Nationalism's Bloody Terrain: Racism, Class Inequality, and the Politics of Recognition 9781782387633

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Nationalism’s Bloody Terrain

Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis General Editor: Bruce Kapferer Volume 1

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND GLOBAL CRISIS Critical Perspectives Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 2

GLOBALIZATION Critical Issues Edited by Allen Chun Volume 3

CORPORATE SCANDAL Global Corporatism against Society Edited by John Gledhill Volume 4

EXPERT KNOWLEDGE First World Peoples, Consultancy, and Anthropology Edited by Barry Morris and Rohan Bastin Volume 5

STATE, SOVEREIGNTY, WAR Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 6

THE RETREAT OF THE SOCIAL The Rise and Rise of Reductionism Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 7

OLIGARCHS AND OLIGOPOLIES New Formations of Global Power Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 8

NATIONALISM’S BLOODY TERRAIN Racism, Class Inequality, and the Politics of Recognition Edited by George Baca Volume 9

IDENTIFYING WITH FREEDOM Indonesia after Suharto Edited by Tony Day

Nationalism’s Bloody Terrain Racism, Class Inequality, and the Politics of Recognition

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Edited by George Baca

Berghahn Books NEW YORK • OXFORD

www.berghahnbooks.com

Paperback edition published in 2006 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2006 Berghahn Books Reprinted in 2007

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-84545-235-3 (pbk.) Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

This volume of Critical Interventions was originally published in Social Analysis, vol. 49

Contents

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Introduction: Politics of Recognition and Myths of Race George Baca 1

Narrating a Nation through Mixed Bloods Viranjini Munasinghe 14

The Making and Unmaking(?) of a Malay Race Joel S. Kahn 29

What’s Love Got to Do with It? The Race of Freedom and the Drag of Descent Elizabeth A. Povinelli 43

The Politics of Moral Order: A Brief Anatomy of Racing Diane Austin-Broos 57

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Second-Hand Dreams Vijay Prashad 72

Disappearing Act: Race and the Neo-liberal State Jason Antrosio 85

The End of Social Construction: What Comes Next? John Hartigan Jr. 95

Notes on Contributors 109

INTRODUCTION Politics of Recognition and Myths of Race

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George Baca

At the time of this writing, the world is watching incredulously as terror and deprivation ravage the poorest citizens of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The region’s middle class and elite fled the disaster, while federal authorities’ inaction resulted in starvation for those too poor to leave. Such callousness embodied in US civil society and state institutions has been made transparent to the world, illuminating the increasing class inequality that has evolved since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. In light of this conflation of racism and class inequality, this forum focuses on the ways that multi-cultural politics mystify such power relations with romantic recollections of popular resistance to racism in the post–World War II era: decolonization, the US civil rights movement, and the fall of apartheid in South Africa. Such mythologies of ‘racial progress’ pervade contemporary scholarship on racism, often providing triumphal narratives of how, after years of anti-colonial and civil rights struggles, the disenfranchised have finally

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made their voices heard. To be sure, these wide-ranging social movements contributed to the demise of legally sanctioned racism throughout the world. However, while international capital and national governments responded to these direct challenges to the legitimacy of the liberal-democratic state by gradually dismantling officially sanctioned racism, those same institutional reforms reconstituted racial domination in other, pernicious ways. More than merely co-opting popular movements, reform policies defused struggles for liberation as they recuperated the energy of these struggles into the maintenance of liberal forms of power. The ‘cunning of recognition’, as Elizabeth Povinelli describes this maneuver of power, does not refuse to recognize past atrocities committed by the liberal state, but acknowledges the horror of these actions—e.g., slavery, genocide, segregation, and apartheid—in order to secure and reinvigorate the future of the liberal nation-state and its core values (Povinelli 2002: 29). In short, liberal forms of multiculturalism use national rituals of apology for the past mistreatment of subordinated and oppressed members of society not to transfer power or to change society but to re-create the national form. Racial reforms—from attempts at reconciliation in Australia, to civil rights in the US, to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa—function as narratives of national redemption, maintaining (and sometimes inventing) racial cleavages along the way (see Dominguez 1994). What surprise, then, that ‘racial reform’ has overlapped—if not conspired—with neoconservative assaults on the welfare state that have gutted the very institutions that were supposed to remedy these inequalities (Baca 2004; see Prashad in this issue). Such co-existence of racial reform with the deepening of racial and class inequality is not as anomalous as some commentators suggest (e.g., Holt

