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Leonard Harris, ed., Racism (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 1999). ISBN 1-57392-639-6 $25.00 (paper). The anthology that Leonard Harris has produced under the series Key Concepts in Critical Theory is one of the best of its kind. Twenty-two different essays covering every conceivable approach and theme related to the question of racism make up this nearly 500 page collection. We find some classical papers, as well as some less known ones. We find discussions of racism and religious persecution, or the way in which racism is a new form of Calvinism, as Ruth Benedict put it. We find socio-biological justifications of racism on the basis of biological nepotism. We find discussions of negritude, nationalism and nativism, and they way they exhibit a type of attitude that is racialist but not racist. We also find discussions of global tribes, and the way race and ethnicity link groups across ages and territory. We also find fascinating and penetrating discussions of the way in which racism was catalyzed by colonialism in India, Brazil, and Latin America. We are treated to instructive discussions and analyses of racism and class struggle, how the former always conditions the latter, or rather how one is smuggled through the other. We also find the indispensable discussions of the relationship between the hegemony of certain types of scientific discourses and racism, as well as their visceral rejection and refutation by a type of philosophical disenchantment and skepticism that now goes by the name of postmodernism. We also find instructive discussions of racism and rationality, and how, given certain weak, or acceptable standards of rationality, racism does not appear too irrational. Thus, the suggestion is that it is not enough to impute to racists a lack of rationality, or that they are being irrational when they are being racists. Such an accusation does not face the racist. Something more biting and severe is required. The book concludes with a look at the relationship between racism and moral virtue. The epilogue, by Harris, served a wonderful summary and synthesis. I described the contents of the books, and some of the topics it covers, because I did not want to prejudge the quality of this work by describing the three rubrics Harris used to divide the book, namely: objective realism, constructive realism, and reason, race, and morality. For the moment, I wanted to suggest by my overview of topics, themes and approaches that this book would make an excellent course reader, and that almost everything is represented in it that merits careful study. In the remainder of this essay I will offer the lineaments of a type of analysis of racism that I think is inchoate in Harris’ overall approach and even in his own epilogue, but which never come to the
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foreground. The following reflections are not to be taken as a criticism. They are instead insights, and desiderata that were instigated by the many wonderful essays Harris has gathered for us. Without the book, and its angle of approach, I would not have been able to develop the following lines of investigation. One of the first questions that we must ask when we are thinking about racism is the following: Has there always been racism? This is a question about the origins, sources, and historicity of racism. Racism is a social practice, an institutional arrangement, a mental attitude, and a moral inclination. As such, it cannot not have a history. For as long as we see racism as being imbricated with all aspects of society, then it changes, mutates, transforms like the rest of society. For this reason, we must agree with David Goldberg, “. . . there is no unified phenomenon of racism, only a range of racisms” (p. 392), and with Harris’s affirmation: “Races do not exist as trans-historical objective entities.” (p. 443). To recognize the historicity of racism already commits us to a multi-pronged approach to racism. For if there is no one form of racism, but racisms, then we must be on guard against their historically specific coagulations. To make racisms historically contingent does not disarm us against their insidiousness and pervasiveness. On the contrary, making it historically specific ought to make us less naive about its stealth character, and perhaps better prepared to discover racism(s) where we least expected, or where we have not been used to see their and its nefariousness and invidiousness. Once we acknowledge the historicity of racism (from here onward I shift to the singular for I am trying to address our own engagement with it, and perhaps arrive at a philosophical typology) we could ask: Is racism an anachronism? I want to make the case that there is a synchronicity of racism that makes it as modern as the latest synthetic pleasures of cyber-society. Racism is not some atavistic residue from a by-gone era. Nor is it some vestigial organ from pre-modern times. It is instead an expression of the very modernity of our society. Prima facie, we know racism is linked to the rise of the taxonomic discourses of the modern sciences. Once nature became an object of scientific investigation, it also became necessary to categorize every natural entity under a heading, and subheading. Things became signs for certain properties, functions, forms of life and survival. Racism is linked to a production of truth, to the discourses of rationality, quantification, and manipulation that have made us modern. I want to say: we have become modern by becoming good racists. Racism is part and parcel of the enshrinement of a certain type of modern rationality, one that is a combination of the Cartesian flight from objectivity, its consequent mathematization of the social world,
