Final Immigration & Ethniity

"Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac": White Supremacy, Antiblack Racism, and the New Historicism

Author(s): George Lipsitz

Source: American Literary History , Winter, 1995, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Winter, 1995), pp. 700- 725

Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/490070

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"Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac": White Supremacy, Antiblack Racism, and the New Historicism George Lipsitz

Racism is like a Cadillac.

Malcolm X

Old Cadillacs never die.

Dizzy Gillespie

The Scar of Race By Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza

Harvard University Press, 1993

Living with Racism: The Black Middle-Class

Experience By Joe R. Feagin and Melvin P Sikes

Beacon Press, 1994

Race in America: The

Struggle for Equality Edited by Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, Jr.

University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

The Black Atlantic.

Modernity and Double Consciousness

By Paul Gilroy Harvard University Press, 1993

In the first volume of his autobiography (published in 1971), Chester Himes recalls how his African-American family offended their white neighbors in rural Mississippi at the end of World War I by becoming the first owners of a private automo- bile in their county. The sight of a black family riding around in such a modern, expensive, and noisy vehicle (loud enough to frighten their neighbors' mule teams) outraged white farmers to such a degree that they secured the dismissal of Himes's father from his job at Alcorn A&M University and then forced the fam- ily to leave the state. Writing from a distance of more than 50 years and in the aftermath of the passage of major civil rights legislation ending de jure segregation, Himes insisted on the en- during relevance of his childhood memory, explaining "... I must confess I find white people just the same today, everywhere I have been, if a black man owns a big and expensive car they will hate him for it" (8).

The story serves as an appropriate introduction to Himes's autobiography, which at every turn emphasizes the ceaseless and unremitting pressure of white racism on the author's life. But his story is one of a man who relishes resistance as well as a man who suffers repression. Immediately after detailing the incident about that car, Himes concedes that part of the hostility that it

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American Literary History

caused among whites came from his mother's "attitude," noting "she always carried a pistol on our car rides through the country, and whenever a cracker mule driver reached for his rabbit gun she beat him to the draw and made him drop it" (8).

Malcolm X also talked about cars to emphasize a point about white supremacy when he told his followers in 1964 that racism was like a Cadillac. He explained that the General Motors Company brought out a new model of their car every year, that the 1960 version differed from the one produced in 1950, but both automobiles were still Cadillacs. Similarly, Malcolm X ex- plained, racism also changed its contours and dimensions. The racism of 1964 might not look like the racism of 1954, but it was still racism. He warned his audience against thinking that racism had ended because it looked different, while at the same time cautioning them that they could not defeat today's racism with yesterday's slogans and analyses.

The dialectical tension between continuity and rupture in- forming the metaphors about racism deployed by Himes and Malcolm X offers important epistemological insights for schol- ars trying to understand the role of white supremacy and anti- black racism in the American literary imagination. Although both men's observations appear to make broad and essentialist claims about the "nature" of white racism, both the puckish pes- simism of Himes and the shrewd skepticism of Malcolm X stemmed as much from the strategic imperatives of their respec- tive speech situations as from any commitment to abstract prin- ciples. Like all utterances, their remarks intervened in a dialogue already in progress, in a tactical situation where metaphors about continuity and change held ideological force.

Himes and Malcolm X knew that self-satisfied narratives

lauding progress in race relations functioned as strategic weap- ons on behalf of a program of "gradualism" that evaded the just demands of black people and irresponsibly deferred remedial ac- tion to some moment in the distant future. But they also under- stood that stories denying the possibility of change worked to fuel defeatism and resignation within their own communities. The speech situations they faced required them to neutralize the rhetoric of progress without belittling the important gains that had been made through struggle in the past-or that might be obtained through social contestation in the future. Thus, their comments were not so much claims about cars, white people, or even racism as much as they were ways of encouraging listeners to look beneath surface appearances, to distrust deterministic paradigms of inevitable progress or hopeless resignation.

With their metaphorical stories, Himes and Malcolm X

Racist Culture:

Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning By David Theo Goldberg Blackwell, 1993

Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America By Cornel West Routledge Press, 1993

Towards the Abolition of

Whiteness. Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History By David Roediger Verso Press, 1994

Race Rebels

By Robin D. G. Kelley Free Press, 1994

701

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702 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

communicated principles about inquiry and interpretation that are as relevant to scholars today as they were to activists in the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. By understanding the tac- tical and strategic imperatives of the discourse in which they found themselves, Himes and Malcolm X displayed what Walter Benjamin called "presence of mind" (One-Way Street 98-99). Benjamin argued that people consult fortune-tellers and mystics because they are afraid that some important part of the present might be escaping them. I submit that we do intellectual work for much the same reason. This is not to advocate "presentism," a term used by historians to describe the process of distorting facts about the past in order to suit our present needs, interests, and inclinations. What I mean by "presence of mind" entails the search to know as fully as possible the forces that shape us as we engage in research, analysis, and argument. Writing about race today requires us to understand the suppressed and silenced di- mensions of racial power in our time as well as its long legacy in our individual and collective pasts.

The books under review here present interpretations of the role of race in US society. They display many of the same anxie- ties over continuity and change that occupied the attention of Himes and Malcolm X a generation ago. Valuable in their own right as systematic studies of an overwhelmingly important issue, they also offer us tools for acquiring the presence of mind neces- sary for studying the racial imagination in American literature.

In recent years, an impressive array of original, innovative, and generative scholarship on African-American writing, white supremacy, and antiblack racism in American literature has un- covered a broad range of new authors and new works to study, developed dynamic ways of rereading familiar classics, and raised important questions about the connections between liter- ary texts and their social contexts of production, distribution, and reception. From Houston Baker's Foucauldian archaeology to Hazel Carby's delineation of the intersections of race and gen- der, from Henry Louis Gates's sophisticated examination of can- ons and canonicity to Valerie Smith's illuminating evaluations of subjectivity and self-discovery in African-American narratives, antiracist writing in the 1980s played a prominent role in the development of new ways of reading, critiquing, and understand- ing literature. Superb studies by Thadious Davis, Frances Foster, Claudia Tate, and Mary Helen Washington of previously ignored or undervalued writers, along with innovative explorations of the role of race in the white literary imagination by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Toni Morrison, and Eric Sundquist, have definitively demonstrated the richness of looking at literary production, dis-

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American Literary History 703

tribution, and reception in its broadest social and historical con- texts.'