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2000: 5–7). Instead, the manner in which racial reforms complement racializing discourse illustrates the politics of nationalism, which requires that we theorize the relationship between the racist content of neo-liberal reforms and the rise of multi-culturalism (Baca 2003). As many commentators have argued, racism and its passions are created by and subordinated to the nation (Kapferer 1998; Williams 1989). This forum develops these insights by examining the way that nationalists have used liberal-democratic forms of racism to rework narratives and visions of the nation to meet new political and economic challenges. Contemporary reforms modify racism in terms of contemporary problems associated with globalization as well as the new political context following decolonization. Nevertheless, such reforms draw upon the passions of nationalist discourse to shape—and obscure—class relations. It is the connection between racism and the nation that is the substance of nationalism. As such, the power of nationalism lies in its capacity to provide interactive frames in which the relationships between state institutions and diverse social relations are negotiated (Lomnitz-Adler 2001: 14). Thus, race has attained its modern significance as a mechanism of state control and civil society and as an embodiment of national culture (Williams 1989). This forum places the practices of racism at the center of analysis of so-called post-racist or multi-cultural nation-states. In this way, each contributor analytically treats racism and its related concepts of race, identity, culture, and naturalizing symbols of blood to highlight the manner in which governing institutions use nationalist precepts to create ‘races’. In the end, it is racism— the actual political practices of domination—that makes ‘race’ salient (Cooper and Brubaker 2000), especially in its multi-cultural and liberal-democratic form.

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Myths of Paradox and the Cunning of Recognition Understanding these connections between racism, nationalism, and class inequality requires historical sensitivity; we must explore the political and economic factors that motivate the mythic post-liberal state. As Brackette Williams reminds us, “[A] useful prologue to the interpenetration of race, class, and culture in nationstates must be the mythmaking and the material factors that motivate and rationalize its elements” (1989: 429). The material factors related to the emergence of the contemporary concept of racism derives from seventeenthcentury class formation, when European merchants and colonists transformed the Caribbean and the southern US into a frontier zone. European colonists invented the modern concept of ‘race’ to make slavery congruent with the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and civic equality. Race resolved the contradiction between slavery—the economic underpinning of both the American and French Revolutions—and liberty by ascribing moral and intellectual features to phenotype, which normalized the disqualification of Afro-Americans from civic participation (Fields 1990: 114).1 Accordingly, racism is neither paradoxical nor contradictory to democracy, liberalism, or nationalism. In fact, the idea that racism is paradoxical to democracy is intrinsic to the mythical construct of the nation dating back to the eighteenth century, when anti-slavery intellectuals and politicians conceived of racism as being a fundamental contradiction to the basic national precepts of civic equality and universal natural rights (see Trouillot 1995). As such, the historical moment of abolition posed the ideology of nationalism as a paradox to racism. Since the racialization of the New World plantation system, the social principle of race has emerged as an

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international framework of ranked categories that segments the world’s population, which differentially recognizes humanity (Trouillot 1990). The multi-cultural state—and its liberal racial reforms—maintains this same hierarchy of races that was at the center of the North Atlantic planetary system. Conventionally, scholars view the US civil rights movement or the fall of apartheid as if it threatened global racial order, a view which is complicit with the multi-cultural state’s national narrative of redemption. Such a view fails to analyze how political reforms, following in the wake of decolonization and the rise of new social movements, have strengthened the global system of race by reworking this international hierarchy. Howard Winant (2001), exemplifies this tendency as he misrecognizes these developments as a “rupture.” Moreover, he glorifies and reifies these movements as “the global resistance to white supremacy.” However, he mitigates his optimism by sounding “a political alarm: all around the world the momentum of struggle against racism is stalemated” (ibid.: xiv). Accordingly, he tells us, in Myrdalian fashion, of the “paradox” of a “new racism”: Paradoxically, in this reformed version racial inequality can live on, still battening on all sorts of stereotypes and fears, still resorting to exclusionism and scapegoating when politically necessary, still invoking the supposed superiority of ‘mainstream’ (aka white) values, and cheerfully maintaining that equality has been achieved. It is rather ironic that this new, ‘color-blind’ racial system may prove more effective in containing the challenges posed over the past few decades by movements for racial justice than any intransigent, overly racist ‘backlash’ could possible have been. (Winant 2001: 289)

By seeing the relationship between racial reforms and racism as paradoxical, Winant misses the crucial point: the essence of race is power and the contests over power, not

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merely the contest between ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ (Fields 2003). Race is also about struggles over power among whites themselves. White supremacy was never the single theme of world history. Even in the US, white supremacy has never led to consensus on a single program (ibid.). Instead, elite forces have consistently harnessed racial ideologies to economic and state projects in order to dominate both blacks and whites with what “may be characterized by a patronizing tolerance” (Fields 1982: 159). Recently, Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant (1999), in “On the Cunning of Imperial Reason,” dropped a bomb on many such anti-racist US scholars—especially those influenced by the book Racial Formations (1994), which Winant co-authored with Michael Omi. Most notably, Bourdieu and Wacquant argued that North American scholars of race represented US imperialism in its most “cunning” form as they had imposed North America’s peculiar and rigid form of race, based upon the principle of hypodescent, foisting US national values and beliefs upon Brazil as well as the rest of the world. Specifically, Bourdieu and Wacquant charged political scientist Michael Hanchard with applying North American racial categories to Brazil, in the process making the history of US civil rights into the universal standard for the struggle of all racially oppressed groups (1999: 44). This intervention resolved little, unraveling into an internecine dispute whereby supporters of US scholarship in Brazil accused Wacquant and Bourdieu of anti-Americanism while being seduced by the Brazilian myth of racial democracy (French 2000, 2003; Hanchard 2003). Nevertheless, Bourdieu and Wacquant made an important point in that they showed how academic knowledge, even in its critical forms, often reproduces the underlying logic of US nationalism—the racial principle of hypodescent—and imposes it on foreign countries, failing to appreciate the indigenous logic of class and race. Interest-

