Race matters: yet race today is as problematic a concept as ever.
Over the last few decades the way we in the United States think of race has changed once again, as so often in the past. I shall argue in this essay that we are now in a period of universal racial dualism.
Once, US society was a nearly monolithic racial hierarchy, in which everyone knew “his” place; under racial dualism, however, everyone’s racial identity is problematized. “How does it feel to be a problem?” Du Bois reported being asked (Du Bois 1989 [1903]). The racial dualism he discerned was, of course, that of black people, who (he argued) were forced to live simultaneously in two worlds. His insight, which at the beginning of the 20th century addressed black experience in a society of all-encompassing white supremacy, continues to apply, but the situation he analyzed has now become considerably more complicated. Today the racial anxiety, uncertainty, conflict, and tension expressed by the term “racial dualism,” affect everyone in the US, albeit in different ways.
Monolithic white supremacy is over, yet in a more concealed way, white power and privilege live on. The overt politics of racial subordination has been destroyed, yet it is still very possible to “play the racial card” in the political arena. Blacks and other racially-defined minorities are no longer subject to legal segregation, but they have not been relieved of the burdens of discrimination, even by laws supposedly intended to do so. Whites are no longer the official “ruling race,” yet they still enjoy many of the privileges descended from the time when they were.
The old recipes for racial equality, which involved creation of a “color-blind” society, have been transformed into formulas for the maintenance of racial inequality. The old programs for eliminating white racial privilege are now accused of creating nonwhite racial privilege. The welfare state, once seen as the instrument for overcoming poverty and social injustice, is now accused of fomenting these very ills.
What racial dualism means today is that there are now, so to speak, two ways of looking at race, where previously there was only one. In the past, let’s say the pre-WWII era, everyone agreed that racial subordination existed; the debate was about whether it was justified. Lester Bilbo and Thurgood Marshall — to pick two emblematic figures — shared the same paradigm, perhaps disagreeing politically and morally, perhaps even representing the forces of evil and good respectively, but nevertheless looking at the same social world.
But today agreement about the continuing existence of racial subordination has vanished. The meaning of race has been deeply problematized. Indeed, the very idea that “race matters” is something which today must be argued, something which is not self-evident. This in itself attests to the transformation which racial dualism has undergone from the time of Souls to our own time.
On the one hand, the world Du Bois analyzed is still very much with us. We live in a racialized society, a society in which racial meaning is engraved upon all our experiences. Racial identity shapes not only “life-chances,” but social life, taste, place of residence. Indeed, the meaning of race, the racial interpretation of everyday life and of the larger culture, polity, and economy, has been so finely tuned for so long, and has become so ingrained, that it is now “second nature,” a “common sense” that rarely requires acknowledgement.
As our racial antennae are tuned and retuned, race becomes “naturalized.” As an element of “human nature,” race partakes of the same degree of reality today — so it seems — as it did at the end of the 19th century when biologistic theories of race held sway and eugenics was advocated by supposedly enlightened and progressive thinkers. Indeed, if race is so much a part of “common sense”; if it is so involved in the production of person, culture, state, and nation; if racial identity is so recognizable, so palpable, so immediately obvious, then in practical terms at least, it becomes “real.” The sociological dictum that if people “…define situations as real, they are real in their consequences,” has its truth (Thomas and Thomas 1928, 572).
On the other hand, though, this “reality” is a rank illusion. It is patently inadequate, if not wholly false, to understand human experience, individual or collective, in racial terms. Indeed it is difficult even to specify the meaning of race beyond the most superficial notions. When we seek to delineate the principles underlying racial categorization, we encounter tremendous obstacles. Not only ordinary individuals, but even specialists — say, anthropologists or sociologists or geneticists — cannot present a convincing rationale for distinguishing among human groups by physical characteristics. Our “second nature,” our “common sense” about race, it turns out, is deeply uncertain, almost mythical.
Consider: in the U.S., hybridity is universal; most blacks have “white blood,” and tens of millions of whites have “black blood.”
Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and blacks, as well as whites, have centuries-long histories of contact with one another; colonial rule, enslavement, and migration have dubious merits, but they are all effective “race-mixers” (Davis 1991, Forbes 1988). Of course, even to speak in these terms, of “blood,” “mixture,” or “hybridity,” even to use such categories as “Asian American,” “Latino,” or “white,” one must enter deeply into the complexities of racial discourse. Such language reveals at once the socio-historical imbeddedness of all racial ideas. For these are merely current North American designations, and hardly unproblematic ones at that. They are not in any sense “true” or original self-descriptions of the human groups they name. Nor could any language be found which would avoid such a situation.