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on the one hand, and the synthesis of reason and history executed by Hegel, on the other hand. This last one, however, was but the secularization of the very Christian idea of divine history (Heilsgeschichte); in this way, what had acted as a corrosive of substantive particularisms and a catalyst of a type of theo-cosmo-politanism, turned once again into a principle of discrimination and segregation. Now, however, the reasons for relegating some to the lower echelons of the sacrificial pyramid of privilege were rationalized on the logic of history itself. History, once naturalized in social Darwinism, assigned some to the losing and others to the winning side of the struggle and slaughter bench that history is and will continue to be. In this way, what were very old ways of separating, segregating, making sense of differences on the basis of theological and cultural differences, was modernized. At the same time, more efficient and “rational” ways of separating and taxonomizing were invented and organized. Without the progress of society, of science, of its practices of communication, and its economic networks, racism would not be what is. Racism is a secretion of modern society, as West put it so beautifully (West 1982, p. 48). Thus, for the moment, racism has a history, which reflects the very historicity of everything that is social. And, racism is endemic to modern societies. If we are to understand the persistence of racisms, its resilience, its astonishing ability to mutate and update, then we must study all the social practices, social institutions, discourses and scientific mythologies that are part and parcel of the renewal of racism. We cannot be content with staying the racism of this or that institution, alone. Nor can we reduce racism to merely economic, political, or aesthetic racism. For racism is plural, lymphatic, capillary. It is a polymorphous and deeply rooted agent of segregation, exclusion, and marginalization. Turning to the origins of racism, we must ask: Where or how did racism begin? Racism is a species of the genus of producing and marking differences that make differences for the sake of exclusion. Before modern racism, we had religious racism (against Jews, heathens or pagans), linguistic racism (against those who did not speak the language of the polis), and even political racism (against those who were not citizens of a city, or an empire). These racisms, if you will, did not operate on the basis of “race” as we come to understand it, namely as a purported biological, genetic, and phenotypic characteristic of human beings. Why did it become necessary to have to catalogue humans from the standpoint of their bodies, their biological properties? Most importantly, why did it become possible to do so when under a Judeo-Christian world-view what is significant about the human being is their soul, that which is intangible and non-corporeal, and for that very reason, the least able to be measured, categorized, and quantified? How did biological racism become possible?
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I circled around again to this question because I want to underscore a point, an area of investigation that in my view remains, at least in philosophical circles, extremely virgin and unexplored. I am referring to the 16th century, the discovery of the New World, the expulsion of the Jews and the Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. These events that are nicely captured by two institutions: the inquisition and the encomienda. The former, one of the truly first modern institutions was at the service of the state, as proxy for the church, and sought to eradicate heterodoxy by detecting blood impurity. The latter, the development of the Imperial state abroad, thus, one of the first institutions of the colonial state, sought to serve the state by putatively “taking care” of immature creatures for the sake of their salvation. Both institutions have something in common: a regimentation of the foreign body in physical buildings and structures, through discourses and technologies of very recent vintage (then in the 16th century), that began to develop a discourse about the “biological” qualities of very foreign and visible bodies. Racism began to transform into a modern practice and institution at the very moment that questions of faith and salvation began to translate into questions of purity of blood and the biological evidence for the status of the soul. In the cases of the inquisition and the encomienda, we find a transmutation of the soul as a prison of the body, into the body as a prison for the soul. But as the body becomes the locus of the agency, the gestation, or management of and by the church and the state, the soul itself becomes corporealized, enfleshed. The truth that the soul spoke is now the truth that our genes speak. The domestication of the soul through the regimentation of the body turned into the management of the