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ingly, Bourdieu and Wacquant’s point was amply elaborated by Michael Hanchard’s response to their critique. Hanchard defended his position by urging analysts to go beyond the politics of the nation-state and focus on the “complexity and specificity of black agency in both Brazil and the US” (2003: 6–7). All the same, he concluded that black and brown people of Brazil should organize as one group to confront the “chimera of racial equality” (ibid.: 20) and reject the categorical distinctions between ‘black’ and ‘mulatto’. In this way, Hanchard falls back on the racial principle of hypodescent as if it were a strategy for mobilization, not fully theorizing how the nation-state provides the very terrain of racism (Williams 1989, 1991). Despite this shortcoming, Hanchard’s response provides an important insight regarding the politics of ‘mixed’ blood in the Americas, pointing out the fallacy, one to which Bourdieu and Wacquant fall prey, that more pliable forms of race in Latin America and the Caribbean are any less coercive. As Viranjini Munasinghe observes in this forum, fluid concepts of race in the Americas do not connote lesser inequality. Instead, such racisms are rooted in class formations and the cultural politics of the nation-state.

Race, Racism, and the Power of Liberalism One key problem in understanding the relationship between race and nationalism results from the conflation of ‘race’ with ‘racism’. ‘Race’ is the mythology, the outward emblem of innate difference between humans, often co-nationals. ‘Racism’ is the political use of the myth. The claim that ‘race is a social construction’ has become a popular mantra, which explains little about the mechanism of its production and its modes of operation. Races do not exist, yet racism does. Thus, Trouillot states that “the crux of the matter is the use to which racial categories are put, the purpose for

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which they are mobilized, and the political contests that make this mobilization necessary in the first place” (2003: 108). Accordingly, when analysts do not analytically distinguish race from racism, ‘race’ functions to euphemize a wide variety of practices—e.g., slavery, genocide, segregation (Fields 2003). By substituting ‘race’ for ‘racism’, race becomes an attribute of the victim as opposed to the act of the racist (ibid.), requiring that we go beyond the mantra that race is a social construction and understand the difference between race and racism (see Hartigan, this issue). National institutions deploy multi-culturalism to recreate myths of ‘fraternity’, in order to simultaneously naturalize hierarchies and incorporate subalterns into the polity. Racism, though, is more than coercion; it defines productive relations whereby subordinated members of the national community forge links with dominant institutions. In this way, groups labeled as a ‘race’ must pit themselves against the state-backed image of the nation—which conflates race and class—that ideologically defines the real producers of the nation’s patrimony (Williams 1989: 434). Racial reforms such as affirmative action provide a systematic line of interaction between the national state and its racialized subjects. Civil rights legislation in the US, for example, integrated the movement into the state apparatus. Racial reforms invoke diversity in ways that neither question nor challenge the naturalized system of social classification on which the society’s system of inequality, which affirms nationalist state projects, is based (Domìnguez 1994: 334). Racial discourse demonizes. Even in its most cherished form—e.g., the Civil Rights Act—it distinguishes those marked as racial from the majority, assimilating diversity with liberal sympathy for essentialized racial minorities (Trouillot 1994: 345). The contributors to this forum explore the cunning of such nationalist practices of racism—what Diane AustinBroos calls “the politics of moral order” (Austin-Broos

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1997, and this issue)—that revolve around class struggles over the nation whereby hierarchies are naturalized. Clarifying this point, Viranjini Munasinghe criticizes Benedict Anderson’s optimistic concept of the nation for not taking into account the role of racism in nation-building. She illustrates that nationalism’s power derives from the manner in which it conjoins inclusion and exclusion by comparing racial myths of mixed blood in the US and Trinidad, whereby nationalists create visions of purity from historically produced heterogeneity through concepts of hypodescent and race mixture, respectively. Joel Kahn further elaborates the centrality of race in nation-building in his discussion of racializing practices in contemporary Malaysia. He challenges the conventional view, which assumes that Malaysian racism is a “legacy of colonialism” by examining what Malaysians identify and experience as a paradox: the simultaneous engagement in racializing practices with an anti-racist critique. Instead of being a paradox, Kahn argues that such racializing and anti-racist tendencies are mutually formative and derive from the manner in which Malaysian state formation used racial classification in order to make an association between ‘blood’ and ‘territory’. Elizabeth Povinelli shows the centrality of intimacy in constructing national narratives in settler colonies such as Australia and the US. By examining the “intimate event,” Povinelli argues that discourses of freedom and social constraint—autological and genealogical imaginaries—collapse alterity into a singular, racialized ‘other’. In this way, multi-culturalism represents a technology of power that builds on—and retains the racializing logic of—the “savage slot” (Trouillot 1991). Racializing practices, even in their multi-cultural form, conjure the specter of “unfreedom,” what Povinelli calls “the drag of descent.” Austin-Broos elaborates these contexts of inequality in Australia and the US by describing how Australian multi-culturalism and

