

signified, wherever social structures are being organized along racial lines. Racial for-

mation is thus a vast summation of signifying actions and social structures, past and

present, that have combined and clashed in the creation of the enormous complex of

relationships and identities that is labeled race.

Chapter 5 , Racial Politics and the Racial State, focuses on the political sociology

of race, the social organization of power along racial lines. A central concern here is

the historical development and contemporary orientation of the U.S. racial state. We

stress the porous boundary between state and civil society, especially where race is

concerned. The racial state inhabits us, so to speak; it is within our minds, our psyches,

14 i n t r o d u c t i o n

our hearts. At the same time we shape and reshape the state, identifying with it or

aganist it, carrying out the signifying action that is the essence of political life, both

collectively and individually. In this chapter, we stress the shift from racial domination

to racial hegemony that has taken place in the post- World War II period. We highlight

the trajectory of racial politics, the first rising and then declining path of the anti- racist

movement that has taken shape up to now (we are writing this in 2013). We argue that

the anti- racist movements that arose in the 1960s dramatically expanded the political

space available for challenging racism by ushering in the politicization of the social. The

chief achievement of the black movement and its allied new social movements was

the enlargement and deepening of U.S. politics. Issues previously regarded as private

and therefore outside the realm of formally defined politics were now embraced by an

expansive politics of identity. Such an expansion of the terrain of politics by race- based

social movements, and then by gender- , anti- imperialist, queer- , and other movements

as well, represents a radical and permanent shift. It is a shift, however, that cannot be

regarded as an exclusively progressive transformation. In the wake of the left- wing

politicization of the social at the hands of the black movement, feminist movement,

and gay movement, a racial reaction took shape. Right- wing movements proved them-

selves capable of rearticulation as well, reframing the emancipatory politics of the

black movement and its allies, first as threats to whites, then as “reverse racism,” and

finally seeking an erasure of race itself through colorblind racial ideology.

In Part III, Racial Politics Since World War II, we apply our racial formation

approach to recent racial history. The post- World War II period, up to the present

historical moment, is our central concern: The transformation of U.S. racial despo-

tism in the period up to about 1970, and then the containment of those democratic

and transformational movements during subsequent decades, is the overarching

theme of these chapters.

Movements rise and fall, both on the political left and the right. The civil rights era

can be seen in terms of rising and declining phases of a political trajectory or cycle: pro-

ceeding from the relative abeyance of racial justice movements before World War II, and

then moving through a phase characterized by the dramatic rise and impact of the civil

rights, black power, and allied movements in the 1960s. This “rising phase” of the cycle

culminated in the achievement of partial movement victories during the 1960s. It was

quickly followed by incorporation and containment of the movement challenge, starting

in about 1970. In Chapter 6 — The Great Transformation — we consider the development

of the anti- racist movement, focusing particular attention on the 1960s. We trace the

transformation of the black movement from an inclusion- oriented reform movement

seeking to end segregation and achieve full political citizenship for blacks, to a broader

radical democratic movement allied with the other social movements that collectively

sought the redistribution of resources, an end to U.S. imperialism, and social citizen-

ship not only for blacks but for other excluded and oppressed groups as well. It was this

expansive radical potential, combined with these allied movements’ inability to attract

majority (mainly white) support, that led to their containment and prolonged decline.

i n t r o d u c t i o n 15

The postwar racial trajectory, then, entered its declining phase in about 1970;

Chapter 7 — Racial Reaction: Containment and Rearticulation — discusses the devel-

opment over time of a center- right power bloc capable of counterattacking and

curtailing the influence of the radical democratic movements that had developed

through the 1960s. The racial reaction moved on various fronts simultaneously, using

violent tactics of repression and assassination as well as seeking to rearticulate move-

ment demands and the emancipatory politics of identity in individualistic, repressive,

and reactionary ways.

The declining phase of the movement, brought about largely by racial reaction,

has continued until today, achieving a new racial hegemony based upon the concept

of colorblindness. In Chapter 8 — Colorblindness, Neoliberalism, and Obama, we argue

that colorblind racial ideology underwrites the neoliberal accumulation project in

the United States, and that neither colorblindness nor neoliberalism would be politi-

cally feasible without the other. We also consider the deep contradictions between

colorblindness and race- consciousness as both ideology and practice. “Painting the

White House Black” under Obama, it turns out, deeply heightened the tensions of

colorblind hegemony, even though Obama tried hard to minimize the anti- racist com-

mitments that were always at least implicit in his presidency.

In sum, after World War II a system of racial hegemony was substituted for the

earlier system of racial domination. It took a great amount of blood, sweat, and tears

to accomplish these limited reforms, this “Second Reconstruction.” To do away with

official Jim Crow, to end the 1924 McCarran–Walter immigration restrictions, as well

as ending the Vietnam War and legalizing abortion, were enormous triumphs, but

they were not definitive. They were generally vulnerable, not so much to “backlash”

and rollback, as to erosion and subversion, what we have termed rearticulation. To

outlaw de jure segregation did not prevent the preservation of segregation de facto by

other means. To overturn the highly restrictive immigration policies that had lasted

from the 1920s to the 1960s did not prevent the continuity, and indeed the increase,

of a draconian system of immigrant deportation and imprisonment that continues

to this day.

The success of racial reform policies— the various civil rights acts and court

decisions of the 1960s— worked to incorporate and thus defuse movement opposi-

tion. This incorporation required that tangible concessions be made without altering

the underlying structural racism that was characteristic of the United States. It also

required the marginalization and, in some cases, destruction of those sectors of

anti- racist opposition that were more recalcitrant about accepting limited (aka mod-

erate) reforms. Once reforms had been enacted and legislated, once some movement

demands and movement activists had been incorporated, a subsequent stage of the

hegemonic racial project was the rearticulation of racial meanings in a series of steps

that culminated in colorblind racial hegemony. Unsteady, limited, and contradictory,

the colorblind concept of race will retain its hegemonic perch until it can be chal-

lenged or rearticulated yet again.

16 i n t r o d u c t i o n

We live in racial history. The racial instability that has characterized the whole of

American history continues unabated. The unsettled meaning of race, and the con-

tinuing elusiveness of a genuine, substantive racial democracy in the United States,

presents the country with both countless problems and limitless opportunities. In this

book’s conclusion— The Contrarieties of Race — we highlight some of the dilemmas

that the country, and perforce the reader, face today. We pose such questions as: What

do you want your race- consciousness to be? What do you consider a democratic and

just racial policy in the United States?

To recognize that race is historically and politically constructed is not only to

see it as a “moving image,” as something we make and remake over time; it is also to

acknowledge our power, both collective and individual, to transform the meaning of

race. We created this meaning- system and the social order it supports. We can change

it as well.

Notes

1. The earliest use of this term that we can fi nd is a track with that title located on a 1999 Rage

Against the Machine record, The Battle of Los Angeles.

2. The depth and degree of Obama’s blackness was widely debated. On the far right, he

was branded an African revolutionary, enacting his father’s anticolonial revenge fantasies

(D’Souza 2012). In the black community, Debra Dickerson and Cornel West, among oth-

ers, cast Obama’s blackness— his authenticity— into serious doubt (Dickerson 2007; on

West see Thompson 2011; see also Lowndes 2013). Others worried that electing a black

president would defuse whatever reform- oriented demands the black movement could

muster (Bobo 2008). In various statements, Obama somewhat inconsistently wrestled with

his blackness: discussing his growing recognition and acceptance of it in his youth, his own

encounters with prejudice and discrimination, and in his most comprehensive political

analysis of racism (“A More Perfect Union”— 3/18/2008), the contradictions and limita-

tions of U.S. democracy in respect to race.

3. On “intelligibility” and domination, see Scott 1998.

4. Some key slave narratives are collected in Gates, ed. 2002. On Spanish colonialism in

the North American Southwest, see Gutiérrez 1991. Enslaved Africans included many

Muslims, some of whom were literate in Arabic. On Muslims and Arabic- language

accounts of slavery and the slave trade, see Opoku- Agyemang et al., eds., 2008; see also

Thornton 1998. On indigenous views, see Thornton 1987.

5. Blauner writes: “[T]he general conceptual frame of European theory implicitly assumed

the decline and disappearance of ethnicity in the modern would; it off ered no hints in

the other direction. Without signifi cant alteration, American sociology synthesized this

framework into its models of social structure and change” (Blauner 2001 [1972], 4). See

also Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1974, 39.

6. Weber’s treatment of the concept of ethnie under the rubric of “status” (a relational category

based on “honor”) is in some ways a social constructionist approach; but in Weber’s volumi-

nous output there is no intensive consideration of the modern imperial phenomenon, and

there are numerous instances of European chauvinism (especially during the World War I

years, when Weber was somewhat affl icted with German nationalism— see Weber 1994, 131;

i n t r o d u c t i o n 17

Weber 1996, 255). In fairness, Weber also recognized racism, notably anti- black racism in

the United States. See his remarks on U.S. racial attitudes in Gerth and Mills, eds., 1958,

405–406. Weber’s sensitivity to U.S. racial matters may be attributed, at least in part, to the

orientation provided him by Du Bois. See Lewis 1993, 225, 277.

Durkheim too ranks the world eurocentrically, distinguishing rather absolutely between

“primitive” and “civilized” peoples based on the limited ethnology available to him; he

also muses in abstractly racial ways: Racial categories are employed as “social types” in

Suicide, for example.

7. They were also “liberal Anglo- Saxonists,” as John H. Stanfi eld (1982, 189–190) has

termed them. See also Winant 2007.

8. “After a promising start in the early period, the study of race and ethnic relations

suff ered…. With little room for ethnic and racial phenomena in the macroscopic models

of social structure and process, the fi eld was isolated from general sociological theory and

particularly from those leading conceptual themes that might have provided coherence

and useful lines of inquiry: stratifi cation, culture, community. The study of race relations

developed in a kind of vacuum; no overall theoretical framework guided its research and

development” (Blauner 2001 [1972], 5).

9. In a series of fi ve lectures given at Howard University in 1915, Alain Leroy Locke, who

had been the fi rst African American Rhodes Scholar and had attended the London Race

Congress in 1911, presented a very worked- out and extremely “modern” theory of race,

an account fully compatible with social constructionist views, and one deeply politically

engaged as well. Locke had been greatly infl uenced by Du Bois, as were all the leading

resistance scholars of the time (Locke 1992). The remarkable Anna Julia Cooper, writer,

educator, and activist, more or less founded black feminism. Born a slave in 1858, Cooper

was the principal of the M Street High School, a prestigious, segregated black institution

in Washington D.C., at the time of the publication of her still- infl uential book A Voice from

the South: By A Woman from the South in 1892 (Cooper 1998; Guy- Sheftall 2009). Wil-

liam Monroe Trotter, a black journalist and activist, was a Harvard graduate and one of

the founders of both the Niagara Movement and the NAACP. Supposedly a descendant of

Jeff erson through Sally Hemings, Trotter challenged Woodrow Wilson in a White House

meeting, and defi ed Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist racial politics when the lat-

ter gave a speech in Boston (Fox 1971). Kelly Miller, Professor of Mathematics at Howard

University, founded the Sociology Department there in 1895 and taught at Howard until

1935 when he retired as Dean of Arts and Sciences. A prolifi c author, Miller’s book Race

Adjustment (1908) sought to reframe the dispute between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B.

Du Bois. In a review of economist Frederick L. Hoff man’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the

American Negro, one of the leading eugenics- based works to argue for the innate inferiority

of African Americans, Miller used census data to argue that Hoff man’s claims were statisti-

cally fl awed (Miller 1897; see also Stepan and Gilman 1993).

10. On the Chicago sociology of race, see Bulmer 1986; Steinberg 2007.

11. Lyman notes: “It [the race- relations cycle] was ideology too, for Park believed that once

the racial cycle was completed, the social arena would be cleared of those racial impedi-

ments interfering with the inevitable class struggle” (1972, 27).

12. The concept of “institutional racism,” often confl ated with that of “structural racism,”

was fi rst fl oated in Ture/Carmichael and Hamilton 1992 (1967); see also Knowles and

Prewitt, eds. 1969.

18 i n t r o d u c t i o n

13. As early as 1967 Pierre van den Berghe wrote that

in spite of the claim of many social scientists that detachment and objectivity are pos-

sible and that they can dissociate their roles as scientists and as private citizens, much

of the work done by North Americans in the area of race has, until the last three or

four years, been strongly fl avored with a great deal of optimism and complacency

about the basic “goodness” of American society and with the cautious, slightly left-

of- center, reformist, meliorative, gradualist approach of “liberal” intellectuals…. The

fi eld has been dominated by a functionalist view of society and a defi nition of the race

problem as one of integration and assimilation of minorities into the mainstream of a

consensus- based society. (1967, 7)

14. This concept is taken from Myrdal (1963, 1962 [1944]). See also Winant 2001.

15. This is an introductory formulation. We shall have more to say later about the numerous

variations (ethnic, national, class- based) possible within racial identity. Among Latin@s,

for example, the Puerto Rican, Central American, and Cuban cases all retain distinct

aspects; among Asians, Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians, South Asians and Filipi-

nos all have particular histories in the United States. There are those whose racial category

is ambiguous at present (e.g., Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans- MEASA, Sami,

Persians, Uighur). Further still, racial classifi cation, as we shall argue below, is always fl ex-

ible, a process without an end point or fi nality of any kind.

16. Bush v. Gore (U.S. Supreme Court 2000), let it be remembered, was decided as a vot-

ing rights case. Many Supreme Court decisions favoring corporate elites have also been

grounded in civil rights laws. The best- known example of this is Santa Clara County v.

Southern Pacifi c Railroad (U.S. Supreme Court 1886), which aff orded “personhood”

status to corporations, anticipating a host of later decisions including Citizens United v.

Federal Election Commission (U.S. Supreme Court 2010). See also Beatty 2007, 172.

17. The concept of a paradigm in scientifi c or scholarly investigation gained currency after the

appearance of Kuhn 1970. Our usage of the term is slightly at variance with Kuhn’s. A racial

paradigm, in our view, is an assumed theoretical category that classifi es racial phenomena.

Today, there is a strong reluctance in social scientifi c circles to indulge in “race- thinking”

(undoubtedly due to the legacy of biologism with which pre- World War II scholarship

encountered issues of race). This is yet another incentive to understand race in terms of

other, supposedly more fundamental or objective, social scientifi c categories.

18. Not entirely, of course. There are black Irish and black Jews in the United States today,

Latin@s who consider themselves Irish or Jewish, and numerous other variations on these

identities as well.

19. Walter Johnson writes of the buyers in the New Orleans slave market:

As the experienced guided the inexperienced [in the slave marketplace], slaves’ bodies

were made racially legible. The buyers’ inspections, the parts they fi ngered, the details

they fetishized, and the homosocial connections they made with one another gave

material substance to antebellum notions of “blackness” and “whiteness” and out-

lined for observers the lineaments of a racial gaze. Out of the daily practice of slavery,

they reproduced the notions of race that underwrote the system as a whole. (2001, 161)

P A R T I

Paradigms of Race: Ethnicity, Class, and Nation

This page intentionally left blank

21

C H A P T E R 1

Ethnicity

Introduction

In this chapter we examine the historical and theoretical trajectory of ethnicity- based

theories of race from their early years as an insurgent and occasionally politically

engaged set of arguments for assimilation, cultural pluralism, inclusion, and democ-

racy, through their ascent to dominance in the mid- 20th century, to their ongoing decline

and fall in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Throughout, we frame ethnicity

theory as a paradigm: It is an approach to race that aff ords primacy to cultural vari-

ables. Ethnicity theory was in fact the fi rst mainstream social scientifi c account of race

to understand it as a socially constructed phenomenon.

Theoretically, the ethnicity paradigm represents the mainstream of the modern

sociology of race. The paradigm has passed through three major stages: a pre- 1940s

stage in which the emergent paradigm challenged the biologistic (and at least implicitly

racist) view of race which was dominant at that time; a 1940s to late 1960s stage during

which the paradigm operated as the left/liberal “common sense” approach to race,

and during which two recurrent themes— assimilationism and cultural pluralism—

were prominent; and a post- 1960s stage, in which ethnicity- oriented accounts of race

focused on defending conservative (or “neoconservative”) individualism against what

was perceived as the radical assault of group rights.

Ethnicity theories arose in the early years of the 20th century, in anthropology and

sociology most centrally, but elsewhere as well. 1 In the United States, the develop-

ment of the ethnicity concept was largely driven by massive European immigration

around the turn of the 20th century. The millions of new European immigrants were

whites “of a different color” (Jacobson 1999). Their identity and social status needed

to be assigned. Their relationships to their new country and to their “mother coun-

try” needed to be understood (Thomas and Znaniecki 1984 [1918–1920]).

Yet ethnicity theory has also been losing its grip. In response to the racial conflicts

of the 1960s, ethnicity- based approaches to race abandoned their earlier progres-

sivism, opting for neoconservatism, a center- right racial ideology that key ethnicity

theorists helped to found (Glazer and Moynihan 1970 [1963]; Murray 1994 [1984];

Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 1999; Wilson and Herrnstein 1985). Since the early

1970s, neoconservative approaches to race have fueled the racial reaction in the United

States, operating in an effective although at times uneasy alliance with the new right.

Under the banner of “colorblindness” this alliance has attempted to forge a new

“post- racial” hegemony, a new “common sense.” The contemporary United States

22 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

is not only “post- racial” in this account, but also “post- civil rights.” In a colorblind

society, it is claimed, racial inequality, racial politics, and race- consciousness itself

would be greatly diminished in importance, and indeed relegated to the benighted

past when discrimination and prejudice ruled.

To treat race as a matter of ethnicity is to understand it in terms of culture.

It is to undermine the significance of corporeal markers of identity and differ-

ence, and even to downplay questions of descent, kinship, and ancestry— the most

fundamental demarcations in anthropology. Because cultural orientations are some-

what flexible— one can speak a different language, repudiate a previous religious

adherence or convert to another, adopt a new “lifestyle,” switch cuisine, learn new

dances— ethnicity theories of race tend to regard racial status as more voluntary and

consequently less imposed, less “ascribed.”

There are immense and obvious problems with this approach, too many for us

adequately to address here. Just to pick one item: The assignment of group identity

on the basis of physical appearance— the corporeal— has served for half a millen-

nium as a practical tool in the organization of human hierarchy and domination,

and as a tool of resistance as well. Who is a native, and who a settler? Who is a

slave, and who a citizen? These and other distinctions, while sometimes made inac-

curately on the basis of “ocular” criteria, have nevertheless generally facilitated

imperial rule, “primitive accumulation,” mass labor recruitment, and all the main

practices of human subjection on view throughout the modern world. It is not so

easy to be “colorblind,” after all.

Guided by ethnicity theory, Americans have come to view race as a cultural

phenomenon. Racial identity is often seen as parallel to other forms of status- based

group identity, such as that of “hyphenated American” groups (Italian- Americans),

gendered groups (women), groups identified by sexual orientation (LGBTQ), and

religiously identified groups (Catholics, Muslims). In this account race is under-

stood as a fundamentally ethnic (i.e., cultural) matter. It is conceptualized in terms

of attitudes and beliefs, religion, language, “lifestyle,” and group identification. In

ethnicity- based approaches, the race- concept is thus reduced to something like a

preference, something variable and chosen, in the way one’s religion or language is

chosen. Racism too is reduced in importance: It is seen as a mere matter of attitudes

and beliefs, involving such issues as prejudice, beliefs about others, and individual

practices: “I’m not racist; I treat everyone equally.”

There is an undeniable affinity between the concept of race as a cultural

phenomenon and such ideas as assimilation, cultural pluralism, diversity, and mul-

ticulturalism. The connection is commonly made between ethnicity theories of race

and the democratic ideals with which the United States has always identified itself,

however much these ideals were (dis)honored in reality. You see, “we” may not be

a perfect democracy, we may not be a fully equal society, but at least we believe in

the full inclusion of all, “without regard for race, creed, or color.” Sometimes in

U.S. history such professions of inclusiveness have appeared quite radical, quite

Ethnicity 23

subversive. At other moments, they seem to liquidate racial difference and thus

freedom and democracy, to deny deep historical injustice, and to insist on universal-

izing the dominant— white— culture. Indeed, sometimes these concepts are doing

both simultaneously: The offer of inclusion may be a Faustian bargain, in which one

(or even a group) achieves acceptance at the price of deracination. In other words,

it may sometimes be an offer you can’t refuse, to quote Mario Puzo. Du Bois wrote

in 1960, at age 92, when the civil rights movement was on the rise in the United

States:

[W]hat we must now ask ourselves is when we become equal American citizens

what will be our aims and ideals and what we will have to do with selecting

these aims and ideals. Are we to assume that we will simply adopt the ideals

of Americans and become what they are or want to be and that we will have in

this process no ideals of our own?

That would mean that we would cease to be Negroes as such and become

white in action if not completely in color. We would take on the culture of

white Americans doing as they do and thinking as they think.

Manifestly this would not be satisfactory. Physically it would mean that we

would be integrated with Americans losing first of all, the physical evidence

of color and hair and racial type. We would lose our memory of Negro his-

tory and of those racial peculiarities which have long been associated with the

Negro. We would cease to acknowledge any greater tie with Africa than with

England or Germany. We would not try to develop Negro music and Art and

Literature as distinctive and different, but allow them to be further degraded

as is the case now. We would always, if possible, marry lighter- hued people so

as to have children who are not identified with the Negro race, and thus solve

our racial problem in America by committing race suicide….

(Du Bois 1973 [1960], 149–150)

Ethnicity theories of race grew out of reaction and accommodation to two fun-

damental features of U.S. racial dynamics: biologistic understandings of race, and

Puritanism, the founding religious/political orientation of the White Anglo- Saxon

Protestant (and actually Calvinist) settlers of North America.

The ethnicity- based paradigm arose in the early 20th century as an explicit

challenge to the prevailing racial views of the period. The then- prevalent biologistic

paradigm continued to explain racial inferiority as part of a natural order of human-

kind. Whites were considered the superior race; white skin was the norm, the most

advanced form of the human body. Other nonwhite corporeal features, such as dark

skin color, nappy hair, or variations in eye shape, had to be explained in respect to the

white norm. Religious doctrine had long been employed for this purpose. Since the

early days of slavery and colonization the “curse of Ham” had been invoked to con-

nect the phenotype of dark skin with God’s displeasure, espcially with black people,

but also with others deemed nonwhite (Haynes 2002).

24 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

With the development of evolutionary theory— and especially after the 1859

appearance of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, scientific accounts of racial differ-

ence became prevalent. Race was equated with distinct hereditary characteristics

and linked to the degree of “development” of a group: 2 not only its physicality (the

“beauty” and even the supposed smell of its members, for example), 3 but also its

attributed mental and social level (the group’s level of “civilization”), were identi-

fied with race. 4 Differences in intelligence, temperament, and sexuality (among other

traits) were deemed to be racial in character. Racial intermixture was seen as a sin

against nature that would lead to the creation of “biological throwbacks.” These were

some of the assumptions in Social Darwinist, Spencerist, and eugenicist thinking

about race. 5

But by the early decades of the 20th century, biologistic accounts of race were

losing coherence. Already in the late 19th century racial biology had come in for

significant criticism by black scholars, notably Martin Delaney, W.E.B. Du Bois,

and Kelly Miller. But the white “mainstream” was quite oblivious to black voices. 6

Biological theories of race eventually were attacked by adherents of Progressivism

and were also called into question by the work of the Chicago School of sociology.

The Progressive attack was led by Horace Kallen, who introduced the concept of

cultural pluralism, which was to become a key current of ethnicity theory (Kallen

1915, 1924). The Chicago sociologists were led by Robert E. Park, who had been

secretary and publicist for Booker T. Washington, and whose approach embodied

the other major current of the ethnicity paradigm, assimilationism.

The Puritan legacy was imparted by the primordial U.S. ethnic group: White

Anglo- Saxon Protestants. This group is not often seen through the ethnicity lens, but

that is certainly a worthwhile angle on them. Puritanism’s history has been exhaus-

tively examined: It was an orthodox Protestant sect, Calvinist in its orientation, that

was in flight from the conformist and repressive pressures of early Reformation

England. Quite repressive itself, ferociously patriarchal (Salem anyone?), 7 archetypi-

cally Protestant- ethic practitioners (Max Weber, can you dig?), and slave- owning as

well (Condé 1994), the broad cultural orientation of this early settler community

has steadily and continuously organized and influenced North American ideas of

identity and belonging in ways that are deeply intertwined with concepts of race.

The tendency to apply to racially defined groups key beliefs and values whose origins

lie in the settlement of North America by English immigrants— and later European

ones— has been discussed extensively (Miller 1956; Dewey 1984 [1930]; Rogin 1996;

White 2010).

This militant, authoritarian, Calvinist sect, quite closely related to the Dutch

Reformed Church (NHK) of the Afrikaaners, set the basic ethnic pattern in North

America. That pattern, insistent upon strict doctrinal adherence, individualism,

repression (especially sexual repression), and a sort of primitive communitarian-

ism of the elect, generated many of the components of what we now call “American

exceptionalism.”

Ethnicity 25

Baptism was grafted onto this pattern; especially Southern Baptism, a white

denomination that split from other Baptist currents in the 1840s over issues of

slavery 8 and was abandoned by most of its remaining black congregants after the

Civil War. The resulting synthesis (or syncresis) was Southern white Protestantism,

now a national religious movement. 9

The ending of Reconstruction in 1877 signaled the rise of a new southern racial

regime. The post- Civil War United States, now a traumatized “republic of suffering”

(Faust 2009), shaken by emancipation and threatened by Reconstruction, reconsti-

tuted itself by recurring, as far as possible, to its white nationalist fundamentals.

In the South, this meant coercive debt peonage, denial of political rights, segrega-

tion, and negrophobic terrorism. A major economic downturn in 1873 had deeply

depressed wages and heightened unemployment. A national railroad strike in 1877

was defeated after 45 days of armed attacks on workers by national guards, federal

troops, and marines. In the West, 1877 also marked the onset of white working- class

assaults on communities of Asian descent and the start of a comprehensive program

of expulsion, exclusion, and expropriation of Chinese and Japanese (Pfaelzer 2008).

That same year, Crazy Horse surrendered (and was promptly murdered) in the Black

Hills of South Dakota, marking the approaching end of Indian resistance (with the

Nez Perce Long March in 1890) and the “closing of the frontier.”

After 1877 the U.S. colorline started to be inscribed around Europe, rather than

through it, chiefly because of the sheer demographic weight of the new immigrants,

and also because other racial conflicts drew attention away. These Atlantic immigrants

were not WASPs and not considered white: While not black or Asian either, they did

possess an intermediate racial status. In the nation’s industrial heartland, immigrant

workers were induced to refashion themselves as white and to compete with each other

for that coveted status (Roediger 2005). The cultivation of European workers’ desires

for inclusion became a political and corporate priority in the turn- of- the- 20th- century

United States: It was a powerful antidote to the radicalism and syndicalism that were

brewing among these same workers. Ensuring that European immigrants would not be

racialized as blacks and Asians had been, guaranteeing that they would not be equated

with the (barely) emancipated ex- slaves or the “coolies” who had built the western

railroads and cleared the California heartland for agriculture (Saxton 1971; Almaguer

2008 [1994]), effectively renewed the “psychological wage” dynamic that Du Bois had

analyzed as a crucial means for cementing the loyalties of working- class whites in the

antebellum South (Du Bois 2007 [1935]; see also Morgan 2003 [1975]).

Beginning in the early 20th century, ethnicity theory challenged this politico-

religious bloc, basing itself largely on the incorporation of tremendous waves of

non- English, and indeed non- Protestant, European immigrants who had inundated

the eastern seaboard and Midwest by that time. Joining their millions of Irish immi-

grant predecessors, Italians, Slavs, Jews, Greeks, and Middle Easterners entered the

mix and required that over time they be admitted to whiteness (Brodkin 1998; Jacob-

son 1999; Guglielmo 2004).

26 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

These demographic shifts generated pressing needs for social scientific theory

and analysis at the turn of the 20th century. The ethnicity paradigm became the core

of that framework: modern, urban, social scientific, progressive and reform- oriented,

but decidedly not radical. 10

Ethnicity theory’s main empirical reference point in the United States was the

study of immigration and the social patterns resulting from it. Two distinct cur-

rents emerged: assimilationism and cultural pluralism. Both largely emphasized

European, white immigrants, what Horace Kallen called “the Atlantic migration.”

While recognizing the presence of blacks and to a lesser degree, that of Asians, writers

on ethnicity sought to incorporate those groups’ experiences into the broad ethnic

framework: The arrival of “strangers in the land” (Higham 2002 [1955]), the resettl-

ment of “the uprooted” (Handlin 2002 [1951]), and the subsequent management and

eventual overcoming of the consequent cultural differences.

Chicago sociologists Robert E. Park and his student Louis Wirth saw the devel-

opment of ethnic enclaves and what Park called a “mosaic of segregated peoples” as

stages in a cycle leading to assimilation. Kallen’s perspective, by contrast, focused on

the eventual democratic acceptance of different immigrant- based cultures ( Kallen

1915, 1924). The origins of the concepts of “ethnicity” and “ethnic group,” then,

lay outside the experience of those identified (not only today, but already in Park’s

and Kallen’s time), as racial minorities: Afro- Americans, Latin Americans, Native

Americans, and Asian Americans.

In its early days, ethnicity- based theory concentrated on problems of migration

and what Park called “culture contact.” 11 The approach was largely ethnographic

and tended to downplay conflict, not to mention racial politics. This limited the

early work in numerous ways and reflected a large- scale neglect of black scholar-

ship, notably that of W.E.B. Du Bois but also work by Alain Locke, William Monroe

Trotter, Kelly Miller, Anna Julia Cooper, Monroe Work, and numerous others. Park’s

aversion to political sociology and insistence on value- free methodology— always a

chimera in social scientific research— inhibited the effectiveness of Chicago sociol-

ogy as racial critique. Racial inequality and injustice were not seen as outcomes or

objects of state policy, but as phenomena of civil society. Lacking a focus on the

racial state, Park (and to varied extents the Chicago researchers he mentored) argued

that racial conflict itself would generate egalitarian and inclusive pressures; this was

the essence of the “race relations cycle” (Park 1950; Lyman 1972, 27–51). Politi-

cal alliances with progressives, immigrant groups, feminists, the labor movement, or

among people of color themselves, were not considered viable; this view may have

descended from Park’s previous association with Booker T. Washington. 12 Park’s

sociology of race also tended to analogize U.S. racial struggles with the European

ethnic conflicts he had observed during his graduate school days in Heidelberg. In

his view, the European model of “ethnocracy” (Persons 1987, 79–83) paralleled U.S.

racial stratification, explaining both prejudice and discrimination (whites’ defense of

their dominant status) and the ineluctable pressures of assimilation (blacks and other

minorities overcoming the cultural disadvantages imposed by slavery and exclusion).

Ethnicity 27

Chicago School sociology owed a lot to pragmatism, the progressive and demo-

cratic philosophical orientation whose influence in Chicago was linked to John Dewey’s

tenure at the university. 13 Pragmatism shaped Thomas and Znaniecki’s work, helped

to generate the social psychology of George Herbert Mead and his student Herbert

Blumer, and oriented the urbanism of the Sociology department, which maintained

cautious relationships with reform- oriented currents in the city. For example, Jane

Addams, social activist and founder of Hull House, had an adjunct relationship with the

Sociology department (Bulmer 1986; Deegan 2002). Pragmatism brought an empirical

richness and a modicum of respect to Chicago School studies of immigrants, blacks,

working- class neighborhoods, and urbanism. It afforded a certain recognition of the

independent agency and interpretive capacity of these social actors, something that

was routinely denied at the time. Pragmatist social scientific premises, then, opened

a window to racial democracy, since blacks were acknowledged to have the ability to

understand and act upon their own experience. Like Du Bois before them (Katz and

Sugrue, eds. 1998), Park and his students approached black and other nonwhite com-

munities with a degree of interest and respect not previously shown to them by white

scholars. In an additional important departure, Park trained black students: Such illus-

trious scholars as E. Franklin Frazier, Charles S. Johnson, 14 and Oliver C. Cox received

their degrees under Park (Steinberg 2007).

For all these reasons— most centrally because of its pragmatist orientation—

Chicago sociology could acknowledge black experience to a greater extent than any

mainstream (that is, white) social science discipline had ever done. Park and his

students also studied racial conflict: in Chicago’s anti- black racism, in European

anti- semitism, in California’s and Hawai’i’s hostility towards Asians, and elsewhere.

They understood this conflict as but an early stage of the deterministic “race rela-

tions cycle” that constituted the core of Park’s approach. The “cycle” not only ended

in assimilation: the eventual liquidation of difference that was later to play such a

crucial role in the ethnicity paradigm of race. It also reduced all race conflict to cul-

tural terms— denying or at least downplaying the political- economic dimensions

(super- exploitation, slavery, exclusion, violence), the national dimensions (empire,

sovereignty over a given territory, political self- determination), and indeed the cor-

poreal markers (the role of the racialized body) that occupy such crucial positions in

the social construction of race.

Despite these significant limits, Park and his students recognized the agency of

the racially subordinated and oppressed, and so departed from the biologistic and

Social Darwinist concept of race that had dominated the early sociology of race

in the United States. This constituted a real innovation, an important reform in

the field. The combination of all these developments (and many more factors we

cannot examine here, such as the centrality of micro- level work at Chicago later

developed by Mead and extended and modified by Blumer)— revitalized the sociol-

ogy of race in numerous ways. In particular, the Chicago School’s emphasis on an

empirically driven approach to race brought new attention to issues of variability,

agency, and  conflict among racially defined groups. Work at Chicago at long last

28 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

incorporated at least some of the insurgent insights pioneered by Du Bois—

previously relegated to sociology’s margins because of his radicalism as well as his

race— into the disciplinary mainstream.

Horace Kallen’s alternative approach to ethnicity theory— “cultural pluralism”—

was less influential that the assimilation- oriented position of Park, although in recent

decades something very close to this current has been reincarnated as “multiculturalism.”

An immigrant himself, Kallen challenged the assimilationist and ethnocentric dimen-

sions of the progressive— and implicitly WASP— elite, which was expressed in both

Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson’s Anglophilia. 15 A former student of William

James at Harvard, Kallen experienced the intense anti- semitism and nativism of the

campus (and the country) in his early years. 16

Another important source of the immigrant analogy was the monumental

study produced over 1918–1920 by Chicago sociologists W.I. Thomas and Florian

Znaniecki, which significantly reconceptualized the sociology of migration (Thomas

and Znaniecki 1984 [1918–1920]). This enormous project combined a great deal

of primary data with a humanistic account of migration that was largely unprec-

edented, especially in scope and scale. Although they weren’t primarily concerned

with race, Thomas and Znaniecki’s work broke new ground by dispensing with the

racism common in then-existing work on immigration. They theorized their subjects

as world- aware agents who comparatively assessed their situations in Central Europe

and Chicago, using political, economic, and cultural criteria. Basing their research

on primary data— employment records, ship manifests, Polish village records, and

letters back and forth— Thomas and Znaniecki’s five- volume work was essentially

a transcontinental community study that dealt with labor, religion, gender and

sexuality, and numerous other quotidian topics, all in the context of the economic

and political sociology of migration. This was a quite different perspective on the

“huddled masses”; Thomas and Znaniecki should be seen as the founders of today’s

sophisticated sociology of migration.

A generally parallel path was taken by anthropology over roughly the same period.

Although we are primarily concerned with sociology’s role in framing ethnicity theory

in its early years, we would be remiss if we did not mention Franz Boas’s influential

role here. Boas virtually founded cultural anthropology in the United States. The

Boasian legacy meshed nicely with ethnicity theory. His fundamental claim was that

cultural variation among distinct peoples could neither be ranked hierarchically nor

classified along a scale that ran from savagery to civilization. He sought both to coun-

ter nativist and eugenicist positions in the public sphere, and to rethink social science

fundamentally, so as to surpass such positions. He bequeathed a remarkable anti-

racist, though somewhat uneven, legacy. His contributions were based upon decades

of work at Columbia and at the American Museum of Natural History, where in

his early career he had to coexist (and contend) with various eugenicist stalwarts,

politicians, and trustees. In the anti- racist annals of American social science, Boas’s

contribution is exceeded only by that of Du Bois, with whom he was associated

Ethnicity 29

at various points (Baker 1998). He trained dozens of influential anthropologists

(among them Zora Neale Hurston, Gilberto Freyre, Ruth Benedict, and Melville

Herskovitz), and deeply reoriented the field in the United States and beyond. 17

The combination of these political influences and theoretical/analytical cur-

rents shaped the sociology of race (as well as other social scientific disciplines such

as anthropology and psychology), especially as the ethnicity paradigm climbed to

theoretical dominance. The adoption of the immigrant analogy and the emphasis on

immigrant incorporation and assimilation were the two most central examples of this.

These themes continue to exert tremendous influence even today. Notably, the immi-

grant analogy involves a “default to whiteness,” especially visible in its treatment of

assimilation, inclusion, and integration. This “default” is sometimes explicit, but

more often it is what Moon- Kie Jung calls an “unconscious” 18 feature of social sci-

entific concepts of race.

With the advent of the somewhat egalitarian vision of the New Deal 19 and of

the anti- fascism of World War II, 20 the ethnicity paradigm definitively dislodged the

biologistic view in what appeared to be a triumph of liberalism. Yet this victory was a

hollow one where racial minorities were concerned, for the new paradigm was solidly

based in the framework of European (white) ethnicity, and could not appreciate the

extent to which racial dynamics differed from ethnic ones. In particular, it could

not transcend the culturally determined framework that lies at the core of ethnic-

ity theory. What was the relationship between ethnicity and political economy: not

just inequality/stratification, but also exploitation and coercion? What was the rela-

tionship between ethnicity and the corporeal: We know what a racialized body is,

but what is an ethnicized body? Were the historical experiences that people of color

encountered similar to those of white Europeans? Were the trajectories for their per-

ceived eventual incorporation and assimilation the same? To these questions ethnicity

theorists generally answered yes. Many anti- racist activists and movement groups,

though, begged to differ.

Ascent to Dominance

Ethnicity theory began as a liberal 21 challenge to religious and biologistic accounts

of race. It operated on cultural territory, between the parameters of assimilationism

and pluralism. Ethnic groups were implicitly white (or becoming white), and reli-

gious diff erences were minimized. Thus the ethnicity paradigm challenged bedrock

U.S. racial ideology only to a limited extent: It was more concerned with “whiteness

of a diff erent color” (Jacobson 1999) than with racialized “others,” notably black

people. Only after World War II was the immigrant analogy stretched at all; only

then did social scientists move from a focus on the U.S. “racial frontier”— a phrase

of Park’s that incorporated imperial and nativist assumptions and was pregnant with

problematic meanings— toward more comprehensive attention to the idea of racial

“otherness” within the American nation (Park 1950 [1926]; see also Ross 1914).

30 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

To apply the immigrant analogy to non- Europeans was a large social scientific

project. Like most racial theory, it was driven by ineluctable political events, most of

them linked to the social upheavals that rocked the United States during and after

World War II.

Black “Immigrants”: The vast majority of U.S. black folk were not immigrants;

the black presence in the United States predates that of most white- identified groups.

But the great preponderance of U.S. blacks remained in the South. The South moved

north, as Robert Coles (1971) famously wrote, because labor shortages in defense

industries and an effective unemployment rate of near- zero percent (by 1944 or so)

impelled their internal migration. This was actually the second “great migration”

of blacks to the North; a similar wave of black souls had flowed north during World

War I (Griffin 1996; Marks 1989). Northern black votes, combined with the return of

more than one million black veterans who were less likely to accept segregation and

racism, both “down South” and “up South” (i.e., in the North) brought renewed

pressures for civil rights. Many civil rights movement leaders were veterans (Parker

2009). With a renewed political force behind it, and with an obvious set of urban prec-

edents close at hand, the immigration model began to be applied to blacks. This was

not illogical, given the vastly augmented presence of black folk in the urban North,

and to some extent the urban West. Irving Kristol’s famous (1966) declaration, “The

Negro today is like the immigrant of yesterday,” was not the first attempt to locate

black history within the immigration framework. Already in the late 1940s the immi-

grant analogy was being invoked, sometimes by blacks themselves (Reid 1947; Denby

1989 [1952]; see also Taueber and Taueber 1964; Tolnay 1997; Sugrue 1996).

Asian American “Immigrants”: Ethnicity theory also re- encountered the Asian

American experience during and after the war. In 1943 FDR signed the Magnuson

Act, repealing the Chinese Exclusion Act that had prevented Chinese from natural-

izing since 1882. 22 After the war, the incarceration of Japanese Americans under the

infamous 1942 Executive Order 9066 also received social scientific attention. Notable

in this regard was the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS),

which was directed at the University of California, Berkeley by Dorothy Swaine

Thomas, widow of William I. Thomas and a formidable social scientific methodolo-

gist in her own right. (Thomas and Nishimoto 1946; Thomas, Kikuchi, and Sakoda

1952). Collaborators on the JERS study included Nisei (second generation Japanese

American) such as Charles Kikuchi, Togo Tanaka, and Tamotsu Shibutani who had

themselves experienced wartime incarceration under the infamous Executive Order

9066. 23 Important research was also conducted clandestinely by incarcerated Japanese

American scholars, notably Tamie Tsuchiyama and Richard Nishimoto. 24 Japanese

naturalization only became possible in 1953; the United States did not apologize or

undertake redress and reparations for this immense injustice until 1988, when many

of its victims had already died. 25

Latin@ Immigrants: Mexicans— the largest Latin@ group in the United

States— also began their journey toward immigrant status during and after World

Ethnicity 31

War II. Having become U.S. citizens as a result of conquest in the mid- 19th century,

Mexican Americans had been subject to sustained efforts at exclusion and mar-

ginalization, especially in Texas and in California (Foley 1999). The U.S.– Mexican

border had undergone successive stages of fortification and militarization, especially

in consequence of the Mexican revolution of 1910–1924 (Romo 2005). After the

Johnson– Reed Act of 1924, legal Mexican immigration was problematic, although

in practice travel across the border has been continuous. The 1930s saw extensive

mass deportations of Mexican@s from the Southwest, particularly from Southern

California, as a consequence of prevalent anti- Mexican race- baiting and intense job

competition in the Depression years (Balderrama and Rodriguez 2006 [1995]). These

oppressive circumstances did not permit recognition of Mexican@s as “immigrants,”

much less as the citizens many already were. Many Mexican American U.S. citizens

were summarily deported. When labor- demand rose during World War II, the U.S.

government initiated the “bracero” program for temporary contract laborers, with

the strong support of agribusiness and the acquiescence of the Mexican government.

But braceros were not permitted immigrant status (Ngai 2005). So the appearance

after the war of Mexican American advocacy organizations like the GI Forum, and

the initiation of anti- discrimination lawsuits like the Méndez and Hernandez cases,

represented some early steps in the Latin@ struggle for civil rights (Lopez 2003).

As long as race could be subsumed under the ethnicity label, in short, the immi-

grant analogy could be applied. Thus when the civil rights movement began to gain

traction in the 1940s and 1950s, ethnicity- based accounts were initially sympathetic.

Kristol’s declaration that “The Negro today is like the immigrant of yesterday”

was continuous with a long line of northern, left- liberal, and often Jewish efforts

to ally with and harness the black struggle to a revamped, post- Dixiecrat, Demo-

cratic Party. Jewish writers had been the key theorists of ethnicity since the 1920s:

Among these were Horace Kallen, Walter Lippman, Max Lerner, Milton Gordon,

and Nathan Glazer. Jews were very active in the civil rights movement, had long-

standing associations with liberalism and the left, and were clearly unhappy with the

tendency— evident in both the Puritan roots and Southern Baptist currents in main-

stream American Protestantism— to see the United States as a “Christian nation.”

They properly linked biologistic racism with Nazism and the Holocaust.

So ethnicity theory’s repudiation of religious and biologistic forms of discrimi-

nation and exclusion, and its claim that ethnicity (including race) was but a cultural

distinction, overlapped with anti-racist political movements. Culture, after all, is mal-

leable and adaptable; assimilation fits right in with that idea. And a certain degree of

ethnic (racial) pluralism was clearly compatible with American democracy: Look at

the Irish, the Jews, the Italians … (Glazer and Moynihan 1970 [1963]); why not the

Negroes as well?

The appearance of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) marked the

ascent of the ethnicity paradigm to a position of theoretical dominance. This monu-

mental study, funded by the Carnegie Commission, was the product of the labors not

32 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

only of its director and principal author, but also of an wide array of talented students

of racial issues in the United States. 26 Myrdal both challenged biologistic theories of

racism and asserted the desirability of assimilation for blacks (Myrdal 1962 [1944],

929). He argued that there was an “American Creed” of democracy, equality, and

justice, that was fundamentally in conflict with black inequality, segregation, and

racial prejudice in general. 27 In order to resolve this conflict, America would be called

upon, sooner or later, to extend its “creed” to include blacks. Myrdal’s assessment

was optimistic about the ultimate resolution of this battle— in his view racial domina-

tion would eventually give way to racial equality and the integration of blacks into the

mainstream of American life.

Rather than presenting his “dilemma” as something endemic and foundational

in U.S. society and culture, Myrdal framed racial injustice as an aberration, a retar-

dation and obstacle besetting the higher virtues of U.S. democracy. He combined

this account with a Fabian faith in progress over the historical medium to long term,

which he saw as a process of “cumulative and circular development.” 28 He would

later apply this approach to global problems of poverty and economic development

as well (Myrdal 1963). Myrdal also presented assimilation as an unproblematic objec-

tive of racial reform, a position that surely differed with the views of many of his

black informants and collaborators. In short, Myrdal’s devotion to the cause of racial

reform— the product of many determinations and influences— drove his project at its

most fundamental level. Writing during the World War II and desirous of contribut-

ing to an Allied victory, Myrdal idealized the “creed” and minimized the very real

obstacles to its achievement:

If America in actual practice could show the world a progressive trend by

which the Negro finally became integrated into modern democracy, all man-

kind would be given faith again— it would have reason to believe that peace,

progress, and order are feasible…. America is free to choose whether the

Negro shall remain her liability or become her opportunity.

(Myrdal 1962 [1944], 1021–1022)

Assimilation was simply the most logical and “natural” response to the “dilemma,”

which was the anachronistic and baleful legacy of slavery, a hindrance to both white

and black development. While there was no doubt that whites must repudiate racial

prejudice (Myrdal did not use the term “racism”), blacks had also to rise to the occa-

sion and demonstrate their worthiness. Indeed Myrdal, drawing on the work of E.

Franklin Frazier (as Daniel Patrick Moynihan was to do 20 years later), suggested

that there was a “pathological” aspect to black culture which only full assimilation

could cure. 29

Elevated to theoretical dominance by the Myrdal study, ethnicity theory derived

its agenda from the political imperatives of the period: to condemn in the liberal terms

of the war years the phenomenon of racial inequality, which smacked of the kinds of

despotism the United States fought against in Europe; to modernize and mobilize

Ethnicity 33

American society in preparation for its postwar role of world leadership; and to dis-

tribute the seemingly limitless resources deriving from U.S. hegemony— resources

which were not only economic, but also political and cultural— to all at home, even as

they were to be offered abroad to American allies (and to the vanquished Axis powers

as well). The ethnicity- based theoretical tradition, derived from the experiences of

European immigrants, was thus extended in the conclusions of An American Dilemma

so that it might include blacks.

And indeed, in the aftermath of the war, racial reforms became imperative. A

“second” migration during the war years had brought millions of blacks and Lati-

nos to the North and West; these were voters who identified with the New Deal and

began to challenge Dixiecrat power in the Democratic Party, as well as to influence

the Republicans. In the liberal view of the time, in short, these were black (and brown)

“immigrants” whose conditions could be equated to the Italians, Jews, Polish peas-

ants, Greeks, and others whose earlier arrivals had created 20th- century ethnicity in

the first place.

Desegregation of the armed forces, which began in 1948, and the contested

1948 Democratic Party convention, also challenged racial divisions at home. The

term “civil rights” returned to the political scene after World War II. Congress had

passed civil rights acts in 1866, 1871, and 1875, during the Reconstruction years. Not

until 1957 would it pass another such act. The Cold War and the rising tide of anti-

imperialism in the global South brought Myrdal’s prescriptions into sharper focus.

Racial politics became central issues: At the United Nations, in the anti- colonial wars

taking place in the Maghreb and Southeast Asia, and in a sharpening U.S. political

debate that combined red- baiting as well as black- baiting, global and domestic racial

concerns began to overlap. This rising phase of the trajectory of racial politics is dis-

cussed more fully in Chapter 6 .

