racialism takes shape in the context of the European colonial project and of white supremacist politics. This is not to say that all white people, whoever white people turned out to be, believed they were superior to non-whites (and that some whites were superior to others) and sought to build society in the image of that idea. It is to say that modern societies were by and large built around the idea of white superiority and the commitment to using this idea as a basic principle of social organization. Enough people embraced this idea and this commitment, and sank them into society at deep enough levels, to make them profound and abiding influences on modern life. (Some scholars would say that the historical role I’ve given white supremacy here should instead be assigned to anti-blackness. We’ll return to this.)
It is important to say clearly that the dominant forms of modernity were not just racialist but also white supremacist and colonialist in order to signal clearly the degree to which race and modern political life are intertwined with each other. The centrality of modern politics to race and of race to modern politics can get lost in the back and forth of philosophical debate with surprising ease. More to the point, it is easy to lose sight of the way race connects to specific forms of politics, rather than simply to a free-floating risk of racial animus. I mean to keep this political context for race-thinking squarely in view.
1.8.2 Systems and structures
One way to insist on the links between race and specific forms of politics is to analyze race systemically. This means moving beyond the idea that race-thinking is about what goes on in the minds of isolated individuals or in the otherwise empty space between or around isolated sets of individuals. It means exploring the patterned interactions and structured relations in which these individuals and events are embedded.
Scholars like Charles Mills model one form of this systemic analysis when they insist on the dual role of terms like “white supremacy” and “racialism.”10 Like many other terms in political life, these expressions refer to ways of thinking and to modes of social organization. Used in one sense they implicate specific commitments, principles, and values. Used in another, related but distinct sense, they implicate specific institutions and practices. Liberalism as a political ideology is about things like freedom of conscience and the rule of law, while liberal political society is about operationalizing values like these in certain routine ways, involving things like free and fair elections and independent courts. Similarly, the various forms of racialism – including but not limited to white supremacy – will have their different commitments, but they will also be connected to particular institutions and practices. We will consider some of these connections in the pages to come.
Scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Cedric Robinson model another form of systemic analysis when they link racial phenomena to gender and class dynamics. For example, modern chattel slavery was not just about race. It was an economic system that used racial and sexual violence to create and control a low cost, self-reproducing labor force. It generated the wealth that financed European and American industrialization and it was a massive laboratory for the experiments in productivity management, international trade, and transnational finance that global capitalism subsequently refined.11 Engaging race responsibly means considering its relationships to these wider social structures and dynamics, as we’ll see in the pages to come.
1.8.3 Process and power
Studying race systemically means attending to the way these systems change over time. This is why I started referring above to dynamics of various kinds. Social structures are dynamic phenomena, transforming in response to changing conditions and shifting power relations. Race is no different.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant foreground the connections between race, power, and processes in their theory of racial formation. This theory has become controversial in some circles, but for reasons mostly unrelated to the core idea I mean to borrow from it. This key idea is that races are the evolving products of ongoing sociopolitical contests, not the free-standing objects that lazy race-talk invites us to imagine. Racial formation in this sense is “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.”12 This process unfolds by means of racial projects, which are political contests that attempt to do two things: to define the concept of race and to distribute social goods in accordance with the mode of race-thinking that results. These projects are, therefore, binary affairs, running simultaneously along parallel semantic and structural tracks. Semantics and structure, social meaning and social distributions, are connected here like two sides of the same coin, and they work together to drive racial practices along their historical trajectories.
US history provides an example that may help make clear how these parallel tracks are supposed to work. When nineteenth-century US slaveholders linked blackness to irrationality, emotionality, and incapacity for self-government, they were interpreting race in a way that linked blackness with generalized inferiority. But in offering this interpretation of race they were also justifying a particular social structure. They were justifying the enslavement of most black people and explaining the economic and political marginalization of free blacks. Modern chattel slavery was, then, a racial project, one among many such projects – including more progressive ones, like the nobler forms of abolitionism – that suffused nineteenth-century European and American cultures.
The nineteenth century’s dominant racial projects gave way to others, and these successor projects have reinterpreted race and reorganized society in ways that US politics neatly exemplifies every ten years. The federal government sponsors a decennial census of the US population, and each round is preceded by a great deal of lobbying, debate, and handwringing about how to design the questions around ethnic and racial identity. In the last few decades the categories and the instructions about how to apply the categories have changed pretty substantially. These changes have concrete implications for the allocation of government resources and for the work of tracking and representing the patterns of advantage and disadvantage that define US society.
Whatever else it does, racial formation theory models the systemic and process-oriented focus on political context that is essential to the proper study of race. There are important conceptual questions to settle about what race means and how it works. But what is ultimately at stake in these questions has to do with the way these concepts shape and get shaped by politically charged racial projects. I’ve tried to write this book in a way that keeps these stakes in mind.
1.9 Conclusion
The first part of this book is building toward a discussion of the existence and nature of the entities that we call races. Call this a question of racial metaphysics. So far I’ve tried to prepare the way for that discussion by introducing the contexts for the argument, some definitions and distinctions, and some methodological ground rules.
I’ve also argued that race is a subject that in many ways invites and rewards philosophical scrutiny. My approach to philosophical scrutiny involved an old-fashioned model of armchair analysis that may feel a little too disconnected from the realities of life in a racialized world, my attempts at reassurance notwithstanding. If so, it may help to know that the next chapter will focus on providing some more historical and social-theoretic detail. This may offer a welcome respite from the abstraction of philosophy and it should supply the empirical ballast that keeps armchair analysis from floating into the clouds.
Notes
1 1. David Robinson, “There really are 50 Eskimo words for snow,” The Washington Post, January 14, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there-really-are-50-eskimo-words-for-snow/2013/01/14/e0e3f4e0-59a0-11e2-beee-6e38f5215402_story.html.