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US civil rights discourse have deployed racial concepts to moralize the national order by acknowledging past injustices in ways that require the morally disenfranchised to re-examine themselves. She points out ways in which national agencies, rather than reforming racial practices, employ reforms to naturalize class inequalities, as if they arise from moral deficits, deviance, or degeneracy. Vijay Prashad discusses the political-economic context of these moral politics in post–civil rights US, showing how the integration of Afro-North Americans into the public sphere occurred at a time in which neo-liberal policies had gutted the already anemic US welfare state. The simultaneous passage of the Civil Rights Act and the rise of Nixon’s New Federalism left North Americans with ‘highminded ideals’ and an enfeebled social-wage state, as neoliberal proponents disinvested from the very programs in which civil rights leaders had vested their hopes. In complementary fashion, Jason Antrosio analyzes the way that the developing neo-liberal Colombian state implemented drastic tariff cuts and privatization of state-owned enterprises through multi-culturalist racializing practices and politics of recognition. In effect, the Colombian national constitution declared the end of the homogeneous nationstate, and instead presented itself as the neutral arbiter of the market and in respect to national identity. Finally, John Hartigan tackles the question of race as a scientific discourse, as political activists and conservative intellectuals have used new studies in genetics to revamp the mythology of race. Moreover, he shows that some of the successes in this reinvigoration of racializing practices derive from the failure of social scientists to develop a useful understanding of race and racism. Instead, social scientists have relied on the mantra that race is ‘socially constructed’ and have not kept up with the dynamic manner in which racializing practices articulate the North American nation-state in the post-segregation era.

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Acknowledgements I thank Goucher College’s generous support in providing me a summer research fellowship for 2005. I started and finished this project while a Visiting Fellow at the School of International and Community Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. I thank Kathleen Burns, Maeve Colohan, Sue Covich, Alex and Bill Druids, Ruth Evans, Cleo Fleming, Sue Grundy, Chris Scanlon, Joe Siracusa, Sue West-Rowe, and Barbara White, who made my visit to RMIT productive and enjoyable.

Notes 1. See Mintz (1984) and Thompson (1935; 1940; [1939] 1975: 83– 111) for an analysis of the relationship between the plantation as a frontier institution in the New World and the invention of race. As a frontier institution, planters used plantations to clear lands and to settle and spread populations in order to bring raw materials into the orbit of European mercantilism.

References Austin-Broos, Diane. 1997. Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of Moral Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baca, George. 2003. “‘Our Way of Life’: Post-Civil Rights Racial Politics in a Southern Army-Town.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University. _______. 2004. “Legends of Fordism: Between Myth, History, and Foregone Conclusions.” Social Analysis 48, no. 3: 169–178. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1999. “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason.” Theory, Culture, and Society 16, no. 1: 41–58. Cooper, Frederick, and Rogers Brubaker. 2000. “Beyond ‘Identity.’” Theory and Society 29, no. 1: 1–47. Dominguez, Virginia. 1994. “A Taste for ‘the Other’: Intellectual Complicity in Racializing Practices.” Current Anthropology 35, no. 4: 333–348.

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Fields, Barbara J. 1982. “Ideology and Race in American History.” Pp. 143–178 in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. M. Kousser and J. M. McPherson. New York: Oxford University Press. _______. 1990. “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America.” New Left Review 181 (May–June): 95–118. _______. 2003. “Of Rogues and Geldings.” American Historical Review 108, no. 5: 1397–1405. French, John D. 2000. “The Missteps of Anti-imperialist Reason: Bourdieu, Wacquant and Hanchard’s Orpheus and Power.” Theory, Culture, and Society 17, no. 1: 107–129. _______. 2003. “Translation, Diasporic Dialogue, and the Errors of Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant.” NEPANTLA: View from the South 4, no. 20: 375–378. Hanchard, Michael. 2003. “Acts of Misrecognition: Transnational Black Politics, Anti-imperialism and the Ethnocentrisms of Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant.” Theory, Culture, and Society 20, no. 4: 5–29. Holt, Thomas C. 2000. The Problem of Race in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 1998. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Australia and Sri Lanka. 2d ed. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Lomnitz-Adler, Claudio. 2001. Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: Anthropology of Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mintz, Sidney W. 1984. Caribbean Transformations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002.The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thompson, Edgar T. 1935. “Population Expansion and the Plantation System.” American Journal of Sociology 41, no. 3: 314–326. _______. [1939] 1975. Plantation Societies, Race Relations, and the South: The Regimentation of Populations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. _______. 1940. “The Planter in the Pattern of Race Relations in the South.” Social Forces 19, no. 2: 244–252.