Ethnicity- based racial theory took off after World War II, driven by developing

debates and controversies in everyday life and mainstream politics, drawing on the

Myrdal study, and influenced by a range of recent social scientific work on race. In

a 1947–1948 series of lectures on “Discrimination and National Welfare” offered at

the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, influential social scientists sought to

apply Myrdal’s analysis, not only domestically but internationally. Prominent New

Dealer and Latin Americanist A.A. Berle, Jr. discussed “Race Discrimination and

the Good Neighbor Policy”; Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU, lectured on “Our

Standing in the Orient”; big- time Columbia sociologist Robert MacIver’s talk was

titled “Our Strengths and Our Weaknesses”; and a young Robert Merton presented

a paper, still frequently cited, on “Discrimination and the American Creed.” 30

Social scientific studies of race based in the ethnicity model developed dramati-

cally after World War II. In sociology, the disciplinary center of gravity moved east

from Chicago to Harvard and Columbia, where structural- functionalism took over

from Chicago School pragmatism. The structural- functionalist framework stressed

the unifying role of culture, and particularly American values, in regulating and

34 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

resolving conflicts. This approach was notably in evidence in respect to the sociol-

ogy of race. It overlapped significantly with the argument of the Myrdal study— the

“American creed.” Myrdal and Talcott Parsons, Myrdal and Robert Merton, influ-

enced each other. As for “who zoomed who?” we don’t need to worry about that too

much here. Parsons was a racial liberal and Merton had been involved in civil rights

activity since his undergraduate days at Temple University 31 — but, in any case, the

consensual political climate of the war years provided an appropriate moment for

calls for racial reform. This was a point Myrdal had made clear in his book’s conclud-

ing pages, pointing out the inconsistencies and contradictions inherent in a racially

exclusionary and discriminatory society’s leading a war for democracy. 32

Another major sociological study that tackled race issues at this time, and that

resonated very deeply with the structural- functionalist perspective, was Samuel

Stouffer et al.’s The American Soldier (1949–1950; see also Ryan 2013). Research for

this project was initiated in 1941 with War Department support; it was published in

1949–1950. The Stouffer study devoted significant attention to racial attitudes in the

wartime military, and to the experiences of the over one million black members of

the U.S. armed forces. In its explicit examination of the tensions of racial segregation

and the aspirations for racial progress that characterized the wartime armed forces,

The American Soldier strongly paralleled the Myrdal study, which had preceded it by

some five years. In Stouffer et al.’s interviews, white soldiers continued to express

their Negrophobia, while blacks articulated their expectations— as they had during

World War I— that their sacrifices in wartime would be recognized and rewarded

later. Stouffer et al. suggested that the war reduced the degree of white racism. While

not a vacuous claim, the extent of this meliorism has since been called into question.

To be sure, the armed forces remained segregated through the war years, various race

riots (and even black– white gun battles) took place on U.S. bases, and U.S. service-

men of color were often discriminated against and assaulted, sometimes even while

in uniform. 33

Although Myrdal’s was the predominant voice in the 1940s sociology of race,

Stouffer et al.’s influence was also significant, especially since the latter work appeared

at roughly the same moment that the U.S. military was finally being desegregated.

Both studies departed from the conflict- oriented approach that had largely informed

the sociology of race into the 1930s. Viewed in conjunction with other mainstream

sociological work of the period (notably MacIver, ed. 1949), these works must be seen

as definitively introducing an integration- oriented perspective on U.S. racial dynam-

ics into mainstream sociology.

While recognizing the gravity of segregation and racial prejudice, the structural-

functionalist view of race consistently stressed the integrative qualities of U.S. society;

thus the overlap of the two uses of the term “integration”— one that summarized

the key civil rights demands of the era, and one that framed sociological explana-

tions in terms of social unity and commonality— is more than a casual synecdoche.

Deep- seated conflicts were not amenable to the structural- functionalist account; at

Ethnicity 35

most they could appear as “social problems,” or be understood as having “latent”

functions (Coser 1956) of an integrative sort. An understanding of race and racial

injustice as foundational elements in U.S. society and culture (not to mention as

world- historically significant issues) was not possible within this viewpoint, which

thus tended to marginalize radical accounts such as those deriving from the Duboi-

sian tradition, anticolonialist and pan- African thought, or Marxism.

Once properly reconceptualized as symptoms of the tensions inherent in soci-

etal self- regulation, however, racial matters could be understood as amenable to

reform. Racial conflict received little attention in Parsons’s early work, but after the

appearance of An American Dilemma, he began writing more about race. Drawing on

the work of his Harvard colleague, the psychologist Gordon Allport, and focusing

largely upon micro- sociological phenomena, Parsons began thinking about prejudice

as a problem of values (in other words white values) in the late 1940s. The edited

work Toward a General Theory of Action (Parsons and Shils, eds. 1951) contained a

substantial essay by Allport taking this approach. 34 Parsons began the essay “Full

Citizenship for the Negro American? A Sociological Problem,” written for The Negro

American (Parsons and Clark, eds. 1967) at the height of the civil rights struggle, by

arguing social- psychologically. He recognized the values- conflict that exclusion and

the experience of white prejudice engender in blacks, echoing Myrdal’s diagnosis of

the “dilemma.” A reform- oriented transition was underway, he suggested, in which

inclusion would first be advanced by legal action, then by politics, and finally by state-

based guarantees of social citizenship and even redistribution of resources (Parsons

in Parsons and Clark 1967, 718). The informed reader must have struggled with this

even in 1967, notably with its underestimation of the white resistance— from overt

“backlash” politics on down to limited reform— that such a program would face, and

indeed was already confronting “up South” (for example, in the North, in places like

the Chicago neighborhood of Cicero) as well as “down South.”

Looking back on Parsons’s account of race, what is most striking is his ungainly

combination of sympathy (“moderate,” to be sure) with the civil rights movement

and his striking unfamiliarity with the nonwhite world. He did manage some criti-

cism of white prejudice and discrimination, but he depicted U.S. “race relations”

as undergoing a steady progress toward inclusion of blacks, a condition which he

seemed to think was on the verge of accomplishment in 1966. A deeper interest in

black life and thought, not to mention black experience, eluded him.

Parsons’s co- editor was the eminent black psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, whose

work in The Negro American took a much less rosy view of mid- 1960s U.S. racial poli-

tics. 35 Clark’s book Dark Ghetto appeared in 1965, with an epigraph by Du Bois and

an introduction by Myrdal. In that work Clark was already reassessing what had been

a lifelong commitment to integration. Clark’s analysis of black exclusion and white

racism invoked the “internal colonialism” framework; his influential book anticipated

Blauner’s important radical analyses (1972) that extended and popularized the concept

several years later. Clark had been the first tenured black professor at City College of

36 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

New York, where he began teaching in 1942. He is perhaps best known for the influ-

ence his early work on internalized prejudice (the famous “doll experiments,” the use

of dolls to determine a child’s racial attitude; carried out in collaboration with his wife

Mamie Phipps Clark) had on the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision. His social

psychological approach to racism and black identity, both collective and individual, has

shaped thinking about racial “identity politics” more generally, right down to the pres-

ent day. In rough parallel to Du Bois’s trajectory, Clark’s early work envisioned racial

progress as occurring through integration and the extension of rational and demo-

cratic norms to U.S. blacks; we can see his affinities with the Myrdal model, as well

as with Parsons’s attempted systematization, through this lens. But his doubts were

already visible in the mid- 1960s and became more pronounced throughout his later

work. He turned to more radical— and in some respects more “nationalist”— positions

as similar tendencies gained increasing traction in the black community.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan attempted

a further innovation in ethnicity theory. Stimulated by the burgeoning civil rights

movement, and threatened with being outflanked on their left, these two Harvard

sociologists wished both to validate the assimilationist bent of previous ethnic

group- based theory, and to reintroduce the theme of “ongoing ethnicity” or cultural

pluralism. In Beyond The Melting Pot they sought to link cultural pluralism with

political pluralism, the dominant construct in American political science, and thus

seemingly to reconcile the paradigm’s problem of ethnic group identity— assimilation

vs. cultural pluralism, incorporation vs. preservation— at a stroke. This volume’s title

itself encapsulates the ethnicity paradigm’s perspective on race; the book’s two edi-

tions bracket the paradigm’s triumphal moment and the onset of its downfall.

Glazer and Moynihan argued that immigrating groups were transformed, if

hardly “melted,” by their experiences in New York, emerging as communities distinct

not only from each other and their pre- existing socio- cultural milieux, but also from

their communities of origin.

Ethnic groups, then, even after distinctive language, customs, and culture are

lost … are continually recreated by new experiences in America. The mere

existence of a name itself is perhaps sufficient to form group character in new

situations, for the name associates an individual, who actually can be anything,

with a certain past, country, or race.

(Glazer and Moynihan 1970 [1963], 17)

Assimilation, they argued, does take place as individuals acculturate and groups

enter the political arena. Yet out of this very process a separate identity emerges,

which must sustain itself culturally and deliver tangible political gains (as well as—

ultimately— economic gains, “upward mobility”) to the group. Thus, fundamental

political interests, rather than factors such as primordial ties, cultural diff erences, or

majoritarian resistance to incorporation, were ultimately decisive in the maintenance

of ethnic identities. Continuing with the same passage:

Ethnicity 37

But as a matter of fact, someone who is Irish or Jewish or Italian generally has

other traits than the mere existence of the name that associates him [sic] with

other people attached to the group. A man is connected to his group by ties of

family and friendship. But he is also connected by ties of interest. The ethnic

groups in New York are also interest groups.

(Ibid, emphasis original)

This political focus initially seemed quite compatible with the racial conflicts

of the 1950s and early 1960s. At that time ethnicity theory was grappling with black

attempts to achieve equality through the civil rights movement. As seen through the

lens of ethnicity, the civil rights movement was a drive for black integration and for

the removal of any remaining forms of institutional/legal discrimination. From the

perspective of writers such as Glazer and Moynihan or Milton Gordon (1964), civil

rights demands were intelligible and comprehensible within the ethnicity framework,

and thus deserving of support. The civil rights movement was trying to create for

blacks the same conditions that white ethnics had found: “opportunity” and relative

equality, the absence of formal discriminatory barriers, however much attitudinal

prejudice may have existed (Glazer 1987 [1975], 25–27).

Although virulent forms of racism persisted in the South, the remedies for seg-

regation were clear. The North, though, presented a different set of problems for

ethnicity theorists. At first glance, it was assumed that black equality had already been

achieved there:

One looked at the demands of the civil rights movement in 1963— equality

in the vote, equality in the courts, equality in representation in public life,

equality in accommodations— saw that they existed more or less in New York

City, and concluded that the political course of the Northern Negro would be

quite different from that of the Southern Negro. He [sic] would become part

of the game of accommodation politics— he already was— in which posts and

benefits were distributed to groups on the basis of struggle, of course, but also

on the basis of votes, money, and political talent, and one concluded that in

this game Negroes would not do so badly.

(Glazer and Moynihan 1970 [1963], x)

In other words, blacks already had equal opportunity in the North; what more could

they demand? Once equal opportunity legislation along with its judicial and admin-

istrative enforcement were accomplished facts, it fell to blacks to follow in their

“predecessors’” footsteps. Through hard work, patience, and delayed gratifi cation,

blacks could carve out their own rightful place in American society. In the North,

where blacks were still recent “immigrants” (from the South), this would involve

some degree of assimilation (Glazer 1983). It would involve the development of a new

post- immigration cultural identity, and it would require engagement in mainstream

pluralist politics. Race relations would thus continue in what Nathan Glazer called

the “American ethnic pattern.”

38 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

So, ethnicity theory assigned to blacks and other people of color the roles which

earlier generations of European immigrants had played in the great waves of the

“Atlantic migration” of the 19th and early 20th centuries. But both whites and people

of color refused to play their assigned roles. Structural barriers continued to render the

immigrant analogy inappropriate; the trajectory of incorporation did not develop

as the ethnicity paradigm had envisioned. Large- scale obtacles blocked the path

to inclusion. (We discuss structural racism later in this book, but for now think of

red- lining, racial steering and residential segregation, school segregration, hiring pat-

terns, imprisonment.) In the face of these concrete practices of states, corporations,

and millions of whites, many blacks (and later, many Latin@s, Native Americans,

and Asian Americans as well) rejected ethnic identity and the false promise of inclu-

sion, in favor of a more radical racial identity which demanded group rights and

recognition. Given these developments, ethnicity theory found itself increasingly in

opposition to the demands of anti- racist movements. The ethnicity paradigm had to

be reworked once again. The result was the phenomenon of neoconservatism.

Not long after ethnicity theorists’ embrace of civil rights came a new round of

racial conflicts: above all, the black power revolt and its cousins, brown power, yel-

low power, and red power. These poked significant holes in the liberal framework of

integration through values- convergence, aka the culturalism of ethnicity theory, aka

the structural- functionalist sociology of race. In addition, race began to appear as a

global issue, not just a U.S. domestic problem. Earlier sociological paradigms had

recognized this better than the post- World War II approaches did: For all their limits,

the biologistic approach had located race in the sphere of “development,” and the

Chicago pragmatists had at least hinted at its intimate connections with nascent U.S.

imperialism. 36 By the mid- 1960s, then, ethnicity theory and its liberal stalwarts were

beginning to part company with the race radicals, nationalists and leftists alike, who

had been at least tacit allies earlier. These were the seeds of ethnicity theory’s decline

and its hastening turn to the right.

The combination of post- World War II racial issues— the crisis of the Jim Crow

regime at home and the breakdown of empire and neocolonialism abroad— all in the

context of the Cold War and the “communist threat”— exceeded the tolerance level

of the racial moderates. Where was the immigrant analogy now? How could the “free

world” and the New Deal coalition address these new conditions? Sociology’s lead-

ing lights were cold warriors; they had taken up the civil rights banner at a time when

segregation, lynching, and discrimination against people of color had become deep

embarrassments for the United States around the world. Did Parsons read Fanon or

even Du Bois? Did Merton consider the sociology of African development proposed

by his one- time junior colleague Immanuel Wallerstein? Did Kingsley Davis— who

wrote on population in South Asia, comparative urbanization, and the sociology of

the family and reproduction in global perspective— ever address anticolonialism?

According to Lipset at least (1994), these leading figures, and many others as well,

came to sociology after youthful involvements with socialism and communism. No

Ethnicity 39

doubt they were nervous in the late 1940s and 1950s. This was quite logical: Many of

them were being watched. 37

From the vantage point of the present, racial dynamics can be seen as deeply

structuring all these issues. But during the 1950s and 1960s, racial issues appeared

largely to be U.S. domestic problems. They were not to be confused with the battle

against communism. Racial integration was supported while the purges and witch-

hunting that stigmatized and disemployed some of the field’s most active advocates

for racial justice were condoned, at least in part. 38 The major figures associated

with the structural- functionalist paradigm of race did not oppose the Vietnam War

or consider its racial implications. 39 King’s 1967 denunciation of the war from the

pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church was condemned by such “moderate” soci-

ologists of race as Daniel Moynihan, as it was by such “moderate” civil rights

leaders as Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. In the 1960s such figures as Milton

Gordon and Nathan Glazer combined support for the “moderate” tendencies in

the civil rights movement and rejection of “positive” discrimination (aka affirma-

tive action). Thus they first prefigured and soon after launched the neoconservative

racial reaction and the “colorblind” resurgence of the “post- civil rights” era (Stein-

berg 2001).

The elective affinity between movement- oriented racial reformism and the socio-

logical critique of racial prejudice and discrimination, then, only operated until the

mid- 1960s or so. The assimilationism advocated so unequivocally by Myrdal and

the integrationism put forward by Parsons and Clark were soon exceeded by the

vast agenda that meaningful racial reform entailed. This was a point made forcefully

by the new wave of race riots beginning in Harlem in 1964 and Watts in 1965, by

the assassinations of Malcolm and Martin, by the resurgence of black nationalism

and the “black power revolt,” and also— as Dr. King pointed out so powerfully— by

the doomed U.S. defense of neocolonialism in Asia and elsewhere. Although Par-

sons, Merton, and other moderates tried valiantly to advocate an incrementalist and

integrationist view of race and civil rights, by the later 1960s the reassertion of a

conflict- oriented sociology of race (Ladner, ed. 1973) and the emergence of identity

politics were well advanced.

Decline and Fall

Although the ethnicity paradigm of race began as a progressive and liberal chal-

lenge to racial biologism, eugenics, and white racial nationalism, it has shifted since

the enactment of civil rights reforms in the mid- 1960s. The core concepts of the

paradigm— the immigrant analogy, cultural determinism, and the denial of the cor-

poreal and “ocular” dimensions of raciality— have become the principal intellectual

apparatus of the neoconservative and now “colorblind” racial project. Most of the

paradigm’s proponents have moved rightward, locating their arguments within an

individualist problematic that has more in common with the white racial nationalism

40 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

their predecessors once attacked than with the civil rights movement those same

predecessors once supported. In many ways this shift is a consequence of eff orts to

understand race as a cultural phenomenon.

Once Chicago sociology had discarded the biological determinism of Sumner,

Spencer, Madison Grant, Social Darwinism, and eugenics, the mainstream soci-

ology of race dismissed the corporeal dimensions of race rather comprehensively.

The body all but disappeared from the sociology of race, as it did from the cul-

tural anthropology of race (post- Boas), and from other social scientific discussions

as well, for example Myrdal’s study. This was a reductionist view of race, one that

neglected the importance of the body as a signifier of status, and as signifier of

group belonging (Blumer 1958) in its own right. The racial body had served from

the earliest days of conquest, and still serves today, as an imperfect but effective tool

and marker: for both domination and resistance, for the assignment of identity and

the recognition of difference, for the maintenance of social control and the drawing

of boundaries among groups, and for claims of solidarity made both by the powerful

and the powerless.

To understand race as a variety of ethnicity, then, was to neglect stigma, exclu-

sion, privilege, and violence, all characteristics inherent in “the mark of race,” the

phenomic, “ocular” dimension of racial belonging. It was to adopt the immigrant

analogy: the assumption that racially identified individuals and groups, like immi-

grants, could adapt to new circumstances (say, the urban settings of the North or West

rather than the rural settings of the South, or industrial labor rather than agricultural

labor). Just as immigrant ethnic groups learned a new language and new customs, eat-

ing and speaking (and perhaps worshipping) differently, so too could blacks, Asians,

and Latin American immigrants. Indeed becoming “ethnic groups” at all, acquiring

the hyphenated identity that marked ethnicity— Italian- American, Jewish- American,

Mexican- American, Negro- American (or later, African- American)— was what eth-

nicity was all about (Glazer and Moynihan, eds. 1975). Both assimilation and cultural

pluralism involved obtaining this ethnic option (Waters 1990) that was the mark of

inclusion. Achieving ethnic identity might be an uneven and prolonged process that

required several generations; it might not eliminate all status differentials, hierar-

chies, and prejudice; and indeed it might not render all groups equally permeable

in the melting pot (or equally tasty in the “salad bowl”). But it would go a long way

toward reducing remaining inequalities and differences.

Concerned that the incorporative consequences of immigration (assimilation and

cultural pluralism once again) might not apply fully enough to racially “different”—

that is, not white— groups, ethnicity theorists had struggled to keep up with the racial

upheavals of the post- World War II period, in which the legacies of slavery and empire

were central, and immigration was secondary. The capture, transport, mass murder,

and chattelization of millions of Africans 40 could not easily be explained within the

immigration analogy, though Kristol, Glazer and Moynihan, and others tried their

best to locate it within their framework of immigrant inclusion and urban ethnic

Ethnicity 41

politics. Nor was the problem of the displacement, removal, and genocide of the pre-

existing native inhabitants of the Americas a major concern of ethnicity theorists. 41

The “immigrant analogy” obviously did not work here. Or maybe it only worked in

reverse: with the immigrants/settlers playing the dominant role.

The radical charge that the construction of American economies, cultures, and

states, both in North America and elsewhere in the hemisphere, depended on slavery

and empire. Indeed the fact that these imperial projects and subsequent American

nations were intrinsically racist projects themselves, was discomfiting for ethnicity

theorists (Drinnon 1997; Stoler, ed. 2006). From the 1960s on, the dominant ethnicity

paradigm was confronted with radical critique from the left. Politically it was upset by

the embrace of various Marxisms in the black movement and other anti- racist move-

ments. It was hostile to the black power movement (Van DeBurg 1992; Joseph 2006),

as well as to such related radical and nationalist organizations as the Black Panthers,

the Young Lords, the American Indian Movement, and the Partido de la Raza Unida.

None of these were comfortable political bedfellows for ethnicity theorists of race.

Confronted with the intractability of racial difference and the resilience of

racial inequality in the aftermath of civil rights legislation and Supreme Court rul-

ings that favored inclusive social policies, ethnicity theorists faced a stark choice.

Broadly speaking, there were two possible reasons why reform did not effectively

reduce racial inequality and difference and facilitate social and political inclusion

under the “American creed”: Either U.S. society was unwilling to tackle the endemic

racial injustices that prevailed within it, or people of color were unwilling to grasp

the opportunities newly becoming available. Ethnicity- based approaches could not

accept the former view; was this not what the Panthers and other radicals were claim-

ing? Calls for “positive” or “affirmative” anti- discrimination policies, for example,

assumed the existence a far more entrenched system of racial injustice than ethnicity

theorists such as Glazer, Moynihan, Charles Murray, and Thomas Sowell were will-

ing to recognize. After all, earlier generations of immigrants had not required special

policies or treatments; why should blacks? State activities should be restricted, they

argued, to guarantees of formal equality for individuals.

This position was not new. Milton Gordon had argued something similar as early

as 1964. But the doyens of the ethnicity school, Glazer and Moynihan, were ambiva-

lent about the group rights question in the 1960s. Indeed, Moynihan had endorsed

positive anti- discrimination measures (“equality of result”) in his famous “Report”

(Rainwater and Yancey 1967, 49); Moynihan also coauthored Lyndon Johnson’s

Howard University speech “To Fulfll these Rights” (June 5, 1964):

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and lib-

erate him [sic], bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you

are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have

been completely fair.

(Ibid)

42 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

For his part Glazer had warned about group rights early on. He argued, also in 1965,

that a “new national interest” in “the fi nal liquidation of Negro separation” was being

defi ned, and that blacks themselves had best not oppose it, for “When an ethnic

group interest has clashed with a national interest, we have been quite ruthless and

even extreme in overriding the group interest” (Glazer 1983, 27). 42

During its long reign, ethnicity theory has frequently been modified as its advocates

attempted to account for new empirical phenomena or to address competing theoreti-

cal approaches. In the early postwar period, the ethnicity model encountered its main

opponents in conservative quarters. Explicitly racist perspectives, rooted in the formerly

dominant biologistic, hierarchical, and religious beliefs of the prewar era, maintained

their hold, especially in the South but also on a national level. (Think KKK.) The early

civil rights movement in the South, and the mobilization of Mexican Americans in the

Southwest, evoked overt expressions of hardcore white supremacy and violence in the

1960s, although reforms slowly took some hold in these regions as well.

The ethnicity paradigm was still on board the movement train in the early 1960s,

operating as its “mainstream” explanatory voice. Until roughly 1966, ethnicity theo-

rists supported the “moderate” desegregation policies of the Johnson presidency

and Warren Court. Subsequently, in the wake of Goldwater’s 1964 defeat, the Voting

Rights Act (1965), and George Wallace’s campaigns, and as a consequence of Nixon’s

(1968) “southern strategy” and party realignment, ethnicity theory was pushed to the

right. By the early 1970s, it had been transformed into neoconservatism. Today, that

political current is seen chiefly through its neo- imperial agenda in Iraq and its alli-

ance with the right-wing Israeli Likud Party, but we should remember that it began

as a center- right racial realignment after breaking with the civil rights movement, not

only the black power movement, but also the movement of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The ethnicity- based, neoconservative approach to race had three main problems:

1) the social scientific, indeed methodological, limitations encountered by the ethnic-

ity paradigm in its attempt to reduce race to an element of ethnicity; 2) the paradigm’s

consequent inability to deal with the particular characteristics of racially- defined

groups as a direct consequence of this reductionism; and 3) the ethnicity paradigm’s

reliance on a single historical case in its use of the great wave of European migration

at the turn of the 20th century to develop its “immigrant analogy.” The first of these

problems we call the “Bootstraps Model”; the second we refer to as “They All Look

Alike”; the third we label “Once Is Not Enough.”

The “Bootstraps Model”: As we have noted, substantial reworking of the eth-

nicity paradigm took place in the later 1960s and early 1970s. By 1975 Glazer and

Moynihan felt themselves able to offer a general hypothesis on the dynamics of group

incorporation:

Ethnic groups bring different norms to bear on common circumstances with

consequent different levels of success— hence group differences in status.

(Glazer and Moynihan, eds. 1975, 7)

Ethnicity 43

The “group norms/common circumstances” correlation raises multiple problems,

which can be traced back to the immigrant analogy. The key factor in explaining the

success that an ethnic group will have in becoming incorporated into “normalized” 43

white society (a goal whose desirability is unquestioned) is the values or “norms”

which the group brings to bear on the general social circumstances it faces, just as all

other minorities have done. Since the independent variable is the “norms,” the idea

that “differences in status” could be affected by factors outside or even unrelated to

the group is ruled out at the level of assumptions. Everything is mediated through

“norms” internal to the group. If Chican@s don’t do well in school, this cannot, even

hypothetically, be due to low- quality education; it has instead to do with Chican@

values. After all, Jews and Japanese Americans did well in inferior schools, so why

can’t other groups? Ongoing processes of discrimination, shifts in the prevailing eco-

nomic climate, the development of a sophisticated racial ideology of “conservative

egalitarianism”— in other words, all the concrete socio political dynamics within which

racial phenomena operate in the United States— are ignored in this approach. 44

“Common circumstances,” by contrast, are relegated to the dependent variable.

These are the universal conditions to which each ethnic group must accommodate.

The assumption is that each racialized “ethnic group” faces the normalized white

society in the same way that its predecessors did; furthermore it is assumed that

each group confronts that majority society alone, unaffected by the histories, accom-

plishments, or misfortunes of previous ethnic/racial groups. The experiences of

immigrants who previously arrived in the United States, or those of other racially

defined minorities, are not considered relevant in the Glazer/Moynihan model. The

achievement of mobility— the group- status dependent variable— reflects group will-

ingness and ability to accept presumptive white norms and values. The “difference”

that characterizes a racialized “ethnic group,” once that group is incorporated, will

be outweighed by the “commonality” it shares with whites.

In other words, something akin to Milton Gordon’s notion of “structural assimi-

lation” (1964, 70) is assumed to take place as immigrant groups pass beyond their

“fresh off the boat” status and gain the acceptance of whites. Yet this assumption is

quite unwarranted with respect to people of color, whose distance from the normal-

ized whiteness valorized by the model has generally not been appreciably lessened

by adoption of the dominant (white) norms and values of American society, some-

thing that actually occurs quite a lot, though obviously unevenly. A large literature on

discrimination bears this out: Returns to education are not equivalent across racial

lines, for example; employment levels and wage rates vary considerably even when we

control for everything but race; the same may be said for access to credit, access to

equivalent housing, and numerous other patterns of discrimination.

The entire model for comparing and evaluating the success of ethnic groups— in

achieving higher status or in being incorporated into normalized white society— is

thus limited by an unwillingness to consider whether there might be any special

circumstances which racially defined minorities encounter in the United States,

44 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

circumstances which definitively distinguish their experiences from those of earlier

European immigrants, and make the injunction to “pull yourselves up by your own

bootstraps” impossible to fulfill.

In addition, the “bootstraps” model is dated. The trend toward a “majority-

minority” demographic is advancing in the United States. In other words, a situation

is emerging in which no single racially defined group, including those considered

white, will be a majority in the country. This inexorable transition casts the assimi-

lationist premises of the “bootstraps” model, as well as the immigrant analogy, into

considerable doubt. In practical terms, there is no longer a clear- cut set of “common

circumstances” into which a given ethnic group can possibly blend its cultural val-

ues and norms. Race exceeds ethnicity in many respects, as it has done for centuries:

Black immigrants from the Caribbean or Africa, for example, blend into U.S. black-

ness, perhaps retaining some cultural (that is, ethnic) differences, but unable and

maybe unwilling to escape the all- inclusive framework of race (Waters 2000). Recent

work on Mexican Americans suggests that broadly similar processes of racialization

are operating in respect to that community as well (Telles and Ortiz 2009).

“They All Look Alike”: In what sense can groups of color be considered in ethnic

group terms? In what sense is the category “black,” for example, equivalent to the

categories “Irish” or “Jewish”? “Blacks” in ethnic terms are as diverse as “whites.”

Latin@s as well, Asian Americans and Native Americans too. Since ethnicity theory

focuses on cultural identity and difference, its practitioners should go much deeper

than they generally do. How might ethnicity theory address the range of subgroup-

ings represented in the U.S. black community? What distinctions might it employ?

Haitians? Jamaicans? Francophones? Georgians? Northern/southern? The black

community has been intensively studied from an ethnographic standpoint, so there

is no lack of materials for analysis. 45 Latin@ communities vary as well: by language,

religion, place of origin; for example, in the United States there are substantial com-

munities of indigenous people of Mexican origin whose first (and sometimes only)

language is not Spanish but Maya, Mixtec, or Nahuatl (Fox and Rivera- Salgado, eds.

2004). Large numbers of Latin@s are phenotypically black, Afro- descendientes, while

many others are visually indistinguishable from North American whites (Montalvo

and Codina 2001; Rodriguez 2000).

Ethnicity theory has not delved to any significant extent into the meaning of these

distinctions. There is a racist element in this substitution— in which whites are seen

as variegated in terms of group identities, but blacks, Latin@s, Native Americans,

and Asian Americans “all look alike.” In our view, this is the effect of the application

of a paradigm based in white ethnic history to a variety of racially defined groups.

Indeed, in sharp contrast to the lack of interest among ethnicity theorists (and their

neoconservative successors) in this issue of intra- racial distinctions, an important

race- studies literature on panethnicity has developed over the past few decades. Racial

formation always involves “lumping”; racialization proceeds through a combina-

tion of centripetal and centrifugal forces. Despite the presence of different cultural

Ethnicity 45

orientations and sometimes long- standing antagonisms— this is the “centrifugal”

force— ethnic groups may be pressured into allying and “bridging” because of the

common presssures they face: exclusion, discrimination, violence against them; such

circumstances constitute “centripetal” forces ( Calderón 1992; Espiritu 1993; Jones-

Correa and Leal 1996; Okamoto 2006).

Once is Not Enough: The ethnicity paradigm was initially developed in reference

to an unprecedented and perhaps unique period of U.S. immigration history: the

arrival and eventual inclusion of vast waves of Southern and Eastern European immi-

grants before and after the turn of the 20th century, roughly 1880–1924. Though

popularly regarded as a general theory of ethnic group incorporation, the paradigm

might simply be characteristic of specific historical circumstances that may never be

repeated again.

The dynamics of immigration have shifted dramatically between the turn of the

20th century and the present. The United States now relates to the global South and

global East through a master- policy of “accumulation by dispossession.” Displaced

and impoverished workers and peasants from Latin America and the Caribbean, as

well as from the Pacific Rim, continue to immigrate, their human flow modulated

but hardly contained by boom and bust, “bubble” and recession. And the United

States has also become more racially predatory domestically, practicing a similar

policy of “accumulation by dispossession” at home as well. Consider post- Katrina

New Orleans or the subprime housing crisis— to pick just two prominent examples.

So is the country less able to integrate immigrants than it was in previous historical

periods?

Where will the United States find another “engine of mobility” to parallel that

of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the epoch of mass labor recruitment to the

industrial economy? The country’s economic capacity to absorb enormous numbers

of immigrants— low- wage workers and their families, and a new globally based (and

very female) servant class (Glenn 2002)— without generating the sort of established

subaltern groups we associate with the terms “race” and “racism,” seems to us more

limited than was the “whitening” of Europeans a century earlier, this argument’s key

precedent.

We suggest that the ethnicity paradigm’s use of an “immigrant analogy” in an

attempt to make sense of the post- World War II black movement upsurge, was fun-

damentally flawed. Most criticism to date has focused on the differences between the

situations faced by European immigrants c. 1900 and blacks who sought integration

post- 1945. Perhaps an even more telling critique, however, is political- economic. The

integration of the European immigrants may have been a one- off. The ethnicity para-

digm’s efforts to apply turn- of- the- 20th- century accounts of European immigration

and integration to the post- World War II United States may thus be a classical case

of bad social science: the conception and (highly influential) divulgation of a theory

based on little more than a single very limited case study and a good deal of ideologi-

cal wishful thinking.

46 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

In sum, the logic of assimilation, the default to whiteness— whether conscious or

unconscious— is an inherent part of ethnicity theories of race (Jung 2009). As U.S.

society transitions from the substantial and largely unquestioned white majorities of

the past, to an increasingly majority- minority demographic pattern, the normaliza-

tion of whiteness that has been an assumed constant of ethnicity- based theories of

race may be eroding.

Ethnicity- based approaches have lost social scientific coherence as they capitu-

lated to neoconservative political priorities, insisting that in the “post- civil rights” era

a new framework of “colorblindness” could replace race- consciousness. We discuss

colorblind racial ideology at greater length in subsequent chapters; here it is suffi-

cient to note that far from moving in an egalitarian and inclusive direction, far from

achieving the “dream” of extending democracy across the color- line that was the

elemental heart of the civil rights and allied movements in the early post- World War

II period, American society has in many ways moved in the opposite direction. It has

become more segregated and more racially unequal. Because on the most practical

level these developments are perfectly visible, they undercut all claims that the sig-

nificance of race is declining, and deeply undermine the idea of the United States as

a colorblind or race- neutral society.

Under these conditions, the default to whiteness has gradually been revealed as

the true message of the ethnicity paradigm of racial theory. Being “ethnic” turns

out to be about whether and how much an individual or group can assimilate into

or hybridize with whiteness. Being “racial” is about how much difference there is

between an individual or a group and their white counterparts.

Notes

1. Max Weber’s early concept of ethnie as a form of status, shaped by “honor”— a cultural

construct— is frequently applied to racial matters. Weber also recognized racism, notably

anti- black racism in the United States. See his remarks on U.S. racial attitudes in Gerth and

Mills, eds. 1958, 177, 405–406. Weber’s sensitivity to U.S. racial matters may be attributed,

at least in part, to the orientation provided him by W.E.B. Du Bois (Lewis 1993, 225, 277).

For critical remarks on Weber’s treatment of race and ethnicity see Banton 2007.

2. The assignment of membership in a given racial group was, of course, problematic in

itself. The existence and characteristics of supposed human groups, the boundaries of the

groups, the groups’ locations in the “great chain of being,” and so on, were all debated.

3. All these themes had extensive intellectual histories, generally fl owing from Enlighten-

ment discussions of race: Linnaean, Kantian. Jeff erson’s refl ections on such issues as the

beauty and smell of black people may be contemplated in his Notes on the State of Virginia

(Jeff erson 1984 [1785]).

4. In fact what became “development theory” had its origins in race- based (and racist) schol-

arship: in anthropology, sociology, history, and beyond (Vitalis 2010).

5. Although these currents were often at odds with one another, they were all committed to

the idea of racial hierarchy, with guess who at the top and bottom? Indeed, a great deal of

Ethnicity 47

infl ammatory “theoretical” material appeared on this topic as the biologistic paradigm

consolidated its intellectual hegemony and achieved the status of “common sense” (Grant

1916; Stoddard 1920; Davenport 1972 [1911]). On eugenics, see Chase 1980; Kevles 1998;

Spiro 2009.

6. In 1879 the black activist and scholar Martin R. Delaney attacked the early physical anthro-

pology of Africa for its racial bias, with a book entitled Principia of Ethnology (Delaney 2009

[1879]). Du Bois’s 1897 essay “The Conservation of Races” attempted a “transvaluation”

of the racial hierarchy implicit in eugenics (Du Bois 1995 [1897]). Kelly Miller, Professor

of Mathematics at Howard University, reviewed economist Frederick L. Hoff man’s 1897

Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, one of the leading eugenics- based works to

argue for the innate inferiority of African Americans, using census data to argue that Hoff -

man’s claims were statistically fl awed. See Miller 1897; Stepan and Gilman 1993.

7. Witch- burning— the 250- year (c. 1450–1700) mass assault on women and the mass killings

and torture that it involved— remains a sociologically undertheorized territory. Federici’s

audacious treatment (2004) is an erudite and crucial intersectional contribution to this

necessary work. See also Lerner 1987.

8. The New England Puritans were slaveholders as well, but on a much smaller scale than the

southern planters. There were also signifi cant religious diff erences between the two settler

groups.

9. Southern (white) Baptism is the world’s largest Baptist denomination and the second larg-

est U.S. church after Roman Catholicism. Religious adherence remains quite segregated in

the United States today. Though various currents jostle within U.S. white Protestantism—

some of them “liberal” (center- left) and some of them racially diverse— the majority of the

national Protestant congregation is “conservative” (center- right), retains a “born again”

theology and strong evangelical dimensions, and is in many ways still southern. Here we

have all the basic elements for a politico- religious white racial nationalism: a civil religion

(Bellah 2005) largely inclined to the right and still linked with theological, not to mention

biological, racism. Witness the racial tensions in contemporary American Protestantism:

traditionally white- black, but now augmented by substantial numbers of Latin@ and

Asian American congregations as well (Wuthnow 2011).

10. The ethnicity paradigm continues today in sociology and other fi elds as well under a social

psychological banner: “ethnicity as cognition” (Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004).

11. This relatively innocuous notion tends to mask the underlying realities of U.S. imperialism,

which was particularly active in the Pacifi c during the years when the Chicago School sociol-

ogy of race was developing. Park’s notion of an American “racial frontier” also gestures in

this direction. As the early Chicago work was being carried out, U.S. troops were still pursu-

ing the brutal subjugation of the Philippines, a war that was explicitly presented as a racial

project (Kramer 2006). Hawai’i’s annexation was still relatively recent, increasing Japanese

power in the region was becoming a concern in Washington, and U.S. competition with

various European powers for “spheres of infl uence” in China was well underway. In general,

immigration— the matter of persons travelling into one’s country — should be seen as produc-

ing only one- half of the issue known as “race contact”; the other half is produced by imperial

travel out from one’s country, notably in projects of settlement and conquest.

12. A little- remembered feature of Washington’s famous Atlanta Exposition speech of 1895

was its anti- immigrant message. His plea to white elites was that they prefer blacks over

48 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

immigrants in their industrial employment practices and thus open the door to inclusion

(Washington 2010 [1895]). That’s what “Cast down your buckets where you are” is all about.

13. Here too Du Bois preceded the Chicago sociologists. Du Bois had been a student at Har-

vard of William James, one of the founding fathers of pragmatist philosophy.

14. Johnson was hired by Park to investigate the 1919 race riot in Chicago, probably the worst

of that “Red Summer’s” series of attacks by white mobs on black communities.

15. Roosevelt sought to mediate between his friend Madison Grant’s biologistic (and in some

ways proto- fascist) Aryanism, on the one hand, and the radical potentialities he saw in mass

movements of immigrants on the other. Hence TR urged deliberate “Americanization”

programs through schooling and other public policies, and embraced the “melting pot.”

Roosevelt’s anti- black racism was mild, far less than that of his fellow progressive Wood-

row Wilson, who was still fi ghting the Civil War as the Virginia confederate he had been in

his youth. Wilson not only celebrated the fi lm Birth of a Nation in 1915, but the following

year ran for reelection on a nativist platform, calling for restrictions on immigration and

explicitly red- baiting immigrant groups and organizations. For Wilson too, only immi-

grants who adapted to “true American” cultural norms could be accepted.

16. Kallen was a lifelong advocate of Jewish causes and a strong early Zionist. One of the

founders of the New School for Social Research, he was also close friends with Alain

Locke, whom he knew from Harvard and later worked with in New York. The origins of the

term “cultural pluralism,” and Kallen’s own beginnings with the idea, are linked to Jew-

ish student struggles for recognition around the turn of the 20th century (Greene 2011).

Despite his celebration of what we today would call “diversity” and his apparent lack of

personal racism, Kallen never addressed African- American issues or took a pro- civil rights

stand. “Kallen’s ‘symphony of civilizations,’ despite its apparent inclusiveness, excluded

people of color— African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans,”

writes Gerald Meyer (2012).

17. At the American Museum of Natural History Boas had to combat the eugenicism of Madi-

son Grant and the elite racism of Henry Fairfi eld Osborn, the paleontologist who became

the Museum’s President and chief primatologist (Haraway 1990). For a history of race in

American anthropology, see Baker 1998.

18. Achieving whiteness serves as the desirable end- state of immigration, as it did for Park’s

cycle. This “default” operates in cultural pluralism accounts as well; there the desirable

end- state is white recognition and tolerance for the former “others”; multiculturalism and

diversity programs work in this direction as well. See Jung 2009.

19. The racial orientation of the New Deal was contradictory at best. FDR’s coalition

included both northern liberals and southern Dixiecrats. Roosevelt sought to accommo-

date both groups. He placated the South (and other racist allies) by excluding blacks from

Social Security and the Wagner Act in 1935, exempting domestic and agricultural workers

from labor regulation, resisting anti- lynching law proposals, and limiting the scope of

welfare. He also maintained restrictive and racist immigration controls. Roosevelt ges-

tured toward racial liberals by taking small steps toward integration, particularly as the

war approached: most notably, he integrated defense industries by executive order, a move

prompted by threats of black protest led by trade unionist A. Philip Randolph. As indus-

trial employment and the demand for black and brown labor increased in the North and

West, a combination of demographic shifts, unionization of blacks and Latinos in the CIO,

Ethnicity 49

women’s entry into industrial work, and linked voting shifts outside the South, deepened

the Democratic Party’s racial divisions. See Katnelson 2013; Klinkner and Smith 2002;

Sitkoff 1978; Vargas 2007; Weiss 1983.

20. In the United States, World War II was anti- racist on the Atlantic front but decidedly racist

on the Pacifi c front. See our discussion of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, below.

21. Unless otherwise stated, we use the term “liberal” here in the colloquial U.S. sense, mean-

ing “center- left.”

22. The Magnuson Act was a complex business. On the one hand, it recognized China as an

ally in the anti- Japanese war; refocusing anti- Asian racism away from Chinese and more

intensely onto Japanese and Japanese Americans. In no way, however, did it relax the anti-

Asian Johnson– Reed immigration law, which had been in eff ect since 1924 and allowed only

105 Chinese immigrants to enter the country per year. Asian exclusion was not reduced until

the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ( Hart– Celler). See Ngai 2005.

Notably, numerous states (including California) maintained anti- miscegenation laws that

prohibited Asians from marrying whites. Some of these laws were repealed or struck down in

the late 1940s; some lasted until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all anti- miscegenation

laws in Loving v. Virginia (1967). See Spiro 2009.

23. Kikuchi had been a student at Berkeley— he was expelled in 1942 and was subsequently

interned under EO 9066 (Briones 2013).

24. On these heroic fi gures, see Hirabayashi 1999.

25. The U.S. Congress passed, and President Ronald Reagan signed, the Civil Liberties Act

of 1988, which stated that Executive Order 9066 was “unjust and motivated by racism

rather than real military necessity.” A second apology and further reparations were issued

in 1992. For a good general account see Weglyn 1996 (1976).

26. The study has a monumental history of its own. See Stanfi eld 1985; Southern 1987;

Jackson 1990. Black reaction to the Myrdal volume varied signifi cantly. E. Franklin Fra-

zier heaped praise upon the work. Myrdal, he wrote, “revealed a remarkable facility for

getting the feel of the racial situation in the United States. His objectivity was apparent

from the very beginning in his relations with Negroes. They were simply people to him”

(Frazier 1945, 557). Ralph Ellison’s review— written in 1944 but not published until 1964

in Ellison’s Shadow and Act — was deeply critical: “It does not occur to Myrdal,” Ellison

writes, “that many of the Negro cultural manifestations which he considers merely refl ec-

tive might also embody a rejection of what he considers ‘higher values.’” Du Bois had

been largely excluded from the project due to his radicalism; he was properly off ended.

The study’s collaborators included, among many others, Arnold Rose and Richard Sterner

(Myrdal’s secondary authors), Ralph Bunche (Myrdal’s principal associate and guide),

Doxey Wilkerson, Sterling A. Brown, St. Clair Drake, E. Franklin Frazier, Melville J. Her-

skovits, Otto Klineberg, Edward Shils, and Louis Wirth. Consultants acknowledged were

W.E.B. Du Bois, Horace Cayton, Robert E. Park, W.I. Thomas, Hortense Powdermaker,

John Dollard, Alain Locke, Walter White, Abram L. Harris, and Ruth Benedict.

27. The Myrdal book was explicitly about “the Negro problem”; Myrdal only discussed blacks

and whites; he had nothing to say about other racialized groups.

28. Myrdal’s theory of “cumulative and circular development” appeared in an early form in An

American Dilemma (1962 [1944]), 1065–1070. It was developed further in later writings on

global inequality (Myrdal 1963) and as an economic analysis oriented toward progressive

50 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

redistribution of resources. Explicitly pragmatist, this account is counterposed to “vicious

circle” explanations of racism (“prejudice”) and poverty. Though primarily crafted to urge

intervention against inequality, the theory also seeks to explain the breakdown of political

systems based on unstable equilibria, and the reiterative dynamics of struggles against

them.

29. See Myrdal 927ff . Frazier remained both a radical and a committed assimilationist:

Since the institutions, the social stratifi cation, and the culture of the Negro com-

munity are essentially the same as those of the larger community, it is not strange

that the Negro minority belongs among the assimilationist rather than the plural-

ist, secessionist, or militant minorities. It is seldom that one fi nds Negroes who

think of themselves as possessing a diff erent culture from whites and that their

culture should be preserved. (Frazier 1957a, 681)

His position derived from an insistence on political engagement with the questions of race

and racism, which he traced back to Du Bois. See Platt 1991.

30. The papers were published under MacIver’s editorship in 1949.

31. Robert Merton, personal communication.

32. Portions of this section appeared in diff erent form in Winant 2007.

33. For additional commentary see Kryder 2001; for a valuable fi ctionalized account, see Kil-

lens 1983 (1963).

34. This essay, “Prejudice: A Problem in Psychological and Social Causation,” is an early ver-

sion of Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice (1979 [1954]), a work that was to have a signifi cant

impact in social psychology.

35. The Negro American (1967) was initially a two- issue collection published in the journal Dae-

dalus. It later went through several book- length editions. References here are to the 1967

Beacon edition. The contrast between the perspectives of black and white contributors to

the book is quite notable. Clark’s introduction to the volume, The Dilemma of Power, and

John Hope Franklin’s essay in the volume, The Two Worlds of Race , are standouts. Other

critical black voices included are those of Martin Kilson, St. Clair Drake, and Whitney

Young. Only Young, Director of the National Urban League, takes a “moderate” position.

36. Du Bois had never hesitated to make this connection, and had particularly emphasized it

in Black Reconstruction (2007 [1935]).

37. The scandalous McCarthyite harassment (and at one point, indictment) of the octoge-

narian Du Bois in the 1950s occurred without notable protest from within the fi eld. FBI

surveillance extended to such mainstream fi gures as Samuel Stouff er, Herbert Blumer,

Robert Bellah, Robert and Helen Lynd, E. Franklin Frazier, Alfred McClung Lee, and,

of course, C. Wright Mills. Some leading sociologists, we know, cooperated with witch-

hunters, most notably Pitirim Sorokin; but most remained cautious, at least through the

late 1940s and 1950s (Lipset 1994; Keen 1999). Mass dismissals did occur on occasion and

surveillance was very widespread (Slaughter 1980). Particular attention was being paid to

area studies: notably Russia and China, but also to the insurgent “third world” (Simpson,

ed., 1999; for parallels in anthropology, see Price 2004). A striking aspect of a great deal of

this late 1940s–1950s academic repression and red- baiting was how much of it related to

race. A major signal to the FBI, HUAC, and other similar agencies that a given scholar or

teacher was ripe for purging, or at least needed watching, was that he or she participated

in anti- racist activities or attended mixed- race events. A certain cold- war orthodoxy was

Ethnicity 51

mandatory; this in itself resulted in a muting of sociological criticism of U.S. racism. For

larger treatments of the links between the Cold War and the civil rights movement, see

Kelley 2008 (1999); Borstelmann 2003; Dudziak 2011.

38. The battles of the McCarthy period lamentably engulfed the black movement as well, as

W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and others were denounced as pariah fi gures, and racial

“moderates” strove to distance themselves from them.

39. In a later edited work, Glazer and Moynihan (1975) did try to address the comparative

sociology of race (in their framework, “ethnicity”). By this time, structural- functionalist

approaches to race were eff ectively dead, though. Neoconservatism was emerging as the

inheritor of both Parsons and Myrdal.

40. A partial exception here was the very controversial 1965 “Moynihan Report,” formally

titled “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action,” and prepared by then-

Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Rainwater and Yancey, eds. 1967).

Moynihan provided a stilted reading of an important study by E. Franklin Frazier to argue

that female- dominated black families did not adequately socialize young black men to

the work ethic, leading to high rates of black male unemployment and crime. The source

of this problem was traced to slavery’s assault on the black family. Although appropri-

ately attacked on numerous grounds— for misreading Frazier, for misunderstanding the

strength of black family ties under and after slavery (Gutman 1976; see also Wilson 2009b),

for “blaming the victim,” for gender bias, and for neglecting larger social structures of

racism, the report was at its core a proper liberal document, urging the Johnson adminis-

tration to focus energy and attention on job- creation and job- training in the ghetto.

41. In fact it is striking how little attention ethnicity- based theories of race have devoted to the

American Indian. See Rogin 1996; Drinnon 1997.

42. Still later, writing in retirement, Glazer (1997) provided some self- criticism of his own

earlier racial views.

43. Not the “majority.” In many areas of the country, whites are no longer the majority. Even

if the local or regional population is not majority white, however, conformity with white

norms is still understood as a prerequisite for assimilation under the colorblind standards

of neoconservatism, the contemporary form of the ethnicity- based theory of race. For this

reason we refer here to “normalized” white society, rather than uncritically adopting the

white majority/nonwhite minority framework.

44. Probably the most straightforward application of this set of assumptions is Sowell 1995.

Sowell treats racial/ethnic groups as equivalent and internally homogeneous; in a largely

decontextualized fashion. He equates the cultural norms attributed to various groups with

their access (or lack of access) to “human capital,” seen as the key to well- being and pros-

perity. Though Sowell’s treatment of these issues is quite shallow, he is far from alone in

his insistence on the “bootstraps model.”

45. See among a welter of possible sources, Clark 1965; Stack 1974; Gwaltney 1980; Kasinitz

1992; Gregory 1998; Bobo et al., eds. 2002.