This flowering of research signals something positive: it stems, at least in part, from the victories of movements for social change in the 1950s and 1960s, from the ways in which egalitar- ian and antiracist struggles opened up cultural and social oppor- tunities for aggrieved individuals and groups. At the same time, the centrality of racial issues in contemporary literary scholar- ship also demonstrates our failures: the discouraging continuity of white supremacy in our society serves as a register of a broader racial crisis that brings home the inability of yesterday's social movements to transform sufficiently the power of racism as a force framing culture, ideology, and life chances in America.

All around us, we see both stasis and change, continuity and rupture in race relations. Black writers are doing surprisingly well in publishing houses and bookstores at a time when black people are faring very poorly in the economy and in the courts. Black culture has made its way into classroom lessons and onto required reading lists at a time when black students are finding it harder to stay in school. Black idioms circulate everywhere in popular speech, song, slang, and style, but police repression, poverty, and prejudice leave black people with ever declining ac- cess to public places and public resources. Many of the key insti- tutions of our society seem open to black culture, but not black people. They want the music, but not the musicians; they want the art, but not the artists; they want the literature, but they ig- nore the context that gives the literature its determinate con- tours.2

The accomplishments of antiracist scholarship have been real and substantive, but they emerge from and participate in complicated and contradictory realities. Our ability to address adequately and accurately the role of race in American literature increasingly depends upon producing a better theorized under- standing of race itself, as a social text as well as a literary trope, as an ongoing historical process as well as a historically specific object of study. Recent research on white supremacy and anti- black racism in American literature has succeeded brilliantly in delineating how authors have struggled with literary apparatuses and institutions, how battles over words in print have reflected broader social divisions and antagonisms.

Yet, by focusing mainly on the technologies of writing and their attendant social relations, literary critics have often over- looked the ways in which racial identities and hierarchies have been "written" into existence in "social texts" like law, labor or- ganization, and ideology. It is necessary but not sufficient to add

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704 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

black authors to the curriculum and the canon, to interrogate the overt and covert role of race in the cosmologies of canonized authors and texts, and to challenge both the static universalisms that deny difference and the static essentialisms that fetishize and reify it. But we also need to see how the contexts in which we work shape our stances toward canonicity itself, toward litera- ture as an institution, and toward questions about the con- junctural, composite, and contested nature of social identities.

We need to know more about the uses and effects of literary texts as nodes in a network, as parts of a system of overdetermi- nation rather than as independent crucibles of identity and meaning. We need to know how race becomes textualized in American social life, as well as how it becomes instantiated in literary works. In addition, while the best studies of race and the American literary imagination have been firmly grounded in the methods of New Historicism, they have too often privileged transhistorical generalizations about race and culture over more nuanced delineations of change over time. Sometimes they re- duce all of black history to the question of slavery or treat the history of race in isolation from the histories of class, gender, and social institutions.

Issues of rupture and continuity are always at the core of historical inquiry because they set the boundaries for the difficult task of periodization-of deciding how to explain both the things that change and the things that remain the same over time. But periodization is never fixed in historical events themselves: it is a hermeneutic tool utilized by researchers to enhance under- standing and analysis by emphasizing some parts of the past over others.

These issues of social textualization and historical periodi- zation are crucial to the future of New Historicist criticism of

race and American literature. Acquiring new objects of study and developing new methods of interpretation and analysis will not suffice if at the same time we misread the enormously com- plex social, cultural, and ideological forces that have congealed to create the special pathologies of racism in the US. If New Historicist criticism is to offer more than a thin historical gloss on literary appreciation and interpretation, if it is to live up to its professed goal of delineating the mutually constitutive rela- tionship between literary texts and social contexts, we need to move beyond the narrow limits of our disciplinary training in the humanities or social sciences and become truly interdisciplinary. This means that scholars trained in the humanities need to move

beyond textual issues and develop expertise about social struc- ture and history, while social scientists need to learn from hu-

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American Literary History 705

manists how to account fully for the role of language and culture as active forces shaping history and social structure.

I review here eight books on white supremacy and antiblack racism in the US. Written by political scientists Paul M. Snider- man and Thomas Piazza, sociologists Joe R. Feagin, Melvin P. Sikes, and Paul Gilroy, legal scholars Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, Jr., philosophers Cornel West and David Theo Goldberg, and historians David R. Roediger and Robin D. G. Kelley, these books offer literary scholars important evidence about the struc- tural and historical dimensions of American racism. But they also show that social scientists and humanists outside of litera- ture still have much to learn about textualization and about lan-

guage as a social force. Most important, they raise issues that help us understand the importance of textualization and periodi- zation in our own scholarship, no less than in the literature that we analyze.

Sniderman and Piazza emphasize rupture over continuity in The Scar of Race. They argue that racism today differs dramat- ically from the racism of the past, boldly declaring that "race prejudice no longer organizes and dominates the reactions of whites; it no longer leads large numbers of them to oppose public policies to assist blacks across-the-board. It is ... simply wrong to suppose that the primary factor driving the contemporary ar- guments over the politics of race is white racism" (5).

In arguing that few whites openly endorse discrimination or claim that blacks are innately inferior (40), Sniderman and Piazza rest their conclusions largely on interpretation of data they assembled through survey-sample public opinion polls of whites in the San Francisco Bay area. They find strong support for fair-housing laws and other pieces of legislation outlawing discrimination (98, 124). They learn from their interviews that educated people are less likely to approve of bigotry than people with limited schooling (47), and they discover that respondents who hold negative views of blacks in general are nonetheless will- ing to endorse government and private assistance for individual blacks who demonstrate good character (76). Perhaps most im- portant, they utilize a sophisticated polling system that demon- strates that aggressive counterarguments can change the minds of respondents who express bigoted opinions, especially when negative stereotypes of blacks are connected to social welfare is- sues (11, 137).

Yet the picture presented by Sniderman and Piazza's inter- view data demonstrates the continuity of racism as well. Their findings disclose that 61% of whites believe that "most blacks on welfare could find work if they wanted to" (40), that nearly 50%

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706 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

of whites agreed that "if blacks would only try harder, they would be just as well off as whites" (41), and that an equal number of whites claimed that "black neighborhoods tend to be run down because blacks simply don't take care of their own property" (42). Indeed, the two political scientists concede that "what is striking is the sheer pervasiveness throughout contemporary American society of negative characteristics of blacks" (50).