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Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1990. Haiti, State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press. _______. 1991. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” Pp. 17–44 in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. R. Fox. Santa Fe: School of American Research. _______. 1994. “Comment on Virginia Dominguez, ‘A Taste for the “Other”: Intellectual Complicity in Racializing Practices.’” Current Anthropology 35, no. 4: 345–446. _______. 1995. “An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-event.” Pp. 70–107 in Silencing the Past. Boston: Beacon Press. _______. 2003. “Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises.” Pp. 97–116 in Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave. Williams, Brackette F. 1989. “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 401–444. _______. 1991. Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Winant, Howard. 2001. The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II. New York: Basic Books.

NARRATING A NATION THROUGH MIXED BLOODS

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Viranjini Munasinghe

Is nationalism more noble than racism? Anderson argues that it is: “Nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations” (1991: 149). For Anderson, racism springs from ideologies of class, which are rooted in notions of blood purity. In contrast, he holds that patriotic dreams and nationalist fellowship rest on a fundamentally different criterion—the language encountered on the mother’s knee. This distinction that Anderson draws is crucial. It leads him to view nations as open and inclusive, since one can be invited into the nation (as is implicit in the term ‘naturalization’), whereas the impulse of racism is to exclude. At a time when many scholars view nationalism as a pathology, Anderson reminds us that nations can inspire love—“often profoundly self-sacrificing love” (1991: 141). Do these contending positions, then, evidence different types of nationalisms, the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (see, e.g., Plamenatz 1973)? I suggest otherwise. Nationalism’s

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power derives from the way it simultaneously conjoins forces that we assume must repel one another—e.g., love and hate, inclusion and exclusion, openness and closure. Accordingly, I argue that if nationalism is an ‘invitation’, it is an invitation predicated on exclusion—a sublime love that is premised on hatred and dreams of a historical destiny that is cleansed of “loathsome copulations.” Such is the paradoxical state of nationalism from which it derives its power. This paradox is heightened in nationalisms of the Americas, where blood (as a synechdoche for race) serves as a key symbol for the nation. While the ‘bloody’ racist history of the New World attests to the intimate connection among racism, exploitation, and the symbolics of blood, nationalists here have also deployed a particular narrative of the spoils of their history—blood mixture—to forge national redemption for each incipient nation.1 Narrating the nation through blood mixture promises national redemption because mixture both “cunningly” acknowledges historical injustices (Povinelli 2002), which are posed as paradoxical to the liberal nation, while it seeks resolution of this contradiction through racial intimacy. The paradox between bondage and liberty needed to be ideologically sutured, and each incipient nation would do it in its own way. The ideology of blood mixture would be the site of this suturing for each national drama. Nationalisms in the Americas are based on an elaborate array of symbols and mythologies of blood mixture, such as the US’s melting pot (reserved for white immigrants), the creole2 in the Caribbean, and the mestizaje in Latin America. I would like to add another symbolic frame, which is not normally recognized as a symbol of mixed blood—the North American principle of hypodescent, according to which the children of mixed unions are automatically assigned to the ‘inferior’ group. Hypodescent is both an empirical process and a symbol of blood mixture,

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colloquially recognized as the ‘one-drop rule’. This theory dictates that black blood contaminates white blood when mixed, so that only black blood can be socially recognized within the mixture. This way, a black purity is classified into being and safely contained within the black-white binary. Hypodescent signals the symbolic site of transformation where mixture becomes classified as blackness, and the binary is the site where black purity subsequently gets anchored. Since nationalisms in the US and the rest of the Americas have revolved around mixed-blood concepts, historical destinies have inevitably been narrated through the specter of blood contagion. Yet blood mixture has also afforded national redemption by providing the ideological glue to create national myths of fraternity—a new national type indigenous to the New World. Melville dreamed of such redemption for the US when he prophesied in 1849 that intimacies among the races would be realized and that English liberty would be perfected only on American ground, because it would “forever extinguish the prejudices of national dislikes” (cited in Hollinger 2003: 1389) Fifteen decades later, historian David Hollinger (2003) echoes Melville as he urges Americanist historians to recognize the history of racial amalgamation in the US as an antidote to the oppressive nature of hypodescent. He views blood mixture as a panacea that would permit the realization of national fraternity, transgressing—in American exceptionalist fashion—Old World racial types. Hollinger’s recognition of the ‘true’ extent of black-white blood mixture in the United States appears radical. However, his effort to redeem American national history resembles the nationalist discourse of post-independence Trinidad and other Anglophone Caribbean nations following decolonization. The difference is that the Trinidad narrative became an official nationalist narrative, while the US nationalist narrative remains a racial binary along

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with the melting pot and hypodescent. Hollinger’s amalgamation thesis is as of yet a non-hegemonic nationalist historical destiny. Accordingly, I will focus on the United States and Trinidad, whose national narratives appear to be at odds. Scholars often view US racial politics as harsh in contrast to the more pliable multi-racialisms of Caribbean and Latin American societies, which register race along a color continuum. However, such optimism fails to recognize that ‘fluid’ forms of racism can operationalize blood mixture as a mechanism to forge national identity as in the Anglophone Caribbean, where nation-building occurred more than a century after abolition (1834). The inverse is true of the US. Since slavery continued for almost a century after the birth of the Republic, blackwhite blood mixture was—and in some sense continues to be—unthinkable within this nation born of enslavement. Despite their differences, we might safely conclude, contra Anderson, that the dreams and destinies of these two nations are firmly conceived in (loathsome or desirable) copulations. As such, in these two national contexts racism and nationalism are inextricably linked, even if they are not clearly identical (I will speculate on the nature of the intimate relation between nationalism and racism later in the essay).