most elemental structure of our beings, the grammar of our life, our genetic code. If the auto-da-fé meant the abdication before the power of the church, which had finally broken our souls to remold them into the spirit of the true faith, now our bodies, the size of our brains, the tone of our epidermis, the size of our bones, the length of lips, the curl of our hair, the color of our eyes, became the way to make a fundamental truth be spoken. Now our visible traces could speak our truth, the truth of our race. Race, thus, is detritus of an assortment of techniques and practices, discourses and forms of knowledge, for making bio-entities speak their docility, their submissions, and their domestication. Should the bodies marked by racialization refuse to genuflect before their appointed masters, the tutors of race, their doctors of health, then racism as a discourse of bio-politics justifies, necessitates that such insubordinate, rebellious, undomesticated and possibly undomesticable bodies be put to death. Racism, in the last instance is about protecting society from its internal and external enemies. In fact, under racism, everyone is potentially a traitor, a poisonous agent, and an agent provo-
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cateur. In that sense, like religious persecutions in the Middle Ages, which were about exterminating putative religious threats, and for the sake of which societies went to holy war, racism is about the extermination of an alleged threat to the health of society. This is what makes racism so excessive, so exorbitant. Racism is the supplement, the excess, of nationalism, but also of the class struggle, and the struggles of civilizations, as Balibar, Foucault, and more recently Chakrabarty, have noted. The matter is not just about justifying a privilege, but most importantly, about justifying an all out defense against the unum verum malum, the absolute foe. The racist is not just concerned with his privilege, the silent and masked benefits of being the master race. For racists, for the racist society and state, it is more important that the contaminant be kept at bay; that all practices and institutions be in a perpetual state of red alert. “Society must be defended,” (Foucault 1997) for it is threatened from within and from without by its most serious danger: its own constituents, its own body, the body politic. Again, and turning back to our original question, racism is the most upto-date practice for the self-policing of society, the modern society, which is a society of normalization and domestication. I will close my comments by laying out the following lines of investigation. If we want to understand how it is that racism became, and continues to become, a set of practices for the policing and regimenting of society, we have at the very least to look at three domains or spheres of analysis: First, there is the domain of truth, or truths, which correspond to the constitution of objects of investigation. The question is this: What does race say about humans, and what must be carefully catalogued, categorized, and indexed before we can say that race says anything about humans? Why do we think that “genes,” skin color, nose shape, etc. say something essential about humans? If we use Heideggerian lingo, we could ask: How is it that the body becomes a thing-ready-to hand, something that is available for our inspection? In short, certain truths, or the truth, is to be disclosed through certain objects. The measure of the truth is the extent to which that truth is spoken by the “object” through which it is revealed. Second, there is the domain of knowledges, and their corresponding disciplines. Certain domains of objects that speak certain truths are to be studied, analyzed, and investigated through certain techniques (be they biological, medical, semiological, or economic). These techniques in turn necessitate certain disciplinary boundaries, methods, methodologies, which are sanctioned and approved ways of asking questions. Perhaps most importantly, knowledges and their disciplinary techniques constitute the locus from which certain, only very specific, subjects can speak. Science, as the production of truth through certain techniques, conditions the locus of the scientist, or the legitimate agent
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of truth. Note that a discipline that baptizes some to be agents of knowledge disqualifies others from the same task. At the core of disciplinary boundaries, and their disciplining trust, is that there is a fundamental asymmetry between the knower and the known: Madman are disqualified from speaking about their rationality, women are disqualified from speaking about their hysteria, racialized bodies are disqualified from speaking about their racialization (for they can only see through the lens of race – blacks, you know, can only think about their blackness). Third, and finally, there is the domain of power, to which correspond certain institutions. Racism is about exorcising a certain type of power over subjects, but also over one self. One of the most important characteristics of modern societies is that power relations suffuse them. Modern societies are characterized by their sociation, their thorough regimentation of every aspect of human interaction. In modern societies, the social colonizes every sphere of human interaction. As it colonizes