This page intentionally left blank

53

C H A P T E R 2

Class

Introduction

The class paradigm of race includes those approaches which, in Stuart Hall’s char-

acterization, argue that “Social divisions which assume a distinctively racial or ethnic

character can be attributed or explained principally by reference to economic struc-

tures and processes” (Hall 1980, 306). The class paradigm of race includes schools of

thought running from right to left, but they all aff ord primacy to economic relation-

ships: market exchange, distribution, production. A central objective of this chapter

is to review and critique class- based theories of race.

Our adoption of Hall’s formulation truly opens up a Pandora’s box. To equate his

“economic structures and processes” with class, whether understood in the  Marxian

sense of relationship to the means of production, or in the Weberian sense of relation-

ship to the mode of distribution (giving rise to particular “life chances”), is to make

a certain analytic leap (Gerth and Mills 1958, 181–183). Indeed there is a significant

economic literature on race, exemplified by the “neoclassical” approach of Nobel

laureate Gary Becker and many other Chicago economists, that does not recognize

the existence of classes at all, but confines itself narrowly to market relationships.

This view overlaps with the paleoeconomic “Austrian” 1 perspective of Hayek, Fried-

man 2 et al., also tied to Chicago, that has informed the anti- statism of neoliberalism.

How, then, do we define the class paradigm of race, and how can the variety of

approaches which emphasize “economic structures and processes” in their analyses

of racial phenomena be categorized, linked, and compared? 3 Once we recognize that

class theories principally explain race by reference to economic processes, understood

in the standard sense of the production, exchange, and consumption of commodities,

that brings inequality to the table. Once we are dealing with any sort of inequality—

unequal exchange, unequal allocation of resources, exploitation in labor, or equivalent

relationships—we have a “class” system, although particular analysts might pre-

fer not to use this designation. Therefore, in the broad terms we have employed to

describe the paradigm, these are class theories, even if the authors assume the exis-

tence of a totally free market (Becker’s starting point is international trade!). Such

“institutional” economists as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, and Jeffrey Sachs

clearly recognize this (Stiglitz 2001 [1944]; Krugman 2008).

This is how the class paradigm of race is constituted, in the broadest possible sense.

We suggest that there are three general approaches to racial formation contained within

it. We designate these as the market, stratification, and class conflict approaches. These

54 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

three approaches ground themselves in the different economic spheres: in exchange

relationships (markets), in systems of distribution (stratification), and in conflict over

production processes (in Marxist terms, conflict over the “social relations of produc-

tion”), to provide their respective frameworks of analysis.

In this chapter we review and critique class- based theories of race, moving

through the class paradigm’s varieties: market- , stratification- , and production/

labor- based accounts. These roughly correspond to a right- to- left political spec-

trum: neoliberal theories (“Austrian,” Chicago- based) emphasize the significance of

exchange relationships and market- based approaches in explaining racial inequality;

Marxism- based theories focus more on the role of production relationships and labor

in shaping race; while U.S. “liberals”— mostly located on the center- left— focus on

stratification/inequality- based accounts of race that emphasize distribution and the

role of the state.

But this is only a rough correspondence. A number of civil rights organizations

are oriented to markets, for example, the PUSH organization and the Urban League.

These groups and parallel organizations in Latin@ communities represent the sub-

stantial black and brown business sectors and their markets, the professional and

“striving” sectors, and even some of the “coping stratum” (Kilson and Cottingham

1991) of blacks and Latin@s today. On the Marxist left today (and throughout the

left’s history), there have been “colorblind” currents that seek to minimize or even

ignore racial inequality, instead focusing their attention entirely (or nearly entirely)

on class. Across the ideological spectrum from right to left there are peculiar overlaps

and concurrences about the relationship between race and class. Eliminating or mini-

mizing the significance of race is a feature of the laissez- faire positions associated with

neoliberalism and Chicago economics. This idea is also associated with “colorblind”

racial ideology and was featured in some pioneering civil rights movement positions.

Class- based theories of race, in short, traverse the political spectrum.

The Market Relations Approach

Market relations approaches deal with the social exchange of resources such as labor

and credit. Racial inequality— like all forms of inequality— is anomalous in market

settings. In the 1950s and 1960s, debates around the nature of racial inequality in the

United States revealed some glaring problems in market- based economic models:

They lacked the capacity to explain racial discrimination as a market phenomenon.

Indeed, the predominant economic model of the time, neoclassical theory, suggested

that the market itself, unhampered by an interventionist state, would eliminate racial

discrimination. Writers such as Milton Friedman argued that this was in fact taking

place (Friedman 2002 [1962], 108–110).

A more accurate account would note that race was simply outside the awareness

of the economics field. As elsewhere, racial inequality was an assumed condition,

beneath the interest of economic explanation. To cite but one (prominent) example:

Class 55

In his extremely well- known article, “Economic Development with Unlimited Sup-

plies of Labor” (1954, 139–191), W. Arthur Lewis did not emphasize the means by

which these unlimited supplies became available. 4 The discovery of the problem of

racial discrimination came later; economics, which had largely seen inequality as eter-

nal and natural where race was concerned, was finally troubled by the civil rights

movement, but only in the 1960s.

The field was challenged by the upheavals of the postwar civil rights struggle, but

civil rights introduced political variables that could not be accommodated within the

“neoclassical” model. Three sources of market disequilibrium, potentially capable of

generating racial inequality, were proposed: an irrational prejudice or “taste for dis-

crimination”; monopolistic practices, which grant “privileges” or “special benefits”

to strategically placed groups, and hence create various interests and incentives for

maintaining (or transforming) racial inequality; and disruptive state practices which

interfere with the supposed equilibrating tendencies of the market (Becker 1971

[1957]; Williams 1982).

Focus on each of these three destabilizing forces generated three different (but

related) accounts of the social dynamics of race. Note that all these accounts intro-

duce a non- economic independent variable, which they argue disrupts the “normal”

equilibrium of the market.

The irrational prejudice model attributes inequality to a white “taste for discrimi-

nation,” essentially a sociocultural variable. In the socially disembedded economy

presumed by neoclassical economics, discrimination would be irrational and costly

to its practitioners. Therefore this model suggests that a society segregated into black

and white sectors, linked as “trading partners” but separated by white “distaste” for

blacks, 5 will be gradually integrated by market pressures. This was the analysis offered

by (Nobel laureate) Gary Becker (1971 [1957]; see also Friedman 2002 [1962]). Per-

haps the most “liberally” inclined Chicago- school economics don, Becker further

amended his markets- only orientation in the 1971 revision of his book, to suggest

that this “natural” overcoming of the “taste” will occur only if countervailing irratio-

nalities can be tamed by limited and judicious state interventionism. Becker’s model

thus includes a place for the state to intervene usefully— though still on the side of

re- equilibrating markets, of course. This puts him on the “left” side of market- based

approaches to race. 6

The monopolistic practices model suggests a society structured in the interests of all

whites, who gain through a systematic transfer of resources from non whites in a wide

variety of fields. Whites, for example, can receive wages above the marginal utility

rate for their labor and benefit from discriminatory pricing practices. Whites become

de facto rentiers (landlords) who derive benefits from their ownership or control of

resources: access to jobs, business licenses, union cards, and the like. Whiteness is

itself a resource: there is a white monopoly or “cartel” that operates comprehen-

sively across U.S. society, as much locally as nationally. It imposes inequalities in

labor, capital, and consumption goods markets in order to maximize white gain.

56 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

Competition over scarce resources motivates whites to act in exclusionary or dis-

criminatory ways (i.e., monopolistically) toward people of color. This combines with

such extra- economic resources as the authorized use of violence (racial harassment

and profiling; state- based violence via policing, courts, prison) to place obstacles

between people of color and access to a “free” market. All forms of exchange are

involved: Access to food, housing, and basic services, for example, is truncated; what

is available is elevated in price (“the poor pay more,” and poverty is more prevalent

among people of color). This amounts to a “race tax” that directs benefits to whites:

for example, higher rents collected by white landlords, or steeper credit terms of

mortgage rates offered to blacks or Latin@s, or real estate “steering.” 7 Furthermore,

the stresses and vulnerabilities associated with these practices— fear of public offi-

cials or police, anticipation of profiling or stereotype threat, pressure to “act white”

(Steele 2010; Carbado and Gulati 2013)— also impose costs. According to this model

various racial inequalities— even seeming political or cultural conflicts about affirma-

tive action, profiling, or racial disparities in sentencing practices— can be explained

by reference to imputed monopolistic market- based interests. 8

In the disruptive state interventionism model, class/racial inequality is generated

by state action on behalf of some racially defined group. There are several differ-

ent versions of this account, each with its own ideological baggage. A laissez- faire,

free market account accuses state policies such as minimum wage laws, labor laws,

licensing procedures in labor- intensive trades (barbering, taxi- driving, trucking),

and importantly, affirmative action, of disrupting market equilibrium and depriv-

ing people of the opportunity to compete fairly (Williams 1982; see also Katznelson

2005). 9 Such policies are to distort the market— here the labor market— on behalf of

powerful political actors. Historically, they developed to assist whites in insulating

their jobs from nonwhite competition; today in the form of affirmative action, they

operate to assist nonwhites. In this account, people of color and capital share an

interest in free market economics, which the state and white workers act to obstruct.

Partially overlapping with this is the “split labor- market” account, a neo- Marxist

position that also emphasizes the actions of “dominant” (white) workers in protect-

ing their jobs and wages from “subordinate” (nonwhite) workers’ competition. We

discuss this below in the section about class conflict- based class theories of race.

Historically, struggles over control of labor, as well as over taxes, property rights,

and other principally economic matters”— “political class struggle”— developed as

industrial capitalism took hold in the United States. In this country— perhaps above

all others— these conflicts were racially inflected. Before the Civil War, there was only

a nascent working class in the strict sense of the term; white men were yeomen in the

rural areas and artisans in the towns; work for wages emerged out of contract labor.

Workshops and sweatshops appeared in the 1820s in New England, New York, and

elsewhere (Dawley 2000 [1975]; Wilentz 2004 [1984]). There was a large number of

enslaved black laborers, and (from the 1840s on) a semi- racialized group of impover-

ished and barely integrated immigrants, the Irish. “Native” white workers had been

Class 57

mobilized in the 1840s and 1850s against the Irish. After emancipation, both they and

the (now- integrated) Irish feared competition from cheap black labor. In the West,

Asian immigrants played the same threatening role. By the end of Reconstruction in

1877, each of these potentially explosive conflicts had been contained by a combina-

tion of state action and state- sanctioned political violence.

In the United States, the state has always regulated capitalist development by

means of race- based law and racial policy- making. This has been evident in labor

law, but operates in other spheres as well. For example, many previously margin-

alized Irish immigrants had fought in the Civil War, 10 obtaining citizenship and

state recognition as a result. New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, among other

cities, incorporated them into the Democratic Party machine politics of the period,

directing city jobs their way and harvesting their votes in return (Katznelson 2005;

Roediger 2005). Efforts to regulate labor conditions, form trade unions, and disci-

pline capital were struck down by the Supreme Court— for example, in the Lochner

case (U.S. Supreme Court 1905)— based on due- process arguments grounded in the

14th amendment, which had been designed to protect emancipated slaves’ citizen-

ship rights. Anti- Chinese riots on the West Coast in 1877 were quickly translated

into state policy: The Chinese Exclusion Act was signed in 1882 11 and the California

Chinese were driven out of hundreds of cities and towns by armed mobs, often led by

police and state officials with torches and pitchforks ready to hand (Pfaelzer 2008).

Exclusionist policies vis- à- vis Asian labor were soon firmly in place. After the Plessy

decision in 1896 (and in many ways before), Jim Crow was institutionalized as state

racial policy, severely curtailing black labor’s competitive threat to whites (and also

holding down white wages). In the South after Reconstruction’s end in 1877, convict

leasing was institutionalized by the state as a form of peonage on farms and in facto-

ries (Blackmon 2009).

Market exchange theories of race necessarily try to reconcile racial inequality with

the equilibrium assumptions of their model, but as we show here, this is not really pos-

sible. In market theories, discrimination is irrational because it increases labor costs, so

it should be driven out of the market by the force of competition itself. Its persistence

can only be explained, therefore, by the extra- economic dimensions of racial formation:

notably coercion and state action. Market approaches conceive of racial phenomena

rather monolithically in terms of (in)equality and discrimination in exchange. Racial

interests are either cast in these terms or assumed to be irrational.

Certain elements of the market- based approach overlap with views deriving from

other paradigms. For example, the disruptive state interventionism model agrees

with “colorblind” theories that racial policies should be guided by principles of

individualism, and opposes demands for “equality of result.” In similar fashion, the

monopolistic practices model shares certain elements with nation- based analyses of

race, especially those that stress the operation of “white privilege” or of a “colonial

labor principle” which allocates rights and resources differentially to groups on the

basis of race. There are innumerable theoretical coincidences, along with patterns of

58 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

agreement and influence, in the vast literature on race. These resemblances, how-

ever, should not be mistaken for theoretical accord. Market- based theories (which are

class- oriented, economic theories) are based on quite different perceptions of what

race means than are ethnicity- or nation- based approaches.

Stratification Theory

Stratifi cation approaches deal with the social distribution of resources— chiefl y

though not exclusively economic ones. Individuals receiving roughly equal incomes,

or partaking of equal quantities of wealth, are deemed to have similar “life chances”

and located in similar positions in the ranked hierarchy of classes. 12 Varying degrees

of social mobility are postulated among the ranks of a racial hierarchy and numerous

non- economic factors are seen as shaping the stratifi cation system’s maintenance and

modifi cation over time. Social networks, informal ties, elite recruitment, caste- like

barriers or other forms of extra- market means of allocation of resources, often play

a role here.

Politics are also a crucial factor. In stratification theory the relationships of elites

and masses, the dynamics of authority systems and forms of domination, and the overall

shape of sociopolitical conflict are central preoccupations. In most respects these extra-

economic factors reinforce the distribution dynamic. Patterns of elite rule, for example,

are frequently traced back to the distribution of economic resources.

Especially since the civil rights movement challenged the racial inequality that

had been taken for granted (especially by whites) throughout U.S. history, there has

been unending debate on the dynamics of racial stratification. What accounts for its

persistence and depth? In what ways does it parallel and in what ways does it diverge

from class stratification? There is no real dispute on its extent and depth: In a deeply

unequal society, whose class- based disparities in wealth and income distribution

greatly exceed all other countries at equivalent levels of “development”— Western

Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia— inequalities along racial lines are far greater still.

Whatever variable one chooses: wealth/income (in)equality, health outcomes, access

to/returns to education, segregation by residence or occupation, rates of surveil-

lance or punishment by the criminal “justice” system, or many other indicators that

compare racial “life- chances,” one finds strikingly persistent patterns. Black unem-

ployment and poverty are consistently double that of whites (and increase greatly if

we factor in incarceration). Median black wealth now stands at about 5 percent of

white wealth, an appalling statistic. Disparities between whites and Latin@s, whites

and Native Americans, and whites and some (not all) Asian American groups also

remain very deep. 13

Almost all the discussion of racial stratification is framed along the race versus

class divide, although serious efforts have been made in sociology to synthesize the

two axes of inequality in various theories of “eth- classes”; these run all the way from

Milton Gordon’s assimilation- oriented account (1964) to James Geschwender’s

Class 59

neo- Marxist one (1977). There is a profound tendency to reify these two dimensions

of inequality, which makes synthesis difficult social scientifically.

In experiential terms, of course, inequality is not differentiated by race or class.

Impoverishment is concretely about suffering, whether it derives from race- based

discrimination or class- based unemployment or superexploitation, or as is more

likely, from a combination of the two. We consider all stratification- based accounts to

be located within the class paradigm of race, because they all seek to explain measur-

able differences in “life- chances” by race. Here we compare two leading currents:

class- based accounts, represented by the extensive work of William J. Wilson on this

subject; versus race- based accounts, as embodied by the equally large body of work on

this theme by Douglas S. Massey. These distinguished researchers’ positions define

the parameters of the stratification approach and encompass much, if not all, of the

key work on racial inequality in the contemporary United States.

William J. Wilson made his foundational statement with The Declining Signifi-

cance of Race (2012 [1978]), which he then followed up with The Truly Disadvantaged

(2012 [1987]). His earlier work on race, Power, Racism, and Privilege, had been politi-

cal sociological and comparative, with the United States and South Africa serving

as his principal cases (Wilson 1973). 14 But Declining Significance shifted the focus

in the later 1970s toward a center- left class analysis, and set the stage for Wilson’s

entire later oeuvre. The book addressed problems of racial inequality in the context of

deindustrialization, as well as interpreting emerging class cleavages within the black

community as functions of limited but real civil rights era reforms. Wilson accepted

an economically determined theory of race- based stratification for previous epochs

of U.S. history (an “economic system,” he wrote, shaped the “polity” and thereby

structured and enforced “racial norms”). He argued, however, that the civil rights

reforms of the 1960s had allowed the state to develop “autonomy” in handling racial

problems (2012 [1978], 17). According to Wilson, although black life- chances were

formerly determined by racial stratification, after 1965 (that is, after the main civil

rights reforms) they were shaped directly by class recomposition. After state- enforced

racial inequality was eliminated by civil rights legislation, blacks were admitted to the

society- wide system of stratification, rather than being confined by segregation and

exclusion to limited numbers of jobs. But a mismatch arose in the cities, as manu-

facturing shrank and the remaining industrial work, as well as administrative labor,

moved away. White flight, capital flight, and a widespread lack of both blue-collar

and white-collar skills condemned most blacks to an “underclass” stranded in the

ghetto. The black community was further stratified as well: A small privileged “class”

emerged whose opportunities and status were effectively equivalent to those of whites

with similar, high levels of training and skills. While a significant number of blacks

obtained what were essentially middle- class jobs— many in the public sector— the

massive black “underclass” was relegated to permanent marginality.

Echoing Bayard Rustin’s “From Protest to Politics” (1964), Wilson argued that

transracial alliances within the Democratic Party would best be able to combat the

60 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

emerging austerity of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as to confront the developing racial

reaction of the Republicans. By the time Wilson’s book first appeared (1978), however,

that reactionary trend had been underway for a decade at least. Nixon’s “southern

strategy” had driven a racial wedge into U.S. class politics, deepening political divi-

sions that had long histories: white workers who had previously flirted with George

Wallace and would soon become known as “Reagan democrats” were resonating with

the Republicans’ code words of “law and order” and anti- welfarism. They were not

inclined to make common cause with inner- city blacks. Wilson’s call for state policies

that would counteract deepening class cleavages in the black community fell on deaf

ears in the Democratic Party. For instance his support for an expansion of day care

services available to low- income single mothers (Wilson 1980, 161) went nowhere.

Cowed by Republican arguments against more state “giveaways” to be funded by

hard working (i.e., white) people’s tax dollars, destined for black “welfare queens,”

whose children’s fathers were probably in jail or ought to be (Edsall and Edsall 1992;

Hancock 2004), Democrats barely defended welfare rights or even civil rights after

the advent of Reagan.

Leaving aside Wilson’s framework of a 1960s shift from race- based to class- based

explanations of black inequality (Pettigrew 1980; Steinberg 2001), other serious ques-

tions remain about Declining Significance. Wilson argued that since the mid- 1960s a

genuinely egalitarian racial state had existed in the United States, and that support

for its policies was now a permanent feature of U.S. politics. If the turn to the right

that began under “Nixonland” did not undermine this idea, later developments—

such as Bill Clinton’s 1996 “welfare reform”— did not reinforce Wilson’s benign view

of state racial policy either. 15

Wilson’s argument that the contemporary black community was now stratified

into a relatively small privileged class and a large black “underclass” implied that

race was no longer a salient linkage between those who have “made it” and their less

fortunate “underclass” counterparts. While that position may have appeared plau-

sible at the time, today the condition of the black middle class seems more fragile, not

less, as job losses in the public sector have accelerated and the already huge chasms

of income and wealth distribution have deepened enormously (Oliver and Shapiro

2006; Woldoff and Ovadia 2009; Rugh and Massey 2010; Squires and Hyra 2010;

McKernan et al. 2011; Taylor et al. 2012). The distribution of wealth remains tied to

race in increasingly brutal ways.

Wilson’s empirical findings are not really in dispute. It is his conceptual frame-

work that has attracted opposition: the notion that class divides have superseded

racial ones within the black community. In more recent books and articles, Wilson

has focused on what happens “when work disappears” (1997). A tremendous amount

of literature has documented urban poverty and explored the conditions of the urban

poor in the aftermath of deindustrialization (Edin and Lein 1997; Brown 1999;

Duneier 2000; Newman 2000; Anderson 2009; Conley 2009). Even before the mas-

sive job losses and regressive redistributions of wealth that accompanied the Great

Class 61

Recession after 2008, black (and brown) positions in the U.S. stratification system

were shaky, both for middle- and lower- strata households. As middle- class, “coping

stratum” teachers, postal workers, and other public- sector workers faced cutbacks,

low- and semi- skilled workers in the private sector were decimated by outsourcing.

The educational and job opportunities available to middle- class blacks are located

disproportionately in the public sector. These positions were largely created as a

result of civil rights reforms as well as other 1960s shifts to more inclusive social poli-

cies and redistributive measures. 16 Furthermore, many middle- class blacks work in

industries and economic sectors whose economic and political raison d’être is linked to

those masses. Government workers, educators, and other tertiary sector workers, for

example, may have achieved middle- class status and incomes, but their employment

relates directly to the management, marketing, and servicing of the black community

as a whole. 17 In addition, the repressive state apparatus (to borrow Althusser’s phrase)

employs millions of people of color, mainly with the purpose of controlling or brutal-

izing other people of color. Lots of whites are employed in this work too, of course;

we’re talking about the police, prison guards, and the armed forces, together with

their huge infrastructural and logistical bases. 18

Black personal, familial, and community ties, not class- based ones, continue to

connect the middle- class (or formerly middle- class) and lower- class strata, though

Wilson’s claims about deepening stratification within the black community remain

accurate. Feeble attempts on the part of a few neoconservative black intellectuals to

rally better- off blacks to the conservative banner have not availed. 19 Forty years of

neoliberalism, first appearing during the Nixon years and then continuing largely

unchecked— though mildly impeded by Carter, Clinton, and Obama— until the onset

of the Great Recession in 2008, have massively eroded whatever evidence existed for

black upward mobility. Ongoing assaults on the welfare state (by Democrats as well as

Republicans), underfunding of public education, and restriction of health and social

security benefits as well have proven detrimental, not only to the black “underclass,”

but to middle- class blacks as well. 20

In a recent book, More Than Just Race (2009a), Wilson has largely abandoned his

agenda of a cross- class alliance against poverty, no doubt because of the deep politi-

cal polarization that now shapes U.S. debates about such matters as redistribution

and public investment. Written before the election of Obama, the book renews and

deepens Wilson’s long- standing argument that racial inequality (black poverty) is

the consequence of deindustrialization and globalization, most notably induced by

“impersonal economic forces, which sharply increased joblessness and declining real

wages among many poor African Americans in the last several decades” (2009a, 6).

In other words, as Sidney Willhelm (1970) said a generation earlier, “who needs

the negro?” In response to these conditions, Wilson argues, poor blacks have adopted

a “culture of poverty”: since there are no jobs, drug- dealing and other criminal voca-

tions are the only alternatives for young men— with the very high likelihood of arrest

and incarceration. For young women, pregnancy and subsequent dependence on

62 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

what remains of the welfare state are all too often the only “careers” imaginable.

Wilson explains these conditions as “cultural” adaptations to the harsh “structural”

conditions of the ghetto (the “inner city”), explicitly invoking the legacies of Dan-

iel Patrick Moynihan, as well as Oscar Lewis’s “culture of poverty” theories. And,

once again, he argues for “race neutral” policies to overcome these dire conditions:

Minimum wage jobs programs akin to those of the New Deal, and vocational training

efforts as well are about the only recommendations he can envision in the effort to

overcome poverty and inequality. And while he recognizes that blacks are the main

victims of this dire situation, the relationship between poverty and race seems almost

incidental in his account: The global capitalist economy took the jobs away; only a

hardheaded social policy aimed at instilling a culture of higher motivation and greater

personal responsibility can restore hope in the ghetto.

In contrast to Wilson’s class- based account of the sources of racial inequal-

ity, Douglas S. Massey offers a race- based view. Massey grounds his research in

demographic and human geography- based approaches to race. Although his work

has focused extensively on segregation and anti- black racism, his career’s main

thematic emphasis has been on migration, particularly Mexican immigration to

the United States. Massey’s book American Apartheid (co- authored with Nancy A.

Denton 1993) was written as a fairly direct response to Wilson’s The Truly Disad-

vantaged. This was a breakthrough work on the subject of residential segregation,

addressing both its structure and consequences. Segregation was measured empiri-

cally, using dissimilarity indices that not only indicate the degree of black–white

“apartness” in given geographic areas (principally cities), but also show segregation

trends over time.

A few years earlier Massey had published an important book on immigration:

Return to Aztlán (Massey et al. 1987). This work was grounded in a transborder strati-

fication model, in which migrants were seen as situated, informed agents of their own

mobility and to some extent that of their communities.

Both books had an “ethnographic” dimension, but the focus in Apartheid was on

black isolation, exclusion, and separation, while that in Return was on brown initiative

and mobility. Race was a more peripheral matter in Return; in Apartheid it was central.

We see these two books— and Massey’s enormous subsequent work in both

areas— as the foundations of his extensive— indeed, career- long— effort to rework

the study of racial inequality in the United States. Both racial segregation and Mexi-

can migration have experienced shifting trajectories over the last decades. Although

there has been no qualitative shift in patterns of black–white racial segregation, mod-

erate declines in dissimilarity indices did occur during the 1990s and 2000s; these

were reversed after the crash of 2008 and the onset of the great recession, when black–

white racial inequalities expanded greatly. On the immigration side, ongoing increases

in the Latin@ population, led by Mexicans, have reshaped U.S. racial demography.

The earlier immigration reforms of 1965 and 1986, which both combined elements

of legalization with new restrictions, greatly increased the number of legal residents

Class 63

and citizens of Latin American ancestry. Legal immigration was restricted in 1996,

as a new wave of anti- immigrant hostility gathered force on the right- wing. New

restrictive policies enacted during that year in parallel with reductions in welfare

programs— both policies supported by Bill Clinton as part of his “triangulation”

strategy— resulted in a jump in the undocumented immigrant population. 21 Further

crackdowns and cutbacks, the emergence of a mass immigrants rights movement

(2006), and failed efforts at further immigration reform (2007) all complicated the

situation. Latin@s also suffered disproportionately in the great recession, and in

the present are experiencing levels of discrimination that parallel those of blacks,

although nowhere near the same extent of residential segregation.

Massey developed a theoretically grounded account of the U.S. stratification

system in his 2008 book Categorically Unequal. Here for the first time he compre-

hensively linked his understandings of anti- black and anti- brown racism, arguing

that the ongoing system of stratification in the United States can be traced back to

a systematic, “categorical” racial inequality that was endemic throughout U.S. his-

tory and that operated through a “socially defined process of exclusion” (6). Massey

argued that poverty, injustice, and human suffering, though shifting over time in

accord with state policy (levels of inequality substantially fell during the 1945–1975

period, he points out), nevertheless exhibit an ongoing longevity and depth that is

largely intractable. Inequality is the result of a combination of practices that he docu-

ments in detail: Social groups are framed conceptually through deeply ingrained

cognitive processes that in his view are of an intrinsic, biological nature. Massey’s

relatively recent turn to intrinsic/biological explanations for the operation of racial

difference strikes us as problematic. Immediate and preconscious perception of race,

he says, is rooted in the less evolved parts of the brain:

Emotions stored in the limbic system may be positive or negative, but when

they are associated with particular classes of people or objects they contribute

to prejudice, which is a predetermined emotional orientation toward indi-

viduals or objects….

(Massey 2008, 10, emphasis original; Wheeler and Fiske 2005)

Though closely tied to the implicit bias literature, Massey’s account exceeds that

framework by arguing that prejudice derives from ineluctable features of human biol-

ogy and evolution, rather than patterns of socialization, however deeply ingrained

over multiple generations. This is not a trivial diff erence; it suggests that racism (and

other forms of bias as well) are permanent and ineradicable, casting a shadow of deep

doubt over social construction- oriented accounts of race. We return to this debate—

which is of course quite extensive— in Chapter 4 .

On the social level, in Massey’s account human groups are understood as deserv-

ing or underserving, capable or incapable, fully human or inferior and despicable.

The latter “lend themselves to exploitation with relative impunity, [and] encoun-

ter few defenders in society” (2008, 244). Inequality is thus built into social

64 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

geography, patterns of labor, education, law enforcement, and citizenship, largely

through legitimated discrimination:

[S]tratification— the unequal allocation of material, symbolic, and emotional

resources among social categories— is accomplished by establishing social

mechanisms that operate according to one of two templates: exploitation or

opportunity hoarding. Exploitation is the expropriation of resources from an

out- group by members of an in- group, such that out- group members receive

less than full value for the resources they give up. Opportunity hoarding is the

monopolization by in- group members of access to resources so as to keep it

[sic] for themselves or charge rents to out- group members in return for access.

In contemporary America, the most common form of exploitation is discrimi-

nation within markets, and the most common form of opportunity hoarding is

exclusion from markets and resource- rich social settings.

(2008, 244)

Massey includes patterns of gender inequality and class inequality (“defi ned by

access to human capital, or more specifi cally, education” [2008, 252]) in his account,

and looks at inequality largely in terms of income, not wealth. 22 His emphasis on

long- standing, deeply entrenched patterns of inequality overlaps in many ways with

our claim that in the United States race is a “master category” of domination and

inequality. Where we diff er is over his reliance on a biologically grounded, cogni-

tively rooted basis for human equality, and indeed over his idea that inequality is the

basic framework through which race (and gender as well) should be understood. In

Massey’s view, the sociopolitical dimensions of race and racism play a secondary role

in structuring race; pride of place goes fi rst to the biological/evolutionary dynamics

of inequality (i.e., where the term “categorically” is grounded), with the economic

determinations running close behind (that’s the business about “discrimination

within markets” and “opportunity hoarding”).

As in the case of market- based theories, stratification theories overlap with view-

points originating in other paradigms. Where they emphasize “caste,” that is, the

closing- off of “mobility” in a status order with racial characteristics, they resemble

certain nation- based views that deny the potential for integration across racial (or col-

onizer/colonized) lines (Dollard 1937 and Warner and Srole 1976 [1947]). Massey’s

(2008) account of the “categorical” nature of inequality is an example here, especially

since he relies on that stubborn limbic system.

Where the stratification- based approach focuses on those characteristics of the

system which facilitate mobility, such as the avenues available to various minority

groups for economic advancement, it resembles ethnicity- based views. Shifting cul-

tural norms, adaptations to new conditions in the labor market or to new educational

opportunities, can allow improvements in SES for individuals, households, or even

Class 65

whole communities (Blalock 1967; Banton 1980). Wilson’s account is an example

here, with its stress on the significance of the civil rights reforms and its call for cross-

racial, class- based alliances.

A notable feature of stratification approaches is the absence of attention to the

political agency of people of color. Wilson thinks of racial politics in terms of the

elite- led class- based alliances he hoped to cultivate as an advisor to Clinton and

later, Obama. Massey’s views of Mexican immigrants as pragmatic opportunity-

maximizers, emphasized in much of his work on patterns of settlement, remittances,

labor patterns and the like, has more in common with rational choice approaches

than social movement ones, and is largely eclipsed by his “categorical” view, which

relegates more radical aspirations to the historical dustbin. The mass mobilizations

that challenged the Jim Crow system, that put millions of demonstrators in the streets

of hundreds of U.S. cities on May 1, 2006, to demand immigrants’ rights, that began

to shift U.S. voting patterns in a majority- minority direction well before the 2008

presidential election, do not figure in these accounts. Neither of these writers, despite

their immense contributions, can explain how egalitarian or social justice- oriented

transformations could ever occur, in the past, present, or future.

Class Conflict Theory

“Classical” Marxism never explicitly addressed issues of race and racial confl ict, but

it did consider the problems of division within the working class and the nature of

“national oppression.” Of course, Marxism has had a profound impact on the class-

based paradigm of race. As the modern civil rights movement developed after World

War II, its radical wing necessarily drew close to Marxist currents. The “old left,”

which included both the Communist Party and its rivals, had been deeply involved in

anti- racist struggles for decades. The “new left” was as much an off shoot of the civil

rights movement as it was a successor to communist and socialist currents of the past.

For both these broad currents, race and racism were central issues. 23

Despite their anti- racist orientation, however, Marxists had difficulties in explain-

ing racial inequality and racial conflict. This was because of the primacy of class in

Marxist theory. From a Marxist standpoint, the key relationship in capitalism is that

of production, the social relationship between the capitalist class and the working

class, the owners and the producers. Marxism explains racial conflict as occurring

within the “social relations of production,” that is, in terms of class conflict. So this

form of class theory begins with a class reductionist model driven by what C. Wright

Mills called a “labor metaphysic”: Racial conflict improperly divides the working

class, whose fundamental struggle requires solidarity. Workers of the world, unite!

Just as in the market- based approach racial division (discrimination) within

the labor force (the working class) appears disruptive to market forces and distorts

the price mechanism, so in the Marxist framework racial division (discrimination)

within the working class disrupts the class struggle and undermines (distorts) the

66 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

revolutionary process. Thus for decades the orthodox Marxist position was that “rac-

ism is the bosses’ tool.” Thus too the slogan, “Black and white, unite and fight.”

In the “post- civil rights” period this analysis took the form of labor market seg-

mentation studies. An exemplary book by Michael Reich, Racial Inequality (1981),

measured the effects of racial (in)equality on wage levels and on the distribution

of social spending in such areas as education and welfare. Reich showed that class

cohesion across racial lines correlated to higher wages, and that class segmentation

across racial lines depressed wages overall, though less so for whites than blacks. He

attempted to synthesize the class conflict and neoclassical modes of analysis. Here as

elsewhere, to develop this argument it was necessary to “bring the market back in.”

Concerned to emphasize the structural aspects of discrimination, Reich employed

the concept of “bargaining power theory.” Because a working class that lacks unity

will exercise less leverage over employers, Reich argued, “Capitalists benefit from

racial divisions whether or not they have individually or collectively practiced racial

discrimination” (Reich 1981, 269; see also Franklin 1991; Goldfield 1997; Roemer

2000; Martinot 2002). This analysis had much in common with the structural racism

accounts we discuss elsewhere in this book.

An alternative Marxist scenario was split labor market theory, which emphasized

white labor’s efforts to limit competition from lower- paid minority workers (Sax-

ton 1971; Bonacich 1972). Where unemployment is higher and competition from

low- waged labor greater, white workers tend to support discriminatory (or exclu-

sionist) policies even at the price of receiving lower wages themselves. This account

pointed to the extensive U.S. historical record of white working- class racism. Notably

it recognized that under conditions of high unemployment and slack demand for

labor— conditions that have become endemic in recent years— capitalists and non-

white workers have a common interest in maintaining a low- waged labor market.

The debate on the left between segmented and split, or class conflict vs. race

conflict, theories, has been around for decades. The resemblance of these approaches

to market- based theories of racial inequality is not surprising, because both accounts

rest upon extra- economic, coercive capabilities based not in the labor- capital

relationship— the “social relations of production” themselves— but rather in the

political power of one class or another, or one class segment or another, to inter-

vene in the labor market in defense of its interests. Historically, corporate influence

has achieved some victories in this structured- in conflict, and labor pressure has

achieved others. It is not coincidental, for example, that most “right- to- work” states

have been concentrated in the South; this was the result of the 1948 corporate victory

of passing the Taft– Hartley Act, and of overriding Truman’s veto of the law. 24 This

reinforces the “divide- and- conquer” argument. On the other hand, immigration

restriction has historically been a demand both of white mobs and white unions; this

orientation only began to shift in the 1970s as the consequences of the civil rights

reforms set in, especially the 1965 immigration reforms. 25 In the debates over immi-

gration law taking place as we write, many unions have taken positions supporting

Class 67

reform, especially public- sector unions with large numbers of immigrant members.

Other unions— notably craft unions, police unions, and prison guard unions in

California— have maintained their restrictionist positions (Zimring, Hawkins, and

Kamin 2003).

In most cases race conflict at the “point of production” is not involved in class

conflict approaches; this is a major limit on these arguments. There are some sit-

uations, however, where class conflict and race conflict do overlap very closely.

Discrimination at “the point of production” can be identified, for example in the

assignment of more dangerous or dirty work to workers of color (Oppenheimer 1974).

The huge struggles in the auto industry in the 1970s— mainly situated in Detroit—

pitted radical black workers not only against the big three auto makers (Ford, General

Motors, and Chrysler) but also against the white- led United Auto Workers union

(Geschwender 1977; Georgakas and Surkin 2012 [1975]). The Justice for Janitors

movement, based in the Service Employees International Union, conducted a series

of strikes that were explicitly anti- racist (Greenhouse 2006; Zlolniski 2006). 26 Impor-

tant as these combined race/class struggles have been, however, they were exceptions

to the secular trends of deindustrialization, increasing polarization of the racial

wealth/income gap, and relentless assaults upon unions that have characterized the

U.S. since the 1980s.

Some Critical Reflections on the Class Paradigm of Race

All three class- based approaches to race are limited by economic determinism. All

three approaches necessarily emphasize racial inequality as the defi ning feature of

race and the core dimension of racism. Their task then becomes explaining how race

operates economically, how it is generated and reproduced in the key economic rela-

tionships of market exchange, resource distribution, and class confl ict in production

itself. This is a valuable but more limited understanding of race, an approach that

reduces its importance to an ancillary aspect of inequality, an epiphenomenon of

class. While inequality is a fundamental dimension of race and racism, race can no

more be reduced to an economic matter than it can to a cultural or national one.

Political factors, violence, psychological elements, and numerous other social rela-

tionships shape economic life as much as they are shaped by it.

Still, the class paradigm makes indisputable contributions to racial formation

theory, principally by linking racial identity and racial collectivity to the most mate-

rial human questions: How do we create and sustain ourselves materially, practically?

Labor, food, health, housing, and education are central to the class paradigm. But put-

ting inequality at the center also has its limits. Class- based theories of race, whether

right, left, or in between, all always forced to look outside the economic sphere to obtain

their causal, or independent, variables. In order to explain racial inequality one must

turn to social and political processes and practices. One must re-embed the economy

in the society: Culture, politics, and collectivity all come back into play.

68 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

Labor, and particularly labor markets, play a central role in all three varieties of

the class paradigm. This is undoubtedly a result of economic thinking itself. Main-

stream economics, while riven by conflicting tendencies, while dreaming desperately

and recurrently of achieving a unified theory of the field, some form of “synthesis”

(the neoclassical synthesis, the Washington consensus), still clings to a view of mar-

kets as autonomous and self- regulated entities, “disembedded” as Karl Polanyi (2001

[1944]) famously argued, from social and political conditions. In the real world, mar-

kets cannot be understood in this way, especially after the Great Depression of the

1930s, the contributions of John Maynard Keynes, the emergence of social democ-

racy throughout the “developed” capitalist world, and the rise of the New Deal.

All the class- based approaches we have discussed— the market- , stratification- , and

class-conflict approaches— focus their attention on the role played by labor- market

processes in determining racial inequality.

Market/exchange- based approaches focus most directly on labor markets and try

to explain why discrimination and exclusion continue when, in strict “supply and

demand,” disembedded economic terms, such practices are inefficient and therefore

should be eliminated. Unable to account for these outcomes within their pure mar-

ket model, even such hardcore market theorists as Gary Becker and Thomas Sowell

have identified exogenous, non- economic causal or independent variables as shap-

ing discrimination, exclusion, and thus racism. Looked at more deeply, this calls into

question much of standard economic theory, not just racial theories of racial inequality.

Distribution/stratification- based approaches also focus on labor— on the demand

for black and brown labor— also determined by extra- economic factors. In William

J. Wilson’s view global economic pressures, combined with anti- racist political con-

flict (the civil rights movement and its elimination of official discrimination) have

reshaped the demand for black labor. In Douglas S. Massey’s view a deeply ingrained,

biologically based inequality shapes U.S. society (and human nature across the board),

ultimately generating power- holders’ strategies for the isolation of blacks and the

super- exploitation of Latin@s. Blacks’ labor is less required than it was previously;

it is more profitable to exploit blacks via the housing market— especially by using

their housing as poker- chips in global capital markets, and by stigmatizing, profiling,

and punishing them— than it is to invest in their labor, even at low wages, or in their

education. Latin@ labor is available at a bargain. It competes favorably with black

labor because it is not native; it is reproduced at low cost in the periphery. Latin@s

and Asians can integrate into U.S. society in ways that black people cannot, not only

because they are a lower- cost labor force, not only because in many cases they are closer

to phenotypic whiteness, but also because for many immigrants it is still possible to

remit wages, to subsidize a family in Mexico, Egypt, or Vietnam, say. 27 Here, once

again, extra- economic factors, such as global flows of immigrant labor and the central-

ity of race as a key social and political dimension of U.S. society, shape racial inequality.

Until quite recently, class- conflict/production- based approaches were also unduly

focused on labor. Older Marxist frameworks have been particularly limited by

Class 69

economic determinism in their understanding of race. Because of the difficulty of

locating racial dimensions in production processes themselves, many neo- Marxist

approaches turned to class divisions produced by discrimination or exclusion as the

key variables explaining racial inequality. Some theories cast the capitalist class in

the role of racist villain, arguing that it seeks to divide and demobilize the workers’

movement. Others assigned this role to the white working- class, since white workers

seek to make use of their racial privileges to protect their jobs and status. Either way,

the consequence was the same: Intra- class division and competition along racial lines

were seen to undermine class struggle. In this way class conflict theories reproduced

not only market- based approaches and their limits, but also fell victim to the “labor

metaphysic.”

Already more than a quarter- century ago, it was clear that this account did

not correspond with economic realities: As the U.S. economy became less nation-

ally self- contained, as it was more engulfed by the global economy, as it became

ever- more deindustrialized and financialized, intra- class conflict along racial lines

became less central to inequality. Once the turn away from the New Deal/social

democracy had begun in the mid- 1970s, followed shortly thereafter by the full flow-

ering of neoliberalism, more abstract forms of racism and more predatory forms of

inequality”— “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2004) and colorblind racial

ideology most notably— had emerged to plague workers across the board, especially

people of color.

Notes

1. Although the “Austrian school,” with its premises of antistatism and individualism, is

associated most closely with Hayek and Mises, other Austrian economists such as Schum-

peter, Hilferding, and Goldscheid had very diff erent views. See Heilbroner 2000 [1953].

2. Milton Friedman’s views diff ered in many ways from those of his mentor Hayek (2001

[1944]). In sharp contrast to Friedman’s monetarism, Hayek went so far as to disapprove

of the state’s issuance of money.

3. “Mainstream” economics thinks of the economy as “disembedded,” a set of relationships

driven by the rational action of those engaged in market exchanges. Market events and

practices are considered distinct and separate from other types of social relationships. The

mainstream was roughly characterized by Paul Samuelson in the 1960s as a “neoclassi-

cal synthesis” of Walrasian equilibrium theory and Keynesian theory. The disembedded

model of economic life has always been subject to criticism, notably from Marxist and insti-

tutional economists. Critics point out that a wide range of human needs and relationships

inevitably impinge upon, or even dominate and structure, actual market relationships.

Subsistence requirements, human creativity, political organization, psychological pro-

cesses, and numerous institutional factors must be taken into account in meaningful

economic accounts. Karl Polanyi (2001 [1944]) produced perhaps the most sophisticated

critique of “disembedded” economics, emphasizing among many other factors the impos-

sibility of rendering land, labor, or money as commodities equivalent to others (such as

needles and pins) produced for sale at market. We cannot adequately address Polanyi’s

70 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

insights here, but in this chapter we make extensive use of his concept of the economy as a

necessarily complex social relationship, shaped by politics, culture, psychological factors,

and self- refl ective action of every sort.

Ernesto Laclau’s remarks on this same topic, made without reference to Polanyi, seem

prophetic today, and highly relevant to the race–class relationship:

I think the critique of economism should have a much wider deconstructive eff ect

on traditional Marxist theory. That is, we should no longer conceive the economy

as a homogeneous milieu that follows its own endogenous laws of development….

Today we can see that the space which traditional Marxism designated “the econ-

omy” is in fact the terrain of a proliferation of discourses. We have discourses of

authority, technical discourses, discourses of accountancy, discourses of informa-

tion. Even categories such as profi t can no longer be accepted as unequivocal. For

instance, a multinational corporation today develops complex political and eco-

nomic strategies within which the search for profi t certainly plays a fundamental

role, but does so within a whole policy of investment which can often require sac-

rifi cing immediate profi ts to wider strategic aims. The functioning of the economy

itself is a political functioning, and cannot be understood in terms of a single logic.

What we need today … is a non- economistic understanding of the economy, one

which introduces the primacy of politics at the level of the “infrastructure” itself.

(Laclau and Mouff e 1982, 92; see also Mouff e 1983)

4. Sir William Arthur Lewis was another Nobelist (1979), an Afro- Caribbean (born in

St. Lucia). A black intellectual pioneer, he was most certainly not oblivious to race. His

early work on development has been applied to current conditions in China, Southeast

Asia, and elsewhere. Where the “unlimited supplies of labor” are located, how they are

recruited, and what their practical conditions are, are all consummately racial matters;

indeed they are some of the core issues of the “modern world- system.”

5. This “taste” business is merely a euphemism for prejudice or Negrophobia. We fi nd it

doubly unacceptable: as the bias that it embodies and as the crude disguise by which it is

euphemized.

6. Becker’s major innovation is introducing psychological factors into economic analysis,

thus taking a step toward overcoming the image of a socially “disembedded” market. As

the fi eld has spiraled into deeper intellectual crisis, Becker has assumed higher status. The

revised version of the book was undoubtedly infl uenced by the civil rights movement. On

Becker’s account, see Reich 1981, 86–88.

7. “Steering” is simply an economic form of profi ling. Customers are steered— with race

as a central orienting factor in the practice— to “appropriate” neighborhoods. Mortgage

borrowers are steered to sub- prime and Alt- A loans— featuring deceptive interest rates,

hidden “balloon” payments, “bundling” procedures, and extremely high foreclosure rates.

These were particularly profi table during the real estate boom years of the late 1990s and

2000s. “Blockbusting” practices in the 1950s and 1960s were a more open form of steering.

Such activities were supposedly outlawed by fair housing and fair credit legislation in the

later years of the civil rights era. In more covert ways, however, many of these practices are

still fl ourishing. See Satter 2009.

8. This account overlaps in numerous ways with white privilege theories (Allen 2012 [1994;

1997]; Wildman et al. 1996; Williams 2003; Lipsitz 2006).

Class 71

9. “There is a ‘moral [and] constitutional equivalence’ between laws designed to subjugate a

race and those that distribute benefi ts on the basis of race in order to foster some current

notion of equality. Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and

protect us as equal before the law. That [affi rmative action] programs may have been moti-

vated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our

Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race” (Thomas

1995).

10. Many young Irishmen were purchased as substitutes in the Union army draft by better- off

citizens; many others were drafted; still others rioted in New York in 1863, attacking free

blacks (blacks were excluded from the draft) and black neighborhoods. See Harris 2003.

11. The Act was supposed to suspend Chinese immigration for ten years; in fact it remained

in eff ect for 60 years, until it was fi nally repealed by the Magnuson Act in 1943.

12. Stratifi cation theories of class have their origins in Max Weber’s critique of Marx; for

Weber class position is shaped by relationship to the means of distribution, not produc-

tion. It’s income and wealth, baby: what you receive, not what you put into the economy,

that shapes your class or “life- chances.” See Gerth and Mills 1958.

13. For data on black– white economic inequality see Taylor et al. 2012; Oliver and Shapiro 2006.

For good overview material on racial inequality, see O’Connor, Tilly, and Bobo, eds. 2001.

For data on residential segregation, see Iceland, Weinberg, and Steinmetz 2002; Massey et al.

2009. For data on incarceration, see Mauer 2006. For data on educational segregation, see

Frankenberg and Orfi eld, eds. 2012. For data on workplace segregation, see Hellerstein and

Neumark 2005. For data on racial attitudes and racial politics, see Bobo 2001; Dawson 2003.

14. Racial stratifi cation/inequality already received signifi cant attention there, but largely as

the outcome of despotic power relations organized along racial lines. Refl ecting the infl u-

ence of the civil rights movement, Wilson introduced his subject this way:

[C]onsidering the nature of both United States and South African race relations,

I have given concepts of “racism” and “power” special attention in this study. In

fact, the central arguments of this volume are (1) that a comprehensive account of

the nature of race relations in these two societies must deal with the dimensions

of power and their relation to dominant- and minority- group contact, and (2) that

the dimensions of power cannot be completely understood if treated indepen-

dently of the phenomenon of racism. (1973, 5)

In this work Wilson not only also explored racial stratifi cation, but also considered in depth

the political conditions under which anti- racist protest operated in the two countries, the

signifi cance of biologistic racism, and a host of other topics that were largely left aside in

his later work.

15. Wilson served as an adviser to Clinton, and has also consulted with Obama, whose “post-

racial” eff orts certainly resonate with Wilson’s work.

16. Anti- poverty, Headstart, affi rmative action programs, the rise of multiculturalism and

diversity criteria in hiring, education, and public service provision, exemplifi ed these shifts.

Many such programs have been eviscerated under the neoliberal project, the decades- long

right- wing eff ort to curtail social expenditures.

17. On this point Wilson’s views converge with neocon/neoliberal abhorrence of “depen-

dency” on the welfare state. Wilson argues that the black “underclass” is to some extent

produced by this “dependency.” While he notes that public sector employment has been

72 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

the chief route to black middle- class status, he does not engage the ongoing relationship

of the black middle class and the “underclass.”