Amalgamation against Hypodescent: Dreaming a Nation’s Destiny through Blood Mixture US politics of nationalism cannot be understood without examining the racial principle of hypodescent. David Hollinger has recently argued that the theory of hypodescent is unique to the United States, the key point on which he claims historical exception for the United States as well as for Afro-Americans in contrast to other minorities in the United States (2003: 1368):3

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The stigma carried by blackness is unique, and is affixed and perpetuated resolutely by the American practice of treating blackness as a monolithic identity that an individual either has or does not have on the basis of the principle that any African ancestry at all determines that one is simply black. The invidiousness of this “one-drop rule” was eloquently encapsulated by Barbara Fields more than twenty years ago: we have a convention “that considers a white woman capable of giving birth to a black child but denies that a black woman can give birth to a white child.”

Hollinger’s thesis is that the principle of hypodescent originates in the property interests of slaveholders, since children sired by the latter but classified according to the status of their mothers would not only augment the slaveholders’ property but also preserve “the amazingly durable fiction that male slaveholders and the other white males in the vicinity were faithful to their wives” (2003: 1369). Accordingly, Hollinger hopes that by accepting racial mixture, blackness itself will be less stigmatized. Thus, he believes that the anti-racist struggle must recognize the national drama of amalgamation that is playing out silently beneath the racist ideology of hypodescent. To aid in this public recognition, he calls on historians to write mixture-centered views of histories of the United States, which he believes will provide lessons that are both hopeful and humbling. Hollinger finds comfort in the fact that intimate bonds were forged between blacks and whites and also among other races during the course of the history of this nation. For him, national recognition of this empirical fact carries the hope of redeeming the nation of its racist heritage. But in keeping with the spirit of nationalism, such redemption is possible only by selectively forgetting (Renan 1994) the complicity between nationalist impulses and the practice of racism in the US. It is not a question of the US recognizing

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what is commonplace in the social sciences—that race is socially constructed (Hollinger 2003: 1368)4—and thereby acknowledging the intimate mixings between blacks and whites that have been historically muted by the principle of hypodescent. Rather, given that the basic principle of nationalism is to create homogeneity out of heterogeneity (Williams 1989), the question remains as to whether blood mixture can preserve its integrity when appropriated for any nationalist cause. Contrary to Hollinger, I would argue that blood mixture finds ultimate resolution in the creation of new purities (to legitimize exclusions by defining outsiders) when such mixtures are appropriated to symbolize the nation. Mixed intimacies that have gone unrecognized encapsulate Hollinger’s hope for the nation’s redemption. I read the opposite in such instances. The absence of a symbolic doxa to register such mixings attests to the power of social and economic historical structures that produce national symbolics that deny such intimacies because they are defined as dangerous. As such, they are classified out of recognition—they do not and cannot socially exist (Douglas 2002). It would be impossible for this symbolic grid to entertain unsavory elements that it had already domesticated or spat out. Scholars’ recognition of illicit mixings does not change the social structure. Starting from “ethnoracial mixture,” as Barbara Fields cleverly reminds us, leads to “the great evasion” of North American history: “the substitution of ‘race’ for ‘racism’” (Fields 2003: 1397–1398). This substitution transforms the act of a racist subject into an attribute of a racialized object. “Once everyone understands that African descent is not race and that African ancestry differs from others only in the racism with which Euro-America has stigmatized it, the problem changes: what is needed is not a more varied set of words and categories to represent racism but a politics to uproot it” (ibid.: 1405). Hollinger

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cannot help us fix hypodescent by merely getting the American5 public to acknowledge amalgamation. Hypodescent, therefore, is fundamental to American nationalism. So is the melting pot, an enduring national image of mixture (see Hollinger 2003). The US narrative of mixture asserts that immigrants leave behind their Old World ancestries and become American upon landing on US soil (Segal 1994). Adoption of this New World identity establishes the cultural basis for civic equality, transforming immigrants into Americans and rupturing symbolic continuity between the Old and New Worlds. Immigrants experience this vital transformation as they symbolically pass through the cauldron of the melting pot. The melting pot myth, however, disregards (and helps fortify) the more comprehensive and powerful American narrative—the black-white binary of race. It is this binary that lends meaning to other national symbols, such as the melting pot and the immigrant experience, because these national images gain meaning only in relation to half of this binary. The ‘unmeltables’ who were brought to the New World as slaves are still refused entry into the cauldron. It is these unmeltables as a group who are produced through hypodescent. The American national narrative hinges on the mutual production of all three images (hence, I see a triangulation of points), wherein the race purities of the binary structure—white and black—are preserved through the symbolic management of mixing in the spheres of the melting pot and hypodescent. In these two arenas, mixing is at first permitted and recognized and later disavowed, creating a new purity, a homogeneous, unmarked white American, and, in the case of hypodescent, a marked black American. Flattening all differences into one racial type, purity triumphs over impurity,6 given its immigrant and slave-based history. American nationalism has created narratives that could transform heterogene-