How can Sniderman and Piazza declare that white racism

has become less important when their own findings reveal such hostility to black people? Their answers are not convincing, but they are instructive. Sniderman and Piazza concede that simple prejudice does feed negative opinions about blacks among whites, but contend that these opinions cannot be reduced to bigotry because "these characterizations capture real features of everyday experience" (43). To support their claims, they note that blacks "were responsible for one in every two murders" in 1990 and for "more than six in every ten robberies" in 1989, that in 1988 "63.7 percent of black births were out of wedlock," and that "the average Scholastic Aptitude Test score of blacks, in 1990, was 737, compared with an average white score of 993" (44).

Aside from their ingenuous presentation of these statistics as if they have never been challenged (by scholarly studies exposing the hostility of police officers and judges to black sus- pects, explaining the logic of extended households and female- headed families given current employment, wage, and welfare policies, and examining the cultural biases and poor predictive capacities of standardized tests), Sniderman and Piazza at this point inject speculations that their research does not support. Their original questions ask whether blacks on welfare could get jobs if they tried, if blacks could be as well off as whites if they would only try harder, if black neighborhoods tend to be run down because blacks do not take care of their property, if most blacks have a chip on their shoulder, and if blacks are more vio- lent than whites. One might argue that the large numbers of blacks convicted of murders relates to the question about the vio- lent nature of black people, yet that question drew the lowest level of white agreement with only 20% claiming that blacks are more violent than whites. But what is the relevance of SAT scores

or births out of wedlock to questions about keeping up neighbor- hoods or working hard? These spurious connections do not come out of the data but are inserted by Sniderman and Piazza as mo- tivations for answers to questions about completely unrelated is- sues. Only if one assumes that any negative action by any black is evidence about all blacks-or that homeowners generally worry about their neighbors' SAT scores-could we possibly conclude

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American Literary History 707

that the "facts" cited by Sniderman and Piazza explain the opin- ions in their data.

Sniderman and Piazza also attempt to minimize the role of bigotry in shaping the negative comments their respondents make about black people by turning to data from the 1991 Na- tional Race Survey that found that African Americans were even more likely than whites to agree that black people are aggressive and violent, boastful, complaining, lazy, and irresponsible. Be- cause these results make it seem that black people have a low opinion of themselves, Sniderman and Piazza conclude that the negative comments made by whites in their own survey are justi- fied and based on experience. Had this standard been in effect during the Brown v. Board of Education case, Kenneth Clark's experiments showing that black children had negative self- images would have been used as justification for segregation rather than as a rationale for integration as the Supreme Court decided. But more important, it should be noted that once again Sniderman and Piazza assume that any negative statement about blacks becomes equal to any other. If blacks think other blacks are boastful, then whites are justified in thinking that the mate- rial advantages they enjoy in comparison to blacks should be attributed to black people's laziness rather than to unequal op- portunity.

The authors of The Scar of Race do not ask blacks the same questions they ask whites, nor do they draw upon existing survey data collected by others about black opinions and attitudes. They pointedly ignore, for instance, the in-depth experiential survey by Feagin and Sikes that forms the basis for Living with Racism: The Black Middle-Class Experience. Interviews with middle-class blacks in the Feagin and Sikes study reveal their attitudes toward whites, but they also disclose important evidence about how white people actually behave-an important counter to the self- serving representations of white open-mindedness so evident in The Scar of Race. The middle-class blacks surveyed by Feagin and Sikes detail the pervasiveness of racial insults and indignities in every sphere of American life, from navigating public places to pursuing an education, from building careers and businesses to securing shelter. The book's chapters about public space and educational institutions initially appeared in scholarly journals in 1991 and 1992, two years before the publication of Sniderman and Piazza's book.3 Yet the authors of The Scar of Race chose to use their own data and ideological justifications for what white people say rather than looking systematically at what white people actually do or how they appear to black people while they are doing it.

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708 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

In their opening and concluding chapters especially, Snider- man and Piazza frame issues of rupture and continuity in Ameri- can race relations in a particularly deficient way. They construct a narrative that looks back to the civil rights era as a golden age when race "was a problem of the heart" (1). For them, defense of de jure segregation hinged on notions of black inferiority, and the civil rights movement triumphed when a consensus formed around the idea that "it was wrong-unequivocally wrong, un- ambiguously wrong-to make it a crime for a black to drink from the same water fountain as a white ... or to attend the

same school" (1). They argue that blacks shattered this integrationist consen-

sus themselves when they began to follow a "race conscious agenda" that violated the American creed (177). Then, race- conscious policies like affirmative action turned civil rights into "pork barrel" politics (129) that they claim alienated a number of whites so profoundly that "they have come to dislike blacks as a consequence" (8). After the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 "the voices of separatism began to drown out those of integration; and the headlines came to be dominated not by Martin Luther King, Jr., but by Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, then in the fullness of time, by Marion Barry, Ta- wana Brawley, and the Reverend Al Sharpton" (177).

The rhetorical flourishes in Sniderman and Piazza's conclu-

sions make their book more revealing as a symptom of our cur- rent racial crisis than as a critique of it. In a book that claims the existence of a dramatic rupture in the history of US race relations, trotting out Barry, Brawley, and Sharpton has a de- pressingly familiar ring to it-using instances of alleged black malfeasance to justify white racism is one of the oldest tropes of North American racism. For example, when W. E. B. Du Bois edited the NAACP journal The Crisis earlier this century, his all- white executive board chided him for printing the names of blacks who had been lynched, and insisted that he "balance" these accounts with lists of blacks who had committed crimes, as if lynchings could be protested only if no black people ever broke the law.

