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Racism Postrace

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 103; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/soundings.103.3.0411

2161-6302

Rafael Walker,

Australian History and Society

Racism Postrace: the title of this timely volume succinctly captures the new paradox into which our culture’s old, pathological obsession with race has thrust us in the new millennium. The ubiquitous yet premature declaration that we have transcended race—at its highest pitch upon the election of Barack Obama—has thrown open the floodgates, unleashing a new generation of gnarly contradictions and fresh forms of oppression. It is to precisely these varied consequences of our postrace dispensation that Roopali Mukherjee, Sarah Banet-Weiser, and Herman Gray’s edited collection addresses itself. The collection joins an expanding chorus of 2010s studies seeking to vanquish the Pollyannaish notion that this nation has outgrown race—among them, Kimberly Jade Norwood’s edited collection Color Matters: Skin Tone Bias and the Myth of a Postracial America, Paul C. Taylor’s recent book On Obama (Thinking in Action) (2015) and his important essays on postracialism, and, of course, the authoritative study by Catherine R. Squires (who contributes the volume’s epilogue), The Post-Racial Mystique (2014). What distinguishes Racism Postrace is its focus on the multifarious kinds of oppression that assertions of a postracial order abet. For the editors of this collection and most of its contributors, the point is not simply that the U.S. is not postracial; no, perhaps far worse, it’s that the pervasive delusion that race no longer matters has enabled racism to adapt to a new age and proliferate with all the gusto of a smallpox strain in a colony of anti-vaxxers.How does a prejudice, such as racism, survive, much less thrive, once its target is discursively conjured out of existence? Gathered here is an impressively diverse array of responses to this quandary, from contributors of various disciplines, although most practice in the omnivorous scholarly enclave known as “cultural studies” (as the sundry kinds of evidence marshaled here readily make plain). Common among almost all the contributors is an interest in mass-cultural artifacts—mainstream radio, web-based, or television shows; popular music and sports; cosmetic products and fashion. Notably, not a single literary critic or art historian has been admitted into the symposium, a feature so conspicuous in such a multifaceted volume that, though unremarked, must be intentional. Are we meant to infer that literature and the visual arts no longer command the audiences necessary for an appreciable impact on postracial discourse? On this question, the editors are silent, and perhaps, finally, that is a canny decision, an eschewal of a potentially distracting fight. In any event, taken together, the essays comprising this volume certainly make the case that postracial thinking pervades popular culture, to the point where one can no more avoid it than keep dry in the rain. Each entry demonstrates in its own way that denials of the relevance of race have the paradoxical, perhaps even perverse, effect of generating new forms of racism—a notion captured in Herman Gray’s epigrammatic assertion that “the claim to postrace is not innocent” (24). On the other hand, as we shall see, this grim picture of our society is brightened by some of the contributors’ incisive attention to the empowering aspects of the postracial order, to the emancipatory improvisations with postracial thinking that have emerged in the first two decades of the new millennium.Composed of thirteen standalone essays, Racism Postrace is a rewarding but very long book. It is divided into two parts. The first, titled “Assumptions,” takes inventory of some of the most important implications ensuing from claims that we have outgrown race. Most of the essays in this section take the next step of exposing the uses to which these claims have been put. The second part, “Performances,” offers a series of case studies of postracial thinking in action, showing how postracial logic has shaped mass entertainment. Deepened by the grand narratives of postrace furnished by the first section, the case-driven essays comprising Part Two succeed admirably at leaving readers with the impression that no sector of culture has not been visited by the insidious specter of postraciality.Among the most recurrent themes of Part One is that postracial thinking has emerged largely as a result of a beset whiteness. Paradoxically, while race has been increasingly downplayed as an influence in the lives of nonwhite people, postracial claims have led to the consolidation of white identity, a momentous shift given that “white” has perennially been viewed as the default, as simply “human.” At first glance, this development seems a good thing, a response to the imperative to recognize the constructedness of whiteness that Toni Morrison spent most of her career issuing.1 Although it is a development ripe with salutary potential, these writers compellingly reveal its vile underbelly. For example, Cynthia A. Young’s “Becked Up: Glenn Beck, White Supremacy, and the Hijacking of the Civil Rights Legacy”—a virtuosic performance—connects the consolidation of white identity in the twenty-first century with just about every evil of which the U.S. has been guilty in modern times—Islamophobia, nativism, anti-black racism, warmongering, the distortion of history, self-righteousness. With so many balls in the air, Young’s essay initially primes one to expect a disjointed ramble, but