Race matters, then, in a second sense: it matters not only as a means of rendering the social world intelligible, but simultaneously as a way of making it opaque and mysterious. Race is not only real, but also illusory. Not only is it common sense; it is also common nonsense. Not only does it establish our identity; it also denies us our identity. Not only does it allocate resources, power, and privilege; it also provides means for challenging that allocation. Race not only naturalizes, but also socializes. The ineluctably contradictory character of race provides the context in which racial dualism — or the “color-line,” as Du Bois designated it, has developed as “the problem of the 20th century.”
RACIAL DUALISM AS HISTORY
The racial dynamics of conquest, of colonization, and of enslavement placed an indelible stamp on US society. Racialization (Omi and Winant 1994, Roediger, 1991) affected every individual and group, locating all in the hierarchy of the developing herrenvolk democracy (Takaki 1993, van den Berghe 1967, Roediger 1991). The herrenvolk, of course, were the white men of a certain standing or class, the only ones deemed worthy of full citizenship rights.
For centuries, white supremacy went almost entirely unquestioned in the political mainstream. This fact established the overall contours, as well as the particular political and cultural legacies, of racial subordination and resistance. It eliminated or at best severely limited the political terrain upon which racially-defined groups could mobilize within civil society, thus constituting these groups as “outsiders.” It denied the existence of commonalities among whites and nonwhites — such as shared economic activities and statuses, shared rights as citizens, even on occasion shared humanity — thus constructing race, at least in principle, in terms of all-embracing social difference.
Not only did racialization tend to minimize differences among people considered white, but it also homogenized distinctions among those whose difference with whites was considered the only crucial component of their identities. Over time, then, this “white vs. other” concept of difference created not fixed and unchanging racial identities — for these are always in flux — but the potentiality, the social structure, indeed the necessity, of universally racialized identities in the US. Elsewhere Omi and I have described this process (drawing on Gramsci 1971), as racial war of maneuver: a conflict between disenfranchised and systematically subordinated groups and a dictatorial and comprehensively dominant power (Omi and Winant 1994). In a war of maneuver, the principal efforts of the subordinated are devoted to self-preservation and resistance. They are anathematized; they lack social standing or political rights. In respect to social action, their options are generally reduced: to withdrawal into exclusive (and excluded) communities, to subversion (Bhabha 1994), and occasionally, to armed revolt.
In a schematic account of this type, there is an inevitable tendency to render the dynamics of racial oppression as more homogeneous than they actually were. But of course racial war of maneuver is not static, not frozen. At various moments, for example under the impact of the Haitian revolution or the pressures of abolitionism, and in the interregnum of Reconstruction, the power of white supremacy waxed or waned considerably. Its component parts — its ideology and instrumentalities — evolved and changed over time. Furthermore, what is true of oppression is true for resistance: both everyday, small-scale forms of opposition (Scott 1985), and large-scale challenge such as armed revolt and institution-building among free blacks, varied significantly with the conditions of racial war of maneuver. Nor should the account of racial war of maneuver be confined to black-white dynamics alone. Efforts to subordinate Native American nations (Cornell 1988, Rogin 1975), Mexicans (Montejano 1987), and Asians (Okihiro 1994, Takaki 1990) through warfare, expropriation of land, exclusion, denial of political rights, and super-exploitation, all fit into the general pattern of racial war of maneuver. Regional and temporal variations in these conflicts (Almaguer 1994) do not diminish the general applicability of this concept. Although I cannot detail these processes here, I have discussed them elsewhere (Winant 1994), and they have been extensively treated by others (Du Bois 1935, Foner 1990, Williamson 1986, Takaki 1993).
Paradoxically, white institutionalization of racial difference; white refusal to grant such basic democratic rights as citizenship, access to the legal system, and the vote; and white resistance to the participation by racially defined minorities in civil society, permitted — and indeed demanded — the organization and consolidation of excluded communities of color. Because it had so comprehensively externalized its racial others, racial war of maneuver helped constitute their resistance and opposition. It set the stage for its own destruction because, over centuries, whites forced nonwhites to forge their own identities, to draw on their own profound cultural and political resources, to suppress their differences, and to unite outside the high walls of a supposedly democratic society whose rights and privileges were systematically restricted on the basis of race.
Racial war of maneuver can be linked to the racial dualism discerned by Du Bois. If in the present we have no trouble understanding racism as a relation with both macro- and micro-social dimensions, as something which necessarily operates at both the institutional and social structural levels on the one hand, and at the levels of identity and experience on the other (Omi and Winant 1994), it is not anachronistic to discern that dynamic in earlier historical moments. What for whites was a fierce and pathological rejection of the possibility that they might harbor traits identified with various racial “others,” was for nonwhites a quasi-terroristic requirement that they anticipate and strive to protect themselves against the “violence of representation” (Armstrong and Tennenhouse 1989), not to mention the physical violence, directed against them by members of the ruling race. Psychohistorical approaches to US racial dynamics have long investigated these processes (Drinnon 1985, Rogin 1975, Williamson 1986).
