Class, Race and Marxism. David R. Roediger
Darder joins Rudy 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 analyses of race as an axis of inequality in Brazil as pernicious exports from a United States social-science establishment that is as “cunning” as it is “imperialist.”
These works are of course much more, and in some ways much less, than a retreat to Debs’s “colorless” ideas. They lack the same focus on, and confidence in, socialist transformation and are often in dialogue less with class struggle than with cultural studies ideas about the importance of “hybridity” and the pitfalls of “essentialism.” In most cases they do not promise to re-center class by removing a fixation on race, and when they do, as in Reed’s “Class-ifying the Hurricane,” they prove unable to deliver on such a promise. They register the increase of immigration, of intermarriage and of cross-racial adoptions, and the need to affix blame (this time on the messengers) in a time when science repeatedly declares the end of race, and white supremacy nevertheless thrives as ideology. Ironically, the very success, largely under United Nations and non-governmental organization auspices, of organizing around race globally has also laid bare the varying national patterns of racialized inequality and the blurred borders between racial, religious, language, and national oppressions.
All of this has rightly made critiques of crude invocations of race as the simple answer to everything more compelling. But while retreats from race are understandable in view of the difficult and changing political tasks that we face, they are no more an answer to how we pursue those tasks when they come from the left than when they come from the right and center. The context in which they emerge, and the stature of voices contributing to them, demand that they be taken seriously. To do so requires us to look at the varieties of left critiques of race-thinking, with the goal of disaggregating them not being simply to show their incompatibility with each other but rather to identify various inspirations to which they respond. The most celebrated advocates of “race is over” and “against race” positions—Gilroy, Patterson, and Bourdieu and Wacquant—do not directly raise the issues of race and class central to this article, but their influence and arguments must be at least briefly discussed if we are to situate the more explicitly class-conscious writings of Darder and Torres and of Reed. In every case, the instability of the positions being invoked suggests all of the excitement, and the problems, of work in progress.
Gilroy’s Against Race begins with an extraordinarily dense and challenging discussion of the connections between the very idea of “race” and what Gilroy terms “raciology,” the nexus of murderous practice, policy, and science born out of seeing race. Race, Gilroy holds, is a “relatively recent and absolutely modern invention” and its scientific credentialing cannot be considered apart from its bloody implication in “evil, brutality and terror.” In a new world ostensibly beyond white supremacist science, and one in which Black bodies are marketed as desirable and even superhuman rather than only as degraded, Gilroy sees both new dangers and the possibility for a “novel and ambitious abolitionist project,” this time doing away with race itself. “Renouncing ‘race’ ” becomes not only the key to “bring[ing] political culture back to life” but the ethical response ‘‘appropriate to confronting the wrongs done in the name of raciology. Acknowledging that for “many racialized populations, ‘race’ and the hard-won, oppositional identities it supports are not to be lightly or prematurely given up,’’ Gilroy proposes a long campaign designed to show that “action against racial hierarchies can proceed more effectively when it has been purged of any lingering respect for the idea of ‘race.’ ” In the book’s early stages, a disabusing of racist science and a recognition of the need to see the elisions of gender and to some extent class divisions made by Black nationalist movements seem to have Gilroy rejecting race but endorsing a more mature antiracism.
But, by the book’s end, despite asides suggesting that he will not too harshly judge those who hesitate to abandon the politics of anti-racist solidarity in favor of a “heterocultural, postanthropological, and cosmopolitan yet-to-come,” Gilroy has dismantled much of the grounds of antiracism. Declaring the “mood” of projects attacking white supremacy to be hopelessly passé as we leave “the century of the color line behind,” he also strongly dissents from any firm connection of racism to power or to white supremacy. Against Race poses the choice in approaches as one between an outmoded concern for “Africa’s antiquity” and an appropriate one for “our planet’s future.” Gilroy writes, “To be against racism, against white supremacism, was once to be bonded to the future. This no longer seems to be the case” as we “move out of a time in which [race] could have been expected to make sense.” The monumental but incomplete and fragile achievements of Black internationalism, so searchingly explored in their contradictions in Gerald Horne’s recent Race War, are reduced to scattered passages of precocious appreciation for the “planetary.” The utopian dimensions that Robin D.G. Kelley shows to be so essential to struggles against white supremacy and capitalism become for Gilroy moments to be captured against the grain, by reading through a lens that can reduce Frantz Fanon to “that prototypical black-European” noteworthy in large measure for his “indiscreetly anti-Marxist spirit.”
Like Gilroy, the sometimes-on-the-left Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson explicitly pronounces Du Bois’s remarks on the color line to be well-past their sell-by date. “Race Over” was the headline for Patterson’s projections in The New Republic in 2000. The article begins from the premise that Du Bois may have been “half-right” regarding the color line in the twentieth century but is certain that any attempt to continue to apply the insight would be “altogether wrong.” For Patterson the problems with twenty-first-century race-thinking are now less political and ethical than they are simply demographic. His visions are not very different from endless accounts in the mainstream press that the United States will become a white-minority nation in the not-too-distant future. By 2050, the United States “will have problems aplenty. But no racial problem whatsoever” Patterson tells his readers. By then, “the social virus of race will have gone the way of smallpox.” The retreat from race would fall into regional patterns, the details of which call the predictions of racelessness somewhat into question. On the West Coast, “cultural and somatic mixing” would produce a population mainly “Eurasian but with a growing Latin element” but the real engine of change would be in-migration by “an endless stream” of allegedly raceless new US residents who would use new technologies to change appearances. In the Northeast and Midwest, deindustrialized zones of misery would contain the white, African-American and Latino poor, bound together by “social resentment” and a “lumpen-proletarian hip-hop culture,” and isolated from the gated communities of the prosperous. In the Southeast, the “Old Confederacy” race divisions would continue—“race over” would not in fact apply—but somehow this would make no difference in the national picture.
At almost every turn the raceless predictions coexist for Patterson with invocations of old-style race-thinking. “Murderous racial gang fights” remain a fact of 2050 life and new technologies to change race are deployed. But an even more glaring contradiction obtrudes when Patterson adds other sets of prognostications in a 2001 New York Times article, “Race by the Numbers,” now distancing himself from the view of demographers that whites would become a minority in the United States in the twenty-first century. Arguing that “nearly half of the Hispanic population is white in every social sense,” Patterson forecast that “the non-Hispanic white population will … possibly even grow as a portion of the population.” Patterson may be right that children of non-Hispanic white/Hispanic intermarriages will identify as (and be identified as) “white,” but the jarring contrast between the two articles suggests just how slapdash the race-is-over position remains. Race disappears and whiteness reigns.
Wacquant and Bourdieu’s “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” published in Theory, Culture and Society in 1999 reproduces with surprising stridency Marx’s argument that the ruling ideas of an age are produced by those who dominate, putting it into the service of an attack on the discussions of racial inequality that have recently led to adoption of forms of affirmative action in Brazil. In doing so, they produce yet another separate strain of “against race” argument, finding it hopelessly fixated on the United States.