18. On the situations of blacks and other people of color employed in the criminal “justice”

system, see Ward 2006. On people of color in the military, see Latty and Tarver 2005. On

black cops, see Bolton and Feagin 2004.

19. On this group, see Roberts 1996; Boston 1998; Ondaatje 2009. Some of the most durable

black conservatives have been John McWhorter, Robert Woodson, Thomas Sowell, and

Walter Williams. Economist Glenn Loury, after an early sojourn on the black right, moved

back to the center in the Bush II years. It is instructive to compare the new ethos of “black

conservatism” with classic works on the subject, notably Frazier 1957a.

20. In respect to health care, the Aff ordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) may represent a partial

reversal of the entrenched abandonment of the health rights of poor people (dispropor-

tionately black and brown). We must await the law’s full implementation in 2014. In respect

to welfare, it is important to note that despite Clinton’s abandonment of cash- grant welfare

(AFDC) in 1996, he did greatly expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) which was

a substantial gain for the working poor.

21. By adopting a number of Republican- backed, racially infl ected policies Clinton sought

to immunize himself from white working- class voter discontent in the 1996 election year.

This voting bloc— are they still the “Reagan Democrats”?— remains a signifi cant force

today: They are disproportionately male, blue- collar voters who have experienced increased

economic vulnerability for decades; they are anti- welfare, anti- immigrant, right- wing

populist, inclined toward the “Tea Party,” and vote Republican (Frank 2005).

22. Perhaps because his book appeared before the onset of the great recession of 2008, Massey

understates contemporary inequalities somewhat, especially with regard to recent devel-

opments such as loss of assets through foreclosure and sustained unemployment. In later

work Massey has addressed foreclosure patterns and race (Rugh and Massey 2010).

23. The extensive history of “black– red” relationships, and also other communist and socialist

relationships with anti- racist movements, is beyond our present scope. Some important

contributions are Sale 1973; Allen 1974; Horne 1986; and Pulido 2006.

24. More recently the “right- to- work” (anti- union) strategy has been making gains outside

the South, most notably in the intermountain West and in some midwestern states as

well (Indiana and Michigan). Where this has occurred, there have been signifi cant attacks

against public- sector unions and against social “safety- net” programs, attacks that usually

mobilize coded racist tropes (Fraser 2012). Taft–Hartley’s original success in 1947 was

based on a tactical alliance between Southern Dixiecrats (i.e., Democrats) and right- wing

Republicans based in the Midwest.

25. The United Farmworkers— a very important case— supported immigration restrictions

until after the death of Cesar Chavez in 1981. See Bardacke 2012.

26. In 2008 an explicitly anti- racist workers’ movement carried out a sit- in against off shoring

at the Chicago factory of Republic Windows and Doors, occupying the factory and forcing

its reopening (Cullotta 2009).

27. Space is not available here to explore the role of the periphery in capitalist reproduc-

tion. World- system theory in general acknowledges the subsidization of the core global

capitalist economy by its hinterlands, not only in terms of reducing the costs of labor

reproduction but also by furnishing cheaper raw materials, absorbing pollution, and

Class 73

externalizing other costs as well. This line of argument goes back through Immanuel

Wallerstein to Rosa Luxemburg. Consider:

The imperialist phase of capitalist accumulation which implies universal competi-

tion comprises the industrialization and capitalist emancipation of the hinterland

where capital formerly realized its surplus value. Characteristic of this phase are:

lending abroad, railroad constructions, revolutions, and wars. (Luxemburg 1973

(1913), 399; emphasis original; see also Schmidt 2010)

The hinterland today is the immigrant- sending area, whether in the periphery or the semi-

periphery in Wallerstein’s terms (1974–1989). Let us say that here in rural Zacatecas, a

young migrant begins her journey to the lettuce- fi elds of Arizona or domestic service in

Beverly Hills. To produce this worker has cost U.S.- based employers (and U.S. tax-payers)

almost nothing. If formally employed and undocumented, her payroll tax payments accrue

to the benefi t of the Social Security Trust Fund, not to her future retirement income. If

settlement in the United States is not an option after years of immigrant labor, her remit-

tances and savings, accumulated in an immigrant household or community, might permit

the construction of a cinderblock house with shingled roof, water well, and indoor plumb-

ing where previously only a bohio (shack) had stood. On these issues, see in general Massey

et al. 1987. The racialization of the periphery, the phenomic or diasporic link between the

hinterlands of Mexico and the Mexican- American economy, needs greater attention than

we can provide here.

This page intentionally left blank

75

C H A P T E R 3

Nation

Introduction

The nation- based paradigm of race originates in seizures of territory by modern

empires. The European conquest of the Western hemisphere, and the colonies that

resulted, both extended the practice of “nation- building” that was central to imperial

ventures, 1 and laid the groundwork for later, insurgent nationalist projects that would

challenge and eventually overthrow these same empires.

In this chapter we explore the nation- based paradigm of race in the United States,

focusing largely on post- World War II events. We begin by discussing the white nation,

the historically dominant construct of the “American people.” We note the centrality

of whiteness in enabling the nation’s expansion and rise to power on the world stage;

we also recognize the instability and anxieties of white nationalism. Next, we discuss

race/class/gender/nation, the intersectional cleavages and conflicts that shaped the

white nation from its colonial origins through independence and beyond. From the

beginning, there were insurgent nationalisms that were hallmarks of early resistance to

the white nation, and that re- emerged among racially subaltern people in the postwar

United States. Building on earlier religious, panethnic, and sometimes revolution-

ary forms of resistance, and linking their struggles to global anti- imperialism, new

nationalist movements were launched after World War II. “Black power” nationalism

was the most established and embedded form of these, but important nationalist proj-

ects were also developed during those years in Latin@, Native American, and Asian

American communities as well (Pulido 2006; Joseph, ed. 2006).

The chapter concludes with some critical remarks on the nation- based paradigm of

race. Here we focus on the limits of the race–nation equation, the nation- based para-

digm’s inherent incompleteness regarding race. We evaluate the uneven democratic

commitments of nationalist politics; we consider the problem of transracial relations

and alliances within the nation- based paradigm; and we reflect on the uncertain sig-

nificance within it of class- or culture/ethnicity- based identities and social positions.

The White Nation

For fi ve centuries the phrase “the American people” has been understood as an implic-

itly white designation. This understanding predates the achievement of national

independence in the American Revolution and ignores or dismisses the continuing

presence— in substantial numbers— of people not considered white. In other words,

76 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

almost from the beginning of European settlement there has been a dominant white

nation in North America. The colonies and the post- revolutionary independent U.S.

state all explicitly celebrated their whiteness, and always took it for granted.

But the congruence of race and nation has never been a done deal, and peri-

odically it has been necessary to tinker with the equation of whiteness and American

identity. The United States has passed through numerous cycles of racial politics:

Despotic moments have alternated with democratic ones; harder and softer racial

regimes have taken the stage. Slavery, genocide, conquest, and empire all mess with

the homogeneity implicit in the concept of a white nation. Immigration and exclusion

also call the nation’s assumed foundational whiteness into question. There have been

various iterations of nativism and legalization, for example, and alternating trajecto-

ries of racial reform and backlash. These also parallel global developmental processes,

in ways too complicated to detail here. 2

White rule in North America, before and after 1776, has always been riven by racial

conflict. The centrality of white/male/property- holders’ rule has been both taken-

for- granted and unstable. There have continually been two contradictory principles at

work: national unity and racial division. To fuel and justify first the colonial impulse

and later the nation- building process, race has served as what Antonio Gramsci called

an ideological “glue” (Gramsci 1971, 328). Race operated as a multi- leveled organizing

principle that established who was “civilized” and who was “savage,” who was “free”

(and hence human), and who was a slave (chattel, not a person). Race linked the corpo-

real/visible characteristics of different social groups to different sociopolitical statuses,

and provided various religious and political principles for inclusion and exclusion from

the imagined community (Anderson 2006) of the nation.

In the United States, the trope of the white nation — the forging of unity and

solidarity among white rulers and their white subordinates— has time after time over-

whelmed nonwhite or transnational (class- based, diasporic, hemispheric) conceptions

of the nation and its peoples (Morgan 2003 [1975]). Oppositional nationalisms (from

groups of color) have often faltered; they have repeatedly been subdued or absorbed.

Yet uncertainty remains about the coherence of the “white nation” and white “peo-

plehood.” The intelligibility and collectivity of whiteness were first cast into doubt

after the Civil War, when the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution extended

U.S. citizenship and ostensible equality to the emancipated slaves. The white republic

(Saxton 2003 [1990]) experienced numerous subsequent crises: over Asian immigra-

tion, relations with Latin America, and the extension of U.S. imperialism (previously

a continental matter) overseas at the turn of the 20th century. The reactionary racism

all this inspired continues to operate today.

During and after World War II, white peoplehood was problematized again, not

only in the United States but on a worldwide level: by the traumatic and galvanizing

experience of the war itself; by the rising tides of anticolonialism and anti-racism the

war fostered; by the mass migrations it set in motion within the United States (and

globally); and by the Cold War, which was waged on racial terrain in many ways; and

Nation 77

above all by the political struggles for racial justice and democracy that took shape

after World War II, not just in the United States but all over the world. 3

So, white racial nationalism both built and fractured the United States. It unified

whites across tremendous chasms of class and culture/ethnicity, precisely because it

allowed them to claim their whiteness, sometimes with ease and sometimes only after

passing through extended “probationary” periods. The racial cleavages we see in the

nation are the products of the exploitative and exclusionist commitments of the white

nation: its deracination of the indigenous inhabitants of North America; its capture,

killing, transport in chains, and enslavement of millions of Africans; its conquest of

adjacent territories and its relegation of their inhabitants to lesser status; and its mas-

sive dependence on immigration, mostly on the part of people not considered (or not

yet considered) white. Thence cometh the divided and hierarchical peoplehood, the

stratified and conflictual nation, the United States of America.

From the earliest days of U.S. national independence, Anglo- Saxonism and

“anglo- conformity” helped create a norm of whiteness that shaped the national image

and culture. State policy sometimes relaxed and sometimes tightened the boundaries

of citizenship, but always reflected restrictive norms. Expansionism and economic

interest linked “nation- building” and domestic labor recruitment to foreign policy

and empire- building: Not only the “turning of Africa into a warren for the commer-

cial hunting of black- skins” (Marx 1967, 351) but also Indian removal (i.e., ethnic

cleansing; genocide) and hemispheric domination (after the 1823 Monroe Doctrine)

were established principles by the early 19th century (Gonzalez 2011 [2001]).

Internally as well, citizenship was assigned or withheld according to racial crite-

ria. The 14th Amendment notwithstanding, blacks only became citizens in a practical

sense in the 1960s, and even then imperfectly; many Asians only achieved natural-

ization rights in the 1950s; and native peoples only received their citizenship in the

1920s. Stringent immigration restrictions were imposed on Asians after the upheavals

of 1877, and on Europeans after the great influx that occurred around the turn of the

20th century. After World War I the screws were further tightened on immigration

through highly restrictive policies that would endure for forty years. Mass deporta-

tions to Mexico occurred in the 1930s, with no regard given to whether the Latin@s

rounded up (in Los Angeles and elsewhere) were U.S. citizens or not; a brown skin

was all you needed to be placed on a sealed train to Jalisco or Michoacan (de Genova

2004; Balderrama and Rodriguez 2006 [1995]). Immigration raises large questions

about national identity, about the meaning of citizenship, and about global inequality

(Smith 2003; Massey, ed. 2008). Indeed the U.S. immigration regime has profoundly

shaped the patterns of racial inclusion and exclusion

The common sense view of “the nation” has always been explicitly inflected

by race. The United States was perceived as “a white man’s country,” a herrenvolk

republic. This identification of the nation with whiteness (and maleness) was a nearly

universal feature of imperial and settler nations. 4 Nativism (Higham 2002 [1955];

Saxton 1975) periodically flamed up when immigrants were seen as threats, just as

78 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

anti- black racism and contempt for indigenous peoples underwrote state racial policy

in both colony and metropole. 5 Despite the penchant for “exceptionalist” accounts

of U.S. nationhood (Lind 1995; Zelinsky 1988; Lipset 2003 [1963]; Billig 1995 offers

a good critique), the United States was no exception to this “rule of racialization”

(Martinot 2002). Indeed, it was the rule’s pioneer.

How white is the U.S. nation? The question of who makes up the American nation,

indeed the question of what is the racial identity of the American nation remains

unanswered. “Your country? How came it yours?” asked Du Bois in 1903. “Before

the Pilgrims landed we were here….” (Du Bois 2007 [1935], 162–163). And Native

Americans had been “here” perhaps 25,000 years before that, according to paleoar-

chaeologists. Indeed, what we now call the United States of America only became

“yours”— a white country— when first it fell under English imperial rule around the

turn of the 17th century. It remained “yours” after it freed itself from that rule after

1776 in the first modern revolution. It is still “yours” in many respects. It has been a

“white man’s country” through conquest, settlement, and expansion, through slavery

and emancipation, through continuing immigration, and through ascent to a global

imperialism of its own, until finally becoming the greatest empire in world history.

But, white men, is the country still “yours”? Starting after World War II and in

parallel with similar race- oriented conflicts elsewhere, the concept of “the American

people” has become less white and less patriarchal. The United States is darkening,

demographically speaking. Because of the black movement and the feminist move-

ments it inspired— not only in the post- World War II period but continually since

abolition— the country is less definitively a white male nation than it used to be, and

that trend is continuing. 6 The U.S. racial regime has been losing momentum, both

internally as a white republic, and globally, as the leading “developed” economic and

military power. Patriarchal power is eroding as well. Of course, the age of the white

and male nation is not over, at least not yet. But that nation is being undone; whether

gradually or rapidly we do not know.

Especially since the imperial dawn, the ideas of race and nation have been deeply

connected, mainly through concepts of peoplehood. Both as outposts of the British

Empire (and to some extent of other European empires as well), and then as an inde-

pendent nation- state, the United States (and its forerunners) identified itself as a

white nation. This racial nationalism remains visible in the associations with whiteness

that are implicit in such concepts as “the American people.” The nation is gendered

as well: the motherland, the fatherland, patria o muerte. Throughout the modern era

the nation has been racialized. This proceeds from its imperial origins: its seizure of

bodies (indigenous people, Africans), and of land as well, for purposes of primitive

accumulation. Racialization is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4 . Here it refers to

the process of sorting out the bodies.

In the wake of the civil rights era, in the aftermath of the postwar racial “break,”

the meaning of the terms “nation” and “nation- state” in the United States must be

carefully examined. What is in question here is “peoplehood.” The general tendency

Nation 79

is still to see the United States as a WASP nation, not only white, but Anglophilic and

Protestant. U.S. national ism is still a strong tendency: particularly on the right, par-

ticularly in the “heartland” and in the “red” states, but not only there. Nationalism is

also a civil religion and a working- class creed that cuts across racial lines.

At the same time, the standard racialized and gendered picture of the United

States— as a “white man’s country”— is breaking down. Significant portions of U.S.

territory are now occupied in the majority by people who are not white. “Majority-

minority” demographics now obtain in California as well as several other states and

major cities, and in many other places that condition is not far off. A recent projection

by the U.S. Department of the Census places the national transition to a “majority-

minority” demographic in the year 2042 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2008).

Race/Class/Gender/Nation

In early North America, race, class, and gender were deeply interlinked. Their amal-

gamation was established both by the necessity of developing a division of labor, an

organized labor force; and by the necessity of supplying, through various forms of

human traffi cking (only some of which can be labeled as “voluntary immigration”)

the steady fl ow of actual human bodies (and souls) that would constitute the North

American population.

An endemic and taken- for- granted national chauvinism consigned blacks and

Indians to inferiority and subhumanity. This condition, this absence of fully human

status, was supposedly permanent. As the settler nation expanded westward, the

right of conquest and the license of the “pioneers” to deprive the Indians of life and

land was never seriously questioned from within the white regime. 7 Although armed

Indian resistance slowed the advance of the European- led tide, it could not, in the

end, repel it. The centrality of slavery and the “primitive accumulation” of Indian

lands in early American life meant that race and not class was the key social division

both in the colonial period and after. 8

What about other “others”? The Irish had been trafficked by the hundreds of thou-

sands during the colonial period. In a British colonial outpost they were racialized as

nonwhite, though generally subject to indenture, not chattelization (Jordan and Walsh

2008; Allen 2012 [1994; 1997]). The millions of Irish immigrants who arrived in the

1840s, driven by British- imposed famine, were exposed to the torches and pitchforks

of mobs inflamed by nativism, and subject to racial discrimination as well. In the Civil

War the Irish made good cannon fodder, especially in the North. Irish service in the

Union armies (when they couldn’t buy substitutes and anti- black riots didn’t prevent

their being drafted) finally launched them on the path to whiteness. The Civil War made

many immigrant Irish members of the American nation.

The invasion of Mexico and subsequent incorporation of the Southwest, from

the annexation of Texas in 1845 through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in

1848, accomplished an enormous conquest of territory. Initially transferring their

80 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

citizenship to the United States and retaining their land rights and titles, the Mexican

population of this huge territory were progressively disenfranchised and stripped of

their land (Pitt 1999 [1966]; Almaguer 2008 [1994]; Gomez 2008).

Post- Civil War industrialization augmented labor demand and European immi-

grant numbers increased. The floodgates would remain open to European arrivals for

decades. But the ending of Reconstruction in 1877, the great railroad strike of that

year, and the general economic crises of the 1870s combined with the rise of anti-

Asian nativism to put new pressure on the white nation framework. Blacks were now

citizens, but their labor (and that of Asians who were mere denizens, largely in the

West) threatened the cross- class alliance that the white nation had maintained since

colonial times. Additional threats came from mobilized white labor. Huge strikes and

bitter labor conflict swept the nation, particularly in 1877 and 1894. Redrawing the

boundaries of the white nation was essential for the development of U.S. capitalism.

Class conflict could be controlled to some extent by the gradual whitening of Euro-

pean labor (Montgomery 1987; Saxton 2003 [1990]). This was not accomplished by

any legislative decree or capitalist maneuvering to divide the working class, but rather

by white workers themselves. Many of them were recent immigrants, who organized

on ethnic lines as much as on traditionally defined class ones.

Race shaped class in America, then, because of the demand for territorial expan-

sion, because racial slavery was crucial to the development of the early nation, and

because whiteness played an important role in deterring rebellion and undermining

popular transracial (i.e., class- based) solidarity (Morgan 2003 [1975]; Du Bois 2007

[1935]; Blight 2002).

Gendered practices were central to nation- building as well. Just as there was a

“racial frontier” in the settlement of the United States, so too was there a “gender

frontier.” 9 As Ann Laura Stoler puts it, “Intimate domains— sex, sentiment, domes-

tic arrangement, and child rearing— figure in the making of racial categories and in

the management of imperial rule” (Stoler 2001, 829; see also Stoler 2002; Schiebin-

ger 2004). In practice these two boundaries were often indistinguishable. From its

earliest moments North American colonialism involved sexual encounters between

Europeans and Indians; these became fodder for fiction and fantasy, and later for

Hollywood films as well (Nash 1995). Some settlers “went native” (Torgovnick 1991;

Ware 1992; McClintock 1995; Cooper and Stoler 1997; Caslin 2008). Miscegnation 10

was inevitable and widespread. Hence mixed- race children and families; hence the

immediate problematization of racial categories.

The plantation, and African slavery overall, were also obviously gender frontiers

(Williamson 1995). Rape and concubinage were commonplace. These practices were

barely stigmatized because they were so widespread. Not unlike other colonial sys-

tems, U.S. nation- building from its earliest moments featured widespread interracial

sex/racial hybridity/mestizaje/métissage. 11

These currents have all continued up through the present. Still, the mainte-

nance of “patriarchal authority and power, racial hierarchy, and white supremacy”

Nation 81

(Woodward 1998), for all its horrors, was never monolithic, never without opposi-

tion. Subversion, escape, revolt, and political mobilization (via abolitionism and,

later, anti- imperialism and immigrants rights), all exposed the conflictual and indeed

contradictory character of the white nation.

To the extent that the legitimacy of the white nation— with its almost unbro-

ken history of structural racism, its history of slavery, violence, exclusion, and

dispossession— is not accepted by racially subordinated groups, alternative national

frameworks may be adopted by those groups as insurgent concepts, as an “imagined

community” in rebellion.

Insurgent Nationalism

The national dimensions of nonwhite racial identities, the experience of collectivity and

solidarity along racial lines, and the sense of collective identity (“peoplehood”) among

distinct— and often panethnic— peoples of color, were key dimensions of the national

liberation and anticolonial struggles of the post- World War II period. The national

impulse remains strong, as a form of cultural identifi cation (where it overlaps with

ethnicity); as the form of various nationalist movements; and as a general signifi er of

race- based community: the ghetto, the barrio, Koreatown. These recognitions— about

the ever- problematic white nation and white nationalism, and about the continuing

exclusion, denial of political and human rights, and discrimination experienced by

peoples of color— all underlie the nation- based paradigm of racial formation.

So while white racial unity certainly fueled a great deal of nation- building zeal over

the course of U.S. history, it also bred its own opposition. Perhaps ironically, some of

the most committed adherents to the democratic ideals professed since the founding of

the United States have been those to whom the white nation denied democratic rights

and full membership; think again of Du Bois: “Your country? How came it yours…?”

For those like Du Bois (especially the later Du Bois [Porter 2010]), Malcolm X, José

Angel Gutiérrez, Russell Means, or Bobby Seale, inclusion in the white nation that

was the United States, was never fully possible. Hence they saw themselves not only as

Americans, but also as part of other, insurgent peoples, of various sorts: Pan- African,

irredentist, anti- imperial, internally colonized.

As the limits of the civil rights reforms of the mid- 1960s became clear, a substantial

sector of the movement turned toward nationalist positions. This shift occurred first

within the black movement, where long- standing discontent with civil rights moderates

was most established, and where the immediate experience of betrayal was most galling:

One example— out of many— was the experience of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coor-

dinating Committee) at the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. 12

SNCC’s adoption in 1965 of a “black power” orientation was followed in the next few

years by the emergence of red power, brown power, and yellow power movements.

The upsurge of black nationalism in the mid- 1960s definitively ruptured

the already tenuous unity of liberal and radical tendencies within the civil rights

82 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

movement. It signaled a growing disillusionment with the moderate political agenda

of non- violence and integration. The slogan “black power,” and the growing popu-

larity of black nationalism that it expressed, also initiated an intense theoretical and

strategic debate about the nature of racism and the future of black politics in the

United States. It followed the split in the Nation of Islam and the emergence of

Malcolm X as the most visible black nationalist leader in the country. 13 It coincided

with Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam war and the emergence of the

anti-war— and in a broader sense, anti- imperialist— movement. It also overlapped

with a new phenomenon in U.S. racial politics: black- led, black- based ghetto rebel-

lions (aka race riots), beginning with Harlem in 1964 and Watts in 1965. 14

The nation- based analysis of black oppression and resistance had, of course, its

historical antecedents. The refusal of assimilationism could be traced back at least

to Ethiopianism and the repatriation movements of the mid- 19th century, led by

men such as Martin Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Paul Cuffe. 15 The Pan-

Africanist and Marxist- Leninist traditions had also elaborated nationalist analyses,

and a substantial current of cultural nationalism also existed whose components

could be discerned in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1999 [1903]), in the Harlem

Renaissance of the 1920s (Locke, ed. 1997 [1925]), and in the influential writings of

Harold Cruse (1967, 1968), to name just a few sources. Strong nationalist traditions

can also be found in all communities of color, notably among Puerto Ricans, Mexican

Americans, and Native Americans.

The nation- based paradigm, to a far greater extent than the ethnicity- or class- based

approaches, is a theoretical convergence, a resultant of disparate currents. Nationalist

currents had always existed in the United States, notably in the black church (Rawick

1972; Moses 1998; Glaude 2000). Nation- based approaches to race also have a long

theoretical fetch; this is the profound and variegated black political tradition, excluded

for centuries from mainstream (white) intellectual and political discourse.

Rooted in the resistance to empire and colonialism, insurgent nationalisms logi-

cally invoke racial criteria in their efforts to theorize and mobilize opposition to white

supremacist rule. Once again, “peoplehood” is a central concern. Who are black

people, Latin@s, Native Americans, Asian Americans? In what historical, political-

economic, and cultural conditions were these peoples created? In what ways are these

groups’ claims for self- rule, land, and freedom justified? How do imperial and colo-

nial structures of power persist in the contemporary, ostensibly postcolonial world,

the “modern world- system”? 16 How are they maintained, indeed, in the very contours

of the international division of labor, based on unequal exchange and the domination

of the “periphery” by the “core”? In the nation- based paradigm, racial dynamics are

understood as products of colonialism and therefore as outcomes of relationships

which are global and epochal in character. 17

Framing the nation- based paradigm to emphasize “peoplehood” and post-

coloniality has several advantages. First, it stresses the relationships among the

Nation 83

different elements of racial oppression— inequality, political disenfranchisement,

territorial and institutional segregation, cultural domination— in contrast to the eth-

nicity or class paradigms which focus on a few aspects (or even one “fundamental”

aspect) of the social order in an attempt to explain racial dynamics. Recognition of

the centrality of the colonial heritage also provides an alternative to other, more taxo-

nomic approaches to nation- based theories of race. Many writers have delineated, for

example, “varieties of black nationalism”: bourgeois, proletarian, reformist, revolu-

tionary, cultural, religious, economic, educational (Allen 1990 [1970]; Van Deburg

1996; Hanchard 2006). While efforts to catalog the range of nationalist positions

within specific minority group traditions, and to trace debates within these tradi-

tions, obviously have merit, they often reveal a notable lack of specificity about the

meaning of nation- based categories in such approaches. Nationalism is easily reduced

to mere group militance or separatism if no effort is made to specify its historical and

theoretical origins in particular racially defined peoples’ experiences of colonialism.

Here we offer an all- too- brief examination of a few of the main insurgent nation-

alist approaches to race: Pan- Africanism, cultural nationalism, Marxist accounts of

the “national question,” and internal colonialism theory. We recognize the selective

nature of focusing on these currents, still, we think that they encompass much of the

broad sweep of nation- based paradigms of race.

While not comparable in many respects, we include these perspectives as vari-

eties of insurgent nationalism that take shape within the nation- based paradigm of

race. These approaches all share a reliance on concepts of race as peoplehood that

derive from the meaning and uses of the race- concept prevalent in colonialism’s

heyday. Chief among these is the use of racial categories to distinguish members

of the oppressor and oppressed “peoples”— the colonizers and the colonized, the

“free” and the enslaved. Several consequences of these arguments may be specified:

the explicit demand for organizations and movements uniformly composed of the

“colonized” (the victims of racial oppression), the need for “cultural autonomy” to

permit the development of those unique characteristics which the colonized group

has developed or preserved through the ordeal of subjugation, and the necessity of

“self- determination” to uproot the colonial heritage and restructure society on a non-

racial basis.

Pan- Africanism : The roots of Pan- Africanism in the United States lie in the

identities, principally collective identities— Yoruba, Bakongo, Asante— that enslaved

Africans carried with them to the Western Hemisphere. In the 20th century, Pan-

Africanism took shape on two fronts: The first was a series of international conferences

held in Europe and the United States from 1900 to 1945, most of them organized by

W.E.B. Du Bois. 18 These conferences were oriented primarily toward decolonization

of Africa and had relatively little U.S. domestic impact.

The second front of Pan- Africanist activity was the formation, largely but not

only in the United States, of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, led

84 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

by Marcus Garvey. The UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) had

unprecedented success in mobilizing blacks, numbering millions of adherents at its

height in the 1920s. Garvey sought to unite blacks throughout the world in a move-

ment for the “redemption” of Africa, which he envisioned as a “racial empire.” For

him and his followers, Africa existed not only on the continent, but in the diaspora

that slavery had visited on its inhabitants and their descendants. Thus the fates of

blacks throughout the world were linked. The liberation and reconstruction of the

African homeland would allow blacks finally to overcome the racial oppression that

sustained colonialism (Hill and Bair, eds. 1988; Clarke 2011 [1974]; Taylor 2001).

Garvey was greatly influenced by the doctrines of Booker T. Washington, specifi-

cally those promoting separate economic development. Garvey’s economic argument,

however, went beyond Washington’s in two respects: First, he denounced the exploitation

of Africa and African labor throughout the world. 19 Second, he saw the black population

of the United States not only in the “self- help” terms of Washington, but as

a vanguard for Africa’s redemption…. He believed that if the Negroes were

economically strong in the United States, they would be able to redeem Africa

and establish a worldwide confraternity of black people.

(Essien- Udom 1962, 50)

For all its excesses and errors, the most notorious being its derelict business prac-

tices and its rapprochement with the Ku Klux Klan, 20 the Garvey movement represents

one of the founding pillars of modern Pan- Africanism, and stands as a crucial source

for much other black nationalism as well. 21 Indeed, it still represents the high- water

mark of mass black political mobilization, rivaled only by the movements of the 1960s.

Pan- Africanism maintained a limited foothold in the United States through the

contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois, George Padmore, and C.L.R. James. When Malcolm

X broke with the Nation of Islam in 1964 to form the Organization of Afro- American

Unity, making a series of well- publicized trips to Africa and the Middle East, and

attempting to enlist the support of African governments in denouncing U.S. racism at

the United Nations, he dramatically stimulated black interest in African issues. With

the advent of black power, the contributions of Malcolm, Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz

Fanon, and later, Amilcar Cabral and Walter Rodney received new attention in the

United States, and contributed to the Pan- African canon. Kwame Ture (Stokely Car-

michael) in particular moved to embrace Pan- Africanism after 1967. 22

Beginning in the 1930s, political action in support of African independence

became a focal point for U.S. Pan- Africanists. Before that, U.S. black activities in

Africa had been largely confined to missionary work. 23 From Mussolini’s invasion

of Ethiopia in 1935 onward, U.S. black involvement with African politics confronted

racism at home as much as imperialism on the continent, especially because the

United States was often complicit in atrocities in Africa. During the Cold War, anti-

imperialist struggles in Africa were linked quite closely to the anti- racist movement

in the U.S. Africa (and the global “Third World” more broadly) became the sites of

Nation 85

struggle for political influence between the U.S. and USSR. Pan- Africanism enjoyed

a small renaissance in the United States when it became clear that Jim Crow prac-

tices were well understood on the continent, just as U.S. support for South African

apartheid, the British war against the Mau- Mau in Kenya, the assassination of Patrice

Lumumba in the Congo, and numerous other events were deeply resented by blacks

in the United States (von Eschen 1997, 2006; Kelley 2003; Dudziak 2011). This con-

nection began to wane in the 1970s as debates over the Angolan revolution divided

left- wing Pan- Africanists, who supported the MPLA (People’s Movement for the

Liberation of Angola) and accepted (often dogmatically) some version of Marxism,

from right- wing U.S. Pan- Africanists, who maintained an (equally dogmatic) Gar-

veyish “race- first” position and sided with UNITA (Marable 1980, 86–88). 24 A final

and largely symbolic iteration of this conflict took place in the United States over the

downfall of the apartheid regime in South Africa in the early 1990s. In this instance,

right- wing U.S. Pan- Africanists like Roy Innis sided with the South African Inkatha

Freedom Party in opposition to the African National Congress, and Afrocentrists

took up the causes of the South African Pan Africanist Congress (PAC— founded

by Robert Sobukwe), and the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM— founded by

Steven Biko). 25

Pan- Africanist perspectives have lost ground in the post- cold war and post-

apartheid periods. Africa is now wracked by civil wars sponsored by competing

corporate (and to some extent, national) interests seeking unfettered access to such

primary materials as coltan (Nest 2011), copper, and of course, petroleum. Wars and

genocides in Eastern Congo, Southern Sudan, the Darfur region, and elsewhere have

taken millions of lives and sparked horrifying atrocities such as rape epidemics. Chi-

nese investment has skyrocketed, generating new claims of inter- imperial rivalries.

Post- apartheid South Africa has emerged as an important regional power, operating

through the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). 26

If Pan- Africanism retains any vitality in the wake of the massive transitions

that Africa has undergone in recent decades, it would be based in its recognition

of the continuity of the exploitation of Africa by the “developed” countries (China

included). This is something that Du Bois denounced a century ago in his prescient

1915 article “The African Roots of the War” (Du Bois 1995 [1915]). Du Bois’s vision

of a unified African continent, which was in a broad sense also Nkrumah’s vision,

Garvey’s vision (although Garvey and Du Bois were bitter opponents), Cheik Anta

Diop’s vision (Diop 1989, 1991), and the vision of what we today call Afrocentrism,

was always a practical impossibility in a black diaspora riven in a thousand ways by

rivalries and differences. Yet as a cultural phenomenon, Pan- Africanism still possesses

considerable interpretive power; it still has the ability to link the specific forms of

oppression which blacks face in various societies with the colonialist exploitation of

Africa of past centuries. The impact this theoretical current has had in the United

States stemmed from its argument that black identity conferred membership in a

single worldwide black “nation”— the African diaspora itself.

86 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

Cultural Nationalism: The roots of cultural nationalism can be traced back at

least to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s (Locke, ed. 1997 [1925]). As a broader

phenomenon, however, cultural nationalist perspectives have been enunciated and

practiced in nearly all U.S. communities of color. Because cultural nationalism has

focused less on the political and economic elements of the nation- based approach—

demands for statehood and self- determination within specific territorial boundaries

for example— than it has on the cultural elements that give rise to collective identity,

community, and a sense of “peoplehood,” it exhibits certain overlaps with ethnicity-

based theories of race.

Probably the most devoted and incisive cultural nationalist theorist has been Har-

old Cruse. In two early and highly original books (1967, 1968), Cruse argued that

“The only observable way in which the Negro rebellion can become revolutionary in

terms of American conditions is for the Negro movement to project the concept of

Cultural Revolution” (1967, 111).

Cruse stressed the unique conditions facing American blacks, conditions which,

while related to those encountered by other victims of colonialism, were unlike those

of the African continent, the West Indies, or elsewhere. Cruse also accepted cer-

tain “domestic colonialism” concepts; indeed, he gave voice to them as early as 1962

(Cruse 1962). Anticipating the “black power” view, he criticized the civil rights move-

ment in the early 1960s for being dominated by liberal ideas and demands:

This Negro rebellion, mistakenly called by some the Negro revolution, is not

revolutionary because it projects no new ideas beyond what have already been

ratified in the democratic philosophy of the American Constitution.

(Cruse 1967, 111–112)

He proposed that the movement “incorporate … a cultural program along with

its economic, social, and political programs” (ibid). A “cultural program,” in Cruse’s

view, would recognize both the unique characteristics of black cultural traditions,

and the essential part that these cultural elements— for example, in music, art, or

language— played in the cultural life of the United States. Cruse suggested that the

black movement focus its demands on “the creation and distribution of cultural pro-

duction in America” (ibid, 117). The ultimate aim of this challenge, Cruse argued,

was “the revolutionizing … of the entire apparatus of cultural communication and

placing it under public ownership” (ibid, 112).

This approach raised as many questions as it answered. How the cultural appara-

tus could be so transformed, how blacks could affect cultural production under the

proposed new “revolutionary” conditions, and what would be the ultimate social and

political impact of such changes, were only a few of the issues Cruse did not address.

What was significant about his work, however, was not its immediate practical applica-

tion. Rather, his accomplishment lay in the development of a culturally based radical

perspective. His positions reframed debates between integrationists and nationalists

in the later 1960s and 1970s. He re- opened questions that had lain dormant for nearly

Nation 87

half a century. 27 In many ways Cruse explored the terrain upon which later figures

of this current such as Maulana Karenga and Imamu Amiri Baraka would stand (on

Karenga, see Brown 2003; on Baraka, see Benston 1976; Woodard 1999; Watts 2001.).

Many black nationalists embraced African values, traditions, culture, and lan-

guage through Pan- Africanism, or became adherents of groups such as Karenga’s

US Organization or Baraka’s Spirit House in Newark, New Jersey, without becoming

Pan- Africanists politically. Cultural nationalism had many indirect effects on black

“lifestyle”: clothes, hair, language, and art reflected the perspective’s upsurge. Afri-

can heritage was often invoked to support domestic ideological and political aims. 28

Cultural nationalism has taken a wide variety of forms among Latin@s, Asian

Americans, and Native Americans as well. It has developed during the post- World

War II period in rough correspondence with the rise and fall of racial justice move-

ments, immigration rates and policies, and political- economic conditions. These

racialized ethnic/national groups have undergone huge transformations over recent

decades. To mention only a few of the major shifts:

• Latin@ and Asian immigration rates soared after passage of the 1965 Immigra-

tion and Nationality Act, dramatically changing U.S. racial demography over

the medium to long term;

• U.S. wars and imperial adventures, notably in Asia, Central America, the Carib-

bean, and the Middle East, have focused attention and increased the numbers

of such U.S.- based diasporic communities— Korean, Salvadoran, Vietnamese,

and MEASA Americans, among others; 29

• The linkage between U.S. domestic and global racial policies and the breakdown

of moderate racial reformism after about 1970 generated a wide variety of radi-

cal movement groups across many communities of color; the legacy of SNCC

and the infl uence of the Black Panther Party also were signifi cant in this process,

which generated the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, the American Indian Move-

ment, the Asian American Political Alliance, and similar groups (Chávez 1998;

Pulido 2006; Erick- Wanzer, ed. 2010; Ogbar 2001; Fujino 2012).

As anti- racist movements gained strength in the 1960s, they brought with them

a sense of collective identity, race pride, and deepened interest in “roots” at various

levels: family, community, and history. All these tendencies flowed together towards

cultural nationalist politics, as larger numbers of people in communities of color

moved to reject the assimilationism offered by mainstream (often white liberal), mod-

erate currents in the civil rights movement and grounded in ethnicity theory. This

was particularly true for youth and those influenced by student movements.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, black student associations, deeply attuned to

the civil rights and black power movements, as well as Latin@ student groups like

the Movimiento Estudiantil Chican@ de Aztlán (MEChA), carried out numerous

demonstrations and occupations on college campuses, demanding the creation of

88 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

“ethnic studies” programs and the hiring of more faculty of color. 30 This movement

began— as it usually does— in California, but soon became a national one, issuing a

series of manifestos in support of black, brown, red, and yellow power, 31 and linking

to anti- war movements and other national and international insurgencies as well. The

year 1968, for example, was a moment of global student unrest in New York, Paris,

Mexico City, Tokyo, Prague, and elsewhere.

Parallel to the occupations and conflicts that took place in the arena of higher

education, a wide variety of other developments that occurred in the arts and mass

media (popular music, film, TV) 32 from the mid- 1960s onward may also be described

as culturally nationalist: Various manifestos, arts movements, and media- based

interventions advocating and celebrating the collective identities and insurgent his-

tories of particular peoples of color appeared at this time, in some respects echoing

Harold Cruse’s call for cultural revolution. Such groups as the Black Arts Move-

ment (Smethurst 2005), the Chican@ Asco group in East Los Angeles (Los Angeles

County Museum of Art 2011), and the Asian American Kearny Street Workshop in

San Francisco, to name but a few, built upon established national and ethnocultural

traditions, both “highbrow” and popular, such as salsa, the vast black musical canon,

the muralista movement in Mexico, and various literary and visual genres, all in the

effort to express (and invent) emancipatory concepts of racial/national identity.

Yet for all its political aspirations, cultural nationalism was limited by its focus

on expression rather than action. Although there were instances in which cultural

action could be linked very directly to community- based action, such as the work of

Sun Ra’s Arkestra and Horace Tapscott’s Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, groups which

combined jazz performance with music education and protest activity in Philadelphia

and South Central Los Angeles respectively (on Sun Ra see Szwed 1998; on Tapscott

see Tapscott 2001; Lipsitz 2007), much of black art or brown art could be coopted and

commodified with relative ease. There was, it turned out, nothing inherently radical

about dashikis, Kemet, or the concept of “soul,” or for that matter about the Aztec

heritage, pupusas, menudo, or fry bread. As Adolph L. Reed, Jr. noted in respect to

black cultural nationalism:

[T]he intellectual climate which came to pervade the movement was best sum-

marized in the nationalists’ exhortation to “think black”…. Truth became a

feature of the speaker’s “blackness,” i.e., validity claims were to be resolved

not through discourse but by the claimant’s manipulation of certain banal

symbols of legitimacy.

(Reed, in Glaude 2002, 52)

Demographic, economic, and political fissures within communities of color—

whose “unity” and “peoplehood” had been central features of cultural nationalist

theory— increasingly became too obvious to ignore. By the 1970s and 1980s, faced with

some of these changes, leading adherents moved on to new political horizons. Some,

notably Baraka, made spectacular and belated conversions to Marxism- Leninism and

Nation 89

Maoism, subsuming their original “racial” projects under broader “class” ones; these

too would prove to have serious limits.

In sum, cultural nationalism built “countercultural” institutions, and wound up

occupying a broad political spectrum that extended from the creation of small (though

sometimes influential) alternative institutions like bookstores and schools, all the way

to a “black capitalism” not too different from what Frazier had characterized in Black

Bourgeoisie (1957a). Too often, though certainly not in all cases, cultural nationalist

approaches neglected the key political determinants of race— the racial state, class

conflict, the politics of alliance and coalitions— preferring expressive authenticity to

political engagement.

The real accomplishment of cultural nationalist currents was in the nature of com-

munity service and education: “consciousness- raising.” This is not to be sneezed at.

An immense amount of interpretive and expressive work, and community organiza-

tion based on culturally grounded themes such as music and art, has burst onto the

American scene in recent decades. Making use of hiphop, Indian rock, punk rock, talk

radio, music videos, and social media of various kinds, the cultural politics of race have

been redefined since in the 1960s. Sun Ra and Horace Tapscott’s work has been con-

tinued by George Clinton, Rage Against the Machine and Tom Morello, Lupe Fiasco,

The Roots, Michael Franti, Das Racist, X- Clan, and innumerable others. Race- based

cultural politics, and thus something very close to cultural nationalism, continues as a

durable feature of American life. This underscores the centrality of cultural domina-

tion as a component of racial oppression, and stresses the importance of “cultures of

resistance” in unifying and promoting collective identity among the oppressed.

The “National Question” and Marxism: Classical Marxism viewed nations and

national boundaries as increasingly meaningless as world capitalism inexorably pen-

etrated every corner of the planet. Marx and Engels stated this perspective clearly in

The Communist Manifesto and viewed it as a “progressive” feature of the unfolding

capitalist order:

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and

more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of

commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and

in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

(Marx and Engels 1968 [1848], 55)

This was not their fi nal word on the subject, though. Indeed the idea of a tendential

abolition of national boundaries and antagonisms is undermined in other writings

of Marx. For example, addressing the national question with specifi c reference to

Ireland, Marx argues that the bourgeoisie not only maintains but heightens national

antagonisms. National hostilities are engendered by

• The struggle to control world markets, which creates confl icts among capitalist

powers;

90 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

• The exploitation of colonies, which creates antagonism between oppressed and

oppressor nations; and

• The use of nationalism as an ideological tool to defl ect proletarian attention

away from class antagonisms (Marx and Engels 1972a,1972b; Lowy 1976).

This contradictory stance towards the persistence or demise of nations is further

complicated by an implicit stage theory of development that views colonial penetra-

tion and plunder as progressive events: They are seen as rupturing traditional and

“backward” social relations and supplanting them with modern capitalist ones.

Marx and Engels did not resolve the “national question,” largely because it did

not fit within the class struggle/mode of production problematic. Nationalism and

empire occasioned significant debates during the period of the Second International. 33

An important polemical exchange between Lenin and Luxemburg, for example,

revolves around the “right of nations to self- determination.” Lenin argued that all

nations should be free from national oppression and enjoy the right to determine

their own destiny. 34 Luxemburg was critical of this “right to self- determination,”

which led in her view to a certain pandering to the aspirations of the national bour-

geoisies of the “oppressed” countries. Both Lenin and Luxemburg attempted to steer

a course between positions which asserted an unqualified right to national/cultural

autonomy, and a position which completely denied the legitimacy of nationalist aspi-

rations (Luxemburg 1976 [1909]).

The legacy of these debates on the national question was subsequently invoked

to analyze the situation of blacks in the United States. Prior to 1928, the Communist

Party of the United States had attributed no special role or status to blacks (or other

“national minorities”) within the general class struggle. Comintern (aka the Third

International or the Communist International) discussions between 1928 and 1930,

however, resulted in the “Black Nation Thesis”: that blacks in the southern region

known as the Black Belt (supposedly named for the soil) constituted a nation and were

therefore entitled to “self- determination”— including the right of political secession.

Blacks in the North were considered an oppressed “national minority” whose salva-

tion was to be sought in solidarity with white workers in the struggle for socialism

(Allen 1974).

The criteria for the thesis were drawn from a 1908 pamphlet by Joseph Stalin,

who had proposed a formula of four defining characteristics of a nation:

A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on

the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological

make- up, manifested in a common culture.

(Stalin 1975 [1908], 22)

In 1928 what Stalin said was not to be questioned. The Black Nation Thesis was

both dogmatic and inapplicable to the United States, but it was adopted anyway, in

Nation 91

an eff ort to resolve contradictions within the Communist Party due to racism. Most

important, it was intended to help the party compete with Garveyism and other sup-

posedly “bourgeois” separatist trends in the black community.

The Communist Party adhered only fitfully to this increasingly marginal analysis.

Between 1936 and the early 1950s, the right to self- determination was subordinated

to the New Deal and the war against fascism. 35 Between 1955 and 1959, the party

moved to discard the thesis entirely, recognizing that black migration from the South

had eroded its political viability. After dying this slow death, the thesis was exhumed

by various Marxist- Leninist groups in the 1970s (Revolutionary Union n.d.; October

League 1976). There never was any consensus about the application, or indeed the

meaning, of the Black Nation Thesis on the Marxist- Leninist left.

Lacking an orthodox Marxist theory of racism, and unable to examine U.S.

society without a comforting pillow of citations from the “classics,” Marxists of all

varieties have performed some strenuous theoretical labor in their efforts to apply the

literature on the “national question” to racial dynamics in the United States. The

general practice has been to substitute national categories for racial ones. The cor-

responding political rights, such as self- determination for “legitimate” nations, can

then be asserted. The result has been confusion and endless debate over the appro-

priate criteria for “nationhood.” 36 For Marxist- Leninists, nation- based approaches

became little more than a convenient way to deal with the messy and undertheorized

concepts of race and racism.

Internal Colonialism: The internal colonialism perspective has been applied to

nationalist movements in many countries, among them France, Peru, South Africa,

and Great Britain (Cotler 1970; Berger 1972; Wolpe 1975; Hechter 1998 [1975]). In

the United States, the concept achieved great currency in the late 1960s and early

1970s (although earlier formulations, such as that of Cruse, can be found), when

various writers employed it to account for the upsurge in racial minority militance.

The radical nationalist movements that (re)surfaced in black, Latin@, Native Ameri-

can, and Asian American communities at this time generally rejected reform- oriented

politics, preferring to link their struggles with those of such national liberation move-

ments as the Vietnamese, Algerian, or Chinese revolutions.

Internal colonialism approaches attempted the synthesis of different aspects of

racial oppression: economic, political, and cultural, through the invocation of a colo-

nial model. In most cases they appealed as well to nationalist forms of mobilization

against this generalized system of oppression. Among the elements of internal colo-

nialism which analysts identified were:

• A colonial geography emphasizing the territoriality or spatial arrangement of

population groups along racial lines;

• A dynamic of cultural domination and resistance, in which racial categories were

utilized to distinguish between antagonistic colonizing and colonized groups,

and conversely, to emphasize the essential cultural unity and autonomy of each;

92 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

• A system of superexploitation, understood as a process by which extra- economic

coercion was applied to the racially identifi ed colonized group, with the aim of

increasing the economic resources appropriated by the colonizers.

• Institutionalization of externally- based control, such that the racially identifi ed

colonized group is organized in essential political and administrative aspects by

the colonizers or their agents.

In some cases militant groups themselves adopted analyses of their conditions and

demands based on internal colonialism arguments; in others, scholarly treatments

brought these perspectives to bear. Notable studies were devoted to the black and

Chican@ communities (Moore 1970; Barrera, Muñoz, and Ornelas 1972; Barrera

2002 [1979]; Flores 1973; Allen 1990 [1970]; Ture [Carmichael] and Hamilton 1992

[1967]).

Internal colonialists argued that the ghetto and barrio were in fact colonized ter-

ritory (Boggs 1970). Robert Blauner’s Racial Oppression in America is probably the

most familiar general discussion of race in the U.S. written from an internal colo-

nialism perspective, and the one most “tailored” to U.S. conditions (Blauner 2001

[1972], 2011). 37 Blauner had two central preoccupations: The first was to provide

theoretical arguments with which to counter the dominant ethnicity paradigm of

race in the United States. The second crucial commitment in Blauner’s work was his

identification with the radical nationalist politics of the 1960s. Blauner acknowledged

the intellectual influence of movement theory and practice on his work, and coun-

terposed its radical depth to the complacency of the ethnicity- oriented sociology he

criticized. 38 He explicitly sought to deepen radical nationalist practice by grafting

internal colonialism theory onto it.

