The seeds of racial reaction were thus already present in the ideological choices open in the 1960s: moderate tendencies which espoused integration and “color-blind” racial policies, and radical positions which advocated black (or brown, or red, or yellow) power, in other words racial nationalism. While each of these positions had something to recommend it, neither was sustainable by itself, and no synthesis between them seemed possible. Integrationist views held open the possibility of a class-based alliance between minority and white poor and working people, a position which Martin Luther King Jr. was espousing in the last year of his life (Garrow 1988). In ideological terms, though, integrationism tended to liquidate the specifically racial dimension of the movement which had spawned it. Nationalist perspectives had the opposite problem: though they could assert the irreducibility of racial differences, they lacked the ideological equipment to forge alliances across racial lines, particularly with whites. The few groups which possessed the ability to walk the line between racial nationalism and radical multiracial class politics — such as the Black Panther Party — were undone by repression and by their precarious hold on an impoverished and volatile membership.
Thus the rise to power of neoconservatism, which inherited and rearticulated the “moderate” tendencies which emerged from the movement. Indeed, already in the mid-1960s such voices were heard decrying the tendency toward “positive discrimination” (Gordon 1964); by the mid-1970s a leading neoconservative could produce an influential tract entitled Affirmative Discrimination (Glazer 1975), and an important intervention of 1978 claimed that race was “declining in significance” (Wilson 1978).
Among ordinary whites similar fragmentations occurred: reacting to perceived losses in their racially privileged status but unable to identify with the more radical successors to the movement; unable in the aftermath of the civil rights era to espouse white supremacy but excluded and condemned by a racial politics which paid little attention to class, most whites came to support a conservative and individualistic form of egalitarianism, advocating a supposedly “colorblind” (but actually deeply race-conscious) political position. This was the white “politics of difference.” This synthesis acquired particular force as job losses and stagnating income cut deeply into whites’ sense of security. It gathered strength as the lower strata of the black and Latino communities were plunged into deeper poverty by massive cutbacks in welfare state programs, education, and federal assistance to the cities; when the inevitable moral panics about crime, drugs, drive-bys, and teenage prgenancy ensued, they fuelled the white flight to the right. In a thoroughly corporate culture, no countervailing arguments (against corporate greed and deindustrialization, for example) acquired so much as a foothold in the mainstream political discourse.
Meanwhile blacks, as well as other racially-defined minority groups, were convulsed by new conflicts over group identity. Class divisions and various strains of resurgent cultural nationalism disrupted the black community and drove some blacks, both elite and “everyday” folks, in strongly conservative directions. Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans experienced different, but parallel, schisms. Even those whose “whiteness” retains problematic elements, such as Arab Americans and Jews, were newly confronted by conflicts over where their political and moral allegiances lay in the post-civil rights era.
These examples need not be extended further. The point is clear: a new racial paradigm, tension-ridden, uncertain, and unstable, came into being. This paradigm combined the pre-WWII inheritance of white supremacy, which survived in significant measure, with the legacy of the 1960s movements — themselves based on a centuries-long tradition of resistance to conquest, enslavement, and racial oppression.
Thus all the social practices which enforced black racial dualism in 1903 continue today: the segregation of minority (and particularly black) communities (Massey and Denton 1993), the discriminatory and regressive allocation of underemployment, undereducation, and other forms of substantive inequality to members of these communities, and the general cultural subordination that accompanies white supremacy.
Nevertheless, we are not in 1903. Massive transformations have occurred in the US racial order, particularly over the last half-century. From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, an important wave of racial reform swept across the land, altering not only racial policy but also racial identity, redrawing the American political and cultural map, refuelling oppositional currents that had lain dormant in the US for decades, such as feminism and anti-imperialism. Strictly, of course, this was not a “new” movement at all, but rather an upwelling of oppositional forces that abided, that had their origins in the earliest moments of conquest and enslavement, and that were linked to the most epochal struggles of oppressed peoples across the globe for emancipation and justice.
From the 1960s to the present, then, not only black people, but the nation at large, have been riven by a throughgoing and deep-seated struggle: the antagonistic coexistence, the contradiction, of the two great forces of white supremacy on the one hand, and of the movement for racial and indeed broader social justice on the other. It is this convulsion, this contradiction, that constitutes racial dualism at century’s end.