those spheres, it deploys power. It is not just the power of the state, or the power of one class over another, but the power of society over every one of its subjects, agents, and bio-units. Racism is the acme of this pervasive deployment of power, for in the last instance, the power that society deploys over the social is the power “to make live” and to let die, but also in order to live, to be prepared to kill. The more society is ready to perpetuate, to maintain, its subsistence, the more it must be ready to kill. Racism, as Foucault noted in his 1976 lectures on racism, became the way in which a normalizing society like ours, which regiments and manages life by controlling populations, not only allows but requires that, first and foremost, a distinction be made between what can live and what must die, and second, racism compels and instigates a visceral, virulent, blind imperative, the more society wants to live, the more it must seek the extermination of the threat to its life. Racism, in short, became the bio-political justification for the acceptability of killing. Now, however, under the mask of the most benign and quotidian: society is threatened from everywhere, by everyone, and we can locate that enemy in the body of the other person. In this way, racism is the inversion of the Ancient Regime’s prerogative to put to death the regicide, the criminal who was only criminal because he dare confront the sovereign. Now, anyone who is marked by the racial discourse and techniques can be put to death by everyone. Further, we are all potential criminals, for we are all carriers of the virus that might contaminate the racialized body politic. In this way, racism makes the killing of the other a normal, everyday necessity. Racism banalizes genocide. Racism makes it imperative that we be ready to kill for our race. Professor Harris’s outstanding collection provided me with the opportu-
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nity to present the lineaments of a genealogical theory of racisms. In this sketch, I suggest that a lot of work on race theory, especially the philosophical work, has not been historical enough; it has not paid attention to the crossroads, if you will, of the emergence of modern racisms. I have in mind here the 16th Century, when Christianity was projected globally through the conquest of the New World. Because of this globalization of Christianity, several institutions emerged that defined the discourse and institutions of race, namely the inquisition and the encomienda. The former had to do with the Jews, which began to be racialized, and the latter with the Native Americans, who also began to be racialized. What is common to both institutions is the convergence of a new set of “institutional” practices that were linked with a series of new disciplines: linguistics, anthropology, ethnography, historical writing, and so on. While one set of institutions operated under the imperative of discerning the enemy within, and thus aiming to purify and eradicate it, the other set operated under the most benign and even enlightened aims, namely to educate and save. To this day, these deep ambiguities and duplicities mark the institutions of racisms: They are forms of enlightened despotism. My remarks also point in the direction of a philosophical approach that silently announces a profound discontent with the way race has been dealt with by more traditional forms of critical social analysis. With respect to Critical Theory, and here we can only restrict our attention to the first generation, i.e. Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, and Benjamin, the study of race was focused on social psychology. The suggestion is that social psychology is still caught in subjectivism, with its attendant voluntarism. From a Foucauldian perspective, it becomes clear why racism has less to do with a post facto attitude of subjects, that is, with attitudes subjects assume vis-à-vis their own subjectivity, and more with the way subjects, as agents, are originally constituted. In other words, the nagging question of why racism is so resilient is not thoroughly addressed by analyzing race assuming that subjects are prior to racial attitudes. Instead, if we seek to understand the resilience of racism, then we have to see how the modern subject is thoroughly invested in a racial economy, i.e. how to be a modern subject means to have to be constituted through a racialized relationship. This is what I meant above when I wrote that racism is modern and not just some atavistic left-over from pre-enlightened periods of society’s immature youth. Eduardo Mendieta SUNY at Stony Brook, USA
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References Balibar Etienne, 1993. Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx. (New York: Routledge). Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Foucault, Michel, 1997. “Il Faut Défendre la Sociéte” Cours au Collège de France (1975– 1976). (Février: Seuil/Gallimard) (German Translation: In Verteidigung der Gesellschaft. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999)). Foucault, Michel, 1997. The Politics of Truth. (New York: Semiotext(e)). Harris, Leonard, Racism. (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books). West, Cornel, 1982. Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press).
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