Thus racial dualism was in part an adaptation, a resistance strategy of the oppressed, the excluded, the terrorized, under the conditions of racial war of maneuver. This recognition is clearly present in Du Bois, although by the time of Souls the seeds of the breakdown of this centuries-long racial regime are already germinating; indeed Du Bois himself is the chief cultivator of those seeds, the key agitator for a very different strategic orientation, racial war of position.
In the US a racial war of position came into being gradually in the 20th century, taking full shape only in the years following WWII. Gramsci explains war of position as political and cultural conflict, undertaken under conditions in which subordinated groups have attained some foothold, some rights, within civil society; thus they have the leverage, the ability to press some claims on their rulers and on the state (Omi and Winant 1994). Du Bois was the crucial early theorist of the transition to racial war of position, as well as the key strategist of black movement politics in that transition. His conflicts with Washington, and later wih Garvey, can be understood in terms of his commitment to politics, his ceaseless struggle for black access to civil society — in other words, his effort to create a racial war of position. Like Horatio at the bridge, Du Bois stands between the old and new racial orders, fighting tenaciously at the cusp of historical transition. Among modern theorists and activists, the only figure to whom he can be compared is Marx, who also ushered in almost singlehandedly a new way of thinking about the world, and who, like Du Bois, made his new manner of thought into a distinct kind of political practice.
RACIAL DUALISM AS POLITICS
Once a foothold in civil society was achieved, it was only a matter of time until full-scale political struggle over race emerged. The sources of the modern black movement have been extensively analyzed (Morris 1984, Branch 1988, Carson 1981, Zinn 1985, Omi and Winant 1994, Kluger 1977, Joanne Grant, ed. 1968) and need not detain us here. For present purposes, the important thing is that the movement transformed the American political universe, creating new organizations, new collective identities, and new political norms; challenging past racial practices and stereotypes; and ushering in a wave of democratizing social reform. This “great transformation,” which at first affected blacks, but soon touched Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans as well, permitted the entry of millions of racial minority group members into the political process. It set off the “second wave” of feminism, a new anti-imperialist and anti-war movement, movements for gay and disability rights, and even for environmental protection. The black movement deeply affected whites as well, challenging often unconscious beliefs in white supremacy, and demanding new and more respectful forms of behavior in relation to nonwhites.
In transforming the meaning of race and the contours of racial politics, the movement shifted the rules of participation and organizing principles of American politics itself. It made identity, difference, the “personal,” and language itself political issues in very new ways.
Once racial politics had taken the form of war of position, once basic political rights had been achieved, racial dualism ceased to be an exclusively black or minority response to white supremacy. The “normalizing” quality of white (and male) identity, which in the past had tended to render whiteness “transparent” and to equate it with US nationality itself, as in the phrase “a white man’s country,” necessarily experienced a certain erosion as nonwhites and women acquired a significant degree of admission into mainstream institutions, and began to exercise their voices and rights from inside, rather than from outside, the terrain of democratic politics.
By the mid-1960s, popular support for the main principles of the “civil rights revolution” had been secured, and legislation passed. An alternative viewpoint to the exclusionary framework of racial war of maneuver, to the archaic principles of overt white supremacy, had been institutionalized; and in legal terms (or in respect to what Weber would call “formal rationality”) something which could be described as “equality” had developed.
But no more than that. Substantive equality had not been achieved. White supremacy had not been vanquished. Indeed, as soon as civil rights legislation and “equal opportunity” policies were initiated, they started to erode under reactionary pressures. Because a significant breach had been opened in the armor of white supremacy, it was not expedient for the forces of “racial reaction” (Omi and Winant 1994) to seek a return to overtly exclusionary policies. Instead they sought to reinterpret the movement’s victories, to strip it of its more radical implications, to rearticulate its vision of a substantively egalitarian society in conservative and individualistic terms. “Equality” has had many meanings since the nation was founded; it was hardly unprecedented to redefine it in terms of formal and legal standing rather than in terms of redistribution of resources, compensation for past wrongs, or forceful efforts to reshape the material conditions of minorities. In retrospect, we can see that to have undertaken these measures would have involved as revolutionary a change as the Reconstruction measures did (Du Bois 1935, Foner 1988), for it would have required not only the dismantling of segregated neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools, but the transformation of the status of white workers as well. Substantive equality would have meant massive redistribution of resources; it would have clashed with fundamental capitalist class interests; it was never even on the table.