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ity (impurity) into homogeneity (purity). Blood mixture representing the various Old World ancestral types was therefore acknowledged out of necessity, but only to be transformed into a new purity. The coincidence of nationbuilding and the moral justification of slavery laid the foundation for what would be labeled America’s national dilemma and exceptionalism—a democracy based on, or a legacy of, bondage. Because of this legacy, American nation-building necessitated the creation of two purities, which had to be created in the separate spheres of the melting pot and hypodescent. Thus, the nation assumed its overtly binary, racialized form. It is tempting to believe that the rigid US racial structure (especially hypodescent) can be dismantled through racial mixing and the recognition of its ‘true’ state—amalgamation. However, as I have illustrated, hypodescent is part of the symbolic infrastructure through which the nation-making machine produces a pure people. Empirical recognitions rarely threaten such classifications that have already symbolically defined illicit mixings as non-existent. The power of classification to define national mixture and its exclusionary underpinnings is vividly illustrated in the case of Trinidad.

Mixture (Creole) against Purity: Defining Exclusions through Mixed Bloods In Trinidad, mixture has been a core national symbol. Since independence in 1962, Trinidad is represented as a nation peopled by diverse ancestries—African, Amerindian, East Indian, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Syrian, among others. The Trinidadian nationalist narrative foregrounds ancestral diversity because historical memory dictates against any claim to a ‘primordial’ identity for the national subject except for the Amerindian. As a consequence, creole—which symbolizes mixtures of all kinds, including blood, language, foods, etc.,

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and which “refers to a local product which is the result of a mixture or blending of various ingredients that originated in the Old World” (Bolland 1992: 50)—emerged as the core national symbol. Creole was also appropriated by nationalists and by local and foreign scholars who saw creolization as a process of cultural interaction, synthesis, and change, whereby diverse Old World forms mixed to create novel forms indigenous to the New World. As such, creolization provided not only an ideal narrative for a common cultural identity for Caribbean people but also a process of indigenization. Creole was anything and anybody native to the New World as a consequence of mixing. In Bolland’s words “‘Creole’ refers to people who are culturally distinct from the Old World populations of their origin” (ibid.) Such mixings defined Creoles in Trinidad as natives. Yet strangely, not everyone was acknowledged as capable of mixing within the classificatory scheme. In his analysis of Trinidad’s colonial racial order, Segal (1993) illustrates how East Indians were excluded from the ‘mixed’ category. This order was built on the premise that ‘pure’ races (representing the Old World) came to Trinidad, and their subsequent mixing was a feature peculiar to Trinidad. Within this cognitive map, pure races were located outside of Trinidad, as against mixed bloods who were firmly located within and native to Trinidad. This belief constituted a major ideological axiom through which East Indians later came to be defined as outside the nation of Trinidad (see Munasinghe 2001). Colonial racial caricatures deemed East Indians as ‘unmixables’, a view premised on Orientalist caricatures of Indians as persons saturated with an ancient (albeit inferior) culture,7 which dictated against mixing. Thus, the Indian remained of the ‘East’ regardless of his or her ties to Trinidad. The African, in contrast, was seen as lacking an ancestral civilization, and his or her imputed status of ‘cultural

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nakedness’ permitted the African, through mixing, to incorporate new elements and thereby become West Indian or native (Segal 1993). The inability to recognize East Indian mixture is evidenced in the color spectrum, which could account for only black-white mixing (Segal 1993). Even though blackness was devalued, the fact that the category ‘black’ constituted a crucial axis in the color spectrum indicated recognition of the black or colored person’s ‘place’ within Trinidad. In contrast, East Indians were excluded from accountability within this system or any other that would have represented their ties to other groups and, by extension, to Trinidad. As such, there is a conspicuous lexical absence for East Indian mixing,8 an absence all the more telling when contrasted to the plethora of terms to account for different proportions of black-white mixing. Despite the ample empirical evidence that points to East Indians mixing with other groups, what is significant to my argument is the absence of the social recognition of such mixing. East Indians were also excluded from the term ‘creole’, which was applied to persons of white and black ancestry represented in the color spectrum. Excluded from the color spectrum, East Indians were not considered an ingredient in this resulting mixture. If mixing was the principle through which ‘nativeness’ was defined, then to be native or local was also to be creole. Denied the capacity to mix and denied social recognition of their local connections to other ancestral groups, East Indians never became creoles. Accordingly, even today East Indians are not designated by the term ‘creole’. The exclusion of East Indians from creole status had significant implications for this group’s positioning vis-à-vis the incipient nation of Trinidad during the decolonization period, when the word ‘creole’ came to metonymize Trinidadian national identity.