Careful readers might also note that Sniderman and Piaz- za's chronology fails to mention that King followed passage of the Civil Rights Act with campaigns against housing discrimina- tion in the North in 1966, that he championed opposition to America's "unjust and immoral war in Vietnam" as a civil rights issue in 1967, and that he died trying to build an interracial Poor People's Movement in 1968. If white people were as enthusiastic about his vision as Sniderman and Piazza imply, why did these

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American Literary History 709

campaigns attract so little support and fail so miserably to change public and private policies? In addition, by using Barry, Brawley, and Sharpton as evidence of how "the voices of separat- ism began to drown out the voices of integration," Sniderman and Piazza do not seem to be aware that Barry, Brawley, and Sharpton are not separatists; what unites them is that they are famous blacks whom white people think are guilty of misbehav- ior. This does not explain why their putative violations should consign black people to discriminatory treatment when similar behavior by Richard Nixon, Charles Stuart, Susan Smith, or the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart does not seem to affect the life chances of European Americans.

As a historical narrative, Sniderman and Piazza's account is wrong in almost every respect. Concrete social struggle, not some amorphous consensus, secured passage of the Civil Rights Act. Direct action protests by civil rights advocates provoked violent repression and sparked civil disorders that key opinion leaders sought to salve with meliorative reforms. Contrary to Sniderman and Piazza's account, those who supported civil rights legislation had interests, not just "ideas" on their minds; Lyndon Johnson, for example, wanted to expand the potential pool of black voters in the South to counter growing Republican strength in white suburbs. Opponents of civil rights legislation did not rely solely on arguments about black inferiority as the authors of The Scar of Race allege; Barry Goldwater, George Bush, and Ronald Reagan all opposed the 1964 law, not by citing the biological superiority of whites, but rather by claiming that the law violated states rights and that it threatened rather than enhanced racial harmony (see Lipsitz 65-119; West 271-91; Sitkoff 127-97; Franklin 476-97).

Although offered as advice for liberals interested in building an electoral coalition supporting public policies aimed at helping blacks, The Scar of Race is curiously silent about the politics of whiteness in our society, about the open, public, and sustained discourse about race carried on by neoconservatives and their allies since the 1960s. From Spiro Agnew's public humiliation of black leaders in Baltimore for their "failure" to prevent riots when King was shot to Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy" pro- moting resistance to desegregation, from the legal and public re- lations campaigns waged by the wealthy neoconservative founda- tions like the Heritage Foundation and John M. Olin Institute Foundation against affirmative action to the elevation of Clar- ence Thomas to the Supreme Court, race has been at the center of neoconservative efforts to build the countersubversive elec- toral coalition needed to dismantle the welfare state and advance

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710 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

Sniderman and Piazza

are not convincing when they argue that a monumental change has already taken place in the discourses of American racism, but,

paradoxically, the very continuity revealed in their account reminds us

how much we need that

change.

the agendas of big business. But Sniderman and Piazza evade any mention of these initiatives, and instead attribute the unrav- eling of the civil rights coalition primarily to the bad behavior of blacks. Whites have neither interest nor agency in their account, only attitudes.

While Sniderman and Piazza's account does not succeed as

scholarship, it needs to be taken seriously as storytelling. The Scar of Race mobilizes and enacts our culture's double standards about race. Narratives of black misbehavior eroding the good will of whites have always fueled racist reaction; in our own day it is a story that writers love to write and publishers love to tell, a tale that reviewers routinely salute as "novel," even though it is as old as the nation itself. But it is here where literary scholars might take special note.

All fiction written today by and about black people circu- lates in a network that includes fictions like the ones disguised as social science in Sniderman and Piazza's narrative. Their story is a social text as well as a book, a widely disseminated story that reinforces itself every time its basic contours are repeated in the speeches of politicians, the content of television news and enter- tainment programs, the comments of callers to talk-radio pro- grams, and the actions of social institutions like home lending agencies, realtors, zoning boards, personnel departments, and schools. The challenge for both literary and scholarly production in this context is to avoid complicity in the erasures effected by stories that obscure actual social relations and hide their own

conditions of production and distribution. Literature as an institution has been no less complicit with

dominant power in this respect than social science, journalism, or any of the other arts. The conventions and conditions of cul- tural production in our society encourage all of us to author sto- ries that effect false reconciliations between antagonistic social interests, that represent systemic social problems as solely private and personal issues, and that hide the interests and privileges of those empowered to speak. Sniderman and Piazza are not con- vincing when they argue that a monumental change has already taken place in the discourses of American racism, but, paradoxi- cally, the very continuity revealed in their account reminds us how much we need that change.

In Race in America: The Struggle for Equality, edited by Hill and Jones, a distinguished group of sociologists, historians, and legal scholars shows how white racism has shaped the trajectory of race relations since the civil rights era. In 16 carefully re- searched and cogently argued chapters, the authors fill in the missing links between the civil rights era of the 1960s and the

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American Literary History 711

race-conscious politics of subsequent decades. They show how many of the victories won by the civil rights movement came in the form of carefully managed concessions designed to insulate and contain the structural consequences of legal equality. They stress the central role of social contestation and struggle in bring- ing about change. Most important, they detail massive, system- atic, and unrelenting white resistance to the desegregation of schools, neighborhoods, and jobs after the passage of the civil rights acts, and they remind us that it was precisely this broad scale defense of white privileges that led to affirmative action and other reforms in the first place.

Patricia J. Williams's "Fetal Fictions: An Exploration of Property Archetypes in Racial and Gendered Contexts" is par- ticularly effective because it succeeds so well in mapping the con- junctural nature of race, class, and gender in shaping social iden- tity and because it skillfully connects personal and subjective experiences with broader social analysis. But the chapters in Race in America that rely on more traditional empirical aca- demic accounts are also excellent, especially those by Aldon Morris, Gary Orfield, Hill, and Jones.

Gilroy, a brilliant reader of literary texts employed as a soci- ologist, and philosophers Goldberg and West provide powerful tools for engaging and transcending racism in their new books, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning, and Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America. Each treats racism as a long-standing but decidedly dynamic and distinctly historical phenomenon. Each argues that race is a fiction, that no basis exists in biology or anthropology to categorize people along ra- cial lines. Yet each also demonstrates that social constructs can

have sinister social causes and consequences. Gilroy, Goldberg, and West reject definitions that relegate racism to the realm of purely personal prejudices and practices, what Goldberg calls the "law of universal reduction" (104), but also challenge the idea of any innate, transhistorical, or universal racism. Similarly, they reject methodologies that deny racism's independent existence and explain it only as a subordinate category within other forms of economic and political domination. Instead, they investigate, analyze, and interpret the emergence and endurance of Euro- American white supremacy as a historical phenomenon with en- during effects on our common intellectual, cultural, and social life.