I anticipate various objections to the line of argument that race no longer operates as a simple signifier — as it largely did in Du Bois’s day — absolutely locating one in a certain largely homogeneous community or another. Was white supremacy ever truly that monolithic? Did not Du Bois’s narrative already expose its delusions of absolute racial difference? And hasn’t “the movement” accomplished at least this much: that it has made possible a greater “crossing over,” a greater cultural hybridization, a greater awareness of the presence of “others” who are also subjects, who also have rights, who can act politically, etc.? Furthermore, isn’t the designation of “duality” suspect for various reasons? Does it not privilege whites, for instance, by suggesting that there are whites and there are “the others”? In racial terms, shouldn’t I be talking about “pluralism” rather than dualism?
And what about the other dimensions of politics and identity? What about gender and class? These dynamics shape politics and culture today in ways very different from the manner in which Du Bois — feminist and socialist though he was — encountered them nearly a century ago. Even if we think about their impact on racial identity and politics, on the problematic theme of racial dualism today, they appear to play a fragmenting role: pointing to many fissures, not just two.
Without question, there are weaknesses in my use of the racial dualism framework in a revised, contemporary form. Although I think these objections can be all be answered, for now I want simply to stress the effectiveness of this approach in illuminating the charged and contentious sociohistorical context in which racial politics are framed in the US at century’s end. I have shown how the concept helps us understand the peculiar and contradictory character of large-scale, macro-level racial politics at century’s end. I should like now to apply it to small-scale, micro-level racial politics.
RACIAL DUALISM AS IDENTITY
As the civil rights legacy was drawn and quartered — beginning in the late 1960s and with ever-greater success in the following two decades — the tugging and hauling, the escalating contestation over the meaning of race, resulted in ever more conflicting and contradictory notions of racial identity. The significance of race (”declining” or increasing?), the interpretation of racial equality (”color-blind” or color conscious?), the institutionalization of racial justice (”reverse discrimination” or affirmative action?), and the very categories — black, white, Latino/Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American — employed to classify racial groups were all called into question as they emerged from the civil rights “victory” of the mid-1960s. These racial signifiers are all ambiguous or contradictory today. We cannot escape the racial labels which US society comprehensively assigns to all within it; this has been the fate of “Americans” since Europeans arrived on these shores. Yet less than ever can we identify unproblematically or unselfconsciously with these designations, for they are riven — as we ourselves are fissured — to an unprecedented extent by the conflicts and contradictions posed by the political struggles of the past decades.
How do these conflicts and contradictions shape the various racial identities available today? Without hoping to be anything more than schematic, I will now offer some observations on the racial “politics of identity” at century’s end. As the entire argument I have presented here should suggest, I do not share the denunciatory attitude toward “identity politics” so evident on both right and left today (Newfield 1993, Gitlin 1993). In my view, the matrices of identity are ineluctably political, for they involve interests, desire, antagonisms, etc., in constant interplay with broad social structures. To explore these matters more fully would go beyond the present article’s scope.
Yet the critics do have one thing right: if any of my account here rings true, there can be no “straightforward” identity politics. Our awareness of the pervasiveness of racial dualism today should serve to check claims of unmediated authenticity, whether hegemonic or subaltern. Appeals to “traditional values,” to the national culture, to canonized texts which exemplify hegemonic claims, must therefore be treated with the extreme suspicion which awareness of standpoint demands. Subaltern claims, as expressed for example through invocation of supposedly direct experiences of oppression — of the form “As a black person, I know X…,” or “As a woman, I know X… (where X is an undifferentiated generalization about blacks’ or women’s experience) — are also suspect.
With these guidelines in mind, let us briefly explore the terrain of the racial politics of identity, focusing our attention on the operations of racial dualism today.
BLACK RACIAL DUALISM: First, 30 years after the ambiguous victory of the civil rights movement, what does it mean to be “black”? The decline of the organized black movement in the 1970s, and the wholesale assaults against the welfare state initiated by Ronald Reagan during the 1980s, sharply increased divisions along class and gender lines in the black community. The divergent experiences of the black middle class and the black poor — experiences far more distant from each other than they were in the days of official segregation — make a unitary racial identity seem a distant dream indeed. A whole other set of divisions has emerged around gender, such that black men’s and women’s experiences probably diverge more significantly today than at any other moment since slavery days. Consequently, a coherent black politics which could reach across class lines seems remote.
