Freedom, Equality, and Race in America PDF

Here is the transcription of the provided text, formatted in Markdown. ### Freedom, Equality, Race Instead, as we learn from the research of Lawrence Bobo and others, they get deflected in myriad directions. *Ressentiment* also appears to have an effect on the other side of the racial divide, wher...

Here is the transcription of the provided text, formatted in Markdown. ### Freedom, Equality, Race Instead, as we learn from the research of Lawrence Bobo and others, they get deflected in myriad directions. *Ressentiment* also appears to have an effect on the other side of the racial divide, where it bears strong affinities with the largely symbolic strategies pursued by black leaders and by the black middle class in general. From the reparations movement to the accusations against Bill Clinton during the primary campaign for making allegedly racist comments on Barack Obama's candidacy, mainstream black political leadership appears to have taken up the strategy of Nietzsche's priests: rather than assaulting the stronger enemy directly, they have decided to make him disdain his own power. Quite often, this technique involves the deployment of high-order, self-justifying victimology aimed at convincing him of his racism, and at propping up the confidence of his accusers. Perhaps this strategy would work if the enemy really was like Nietzsche's warriors, but the slippery post-civil rights form of white racism rarely expresses itself in a full-throated fashion. In fact, many supposedly powerful whites already think of themselves as real or potential victims of one sort or another. One only needs to reflect for a moment on the war in Iraq, hysterics over terrorism, or the gigantic background of private fear and paranoia now possessing the country, to become downright paranoid about the prospect of becoming the victim of some other victim's gesture of self-defense. Our current era of race relations in America maintains racial distinctions largely through the expectation that they will soon disappear. This stands in contrast with previous periods, in which such categories as black and white counted as durable facts of descent and destiny. One side of the current race debate plays up the disappearance of racial distinctions, sometimes by exaggerating the virtues of color blindness. The other side guards against the diminishment of such distinctions, at times going so far as to equate current racial problems with the dark and distant past of slavery and Jim Crow. For the first camp-what we might call a "party of hope"-current racial realities signal the promise of a raceless future where skin color may have no more societal import than does eye color. The second-a "party of memory"-aims for a similar goal, but it generally casts its ultimate purpose in more pluralistic terms. This party finds the waning of time-worn forms of racial identity, along with the deeply etched barriers that gave rise to them, threatening to the very political movements that might bring about lasting positive change. Ironically, the party of memory finds what the party of hope would call racial progress somewhat dangerous to ultimate racial justice. No less curious is the party of hope prevailing expectation that after more than two hundred years of Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance constant racial strife, black and white identity in the United States will simply fade away. In some ways, the expectation that race will disappear seems particular to our era of race relations; but in other ways, the thought goes back quite far. Most Americans have always regarded the abiding values of our country as universal, and therefore raceless. Because they think of such principles as equality and freedom in this they believe that eventually, in an essentially good and the fair country such as ours, these high ideals will prevail over the more parochial values that keep us apart. Historically, this progressive mind-set has come with many good intentions on the race question but much less follow-up. For this and other reasons, it has long been an object of attack for scholars of the African American experience. Those who believe that racial problems will go away on their own tend not to act directly to solve them, or they put forth half-stepping measures that address some issues but invent, reinvent, or exacerbate others. Over time, this tendency has contributed mightily to the cloud of betrayal that hangs constantly, and sometimes ominously, over the American racial discourse. At its worst, the seemingly benign idea of progress, which many still regard as the soul of the American Dream, can serve as a mask for crass class interest, or can allow racists to "blame the victim" and thus to deny the cruel meaning of their antidemocratic views. Yet these consequences of progress do not contradict the meaning of such foundational values as freedom and equality so much as they manifest their inner logic. It is worth remembering the uncomfortable and often repeated fact that our most cherished American principles have as one of their most important sources the minds of slave masters and slave traders. Discerning observers of the American experience, such as the historian Edmund Morgan, have demonstrated a necessary relationship between the freedom cries of slave masters and their status as absolute rulers of stateless men and women who were regarded primarily as property, and as human beings in a much less formal register. In American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), Morgan argues that ruling-class Southerners at the time of the American Revolution-Patrick Henry, for example tended to associate all subordination with the wretched condition of their slaves.