Gilroy and Goldberg especially trace contemporary racism to the distinctly modern categories of the Enlightenment: nation- ality, ethnicity, authenticity, and cultural integrity (Gilroy 2).

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712 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

John Locke's justification of the Royal Africa Company's slave expeditions as "just wars" and Immanuel Kant's belief in funda- mental differences in the rational capacities of blacks and whites serve as revealing examples, not because they contradict the lib- eral ideals of the Enlightenment but because they flow logically from its commitments to categorizing, classifying, and control- ling. Gilroy notes that the rationality of modernity originated, in part, in the slave-labor sugar plantations of the Caribbean (47), while Goldberg identifies the presence of racialized language and preconceptual elements of racism even in antiracist documents and arguments (42). These authors insist on viewing slavery and racism as "part of the ethical and intellectual heritage of the West" (Gilroy 49) rather than as the special property or special problem faced only by blacks.

A central contribution of these books is their delineation of

how racism and resistance against it get written into the com- monplace practices of everyday life and culture. West offers pow- erful and persuasive critiques of the racialized assumptions or- dering modern art and architecture (45-66), Goldberg produces a brilliant reading of urban spatial arrangements as the political unconscious of racism in cities all over the world (185-205), and Gilroy offers an original and inspired reading of the role of race in Richard Wright's modernism and internationalism (147-86).

Remembering the roles played by racism and slavery in the evolution of the Enlightenment is important for these authors, not because they want to distance themselves from Western tra- ditions of thought and reason, but rather because they claim a special place for antiracist thought within them. Because anti- racist writers have to confront directly the racist elements of En- lightenment thought that others have the luxury of ignoring, the antiracists by necessity must do better work, must imagine ways of fulfilling the worthy goals of the Enlightenment without col- laborating in its uninterrogated racist subtexts. As Gilroy ex- plains, slavery and its aftermath forced diasporic Africans in the West "to query the foundational moves of modern philosophy and social thought, whether they came from the natural rights theorists who sought to distinguish between the spheres of mo- rality and legality, the idealists who wanted to emancipate poli- tics from morals so that it could become a sphere of strategic action, or the political economists of the bourgeoisie who first formulated the separation of economic activity from both ethics and politics" (39).

The critiques presented by Gilroy, Goldberg, and West en- able us to shift the terms of racial debate away from the terms

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American Literary History 713

favored by traditional social science-why blacks are not more like whites-toward an infinitely more useful and instructive is- sue: what intellectuals and artists from aggrieved black commu- nities have been able to create as a result of the specific circum- stances they confront.

West describes a "New World African modernity" that emerges when "degraded and exploited Africans in American circumstances" use "European languages and instruments to make sense of tragic predicaments-predicaments dispropor- tionately shaped by white supremacist bombardments on black beauty, intelligence, moral character, and creativity" (xii). West celebrates the skill of black artists and intellectuals in drawing on cultural traditions to critique white supremacy; he cites Horace Pippin's art, Bessie Smith's music, and Sterling Brown's poetry as creations that transcended the art of uplift and protest allowed to blacks in the white world to articulate and affirm traditional

African and African-American paradigms of art as healing. West also shows that New World Africans gravitated toward newness and novelty, innovation and improvisation, as tools for changing their condition (xii). Gilroy stresses the fundamental commit- ment to modernity in black art and literature, showing how a "politics of fulfillment and transfiguration" appealed to ag- grieved peoples who longed for change, not just out of an ab- stract artistic commitment to progress, but because of their fun- damental struggle for justice (37). Perhaps most important, he shows how the lessons learned through struggle by diasporic Af- ricans can serve all people because of their sophisticated cri- tiques of exploitation and hierarchy.

Cultural production provides important evidence for Gil- roy, Goldberg, and West because they understand not only the influence of social conditions on cultural texts and the role of

cultural texts in social life, but also the inevitable textualization of social life by dominant groups who circulate stories that repre- sent their own power as necessary and inevitable. Following the intellectual traditions of antiracist resistance within aggrieved communities of ordinary people, they find epistemological and ontological principles vital to improving scholarly research. Just as the burdens of slavery and racism are not the special property of blacks alone, the insights and ideological critiques of ag- grieved populations forced to open up the suppressed contradic- tions of the Enlightenment have generalizable validity for people from all backgrounds.

Self-reflexive about their roles as intellectuals, Gilroy, Gold- berg, and West offer concrete programs for antiracist thought

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714 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

By stressing the ways of knowing that emerge from antiracist intellectual and political struggle, Gilroy,

Goldberg, and West demonstrate that

multiculturalism is not

just a matter of adding the experiences of "Others" onto what we

already presume to be true about culture and

history.

and action. Gilroy shows how a hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutics of memory can guide intellectual critique and cultural practice grounded in "the mimetic functions of artistic performance in the processes of struggles towards emancipation, citizenship, and eventually autonomy" (71; see also 57). Gold- berg offers a carefully conceived program of pragmatic antirac- ism based on the presumption that racialized definitions of self and social structure are so pervasive in our society that they can- not be altered by simple "color blind," "non-racial" thinking (213).

West calls for intellectuals to become "critical organic cata- lysts" (27) who blend the paradigms, viewpoints, and methods of traditional scholarship with the insights, ideas, and experiences of aggrieved communities. Crucial to this role is the development of "genealogical materialist analysis of racism" based on genea- logical inquiry into the origins, evolution, and enabling condi- tions of racist practices, a microinstitutional and local analysis of the actual mechanisms that instantiate or resist racism in so-

cial life, and a macrostructural approach that connects class ex- ploitation, police power, and bureaucratic domination to the maintenance and regeneration of racisms around the globe (268).

By stressing the ways of knowing that emerge from antirac- ist intellectual and political struggle, Gilroy, Goldberg, and West demonstrate that multiculturalism is not just a matter of adding the experiences of "Others" onto what we already presume to be true about culture and history. The significance of marginalized peoples to cultural studies does not lie in their marginality, but rather in the role that marginalization (not to mention oppres- sion and suppression) plays in shaping intellectual and cultural categories that affect everyone. Like the feminist epistemologies of Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, and Teresa de Lauretis, these books turn to the perspectives of aggrieved individuals and communities not because of who they are, but because of what they have been forced to learn because of how they have been treated (see Haraway 183-201; De Lauretis 119-31; Harding 136-62).

