Why Race Still Matters. Alana Lentin
that operate in human societies. Race, in this sense, is the centerpiece of a hierarchical system that produces differences’ (S. Hall 2017: 32–3). Hall also offers us an understanding that, although race is about the ‘inscription of power on the body’, it has no meaning as an actual biological or physical distinction that exists in nature (2017: 47). Moreover, the biological understanding of race is only one way in which the racial distinction is constructed; geographical, religious, cultural, and, only lastly, biological or genetic explanations of why Europeans theorized that they were superior to, and should therefore dominate, non-Europeans were all used to make of race the ‘central term organizing the great classificatory systems of difference in modern human history’ (2017: 33). Therefore, as Alexander Weheliye writes, it is more conducive to conceptualize race as a set of what he calls ‘racializing assemblages’, a series of ‘discourses, practices, desires, infrastructures, languages, technologies, sciences, economies, dreams, and cultural artifacts’ that, together, ensure the maintenance of political structures and institutions in ways that bar ‘non-white subjects’ from being considered fully human (Weheliye 2014: 3).
Weheliye’s concept of assemblages is in part indebted to Stuart Hall’s theorization of race as an articulation, or a series of linkages between different structures of dominance. Therefore, we need to think of other structures of power – capitalism, gender, sexuality, class, and ability – as working through race, and vice versa. As systems that produce oppression, ranking, exclusion, and – to use Gilmore’s formulation again – the possibility of ‘premature death’, these, like race, were produced within specific historical contexts. At a general level, the categorization and ranking of humans into putatively natural groupings along racial, gendered, and classed lines grew in necessity at the start of the modern era, in Europe. As Robin Kelley puts it, in his foreword to Cedric Robinson’s book on the evolution and development of racial capitalism, Black Marxism, race is ‘rooted in premodern European civilization’ (Kelley 2000: xiii). However, both race and capitalism, developing together and inextricable from each other, matured within the context of European colonial domination over the majority of the world. Therefore, although with the birth of the modern nation-state in Europe racism and nationalism entered into a reciprocal relationship (Petitjean and Balibar 2015), race as a regime of power is ‘colonially constituted’, as Barnor Hesse explains (Hesse 2016). What Hesse means by this is that, ultimately, race is about the delineation not only of whites from non-whites, but of the essence of Europeanness from that of non-Europeanness.
Therefore, race is above all else a project of colonial distinction and a system of legitimation to justify oppressive and discriminatory practices. This unfurls internally, within national societies, for example producing eugenicist hierarchies of the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor (Shilliam 2018). Racial logic is also at work in the false idea that there are ‘enclaves’ or ‘ghettoes’ of ‘self-segregating’ migrant communities that disrupt the possibility of social cohesion. It underpins the conspiratorial notion that ‘rootless, cosmopolitan elites’ are responsible for a negative influence on society, to the detriment of the ‘indigenous’ inhabitants, as has been argued by Paul Embery, a former fire-fighter on the right wing of the British labour movement, mobilizing old antisemitic tropes (Cartledge 2019). Externally, it plays a role in reproducing narratives of European progress vis-à-vis the supposed poverty, or non-existence, of Indigenous and majority world languages and knowledges. As one philosopher colleague once told me, unironically, ‘There are no non-European philosophies!’ It creates the notion of developed and developing worlds. It casts the white, the western, and the European – each co-constitutive of each other – as neutral and universal, while everything that cannot be captured by these categories is cast as specific only to the time and place in which it is produced, never serving as a global exemplar.
The central ruse or illusion created by racial logics is that everything in the world has a fixed or natural place. That is why extreme racial regimes like Apartheid, Nazism, or Jim Crow punished ‘race-mixing’. However, to fully understand why race continues to have power, even after these systems of rule have been abolished, we must understand why it needed to be legislated for in the first place. Race, having no bearing in reality, had to be invented and needed to be constantly secured. For example, a panoply of mechanisms and practices was needed to pin down the US institution of slavery and to attach an inferior racial status to Black people’s bodies, before criminalizing them as a group. These included branding, plantation rules, black codes, identity papers, lantern laws, dress codes, and runaway notices. Simone Browne describes the passage of the lantern laws in seventeenth-century colonial New York city, which ruled that the black body remain illuminated at night (Browne 2015; see also Garcia-Rojas 2016). These laws not only introduced practices of surveillance which Black people remain subjected to today, but they also created and policed ‘racial boundaries’ that still cohere in the common idea that Black people pose a threat to public and individual safety. How else to explain the practice of reporting Black people to the police for simply existing in spaces it is not deemed they should be in? As found in the coronial inquiry held into the death in police custody of Aboriginal grandmother Tanya Day in September 2019, she had been arrested for ‘being unruly’ because she had fallen asleep on a train while on her way to visit her pregnant daughter (Human Rights Law Centre 2019). She died alone in the ‘lock-up’.
Police powers and legislation, such as segregation laws, or, to take the aforementioned much more recent example, the ban on the hijab in French schools, are deemed necessary because race is above all else an idea in search of reassurance (Wolfe 2016). It is on such shaky conceptual ground that it needs to be constantly filled with content, fed like a hungry animal. This is what makes it what Stuart Hall calls a ‘sliding signifier’. Its slipperiness makes it difficult to pin down. While we argue about just what defines race or whether this or that event or arrangement can really be racist, race is doing its job of, as Hall put it, sidling ‘around the edge of the veranda and climb[ing] back in through the pantry window’ (S. Hall 2017: 37). Race continues to matter because it is in a continual process of reinvention.
Despite this, for many it is dangerous to speak about race and better to talk about racism as a set of practices produced by the ‘ideology’, or what has been referred to as the ‘folk idea’, of race (Fields et al. 2015; Haider 2018a). However, race is not ‘stuck’ in the nineteenth century, and, as I discuss in greater detail in Chapter 2, it did not ‘end’ with the Holocaust, Apartheid, or Jim Crow. I disagree that it is sufficient or possible to talk about racism without explaining the genealogy of race as a system of rule and revealing this process of continual reproduction. I believe that racism is better understood as beliefs, attitudes, ideas, and morals that build on understandings of the world as racially delineated. I explore the evolution of racism, only coined at the end of the nineteenth century, in order to make sense of intra-European racial divisions, predominantly antisemitism, in Chapter 2. My point here it that we need to work with both concepts – race and racism – because they are reliant on each other. I prefer to label my approach to scholarship ‘race critical’, rather than the more common ‘critical race’, in recognition of the fact that while we can and should use race analytically, we should also question its terms.
Preferencing racism over race runs a certain risk because, outside of scholarly and activist conversations, racism is used in a very particular way in the public domain to confer a moral judgement. It is now universally understood that to be racist is to have erred morally, as an individual. This is why, as Sara Ahmed has shown (Ahmed 2012), the primary response to accusations of racism is horror and outrage: how dare you call me a racist? And as the Aboriginal rapper Adam Briggs said after Australian football players appeared at a party in blackface, ‘People look at me like it’s my problem. Like pointing out racism is worse than the act itself. Saying “that’s racist” creates more drama than the actual blackface situation’ (McCormack 2016).
Racism has been successfully personified as embodied by the bad attitude of ignorant or ‘vicious’ individuals (Garcia 1999). While, as Lewis Gordon argues, ‘bad faith’ always plays a role in racism, it is not, the full picture (Gordon 1999). And while we must be