Divisions of class have meant that in the upper strata of the black community a portion of the ideal of substantive equality has indeed been achieved, though in the US no black person can ever believe her or himself to be beyond the reach of white supremacy (Cose 1993, Graham 1995, Williams 1991). Meanwhile the desolation of the poor increases steadily, fuelled in part by the very claim that equality (formal equality, that is) has been attained, that we are now a “color-blind” society, etc. Such rhetoric attributes black poverty to defects in black motivation (Murray 1984, Kaus 1992) intelligence (Herrnstein and Murray 1994), or family structure (Gordon 1994), a strategy of victim-blaming which often takes aim, not only at “underclass” blacks but at low-income black women in particular. Additionally, opportunity structures for blacks are changing by class and gender in unprecedented ways (Carnoy 1994, Hacker 1992).
The significance of a divided black community, and hence identity, is complex, even contradictory. On the one hand the emergence of diverse and even conflicting voices in the black community is welcome, for it reflects real changes in the direction of mobility and democratization. On the other hand, the persistence of glaring racial inequality — that is, of an ongoing dimension of white supremacy and racism that pervades the entire society — demands a level of concerted action that division and discord tend to preclude. Racial dualism at century’s end.
OTHER “OTHERS”: In the 1990s, what does it mean to be “yellow” or “brown”? Before the success of civil rights (and particularly immigration) reforms in the mid-1960s, racialized groups of Asian and Latin American origin experienced very high levels of exclusion and intolerance. After 1965 these communities began to grow rapidly. Previously isolated in enclaves based on language and national origin, Koreans, Filipinos, Japanese, and Chinese underwent a substantial racialization process from the late 1960s onward, emerging as “Asian Americans” (Espiritu 1992). Accompanying these shifts was significant upward mobility for some — though by no means all — sectors of Asian America.
Similar shifts overtook Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Central Americans, and even Cubans as the “Latino” and “Hispanic” categories were popularized (Moore and Pachon 1985). For example, the destruction of formal segregation in Texas had a profound impact on Mexican-Americans there (Montejano 1987). Segregation of Latinos in the upper and middle economic strata decreased rapidly across the country (far more rapidly than that of comparable black income earners) (Massey and Denton 1993), and some Latino groups achieved or consolidated solid middle class status (notably Cubans and to some extent Dominicans). The Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Central American barrios, however, continued to be plagued by immigrant-bashing and high levels of poverty that could only be seen as racially organized (Moore and Pinderhughes, eds. 1993).
Thus for both Asian Americans and Latinos contemporary racial identity is fraught with contradictions. Apart from long-standing antagonisms among particular groups — for example, Cubans and Puerto Ricans, or Koreans and Japanese — significant class- and gender-based conflicts exist as well. Tendencies among long-established residents to disparage and sometimes exploit immigrants who are “fresh off the boat,” or for group ties to attenuate as social mobility increases, suggest the centrality of class in immigrant life (Portes and Bach 1985; Takaki 1990). The liberating possibilities encountered by immigrating women, and their greater proclivity to settle in the U.S. rather than to return to their countries of origin, suggest the centrality of gender in immigrant life (Grasmuck and Pessar 1991).
Not unlike blacks, Asian Americans and Latinos often find themselves caught between the past and the future. Old forms of racism have resurfaced to confront them, as in the renewed enthusiasm for immigrant bashing and the recurrent waves of anti-Japanese and anti-Chinese paranoia. Discrimination has resurfaced again, sometimes in new ways, as in controversies over Asian admissions to elite universities (Takagi 1993). Yet at the same time the newly panethnicized identities of Asian Americans and Latinos have brought them face to face with challenges that were quite distinct from anything faced in the past. Some examples of these challenges are the dubious gift of neoconservative support (Asians as the “model minority,” for example), the antagonism of blacks (Kim 1993, Omi and Winant 1993, Miles 1992), and the tendencies toward dilution of specific ethnic/national identity in a racialized category created by a combination of “lumping” and political exigency. Often more successful and accepted than in the past, but subject to new antagonisms and new doubts about their status, Asian Americans and Latinos experience a distinct racial dualism today.
For reasons of space I am going to slight Native Americans here, but there is ample evidence to believe that in the postwar period Indian nations as well came face-to face-with a racially dualistic situation. Here too the old logic of despoliation still applied: environmental destruction and land rape, appalling poverty, and cultural assault continued to take their toll. Yet a new, activist, and often economically and politically savvy Native America could also be glimpsed. Today Indians have developed techniques for fighting in the courts, for asserting treaty rights, and indeed for regaining a modicum of economic and political control over their tribal destinies which would have been unthinkable a generation ago (Nagel 1995, Cornell 1988).