Both continuity and rupture pervade the analyses of racism offered by Gilroy, Goldberg, and West. Tracing present racist practices back to the core categories of modernity, they help us understand the endurance of racist hierarchies despite the long tradition of critique against them. Yet they also contest the possi- bility of a universal or transhistorical racism impervious to social or intellectual challenges. "In contrast to the prevailing picture of a singular and passing racism," Goldberg writes, "I will be developing a conception of transforming racisms bound concep-

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American Literary History 715

tually in terms of and sustained by an underlying culture" (8). This project holds particular importance for New Historicist lit- erary critics precisely because it is historical, because it traces how racism changes over time, how there has always been racism in the US at different times and different places but never exactly the same racism.

In the spirit of that kind of attention to change over time, historians Roediger and Kelley offer even more finely delineated and carefully nuanced historical accounts of US racial identities in Towards the Abolition of Whiteness and Race Rebels. Both au- thors are superb researchers who combine mastery of macroso- cial economic and political history with an uncommon attention to the microsocial textures of everyday life as they are experi- enced by ordinary people. Although they are not students of can- onized literary texts, they offer insightful critiques of how domi- nant power relations become textualized in language and law, as well as of the ways in which the cultural creations of aggrieved communities author and authorize oppositional "texts" and practices.

Roediger reminds us that racial identities affect white people too, that whiteness is a category that requires historical explanation because it has been a social construction with ca- lamitous consequences. Building on his previous study of the ori- gins and evolution of white identity in the American working class before the Civil War, he traces the continuity and permuta- tions in white identity as they have affected gender, work, social movements, ethnicity, language, and historical scholarship from the Civil War to the present.

Towards the Abolition of Whiteness contains many brilliant moments, but students of the racial imagination in American lit- erature will be most interested in Roediger's sensitive, knowing, and complex mapping of the role played by whiteness in both constructing and destabilizing European-American ethnic iden- tities (181-98). His account reveals much about the logic of New Historicism because it underscores the impossibility of separat- ing cultural texts from the textualization of cultural and social life. Roediger also offers a fascinating etymology of the word "gook," a racial epithet used by US soldiers since the nineteenth century against indigenous populations in diverse locations in- cluding Haiti, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Arabic Middle East, Hawaii, Korea, and Vietnam (117-20). This curiosity about the origins of white supremacist slang is indicative of Roediger's sophisticated grasp of social life as a totality made up of both macrosocial structural institutions and microsocial practices and experiences.

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716 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

In a chapter that exemplifies the best possibilities of histori- cally grounded cultural criticism, Roediger details labor poet and humorist Covington Hall's struggles to popularize a new lan- guage of labor, race, and gender among southern timber workers in the early part of the twentieth century. In this discussion, Roe- diger shows not only how struggles over resources necessitate struggles over culture but also how enduring cultural conserva- tism can undermine political radicalism (127-80). Rejecting any temptation to make simple and one-dimensional relationships between social structure and culture, he accomplishes the far more difficult feat of showing the mutually constitutive relation- ships connecting the culture of everyday life to the broad distri- bution of wealth, power, and life chances in society.

Roediger's explorations of whiteness provide a perfect intro- duction to Kelley's Race Rebels, a stunningly original and illumi- nating history of episodes when poor and working-class people in America have mobilized on behalf of their own interests in

the face of systematic discrimination and exploitation. Ever since Herbert Gutman's generative 1973 essay "Work, Culture, and So- ciety in Industrializing America, 1815-1919," social historians have developed ever more sophisticated ways of exploring popu- lar resistance to concentrated wealth and power, but Kelley raises this discussion to an entirely new level. Imagination and ingenu- ity characterize his efforts, but Kelley's best skill is his mastery of empirical data-he finds more and better evidence than any- one in the field.

From Kelley's introductory reminiscences about working at a fast-food restaurant when he was a teenager to his cogent ob- servations about how wage labor shaped the nature of the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Race Rebels delineates the in- tersections of race and class in the US in important and enlight- ening ways. It combines a comprehensive and convincing analy- sis of the broad social forces that shape individual and collective behavior and an attention to the quotidian that often appears only in novels. Most important, Kelley understands how prevail- ing power relations-and resistance to them-often become "written" into everyday life as cultural performances.

Drawing on the cultural criticism of James Scott, Michel de Certeau, and C. L. R. James, among others, Kelley explains how dressing up on Saturday nights enabled southern blacks to an- swer back to the deprivations they suffered as underpaid workers and to transform the indignities imposed on them by their work uniforms that marked them as people with subordinate status. He analyzes the role of dancing as a way of reclaiming the work

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American Literary History 717

body for pleasure, and in his tour de force shows how Malcolm X's description of changing into his zoot suit from his work uni- forms as a pullman porter and soda jerk proclaimed a self- affirmation that found full expression in the way that the zoot "uniform"-with its wide shoulders and broad hats underscored

by the zoot suiters' characteristic "walk"-took up physical space on city streets (147-68).

The "presence of mind" practiced by Kelley and Roediger allows for no easy answers about continuity and rupture in US race relations. To be sure, they remind us of the long duration of white supremacist practices and institutions, but they also illumi- nate the innumerable instances of antiracist resistance growing out of the contradictions and inconsistencies necessitated by the insupportable fictions of race. Yet if racism has no absolutely determined innate trajectory in our nation's history, its perpetual presence poisons everything we are and everything we hope to become. It makes every moment a moment of danger, not just because of the potential for explosions of violence like the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992, but because of the ruined lives, wasted talents, and corrupt interpersonal and social relations that rac- ism causes. But the very danger that racism represents can serve constructive ends if it motivates us to create new ways of know- ing and acting.

The same Benjamin who ruminated on our need for "pres- ence of mind" also developed a concept of historical materialism based on "memories that flash up in a moment of danger" ("The- ses" 257). He understood that "presence of mind" impels us to move back and forth between the present and the past in search of a fuller understanding of our condition. Historical research is not just a matter of accumulating evidence about dead people and dead societies; it demands that we constantly refine our questions about the past on the basis of our experiences in the present while also looking at elements of the past we may have overlooked because their ultimate import had not yet become clear. Defined in this way, historical research is too important to be left to the historians alone; it becomes a vital resource for all citizens and scholars interested in creating a better theoretical and empirical understanding of the role of race in our lives.

