The Retreat from Race and Class
by David Roediger
David Roediger ([email protected]) teaches history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His most recent book is Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (Perseus Publishing, 2006).
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As the twentieth century started, indeed at almost exactly the same moment that W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that the “color line” would be its great divide, Eugene Victor Debs announced that the socialist movement that he led in the United States could and should offer “nothing special” to African Americans. “The class struggle,” Debs added, “is colorless.” As the century unfolded, the white Marxist left, schooled by struggles for colonial freedom and by the self-activity of people of color in the centers of empire, increasingly saw the wisdom of Du Bois’s insight and tried hard to consider how knowledge of the color line could illuminate, energize, and express class struggles. We would increasingly turn to other passages from Debs, including one expressing a historical insight that he could already articulate in the early twentieth century but that his colorblindness kept him from acting upon: “That the white heel is still on the black neck is simply proof that the world is not yet civilized. The history of the Negro in the United States is a history of crime without a parallel.”
As the twenty-first century starts, the idea of a colorless struggle for human progress is unfortunately back with a vengeance. Such is of course the case on the right in the United States, where what the legal scholar Neil Gotanda and others have called “colorblind racism” has underpinned attacks on affirmative action and even on the collection of the race-based statistics necessary to show patterns of discrimination. The high-sounding, ostensibly freedom-loving names given to such well-funded campaigns—“civil rights initiatives” to undermine affirmative action and “racial privacy acts” to do in the amassing of basic knowledge regarding the impact of race—have contributed mightily to attempts to recapture the moral high ground by those contending that a society in which white family wealth is about ten times that of black family wealth is nonetheless a colorblind one.
Nor are such instances confined to the United States. With the blood scarcely dry from white Australian riots against Arab beachgoers, that country’s neoliberal leader John Howard reacted to press headlines screaming “Race Hate” and “Race War” by loudly proclaiming that he heads a colorblind society. When the French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the ruling party there and leading candidate to replace Jacques Chirac as president, recently suffered criticism on race issues, he quickly planned a trip to Martinique to emphasize how little race allegedly matters in the French colonial world. Sarkozy stood out as especially harsh in his response to the rebellions of Islamic youth in France against police violence. He failed to join the president and prime minister in belatedly distancing themselves from a recently passed law requiring that French textbooks “recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in North Africa.” But an escape to colorblindness still seemed possible.
Yet, Sarkozy was so thoroughly not welcomed by Martinique’s great politician, poet, and theorist of liberation, Aimé Césaire, and others that the publicity stunt had to be canceled. Nonetheless, within France the pernicious role of long-established “colorblindness” operates so strongly that Sarkozy can remain a top presidential contender. The legislative left did not originally raise any serious protest against passage of the pro-colonialist textbook legislation, and the nation adheres to the same basic no-counting-by-race policies that racial privacy acts seek to establish in the United States. Ironically, Sarkozy himself has recently called for limited “discrimination positive,” (affirmative action), as a carrot operating in tandem with deportations and immigration restriction to quell rebellions in France. But to put any “positive” measures into practice remains a problem. As The Economist recently put it, the French minister for equality remains practically alone at the top of the government in advocating finding a way even to “measure the presence of the children of immigration” in political structures, the bureaucracy, and the labor force.
Against Race But Not for Class: Raceless Liberalism & Social Theory
What is distressingly new is the extent to which indictments of antiracism, and even attacks on the use of race as a concept, come now from liberalism and from the left. Electorally, of course, one hallmark of efforts by the Democratic Leadership Council to move the Democratic Party still further to the right has been an attempt to distance the party from concrete appeals to, and identification with, people of color. Thus the constituencies most aware of both race and class inequities are marginalized in the name of appeals for “universal” programs. Meanwhile actually existing universal social programs, such as “welfare-as-we-know-it,” have been subjected to withering (and anything but colorblind) bipartisan attacks. The left was capable a decade ago of dissecting such a shell game, most trenchantly in Stephen Steinberg’s 1994 New Politics article on the “liberal retreat from race,” and in what will presumably be Christopher Hitchens’s last serious book, his 1999 dismantling of Clintonism, No One Left to Lie To.
At a time when no real political alternatives are offered by Democratic candidates who confine their tepid appeals for racial justice to the King holiday and to talks in black churches, the intellecutual left also seems to be abandoning race. Thus the brilliance of Paul Gilroy is turned to writing Against Race, and Antonia Darder joins Rodolfo D. Torres in producing the triumphal After Race. Orlando Patterson holds forth under the title “Race Over,” while Loïc Wacquant and the late activist/sociologist Pierre Bourdieu brand analysis of race as an axis of inequality in Brazil as a pernicious export from a United States social science establishment that is as “cunning” as it is “imperialist.”
Full article.