Blauner employed the distinction between “colonized and immigrant minori-

ties” to criticize the ethnic group paradigm. By “colonized” minorities he meant

those whose presence in the United States was the result of “forced entry,” a crite-

rion that seeks to distinguish between those (Africans and Latin Americans) whose

entry into the country was the direct result of processes of colonialism and slav-

ery and those (Europeans) who “became ethnic groups and minorities within the

United States by the essentially voluntary movements of individuals and families”

(2001 [1972], 55). In using the distinction between coerced and voluntary migra-

tion, superimposing it, so to speak, on the race/ethnicity distinction, Blauner was

on somewhat shaky ground. The line between coerced and voluntary migration is far

from clear: consider the Irish emigrations in the 1840s, for example, or Jewish emi-

grations from Russia at the turn of the 20th century. In these cases, mass starvation

(imposed by the British as a form of what we today might call “ethnic cleansing”)

and widespread pogroms (organized campaigns of murder, rape, and expulsions

of impoverished and stigmatized people), seem to be sufficiently violent, and to

cause sufficient desperation, to qualify as coercive practices, even if their monstros-

ity does not fully attain the levels of predation and mass murder achieved by the

Nation 93

Atlantic slave trade. 39 Further problems arise when we consider Asian immigration:

coerced or voluntary, racial or ethnic? When we apply the Blauner’s approach to

contemporary patterns of global racism and migration, still other difficulties arise,

for example: massive trafficking of living human bodies (preponderantly women)

to the United States that combines coerced and voluntary dimensions; refugee and

asylum policies shaped by U.S. government realpolitik; and post- 1965 shifts in

“voluntary” immigration from Africa, the Philippines, the Caribbean, and China

(Zolberg 2008).

In respect to Blauner’s second point of emphasis, derived chiefly from the militant

black politics of the late 1960s— his “basic thesis that the most important expressions

of protest in the black community reflect the colonized status of Afro- America” (2001

[1972], 89)— the internal colonialism approach also fares poorly, especially in a more

contemporary perspective. None of the protest phenomena Blauner cites (ghetto

riots, cultural nationalism, ghetto- based “community control” movements) neces-

sitates the internal colonialism perspective as an analytical framework. For example,

ghetto uprisings have been explained as an extension of “normal” politics when insti-

tutionalized channels of political expression are blocked (Piven and Cloward 1978).

As the 1992 Los Angeles riots showed, urban revolt is now a multiracial phenomenon:

black, brown, and even a bit white, and with Asians often targeted along with whites

(Rutten 1992; Gooding- Williams 1993; Kim 2008).

What is “nationalist” about race- based social movements is a matter of consider-

able ambiguity and debate. Ghetto community control demands have proved subject

to quite moderate (or “reformist”) interpretation, besides proving to be at best “too

little, too late” as key decisions about the cities’ fate are made elsewhere. There is

nothing inherently democratic about “community control”; it should be remem-

bered that Richard Nixon was a major proponent of affirmative action, community

control, and black capitalism, all of which he rearticulated to serve as “divide and

conquer” strategies for the diffusion and demobilization of the black power move-

ment (Perlstein 2008; Goldberg and Griffey, eds. 2010; Hill and Rabig, eds. 2012). At

best, such programs can provide employment and training, and, of course, support

for progressive sectors of the “black bourgeoisie” (see Cross 1974). At worst, such

demands provide grounds for rearticulation in new right or neoconservative analyses

and programs, for example to provide code words for opposition to busing or welfare

rights.

Blauner’s internal colonialism approach neglected the cleavages that exist within

communities of color, notably class- and gender- based ones. He did not address

inter- group rivalries either: “black–brown” and black–Asian conflicts, for example.

Finally, the extensive “hybridization” of racial cultures in the U.S. societies went

largely untheorized. Though it is hardly as complete as an ethnicity theorist like

Glazer might wish to argue, the extensive mixture of racial identities and communi-

ties in the (still very segregated) United States casts doubt on the internal colonialism

analogy in respect to territoriality, at the very least. 40 Racial hybridity also suggests

94 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

limits to other elements of the nation- based paradigm in the U.S. context. The cul-

tural domination/cultural autonomy tension so central to cultural nationalism, for

example, appears to be but one element of a broader cultural dynamic that includes

both the distinctiveness and the interaction of whiteness, blackness, and brownness,

at a minimum. In the same way, the concept of “superexploitation,” something

central to Marxist accounts of race and nation, does not adequately address con-

temporary economic developments which include marginalization and permanent

dependency for many, on the one hand, and significant “upward mobility” for some,

on the other.

In many respects, then, there are limits to nation- based approaches to race. It is

quite understandable why the epochal history of racial nationalism— notably black

nationalism— was grafted onto or analogized to the national liberation struggles that

swept the planet during the post- World War II period. The political affinities between

domestic, U.S.- based racial freedom struggles and the anti- colonial battles of Viet-

nam, Algeria, and elsewhere, were linkages and overlaps of great resonance and

importance. But because accords were grounded in political considerations and not

theoretically or analytically worked out, they could not sustain the internal colonialist

version of nation- based racial theory.

Some Critical Remarks on the Nation- Based Paradigm

How eff ectively does the nation- based paradigm account for racial dynamics? In

fact, the connection is tenuous. Both the U.S. system of racial oppression and colo-

nial systems of racial rule composed of colonizers and colonized made use of racial

distinctions. But in the present period the two cannot be compared in more than

a general way. All the specifi cally national aspects of the internal colonialism per-

spective (geography, culture, extra- economic coercion, and external political rule),

while remaining true in a general fashion, are contradictory and problematic when

examined in detail. While segregation is still extensive, it varies widely by class and

racial category; culture is racially hybridized to an unprecedented degree. As we have

already noted, extra- economic coercion, what David Harvey calls “accumulation by

dispossession” (Harvey 2004) is a general feature of neoliberalism, and not only a

matter of structural racism; and external political rule also operates fairly compre-

hensively under the present- day oligarchical regime of the United States.

Racial oppression and white supremacy retain their power, but these patterns and

social structures have been reorganized and rearticulated over the post- World War II

period, and especially since the late 1960s, in ways that render the nation- based

paradigm of race problematic. As applied to the contemporary United States (with

significant if partial exceptions such as Native American conditions or the cases of

Puerto Rico and Hawai’i), the appeal of nationalism, in political practice or in theory,

appears to be limited. This is true across the board: for the various cultural national-

isms, for Marxist accounts, and for internal colonialism theories as well. In our view,

Nation 95

the nation- based paradigm of race is an important component of our understand-

ing of race: in highlighting “peoplehood,” collective identity, it “invents tradition”

(Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds. 1983) and “imagines community” (Anderson 1998).

Nation- based understandings of race provide affective identification: They prom-

ise a sense of ineffable connection within racially identified groups; they engage in

“collective representation” (Durkheim 2014). The tropes of “soul,” of “folk,” of

hermanos/hermanas unidos/unidas uphold Duboisian themes. They channel Martí’s

hemispheric consciousness (Martí 1977 [1899]); and Vasconcelos’s ideas of la raza

cosmica (1979; Stavans 2011). In communities and movements, in the arts and pop-

ular media, as well as universities and colleges (especially in ethnic studies) these

frameworks of peoplehood play a vital part in maintaining a sense of racial solidarity,

however uneven or partial.

So the nation- based paradigm remains valuable, but cannot capture the complex-

ity of U.S. racial dynamics across the board. In this respect it parallels the other two

paradigms we have discussed: ethnicity- based theory and class- based theory. Because

it is based on a reductionism of race— in this case to the idea of “peoplehood”— it

cannot grasp the phenomenon comprehensively.

Unlike many of the old colonial nations, and possibly because it was created in

an anti- colonial revolution, the U.S. political scene allows insurgent racial national-

isms little space. It does preserve and protect white racial nationalism, not only as a

popular ideology, but as a respectable intellectual position. This is visible not only on

the political and academic right- wing (Swain 2002; Walters 2003), but also among

centrist and liberal scholars, including those identified with the ethnicity paradigm

(Glazer 1997; Thernstrom and Thernstrom 1999; Lipset 2003 [1963]). White racial

nationalism remains the bedrock of the U.S. right wing, and much of its liberal cen-

ter as well (Amadae 2003). This normalization of whiteness is often quite invisible

to leading U.S. nationalists, who prefer to celebrate “western civilization” and the

“triumph of democracy” (Smith 2003). 41

Insurgent nationalisms tend to reduce race to a taken- for- granted “peoplehood,”

but they do take it seriously. They do not dismiss it as a mask for something else,

as do both the ethnicity- and class- based approaches. Yet insurgent variants of the

nation- based paradigm of race fail to demonstrate the existence of relatively homo-

geneous black, brown, or other colonized “nations,” notably internally colonized

peoples whose claims to “self- determination” in the United States might be logical

and workable. 42 Despite the ongoing realities of structural racism, the vast increase

in the incarcerated black and brown population over the past three decades, and the

deepening of economic inequality since the onset of the great recession in 2008, U.S.

communities of color remain highly stratified by class and gender, vastly differenti-

ated by age cohorts, and more hybridized culturally— as well as through mixed- race

relationships and identities— than was ever the case before. Therefore nation- based

accounts cannot sustain the argument that the ghettos and barrios are so thoroughly

and structurally separated from U.S. society overall that they could be reorganized in

96 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

democratic and egalitarian fashion along the lines of “self- determination “and “com-

munity control.” While these notions may have some emotional resonance for those

who are simply “sick and tired of being sick and tired” (Nappy Roots 2003), in practi-

cal terms such measures would represent the opposite of an emancipatory solution to

problems of segregation, isolation, and exploitation. Not that practical measures of

this type are feasible, but if they were, they would more likely take the form of South

African “bantustans” or “townships” than they would of liberated territory.

Nation- based theories of race still practice epiphenomenalism. They treat race as

a manifestation of “peoplehood”— and thus still reduce it to a something supposedly

more fundamental. We argue that race is not a mask for something else. It cannot

be reduced to the “true” national identity of a racially categorized people— as the

nation- based paradigm would claim. It cannot be reduced to cultural differences— as

the ethnicity- based paradigm suggests. And it cannot be reduced to a type of inequal-

ity either— as the class- based paradigm suggests. Although race contains all these

dimensions, it exceeds them all as well.

Perhaps it is the very inability of the nation- based account to specify precisely

what exactly is “national” about racial oppression in the United States that leads it

to lend a certain primacy and integrity to racial phenomena. The ethnicity and class

paradigms, working from more secure assumptions about the “primacy” of their par-

adigmatic categories, tend to dissolve the unity of racially constituted groups more

easily than the nation paradigm does.

Notes

1. Imperialism and conquest had been inherent in the making of modern European nations

themselves. Even today many European nations are uneasy aggregations of distinct peo-

ples forged by conquest: consider Scots or Catalan nationalisms today, for example. The

transoceanic imperial adventures of the European powers were therefore extensions of

earlier transitions to nation- states. Though that process was already well underway, it was

expanded signifi cantly after the politically foundational Treaties of Westphalia ended the

Thirty- Years War in 1648 (Bobbitt 2002; Geary 2002).

2. For an overview of the linkages between U.S. and global racial politics, see Winant 2001. A

substantial literature now links domestic racial policy and U.S. foreign policy in respect to

the international coordination of racial rule. For example, the CIA worked with the BOSS,

the apartheid- era South African secret police. On the fl ip side of this, these linkages were

also recognized by radical democratic oppositions: SNCC, the South African ANC or

Algerian FLN, and many other anti- racist and antiwar organizations around the world

explicitly made these connections, especially during the 1960s (Dudziak 2011; Kelley

2003; Singh 2004; Hanchard 2006; Prashad 2007). Movement eff orts to identify anti-

imperial struggles in the “Third World” (the then- current term for the Global South),

with anti- racism politics on the domestic front (“in the belly of the beast”) have a very long

history.

3. Debates on the dynamics of whiteness are extensive. We recognize the importance of

“privilege” in the constitution of whiteness, but resist the reduction of white identity to

Nation 97

nothing more than privilege. We note that while whites generally benefi t materially from

racism and thus have an interest in perpetuating it (Harris 1993; Lipsitz 2006), they are

also hurt by racism and therefore have contrary interests in reducing or ending it. Con-

sider: about 750,000 Americans died in the Civil War, for example; the majority of them

were white (Faust 2009; Gugliotta 2012).

4. In Europe as well, citizenship rights were only gradually extended (and even more

gradually granted in practice) to immigrants, Jews, and nonwhites. In Germany jus san-

guinis policies were continued from the formation of the nation, through the Third Reich,

and into the establishment of the EU, when they were fi nally relaxed only in the 1990s

(Brubaker 1992). French “racial diff erentialism” (Taguieff 1999, 2001) struggles in vain to

reconcile the exclusion and despair of the banlieues with the Jacobin/Napoleonic legacies

of assimilationism and secularism (Wieviorka 1995; Noiriel 1996; Silverstein 2004).

5. South Africa explicitly institutionalized the herrenvolk model, fi rst piecemeal, and then

systematically after 1948. All the European empires struggled to distinguish between met-

ropolitans/citizens and colonials/natives, especially as mixed- race populations expanded,

miscegenation became commonplace, and “creoles,” “wogs,” “kaffi rs,” “beurs,” and “Indos”

established themselves in London, Paris, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and elsewhere (Stoler 2002).

6. There are more women than men in the United States, and for the fi rst time, more women

than men in the U.S. labor force.

7. What few legal, political, or cultural constraints there were on Indian expulsions or land

seizures were ignored in practice. The most famous case was Andrew Jackson defi ance

of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Worcester v Georgia (31 U.S. 515, 1832): writing for

the Court, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokee were a sovereign nation

and therefore not subject to the Indian Removal Act, which Jackson supported. Jackson’s

famous response was, “Justice Marshall has made his decision. Let him enforce it now

if he can.” Jackson’s defi ance paved the way for the “Trail of Tears” forced march of the

Cherokee from their homes in Georgia to the Oklahoma territory. See Rogin 1991.

8. Neither race nor class were ever fully worked- out and defi nitive characteristics of the

early U.S. social system: from the early days the presence of free blacks, the abolitionist

impulse, and the extensive overlap between the categories of “servant” and “slave” had

both intensifi ed and muddied the waters of racial despotism (Roediger 2007 [1991]). And

the ill- defi ned and preliminary forms of capitalist development also vitiated clear distinc-

tions of class: who or what was a “worker” and who a “servant” was being determined in

the shoe factories of Lynn, Massachusetts, at the same time that the slave system was shap-

ing U.S. exports, shipping, and investment opportunities (Dawley 2000 [1975]). Although

most slaves were rural laborers, there was also industrial slavery (Starobin 1970) and of

course extensive domestic slavery (mainly but not entirely female).

9. Brown (1998) provides a good overview of the historiography of gender and race in early

North America, focusing on its late emergence under the infl uence of the civil rights and

second- wave feminist movements. See also Hodes 1997; Gordon 2001; Gilmore 1996; and

Bederman 1996 on the intersections of race, gender, and national identity in the United

States. Mosse 1997 (1981); Radhakrishnan 1992; Stoler 2002; and McClintock 1995 link

race, gender, and nation in the global context of imperialism.

10. A word to which we object, since it signifi es “misbreeding.” It was “coined in the election

of 1864 by Northern Democrats, who used it to denounce Lincoln Republicans as advo-

cates of interracial sex” (Woodward 1998).

98 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

11. As Martha Hodes (1997) has shown, in the slave South before the Civil War, there existed

many varieties of intimate relationships, including marriages, between white women and

black men. After the war, the southern regime became far more brutal and terroristic, in

the age of the KKK and under the command of Judge Lynch. By then a great deal of

interracial breeding had occurred. Mixed- race identity undermined and threatened the

system of racial classifi cation on which slavery and Jim Crow were based. After the war

interracial liaisons grew far more dangerous, and white antagonism to them became ever

more irrational and violent. See also Williamson 1986.

12. Urged on by the Kennedy administration and various liberal foundations and policy

groups, SNCC had deeply committed itself to voter registration work in Mississippi. In

return it was subject to unremitting KKK violence. The torture and murders of the three

SNCC workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner during the 1964 SNCC- led “Free-

dom Summer” project— a voting rights eff ort— were just the most publicized of these

vicious reprisals. The Johnson administration, focused on the 1964 election and still pan-

dering to the South, off ered very little support and almost no protection to the eff ort its

predecessor— especially Robert Kennedy— had sponsored. When the SNCC- led alter-

nate Mississippi delegation to the national convention, known as the Mississippi Freedom

Democratic Party, arrived in Atlantic City, it was rudely dismissed. Off ered two seats in

the state delegation, the MFDP (Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party)— led by civil

rights hero Fannie Lou Hamer— criticized Lyndon Johnson ferociously and publically.

SNCC went on to complete its turn, already well underway, to black power and the anti-

imperialist left. See Payne 2007 (1995); Lee 2000; Carson 1995 (1981).

13. Malcolm’s assassination in February of 1965 (at the age of 40) signifi cantly narrowed the

prospects for the creative development of black nationalist politics in the U.S. In Malcolm’s

fi nal few years he had not only developed his own independent political orientation, but

had also crafted the beginnings of a creative and autonomous black nationalist politics

that combined internationalism, socialism, religious syncretism, and anti- racism. That

approach to black nationalism would never come to fruition. See Marable 2011.

14. All previous race riots in U.S. history had been white attacks on people of color and their

communities (Rucker and Upton, eds. 2006).

15. In 1854, for example, a National Emigration Convention was held at Pittsburgh, with

Delany in the leadership, which called for emigration “towards those places where the

black and colored man [sic] comprise, by population … the ruling element of the body

politic” (Bracey, Meier, and Rudwick, eds. 1970, 93).

16. Immanuel Wallerstein’s term has now entered the social scientifi c canon; it intersects with

race theory at multiple points. Original an anti- colonial sociologist of Africa, Wallerstein

has written on race and racism fairly extensively. See Balibar and Wallerstein 2011, among

other sources.

17. Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano (2000; see also Mignolo 2011) has developed a theory

of “the coloniality of power” to account for the persistence of structures of unequal power

in postcolonial societies. Quijano asks how racism, and racial categories themselves, man-

aged to survive and indeed deepen in the aftermath of colonial rule throughout the global

South. What accounts for the resilience, not only of racial inequality and exclusion from

the political process of, say, indigenous and African people in Peru, long after the end of

Spanish colonialism there?

Nation 99

18. A sixth (or seventh, depending on which events are counted) Pan- African Congress was

held in Tanzania in 1974.

19. Garvey’s origins were as a labor insurgent in Jamaica. See among many statements his

“Speech at Royal Albert Hall.” In Clarke 2011 (1974), 284–299.

20. Garvey visited Ku Klux Klan headquarters in June, 1922, and subsequently declared

his agreement with the Klan that “this is a white man’s country.” He also fl irted with

the Anglo- Saxon Clubs of America, a white supremacist group led by one John Powell.

His connection with such groups was certainly ill- advised, but his motivation in making

these contacts has never been suffi ciently explained. He was obviously not in agreement

with such groups on white supremacy itself. See Moore in Clarke, ed. 2011 (1974), 225,

233–234. For a strong contemporary critique of authoritarianism in Garvey— and in black

nationalism more generally— see Gilroy 2000.

21. Even opposing tendencies of black nationalism were infl uenced. For example, it is unlikely

that the Communist Party would have adopted its “black nation” approach in 1928 had

not Party leaders both in the United States and in Moscow become alarmed at Garvey’s

successes.

22. On Carmichael’s 1967 meetings with Sekou Toure and Kwame Nkrumah, see Carson 1995

(1981), 276. Carmichael later founded a small Pan- Africanist party in the United States,

the All African Peoples Revolutionary Party.

23. See Fredrickson 1995; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997. Of course, there were some

exceptions. We have already mentioned U.S. black colonization movements. The early

involvement of George Washington Williams— an extraordinary 19th- century U.S. black

activist and intellectual— in the eff ort to curtail the genocidal practices in the Congo of King

Leopold II of Belgium, also deserves notice. See Hochschild 1998; Franklin 1998 (1985).

24. In Angola, the U.S. and the USSR fought a “hot” proxy war for a quarter- century: from

1975 to 2002. Angola, a major oil- producing state, became independent in 1975 after Por-

tugal’s decrepit fascist regime was overthrown, largely by colonial soldiers disgusted with

counterinsurgency warfare in Portugal’s African colonies. Two anti- imperialist Angolan

movements, the MPLA and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola

(UNITA), then commenced a brutal civil war for control of the resource- rich country. The

MPLA, a Marxist group, received support from the USSR; the UNITA declared itself

“anti- communist” and gained U.S. backing. Neighboring South Africa— a U.S. ally and

then still an apartheid state— invaded in support of UNITA. Cuba, a USSR ally, sent in

troops in support of the MPLA. The MPLA achieved victory only in 2002; an estimated

500,000 people died, and the country was largely destroyed.

25. The U.S. steadily backed the apartheid regime on Cold War grounds, branding the oppo-

sition ANC as communist, maintaining clandestine CIA ties with BOSS (the South Africa

Bureau of State Security), and resisting a rising movement for democratization at home

that included an anti- corporate boycott campaign and extensive civil disobedience. The

fall of the regime was met with great excitement in the U.S., especially in the black com-

munity. Still, within the Pan- Africanist current there were echoes of the divisions that

had arisen over Angola: right- wing support for Inkatha, and Afrocentrist support for the

South African Pan- Africanist Congress, the organization founded by Robert Sobukwe in

opposition to the “non-racialism” of the ANC. On Sobukwe see Pogrund 1991; Fredrick-

son 1991.

100 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

26. NEPAD has been strongly criticized from the left as a new sub- imperialist cartel in which

South Africa dominates but Nigeria, Algeria, and the Organization of African Unity

(OAU) also play important roles (Bond 2002, 2010).

27. Cruse’s contention that the demand for “public ownership” of the cultural apparatus

formed the basis for a new revolutionary nationalist politics was unrealistic. The inte-

gration of the U.S. cultural apparatus, on the other hand, proved possible, though not

without ongoing struggle. A more conservative version of black cultural nationalism, akin

to notions of “black capitalism,” may be seen here. Robert Allen has noted the hegemonic

dimensions of this process (Allen 1990 [1970], 179). Political battles within hip- hop, and

struggles over TV and Hollywood “production values” with respect to race/class/gender,

were all prefi gured in Cruse’s work.

28. A vast cultural nationalist literature seeks to establish links between U.S. black habitus and

the (sometimes idealized and stereotyped) African motherland. Discussions here often

intersect with long- standing debates in the anthropology of race. See Asante 1998; Moses

1998; Glaude, ed. 2002.

29. For a systematic treatment of the relationship over historical time between U.S. imperial-

ism in Latin America and the emergence of Latin@ politics at home, see Gonzalez 2011

[2001].

30. To a large extent the presence on U.S. college and university campuses of ethnic studies

departments and programs, multicultural centers, and recognized race- based organiza-

tions of various kinds is the product of these actions. Though still uneven and sometimes

beleaguered in budgetary battles and ideological disputes, the institutionalization of eth-

nic studies has been a tremendous political and cultural accomplishment, responsible for

reshaping the race consciousness of millions of U.S. students, by no means only students

of color, across the United States for nearly half a century. Today, ethnic studies— and the

teaching about race and racism in general— faces new challenges, and new attempts to

curtail it as well. See Winant 2006; Alcoff 2012).

31. See El Plan de Santa Barbara, adopted April 1969 (Chican@ Coordinating Council on

Higher Education, 1969).

32. Marlon Riggs’s documentary fi lm Color Adjustment (1992) traces the transformation of

U.S. television from its all- white beginnings in the late 1940s through its various racial

confl icts and accommodations up to the late 1980s.

33. The European “empires within” (Austria- Hungary and Tsarist Russia particularly) were

the main objects of these debates. External colonies drew less attention, but were certainly

not ignored, especially in the work of Luxemburg.

34. Lenin sought to place these “national” confl icts in their international “class” context:

the relationship between the proletariat of the “oppressor” nation and the proletariat of

the “oppressed” nation (the so- called “aristocracy of labor”) was also one of exploitation

(Lenin 1970 [1915]). Lenin’s ideas on self- determination are productively compared to

Woodrow Wilson’s— who made this concept central to his position at the 1919 Versailles

conference— by Nikhil Pal Singh (2004, 31).

35. As is well- known, the CPUSA undertook some torturous reversals during these years,

moving from sectarian attacks on other leftist groups during 1928–1935, then embrac-

ing its former rivals in a “popular front” posture until 1939, then attacking them again

during the period of the Hitler–Stalin pact (1939–1941), and then making common cause

Nation 101

with leftists and liberals after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June of 1941. These

reversals alienated many left- oriented black nationalists, as they did other anti- racists and

progressives. See Robinson 2000 (1983) for the defi nitive analysis and background on these

matters.

36. Some of the analyses are tragically humorous. The Communist Labor Party, a Marxist-

Leninist group, understood the black nation in the following manner:

Owing to the specifi cs of the rise of USNA [United States of North America]

imperialism and the history of the Black Belt of the South, there arose a nation,

oppressed by USNA imperialism, whose social root and base was the aforemen-

tioned Negro people … Now, when referring to the nation, we use the term Negro

and mean national and not color … In the sense of national, Negroes are both the

“black” majority and “white” minority. (Peery 1975, 11)

One can well imagine the success of eff orts to organize both blacks and whites in the South

on the basis of their common identity as “Negroes.”

37. Blauner’s approach infl uenced us very deeply. We pay tribute to him in Omi and Winant

2012. Of course this work, like other “internal colonialism” analyses, can be criticized as

well. Blauner departs from the original meaning of the term “colonialism,” as Michael

Burawoy (1974, 546) has argued. Burawoy off ers a defi nition of colonialism that reasserts

the criterion of territoriality in terms which no “internal” application can satisfy:

Colonialism may be defi ned as the conquest and administration by a “metro-

politan country” of a geographically separate territory in order to utilize available

resources (usually human or natural) for the creation of surplus which is repatri-

ated to the metropolis.

38. “My own developing framework,” Blauner writes, “probably owes more to the social

movements of the oppressed than to standard sociology” (2001 [1972], viii).

39. Blauner is not unaware that economic suff ering and political persecution in their coun-

tries of origin impelled much immigration to the United States, but he notes that these

problems, however dire, did not force their victims to come to the U.S. specifi cally. Many

European emigrants headed for South America, for example. This seems to us an inad-

equate foundation on which to rest so important a distinction.

40. Ralph Ellison writes,

What, by the way, are we to make of a white youngster who, with a transistor radio

screaming a Stevie Wonder tune glued to his ear, shouts racial epithets at black

youngsters trying to swim at a public beach— and this in the name of the ethnic

sanctity of what has been declared a neighborhood turf? (1995 [1986])

Charles Gallagher writes,

An adolescent white male at a bar mitzvah wears a FUBU shirt while his white

friend preens his tightly set, perfectly braided corn rows. A black model dressed in

yachting attire peddles a New England yuppie boating look in Nautica advertise-

ments. It is quite unremarkable to observe whites, Asians, or African Americans

with dyed purple, blond, or red hair. White, black, and Asian students decorate

their bodies with tattoos of Chinese characters and symbols. In cities and suburbs,

young adults across the color line wear hip- hop clothing and listen to white rapper

102 p a r a d i g m s o f r a c e

Eminem and black rapper Jay- Z. A north Georgia branch of the NAACP installs

a white biology professor as its president. The music of Jimi Hendrix is used to

sell Apple Computers. Du- Rag kits [sic], complete with bandana headscarf and

elastic headband are on sale for $2.95 at hip- hop clothing stores and theme parks

like Six Flags. Salsa has replaced ketchup as the best- selling condiment in the

United States … (2003, 22–23; see also Wimsatt 1994)

41. Some writers— for example, Samuel P. Huntington— do argue unabashedly that U.S. civic

culture was founded on White Anglo- Saxon Protestant values, and that the ticket for inclu-

sion in “our” society remains full adherence to those values (Huntington 2005).

42. With the partial exceptions of the Puerto Rican, Native Hawai’ian, and Native American

peoples, who have more credible claims as racialized nations because of their history of

U.S. occupation.

P A R T I I

Racial Formation

This page intentionally left blank

105

C H A P T E R 4

The Theory of Racial Formation

Race is a way of “making up people.” 1 The very act of defi ning racial groups is a pro-

cess fraught with confusion, contradiction, and unintended consequences. Concepts

of race prove to be unreliable as supposed boundaries shift, slippages occur, realign-

ments become evident, and new collectivities emerge. State- imposed classifi cations

of race, for example, face continuing challenges by individuals and groups who seek

to assert distinctive racial categories and identities. Historical shifts in scientifi c

knowledge, in fi elds ranging from physical anthropology to the genomic sciences,

fuel continuing debates about what race may or may not mean as an indicator of

human variation. While such debates and reformulations regarding the concept of

race initially occur in specifi c institutional arenas, public spaces, or academic fi elds,

their consequences are often dramatic and reverberate broadly throughout society.

Race- making can also be understood as a process of “othering.” Defining groups

of people as “other” is obviously not restricted to distinctions based on race. Gen-

der, class, sexuality, religion, culture, language, nationality, and age, among other

perceived distinctions, are frequently evoked to justify structures of inequality, dif-

ferential treatment, subordinate status, and in some cases violent conflict and war.

Classifying people as other, and making use of various perceived attributes in order

to do so, is a universal phenomenon that also classifies (and works to amalgamate and

homogenize) those who do the classifying (Blumer 1958). “Making up people” is

both basic and ubiquitous. As social beings, we must categorize people so as to be able

to “navigate” in the world— to discern quickly who may be friend or foe, to position

and situate ourselves within prevailing social hierarchies, and to provide clues that

guide our social interactions with the individuals and groups we encounter.

But while the act of categorizing people and assigning different attributes to such

categories may be universal, the categories themselves are subject to enormous varia-

tion over historical time and space. The definitions, meanings, and overall coherence

of prevailing social categories are always subject to multiple interpretations. No social

category rises to the level of being understood as a fixed, objective, social fact.

One might imagine, for example, that the category of a person’s “age” (as measured

in years) is an objective social category. But even this familiar concept’s meaning var-

ies across time and space. In many societies where the elderly are venerated and highly

valued as leaders and living repositories of wisdom, individuals tend to overstate their

age in years. By contrast, people in the youth- oriented United States tend to under-

state how old they are. Processes of classification, including self- classification, are

106 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

reflective of specific social structures, cultural meanings and practices, and of broader

power relations as well.

The definitions of specific categories are framed and contested from “above”

and “below.” The social identities of marginalized and subordinate groups, for

example, are both imposed from above by dominant social groups and/or state insti-

tutions, and constituted from below by these groups themselves as expressions of

self- identification and resistance to dominant forms of categorization. In any given

historical moment, one can understand a social category’s prevailing meaning, but

such understandings can also be erroneous or transitory. They are often no more

than the unstable and tentative result of the dynamic engagement between “elite” and

“street” definitions and meanings.

Race as a Master Category

It is now widely accepted in most scholarly fi elds that race is a social construction.

Simply stating that race is socially constructed, however, begs a number of important

questions. How is race constructed? How and why do racial defi nitions and meanings

change over time and place? And perhaps most important, what role does race play

within the broader social system in which it is embedded?

With respect to this last question, we advance what may seem an audacious claim.

We assert that in the United States, race is a master category — a fundamental concept

that has profoundly shaped, and continues to shape, the history, polity, economic

structure, and culture of the United States. Obviously, some clarification is in order.

We are not suggesting that race is a transcendent category— something that stands

above or apart from class, gender, or other axes of inequality and difference. The lit-

erature on intersectionality has clearly demonstrated the mutual determination and

co- constitution of the categories of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. It is not

possible to understand the (il)logic of any form of social stratification, any practice

of cultural marginalization, or any type of inequality or human variation, without

appreciating the deep, complex, comingling, interpenetration of race, class, gender,

and sexuality. In the cauldron of social life, these categories come together; they are

profoundly transformed in the process. 2

We hold these truths of intersectional analysis to be self- evident. But we also

believe that race has played a unique role in the formation and historical develop-

ment of the United States. Since the historical encounter of the hemispheres and

the onset of transatlantic enslavement were the fundamental acts of race- making,

since they launched a global and world- historical process of “making up people” that

constituted the modern world, race has become the template of both difference and

inequality. This is a world- historical claim, but here we develop it only in the context

of the United States.

We suggest that the establishment and reproduction of different regimes of

domination, inequality, and difference in the United States have consciously drawn

The Theory of Racial Formation 107

upon concepts of difference, hierarchy, and marginalization based on race. The geno-

cidal policies and practices directed towards indigenous peoples in the conquest and

settlement of the “new world,” and towards African peoples in the organization of

racial slavery, combined to form a template, a master frame, that has perniciously

shaped the treatment and experiences of other subordinated groups as well. This

template includes not only the technologies (economic, political, cultural) of exploi-

tation, domination, and deracination; it also includes the technologies of resistance:

self- activity (James et al., 1958); “ liberté, égalité, fraternité ,” sisterhood, and abolition

democracy (Du Bois 2007 [1935]).

Consider the questions of class and gender. Historically in the United States,

race has provided a master category for understanding the definition of class and the

patterns of class consciousness, mobilization, and organization. Class stratification in

the United States has been profoundly affected by race and racism, and the reproduc-

tion of class inequalities is inextricably linked to the maintenance of white supremacy.

Race has shaped the meaning of such concepts as work and worker, labor and employ-

ment, master and servant, supervisor and subordinate (Roediger 2007 [1991]). Race

is a fundamental organizing principle of social stratification. It has influenced the

definition of rights and privileges, the distribution of resources, and the ideologies

and practices of subordination and oppression. The concept of race as a marker of

difference has permeated all forms of social relations. It is a template for the processes

of marginalization that continue to shape social structures as well as collective and

individual psyches. Drawing upon social psychology and mind science research that

explores mechanisms of “othering,” john a. powell and Stephen Menendian assert:

“Without being identical, most of the forms of marginalization and stratification in

society share a common set of heuristics and structure, which is patterned on race”

(powell and Menendian n.d.).

From conquest and slavery on, racial parallels and racial “crossings” have shaped

gender relations. Women and slaves were at best lower- status humans, at worst not

human at all. They were both subject to chattelization. Their labor was coerced and

unremunerated; they were physically brutalized. Although there were, of course, very

distinct and widely varied experiences of subordination among different classes of

women and of blacks, the objectification of both groups was near- total. Repression

of women’s autonomy, intellect, and bodily integrity was obsessive and often violent

(Beauvoir 1989; Federici 2004). Blacks, Indians, and women were afforded very little

recognition: Their entry into the public sphere, corporeal integrity, and intellectual

capacity was strenuously denied. In political and legal theory, the sexual contract and

the racial contract have been extensively compared (Goldman 1911; Rubin 1975;

Pateman 1988; Mills 1999).

The corporeal distinction between white men and the others over whom they

ruled as patriarchs and masters, then, links race to gender, and people of color to

women. Whether they were defined by their racial status (as enslaved or “free,” black,

Indian, mestiz@ ), or by the patriarchal family (as daughters, wives, mothers), they

108 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

were corporeally stigmatized, permanently rendered as “other than,” and the pos-

sessions of, the white men who ruled. As in the case of class distinctions, evolving

gender distinctions coincided in important ways with racial ones. In part, this too

was corporeal: Perhaps at the core of intersectionality practice, as well as theory, is

the “mixed- race” category. Well, how does it come about that people can be “mixed”?

What does the presence of mixed people mean for both white and male supremacy?

In short, the master category of race profoundly shaped gender oppression. It

is fascinating that this pattern of combined political influence and political tension,

which was established in the antebellum intersection between abolitionism and early

feminism and reproduced during the struggle for women’s suffrage and against Jim

Crow at the turn of the 20th century, was then reiterated again in the post- World War

II years in “intersectional” alliance and conflict between the civil rights movement

and “second- wave” feminism. To be sure, there were many “intersections” between

the two patterns described here. The tense and ultimately ruptural relationship

between “first- wave” feminism and the black freedom movement around the turn of

the 20th century is perhaps the best- known example: The (white) women’s suffrage

movement broke with its former black allies, abandoning black women (and black

men too) in the process, as the Jim Crow system was institutionalized in the United

States. Southern states’ ratification of the 19th Amendment was conditional on their

continued denial of black voting rights. Such black women activists as Ida B. Wells,

Mary Church Terrell, and Anna Julia Cooper, as well as many lesser- known figures,

fiercely denounced this as a betrayal. Of course, it reflected the pervasive white rac-

ism of the epoch (see Crenshaw 1991; Cooper 1998; Collins 2008 [1999]; Davis 2011

[1983]).

While race is a template for the subordination and oppression of different social

groups, we emphasize that it is also a template for resistance to many forms of mar-

ginalization and domination. The new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, for

example— the women’s movement, the student movement, the anti- war movement,

the gay liberation movement— were inspired by and consciously drew upon the black

movement’s theoretical insights, strategies, and tactics to organize their specific con-

stituencies, make political demands, and challenge existing practices of exclusion and

subordination. These movement challenges underscore the dual- edged and dynamic

qualities that inhere in the social category of race. These qualities are, once again,

economic, political, and cultural technologies. They involve asserting previously

stigmatized identities, “fusing” previously “serialized” groups (Sartre 2004), creat-

ing “commons” where resources can be shared. “Making up people” racially, then,

has been “portable” across U.S. history. It has spread from one oppressed group to

another and proved transferable to other marginalized identities, social cleavages, and

political struggles.

Before we can consider and fully evaluate the notion of race as a master cat-

egory of social organization in the United States, we need to think about how race

itself is defined, what meanings are attached to it, and how it is deployed to create,

The Theory of Racial Formation 109

reproduce, or challenge racist structures. The process of race making, and its rever-

berations throughout the social order, is what we call racial formation. We define racial

formation as the sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out,

transformed, and destroyed.

Our presentation of racial formation theory proceeds in several steps. First, we

provide a concept of racialization to emphasize how the phenomic, the corporeal

dimension of human bodies, acquires meaning in social life. How are corporeal dif-

ferences among humans apprehended and given meaning? Next, we advance the

concept of racial projects to capture the simultaneous and co- constitutive ways that

racial meanings are translated into social structures and become racially signified.

Then, we discuss the problem of racism in an attempt to specify under what condi-

tions a racial project can be defined as racist. Finally, we discuss racial politics, the

way society is racially organized and ruled. Here, we consider racial despotism, racial

democracy, and racial hegemony as frameworks for racial rule and racial resistance.

We suggest that in the early 21st century the hegemonic concept of race in U.S.

society is that of “colorblindness.” The ideological hegemony of colorblindness, how-

ever, is extremely contradictory and shallow. It confronts widespread resistance and

falls short of achieving the political stability that hegemonic projects are supposed to

deliver. This chapter ends there; the post- World War II political trajectory of race is

treated in detail in the chapters that follow.

Racialization

Race is often seen as a social category that is either objective or illusory. When viewed

as an objective matter, race is usually understood as rooted in biological diff erences,

ranging from such familiar phenomic markers as skin color, hair texture, or eye shape,

to more obscure human variations occurring at the genetic or genomic levels. When

viewed as an illusion, race is usually understood as an ideological construct, some-

thing that masks a more fundamental material distinction or axis of identity: our

three paradigms of ethnicity, class, and nation typify such approaches. Thus race is

often treated as a metonym or epiphenomenon of culture (in the ethnicity paradigm),

inequality and stratifi cation (in the class paradigm), or primordial peoplehood (in the

nation paradigm).

On the “objective” side, race is often regarded as an essence, as something fixed

and concrete. The three main racial classifications of humans once posed (and now

largely rejected) by physical anthropology— Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid—

are examples of such an essentialist perspective. Another example is “mixed- race”

identity: To consider an individual or group as “multiracial” or mixed race presup-

poses the existence of clear, discernible, and discrete races that have subsequently

been combined to create a hybrid, or perhaps mongrel, identity. Here race is function-

ing as a metonym for “species,” although that connection is generally not admitted

in the present day.

110 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

While race is still popularly understood as essence, it has also been viewed as a

mere illusion, especially in more recent accounts. As a purely ideological construct,

race is considered to be unreal, a product of “false consciousness.” As we have seen

in our discussion of class paradigms of race, both orthodox (neoclassical) econom-

ics and orthodox Marxism viewed race this way. For the former, it was an irrational

distraction from pure, market- based considerations of value in exchange; for the

latter it was an ideological tool that capitalists (or sometimes privileged white work-

ers) deployed to prevent the emergence of a unified working-class movement. In the

current period, colorblind ideology— expressed, for example, in affirmative action

debates— argues that any form of racial classification is itself inherently racist since

race is not “real.”

We are critical of both positions: race as essence and race as illusion. Race is not

something rooted in nature, something that reflects clear and discrete variations in

human identity. But race is also not an illusion. While it may not be “real” in a bio-

logical sense, race is indeed real as a social category with definite social consequences.

The family, as a social concept, provides an intriguing analogy to grasp the “reality”

of race:

We know that families take many forms … Some family categories correspond

to biological categories; others do not. Moreover, boundaries of family mem-

bership vary, depending on individual and institutional factors. Yet regardless

of whether families correspond to biological definitions, social scientists

study families and use membership in family categories in their study of other

phenomena, such as well- being. Similarly, racial statuses, although not repre-

senting biological differences, are of sociological interest in their form, their

changes, and their consequences.

(American Sociological Association 2003, 5)

We cannot dismiss race as a legitimate category of social analysis by simply stating

that race is not real. With respect to race, the Thomases’s sociological dictum is still

in force: “It is not important whether or not the interpretation is correct— if men [sic]

defi ne situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas

1928, pp. 571–572).

One of our aims here is to disrupt and reorganize the rigid and antinomic

framework of essence- versus- illusion in which race is theorized and debated. We

understand race as an unstable and “decentered” complex of social meanings con-

stantly being transformed by political struggle. With this in mind, we advance the

following definition: Race is a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and

interests by referring to different types of human bodies. Although the concept of race

invokes seemingly biologically based human characteristics (so- called phenotypes),

selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification

is always and necessarily a social and historical process. Indeed, the categories

employed to differentiate among human beings along racial lines reveal themselves,

The Theory of Racial Formation 111

upon serious examination, to be at best imprecise, and at worst completely arbitrary.

They may be arbitrary, but they are not meaningless. Race is strategic; race does

ideological and political work.

Despite the problematic nature of racial categorization, it should be apparent

that there is a crucial and non- reducible visual dimension to the definition and under-

standing of racial categories. Bodies are visually read and narrated in ways that draw

upon an ensemble of symbolic meanings and associations. Corporeal distinctions

are common; they become essentialized. Perceived differences in skin color, physi-

cal build, hair texture, the structure of cheek bones, the shape of the nose, or the

presence/absence of an epicanthic fold are understood as the manifestations of more

profound differences that are situated within racially identified persons: differences

in such qualities as intelligence, athletic ability, temperament, and sexuality, among

other traits.

Through a complex process of selection, human physical characteristics (“real”

or imagined) become the basis to justify or reinforce social differentiation. Conscious

or unconscious, deeply ingrained or reinvented, the making of race, the “othering” of

social groups by means of the invocation of physical distinctions, is a key component

of modern societies. “Making up people,” once again. This process of selection, of

imparting social and symbolic meaning to perceived phenotypical differences, is the

core, constitutive element of what we term “racialization.”

We define racialization as the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially

unclassified relationship, social practice, or group. Racialization occurs in large- scale

and small- scale ways, macro- and micro- socially. In large- scale, even world- historical

settings, racialization can be observed in the foundation and consolidation of the

modern world- system: The conquest and settlement of the western hemisphere, the

development of African slavery, and the rise of abolitionism, all involved profuse

and profound extension of racial meanings into new social terrain. In smaller- scale

settings as well, “making up people” or racial interpellation (a concept drawn from

Althusser 2001 (1971) also operates as a quotidian form of racialization: Racial profil-

ing for example, may be understood as a form of racialization. Racial categories, and

the meanings attached to them, are often constructed from pre- existing conceptual

or discursive elements that have crystallized through the genealogies of competing

religious, scientific, and political ideologies and projects. These are so to speak the

raw materials of racialization.

To summarize thus far: Race is a concept, a representation or signification of

identity that refers to different types of human bodies, to the perceived corporeal

and phenotypic markers of difference and the meanings and social practices that are

ascribed to these differences.

It is important to emphasize that once specific concepts of race are widely cir-

culated and accepted as a social reality, racial difference is not dependent on visual

observation alone. Legal scholar Osagie Obasogie makes the intriguing point that

iterative social practices give rise to “visual” understandings of race, even among

112 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

those who cannot see. The respondents in his study, blind since birth, “see” race

through interpersonal and institutional socializations and practices that shape their

perceptions of what race is (Obasogie 2013). Thus race is neither self- evident nor

obvious as an ocular phenomenon. Instead racialization depends on meanings and

associations that permit phenotypic distinction among human bodies.

Some may argue that if the concept of race is so nebulous, so indeterminate, so

flexible, and so susceptible to strategic manipulation by a range of political projects,

why don’t we simply dispense with it? Can we not get “beyond” race? Can we not see

it as an illusory thing? Don’t we see how much mischief has occurred in its name?

These questions have been posed with tremendous frequency in both popular and

academic discourse. 3 An affirmative answer would of course present obvious practical

difficulties: It is rather difficult to jettison widely held beliefs, beliefs which more-

over are central to everyone’s identity and understanding of the social world. So the

attempt to banish the concept as an archaism is at best counterintuitive. But a deeper

difficulty, we believe, is inherent in the very formulation of this schema, in its way of

posing race as a problem , a misconception left over from the past, a concept no longer

relevant to a “post- racial” society.

A more effective starting point is the recognition that despite its uncertainties and

contradictions, the concept of race continues to play a fundamental role in structur-

ing and representing the social world. The task for theory is to capture this situation

and avoid both the utopian framework that sees race as an illusion we can somehow

“get beyond,” as well as the essentialist formulation that sees race as something objec-

tive and fixed, a biological given. We should think of race as an element of social

structure rather than as an irregularity within it; we should see race as a dimension

of human representation rather than an illusion. Such a perspective informs what we

mean by racial formation.

Since racial formation is always historically situated, understandings of the

meaning of race, and of the way race structures society, have changed enormously

over time. We now turn to a historical survey of the race concept and the domains in

which it has been defined and debated, consolidated and contested. Our effort here

is to outline a genealogy of racialization that proceeds from religion to science to

politics. Such a trajectory is by no means linear or progressive; rather it consists of

the accretion of racialized experiences that are uneven and often incompatible. But it

does allow us roughly to map and situate the development of the race concept, and to

underscore its still unstable and ambiguous character.

The Evolution of Race Consciousness

How do perceived diff erences between groups of people become racialized? The

identifi cation of distinctive human groups, and their association with diff erences

in physical appearance, goes back to prehistory, and can be found in the earliest

documents— in the Bible, for example, or in Herodotus. But the emergence of a

The Theory of Racial Formation 113

modern conception of race does not occur until the rise of Europe and the arrival

of Europeans in the Americas. Even the hostility and suspicion with which Chris-

tian Europe viewed its two signifi cant non- Christian “others”— the Muslims and the

Jews— cannot be understood as more than a rehearsal for racial formation, since these

antagonisms, for all their bloodletting and chauvinism, were always and everywhere

religiously interpreted. 4

It was only when European explorers reached the Western Hemisphere, when

the oceanic seal separating the “old” and the “new” worlds was breached, that the

distinctions and categorizations fundamental to a racialized social structure, and

to a discourse of race, began to appear. The European explorers were the advance

guard of merchant capitalism, which sought new openings for trade. What they found

exceeded their wildest dreams, for never before and never again in human history has

an opportunity for the appropriation of wealth, for predation or “primitive accumu-

lation” remotely approached that presented by the “discovery.” 5 Modern capitalism

could not have come into being without this grand infusion of stolen wealth: a seem-

ingly limitless reservoir of treasure— land, labor, lives by the millions— to do with as

one willed.

But the Europeans also “discovered” people, people who looked and acted dif-

ferently. These “natives” challenged their discoverers’ preexisting conceptions of the

origins and possibilities of the human species (Jordan 2012 [1968], 3–43). The rep-

resentation and interpretation of the meaning of the indigenous peoples’ existence

became a crucial matter, one that would affect not only the outcome of conquest but

the future of empire and thus the development of the modern world. For the “dis-

covery” raised disturbing questions as to whether all could be considered part of the

same “family of man,” and more practically, the extent to which native peoples could

be exploited and enslaved. Thus “discovery,” conquest, and soon enough, enslave-

ment, launched not only the headlong rush toward modernity, but also debates over

human nature, philosophical anthropology. Such questions as: “What is a human

being?” and “What is the nature of human difference?” were posed repeatedly as

rulers and their advisers sought to organize and exercise control over their new

dominions and new subjects. 6

In practice, of course, the seizure of territories and goods, the introduction of slav-

ery through the encomienda and other forms of coerced native labor, and then through

the organization of the African slave trade— not to mention the practice of outright

extermination— all presupposed a worldview which distinguished Europeans, as chil-

dren of God and fully- fledged human beings, from “others.” Given the dimensions

and the ineluctability of the European onslaught, given the conquerors’ determina-

tion to appropriate labor, land, and goods, and given the presence of an axiomatic and

unquestioned Christianity among them, the ferocious division of society into Euro-

peans and “others” soon coalesced. This was true despite the famous 16th- century

theological and philosophical debates about the identity of indigenous peoples. 7 In

fact it ran right over whatever cautionary notes religious ethicists like las Casas, or

114 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

later Antonio Vieira (Blackburn 1997; Cohen 1998), William Wilberforce, or Henry

Ward Beecher might have sounded.

Indeed, debates about the nature of the “others” reached their practical limits

with a certain dispatch. Plainly, they would never touch the essential: Nothing, after

all, would induce the Europeans to pack up and go home. The “discovery” signaled

a break from the previous proto- racial awareness by which Europe had contem-

plated its “others” in a relatively disorganized fashion. The “conquest of America”

was not simply an epochal historical event— however unparalleled in importance. It

was also the advent of a consolidated social structure of exploitation, appropriation,

domination, and signification. Its representation, first in religious terms, but later in

scientific and political ones, initiated modern racial awareness. It was the inaugura-

tion of racialization on a world- historical scale.

The conquest, therefore, was the first— and given the dramatic nature of the

case, perhaps the greatest— racial formation project. Together with African slavery

it produced the master category of race, the racial template we have discussed. Its

significance was by no means limited to the Western Hemisphere, for it also began the

work of constituting Europe as the metropole, the center, of a series of empires which

could take, as Marx would later write, “the globe for a theater” (Marx 1967, 751).