The racial crisis of our time-and the new ways of knowing that it promotes and demands-points toward a new kind of scholarship based on presence of mind and memories that flash up in a moment of danger. Moving beyond the confines of our training in specific disciplines and studying new combinations of texts in new ways can lead us to a socially responsible kind of

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718 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

scholarship attuned to addressing the overwhelmingly difficult moral and intellectual challenges we face.

New Historicist literary criticism has many strengths, but too often it displays some characteristic weaknesses-a tendency to privilege the technologies of writing over other cultural prac- tices, reliance on vague and imprecise references to an abstract historical context rather than to definite features of change over time, and an underdeveloped awareness of the connection be- tween literary criticism and the social relations and conditions of our own day. On the other hand, humanities and social science scholars of race and racism display many characteristic flaws of their own. They often underestimate the importance of literature as a force shaping popular ideologies and interpretations, and they frequently forget that cultural expressions are not transpar- ent representations of reality but rather utterances that require theoretical analysis and critique.

What would happen if New Historicist literary critics and the humanists and social scientists studying racism adopted more of each other's methods? The result might resemble some outstanding recent works by scholars working at the crossroads of culture and structure in literary studies and history. Literary critical works offering important examples for emulation include Eric Lott's analysis of minstrelsy and the US working class, Vir- ginia Carmichael's sophisticated interpretation of the fictions fashioned about the Rosenberg spy trials after the fact by popu- lar authors but during the trial itself by lawyers, judges, and jour- nalists, Maria Damon's memorable study of beat poet Bob Kauf- man, and Carl Gutierrez-Jones's original investigation of the role of law in Chicano literature and popular culture. Similarly, recent historical works that display a fine attention to the role of textu- alization in social life include Wendy Kozol's perceptive study of the conflation of patriotism and patriarchy in Life magazine's photo essays during the 1950s, Tricia Rose's dazzling description of the relationship between the 1970s urban crises and the rise of rap music, break dancing, and graffiti writing, and George Sanchez's original interpretation of the roles played by popular culture and trade unions in authoring a new "Mexican- American" identity in Los Angeles during the 1930s.

One way to accomplish this fusion of literary criticism with social science and humanities scholarship about race might be to combine the skills of social analysis and cultural critique by comparing and contrasting contextualized readings of tradi- tional literary texts with stories from other kinds of sources. For example, let us look at three different pieces of evidence-a

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American Literary History 719

scholarly report from the 1880s, a novel from the 1950s, and a once confidential government document from the early 1800s- for what they can teach us about the racial crisis of our own time.

During the 1880s, folklorists in Washington, DC, collected a tale then in wide circulation among that city's African- American residents. This story alleged that when George Wash- ington lay on his deathbed, his last words to his friends and family were "Forever keep the niggers down." With only half- disguised amusement, the scholars wrote that the story was "ac- cepted as undoubtedly true by many, if not most, of the colored people over a wide area" (Levine 88).

The activity of collecting folklore in the nineteenth century often stemmed from paternalistic assumptions about the simplic- ity and naivete of ordinary people. Like geographical expedi- tions, wild West and minstrel shows, or jungle stories, it offered escapist fantasies about traditional peoples and their cultures as a way of easing the pains of modernity and the alienating self- regulating individualism it encouraged. Through that frame, the story about George Washington's dying wish plays a part in rep- resenting black people as nonempirical, superstitious, and gull- ible. Its possible function as a teaching device encapsulating im- portant parts of the experiences of its authors did not strike the folklorists who collected it.

A similar kind of story appears in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) when Dr. A. Hebert Bledsoe explains to the narrator why he collaborates with the power of whites in his job as presi- dent of a black college: "These white folks have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them that you're lying, they'll tell the world even if you prove you're telling the truth. Because it's the kind of lie they want to hear .. ." (140-41). Later we learn that Dr. Bledsoe means what he says. The narrator carries a letter of rec- ommendation from the college president that he thinks will help him secure temporary employment so that he can make enough money to return to school. But he discovers that the letter (which he is not supposed to see) explains that the narrator has been expelled from the school secretly and it advises the prospective employer to keep that information from him (187-91).

Taken by themselves, these passages from Invisible Man can be read as illustrative anecdotes about a general problem-about bureaucracy, duplicity, or subordination. But when placed in his- torical context, they disclose a quite specific and quite racialized history with only incidental connection to the more generalized

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720 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

alienations expressed so often in modern literature. Consider, for example, what we can learn about the racial crisis of our time by reading these passages from folklore and Invisible Man against a historical document written in 1802 by Thomas Jefferson's post- master general.

The document I have chosen was written on 23 March 1802

by US Postmaster General Gideon Granger and sent in an ex- traordinary letter to Georgia Senator James Jackson. Granger's letter explained his opposition to "employing negroes, or people of color, in transporting the public mails." Describing his com- ments as "too delicate to engraft into a report which may become public, yet too important to be omitted or passed over without full consideration," Granger drew a direct connection between post office hiring policies and the recent revolt in Haiti against slavery and colonialism. Arguing that "we cannot be too cau- tious in attempting to prevent similar evils in the four Southern States, where there are, particularly in the eastern and old settled parts of them, so great a proportion of blacks as to hazard the tranquility and happiness of free citizens," the postmaster gen- eral noted that in Virginia and South Carolina "plans and con- spiracies have already been concerted by them more than once, to rise in arms, and subjugate their masters."

It is not surprising that the successful slave insurrection in Haiti frightened property owners and "free citizens" in the US or that it motivated federal officials to take defensive precau- tions. But the extent of Granger's actions, and his reasons for them, demonstrates dynamics and dimensions of white suprem- acy and antiblack racism of singular and enduring importance. With a comprehensive and systematic logic, Granger argued in his confidential letter to Senator Jackson that banning blacks from positions as postal riders served the interests of slavery be- cause "everything which tends to increase their [black people's] knowledge of natural rights, of men and things, or that affords them an opportunity of associating, acquiring, and communicat- ing sentiments, and of establishing a chain or line of intelligence, must increase your hazard, because it increases their means of effecting their object." He warned that "the most active and intel- ligent" blacks would gravitate to jobs as postal riders, that they would learn important information from their travels, and that they would "in time, become teachers to their brethren." In order to foreclose that end, Granger decided to deny them employment in those positions. "The hazard may be small and the prospect remote," he argued, "but it does not follow that at some day the event would not be certain." Deploying the language of counter- insurgency that so often guides those with power to take repres-

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American Literary History 721

sive measures, Granger warned that "it is easier to prevent the evil than to cure it."