what she delivers is anything but that. She achieves an enviable cohesiveness through her single-minded focus on a key figure in the cultivation of white self-consciousness, the conservative commentator Glenn Beck, an architect of the Tea Party movement. Young shows how Beck’s simplistic adaptation of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” to a post-9/11 context—among other things—obscured racism at home, authorized xenophobia abroad, and abetted white Americans’ misguided belief that they were victims. Against the tendency to confine these baleful views to rural whites, Young asks us to identify them at the heart of modern white identity formation—an extremely frightening proposition to contemplate in an election year.If Young’s essay leaves us pessimistic about the nation’s political future, we find a glimmer of hope in Daniel Martinez Hosang and Joseph Lowndes’s “Theorizing Race in the Age of Inequality.” They are interested in what they understand as a growing class-based fissure within the category of whiteness that has propelled the invention of a new subcategory of white people, “poor whites.” I would be remiss not to point out that the category of “poor whites” is hardly new, as Keri Leigh Merritt’s monograph Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (2017) makes clear. Or, as a shortcut to the point, we might recall a literary classic, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), wherein John Steinbeck—always as subtle as a firetruck—takes pains to link the epithet “Okie” to the n-word. Fortunately, this historical inaccuracy does not tank their argument, which, in modified form, is simply that the increasingly uneven distribution of wealth in the U.S. is diminishing the benefits of whiteness for working-class people, whose access to state-managed goods and services is jeopardized by the neoliberal regime. Hosang and Lowndes discern in this trend the possibility for white-black solidarity, an interracial effort to combat the twin evils of “white supremacy and class rule.” If realized, that possibility would disrupt the pattern of white identity formation that Young describes and swing the political pendulum toward the progressive end. Considering Young’s conclusions alongside Hosang and Lowndes’, I cannot help wondering how this volume would have looked had it been composed more collaboratively, with the contributors provided the opportunity to read one another’s work. (Alas, the inefficiencies of the publishing process probably render that vision a pipedream.)One of the chief contributions of Racism Postrace is its demonstration that the claim of postraciality, though formulated in and directed at American society, has reshaped social life in other parts of the world. Radhika Parameswaran’s “‘Jamming’ the Color Line: Comedy, Carnival, and Contestations of Commodity Colorism” and Inna Arzumanova’s “Veiled Visibility: Racial Performances and Hegemonic Leaks in Pakistani Fashion Week” both vividly illustrate the global reach of postracial thinking. From Parameswaran, we learn that South Asian digital artists have been combatting “the malignancy of colorism and the shortsightedness of postrace” through online spoofs of pernicious advertisements for skin-lightening products. Arzumanova’s essay shows how Pakistani fashion designers have managed the demands of a Western-dominated industry that marks “racial ‘otherness,’ only to then bring it into the fold, neutralizing its power and then using its visibility as evidence of racial progress, at best, and racial transcendence, at worst” (266). Notwithstanding the conformity inevitable in cultural exchanges where there is such a power imbalance, Arzumanova shows that Pakistani designers are using the resources of postracial thinking to upend prevailing stereotypes of Islamic people and culture as backwards. They do so by incorporating the veil—a cultural garment that has provoked controversy after controversy in the West—into otherwise Westernized fashion shows. In their inassimilablity, the veils demand recognition of Islamic people and culture as part of modernity and, given fashion’s forward orientation, the future. From both Arzumanova’s essay and Brandi Thompson Summers’—titled “‘Haute [Ghetto] Mess’: Postracial Aesthetics and the Seduction of Blackness in High Fashion”—it becomes clear that the fashion industry has been especially affected by the postracial turn. In her fascinating essay, Summers shows how some of the biggest scandals in the world of high fashion, including spreads with models in blackface, have their roots in postracial thinking. American culture’s denial of race’s significance, as Summers demonstrates, has afforded designers greater license to play with racial signifiers, and diversity has become a matter of aesthetics, not of politics.As I have tried to make clear, Racism Postrace has much to recommend it. But a work composed by so many hands and addressing such a fraught issue is bound to miss a step or two. One of the missteps is the strange sense of historical exceptionalism that results from the volume’s short memory about the history of racism in this country. In some of the essays, this poses no problem because of careful specificity about the object of study. For example, it makes good sense for Young to range between the 1960s and the present in a discussion of how a white commentator’s cooptation of MLK in the wake of 9/11 helped invent the Tea Party, or for Aymar Jean Christian to restrict himself primarily to the first two decades of our century in examining portrayals of black queer sexuality as alternatives to broadcast television swell. (And there are