This new imperial structure was represented as a struggle between civilization and

barbarism, and implicated in this representation all the great European philosophies,

literary traditions, and social theories of the modern age (Said 1993).

The immensity of this historical arc, the longue durée of racial formation from

religion to science to politics, also underlies our claim that race provided a master

concept for our understanding of oppression and resistance. But it is worth noting

that right from the beginning of this historical journey, something like the social

construction of race was already present. Before the white talking heads had debated

the philosophical anthropology of Native Americans, or Africans, 8 well before that

in fact, the immediate need to classify and categorize, to “ make up people, ” had already

surfaced: Who was a European, a settler, a free man, and who was an Indio, an African,

a slave? As a practical matter, something relatively devoid of theology or philosophy,

the exercise of power required these distinctions. 9 The main criteria available for this

purpose were phenomic: the visual appearance of the bodies that had to be judged,

sometimes under great pressure and with speed— for violence was omnipresent— as

like or unlike, similar or different. This social (or more properly, this power- oriented,

political) construction, this phenomic categorical imperative, would soon enough be

reprocessed in the discourse available at the time: primarily and for a long time to

come, theological discourse.

Only in later epochs would other ways of knowing supplant theological under-

standings: First scientific, and later, political accounts of race would be offered. Still

the earlier religious and scientific frameworks, though losing influence, would never

be fully eliminated, never really die. Thus do we arrive at our own time, our own

knowledge of race, our own insistence on the social construction of race, with its

The Theory of Racial Formation 115

unstable combination of corporeal and performative elements, its inherent biosocial-

ity. We are still on this journey. We should be clear- sighted enough to recognize that

these components, most centrally the political technology of the body, were  there

from the beginning. In short, just as the noise of the “big bang” still resonates

through the universe, so the overdetermined construction of world “civilization” as

a biosocial manifestation of European subjugation and the resistance of the rest of us

still defines the race concept in the present.

From Religion to Science

After the initial depredations of conquest, religious justifi cations for racial diff erence

gradually gave way to scientifi c ones. By the time of the Enlightenment, a general

awareness of race was pervasive, and most of the great philosophers of Europe, such

as Hegel, Kant, Voltaire, and Locke, were issuing virulently racist opinions (Count,

ed. 1950; Eze, ed. 1997; Bernasconi and Lott, eds. 2000).

The problem posed by race during the late 18th century was markedly differ-

ent than it had been in the earlier stages of conquest and enslavement. The social

structures through which race operated were no longer primarily those of violent sub-

jugation and plunder, nor of the establishment of thin beachheads of settlement on

the edge of what had once seemed a limitless wilderness. Now the issues were much

more complicated: nation- building, establishment of national economies in the world

trading system, resistance to the arbitrary authority of monarchs, and the assertion of

the “natural rights” of “man,” including the right of revolution (Davis 1999 [1975]).

In such a situation, racially organized exploitation in the form of slavery, the expan-

sion of colonies, and the continuing expulsion of native peoples, was both necessary

and newly difficult to justify.

Early Iterations of Scientific Racism: The invocation of scientific criteria to dem-

onstrate the “natural” basis of racial hierarchy was both a logical consequence of the

rise of this form of knowledge, and an attempt to provide a more subtle and nuanced

account of human complexity in the new, “enlightened” age. Spurred on by the clas-

sificatory scheme of living organisms devised by Linnaeus in Systema Naturae (1735),

many scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dedicated themselves to the

identification and ranking of variations in humankind. Race was conceived as a biologi-

cal concept, a matter of species. Voltaire wrote that “The negro race is a species of men

[sic] as different from ours … as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds,” and

in a formulation echoing down from his century to our own, declared that

If their understanding is not of a different nature from ours …, it is at least

greatly inferior. They are not capable of any great application or associa-

tion of ideas, and seem formed neither for the advantages nor the abuses of

philosophy.

(Voltaire, in Gossett 1997 [1965], 45)

116 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

Jefferson, the preeminent exponent of the Enlightenment doctrine of “the rights

of man” on North American shores, echoed these sentiments:

In general their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflec-

tion. … [I]n memory they are equal to whites, in reason much inferior …

[and] in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous…. I advance it

therefore … that the blacks, whether originally a different race, or made dis-

tinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites…. Will not a lover

of natural history, then, one who views the gradations in all the animals with

the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of Man

[sic] as distinct as nature has formed them?

(Jefferson 1984 [1785], 264–266, 270)

Such crackpot claims of species distinctiveness among humans justifi ed the inequ-

itable allocation of political and social rights, while still upholding the doctrine of

“the rights of man.” They rationalized the rapacious treatment to which the racial

“others” were subjected, and even justifi ed it as the unfortunate byproducts of devel-

opment. You can still hear these arguments today: “Sure, these natives and slaves

might be suff ering now, but that is still preferable to being condemned to the eternal

darkness of primitiveness and superstition….” The frequent resort to familial meta-

phors (“Our slaves are like our children; they must be taught to obey …”), and the

mad search for scientifi c justifi cations for unequal treatment— in phrenology and

craniometry, for example, and then in evolution— all attest to the overarching impor-

tance of racial rule in the genealogy of the modern world.

Indeed the quest to obtain a precise scientific definition of race generated debates

which continue to rage today, reiterated in the genomic, the criminological, and the

humanistic approaches to race that we take for granted. Yet despite efforts to define

race scientifically, ranging from Dr. Samuel Morton’s studies of cranial capacity 10

to contemporary attempts in the genomic sciences, the concept of race has defied

biological precision.

In the mid- 19th century, Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau drew upon the

most respected scientific studies of his day to compose his four- volume Essay on

the Inequality of Races (Biddiss 1970; Gobineau 1999 [1853–1855]; Todorov 1993).

He not only greatly influenced the racial thinking of the period, but his themes

would be echoed in the racist ideologies of the next one hundred years: beliefs that

superior races produced superior cultures and that racial intermixtures resulted

in the degradation of the superior racial stock. These ideas found expression, for

instance, in the eugenics movement launched by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton,

which had an immense impact on scientific and sociopolitical thought in Europe

and the United States (Chase 1980; Kevles 1998; Graves 2001; Black 2012). In

the wake of civil war and emancipation, and with immigration from Southern and

Eastern Europe as well as East Asia running high, the United States was particu-

larly fertile ground for notions such as Social Darwinism and eugenics. Within

The Theory of Racial Formation 117

this context, racial difference became the rationale for discriminatory policies and

practices of immigrant exclusion, naturalization rights, residential segregation,

and forced sterilization.

Although black scholars like Kelly Miller, William Monroe Trotter, and W.E.B. Du

Bois had questioned biologistic racism at the end of the 19th century, and Chicago soci-

ologists had cast doubt on evolution- based accounts of racial difference in the 1920s, it

was not until after World War II that a sustained attack on the notion of race as a biologi-

cal concept emerged and gained widespread acceptance. Only after eugenics had been

discredited as the basis for racial science in Nazi Germany— eugenics had, of course,

flourished in the United States as well— did scientific critiques of biologistic racism

become prominent. The 1950 UNESCO “Statement on Race” 11 boldly asserted that

race was not a biological fact but a social myth. During this period, social and cultural

conceptions of race became ascendant and it was optimistically assumed that the death

knell of scientific racism had been rung. But had it?

Contemporary Reiterations of Scientific Racism: Over the past decades, the study of

human variation in a number of fields has often defaulted to, and indeed relied upon,

biological concepts of race in research on “population groups.” Default to the race

concept remains pervasive. After the launching of the Human Genome Project, for

example, geneticists have engaged in vigorous debate about whether race is a mean-

ingful and useful genetic concept. But they can’t get rid of it. The notion of race as

a discernible “biological category” has not been relegated to the proverbial dustbin

of history.

Geneticist Neil Risch contends that genetic differences have arisen among peo-

ple from different continents and uses the term “race” to categorize and cluster the

human population into five major groups. This recognition of race, he contends,

is important for understanding genetic susceptibility to certain diseases and recep-

tivity to medical interventions such as drug treatments (Wade 2002). Indeed, the

linkage between race and genetics finds its sharpest expression in the field of phar-

macogenomics. The ultimate goal of pharmacogenomics is to be able to deliver the

precise type of medication— and precise dose— to a patient based on their individual

genome. Its goal is to tailor- make drugs to treat a specific condition. Because it is

not yet practical to sequence each individual’s genome in a quick and cost- effective

manner, much less to do drug design on this level, race often serves as a “proxy” for

determining how treatment with a specific drug might be targeted, if not at individu-

als, then at identifiable groups. And not surprisingly, race is the descriptor employed

to select such groups (Lee 2005).

Consider the introduction of BiDil as the first “ethnic designer drug.” Originally

produced by the now defunct biotech firm NitroMed, BiDil was marketed to African

Americans who suffer from congestive heart failure, despite serious doubts that arose

in clinical trials about the distinctive racial claims being made for the drug. Yet it was

released anyway, and prescribed for African Americans. Some medical researchers

feared that BiDil sets a dangerous precedent by linking race and genetics in ways that

118 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

could distract from alternative ways of understanding the causes of a disease and the

means to treat it (Kahn 2012).

The issue of race and genetics is a contentious one that finds expression in dif-

ferent sites and arenas.

• In 2010, PBS aired Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a four- episode

documentary series that traced the ancestral roots of prominent celebrities

through “genealogy and genetics.” An extension of earlier shows focused on

famous African Americans, the series refl ects a growing popular quest by indi-

viduals to fi nd their “roots” through allegedly scientifi c means.

• In the fi eld of forensics, Tony Frudakis of DNAPrint Genomics, a molecular

biologist who came to fame in a Baton Rouge serial killer case in 2003, claims

that he can determine a murderer’s race by analyzing his or her DNA (Wade

2003; Quan 2011; Obasogie 2013).

• DNA testing has increasingly been used by individuals and groups to claim

Native American tribal membership. The Meskwaki Nation in Iowa utilized

genetic- ancestry testing as a way to screen out individuals who sought tribal

affi liation in order to share in the tribe’s casino profi ts. The Mashantucket

Pequot Tribal Nation of Connecticut, which controls the huge Foxwoods casino,

requires DNA testing of newborns. Both the Cherokee and Seminole nations/

tribes have been embroiled in confl icts with blacks who claim tribal ancestry and

seek access to court- ordered monetary judgments. In these cases disputes have

revolved around the “blood quantum” system of measuring Indian belonging

(put in place by the Dawes Act of 1887), and have also involved tribal attitudes

toward DNA testing of present- day claimants ( Tallbear 2003; Indians.com

2005; Kaplan 2005; Koerner 2005). 12

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has said: “We are living through an era of the ascendance

of biology, and we have to be very careful. We will all be walking a fine line between

using biology and allowing it to be abused” (Harmon 2007). There is indeed a fine

line. Our individual sense of racial identity, the system of racial classification we

employ, the meanings we ascribe to racial categories, and their use in social analysis

and policy formation are rendered more complex, indeterminate, and muddy with

the increasing re- biologization of race.

In psychology too, the cognitive presence of race, the immediacy of race that

is seemingly rooted in perception rather than reasoning, leads researchers to think

of it as an essence, something innate. Cognitive psychology and related fields have

sought to uncover forms of racial animus that function “below the radar” of the

conscious mind. Studies on the mechanisms and processes that affect perception,

interpretation, memory, and decision- making have convincingly demonstrated that

people harbor “implicit biases” and possess “racial schemas” that strongly influence

perceptions and behaviors. 13 Implicit biases can influence or shape various forms

The Theory of Racial Formation 119

of individual or institutional racial discrimination. Such discrimination, therefore,

can occur in the absence of conscious intent, explicit prejudice, or racial animus.

Thus the pervasiveness of racial meanings and their significance goes deep, very deep

(Hirschfeld 1973 (1938); Eberhardt and Fiske, eds. 1998; Goff et al. 2008; Marsh,

Mendoza- Denton, and Smith, eds. 2010). Notions of race do not only inform our

conscious understanding of the social world; they also permeate our unconscious

minds— shaping our perceptions and attitudes, and influencing our actions.

For all its obvious importance, this approach also raises troubling questions: Are

those cultural formations not themselves constructed? Are those “aggregate rela-

tions of power” impervious to challenge? Social constructions like race (or gender,

or countless other human qualities) are of course composed of layered attributes

that human beings understand as essences, but that does not make race, or gender

an essence in reality, does it? (What would W.I. Thomas reply to that question?)

If in practice race remains flexible and unstable, how does that instability affect

the “racial schemas” that structure immediate perceptions? What is the essence of

blackness or whiteness? Of maleness or femaleness (Butler 1993; Butler 2006 [1990];

Shelby 2007)?

There is a very strong temptation to derive racial distinctions, and perforce racism,

from biological or evolutionary sources. This tendency is not limited to reactionary

or conservative thinkers, but also affects progressive and egalitarian analysts, as we

have seen in Douglas S. Massey’s “categorical” approach to inequality (discussed in

Chapter 2 ). No doubt there is irony in contemporary attempts to provide a seemingly

objective and scientific definition of race, and of the boundaries and contents (the

essences) of racial categories as well. In previous historical periods, scientific racism

provided the rationale for the subordination, if not elimination, of what were seen as

undesirable, “mongrel,” and threatening racially identified groups. In the current

period, biological/genetic definitions of race are mobilized to improve the treatment

of diseases and minimize health disparities, to serve justice by providing “hard evi-

dence” in criminal cases, to help individuals find their ancestral “roots,” and in the

case of cognitive psychology, to reveal the deep mental structures of racism. While

often motivated by good intentions, the premises behind these examples share an

underlying logic with the racist frameworks of the historical past: a quest for some

fundamental quality of racial identity, if not skin or hair, then genomic or limbic.

The recourse to “human nature,” to philosophical anthropology, to explain the

supposed differences and “natural” biases entailed by race, has been a constant fea-

ture of human thought, especially in western civilization. 14 It is tempting to extrapolate

from implicit bias research: to conclude that race thinking is an innate part of human

consciousness— something to which we are intrinsically and naturally predisposed. In

clear disagreement with such views we insist that the “racial schemas” that structure

immediate perceptions are also cultural formations; they may be deeply embedded as a

result of centuries of reiteration in various forms. Yet they remain socially, not biologi-

cally, given. They remain subject to change. We are not biologically “hardwired” to be

120 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

racist. We reject any default to an essentialist and intrinsically unprovable notion of

race. Yet resisting the temptation to racial biologism, whether conscious or unconscious,

remains as difficult in science as it once was in religion.

From Science to Politics

Eff orts to “re- biologize” race suggest that the understanding of race as a preeminently

social concept remains an embattled and contested notion. While we acknowledge

this ongoing tension, we suggest that confl icts and controversies about the meaning

of race are principally framed on the terrain of politics. By privileging politics, we do

not mean to suggest that race has been displaced as a concern of scientifi c inquiry, or

for that matter as a theological question. Nor do we claim that struggles over cultural

representation are less signifi cant than political ones in shaping prevailing patterns

of race and racism. We do argue, however, that race is now a preeminently political

phenomenon.

Toward Social Construction: The historical trend towards recognizing race as a

social and political construction has been slow and uneven. While critiques of race

as a biological concept were more evident and ascendant in the early post- World

War II period, there were previous historical precedents for understanding race as a

social and political category. For example, Max Weber discounted biological explana-

tions for racial conflict and instead highlighted the social and political factors that

engendered it (Weber 2008, 385–387; Manasse 1947). Du Bois too wrestled with the

conflict between a fully sociohistorical conception of race, and the more essentialized

and deterministic vision he encountered as a student in Berlin. 15 Pioneering cultural

anthropologist Franz Boas rejected attempts to link racial characteristics to biological

or evolutionist schemas, labeling as pseudoscientific any assumption of a continuum

of “higher” and “lower” cultural groups, and allying with Du Bois quite early on

(Boas 1969 [1945], 1962; Baker 1998). 16

Du Bois and many prominent black scholars, for example, Alain Leroy Locke,

philosopher and theorist of the Harlem Renaissance, had switched the focus of race

studies definitively away from biologistic accounts and towards sociopolitical explana-

tory frameworks, almost before modern sociology even existed in the United States.

Black voices were ignored, however, until white exponents of socially based views of

race like Robert E. Park, one of the founders of the “Chicago School” of sociology,

reinvented a socially grounded account of it in the 1920s. Park combined the standard

German training in sociology with a history of eight years as journalist and publicist

for Booker T. Washington. After his substantial career at Chicago, Park’s last job was at

Fisk University, the leading historically black college (Du Bois’s alma mater as well). 17

Perhaps more important than these and subsequent intellectual efforts, how-

ever, were the political struggles of people of color themselves. Waged all around

the globe under a variety of banners such as anti- colonialism and civil rights, these

battles to challenge various structural and cultural racisms have been a major feature

The Theory of Racial Formation 121

of 20th-century politics. The racial horrors of the 20th century— colonial slaughter

and apartheid, the genocide of the Holocaust, and the massive bloodlettings required

to end these evils— have also indelibly marked the theme of race as a sociopolitical

issue par excellence.

Racial Politics: Our notion of racial formation foregrounds the ongoing political

contestation that takes place between the state and civil society— across the political

spectrum— to define and redefine the very meaning of race. This is a good example

of the way race operates across micro–macro linkages: The persistent and continu-

ing controversies regarding state- based racial classification provide a particularly apt

illustration of racial formation.

Over the last several centuries, the designation of racial categories by the state—

the political dimensions of state assignment of racial identity— has provoked intense

disputes in the United States. Who was considered “free” and who “unfree”? Who

could be a naturalized citizen (Carbado 2005)? Who could marry whom? In this last

regard, it is sobering to think that it was not until 1967 that all state anti- miscegenation

laws were ruled unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia. The state wields enormous

power in defining what race is. Through its powers of racial classification, the state

fundamentally shapes one’s social status, access to economic opportunities, political

rights, and indeed one’s identity itself.

In 2003, former University of California Regent Ward Connerly introduced a

measure popularly known as the Racial Privacy Initiative (Proposition 54) before

California voters. Proposition 54 sought to amend the California State Constitution

by enacting a ban on racial data collection by the state. Connerly (2003) asserted

that relying on racial classification and maintaining race- based remedies to racial

inequalities would only “give credence to the dangerous view held by many that ‘race’

is a fixed biological reality.” 18

The discrepancies, gaps, and contradictions between state definitions and indi-

vidual and collective racial identities are no more evident than in the racial and ethnic

categories employed by the U.S. Census. Among others, the U.S. Census establishes

categories based on nativity, citizenship status, age, household income, and marital

status. None of these categories, however, has been subject to such intense scrutiny,

vigorous debate, and political controversy as that of race.

The race questions on the U.S. Census have been shaped by the political and social

agenda of the historical period in question. The first census in 1790 distinguished

holders of the franchise, namely tax-paying white males, from the general population.

The practice of slavery motivated changes in categorization such as grouping blacks

into free and slave populations. Prior to the 1960s, census categories were utilized

politically to disenfranchise and discriminate against groups defined as nonwhite,

a practice that has diminished but not entirely ceased in the “post- civil rights” era.

From restrictions on, naturalization rights to the setting of national quotas in the

1924 National Origins Immigration Act, census categories were routinely and stra-

tegically deployed to circumscribe the political, economic, and social rights of people

122 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

of color and immigrants. By the 1960s, the idea of race as a biological construct was

widely discredited in academic and scientific circles, and the race question would

have been excluded from the 1970 census had it not been for the passage of civil rights

and equal opportunity legislation. The new laws required federal agencies to compile

data, look for patterns of discrimination, and selectively redress them through various

programs and initiatives. This made it necessary to continue to employ forms of racial

classification and statistics (Prewitt 2013).

In 1977, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued Statistical Direc-

tive No. 15 that fostered the creation of “compatible, nonduplicated, exchangeable

racial and ethnic data by Federal agencies.” The directive defined the basic racial

and ethnic categories to be utilized by the federal government for three reporting

purposes: statistical, administrative, and civil rights compliance. The five standard

categories were American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black,

White, and Hispanic (U.S. Office of Management and Budget 1994).

These racial categories are rife with inconsistencies and lack parallel construc-

tion. Only one category is specifically racial, only one is cultural, and only one relies

on a notion of affiliation or community recognition. Directive No. 15 defines a black

person as one who has his or her “origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa,”

but it does not define a white person with reference to any of the white racial groups of

Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East. Indeed “Black” is the only category that is

defined with an explicit “racial” designator— one which is quite problematic. What,

we might ask, are the “black racial groups of Africa”? Hispanics are not considered or

classified as a “race,” but as an “ethnic group.” The Hispanic category is, in fact, the

only “ethnicity” that the state is interested in explicitly identifying and classifying.

The category is defined through a combined national/ethnic designator— a person

of “Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American or other Spanish

culture or origin.” In this definition, Hispanics can be of any race. 19 The category

of “American Indian or Alaskan Native” complicates matters further. To be counted

as part of the group, individuals must not only trace their origins in any of the origi-

nal peoples of North America, but they must also maintain “cultural identification

through tribal affiliation or community recognition.” This is a condition that the state

does not require of any of the other groups.

While originally narrowly conceived to provide consistent categories for use by

federal agencies, Directive No. 15 had the unintended consequence of reshaping

much of the discourse of race in the United States. These categories have become the

de facto standard for state and local agencies, the private and nonprofit sectors, and

the research community. Social scientists and policy analysts have widely adopted

census directives since data is organized under these rubrics. The social and cultural

impact of these categories is readily apparent. They inordinately shape both group

identities and community- formation patterns. Largely in response to these catego-

ries, new organizations have emerged representing the interests of “Asian and Pacific

Islanders” or “Hispanics” in a variety of forms from service providers to professional

The Theory of Racial Formation 123

caucuses. Census categories have played a pivotal role in the emergence and sustain-

ing of panethnic forms of social organization and consciousness. The Census has

become the primary site within the U.S. state where competing political claims for

group recognition by race and ethnicity are advanced, and where classifications are

established in response to statistical needs, administrative recordkeeping practices,

and legal requirements. Racially identified groups realize the political value of racial

categorization, along with the strategic deployment of “numbers,” in highlight-

ing inequalities, arguing for resources, and lobbying for specific redistricting plans,

among other demands. Electoral districts, for example, are drawn on the basis of

census data.

Despite attempts to achieve standardized and generally understood racial cat-

egories, all such forms of classification are fundamentally unstable. One problem

is the persistent gap between state definitions and individual/group forms of self-

identification. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, over the last four Censuses

(from 1980 to 2010) at least 40 percent of “Hispanics” failed to answer either the race

question and/or the ethnicity question. Correspondingly, over 95 percent of individ-

uals who mark the “Some Other Race” box were classified Hispanic by the Census.

This reflects individual, group, and/or national differences in conceptualizing race.

Immigrant groups who come from societies organized around different concepts of

race and ethnicity often have difficulty navigating and situating themselves within

U.S. racial categories.

Groups continually contest the existing system of racial classification. Arab

Americans, currently classified as “white,” have argued for a distinctive category to

capture forms of discrimination exemplified by the hate crimes and profiling that

have occurred as a result of the “War on Terror” and continuing political instability in

the Middle East. Taiwanese Americans have been lobbying for a distinctive category

as Taiwanese, separate from that of Chinese under the Asian or Pacific Islander cat-

egory. In both these instances, racial and ethnic consciousness is being fueled in large

part by geopolitical transformations that affect how groups see themselves as well as

how they are viewed by others.

Multiracial Identity: The debate surrounding the establishment of a multiracial

category in the U.S. Census illustrates how some groups contest the existing frame-

work of racial classification, how other groups seek to preserve it, and how the power

of the state is employed to adjudicate different racial claims.

For the past 100 years or so, the U.S. Census has assumed that each individ-

ual possessed a clear, singular, and monoracial identity. Earlier census enumeration

schedules, by contrast, recognized “mixed race” individuals. The 1890 Census listed

“mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon” along with “white, black, Chinese, Japanese, and

Indian.” These mixed race categories eventually disappeared from the census, but

the “one- drop rule” of racial descent and the imposition of an arbitrary monoracial

identity on individuals of racially mixed parentage remained in place. The 1920 cen-

sus stipulated that “any mixture of White and some other race was to be reported

124 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

according to the race of the person who was not White.” In 1977, OMB Directive 15

stated that “[t]he category which most closely reflects the individual’s recognition in

his community should be used for purposes of reporting on persons who are of mixed

racial and/or ethnic origins.”

In an attempt to assert their multiracial heritage, some individuals ignored cen-

sus instructions to “[f]ill ONE circle for the race that the person considers himself/

herself to be,” by marking two or more boxes. However, since the census scanners are

designed to read only one marked box, these people were reclassified as monoracial,

based on whichever box was marked more firmly. In addition, individuals specifying

the “Other” category are routinely reassigned to one of the OMB’s distinct racial

categories based on the first race listed.

Beginning in the 1970s, various individuals and groups formally protested the

notion of mutually exclusive racial categories embodied in the “single- race checkoff ”

policy. Much of the public pressure came from the parents of school- age multiracial

children. In the public schools, a multiracial child is often faced with the dilemma

of having to choose one race, and constantly risks being misclassified in this setting.

After several years of intense debate, the OMB’s Interagency Committee for the

Review of the Racial and Ethnic Standards rejected the proposal to add a separate

multiracial category. Instead, in July 1997, the 30- agency task force recommended

that Directive 15 be amended to permit multiracial Americans to “mark one or more”

racial category when identifying themselves for the census and other government

programs. At first, most of the major civil rights organizations, such as the Urban

League and the National Council of La Raza, along with groups such as the National

Coalition for an Accurate Count of Asians and Pacific Islanders, opposed a multira-

cial category. These groups feared a diminution in their numbers, and worried that a

multiracial category would spur debates regarding the “protected status” of groups

and individuals. According to various estimates, from 75 to 90 percent of those who

checked the “black” box could potentially check a multiracial one if it were an option.

Concerned about the possible reductions in group numbers, civil rights groups

argued that existing federal civil rights laws and programs were based on exclusive

membership in a defined racial/ethnic group. It would be difficult, if not impossible,

from this angle, to assess the salience of multiraciality in relationship to these laws and

programs. The “mark one or more” option was adopted in Census 2000.

Racial Projects

Race is a “crossroads” where social structure and cultural representation meet. Too

often, the attempt is made to understand race simply or primarily in terms of only one

of these two analytical dimensions. For example, eff orts to explain racial inequality

as a purely social structural phenomenon either neglect or are unable to account for

the origins, patterning, and transformation of racial meanings, representations, and

social identities. Conversely, many examinations of race as a system of signifi cation,

The Theory of Racial Formation 125

identity, or cultural attribution fail adequately to articulate these phenomena with

evolving social structures (such as segregation or stratifi cation) and institutions (such

as prisons, schools, or the labor market).

Race can never be merely a concept or idea, a representation or signification alone.

Indeed race cannot be discussed, cannot even be noticed, without reference— however

explicit or implicit— to social structure. To identify an individual or group racially

is to locate them within a socially and historically demarcated set of demographic

and cultural boundaries, state activities, “life- chances,” and tropes of identity/differ-

ence/(in)equality. Race is both a social/historical structure and a set of accumulated

signifiers that suffuse individual and collective identities, inform social practices,

shape institutions and communities, demarcate social boundaries, and organize the

distribution of resources. We cannot understand how racial representations set up

patterns of residential segregation, for example, without considering how segregation

reciprocally shapes and reinforces the meaning of race itself.

We conceive of racial formation processes as occurring through a linkage between

structure and signification. Racial projects do both the ideological and the practical

“work” of making these links and articulating the connection between them. A racial

project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial identi-

ties and meanings, and an effort to organize and distribute resources (economic, political,

cultural) along particular racial lines. Racial projects connect what race means in a par-

ticular discursive or ideological practice and the ways in which both social structures

and everyday experiences are racially organized, based upon that meaning. Racial

projects are attempts both to shape the ways in which social structures are racially

signified and the ways that racial meanings are embedded in social structures.

Racial projects occur at varying scales, both large and small. Projects take shape

not only at the macro- level of racial policy- making, state activity, and collective action,

but also at the level of everyday experience and personal interaction. Both dominant

and subordinate groups and individual actors, both institutions and persons, carry

out racial projects. The imposition of restrictive state voting rights laws, organizing

work for immigrants’, prisoners’, and community health rights in the ghetto or barrio

are all examples of racial projects. Individuals’ practices may be seen as racial projects

as well: The cop who “stops and frisks” a young pedestrian, the student who joins a

memorial march for the slain teenager Trayvon Martin, even the decision to wear

dreadlocks, can all be understood as racial projects. Such projects should not, how-

ever, be simply regarded and analyzed as discrete, separate, and autonomous ideas

and actions. Every racial project is both a reflection of and response to the broader

patterning of race in the overall social system. In turn, every racial project attempts

to reproduce, extend, subvert, or directly challenge that system.

Racial projects are not necessarily confined to particular domains. They can, for

example, “jump” scale in their impact and significance. Projects framed at the local

level, for example, can end up influencing national policies and initiatives. Correspond-

ingly, projects at the national or even global level can be creatively and strategically

126 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

recast at regional and local levels. Projects “travel” as well. Consider how migration

recasts concepts of race, racial meaning, and racial identity: Immigrants’ notions of race

are often shaped in reference to, and in dialogue with, concepts of race in both their

countries of origin and settlement. Thus migrants can maintain, adopt, and strategi-

cally utilize different concepts of race in transnational space (Kim 2008; Roth 2012).

At any given historical moment, racial projects compete and overlap, evincing

varying capacity either to maintain or to challenge the prevailing racial system. A good

example is the current debate over the relevance of “colorblind” ideology, policy, and

practice; this provides a study of overlapping and competing racial projects. We dis-

cuss the hegemony of colorblindness in the concluding section of this book.

Racial projects link signification and structure not only in order to shape policy or

exercise political influence, but also to organize our understandings of race as every-

day “common sense.” To see racial projects operating at the level of everyday life, we

have only to examine the many ways in which we “notice” race, often unconsciously.

One of the first things we notice about people when we meet them (along with

their sex) is their race. We utilize race to provide clues about who a person is. This fact

is made painfully obvious when we encounter someone whom we cannot conveniently

racially categorize— someone who is, for example, racially “mixed” or of an ethnic/

racial group with which we are not familiar. Such an encounter becomes a source of

discomfort and momentarily a crisis of racial meaning.

Our ability to interpret racial meanings depends on preconceived notions of a

racialized social structure. Comments such as “Funny, you don’t look black” betray

an underlying image of what black should look like. We expect people to act out their

apparent racial identities. Phenotype and performativity should match up. Indeed

we become disoriented and anxious when they do not. Encounters with the black

person who can’t dance, the Asian American not proficient in math and science, or

the Latin@ who can’t speak Spanish all momentarily confound our racial reading of

the social world and how we navigate within it. The whole gamut of racial stereotypes

testifies to the way a racialized social structure shapes racial experience and socializes

racial meanings. Analysis of prevailing stereotypes reveals the always present, already

active link between our view of the social structure— its demography, its laws, its

customs, its threats— and our conception of what race means.

Conversely, the way we interpret our experience in racial terms shapes and reflects

our relations to the institutions and organizations through which we are embedded in

the social structure. Thus we expect racially coded human characteristics to explain

social differences. “Making up people” once again. Temperament, sexuality, intelli-

gence, athletic ability, aesthetic preferences are presumed to be fixed and discernible

from the palpable mark of race. Such diverse questions as our confidence and trust in

others (for example, salespeople, teachers, media figures, and neighbors), our sexual

preferences and romantic images, our tastes in music, films, dance, or sports, and our

very ways of talking, walking, eating, and dreaming become racially coded simply

because we live in a society where racial awareness is so pervasive.

The Theory of Racial Formation 127

To summarize the argument so far: The theory of racial formation suggests that

society is suffused with racial projects, large and small, to which all are subjected.

This racial “subjection” is quintessentially ideological. Everybody learns some

combination, some version, of the rules of racial classification, and of their own

racial identity, often without obvious teaching or conscious inculcation. Thus are we

inserted in a comprehensively racialized social structure. Race becomes “common

sense”— a way of comprehending, explaining, and acting in the world. A vast web of

racial projects mediates between the discursive or representational means in which

race is identified and signified on the one hand, and the institutional and organiza-

tional forms in which it is routinized and standardized on the other. The interaction

and accumulation of these projects are the heart of the racial formation process.

Because of the pervasion of society by race, because of its operation over the

longue durée as a master category of difference and inequality, it is not possible to

represent race discursively without simultaneously locating it, explicitly or implicitly,

in a social structural (and historical) context. Nor is it possible to organize, main-

tain, or transform social structures without simultaneously engaging, once more

either explicitly or implicitly, in racial signification. Racial formation, therefore, is

a synthesis, a constantly reiterated outcome, of the interaction of racial projects on a

society- wide level. These projects are, of course, vastly different in scope and effect.

They include large- scale public action, state activities, and interpretations of racial

conditions in political, artistic, journalistic, or academic fora, 20 as well as the seem-

ingly infinite number of racial judgments and practices, conscious and unconscious,

that we carry out as part of our individual experience.

The concept of racial projects can be understood and applied across historical

time to identify patterns in the longue durée of racial formation, both nationally and

the entire modern world. At any particular historical moment, one racial project can

be hegemonic while others are subservient, marginal, or oppositional to it. White

supremacy is the obvious example of this: an evolving hegemonic racial project that

has taken different forms from the colonial era to the present. In the chapters that

follow, we utilize the concept of racial projects to examine the political trajectory of

race over the past six decades in the United States.

But we are not done with racial formation yet. Before we get to the recent his-

tory of racial politics, and with the foregoing account of racial formation in mind,

we must turn our attention to the problem of racism. Racial politics are necessarily

deeply bound up with this topic. But race and racism are not the same thing. What is

the relationship between them?

Racism

Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician and sexologist of the Weimar era who was an

early advocate of gay and transgender rights, initially gave currency to the term “rac-

ism.” Published posthumously, Hirschfeld’s book Rassismus ( Racism ; 1938) provided a

128 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

history, analysis, and critical refutation of Nazi racial doctrines. Since the 1930s, the con-

cept of racism has undergone signifi cant changes in scope, meaning, and application. As

historian George Fredrickson observes, “Although commonly used, ‘racism’ has become

a loaded and ambiguous term” (2002, 151). While ideological notions of race have been

directly tied to practices ranging from social segregation, exclusion from political par-

ticipation, restrictive access to economic opportunities and resources, and genocide, the

precise defi nition and signifi cance of racism has been subject to enormous debate.

Robert Miles (1989) has argued that the term “racism” has been conceptually

“inflated” to the point where it has lost its precision. While the problem of conceptual

inflation and its political implications are evident in an era of colorblindness, the term

“racism” is also subject to conceptual de flation. That is, what is considered racist is

often defined very narrowly, in ways that obscure rather than reveal the pervasiveness

and persistence of racial inequality in the United States For example, racism has been

popularly and narrowly conceived as racial hate. The category of “hate crimes” has

been introduced in many states as a specific offense with enhanced sentencing con-

sequence, and many colleges and universities have instituted “hate speech” codes to

regulate expression and behavior both inside and outside of the classroom. Dramatic

acts of racial violence are given considerable play in the mass media, and are the sub-

ject of extensive condemnation by political elites. But as critical race scholar David

Theo Goldberg (1997) has pointed out, the conceptual and political reduction of rac-

ism to hate both limits our understanding of racism and of the ways to challenge it.

Racist acts are seen as “crimes of passion”— abnormal, unusual, and irrational deeds

that we popularly consider offensive. Missing from such a narrow interpretation of

racism are the ideologies, policies, and practices in a variety of institutional arenas

that normalize and reproduce racial inequality and domination.

How should we understand racism today? We have argued that race has no fixed

meaning, that it is constructed and transformed sociohistorically through the cumula-

tive convergence and conflict of racial projects that reciprocally structure and signify

race. Our emphasis on racial projects allows us to advance a definition of racism as

well. A racial project can be defined as racist if it creates or reproduces structures of

domination based on racial significations and identities.

Rather than envisioning a single, monolithic, and dominant racist project, we

suggest that racist projects exist in a dense matrix, operating at varying scales, net-

worked with each other in formally and informally organized ways, enveloping and

penetrating contemporary social relations, institutions, identities, and experiences.

Like other racial projects, racist projects too converge and conflict, accumulate and

interact with one another.

Complex and embedded as this web of racist projects is— remember, projects

both signify and structure relationships, practices, and institutions— it is not the

whole story. Powerful as racism is, it does not exhaust race. It does not crowd out

anti- racism or eliminate the emancipatory dimensions of racial identity, racial soli-

darity, or racially conscious agency, both individual and collective. Indeed race is so

The Theory of Racial Formation 129

profoundly a lived- in and lived- out part of both social structure and identity that it

exceeds and transcends racism— thereby allowing for resistance to racism. Race, there-

fore, is more than racism; it is a fully- fledged “social fact” like sex/gender or class.

From this perspective, race shapes racism as much as racism shapes race.

That said, a number of questions remain to be addressed. Our discussion has

focused on racist projects, but are there also anti- racist projects? Can groups of color

advance racist projects?

Are there anti- racist projects? On some level, this question answers itself. Mil-

lions of people in the United States (and elsewhere) have committed their actions,

intellects, emotions, and in many cases their lives, to the cause of ending, or at least

reducing, racism. Numerous individuals and groups continue to mobilize against

racism. They seek to respond to racist attacks: assaults and murder, often by the

police, on black and brown people, racial “steering” in housing and credit markets,

racially biased sentencing practices in criminal courts … the list is seemingly endless.

They act to resist institutionalized racist practices, such as “stop and frisk” policies

targeting black and brown youth; 21 to educate and organize against racism through

media, research, legal and political action; and to disrupt and counter racist prac-

tices in everyday life. Continuing the argument advanced throughout this chapter, we

define anti- racist projects as those that undo or resist structures of domination based on

racial significations and identities.

Anti- racism has been the subject of seemingly endless discussion, especially

through the rise and fall of the post- World War II political trajectory of race. It has

become much more difficult to understand anti- racism since racism went “under-

ground” at the end of the 1960s; since the racist practices and the meaning of racism

have changed from “old school” explicit discourses and white supremacist actions

like lynchings and cross- burnings. Instead, racism now takes more implicit, deniable,

and often unconscious forms. Because the law continues to understand racism (racial

discrimination) in the old way— as an explicit, intentional, invidious distinction based

on race—legal remedies have been sharply curtailed. 22 By restricting its under-

standing of discrimination in this way, the Supreme Court has permitted and tacitly

encouraged denial and concealment of racist practices.

If racism is not merely a matter of explicit beliefs or attitudes— significations or

identities, in our vocabulary— but also and necessarily involves the production and

maintenance of social structures of domination, then the denial of invidious intent is

clearly insufficient to undo it. The absence of invidious intent does little or nothing

to unwind the social structures through which racism flourishes and is reproduced.

In the “post- civil rights” era, racism has been largely— though not entirely, to be

sure— detached from its perpetrators. In its most advanced forms, indeed, it has

no perpetrators; it is a nearly invisible, taken- for granted, common- sense feature of

everyday life and social structure. This is the situation that has allowed U.S. courts

and mainstream political discourse to block race- conscious reparative measures such

as affirmative action, to proclaim the United States a “colorblind” society, and to

130 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

stigmatize anti- racist activists and intellectuals— legal practitioners, community

organizations, school systems and universities, and other individuals and institutions

seeking to overturn structures of racial exclusion and discrimination— as “playing

the race card,” as the “real racists.”

Can Groups of Color Advance Racist Projects? Some scholars and activists have

defined racism as “prejudice plus power.” 23 Using this formula, they argue that peo-

ple of color can’t be racist since they don’t have power. But things are not that simple.

“Power” cannot be reified as a thing that some possess and others do not; instead it

constitutes a relational field. Furthermore, unless one is prepared to argue that there

has been no transformation of the U.S. racial order in the past several decades, it is

difficult to contend that groups of color have attained no power or influence. To do so

risks dismissing the political agency of people of color. 24

Racialized groups are positioned in unequal ways in a racially stratified society.

Racial hierarchy pervades the contemporary United States; that hierarchy is prepon-

derantly white supremacist, but it is not always that way. There are some exceptions,

specific urban areas where groups of color have achieved local power, for example,

in the administration of social services and distribution of economic resources. In

cities like Oakland and Miami, this has led to conflicts between blacks and Latin@s

over educational programs, minority business opportunities, and political power,

with dramatically different results depending on which group held relative power. In

these cases, some groups of color are promoting racial projects that subordinate other

groups of color. While such exceptions do not negate the overarching reality of white

supremacy, they do suggest that differences in racial power persist among groups

of color. Inter- group racial conflict is not unidimensional; it is not solely whites vs.

people of color, though whiteness still rules, OK?

Racial Politics: Despotism, Democracy, and Hegemony

For most of its existence, both as a European colony and, as an independent nation,

the United States was a racial despotism. In many ways it remains racially despotic

today. Progress towards political standing and the empowerment of people of color,

for example, has been painfully slow and highly uneven. It took over 160 years, from

the passage of the Naturalization Law of 1790 to the 1952 McCarran–Walter Act, to

abolish racial restrictions regarding naturalization (well, not totally). 25 After the civil

war, there was the brief democratic experiment of Reconstruction that terminated

ignominiously in 1877. In its wake there followed almost a century of legally sanc-

tioned segregation and wholesale denial of the vote. While the civil rights movement

and its allies made signifi cant strides towards enhancing formal political rights, obsta-

cles to eff ective political participation have remained stubbornly persistent, as recent

legal decisions jeopardizing voting rights have revealed (U.S. Supreme Court 2013).

It is important, therefore, to recognize that in many respects, racial despotism

is the norm against which all U.S. politics must be measured. Centuries of U.S.

The Theory of Racial Formation 131

racial despotism have had three important and dramatic consequences. First, they

defined “American” identity as white: as the negation of racialized “otherness”—

initially African and indigenous, later Latin American and Asian as well (Rogin 1991;

Morrison 1993; Drinnon 1997). This negation took shape in both law and custom, in

public institutions and in forms of cultural representation. It became the archetype

of racial domination in the United States. It melded with the conquest and slavery as

the “master” racial project.

Second, racial despotism organized— albeit sometimes in an incoherent and

contradictory fashion— the “color line,” rendering racial division the fundamental

schism in U.S. society. The despotism of the color line also demanded an ongoing

and intensive policing of racial boundaries, an ongoing racialization effort that ran

not only between various groups and people, but also through them. In other words,

racial despotism did not only elaborate, articulate, and drive racial divisions institu-

tionally; it also hammered them into our psyches, causing untold fear and suffering,

and extending, up to the moment in which you are reading this, the racial obsessions

and oppressions of the conquest and slavery periods.

Third, racial despotism consolidated oppositional racial consciousness and

organization. Originally framed by slave revolts and marronage, 26 by indige-

nous resistance, and by nationalisms of various sorts, and later by nationalist and

equalitarian racial freedom movements, oppositional racial consciousness took on

permanence and depth as racial resistance. Just as racial despotism reinforced white

supremacy as the master category of racial domination, so too it forged racial unity

among the oppressed: first native peoples assaulted and displaced by armed settlers,

later Africans and their descendants kidnapped and reduced to mere chattel, and

then conquered Latin@s/mestiz@s and superexploited Asian immigrants. Racial

despotism generated racial resistance: Just as the conquest created the “Indian”

where once there had been Pequot, Iroquois, or Tutelo, so too it created the “Black”

where once there had been Asante or Ovimbundu, Yoruba, or Bakongo. What had

once been tribal or ethnic consciousness— among enslaved Africans, Native Ameri-

cans “removed” to reservations or decimated by settler violence, Latin@s forcibly

denationalized and stripped of their lands, and Asian immigrants subjected to virtual

corvee labor and then violently expelled from the communities they had created—

ultimately became oppositional race consciousness and racial resistance. Thus in many

ways racial despotism laid the groundwork for the creation of the racially based

movements of today.

These patterns are now understood as “panethnicizing” processes. (Every racially

defined group is a panethnic group.) They comprise not only the shared experience

of suffering and the unifying pressures it brings to bear, but also the concerted self-

activity of the oppressed to confront their tormentors and change their conditions.

Panethnicity is a type of racialization; it is not without internal tension and conflict;

it is often uneven and incomplete; it often does not liquidate ethnic difference but

subsumes it; above all, it is a product of racial despotism.

132 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

The transition from racial despotism to racial democracy has been a slow, painful,

and contentious one; it remains far from complete. A recognition of the abiding pres-

ence of racial despotism, we contend, is crucial for the development of a theory of racial

formation in the U.S. It is also crucial to the task of relating racial formation to racial

resistance, the broader current of political practice, organization, and change.

Over extended periods of time, and as a result of resistance of disparate types, the

balance of coercion and consent began to change, to move from domination to hege-

mony. It is possible to locate the origins of hegemony right within the heart of racial

despotism, for the effort to possess the master’s tools— religion and philosophy in this

case— was crucial to emancipation and to “freedom dreams” (Kelley 2003), crucial to

efforts both individual and collective to possess oneself, so to speak, to achieve some

degree of “self- determination” as a people. As Ralph Ellison reminds us, “The slaves

often took the essence of the aristocratic ideal (as they took Christianity) with far

more seriousness than their masters” (1964, xiv). In their language, in their religion

with its focus on the Exodus theme and on Jesus’s tribulations (Glaude 2000), in their

music with its figuring of suffering, resistance, perseverance, and transcendence (Du

Bois 2007 (1935), in their interrogation of a political philosophy which sought per-

petually to rationalize their bondage in a supposedly “free” society (Douglass 2000

[1852]), enslaved Africans and their descendants incorporated elements of racial rule

into their thought and practice, turning them against their original bearers.

Racial rule can be understood as a slow and uneven historical process that has

moved from despotism to democracy, from domination to hegemony. In this tran-

sition, hegemonic forms of racial rule— those based on consent— eventually came

to supplant those based on coercion. But only to some extent, only partially. By no

means has the United States established racial democracy in the 21st century, and

by no means is coercion a thing of the past. But the sheer complexity of the racial

questions U.S. society confronts today, the welter of competing racial projects and

contradictory racial experiences which Americans undergo, suggests that hegemony

is a useful and appropriate term with which to characterize contemporary racial rule.

What form does racial hegemony take today? In the aftermath of the epochal

struggles of the post- World War II period, under the conditions of chronic crisis of

racial meaning to which U.S. society has grown accustomed, we suggest that a new

and highly unstable form of racial hegemony has emerged, that of colorblindness. In

the following chapters, we discuss the post- World War II political trajectory of racial

formation that has brought us to this point.

Notes

1. Ian Hacking (2006; 1999) has given us the phrase “making up people” to explain how the

human sciences operate, but Hacking doesn't stop there: he discusses medicine, education,

ideology, law, art, and state institutions as they do this work.

The Theory of Racial Formation 133

2. The notion of intersectionality was advanced by legal scholar Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, who

argued that both oppression and resistance are always situated in multiple categories of

diff erence (Crenshaw 1989). Failure to grasp how categories of race, gender, sexuality, and

class dynamically interact and shape one another, she asserted, led to a fragmented politics:

Feminist eff orts to politicize experiences of women and anti- racist eff orts to politi-

cize experiences of people of color have frequently proceeded as though the issues

and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. (Crenshaw

1991, 1242)

Two other key intersectionality theorists should be mentioned. Patricia Hill Collins

emphasizes the mutual determination of race, gender, and class in her survey and theo-

retical synthesis of the themes and issues of black feminist thought. Collins invented the

phrase “matrix of domination” to describe the “overall social organization within which

intersecting oppressions originate, develop, and are contained” (Collins 2008 [1999]

227–228). Evelyn Nakano Glenn argues that race and gender are relational concepts in

an interlocking system, providing a historical examination of citizenship and labor in the

United States between 1870 and 1930. Glenn argues that these categories cannot be under-

stood separately, but are defi ned and given meaning in relationship to each other: “Race

and gender share three key features as analytic concepts: (1) they are relational concepts

whose construction involves (2) representation and material relations and (3)  in which

power is a constitutive element” (Glenn 2002, 12–13). In many respects, race is gendered

and gender is racialized. Inequality is always racialized and gendered as well. There are no

clear boundaries between the “regions” of hegemony, so political confl icts will often invoke

some or all these themes simultaneously.

3. “The truth is that there are no races; there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race

to do for us…. The evil that is done is done by the concept, and by easy— yet impossible—

assumptions as to its application” (Appiah 1992, 45). Appiah's eloquent and learned book

fails, in our view, to dispense with the race concept, despite its anguished attempt to do so;

this indeed is the source of its author's anguish. We agree with him as to the non- objective

character of race, but fail to see how this recognition justifi es its abandonment.

4. George L. Mosse (1985) argues that anti- semitism only began to be racialized in the 18th

century. For a competing view, see Thomas 2010.

5. As Marx put it:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and

entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest

and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the com-

mercial hunting of blackskins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist

production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accu-

mulation. (1967, 75)

David E. Stannard (1992) argues that the wholesale slaughter perpetrated upon the native

peoples of the Western hemisphere is unequalled in history, even in our own bloody cen-

tury. See also Lovejoy and Rogers, eds. 1994.

6. Debates of a similar nature also took place among the subjects of conquest and enslave-

ment. On Native American perspectives, see Calloway 1994; Richter 2003; White 2010. On

African perspectives, see Opoku- Agyemang et al., eds. 2008; Thornton 2012.

134 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

7. In Virginia, for example, it took about two decades after the establishment of European

colonies to extirpate the indigenous people of the greater vicinity; 50 years after the estab-

lishment of the fi rst colonies, the elaboration of slave codes establishing race as prima facie

evidence for enslaved status was well under way. See Jordan (2012 [1968]).