¹ They employed this analogy in their idealistic insistence on freedom from the British. Henry's famous eruption on the floor of the Continental Congress, "Give me liberty or give me death," marked him as a radical republican, one ready to pay the highest price for independence. Nevertheless, the reverberant utterance of this slave-holding Virginian (and others like him) bequeathed a cruel legacy to generations of Americans. Unlike free white men, Henry's slaves lived under the very condition that would presumably have driven their freedom-loving master to kill and to die. Henry's formulation, oddly, justified the degradation of African Americans by the very condition that the degradation caused; in no small measure, it associated blackness with shame. Though they lived to guarantee the freedom of supposedly independent men and yearned for freedom in their own terms despite their abasement, African Americans suffered for how starkly they symbolized what white men both feared and despised. Many writers have observed that the Enlightenment, through its emphasis on human powers, gave freedom in modern meaning; but it also codified the modern idea of race as one way to distinguish those worthy of liberty from the irrational, uncivilized, and superstitious "others" who supposedly lived in a perpetual past. In other words, this period handed down most of the reasons to believe in race along with justifications for despising and resisting it. As the Enlightenment gave life to the modern concept of race, it Freedom, Equality, Race Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance Freedom, Equality, Race created the conditions that force us to explain and theorize this category incessantly. In the hands of early theorists such as Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and de Buffon, seemingly objective biological categories like skin color and skull size served as impartial measures that positioned man as a subject of his own scientific inquiry and thus as an object of new forms of power/knowledge that enabled the shaping and control of populations. Thus, human freedom in this era, and thereafter, depended crucially on a thoroughgoing form of subjection that created its own human hierarchies, which in some ways reinscribed ancient ideas of descent and inheritance but now with a new and highly influential scientific imprimatur. As the modern concept of freedom carried with it the inclusive language of universalism, it also privileged certain human qualities: rationality, possession of nature or property, power, resistance, and autonomy, to name a few. Instead of membership in humanity as it is, freedom signified communion with humanity as it ought to be. Those who failed to qualify for this imagined ideal often faced terrible consequences, as the long history of slavery, imperialism, sexism, and class oppression demonstrates amply. From their inception, the concepts of freedom and race have reinforced each other in the making of modernity; they continue to do so today, though the concept of race has shifted in its definitional grounding, from nature to culture. Despite the fact that some of the old biological valences remain active, the post-civil rights concept of race relies mainly on values, modes of signifying, and behavior. Rather than membership in a biological group, "whiteness" represents a cultural norm that nonwhites may receive rewards for adopting-though acquiring the necessary cultural capital to do so can prove almost impossible for many. Here, as the social theorist Étienne Balibar points out, the work of exclusion occurs through the regulation of inclusion rather than forming an absolute line of demarcation between the races.² Those able to conform to the normalizing logic of post-civil rights "whiteness" live freer lives than those who cannot, as the dismal statistics showing racial disparities in wealth, health, education, and criminal justice reveal so evidently. Under this regime, the work of racial exclusion can occur quite efficiently but without overt racism. In contrast with the frontal assault of the pre-civil rights racial regime, which occurred more or less in the open, the new dispensation conducts most of its oppressive labor behind a smokescreen of elaborate racial etiquette and discursive deflection that communicates racial fear and aversion across an ever wider range of signification. In its more recent cultural guise, race continues to play a strategic role on the exclusionary side of modern freedom; for the excluded, however, racial identity still has deep attractions, partly because the sheer existence of barriers to full social advancement provides a backdrop against which group solidarity might be perceived in moral terms: as part of a long and righteous struggle for freedom. This idea is well established among African Americans, who, out of the necessity struggles have served not only as ways of acquiring freedom, but also as a means of performing it culturally and politically across a great range that encompasses modes of self-fashioning, artistic styles, and direst forms of political resistance and protest. This tradition of performing freedom has helped raise African American identity above the level of mere external imposition as it has created a point of identification for those outside the group to symbolize their own freedom struggles. As a dominant value in American life, freedom has always stood beside and competed with the idea of equality. Nowhere Freedom, Equality, Race Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance Freedom, Equality, Race has the complex relationship between these two bedrock concepts had greater impact than in the history of race relations, and rarely has their mutual opposition and entanglement received more trenchant treatment than in the work of the century theorists Alexis de Tocqueville. In his classic Democracy in America (1840), he observed that in a country where all men are created equal, those not recognized as equals may not be regarded as men. Tocqueville's eminently logical formula sets out in elegant form the intimate connection between a high universal ideal and a foundational violence that it maintains through masking. Following Tocqueville calculation, hierarchies of descent grow naturally from the inner tensions of democratic values, not out of failure to attend to them. Americans constantly reinvent racial distinctions and invidious race theories in part to resolve the quandary of their national