other writers, such as Parameswaran, Tongson, and Johnson, who are exempted from this criticism as well.) The hermetic synchronicity of some of the other essays, however, raises significant questions for me. In the manifold attempts to associate postracialism with respectability politics, for instance, I found myself wondering how the twenty-first century’s bid to downplay racial differences compares with the well-documented reliance on respectability politics in the struggle for black uplift during the first half of the twentieth century. This question was most importunate in my perusal of Kevin Fellezs’s “Clap Along If You Feel Like Happiness Is the Truth,” an essay about the consonance of Pharrell Williams’s hit song “Happy” (2013) with postracial ideology. Fellezs demonstrates that, in the effort to link happiness to a voluntary state of mind (shades of positive psychology), Williams makes recourse to a “boot straps” ethic linked to respectability politics and consumption. This argument is fine as far as it goes, but the problem is that Fellesz treats Williams’s marriage of consumption with respectability as if it were an unprecedented tactic for blacks pursuing equality. Tellingly, there is no mention of E. Franklin Frazier, whose trailblazing Black Bourgeoisie (1957) connected this tactic with a loss of identity for blacks, an observation with obvious relevance to a postracial discourse. But Fellesz’s omission of Frazier isn’t really the point. I mention it because it is symptomatic of an inattentiveness to history that, among other things, prevents the writer from asking the right questions. Given that we have seen the convergence of respectability politics and heightened consumerism before in the fight for black equality, what, we ought to be asking, are the historical conditions that have caused it to recrudesce? What are the similarities and differences between this permutation and its antecedent?Reluctance to engage with earlier moments of integrationist thinking in the history of American race relations may well be at the root of another, perhaps more urgent blind spot of the volume. It is disturbingly easy to walk away from the book with the impression that postracialism hangs some remove from the more violent forms of discrimination used against nonwhites, blacks especially—as if it were the wispy superstructure of a more straightforwardly racist base, the nitty-gritty pit where the gloves come off. The editors practically say as much in the introduction: we approach postrace as a construct with real political and material consequences, and the cases we showcase in the book grapple with the links between the structural and cultural productivities of the postracial, unpacking the mythic registers and relationships of postrace as key to understanding public policies and practices geared to state repression and violence, the material impacts of populist white anger, as well as those of social movements and alliances geared to racial and social justice. (5) But it is vital to remember that postracial thinking is weaponized not just in “mythic registers” but also right down in the trenches (and here I am speaking in metaphor just barely). I have in mind the way that postracial thinking has been used to discipline social activism. Driven by what scholars have described as the “romance narrative” of civil rights activism, the mainstream media has tended to malign more militant social protests of state violence against black people while enshrining nonviolent protest as the only legitimate strategy for black activism.2 The postracial implications are all too clear: proponents of more militant approaches are cast as “bad subjects” clinging to the divisive category of race while pacifists are portrayed as model progressives willing to get with the postracial program and get along. The collection’s somewhat genteel evasion of the ways postracial ideology functions in the more violent instantiations of racism veers dangerously close to reproducing precisely the sugarcoated version of race relations with which it has reprehended the postracial turn.Even with these considerable concerns, I am certain that Racism Postrace will earn a place among the definitive treatments of the postracial era, which may or may not still be with us. In the book’s epilogue, Catherine R. Squires understands the era as bygone, the torch-carrying mobs in Charlottesville in 2017 serving for her as proof positive. And yet the rhetorical tactics of the first openly gay frontrunner in a Democratic party, Pete Buttigieg, suggest that the postracial well may not be so dry after all. In the response to concerns about his capacity to connect with black voters, the South Bend, Indiana, mayor has shown a fondness for facile comparisons between racism and homophobia and has coopted civil rights–era rhetoric to advance his cause. In a 2015 op-ed, for example, we find him repurposing Dr. Martin Luther King’s civil rights rhetoric in virtually the same way that Young demonstrates Beck to have done: Whenever I’ve come out to friends and family, they’ve made clear that they view this as just a part of who I am. Their response makes it possible to feel judged not by sexual orientation but by the things that we ought to care about most, like the content of our character and the value of our contributions.3 I cite this example to explain why, despite the resurgence of overt racism in the U.S. and elsewhere, I suspect that Racism Postrace will remain relevant for a long time. The postracial turn may indeed be reversing course, but Racism Postrace is scarcely less illuminating about the way we live now for that reversal.