8. In 1550- 1551 two Spanish Dominicans, Bartolomeo de las Casas and Juan Ginés de

Sepúlveda, conducted a prolonged theological debate in Valladolid, Spain, about the

humanity and spiritual status of Spain's Native American subjects. The debate was car-

ried out at the behest of the Spanish king, Charles V, and in the shadow of the Inquisition.

While ostensibly theological, and thus focused on such questions as the status— or even

presence— of the souls of the Indians, the debate also addressed questions of Spanish

imperial development strategy, notably the scope and legitimacy of slavery and the status

of the encomienda system vis- à- vis religious and royal authority. See Hanke 1974; Todorov

1984.

9. For a pointed, parallel demonstration of the imperative of racial classifi cation during

relatively early stages of conquest, see the genre of Mexican casta paintings (Denver Art

Museum 2004; Katzew 2005).

10. Proslavery physician Samuel George Morton (1799- 1851) compiled a collection of 800

crania from all parts of the world, which formed the sample for his studies of race. Assum-

ing that the larger the size of the cranium translated into greater intelligence, Morton

established a relationship between race and skull capacity. Gossett reports that “In 1849,

one of his studies included the following results: the English skulls in his collection proved

to be the largest, with an average cranial capacity of 96 cubic inches. The Americans and

Germans were rather poor seconds, both with cranial capacities of 90 cubic inches. At the

bottom of the list were the Negroes with 83 cubic inches, the Chinese with 82, and the

Indians with 79” (Gossett 1997 [1965], 74). When Steven Jay Gould reexamined Morton's

research, he found that the data were deeply, though probably unconsciously, manipulated

to agree with his “a priori conviction about racial ranking” (1981, 50- 69).

11. See UNESCO 1950/1951. The production of the documents was coordinated by Alfred

Metraux (1951). The 1950 authors included Professors Ernest Beaglehole (New Zealand),

Juan Comas (Mexico), E. Franklin Frazier (U.S.), Humayun Kabir (India), Claude Levi-

Strauss (France), Morris Ginsberg (United Kingdom), and Ashley Montagu (U.S.). It was

revised by Montagu “after criticism submitted by Professors Hadley Cantril, E. G. Conk-

lin, Gunnar Dahlberg, Theodosius Dobzhansky, L. C. Dunn, Donald Hager, Julian S.

Huxley, Otto Klineberg, Wilbert Moore, H. J. Mullet, Gunnar Myrdal, Joseph Needham,

and Curt Stern” (ibid, 35). The 1950 document was criticized as excessively sociologically

oriented; the 1951 revision included text drafted by anthopologists, geneticists, and biolo-

gists as well. On Metraux see Prins 2007.

12. These are complex cases. The Cherokee Freedmen are the descendants of black slaves

owned by the Cherokee (Jones 2009). The Seminole Blacks are the descendants of U.S.

maroons who fl ed slavery to tribal lands in Florida, Indian territory controlled by Spain

until 1821. The U.S. fought two “Seminole Wars” (1817–1818 and 1835–1842) to recap-

ture the area and reimpose slavery. Many Seminoles were transported (or fl ed) to the

Oklahoma territory, but some remained in Florida. In 1849, threatened by slave- raiders,

c.200 armed Black Seminoles under the leadership of John Horse escaped from Florida

and conducted a heroic “long march” across slave- holding Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas.

The Theory of Racial Formation 135

Accompanied by some traditional (i.e., non- black) Seminole comrades led by the Seminole

chief Coacochee. This amazing feat culminated in their crossing into abolitionist Mexico

in July 1850; they formed a community in Coahuila that is still called Nacimiento de los

Negros . See Mulroy 2007.

13. The Implicit Bias Test (IAT) was developed in the mid- 1990s by experimental/social psy-

chologist Anthony G. Greenwald. It has spawned a large literature and been applied to

various issues of bias (notably race, gender, and stereotyping of various types) in numerous

settings, particularly educational, political, and legal. For a small sample of relevant work

by Greenwald and collaborators, see Greenwald et al. 2003; Greenwald et al. 2009; Kang

et al. 2012.

14. The legacy of Kant is particularly evident here (McCarthy 2009), but sociological and psy-

chological concepts such as “consciousness of kind” (Giddings 1932) have also acquired

great followings over the years.

15. See “The Conservation of Races” (1993 [1897]), an early statement that has occasioned

much debate among Du Bois scholars (Marable 1986, 35- 38; Appiah 1992, 28–46; Lewis

1993, 372–373; Reed 1997a).

16. Boas’s work has drawn contemporary criticism for its residual essentialism; his early physi-

cal anthropology at times overwhelmed his vaunted cultural relativism (Boas 1912a, 1912b;

Williams 1996).

17. Park’s Race and Culture (1950) is still useful; see also Lyman 1992; Steinberg 2007. Locke’s

1915 lectures at Howard University, unpublished until 1992, bear a remarkable resem-

blance to contemporary racial theories and comparative historical sociologies of race

(Locke 1992 [1915]).

18. Proposition 54 was defeated, less because voters wished to preserve racial categorization as

an overall state practice, but rather because in a few particular areas of state activity they

had been convinced that maintaining racially based data was good for society overall. A

particularly crucial source of Connerly’s defeat was a series of campaign ads run by medi-

cal societies arguing that collecting racial data was important for public health purposes

(HoSang 2010).

19. In August, 2012 the Bureau announced that it was considering redefi ning the Top of Form-

Bottom of Form “Hispanic” category to the status of a racial category, possibly called

“Hispanic/Latino,” that would be equivalent on the form to white or black. See Cohn 2012.

20 . We are not unaware, for example, that publishing this work is itself a racial project.

21. Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al. , a class action suit brought by the Center for Consti-

tutional Rights on behalf of victims of “stop and frisk” racial profi ling by New York City

police, was decided on August 12, 2013. Federal judge Shira Scheindlin decided for the

plaintiff s and ordered a series of modifi cation and reforms of “stop and frisk.” See Center

for Constitutional Rights 2013. Challenges to the decision suggest that the case's ultimate

outcome remains in doubt.

22. Racial jurisprudence largely relies on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment

and on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The full extent of Supreme Court rulings on the nature

of racism cannot be addressed here. An exemplary decision is Washington v. Davis (U.S.

Supreme Court 1976), which established the rule of “invidious discriminatory purpose” as

the criterion for determining if discrimination had occurred. The Court understood “pur-

pose” as “intent” and refused to extend its concept of discrimination to include “disparate

136 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

impact”; in other words the consequences of practices alleged to be discriminatory were

offi cially ignored. See Pillai 2001.

23. Bonilla- Silva defi nes this view as an “institutionalist perspective,” in which “racism is

defi ned as a combination of prejudice and power that allows the dominant race to insti-

tutionalize its dominance at all levels in a society (Bonilla- Silva 1997, 466). See also Katz

2003.

24. See our debate with Joe Feagin and Chris Elias over these issues: Feagin and Elias 2013;

Omi and Winant 2013.

25. In practice, this just means rendering the racial dimensions of race informal, outside

explicit legal regulation, but still subject to political pressures, and thus to racist projects

and anti- racist ones as well. Thus it may be an overstatement to say that such restrictions

were “abolished.”

26. This term refers to the practice, widespread throughout the Americas, whereby runaway

slaves formed communities in remote areas, such as swamps, mountains, or forests, often

in alliance with dispossessed indigenous peoples. The Black Seminoles discussed above

were a maroon people.

137

C H A P T E R 5

Racial Politics and the Racial State

“[H]istorical reality is completely obfuscated in the myth of an all- inclusive contract creat-

ing a sociopolitical order presided over by a neutral state equally responsive to all its colorless

citizens.”

— Charles W. Mills 1

Introduction

Race is consummately political. The instability of the race concept and the contro-

versies it generates are emblematic of the racially contradictory society in which we

live. In the United States, a system of racial rule has always been in place, operating

not merely through macro- level, large- scale activities, but also through micro- level,

small- scale practices. The racial regime is enforced and challenged in the schoolyard,

on the dance fl oor, on talk radio, and in the classroom as much as it is in the Supreme

Court, electoral politics, or on the battlefi eld of Helmand province. Because racial

formation processes are dynamic, the racial regime remains unstable and contested.

We cannot step outside of race and racism, since our society and our identities are

constituted by them; we live in racial history.

Race is a vast and variegated theme. Any racial theory is a work- in- progress. Race

is a factor not only in politics and history, but also in economy, culture, experience …;

it is a fully- fledged social fact like class or gender. Like those other large markers

race is an unstable set of collective representations as well. 2 We focus here on racial

politics and the racial state because through politics, through struggles over power

and freedom, we can see race and racism being remade both social structurally and

experientially. What we call racial projects have interacted over half a millennium to

build up the social structures of race and racism. A parallel experiential dimension exists

as well: The short- term, present-tense experience of racial subjectivity, in which new

racial projects are being launched and interacting all the time. 3

Looking at racial politics in general and the racial state in particular also allows us to

consider the state–civil society distinction: The state may represent the core of a given

racial regime, but no state can encompass all of civil society. People conceive of, operate,

and inhabit their own racial projects (within broader constraints) and “experience” race

in distinct and varied ways.

To theorize racial politics and the racial state, then, is to enter the complex terri-

tory where structural racism encounters self- reflective action, the radical pragmatism

138 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

of people of color (and their white allies) in the United States 4 It is to confront the

instability of the U.S. system of racial hegemony, in which despotism and democ-

racy coexist in seemingly permanent conflict . It is to understand that the boundary

between state and civil society is necessarily porous and uncertain where race is con-

cerned . Emphasizing the political dimensions of race and racism allows us to discern

the contours of the racial system, to understand what racial hegemony looks like, to

specify its contradictions, and to envision alternative scenarios.

Racial politics are bigger than the state. They involve civil society, political social-

ization and thus race- consciousness, racial identity- making (both individual- and

group- based), and group boundary formation (Barth, ed. 1998 [1969]) as well. The

enmeshment of the state in our everyday lives means that all racial identities are

contradictory and “hybrid”; it means that uncertain group boundaries are regulated

and often tightened and enforced by the state. We make our racial identities, both

individually and collectively, but not under conditions of our own choosing.

Racial formation theory approaches politics as an uneasy combination of despotic

and democratic practices, of self- reflective action undertaken both with and against

established social structures. Why, for example, are racial attributions so prone to vio-

lence, so “hot,” so fiercely upheld and contested, so necessary in the modern world as

components of both self and social structure? Why is race so available as a “scaven-

ger concept”: a default variable on the basis of which so many disparate phenomena

are supposedly explained? 5 How can a social distinction be both so determining— of

life chances and status, of freedom, of economic, political, and social institutions,

and indeed of identity itself— and at the same time so undetermined, inchoate, and

indeed unreal on so many levels?

The modern state makes use of ideology— racial ideology in this case— to “glue”

together contradictory practices and structures: despotism and democracy, coercion

and consent, formal equality and substantive inequality, identity and difference. 6 The

racial state does not have precise boundaries. Although based in formally constituted

institutions and grounded in a contentious historical process, the state extends beyond

administrative, legislative, or judicial forms of activity. It inhabits and indeed orga-

nizes large segments of social and indeed psychological identity, as well as everyday

life. Internalizing and “living out” a particular racial identity, for example, is in some

ways internalizing the state; post- structuralist theorists might describe this in terms

of “governmentality” (Foucault 1991, 1997). From a Freudian point of view, we might

understand the racial state in terms of “introjection”: another form of internaliza-

tion in which rules and constraints become mechanisms of psychological self- defense.

Still another way in which the racial state casts its net over our identities, our everyday

experiences, is through the process Althusser called “interpellation”: the way the state

“notices” us, “hails” us. In Althusser’s account, a police officer calls out “Hey! You

there!” and we instantly flinch; we turn to face the state that is already within us:

[I]deology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects

among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals

Racial Politics and the Racial State 139

into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I

have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the

lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you

there!”

Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the

street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one- hundred- and-

eighty- degree physical conversion, he [sic] becomes a subject. Why? Because

he has recognized that the hail was “really” addressed to him, and that “it was

really him who was hailed” (and not someone else).

(Althusser 2001 [1971], 174; see also Butler 1997a)

By despotism we refer to a familiar series of state practices: deprivation of life,

liberty, or land; dispossession, violence, confinement, coerced labor, exclusion, and

denial of rights or due process. The contemporary United States, and the colo-

nial societies that preceded it in North America, were founded on these and related

forms of despotism, all organized according to race. Although racial oppression has

lessened over the years, and although some of these despotic practices have been sig-

nificantly reduced if not eliminated (slavery is a good example here), others continue

unabated and in some cases have even increased. For example, carceral practices

today rival or exceed any previous period in both the proportions and absolute

numbers of black and brown people held in confinement. The little- noticed devel-

opment of a whole gulag of specialized immigration prisons has no precedent in

U.S. history.

All right then, how about the democratic dimensions of the racial state? Though

it is a constant and prominent feature of the racial state, despotism is not the only

story that the state tells about race. “Freedom dreams” (Kelley 2003) rooted in

racial politics are among the most enduring contributions to the foundation of

democracy in the modern world; these “dreams” have constantly challenged the

state, most famously in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s August 1963 speech, but on

numerous other occasions as well. In fact the persistence and depth of social justice-

oriented movements has been the chief source of popular democracy and indeed

popular sovereignty in the United States. What W.E.B. Du Bois called “abolition

democracy” is a clear instance of that movement challenge. In Du Bois’s view,

the American Revolution of 1776–1781 was only a partial and incomplete anti-

imperial transformation, since it was dominated by elites and left slavery intact.

The Civil War, and Reconstruction, abortive as it was, were the second phase of

the American Revolution, based upon the expansion of the rights that abolition

implied: the achievement by all of complete democracy and full citizenship (Du

Bois 2007 [1935] 186; see also Lipsitz 2004; Davis 2005, 73–74).

To be sure, democratic movements have often been foreclosed by state- based

coercion, as well as by reactionary practices based in civil society: mob violence and

lynching, for example. Only under some circumstances has open and “free” political

mobilization for democratic reform been possible for people of color: The two great

140 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

moments of this mainstream political upsurge were, of course, the Reconstruction

period (1865–1877) and the post- World War II civil rights period (1948–1970). At

other times democratic political action had to take shape quite autonomously, beneath

the radar of the state (and often beneath the social scientific radar as well). This sug-

gests the subaltern character of racial democracy. 7

* * *

In order to understand racial politics and to grasp the contradictory relation-

ship between racial despotism and racial democracy, it is necessary to situate the

racial state historically and account for its development over time. Here, we accom-

plish this by discussing the transition from war of maneuver to war of position. Next,

we address the racial body politic, the corporeal or phenomic dimensions of raciality.

Race and racism politicize the body, subjecting it to state control, surveillance, and

violence. In the next section, The Radical Pragmatist Politics of Race, we consider the

micro–macro linkages that operate in racial politics. We examine such matters as the

way individuals and movements “navigate” in unstable and uncertain racial condi-

tions, and the contradictions between racial despotism and racial democracy that

continue to shape and reshape the racial state. We draw once again on the theories of

the Italian neo- Marxist politician, theorist, and anti- fascist leader Antonio Gramsci.

In the next section, we introduce the concept of trajectories of racial politics. Trajec-

tories are shaped interactions, taking place over historical time, between the racial

state and race- oriented social movements. Finally, we reflect upon racial politics in

everyday life, discussing the politicization of the social that took place in the United

States during the post- World War II years. We argue that anti- racist movements

greatly expanded the political “space” available in the country, achieving an enor-

mous deepening and broadening of political awareness. From (and within) race this

“politics of identity” went everywhere: into personal relationships, family, sexuality,

and “micro-political” interactions of all types. Prior to the 1970s, these identities and

relationships were seen as mostly private matters, located outside the political sphere.

Since the black movement challenge, they have “gone public”; awareness of racism,

sexism, and homophobia cannot be removed from the public sphere.

From War of Maneuver to War of Position

There has been a racial system in North America since the earliest days of contact

with and conquest by Europeans. This system has linked political rule to the racial

classifi cation of individuals and groups. The major institutions and social relation-

ships of U.S. society— law, political organization, economic relationships, religion,

cultural life, residential patterns— have been structured from the beginning by this

system.

Clearly, the system was more monolithic, more absolute, at earlier histori-

cal moments. Despite its epochal revolutionary origins, the early U.S. maintained

Racial Politics and the Racial State 141

many of the residues of the absolutist system of monarchical rule from which it had

emerged. Empire, slavery, and patrimonialism were some of these “birthmarks.”

Having thrown off the shackles of the British empire, “the first new nation” (Lipset

2003 [1963]) proceeded to establish itself as an empire of its own, seizing the land and

labor of native peoples of North America (Kaplan 2005; Stoler, ed. 2006;). Having

declared itself subject to a natural law in which “all men [sic] are created equal,” the

United States quite comprehensively disobeyed that law in practice: not only through

its support for hereditary chattel slavery, but also through its severe restrictions on

democratic participation. 8 The American Revolution was in many respects triggered

by trade restrictions imposed by the “mother country”; 9 the insurgent colonies were

merchant capitalist, not yet industrial capitalist. They were patrimonial systems that

were still marked by feudalism (Adams 2005). Not only did romantic racist ideol-

ogy justifying slavery develop out of this political- economic complex— the plantation

owner as the father, the slaves as children— but also the chattelization of both slaves

and women was operating here (Pateman 1988; Mills 1999). Furthermore, because

there was very little industrial production in the early decades of the nation’s exis-

tence, property- less white men were uncertain about their status. The main “workers”

were slaves, and white men, unwilling to accept the quasi- feudal status of “servant,”

were determined to distinguish themselves from slaves at all costs. David Roediger

(2007 [1991]) finds deep roots for later U.S. racism in this unstable and conflictual

situation. What about the slaves themselves? The 1790 census— the first ever taken

in the country— counted roughly 20 percent of the U.S. population as enslaved (U.S.

Bureau of the Census 1791). In Virginia, the principal slaveholding state of the time,

the enslaved population was around 40 percent of the total.

Thus policing and controlling the enslaved population was a particular concern,

especially in the South, where slaves were concentrated and represented the main

source of labor. The U.S. Constitution reflected extensive experience in the surveil-

lance and punishment of slaves, experience that had been acquired by Europeans

over 250 years of colonization before the Constitution was even promulgated. Protec-

tion for “the peculiar institution” was provided by the document in numerous ways:

notably in its provision for the return of escaped slaves, and in its ignominious “three-

fifths clause,” whereby the enslaved population, though obviously unrepresented in

the legislature, could yet be counted as a component of the population for purposes

of legislative enumeration.

For most of U.S. history, state racial policy’s main objective was repression and

exclusion. Congress’ first attempt to define American citizenship, the Naturalization

Law of 1790, declared that only free “white” immigrants could qualify. A persis-

tent pattern of disenfranchisment targeted people of color. Before the Civil War,

“free persons of color” were stripped of their right to vote— the key to citizenship

status— in many states. The extension of eligibility to all racial groups has been slow

indeed. Japanese, for example, could become naturalized citizens only after the pas-

sage of the McCarran–Walter Act of 1952. 10

142 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

The state plays a crucial part in racialization, the extension of racial meaning to

a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group. Throughout

the 19th century, many state and federal laws recognized only three racial categories:

“white,” “Negro,” and “Indian.” In California, the influx of Chinese and the debates

surrounding the legal status of Mexicans provoked a brief juridical crisis of racial

definition. California attempted to resolve this dilemma by classifying Mexicans and

Chinese within the already existing framework of “legally defined” racial groups.

After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Mexicans were accorded the political-

legal status of “free white persons,” a fig- leaf placed by the U.S. conquerors over the

realities of Mexican mestizaje and slave emancipation. State racialization of Asians

was even more baroque: In 1854 the newly established California Supreme Court

ruled in People v. Hall (CA Supreme Court 1854) that Chinese should be considered

“Indian”[!] and denied the political rights accorded to whites. 11

But even at its most oppressive, the racial order was unable to arrogate to itself

the entire capacity for the production of racial meanings or the racial subjection

of the population. Racially defined “others”— people of color— were always able

to counterpose their own cultural traditions, their own forms of organization and

identity, to the dehumanizing and enforced “invisibility” imposed by the majority

society. As the voluminous literature on black culture under slavery shows, black

slaves developed cultures of resistance based on music, religion, African traditions,

and family ties, among other political technologies. By these means they sustained

their own ideological project: the development of a “free” black identity, a sense

of “peoplehood,” and a collective dedication to emancipation. 12 Similar processes

of cultural resistance developed among Native Americans, Latin@s, and Asians. 13

Without reviewing the vast history of the U.S. racial order, it is still possible to

make some general comments about the manner in which this order was historically

consolidated. Gramsci’s distinction between “war of maneuver” and “war of posi-

tion” will prove useful here. In his account, war of maneuver is the form of politics

appropriate to conditions of dictatorship or despotism, when no terrain is available

for opposition inside the system. Resistance to the regime mobilizes outside the polit-

ical arena, in the hinterlands, the slums and barracoons, the places of worship, the

fields and mines and other workplaces, everywhere the subaltern strata are gathered.

Once it has acquired the necessary force, resistance moves to the key locus of power,

the capital, and seizes the key redoubts (the Bastille, the Winter Palace) from which

oppressive power has been exercised.

War of position, by contrast, is the political form appropriate to hegemonic sys-

tems of rule that operate by incorporating their opposition, at least up to a point.

Modern mass societies of both the fascist and the democratic type are the kinds

of political systems Gramsci has in mind. Resistance to fascism combines the two

forms of politics. Democratic states may be quite restrictive, but they still generally

provide some space for challenge from within: legislative, electoral, or judicial pro-

cesses, for example. In such societies the state is fortified (Gramsci calls it a system

Racial Politics and the Racial State 143

of “trenches”) 14 by structures of legitimation and consent against insurrection or

other direct challenges. The task faced by any oppositional movement engaged in a

“war of position” is to delegitimate the hegemonic system and to erode or under-

mine consent. By rearticulating political and cultural “common sense” in such a

way that the excluded, oppressed, and exploited sectors of society can achieve their

own legitmacy, their own inclusion, the opposition develops counter- hegemony. It

seeks to attain the rights, justice, and political power that its supporters had earlier

been denied. “War of position” is thus a prolonged struggle for the adherence of the

general population and the achievement of political power, generally without insur-

rection or armed struggle. 15

For much of American history, no political legitimacy was conceded to alterna-

tive or oppositional racial projects. The absence of democratic rights, of material

resources, and of political and ideological terrain upon which to challenge the mono-

lithic character of the racial order, forced racially defined opposition both outward, to

the margins of society, and inward, to the relative safety of self- defined communities.

Slaves who escaped to the North or Canada, or who formed maroon communities

in forests and swamps; Indians who made war on the United States in defense of

their peoples and lands; Chinese and Filipin@s who drew together in Chinatowns

and Manilatowns in order to gain some measure of collective control over their

existence— these are some examples of the movement outward, away from political

engagement with the racial state.

These same blacks, Indians, Asians (and many others), banned from the political

system and relegated to what was supposed to be a permanently inferior sociocultural

status, were also forced inward upon themselves as individuals, families, and com-

munities. Tremendous cultural resources were nurtured among such communities;

enormous labors were required to survive and to develop elements of an autonomy

and opposition under such conditions. These circumstances can best be understood

as combining with the violent clashes and necessity of resistance (to white- led race

riots, military assaults) which characterized these periods, to constitute a racial war

of maneuver.

War of maneuver was gradually replaced by war of position as racially defined

minorities achieved political gains in the United States. 16 A strategy of war of position

can only be predicated on political struggle— on the existence of diverse institutional

and cultural terrains upon which oppositional political projects can be mounted. To

the extent that you can confront the racial state from within the political system, to

the degree that you possess political “voice” (Hirschman 1971), you are fighting a war

of position. Prepared in large measure by the practices undertaken under conditions

of war of maneuver, black movements and their allies were able to make sustained

strategic incursions into the mainstream political process during the post- World War

II years. “Opening up” the state was a process of democratization which had effects

both on state structures and on racial meanings. The postwar black movement, later

joined by other racially based minority movements, challenged the dominant racial

144 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

ideology in the United States, insisting upon a more egalitarian and democratic con-

cept of race. The state was the logical target for this effort.

The Racial Body Politic

Race and racism both defi ne and disrupt the body politic of the nation- state. 17 As we

saw in Chapter 3 , concepts of the nation like “the American people” or “the French

people” presuppose a degree of inclusion and commonality that is impossible to

achieve in practice. States occasionally become the instruments of necessarily geno-

cidal attempts to attain that level of uniformity (“purity”), which is usually framed

in racial terms. 18 But more often they must manage the heterogeneity of the body

politic, operating on the continuum of despotism–democracy that we have discussed.

Therefore racial diff erence and racial inequality are fundamental dimensions of social

organization. This is something that reductionist theoretical approaches to race and

racism just can ’ t explain. There is a persistent tendency to recur to other, suppos-

edly more fundamental social forces like class and culture/ethnicity, in the eff ort to

explain the persistence and breadth of race. Such accounts always neglect or dismiss

the embeddedness of race in the modern world.

Foucault’s concept of “biopower” 19 addresses some of the problems of this sort

of management. Though he developed it in his later work on sexuality, Foucault also

applied this term to issues of race and racism, especially in regard to colonialism and

empire. The biopower concept is useful here because it allows us to see the normal-

ization and comprehensiveness of race and racism in the modern world (and most

certainly in the U.S.). With Foucault, we challenge the idea— found everywhere in

both scholarly work and common sense— that human differentiation according to

race is somehow aberrant, and that racism is an irrational deviation from such immu-

table principles as individualism, “ liberté, égalité, fraternité, ” or the law of supply and

demand. Foucault labels such accounts “scapegoat theories” of race. As Ann Laura

Stoler writes,

Scapegoat theories posit that under economic and social duress, particular sub-

populations are cordoned off as intruders, invented to deflect anxieties, and

conjured up precisely to nail blame. For Foucault, racism is more than an ad hoc

response to crisis: It is a manifestation of preserved possibilities, the expression

of an underlying discourse of permanent social war, nurtured by the biopoliti-

cal technologies of “incessant purification.” Racism does not merely arise in

moments of crisis, in sporadic cleansings. It is internal to the biopolitical state,

woven into the weft of the social body, threaded through its fabric.

(1995, 69)

From this standpoint the “scavenger concept” of race also acquires new focus and

emphasis. The ready availability of race as an “explanation” for deviance from some

Racial Politics and the Racial State 145

attributed norm becomes more intelligible when we recognize both the ease with

which racial distinctions are made— their “ocularity”— and when we simultaneously

admit the breadth and depth of racial awareness in American society. With these

political tools in view, with an awareness of biopower handy and Foucault by your

side, consider once again the raciality of the body politic: the endless list of attributed

variation by race that pervades the United States, and much of the rest of the world

as well. Variation by race in scores on the SAT test? In evacuation rates by race from

hurricane- fl ooded New Orleans? In diff erent racial groups’ commitments to “hard

work”? In criminal propensities? How about in common- sense beliefs about sexual

proclivities across racially defi ned groups (consider the word “vanilla” in this con-

text)? This list can go on for days.

The phrase “body politic,” of course, refers not only to the collective body,

the “nation” or its equivalents; it also refers to the politicized body. Here we are

arguing that the phenomic dimensions of race are among the central components

of this phenomenon. Race and racism not only politicize the social but render up

the human body into the burning heart of the state as material for the social control.

State racial policy is directed against the racial body, in such forms as surveillance,

profiling, policing, and confinement. This racial body politic is also gendered and

classed: State violence against black men— against poor, dark, mainly male bod-

ies— is one of the most continuous and seemingly central aspects of the U.S. racial

system. Women of color are also targeted, especially by violence, discrimination, and

assaults on their reproductive rights (Harris- Perry 2011); profiling is everywhere

(Glover 2009).

Much recent scholarship has properly been devoted to “performing race” (Kondo

1997). In parallel fashion, critical studies of racism tend to see it as something that can

be “performed’ or not; for example we are urged to “interrupt” racism, or to “ally”

against racism. We consider that both these dimensions of race— race as “perfor-

mance” and race as “phenomics”— must be synthesized if we are to conceive fully of

the racial politics of civil society. To be sure there is no easy separation of the racial

state from the racial dimensions of identity and everyday life.

The body is the person. It is not news that racism derives much of its energy

from the effort to control racially marked bodies. Nor is it surprising that des-

potism operates on the racial body, assaulting it, confining it, and profiling it. 20

Whether traditional or modern, whether religious or corporate, whether super-

exploiting immigrant workers, profiling “suspicious” persons (“stop and frisk”;

“show me your papers”), whether enforcing the boundaries of neighborhood seg-

regation, policing school hallways in neighborhoods of color (Nolan 2011)— again

the list is long— the convergence between despotism and the racial body is com-

prehensive. For this reason— as well as for reasons of gender and sexuality— the

right of all human beings to control their own bodies is a fundamental democratic

demand.

146 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

The Radical Pragmatist Politics of Race

Racial formation theory draws a great deal from the pragmatist philosophical tradi-

tion. Pragmatist concepts of self and society are based on the core idea of self- refl ective

action. This term means that both individually and collectively we are self- consciously

cognizant of the social forces in which we are immersed, and through which we steer

our individual and collective selves. 21 Consider racial formation as a continuous pro-

cess of this type. It is not only a struggle over the meaning of one’s own racial identity

within a particular social context and defi ned set of relationships; it is also a confl ict

over the terms of collective self- defi nition carried out in the shadow of the state and

its biopolitical capabilities. In the post- World War II period, these struggles have

taken place in explicitly political terms, as an ongoing “war of position” between

racial despotism and racial democracy.

A radical pragmatist approach allows us to analyze the interaction of the racial-

ized self and the racialized social structure. At the “micro- level,” each racial self

engages in a certain amount of sociopolitical “navigation,” so to speak. This activity

takes place in everyday life and in political life, and requires what might be called

racial “intelligence.” When one acts self- reflectively in respect to race, she or he links

the racial conditions of everyday life with those of the overall social structure. Often

this racial intelligence is taken for granted, but it is also self- conscious much of the

time, especially for people of color.

At the “macro- level,” the radical pragmatism of racial formation theory allows us

to understand why even in the present— in the post- civil rights, neoliberal era— racial

politics are so intractable, why they consist of simultaneous advances and setbacks. At

some moments and during some periods, projects for collective self- definition assume

the utmost importance, while at others they are in relative abeyance. Under some

conditions, when mobilization is sufficient— say in 1963 Birmingham, Alabama—

movements and organizations are able to intervene politically and act strategically on

behalf of insurgent groups of color. More often, self- reflective political activity is dif-

fused and sporadic, less frequently concentrated in mass political undertakings. The

Birmingham campaign or the August 1963 March on Washington were exceptional

moments of collective mobilization. But self- reflective action is always present to

some degree.

The state also operates this way. Indeed a radical pragmatist approach to racial

politics also allows us to see the “life of the state” as Gramsci describes it, as

a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria …

between the interests of the fundamental group and those of the subordinate

groups— equilibria in which the interests of the dominant group prevail, but

only up to a certain point, i.e., stopping short of narrowly corporate economic

interest.

(1971, 182)

Racial Politics and the Racial State 147

The framework here is Marxian class analysis, but if we think about this processual

notion of “the life of the state” from a racial point of view it closely parallels the

pragmatist concept. The “fundamental group” may be seen as whites— or more prop-

erly whites and others who benefi t from white supremacy and racism— while the

“subordinate groups” are people of color and their allies who are incorporated

into the “unstable equilibrium,” but only “up to a point.” Racial politics are unstable

because state and opposition are both the targets and operators of intersecting racial

projects. In the old days, the racial state could be more overt and violent. In the

“post- civil rights” era, the racial state cannot merely dominate; it must seek hege-

mony. It does this in two related ways; fi rst by incorporating “subordinate” groups:

the “sub- ” others, in other words the subaltern; and second by creating and embody-

ing racial “common sense,” as we have discussed. Yet state violence, confi nement,

and aggressive and repressive policing of people of color all continue; this is how

hegemony and subalternity are maintained: though a combination of repression and

incorporation.

What is despotic, and what is democratic, about the U.S. racial state? Despite sev-

eral historical “breaks”— when abolition of slavery, decolonization, and large- scale

extensions of citizenship and civil rights took place— the contemporary world is still

mired in the same racial history from which it originally sprang. The U.S. state was

born out of white supremacy and still maintains it to a significant degree. Yet the

state has been forced time and time again to make concessions to the racial “others”:

people of African descent, subjects of imperial conquest, indigenous people, and

immigrants. The racial state has been transformed over and over in unending efforts

to deal with its fundamental contradictions: Its concept of “freedom” included slav-

ery. It is a racial despotism that also claims to be democratic. It is an empire that arose

out of an anti- imperial revolution. It is a settler society (based on immigration) that

is also exclusionist.

Colonial rule and slavocracy were systems whose fundamental political charac-

ter was despotic. By seizure of territory, by kidnapping and theft, by coercive and

authoritarian rule, Europe- based imperial regimes destroyed countless lives and sen-

sibilities. No amount of rationalization, no invocation of themes of development and

uplift, no efforts at historical relativization can justify these predations or deodorize

their moral stink. So, racial politics and the racial state have their origins in the ravag-

ing of the globe, in the consolidation of European rule, and in the classification of all

humanity along racial lines. It is a bleak picture.

But not in every way. Racial politics also embody self- activity, resistance, and

“situated creativity” (another pragmatist phrase; see Joas 1996). For the past half-

millennium, refusal of slavery, resistance to colonialism, noncompliance with racial

domination, fidelity to oppositional cultural traditions and alternative concepts of

group and individual identity, and belief in racial solidarity have been some of the

most crucial sources of insurgency, some of the central passions underlying eman-

cipatory and democratic politics, both in the United States and around the world.

148 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

Trajectories of Racial Politics

What happens in racial politics when huge crises and racial “breaks”— matters of

global and not just national signifi cance for the most part— are not on the horizon?

The 17 years of the Civil War/Reconstruction (1860–1877) and roughly 22 years

(1948–1970) of the post- World War II racial “break” were exceptional periods. The

brief and heroic latter period is now receding historically. As President Obama has

noted— speaking about himself as well as other present- day black leaders— the

“Moses” generation of Dr. King and his contemporaries has now been succeeded by

the “Joshua” generation (Bobo and Dawson 2009). What do “normal” racial politics

look like today?

Racial politics should be understood in terms of trajectories. In the post- World

War II civil rights era and its aftermath, there have been a rising and a declining phase

of this political trajectory. The trajectory proceeded from the relative abeyance of

racial justice movements before the war; it was initiated during the war with the 1941

desegregation of the defense industries, and continued with the desegregation of the

armed forces and the 1954 Brown decision; it reached its apogee with the upsurge

of the civil rights, black power, and their allied movements in the 1960s. It began its

decline after the adoption of civil rights reforms in the mid- 1960s. A victim of its own

(partial) success, the movement confronted the onset of racial reaction at the hands of

the new right from about 1970 onward.

Applying Gramsci’s approach, let us consider the U.S. racial system as an “unsta-

ble equilibrium.” The idea of politics as “the continuous process of formation and

superseding of unstable equilibria” has particular resonance in describing the opera-

tion of the racial state. The racial system is managed by the state— encoded in law,

organized through policy- making, and enforced by a repressive apparatus. But the

equilibrium thus achieved is unstable, for the great variety of conflicting interests

encapsulated in racial meanings and identities can be no more than pacified by the

state. Racial conflict persists at every level of society, varying over time and in respect

to different groups, but ubiquitous. Indeed, the state is itself penetrated and struc-

tured by the very interests whose conflicts it seeks to stabilize and control. 22

Disruption and restoration of the racial order suggest the type of reiterative

movement or pattern we designate by the term “trajectory.” Both racial movements

and the racial state experience such transformations, passing through periods of rapid

change and virtual stasis, through moments of massive mobilization and others of rel-

ative passivity. While the movement and regime versions of the overall trajectory are

independently observable, they could not exist independently of each other. Racially

based political movements are inconceivable without the racial state, which provides

a focus for political demands and structures the racial order. The racial regime, in

turn, has been historically constructed by racial movements; it consists of agencies

and programs which are institutionalized responses to racially based movements of

the past.

Racial Politics and the Racial State 149

Our concept of the trajectory of racial politics thus links the two central actors

in the drama of contemporary racial politics— the racial state and anti- racist social

movements, the “dominant” and “subordinate” groups in Gramsci’s account— and

suggests a general pattern of interaction between them. Change in the racial order, in

the social meaning and political role played by race, is achieved only when the state

has initiated reforms, when it has generated new programs and agencies in response

to movement demands. Movements capable of achieving such reforms only arise

when there is significant “decay” in the capacities of pre- existing state programs and

institutions to organize and enforce racial ideology. Contemporary patterns of change

in the racial order illustrate this point clearly.

Taken as a whole, the anti- racist movements of the post- World War II period con-

stitute a broad democratic upsurge, whose goals were a wide aggregation of “freedom

dreams” (Kelley 2003) that ranged from moderate (voting rights) to radical (socialist

revolution, national liberation). The state response to this challenge sought to contain

it through reforms that would substitute a system of racial hegemony for the previ-

ous system of racial domination. The various civil rights acts and court decisions of

the 1960s incorporated movement opposition. This involved making tangible conces-

sions without altering the underlying structural racism that was characteristic of the

United States. It also meant the marginalization and in some cases destruction of

those sectors of racial opposition that were unwilling to accept limited (aka “moder-

ate”) reforms.

After the dust had settled from the titanic confrontation between the movement’s

radical propensities and the “establishment’s” tremendous capacity for incorporative

“moderate” reform, a great deal remained unresolved. The ambiguous and con-

tradictory racial conditions in the nation today result from decades- long attempts

simultaneously to ameliorate racial opposition and to placate and sustain the ancien

régime raciale. The unending reiteration of these opposite gestures, these contra-

dictory practices, itself testifies to the limitations of democracy and the continuing

significance of race in the United States.

Where are we located today on this trajectory? Were the incorporative reforms

effective in defusing the anti-racist movement? Of course, they were; let’s not have

any illusions about that. But the political processes we are discussing here proceed

forward in time, driven in part by the very limitations of the reforms that shaped them.

The trajectory of racial politics continues. Perhaps perversely, or at least ironically,

the reforms which curtailed racial inequality and injustice’s most despotic features

have worked to reinforce the production and diffusion of “colorblindness” as the

hegemonic U.S. racial ideology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In Chap ters 7

(Racial Reaction: Containment and Rearticulation) and 8 (Colorblindness, Neoliberal-

ism, and Obama), we consider the rise to hegemony of colorblind racial ideology, as

well as its contradictions and vulnerabilities.

This is the racial crisis of the early 21st century. “[C]risis,” Gramsci wrote, “con-

sists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this

150 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (1971, 276). The significant

advances made since World War II in overcoming the entrenched systems of U.S. racial

despotism coexist with a system of ongoing racial stratification and injustice that man-

ages to reproduce most of the conditions that have supposedly been abolished.

The Politicization of the Social

The race- based/anti- racism movements that arose after World War II were the fi rst

new social movements (Laraña, Johnston, and Gusfi eld, eds. 1994; Goodwin, Jasper,

and Polletta, eds. 2001). They were the fi rst systematically to expand the concerns of

politics to the social sphere, to the terrain of everyday life and emotional life. 23 New

social movement politics would later prove “contagious,” leading to the mobilization

of other people of color, as well as other groups whose concerns were principally social.

The new social movements were inspired by the black movement— particularly in the

United States but all around the world as well (Mullings 2009). These movements

challenged the more limited notions of politics that had shaped “mainstream” under-

standings. They vastly enlarged and qualitatively transformed the classical defi nition

of politics: “Who gets what, when, and how” (Lasswell 1950 [1936]).

What distinguishes the post- World War II racial regime, and the anti- racist initia-

tives of the mid- 20th century, from previous periods of racial despotism and earlier

attempts to create racial democracy? Of course, no historical period is completely

different from those that preceded it; all political systems, all racial projects, bear the

“birthmarks” of their epochs of origin. Even a radical “break,” like the one described

by Du Bois in Black Reconstruction, or the post- World War II upheaval in racial

dynamics— which was a worldwide phenomenon, not just a U.S. one— preserves

within itself substantial components of what went before.

How could it be otherwise? Enslaved people of African descent may have sought

freedom, and indeed fought and died for it with all their hearts, but they nevertheless

remained wounded and brutalized by the system they succeeded in overthrowing.

And that system, however much it had been laid waste by Sherman’s armies, and

however much it had been chastened by Lincoln’s poignant warning in his Second

Inaugural Address (1864) that

if God wills that it [the War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bonds-

man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and

… every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn

with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said,

“The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether…,”

would still not emerge from the carnage and suff ering of the Civil War as a truly free

society.

The achievement of civil rights reforms was a great triumph, despite the limi-

tations and compromises built into the reform legislation and the Supreme Court

Racial Politics and the Racial State 151

decisions involved (the Brown decision’s “all deliberate speed” equivocation on

desegregation was but one example of this). Yet the passage of civil rights laws in the

mid- 1960s was no more the creation of racial democracy than was the passage of civil

rights laws in the late 1860s. The Supreme Court overturned the 1868 Civil Rights

Act and other emancipatory Reconstruction- era measures, just as it has eviscerated

the 1960s civil rights laws in the decades since their enactment. 24 The achievement

of slavery’s abolition was at best a hint of what “abolition democracy”— that quasi-

revolutionary ideal that Du Bois identified as the heart of slaves’ auto- emancipation

during the Civil War— would have involved: redistribution of land, severe punish-

ment for rebellious Confederates. Civil rights are not the same as democracy. They

do not spell the end of racism; indeed they are marked by racism’s continuity, not its

elimination.

Yet the post- World War II racial upheavals in the United States, the anti- racist

movements of that epoch, did indeed achieve something new and unprecedented.

This was the politicization of the social: the overflow of political meaning and aware-

ness into the arena of everyday and emotional life, which had up to then been a largely

“private” and depoliticized sphere. This terrain had previously been seen as largely

irrational, disembodied, unrelated to politics, unconnected to power, and outside the

purview of the state.

Emerging from the territory of the everyday, lived experience of racism, and indeed

embedded with that experience, the anti- racist movement was all about the ways race

was conceived, constructed, and practiced at both the macro- level of institutional

arrangements and social structure and the micro- level of everyday social relation-

ships. The modern civil rights movement, and its allied anti- racist movements, were

struggles over these concepts, practices, and structures; they were conflicts about

the social meaning of race. It was their incursion into the nation’s political life, and

their achievements within it, that created what we call The Great Transformation—

the shifts in racial awareness, racial meaning, racial subjectivity that were brought

about by the black movement. Race is not only a matter of politics, economics, or

culture, but operates simultaneously on all these levels of lived experience. It is a

pre- eminently social phenomenon that suffuses each individual identity, each family

and community, and that also penetrates state institutions and market relationships.

After World War II, the black movement politicized the social. It asserted the “fact

of blackness” (Fanon 1967), a realization that erupted like a volcano onto the sleeping

village below. The village of American social life— that is, the white “mainstream” of

segregated American society— was turned inside out by this “social fact” (Durkheim

2014) after centuries of white obliviousness and dormant racial insurgency. The rise

of the black movement eclipsed the ethnicity- based model of race and instituted a

new model based on new understandings— what we call rearticulations — of key socio-

political pillars of U.S. “common sense”: democracy, state, and identity.

Because it represented a critical upheaval in the meaning of race and a far more

profound understanding of the dynamics of racism, the politicization of the social

152 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

was linked to the two challenging paradigms of racial formation that we have dis-

cussed here: the class- based paradigm and the nation- based paradigm. But it was

only linked in part. Yes, the class- based and nation- based approaches to race and

racism shared a rejection of the “moderate” orientation of the ethnicity paradigm.

This drew them together in their quest for a more radical anti- racist position, and it

suggested a deeper critique of race and racism in everyday life. For example, some

class- based theories of race focused on the experience of inequality and superex-

ploitation (Oppenheimer 1974). Cultural nationalist politics and theory focused on

community, customs, and peoplehood.

But the challenging paradigms could not grasp the larger significance of the racial

politics of everyday life, the social psychological and experiential dimensions of the

politicized social. The class- based and nation- based paradigms of race, though critical

and radical, relied on more traditional forms of politics— on economic determinism

and anti- colonialism respectively. Because they were limited by their reductionism

of race, even the radical varieties of the class- based and nation- based paradigms—

Marxist accounts and internal colonialism accounts in particular— could not fully

embrace the autonomy and self- activity of the new social movements.

We do not argue that the politicization of the social was a purely spontaneous

phenomenon. Indeed it was crafted in part by movement activists and theorists, for

example by Bayard Rustin (Rustin 2003 [1965]; D’Emilio 2004). We draw special

attention, however, to the movement’s ability to pay attention to its base, to “learn from

its followers.” This derived from its profound commitment to the complexities of race

itself. This recognition of black “self- activity” (James et al. 2006 [1958]) bore a strong

resemblance to the “situated creativity” highlighted in Dewey’s political philosophy.

We have discussed this radical pragmatism of race. The movement’s immersion in the

black religious tradition, its embrace of direct action, and its heteronomous adoption

of such political tactics as the “sit- in” (based in the labor movement) and satyagraha /

nonviolence (based in Gandhi’s anti- colonial struggle in India; see Chabot 2011) 25 all

undermined the racist barriers that had for so long separated the thoroughly racial-

ized social life of American society from the exclusive white politics of the Jim Crow

regime. A notable feature of the black movement’s politicization of the social was the

active role that youth, especially black youth, played in this transition. The willingness

of young blacks to expose their bodies to the brutality of white racism— particularly in

the South— was itself a rearticulation: a practical reinterpretation of the significance

of the black body, as well as a defiance of the inherent violence of lynching. 26

In short, racial identity, racial experience, racial politics, and the racial state itself

were deeply transformed after World War II by the black movement and its allies.

They were so profoundly reinvented and reinterpreted that the racial meanings estab-

lished during this period continue to shape social and political life, even in the current

period of reaction.

Furthermore, the politicization of the social spread across all of American life,

highlighting the injustices, inequalities, and indignities that pervade U.S. society. The

Racial Politics and the Racial State 153

taken- for- granted unfreedom of women as a result of their sexual objectification and

assumed unsuitability for the public sphere— in other words, the whole panoply of

sexist practices and social structures— now became visible and a matter of conten-

tion, not only in the legislatures and courts but in the workplace and bedroom. 27 The

assumed abnormality, perversion, deviance, and criminality of homosexuality— in

other words, the unquestioned homophobia, ostracism, and discrimination expe-

rienced as a matter of course by anyone recognized as gay— now became a public

political conflict, not only for those stigmatized as a result of their sexual identities,

but for everyone, for the whole society. 28 Of course, these shifts did not take place

overnight; they required years to unfold; indeed they are still very much sociopoliti-

cal battlefields and are likely to remain so, just as race and racism itself will remain a

political “war zone,” a field of profound conflict. But our point here is not that that

these were “problems” that were “solved” in political life and everyday life. Indeed

it is quite the opposite: that racism, sexism, and homophobia— and other society-

wide conflicts as well— were revealed and politicized by the anti- racist movement

that succeeded World War II. Henceforth these and related dimensions of injustice,

inequality, and exclusion became public issues, ceasing forever to be relegated to the

private and personal sphere, or worse yet, to be utterly denied and suppressed.

The radical upsurge of the anti- racist movement during the post- World War

II years succeeded in disrupting white supremacy. It discredited the European

immigrant- based model of race that had grounded ethnicity theory and had ratio-

nalized the racial “moderation” and complacency of white liberals. Anti- racist

mobilization incentivized class- based and nation- based theories and analyses of

race— the challenging paradigms we have discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. But although

the movement launched a new political trajectory of conflict and reform, neither of

the two challenging viewpoints could achieve hegemonic status. They suffered from

serious deficiencies, largely because (as we have argued in Part I ) of their reduction

of race to other phenomena. The subsequent waning of the class- and nation-based

viewpoints and organizations, grounded in challenging paradigms left a vacuum in

racial theory and politics. This vacuum permitted the racial state to adopt new tech-

niques of violence and repression, working under the “law and order” ideology of

the new right. This vacuum also created the political space for the rearticulation and

containment of movement demands under the ideology of colorblindness.

Despite these serious setbacks, the depth and breadth of “the Great Transforma-

tion” can hardly be exaggerated. The forging of new collective racial identities during

the 1950s and 1960s has been the single most enduring contribution of the anti- racist move-

ment. It is a set of political resources that endures today as a central component of the

struggle for democracy in the United States. Today, the gains won in the past have

been rolled back in many respects. Many anti- racist movement organizations have

been forced onto the defensive: Rather than demanding increased racial justice, they

have had to fight to uphold welfare state policies and liberal reforms— affirmative

action is perhaps the best example— that they once condemned as inadequate and

154 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

tokenistic at best. The trajectory of racial politics continues, but now in a prolonged

downturn. Amidst these reversals, the persistence of the politicized social, the con-

tinuity and strength of the new racial identities forged by the anti- racist movement,

stands out as the most formidable obstacle to the consolidation of a repressive racial

order. Apparently, the movements themselves could be fragmented, many of the poli-

cies for which they fought could be reversed, and their leaders could be coopted or

even assassinated; but the racial subjectivity and self- awareness that they developed

have taken permanent hold, and no amount of repression or cooptation can change

that.

Notes

1. Mills 2008, 1389.

2. Durkheim’s theoretical claims about social facts and collective representations are conve-

niently assembled and discussed in Durkheim 2014.

3. Concepts of the subject, subjection, and subjectivity are usefully deconstructed in Butler

1997a. The experience/structure framework parallels Mills’s “sociological imagination”

(2000 [1959]), and also Levi- Strauss’s (1966) concept of social structure as simultaneously

synchronic and diachronic. All three of these accounts share central pragmatist tenets as well.