Granger's letter to Jackson constitutes an important mo- ment in American literary history in itself, but it also provides an important resource for analyzing and critiquing the produc- tion of racialized identities and hierarchies in American litera-

ture and American social life alike. No public pronouncement or statute announced any intention to discriminate against blacks, but through a policy of willful, deliberate, and systematic decep- tion, an official at the highest level of government authored and authorized a policy of racial discrimination in order to protect the long-term interests of members of his own race. Slave owners may or may not have reaped direct benefits from Granger's ac- tions, but other whites also enriched themselves because of his decision. Those whites hired as postal riders were not told that they received their positions because of racial privilege; the prop- erty and privileges they passed on to their descendants may have seemed like the fruits of competition in a free market, but they stemmed instead from systematic racial favoritism.

Black people denied employment as postal riders were led to believe that they failed to qualify for these jobs because of their deficiencies as individual applicants. Yet exactly the oppo- site was true; their very potential for oppositional ideas and in- surrectionary actions made them ineligible for these government jobs. We must certainly surmise that black people noticed the effects of Granger's decision and no doubt knew that a policy against their employment existed, but the privileges of power en- abled Granger (and all whites) to escape responsibility for their actions.

The prose of Granger's letter hardly qualifies it for inclusion in the classical canon of American literary history, although its frank disclosures of elite fears of popular protest make it of sig- nificant historical and sociological interest. When one considers that it came from a time in our nation's history when slavery was legal and when overt white supremacy perpetually imperiled the property and persons of even free blacks, it is hardly the most racist document in our national papers of state. But Granger's letter represents an important artifact in American literary his- tory and offers some important insights into how we might con- duct American literary criticism in the future.

Granger's letter enables us to cast the folktale about George Washington's dying wish in a new light. Secret communications among whites at the dawn of the Republic did consign black people to subordinate status. Even though they might not have had access to documents detailing exactly how their suppression

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722 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

was accomplished, the blacks in Washington certainly saw the consequences of those actions in their own lives, as the story at- tests.

The communication to Senator Jackson by the postmaster general also shows that Ellison's imagination has historical roots; indeed the entirety of Invisible Man is an exploration into the tension between surface appearances and hidden structures of suppression and power. It starts with another kind of deathbed pronouncement-the narrator's grandfather advises his family to teach "the younguns" deception before whites, to "overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open." He justifies his advice by declaring "our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's coun- try ever since I give up my gun back in Reconstruction" (16).

These three texts are related to each other and to the larger body of texts (written and unwritten) that have authored and authorized the racialization of life chances in America: for ex-

ample, the confidential City Survey appraisals for the Home Owners Loan Corporation (discovered by urban historian Ken- neth Jackson) that covertly channeled federally guaranteed home loan funds toward whites and away from blacks (see Jackson 195-203). But even more significant, Granger's letter, Ellison's novel, and the story about George Washington's deathbed wish are texts from other times with special explanatory power for our own time because they are memories that flash up in a moment of danger.

During the days of slavery and segregation, we might have missed the true import of Granger's letter, the folktale about George Washington's dying wish, or the episodes in Invisible Man. But in our day, their emphasis on covert actions and decep- tions flashes up to us in a moment of danger as an important way of understanding our own circumstances. They dramatize some important facets of American racism with immediate rele- vance for our presence of mind. They show that racism can be systematic and effective even when unannounced in public; that rational considerations of self-interest and preservation of privi- lege can motivate racist behavior just as surely as private preju- dice or irrational fear; that hypotheses about the nature and ex- tent of white racism that might strike many whites as paranoid can sometimes be traced to accurate knowledge about history among blacks and uninterrogated privileges among whites.

The long history of antiblack racism and white supremacy in the US may make many of us wish to second West's observa- tion that "the extent to which race still so fundamentally matters

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American Literary History 723

in nearly every sphere of American life is-in the long run- depressing and debilitating" (xv). Like those white neighbors whom Himes remembered from his childhood, many whites to- day still seem disturbed and threatened by the prospect of black success-witness neoconservative ideologue Carol Iannone's rid- icule of the literary awards bestowed on Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. In Malcolm X's terms, they may turn out a new Cadillac every year, but it's still a Cadillac.

While racism may never go away, we know that it does change, that it contains unresolved contradictions and is always susceptible to exposure and challenge. Those white farmers who succeeded in driving the Himes family out of Mississippi did not convince Himes that he did not deserve the good things in life; they only showed him that he would have to fight to get what he wanted. New racisms may always supplant old ones-just like this year's Cadillacs roll off the assembly lines to replace last year's. Old Cadillacs never die, but they sometimes become too expensive to support.

Perhaps that is what Dizzy Gillespie had in mind in 1959 when he wrote and recorded "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac," a song that fuses African chants, old-time spirituals, and a parody of General Douglas MacArthur's farewell speech. At the end of the recording, Gillespie steps up to the mike and says "Old Cadil- lacs never die, the finance company just fades them away." White supremacy and antiblack racism may never die. But that should not stop us from trying to see what we can do to fade them away.

Notes

1. In this review, I address the specific contours of antiblack racism in America, although I know that it is incorrect to reduce racism in the US to a simple binary conflict between blacks and whites, as if the polylateral intercul- tural relations among whites, blacks, Chicanos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans did not exist or did not matter. Yet since the works I am reviewing are for the most part about antiblack racism, I confine my critical remarks to that subject. For detailed and sophisticated analyses of the complexities of intercultural identities and racisms, see Guti6rrez, and Anzalduia.

2. My formulation here paraphrases Charles Keil's powerful observations about popular music and the people who make it in his closing remarks at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music meetings in Mon- treal, 11 July 1985. Author's notes.

3. Feagin, "The Continuing Significance of Race" and "The Continuing Sig- nificance of Racism."

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724 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

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