condition, which entails basic equality on one side and a battle for individual distinction or status on the other. Basing his observations on an extensive tour of the United States during the 1830s, Tocqueville regarded American society as test case for the prospects of a new and inexorable world-historical processes in which equality, individualism, and democracy would increasingly displace privilege based on birth and permanent class structures. He contemplated America at an early stage of its development with the chaos and despotism of postrevolutionary France. Though he recognized the positive potential of democracy, he remained equally cognizant of its constitutional flaws tendencies toward conformity, dictatorship of the that he might arrange life according their tastes, talents, and desires. Many of the that Tocqueville recognizes in American democracy endangered in our own age. Without blackness one of the justification for average white people to count that some the poorest American tolerate their Freedom, Equality, Race Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance Freedom, Equality, Race condition, even as demographers anticipate the day, not more than a few decades from now, when the American majority will in numbers, take on a darker hue. In his famous section "On the Three Races That Currently Inhabit America," Tocqueville contributed a foundational pillar to a long tradition of social analysis that would regard the problem of black and white as an aberration rather than a constitutive feature of American social and political life. Though he analyzes the slave South in detail, he treats it as the opposite of the industrial North Which for him represented the future of American democracy because of its burgeoning productivity, its culture of equality, and the competitive anxiety of its citizens. In the South, he surmised the existence of slavery retarded development. Rather than productive the South was lazy, instead of progressive, it remained mired in the past. Lacking ingenuity, it depended on a narrow range of cash crops; lacking equality, it suffered from the absence of inner drive in its rank-and-file citizens, who depended on relatively unproductive slaves; lacking equality it suffered from the absence drive of its rank-and-file citizens who depended on relatively unproductive slaves to do most of the work. None of these factors that make the American experience the more one has ever seen in what they have lived Freedom. Equality, Race Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance to invent the nigger- the nameless, faceless incompetent who warranted no respect in order to hide from the real prospect of becoming one. The "psychological wage" of whiteness, which W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified in Black reconstruction (1935), to explain what kept the white and black working classes apart, resorted heavily on this formula, for no matter how far a white person fell in the competition with other whites he could always back and spot in a dark face in order. Given the broad patterns of American politics since the late 1960s, it appears that an unfortunately high percentage of those still think this way of thinking. In his many essays on race and American identity. Ralph Ellison wrote what the democratic Chaos' that white Americans thought to avoid through their various production onto African Americans. Today, this pre-civil rights may vary from today, the consequences have been much at all. As they did for at least four decades, they didn't do it for the first four decades. At its base, Ellison suggested, this democratic culture is not as successful. Ellison's protagonist in the novel Invisible Man (1952) spends the largest way in his mind in order, since he needed the humanity he wants to recognize, as he is like them with some authority. The game of projection at the heart of race relations comes, according to Ellison, with a large portion of paranoia, as whites, subject to the identity confusion so basic to American life, know on some unconscious level that black skin for the misses. Of course, and thus as you can see, Today, in our post-civil rights period that he is a bad person and no trace of his sin. Freedom. Equality, Race Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance even poorer-the black middle class has risen to unprec- edented heights of professional achievement, inclusion in important institutions, and social exposure. Today, the appearance black Americans in advertising and the media no longer surprises, nor do the image they portray faces reflect stereotypes some popular stars, such as Tiger, Woods, whose background would not have spared him from being considered black Such are the confusions of our moment, emanations of an undigested past. Through this one can say that America is ready again. They always tried to keep them out as well. Freedom. Equality. Race Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance **Notes** 1. On the connection between republicanism and slavery, see Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 363-390; also Edmund S. Morgan, "Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox," Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (June 1972): 5-29. 2. Étienne Balibar, "Is There a 'Neo-racism'?," in Race, Nation, Class, by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 17-28. 3. See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 2007); and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 4. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 2002), 302-391. 5. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1995); Ralph Ellison, "Twentieth Century Fiction and the Mask of Humanity," in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House 6. This is the title of Werner Sollors's authoritative account of interracial literature in America; see Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 7. Nathan lrvin Huggins, Black Odyssey: The Afro-American Ordeal in Slavery (New York Random House, 1990), 243-244. Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance Freedom, Equality, Race