4. The concepts of “situated creativity” and “self- refl ective action” are core ideas in the

radical pragmatism of John Dewey (1933, 1948 [1919]). A parallel concept can be found

in C.L.R. James’s idea of “self- activity” and in Grace Lee’s early work. The term “self-

activity” was introduced into the political lexicon in Facing Reality , a theoretical text by

C.L.R. James, Grace Lee, Martin Glaberman, and Cornelius Castoriadis that appeared

in the 1950s. Because “self- activity” cannot be delegated to others, it embodies radical

democracy. The authors write:

The end toward which mankind is inexorably developing by the constant over-

coming of internal antagonisms is not the enjoyment, ownership, or use of goods,

but self- realization, creativity based upon the incorporation into the individual

personality of the whole previous development of humanity. Freedom is creative

universality, not utility. (2006 [1958], 58)

The radical pragmatist (and arguably Deweyan) framework here is quite palpable. See also

Rawick 1972; Lawson and Koch, eds. 2004. Lee (later Grace Lee Boggs), still active today

at age 95, remains a leading anti- racist radical activist and author. She received her Ph.D.

in 1940 with a dissertation on George Herbert Mead and has written on Dewey as well.

5. The notion of racism as a “scavenger ideology” was fi rst elaborated by George Mosse

(1985, 213). It is also noted in Collins and Solomos 2010, 11; Fredrickson 2002.

6. On Gramsci’s concept of ideology as “glue,” see Gramsci 1971, 328.

7. In U.S. race studies the subalternity argument goes back through Robin D.G. Kelley to

the “hidden transcripts” of James C. Scott. Scott in turn drew on the “subaltern stud-

ies” school of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among

others. The term “subaltern” comes from Gramsci. In our view, it pairs domination and

“otherness,” and thus addresses key race/racism issues. In important part of subalternity

theories is the argument that it is diffi cult to govern subaltern peoples “all the way down.”

Racial Politics and the Racial State 155

Implicitly, “below” normal politics there is a level of autonomy available to such groups

and individuals, an “infrapolitical” terrain beneath the radar of white supremacy, colonial-

ism, slavocracy, or other authoritarian regimes. This theme relates to the theme of race/

racism as the “politicization of the social” that we discuss later in this chapter.

8. The American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, in the sense that it overthrew a feu-

dal system and established a system of rule by a property- holding class of “commoners.”

The revolution thus repudiated not only absolutism and “divine right” but also nobility

and aristocracy. But because it occurred in the early stages of capitalism’s development,

it initially recognized only the democratic rights of established (male, white) property-

holders. The founding fathers’ distaste for the “rabble,” the masses, even those who were

white and male, is well- known. Later, as capitalism developed, political rights could be

extended (gradually to be sure) to the “middling sorts”: small (white, male) property-

holders. See Beckert 2001.

9. This is true of almost all the American anti- colonial revolutions: Beginning in the early

19th century, local (“creole”) elites— Bolivar, Juarez, San Martin— sought to throw off the

restrictive commercial practices demanded by colonial administrations based in Europe.

They wanted to control their own exports— largely primary products— and sell to the

world market, a form of “free trade” much encouraged by the superpower of that century:

Great Britain. The one exception here is Haiti and even that epochal struggle was partially

trade- based.

10. The ideological residue of these restrictions in naturalization and citizenship is the popular

equation of the term “American” with “white.” The emergence of the “birther” phenom-

enon in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s election in 2008 has been cited as evidence of

this. As pundit Andrew Sullivan writes:

The demographics tell the basic story: a black man is president and a large major-

ity of white southerners cannot accept that, even in 2009. They grasp conspiracy

theories to wish Obama— and the America he represents— away. Since white

southerners comprise an increasing proportion of the 22% of Americans who still

describe themselves as Republican, the GOP can neither dismiss the crankery nor

move past it. The fringe defi nes what’s left of the Republican center. (Sullivan

2009; see also Parker and Barreto 2013; Fang 2013)

11. For a comparative analysis of Mexican and Chinese experiences in 19th- century California

see Almaguer 2008 [1994].

12. A brief selection of sources: Lester 1968a; Harding 1969; Rawick 1972; Gutman 1976;

Aptheker 1983 (1963); Thompson 1983; Hahn 2003; Du Bois 2007 (1935).

13. The examples of Geronimo, Crazy Horse, and other Native American leaders were passed

down from generation to generation as examples of resistance, and the Ghost Dance and

Native American Church were employed by particular generations of Indians to maintain

a resistance culture (Geronimo 2005 [1905]; Powers 2011; see also Snipp 1989). Rodolfo

Acuña has pointed out how the same “bandits” against whom Anglo vigilantes mounted

expeditions after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo— Tiburcio Vasquez and Joaquín

Murieta are perhaps the most famous of these— became heroes in the Mexicano commu-

nities of the Southwest, remembered in folktales and celebrated in corridos (Acuña 2011

[1972]; see also Peña 1985). Chinese immigrants confi ned at Angel Island in the San Fran-

cisco Bay carved poetry in the walls of their cells, seeking not only to identify themselves

156 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

and their home villages, but also to memorialize their experiences and to inform their suc-

cessor occupants of those same places of confi nement (Lai, Lim, and Yung 1991; Huang

2008). We do not off er these examples to romanticize repression or to give the air of revo-

lutionary struggle to what were often desperate acts; we simply seek to affi rm that even in

the most uncontested periods of American racism, oppositional cultures were able, often

at very great cost, to maintain themselves.

14. “The massive structures of the modern democracies, both as State organisations, and as

complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the

‘trenches’ and the permanent fortifi cations of the front in the war of position: they render

merely ‘partial’ the element of movement which before used to be ‘the whole’ of war”

(Gramsci 1971, 503).

15. Gramsci’s elliptical language, required by imprisonment in fascist Italy, makes concise

citation diffi cult. For more details of his approach to the war of maneuver/war of position

concepts, see “State and Civil Society,” in Gramsci 1971, 445–557. The entire work (itself

an edited selection) is useful for the student of race and racism.

16. Our treatment here is necessarily very brief. The contemporary confi guration of racial

politics is a major subject later on in this work.

17. We confi ne ourselves here to the issue of political uses of the racial body, which is what

we mean by “the racial body politic.” Originally the phrase “body politic” referred to

absolutist political frameworks, in which the sovereign’s body was conceived as dual. A

mortal individual, the sovereign’s political body was also divine. As a result of divine right,

it incorporated (note the bodily etymology of this term) his or her people as well. Only

because sovereignty embodied the divine in the mortal, only because of “the king’s two

bodies” could it exercise absolute power (Kantorowicz 1957; see also Allen 2004, 69–84).

18. Eric D. Weitz (2003) has traced a whole series of 20th- century genocides back to the

attempt, which he calls “utopian,” to achieve racial (or quasi- racial) homogeneity in par-

ticular nations or empires.

19. This term refers to the making of political distinctions among human bodies. This hap-

pens according to gender and race most centrally, but in respect to other phenomic

characteristics as well. Such distinctions are not merely imposed from outside, but are

seen as intrinsic by their bearers; they thus become essential to the political- economic and

cultural self- discipline Foucault calls “governmentality.” He refers to biopower as a politi-

cal technology— that is, an apparatus of rule and subjection— that took the shape of “an

explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies

and the control of populations” (Foucault 1990 [1978], 140). See also Butler 1997a.

20. Similar patterns can be discerned in eff orts to control the gendered body and the queer

body: abortion restriction, gay- bashing, and numerous other repressive practices are clear

examples.

21. This defi nition imperfectly renders some organized principles of pragmatist thought,

notably its democratic currents. These proceed from Dewey 1933; see also Joas 1996.

22. The main means available to the state for the equilibration of confl icting interests is pre-

cisely their incorporation into the state in the form of policies, programs, patronage, etc.

Gramsci argues that various forms of hegemony fl ow from this process of incorporation:

“expansive” hegemony if state– society relations display suffi cient dynamism and are not

inordinately plagued by crisis conditions; or “reformist” hegemony (what he calls “trans-

formism”) if political stability requires continuing concessions to competing forces.

Racial Politics and the Racial State 157

23. This is not strictly true, of course. From the onset of racial slavery there has always been

a ferocious social critique not only of slavery itself, but of racism too, although that term

was not yet used. This is evident in the writings and speeches of Douglass, Wells, Cooper.

“First- wave” feminism also possessed a social critique: It was about women’s lives, not just

about the vote.

Yet our claim holds, because by and large the earlier movements were far more con-

strained by the very laws, customs and conventions that they sought to oppose, than were

the post- World War II movements. The appeal that the modern civil rights movement

exercised, its penetration into the everyday, its appeal to youth, its institutional base

(“resource mobilization”) were unprecedented in earlier cycles of protest. We address this

topic at greater length in Chapter 6.

24. This may be yet another example of Myrdal’s “cumulative and circular development.”

On the SCOTUS annulment of the 1960s civil rights laws and the undoing of the Warren

Court’s own liberal race jurisprudence, see Kairys 1994; Alexander 2012. On the undoing

of the Radical Republican civil rights laws of the 1860s, see Kaczorowski 1987.

25. The movement’s early assertion of nonviolent resistance linked it to anti- colonialism well

before civil rights and antiwar politics fused in the later 1960s.

26. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote:

In 1960 an electrifying movement of Negro students shattered the placid surface

of campuses and communities across the South. The young students of the South,

through sit- ins and other demonstrations, gave America a glowing example of dis-

ciplined, dignifi ed nonviolent action against the system of segregation. Though

confronted in many places by hoodlums, police guns, tear gas, arrests, and jail sen-

tences, the students tenaciously continued to sit down and demand equal service

at variety store lunch counters, and they extended their protest from city to city.

Spontaneously born, but guided by the theory of nonviolent resistance, the lunch

counter sit- ins accomplished integration in hundreds of communities at the swift-

est rate of change in the civil rights movement up to that time. In communities like

Montgomery, Alabama, the whole student body rallied behind expelled students

and staged a walkout while state government intimidation was unleashed with a

display of military force appropriate to a wartime invasion. Nevertheless, the spirit

of self- sacrifi ce and commitment remained fi rm, and the state governments found

themselves dealing with students who had lost the fear of jail and physical injury.

The campuses of Negro colleges were infused with a dynamism of both action

and philosophical discussion. Even in the thirties, when the college campus was

alive with social thought, only a minority were involved in action. During the sit-

in phase, when a few students were suspended or expelled, more than one college

saw the total student body involved in a walkout protest. This was a change in

student activity of profound signifi cance. Seldom, if ever, in American history had

a student movement engulfed the whole student body of a college.

Many of the students, when pressed to express their inner feelings, identifi ed

themselves with students in Africa, Asia, and South America. The liberation struggle

in Africa was the great single international infl uence on American Negro students.

Frequently, I heard them say that if their African brothers could break the bonds of

colonialism, surely the American Negro could break Jim Crow (King 2001, 137–138;

see also MLK Jr Research and Education Institute n.d.).

158 r a c i a l f o r m a t i o n

It is also vital to note the key role of Ella Baker in the emergence of the student- based com-

ponents of the movement: in the 1960 Greensboro sit- ins and the Student Non- Violent

Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In the 1964 Freedom Summer, students were the key

activists (Carson 1995 [1981]; Ransby 2005).

27. The origins of “second- wave” feminism have been linked to the analyses and practice of

key women activists in the civil rights movement. See Echols 1989; Curry 2000; Breines

2007.

28. Here too Bayard Rustin must be acknowledged. As a gay man Rustin was marginalized

and discriminated against in the movement he did so much to found. See Rustin 2003;

D’Emilio 2004.

P A R T I I I

Racial Politics Since World War II

This page intentionally left blank

161

C H A P T E R 6

The Great Transformation

Introduction

The racial upsurges of the 1950s and 1960s were among the most tempestuous events

in American history. The struggles for voting rights, the sit- ins, freedom rides, and

boycotts to desegregate public facilities, the ghetto rebellions, armed standoff s

(Wounded Knee, Tierra Amarilla, Alcatraz, Attica…), and the mobilizations of

Latin@s, Indians, and Asian Americans dramatically transformed the political and

cultural landscape of the United States. The postwar period has indeed been a racial

crucible. During these decades, new conceptions of racial identity and its meaning,

new modes of political organization and confrontation, and new defi nitions of the

state’s role in promoting and achieving equality were explored, debated, and fought

out on the battlegrounds of institutionalized politics, the politics of law, and the poli-

tics of everyday life.

Beginning during World War II, movements for racial justice, led by the black

movement, initiated a “second reconstruction,” a Great Transformation ( pace

Polanyi), 1 an expansion of democracy that challenged some of the pillars of despotism

in the United States. The black movement enlarged and deepened democracy, not

only in terms of racial justice and equality, but in terms of social justice and equality.

Over a mere quarter of a century, very real reforms were achieved, though there were

numerous limits and indeed failures in this democratizing project.

We suggest that two important changes characterize postwar racial politics: para-

digm shift and new social movements. Paradigm shift occurred as the hegemonic theory

of race, based in the ethnicity paradigm of race, experienced increasing strain and

opposition. This opposition gradually took shape within the civil rights movement,

initially as a challenge against segregation in the South, and was subsequently trans-

formed into a national movement against racism. The second change was the rise of

new social movements, led by the black movement, as the primary means for contesting

the nature of racial politics. These movements irreversibly expanded the terrain of

political conflict, not only recentering and refiguring race, but also refiguring experi-

ence itself as a political matter, a matter of identity and self- conscious activity. They

thus set the stage for a general reorganization of U.S. politics.

Paradigm Shift: The modern civil rights movement was initially organized within

the dominant paradigm of ethnicity. The ethnicity perspective initially shaped the

movement’s political agenda. Early movement leaders were also assimilation- oriented

and individualistic to a degree that appears a bit embarrassing today, but made more

162 r a c i a l p o l i t i c s s i n c e w o r l d w a r i i

sense in the repressive and exclusive racial climate of the time. They were moder-

ates who sought to end “race- thinking” and assure “equality” to each individual.

The movement initially focused its energies on the South, the most racially reac-

tionary region of the country. There the ethnicity paradigm of assimilation and

group- oriented pluralism retained a critical edge in facing exclusion, segregation,

and still- vibrant Jim- Crow racism. 2 “Civil rights” was then a radical challenge to

explicit white supremacy. Later, when demands for racial reforms attained national

scope and expanded beyond the black movement to other racially defined minori-

ties, the limited explanatory abilities and programmatic usefulness of the ethnicity

paradigm were revealed. The eclipse of this perspective led to a period where com-

peting paradigms— the class- and nation- based views— flourished and contested for

hegemony.

Although the challenging paradigms were not able to replace the dominant

ethnicity- based view of race, they did manage to dislodge it for a while. When it

regained its hegemony as the dominant paradigm, the ethnicity- based approach had

been rearticulated, deeply transformed, emerging as the “colorblind” concept of

race. It remains highly problematic and riven by contradictions, as we shall see in

later chapters of this book.

New Social Movements: The upsurge of racially based movements that began

in the 1950s was a contest over the social meaning of race. It was this battle that

transformed racial awareness, racial politics, and racial identity. Race is not only a

matter of politics, economics, or culture, but of all these “levels” of lived experience

simultaneously. It is a pre- eminently social phenomenon, something which suffuses

each individual identity, each family and community, yet equally penetrates state

institutions and market relationships. The racial justice movements of the postwar

period were the first new social movements — the first to expand the concerns of poli-

tics to the social, to the terrain of everyday life. New social movement politics would

prove “portable,” leading to the mobilization of other racial minorities, as well as

other groups whose concerns were principally social. The black movement, in other

words, made it possible for a wide range of movements to reframe social identities,

both at the collective and individual level. It helped these movements connect with

each other as well, though not always easily (Epstein 1987; Scott 1988; Morris and

Mueller, eds. 1992; Polletta and Jasper 2001). An extensive literature that developed

even before the development of “intersectionality” accounts drew upon the black

struggle as an organizing framework, a “master narrative” of oppression and resis-

tance. Both in political practice and in critical theory, then, the black movement’s

politicization of the social shaped the upsurges of the 1960s: anti- imperialist, stu-

dent, feminist, and gay. As British playwright and activist David Edgar wrote, black

mobilization was “a central organizational fact …, a defining political metaphor and

inspiration” (1981, 222).

These two interrelated dimensions— the eclipse of the ethnicity paradigm and

the emergence of new social movement politics— constitute an alternative framework

The Great Transformation 163

by which to assess the racial politics of the Great Transformation. Racial identity,

the racial state, and the very nature of racial politics as a whole were radically trans-

formed during the 1960s— were transformed so profoundly that the racial meanings

established during this period came to shape U.S. politics permanently, even after the

movements peaked and entered a decades- long decline.

Although the ethnicity paradigm was weakened during the 1960s and the class-

based and nation- based paradigms of race increased in strength, these two challenging

viewpoints could not achieve hegemonic status. All three paradigms suffered from

serious deficiencies, largely because their concepts of race were reductionist: They

relied on other, supposedly more fundamental phenomena, such as culture (the eth-

nicity paradigm), inequality (the class paradigm), or “peoplehood” (the nation- based

paradigm), to explain the social fact of race. The subsequent waning of class- based

(generally Marxist) and nationalist movements, and of the specific organizations

operating within these challenging paradigms, left a vacuum in racial theory and poli-

tics. This created the political space for the resurgence of neoconservatism, which

developed in the 1970 and 1980s as a reworked, right- wing version of the ethnicity

paradigm. This contributed to the rise of colorblind racial ideology.

Still, the depth and breadth of “the Great Transformation” can hardly be

exaggerated. The forging of new collective racial identities during the 1950s and

1960s has been the enduring legacy of the new social movements pioneered by the

black movement. Even though many anti- racist movement victories were rolled

back, even though many movement organizations were marginalized by the com-

bined powers of the racial state and racial reaction, the politicization of the social

during this rising phase of the political trajectory of race has persisted. The deep-

ening and broadening of racial politics in the sphere of everyday life stands out

as the single truly formidable obstacle to the consolidation of a newly repressive

racial order. Apparently, the movements of people of color themselves could be

weakened, the policies for which they fought could be reframed and even reversed,

and their leaders could be coopted or destroyed, but the racial subjectivity and

self- awareness which they developed had taken permanent hold, and no amount

of repression or cooptation could change that. The genie was out of the bottle.

The Emergence of the Civil Rights Movement

The moderate goals of the early civil rights movement did not challenge the nationally

dominant paradigm of racial theory, the ethnicity perspective. Indeed, early movement

rhetoric often explicitly appealed to the ideal of a “race- free” society, the centerpiece

of the liberal ethnicity vision. This was consistent with the call for integration framed

by Gunnar Myrdal in 1944, or with Nathan Glazer’s description of the “national con-

sensus” which abolished Jim Crow in the mid- 1960s (Glazer 1975, 3).

Although its political goals were moderate, the black movement had to adopt radi-

cal tactics of disruption and direct action due to the “massive resistance” strategy

164 r a c i a l p o l i t i c s s i n c e w o r l d w a r i i

of the South, a region that clung to the racist assumptions of the Jim Crow/ Plessy

era. 3 The modern civil rights movement came into being when southern black orga-

nizations, frustrated by Southern intransigence and drawing on both national and

indigenous support bases, moved to mobilize a mass constituency in the South. They

thus augmented the tactics of judicial/legislative activism— based in the elite politics

that had previously characterized the civil rights struggle 4 — with those of direct

action, which required an active “grass- roots” constituency. This was the key shift

of the mid- 1950s.

What made this change possible? After the civil rights upsurge, social movement

studies have developed models of “political process” or “resource mobilization” to

explain the emergence of significant struggles for change. Analyses of the formation

of the modern civil rights movement in the mid- 1950s are often based on these mod-

els (McAdam 1984; Morris 1984). Clearly, such approaches have their merits as they

focus on essential conditions for the emergence of movements: the inadequacy of

“normal” political channels to process demands, and the availability of material and

political resources for the organization of movement constituencies. The monolithic

southern resistance to desegregation is an instance of the failure of “normal” politics

to respond to demands for change; white supremacist intransigence revealed the ossi-

fication and racial despotism of the political system in Dixie, generating a new political

process and a new organizing vision (Payne 2007 [1995]). The role of such groups

as the local NAACP chapters, and particularly the black churches, effectively docu-

mented by Aldon Morris, exemplifies the centrality of resource mobilization issues.

Although both the resistance to change and the availability of economic and

political resources in the black community were essential components of the civil

rights movement’s shift to a direct action strategy, neither of these conditions were

sufficient to spark the transition. After all, racial degradation, exclusion, and violence

had been well- established in the region since Reconstruction’s termination in 1877,

and black mobilization had been continuous, even under severely repressive condi-

tions (Hahn 2003). A third element was required. This was an ideological or cultural

transformation, the politicization of black identity, the rearticulation of black collective

subjectivity. It was this change that would eventually place radical objectives on the

agenda of racial minority movements, facilitate the diffusion of racially based move-

ment activity to other groups, and become anathema to the moderate advocates of

civil rights operating within the ethnicity paradigm of race.

New Social Movement Politics: Identity and Rearticulation

Before the modern black movement’s appearance on the political stage, the U.S. polit-

ical system had not signifi cantly changed since the New Deal. The Democratic Party

had served as a repository of consensus ever since Roosevelt led it to power in the

1930s. Compromise and coalition- building among disparate interests, constituen-

cies, and loyalties (“interest- group liberalism”) 5 shaped national politics. “Interests”

The Great Transformation 165

themselves were largely defi ned economically. Such a system had obvious limitations

in its ability to respond to challenges that cut across class (or “status”) lines. It was

unable to confront an unjust social system which had not only economic but also

political and cultural causes and consequences. The near- total disenfranchisement of

black voters in the South, for example, not only underwrote the New Deal coalition

and vastly increased the legislative power of Southern legislators in Congress (as it

had done throughout U.S. history), but also undermined prospects for social legisla-

tion, not only in regard to civil rights but also in labor law, health, education, and

other areas. A good example of this was Congress’s overriding of Truman’s veto of

the Taft– Hartley Act in 1947, perhaps the single most telling setback of labor rights

in U.S. history. This was accomplished by a coalition of Southern Democrats and

right- wing, pro- business Republicans (Cockburn 2004).

In its efforts to transform precisely that social system, the black movement

sought to expand the concerns of politics, without abandoning the earlier economi-

cally centered logic. The expansion of normal politics to include racial issues— a

“common- sense” recognition of the political elements at the heart of racial identities

and meanings— made possible the movement’s greatest triumphs, its most perma-

nent successes. These did not lie in its legislative accomplishments, but rather in its

ability to create new racial “subjects.” The black movement redefined the meaning of

racial identity, and consequently of race itself, in American society.

Social movements create collective identity by offering their adherents a different

view of themselves and their world; different, that is, from the worldview and self-

concepts offered by the established social order. Movements take elements and themes

of existing culture and traditions and infuse them with new meaning. This process of

rearticulation produces new subjectivity by making use of information and knowledge

already present in the subject’s mind. Drawing once again on the insights of Antonio

Gramsci, we define rearticulation as a practice of discursive reorganization or reinterpre-

tation of ideological themes and interests already present in subjects’ consciousness, such that

these elements obtain new meanings or coherence. In Gramsci’s account this practice is

ordinarily the work of “intellectuals,” those whose role is to interpret the social world

for given subjects— religious leaders, entertainers, school teachers (Gramsci 1971,

3–23; Butler 1997b; Laclau and Mouffe 2001 [1985]; Visweswaran 2010). 6

The movement’s “intellectuals” were often preachers. They infused their activ-

ism with a well- known set of symbols and rhetorical tools. 7 The centuries- long black

interrogation of biblical images of bondage and liberation— as embodied in the

Exodus, for instance, or the theology of Christian redemption— had traditionally

furnished a familiar vocabulary and textual reference- point for freedom struggle, a

home- grown “liberation theology” (West 1982).

The civil rights movement rearticulated black collective subjectivity. It reframed

traditional black cultural and religious themes to forge a new black politics. Its intel-

lectuals augmented the already vast treasure- trove of emancipatory black historical

and religious imagery with ideas, lessons, and strategies developed not only in North

166 r a c i a l p o l i t i c s s i n c e w o r l d w a r i i

America but in India, Africa, and Europe (in the experience of anti- Nazi resistance). 8

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s application of the Gandhian philosophy of satyagraha drew

upon Bayard Rustin’s involvement in the anti- colonial struggle in India (Anderson

1998; Rustin 2003; Prashad 2009).

The adoption of the “sit- in” as a tactic for forcing integration had deep roots not

only in union battles against the repressive, post- Lochne r U.S. labor regime in the

early decades of the 20th century, but also in the legacy of enslaved people of African

descent “sitting in” in the fields and slave quarters of the plantation and forcing

their masters to negotiate over working conditions, time off, and the right to culti-

vate their own garden plots and sell their produce for money at town markets (Hahn

2003). Parallels drawn between the Civil Rights and Black Power movement struggles

and those of African liberation movements also provided material for rearticulation

as they invoked already known, long- standing cultural traditions that traversed the

whole dark history of black oppression in the United States.

The formation of the modern civil rights movement is a classical illustration of

rearticulation processes. In order to win mass black support for the tactics of direct

action, it was necessary to replace the established cultural norms through which ordi-

nary blacks, particularly in the South, had previously sought to ameliorate the impact

of racial oppression: “shuckin’ and jivin’,” “putting on whitey,” feigning ignorance

and humility. These strategies had served in the past to limit the extent of white con-

trol, to insulate the black community and black institutions from white intrusion and

surveillance, and to protect individual blacks who ran afoul of white authority. But

they had also limited the extent and depth of black organization, organization that

would be necessary to challenge the system of segregation. They represented a range

of subaltern political adaptations, in effect both practical recognitions of powerless-

ness, and strategies for surviving it. 9

But this is not the whole story. Researchers associated with the subaltern stud-

ies school have shown that even where political mobilization is highly restricted, a

substantial reservoir of cultural resistance necessarily confronts racist regimes,

peripheral or metropolitan, colonial or postcolonial. In their studies of colonial and

postcolonial systems of rule in a variety of spatiotemporal contexts— India, Latin

America, Southeast Asia, as well as the American South— they have demonstrated

that where rule is highly despotic and racially exclusive, it cannot “go too deep.” It

generally must rely on “indirect” strategies of domination: collaborators, colonial

administrators, agents, informers, and the like. Beneath this level, infrapolitically so

to speak, an alternative and antagonistic culture of resistance takes hold, operating

largely defensively, impenetrable from above (Bond- Graham 2010). The term “sub-

altern,” after all, combines the meanings “subordinate” and “other” (alterity). 10

Elsewhere in the book we have characterized the Jim Crow era as necessitating

opposition in the form of “war of maneuver.” Only in the post- World War II period

did anything like normal politics— “war of position”— become possible on a mass

scale. And given the degree of racial despotism that had to be overcome, even after

The Great Transformation 167

World War II, the achievements of the modern civil rights movement truly stand out

as remarkable and heroic.

The movement sought not to survive racial oppression, but to overthrow it. Thus

the traditional ideological themes of liberation and redemption, and the political tactics

of protest derived from movements around the world were rearticulated: incorporated

in the heat of political struggle as elements of a transformed racial identity, one of explicit

collective opposition. According to Robert Parris Moses or Martin Luther King, Jr.,

blacks were, collectively, the moral, spiritual, and political leadership of American soci-

ety. They represented not only their own centuries- long struggle for freedom, but the

highest and noblest aspirations of white America as well.

Far from having to passively accept the “‘bukes and scorns” of segregation and

perhaps trying to outmaneuver “whitey,” blacks were now called upon to oppose the

system with righteous and disciplined action:

To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby

the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor. Noncooperation with evil is as

much a moral obligation as cooperation with good.

(King, quoted in Sitkoff 1981, 61)

Thus the old linkages of religious and cultural themes— for example, the Christian

virtues of humility, of “turning the other cheek”— were not negated, but dramati-

cally captured by the movement. The “culture of resistance” with which these virtues

had previously been identifi ed was displaced from an emphasis on individual survival

to one of collective action. This process of rearticulation made the movement’s politi-

cal agenda possible, especially its challenge to the existing racial state.

Black Power

In subsequent stages of the movement’s history, rearticulation processes continued

to function as radical perspectives, fi lling the void created by the eclipse of the eth-

nicity paradigm. This is particularly true of the emergence of black power. When the

moderate demands of the civil rights movement were realized— after a fashion— in

1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and in 1965 with the enactment of vot-

ing rights legislation, many black activists considered that their underlying ideals had

not only gone unfulfi lled, but had been betrayed. Not only had they failed to create

a “beloved community” (which they now admitted had been a utopian vision; see

Lester 1968b), but they had failed to achieve signifi cant change in the overall social

conditions faced by blacks. Kenneth Clark echoed these sentiments in 1967:

The masses of Negroes are now starkly aware that recent civil rights victories

benefited a very small number of middle- class Negroes while their predica-

ment remained the same or worsened.

(Clark, quoted in Wilson 1981, 28)

168 r a c i a l p o l i t i c s s i n c e w o r l d w a r i i

The radicalization of an important segment of the black movement took shape in

the myriad disappointments and disillusionments that afflicted civil rights activists:

the acrimonious division between SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com-

mittee) and civil rights moderates amidst the ferocity of the Birmingham campaign

of April–May, 1963, combined with the limited victory won there; 11 the conflicts dur-

ing the preparations for the August, 1963 March on Washington; 12 the experience of

the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an SNCC- organized project to unseat

the segregationist “regular” delegation at the 1964 Democratic Party convention in

Atlantic City; 13 the onset of rioting in northern cities during the summer of 1964,

followed by hundreds of riots during the next four years; 14 and the development of

a new “backlash” politics in the middle 1960s, after the “massive resistance” strat-

egy of the South had been broken. Backlash was epitomized by the appearance in

the national spotlight of George Wallace, the segregationist Governor of Alabama. It

also took the form of white counterdemonstrations and violence against civil rights

marches, notably in 1966 in Cicero, Illinois, a white suburb of Chicago. Many move-

ment radicals viewed white resistance (especially white resistance in the North) as

decisive proof that non- violent strategy was ineffective in its efforts to lead not only

blacks but whites toward greater racial equality and harmony.

By the time of the Selma campaign (February‒March, 1965), no more than

limited tactical cooperation existed between the radicals, led by SNCC, and the

moderates, led by SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference). Militants

from SNCC were infuriated when King, maneuvering between Washington, the fed-

eral courts, and the marchers themselves, halted an attempt to march from Selma to

Montgomery on March 10, 1965. 15 By June, 1966, when diverse civil rights groups

came together to complete a march through Mississippi begun by James Meredith

(who had been shot by a sniper), there was open competition between advocates of

“black power” and supporters of integration.

Beginning with the Meredith march, 16 the more radical wing of the movement

signaled its disillusionment with past emphases on civil rights and the transformative

power of nonviolence. SNCC and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), in particular,

adopted the more militant positions associated with the slogan “Black Power.”

Black power was a crystallization of numerous political and cultural tendencies,

some of them quite venerable, within the black community and black history. 17 It was

a flexible, even amorphous concept, but it was frequently interpreted to mean sepa-

ratism. It was this connotation which the moderates, operating within the ethnicity

paradigm, despised and strenuously denounced: “We of the NAACP will have none

of this. It is the father of hatred and the mother of violence. Black power can mean in

the end only black death” (Wilkins, quoted in Allen 1990 [1970], 78).

But the concept of black power was also a rearticulative move. It operated on

a very practical level. It expressed black popular frustration— especially among

young people— with the glacial pace of racial reform. The cry of “black power”

was no more a complete break with the civil rights movement than that movement

The Great Transformation 169

had been a break with the older “establishment” of civil rights organizations such as

the NAACP and National Urban League. The concept of black power embraced a

wide spectrum of political tendencies, extending from moderate “self- help” groups

through reform- oriented advocates of “community control” to cultural and revolu-

tionary nationalism and armed struggle. The concept’s emergence as a nationalist

ideology was an effort once more to rearticulate traditional themes of the black

movement. The rearticulation of civil rights as black power invoked themes cen-

tral to both the dominant ethnicity paradigm and the civil rights movement, while

simultaneously rejecting their integrationist and assimilationist goals. It also vastly

expanded the already resourceful black imagination: The postwar decades of black

activism had rendered possible and had concretized a set of new political and

economic strategies ranging from boycotts to sit- ins, from black business opportu-

nities to insurrection, all situated somewhat uncomfortably under the black power

umbrella.

Indeed black power had a mainstream political version: In the early 1960s the pre-

mier liberal ethnicity theorists, Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, mindful of

their paradigm’s origins in the experiences of white ethnic groups of previous genera-

tions, had suggested that blacks in the North, too, should be organized as an interest

group (Glazer and Moynihan 1970 [1963], x). Much of the black power current could

be understood as following this advice. The idea that the black community should

patronize businesses owned by blacks, that it should adopt cooperative forms of orga-

nization, that it should mobilize politically at the local level (“community control”)

were concepts which borrowed as much from the tradition of Booker T. Washington

as they did from those of Cyril Briggs, Marcus Garvey, or Malcolm X. Robert Allen

notes that in many respects black power was “only another form of traditional eth-

nic group politics” (1990 [1970], 50; see also Ture (Carmichael) and Hamilton 1992

[1967], 44; Joseph 2006).

Despite its many “moderate” elements, black power drew an important line of

demarcation within the black movement and deeply disturbed the dominant (i.e.,

white) political culture. White liberals reacted in horror when their ethnic pre-

scriptions were put into practice by black militants; they quickly retreated into a

fundamentalist individualism which would have embarrassed Adam Smith.

While liberals like Glazer and Moynihan sought to rearticulate the ethnicity

paradigm, which was after all the dominant current in U.S. race- thinking during the

mid- 1960s, black power theorists were also breaking with it. They were reinvigorat-

ing black nationalism, a current that had far deeper roots, something that went back

centuries in black America (Moses 1988 [1978]). Black power also repudiated the

ethnicity paradigm by drawing upon colonial analogies to analyze the plight of blacks,

and by focusing attention on racially based intra- class conflict. The political implica-

tions of this paradigmatic shift represented a distinct departure from the “interest

group” politics of the ethnicity paradigm. Ture and Hamilton’s work, for example,

explicitly addressed black conditions from within the nationalist paradigm. 18 James

170 r a c i a l p o l i t i c s s i n c e w o r l d w a r i i

Boggs’ essays (1970) focused on the role of black industrial workers and urban strug-

gles from a perspective based in Marxism- Leninism.

A key figure in the transition from civil rights to black power was Malcolm X, who

framed radical black nationalism with a political energy and coherence never seen

before in the United States. Malcolm attracted mass black support that in some ways

echoed the Garvey movement of the 1920s. 19 First as organizer and chief spokesper-

son for the Nation of Islam (NOI), and then, briefly, as founder of the Organization

of Afro- American Unity, Malcolm played a unique role in the black community.

Although he often derided the civil rights movement, referring to its organizations

and leaders as “Uncle Toms,” Malcolm also recognized the importance of raising

civil rights demands, even while arguing that the United States could not meet them

(Malcolm X 1964; 1990 [1965]).

After his 1963 break with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm moved closer to the radi-

cal wing of the movement and deeply influenced SNCC thinking, bringing a more

internationalist orientation to the organization. In late 1964 he met with SNCC lead-

ers in Nairobi, Kenya, where he stressed the importance of Pan- Africanism for U.S.

blacks (Williams 1997). He also approached socialist positions in a number of respects

(Malcolm X 1990 [1965]; Marable 2011). Malcolm formulated a radical challenge to

the moderate agenda of the civil rights movement and prefigured the themes of black

power. In February, 1965 he was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem,

under circumstances that remain mysterious. Malcolm’s chief bodyguard was later

revealed to have been a police agent; his criticisms of the misdeeds of Elijah Muham-

mad, as well as his break with Elijah’s politics, drew death threats from the NOI.

Black power advocates and adherents questioned the integrationist and assimila-

tionist orientations pursued by the civil rights movement, especially by its moderate

leadership and middle- class black adherents. In breaking away from the earlier black

movement’s struggle for a “raceless society” they anticipated— by several decades—

later opposition to “colorblindness” as a supposedly anti- racist orientation. Integration,

they powerfully argued, could only be a result of political power and equality, never its

cause. The radicalization of the black movement appropriated and rearticulated the

legacy of civil rights, much as the earlier movement had appropriated the legacy of

the southern “culture of resistance” which had been nourished in the black church,

in black music, in folklore and literature, even in food (Childs 1984).

In addition to the demand for social justice, black power advocates raised the

question of “self- determination.” This was not only a revindication of the centuries-

long legacy of black nationalism, but also a convergence with the Marxist (and in

some instances Leninist and Maoist) left. In the great debates about nationalism that

had preoccupied the Second and Third Internationals, and that had drawn passion-

ate polemics from Rosa Luxemburg, V.I. Lenin, the “Austro- Marxists,” and Joseph

Stalin, U.S. black radicals rediscovered the socialist and communist affinities that had

preoccupied and confounded the black left in their grandparents’ times (Luxemburg

1976 (1909); Naison 1983; James 1999; Robinson 2000 [1983]; Perry 2008; Kelley

The Great Transformation 171

and Esch 2008 [1999]). The prospect of having not only “rights” but “power” once

again rearticulated black cultural and political traditions, reviving themes from black

political history. The cultural nationalism and black Marxism of the late- 1960s were

restatements of positions which harked back to the 1920s and 1930s, the days of the

Harlem Renaissance, the African Blood Brotherhood, the Garvey movement, and the

“black nation” thesis of the Communist Party. The nation- based paradigm was not,

however, synonymous with radical politics. Less “progressive”— or, as Huey P. New-

ton, co- founder of the Black Panther Party, called them, “pork chop”— nationalists

tended to dilute their vision of black power by ignoring its racial dimensions for a

more limited, “ethnic” view of its meaning. These groups often adopted reformist

orientations, embracing “black capitalism,” for example (Allen 1990 [1970], 153–164,

210–238; Hill and Rabig, eds. 2012).

Encountering and Reforming the Racial State

There were two phases to the minority encounter with the state in the 1950s and

1960s. The fi rst phase was shaped by the civil rights movement’s mass mobilization

in the South, a “direct action” political strategy aimed at desegregation that is usually

seen as beginning in the mid- 1950s with the Montgomery bus boycott. As we have

seen, this already depended upon new social movement politics, on the “politics of

identity,” and rearticulation of racist tropes in new and insurgent directions.

Selection of this 1955 point of departure accepts the movement’s decision to

focus on desegregation, rather than labor injustice and superexploitation, as the

cutting- edge issue in the civil rights struggle. That decision in turn was influenced

by the NAACP’s exercise of leadership in the early post- World War II years. Success

in desegregating the armed forces and in the courts were crucial in shaping the turn

toward desegregation as the major goal. Use of the “due process” clause of the 14th

Amendment as a weapon against state- based, de jure segregation was the linchpin of

NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall’s decades- long campaign for racial justice. An

alternative strategy that had been equally successful but was not pursued involved

labor rights. This was to attack racism via the 13th Amendment’s prohibition of

involuntary servitude, a situation that continued through peonage, convict leasing,

and racist labor practices. This approach had been effectively supported by the Civil

Rights Section of the Justice Department, but was dismissed by the NAACP (for this

argument see Goluboff 2007).

The first phase resulted in the civil rights reforms of the mid- 1960s. Through

desegregation campaigns the black movement set in motion a reform- oriented,

democratizing political process. The resulting concessions were limited but real:

policy shifts through executive order and legislation, judicial action against specific

racist practices, establishment of new state programs and agencies with “equal oppor-

tunity” mandates, and the election and the hiring of many black activists by state

institutions. Civil rights reforms were crafted in numerous state settings: NAACP

172 r a c i a l p o l i t i c s s i n c e w o r l d w a r i i

legal offices, the White House, the Congress, the federal courts. They were then

implemented unevenly throughout the state apparatus at all levels: resisted, unevenly

enforced, subverted even after adoption, sure, but also carried out to a significant

extent. These victories ended the exceptional situation in the South by forcing that

region to confront the nationally dominant racial ideology, as defined by the ethnicity

paradigm. The reforms of the 1960s also signaled the fulfillment of that paradigm’s

vision of racial equality.

The second phase of the movement/state encounter was marked the onset of

racial reaction. Indeed it was the reality of civil rights reforms— the moderate,

limited, but nevertheless significant democratic concessions that the movement

obtained— that allowed the racial reaction to consolidate. The capacity of the racial

reaction to adjust to a somewhat democratized racial state, and to the national civil

society’s broad endorsement of limited racial reform, was what made possible the

right- wing rearticulation of concepts of civil rights— notably racial equality and

racial justice— in what would become the colorblind racial ideology we see all around

us today.

We discuss racial reaction at length in later chapters of this work. Here we empha-

size the fragmentation of the black movements into competing currents— entrists

and radicals, most notably— in the aftermath of the adoption of the racial reforms of

the mid- 1960s. As the new reforms took hold, they transformed a part of the move-

ment into a constituency for the new programs its efforts had won. They lent support

to the assimilationist and pluralist policy orientations rooted in the ethnicity- based

paradigm of race. At the same time, the inadequacy and limitations of the reforms

reinforced the radical tendencies in the movement, accelerating the rise of the insur-

gent class- and nation- based paradigms of race, and fuelling radical and rebellious

political approaches.

The state was the chief movement target for several reasons. The state, as the

“factor of cohesion in society,” gives shape to the racial system. State racial policy

ultimately defines the extent and limits of racial democracy, of racial despotism and

inequality, of racial inclusion or exclusion. The state is traversed by the same antago-

nisms that penetrate the entire society, antagonisms that are themselves the results of

past cycles of racial struggle. The lukewarm commitments to desegregation in public

employment and the armed forces extracted by A. Philip Randolph from Roosevelt

and Truman, the use of the 14th Amendment by NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall

to challenge school segregation, the freedom rides of the 1940s and 1960s (which

probed the federal commitment to integration of interstate travel), and the voting

rights drives in the South, were all examples of the small but significant “openings”

through which the existing racial state was susceptible to challenge. Movement tactics

often sought to make use of the state’s internal racial contradictions. For example:

The SNCC- led voting rights drives sought to induce confrontations between dif-

ferent branches of the state— the courts vs. state legislatures, federal police vs. local

The Great Transformation 173

or state police. The idea was to force the federal government to defend civil rights

from infringement by racist local and state agencies. In some respects SNCC’s stra-

tegic turn to voting rights was fomented by the Kennedy administration, although the

Justice Department (headed by Robert F. Kennedy) did not adequately protect the

activists of the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign. 20

By the latter stages of this process— the late 1960s— the reform- oriented program

of the black movement was acquiring a foothold in state institutions, where movement

activists were becoming officials: social service agencies, electorally based positions:

legislators, mayors, elected judges and local officials. The numbers weren’t large, but

they were growing. This “entrism” was linked in important ways with such Great Soci-

ety programs as Head Start, the War on Poverty (OEO), 21 massive new federal aid to

education, new labor programs, and expansions in the welfare system (AFDC). 22 It

amounted to a modest but real shift toward progressive redistribution, which would not

only benefit people of color but be democratically directed by them, under the banner

of “maximum feasible participation,” a guiding principle of the Community Action

Program, one of the most important components of the OEO.

In the racial minority movements of the period, the state confronted a new type

of opposition, one that for a while deployed an “inside–outside” strategy. Numerous

progressive initiatives were undertaken after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of

1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; this was a moment of national remorse follow-

ing the JFK assassination and the landslide victory of Lyndon Johnson in November,

1964. These were the first years of the “Great Society,” when the black movement and

its allies were at their apogee of political influence. They were able to challenge estab-

lished racist practices simultaneously through direct action, through penetration of

the mainstream political arena (electoral/institutional projects from voter registration

to community organization, and other sorts of entrism as well), and through “ethical/

political” tactics (taking the “moral initiative,” developing “resistance cultures” and

service projects). For a brief time the movement was able to link spontaneity and mass

participation, on the one hand, with electoral/institutional politics, on the other. The

unifying element in this opposition was at first the burgeoning collective subjectivity

of blacks— and later that of other people of color— which connected demands for

access to the state with more radical demands for freedom, “self- determination,” cul-

tural and organizational autonomy, “community control,” and a host of other issues.

The beginning of urban uprisings, the rise of black power, and the reorganization of

right- wing opposition as well, all were looming up during this brief period, roughly

1964–1966.

By combining different oppositional tactics, the black movement of the 1960s ini-

tiated the reforms that eventually created a new racial state. This new state, however,

was not the institutional fulfillment of the movements’ ideals. Rather it held a cloudy

mirror up to its antagonists, reflecting their demands (and indeed their rearticulated

racial identities) in a distorted fashion.

174 r a c i a l p o l i t i c s s i n c e w o r l d w a r i i

At the same time, splits and divisions had surfaced in the movement, and in

minority communities as well. These included inter- group rivalries, class divisions,

controversies over strategy, and disputes over the meaning of race: notably racial

integration and pluralism vs. black power and ghetto- based “community control.”

Malcolm’s assassination in February 1965 was a huge blow to mass- oriented black rad-

ical organization; his nationalism, always clearly present, had been evolving steadily

towards a more class- based and global orientation that had the potential to bridge

across divisions among people of color, and even across the black–white divide, the

core of the colorline. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968 would remove

many more possibilities for alliances across movements. As the 1960s wore on, class

polarization deepened within communities of color. Those who were able to do so took

advantage of new jobs and educational opportunities, while the majority of ghetto and

barrio dwellers remained locked in poverty. The war on poverty was lost, as King had

warned, on the battlefields of Vietnam. 23 Some formerly integrated movement orga-

nizations expelled their white members (SNCC did so in December of 1966); others

that formed in the later 1960s were organized from the beginning as exclusively black,

Mexican American, or Asian American.

Contesting Paradigms/Strategic Divisions

By the late 1960s, the fragmentation within the movement was clearly visible and

shaped very distinct and sometimes antagonistic currents. New social movement

politics had galvanized activists in their respective communities, but the lack of theo-

retical clarity about racial dynamics in the United States splintered political action.

Although the ethnicity paradigm had been seriously challenged, it remained an

important explanatory model, not only for academics, but also for movement activists

who sought to work within the reformed racial state. The challenging paradigms—

the class- and nation- based views— gave rise to counterposed strategic orientations.

Strategic divisions also fl owed from class cleavages internal to communities of color,

from state repression that marginalized radical tendencies, and from the very eff ec-

tiveness of state strategies of reform, which tended to replace movement perspectives

with the constituency- based (and ethnicity paradigm- derived) viewpoints of “nor-

mal” politics.

Three broad political currents can be recognized within the racial minority

movements of this period. 24 These were electoral/institutional entrism, socialism, and

nationalism. Each recognized the incompleteness of the civil rights reforms. While

distinct from one another both in their understandings of race and in their practi-

cal activities, the entrists, socialists, and nationalists were not diametrically opposed:

They overlapped and drew upon each other’s orientations. They had, after all,

emerged from roughly similar movement experiences. Each tendency embodied and

enacted a particular understanding of race, one of the three theoretical paradigms of

race discussed here.

The Great Transformation 175

Electoral/Institutional Entrism reflected greater participation in existing political

organizations and processes by movement activists. The electoral/institutional entrists

were oriented by the ethnicity paradigm of race. Drawing upon the assimilationist

and cultural pluralist frameworks that shaped the ethnicity paradigm (and that had

always been in tension with one another as well), and recognizing that ethnic group

mobilization had been essential to obtaining political power and access to the state for

more than a century of U.S. history, they built political organizations that could win

elections, penetrate and influence state bureaucracies, and either exercise power in

the Democratic Party or openly compete with it. 25 By the 1970s, groups such as the

Congressional Black Caucus and the Joint Center for Political Studies had achieved

real influence on the national political scene, while local political machines developed

under victorious black and Chican@ mayors in Atlanta, Newark, Gary, Birmingham,

Denver, Detroit, Chicago (the important Harold Washington campaign), and San

Antonio. These instrumentalities were in turn linked to the many civil rights, lobby-

ing, and local political groups, including those at the neighborhood, social agency,

union, or church level. Thus as a result of the 1960s movement victories, social

programs and policies— with all their limitations— addressed the needs of minor-

ity communities as never before. The nascent influence of entrist activists of color

made innovations not only in the obvious areas of policy— in employment, housing,

education, health— but also in the less obvious such policy areas of foreign affairs,

taxation, environment, science and arts support. The network of entrists as a whole

played a key long- term role in maintaining minority viewpoints and positions— for

example, the Congressional Black Caucus’s annual alternative budget proposals— in

the mainstream political process.

After the successes of the civil rights movement, pressures to include communi-

ties of color in the mainstream political process increased rapidly as voting patterns

shifted, immigration expanded, and the “politics of turmoil” escalated. The ethnicity

paradigm of race came under significant assault and for a time seemed in disarray.

It ultimately re- emerged under the banner of neoconservatism and later “color-

blindness.” The permanently increased presence of people of color in elective or

administrative office, while a clear victory for racial reform, did not signal the end,

but only the limited democratization, of white supremacy in the United States. The

ethnicity paradigm retained its grasp on racial hegemony, but only under conditions

of ongoing tension and instability. Party politics, local government agencies, welfare

state and poverty programs, and electoral campaigns were some sites for entrism.

While this tendency was perhaps most closely associated with the reform orienta-

tion of moderate movement factions, more militant currents also experimented with

entrist strategies, for example, in the campaigns of La Raza Unida Party Texas during

the 1970s (Shockley 1974; Navarro 2000; Barrera 2002 [1979]; Acuña 2011 [1972],

329–331), and SNCC’s organization of the campaigns of activist Julian Bond for

the Georgia House of Representatives and later the Georgia Senate (Carson 1995

[1981], 167–168). Still later, the Black Panther Party engaged in entrism as well, first