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Creole, within this scheme, constituted a nationalist myth about creating impurity or mixture out of purity (that is, by mixing originally diverse pure ancestral types representing Old World disassociations), from which, in turn, emerged a Trinidadian purity. In a place where no one except Amerindians could truly claim native status on the basis of ancestry, new myths of origin arose. Since racial, cultural, and all other types of mixtures and multiplicities continue to play a part in the ideology of the Caribbean, any conception of ‘nativeness’ had to encompass this fundamental characteristic. In other words, Trinidadian purity necessarily had to acknowledge symbolically and then ‘manage’ a situation of impurity or mixture. It did this by recognizing the mixture of some bloods (mainly black and white) to create a Trinidadian New World purity against the exclusion of Old World purity, projected to the East Indian. To apply Hollinger’s argument here would be in vain. The empirical fact of mixed bloods with East Indian ancestry only makes transparent the national symbolic infrastructure geared toward producing the ‘legitimate’ national geo-body. Scholars’ recognition of this fact would hardly dismantle this machinery. Within the national symbolic doxa, empirically mixed persons with East Indian ancestry do not have a social existence—they are matter out of place (Douglas 2002). In Trinidad, if mixture is to be the basis for ideologically producing national purity, then mixables must be pitted against unmixables, the unmixable in this case coming in the form of East Indian purity. The invitation to be creole (representing blood mixture) is predicated, then, on the exclusion of being East Indian (representing blood purity). In the United States, the invitation to the melting pot is predicated on an exclusion based on hypodescent, whereby all blood mixture is reduced to the most despised element upon which a new purity—a black purity—was created.

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Conclusion The paradox of the nation-state as we know it is that while it is the most common geo-political unit shaping the twenty-first century, each unit also claims exception with respect to its own national genius. In this sense, every nation is both the same and yet not the same. Claiming national genius for one’s people in turn is a crucial strategy of race-making that takes place both within and without the context of the nation-state. In identifying the national genius of a people, nation-builders become racemakers (Williams 1989) by producing a national people against Other internal (ethnics and minorities) and external (foreign nation-states) peoples who claim a different genius. In the nation game, all such differences—cultural, linguistic, and phenotypic—are ultimately reducible to blood. Following Brackette Williams (1989), if we argue that a people’s purity exists only at the moment when it is classified into being, which is the nationalist imperative of achieving homogeneity, then the examples of both the United States and Trinidad illustrate that acknowledging tabooed mixture at the empirical level (as opposed to classifying it at the symbolic level) can never be an antidote for racism. Rather, tabooed mixtures might instead illustrate the tenacity of the symbolics shaping the national body because it has shown at least to some of us that nationalism has the power to suppress certain (empirical) facts from even entering the realm of possibility. For example, in contemporary Trinidad, the irony is that it is mostly East Indians who are intent on preserving their blood purity. Nationalisms that foreground blood mixture also give us some insight into the nation’s schizophrenic character, in which nationalist ideologies (articulated and managed through nationalist narratives) simultaneously embrace

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mixture (with some) as much as they repel it (with certain others)9 (see Munasinghe 2002). Blood constitutes the ultimate basis through which a nation’s people are classified into being. In Trinidad, national imaginings celebrate all kinds of mixture, but celebrations of mixture can be acknowledged only through the disavowal of mixings with the East Indian. To dream of historical destinies for a pure people is to be in constant vigilance against the nightmare of loathsome copulations and its consequence of blood mixtures—schizophrenia.

Acknowledgments I gratefully acknowledge the fine advice of Diane Austin-Broos and Derek Chang, which substantially improved this article. My most sincere thanks go to George Baca for his inspiring conversations, for his expert advice and editing of this essay, and, finally, for his generosity and patience.

Notes 1. In this preliminary essay, I restrict my analysis to black-white mixings when I consider racial politics in the US; specifically, I focus on its racial principle of hypodescent. 2. The term ‘creole’ also signifies local languages in the Caribbean. 3. His exceptionalism argument enables Hollinger to intimate that these other minorities, mainly consisting of new immigrants (Asian Americans and Latinos), are unfairly reaping the benefits of affirmative action policies that were originally designed for African Americans. 4. I would add that if blackness is to be recognized as arbitrary, then all color and race categories should be subject to such national scrutiny, since one cannot effectively interrogate the arbitrariness of a single category in the universal race hierarchy without questioning the whole.

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5. Fully aware of the hegemonic implications of equating ‘the United States’ with ‘American’, I nevertheless use the terms interchangeably to avoid awkwardness in phrasing. 6. I would argue that the purities produced through the melting pot and hypodescent are not equivalences in that white Americans have the possibility of still accounting for their different Old World ancestries as secondary identities. Such secondary identities are not a realistic option for black Americans. 7. In addition to Segal (1993), see also Munasinghe (1997). 8. The ‘dougla’ signifies black and East Indian mixing. This term until recently was used only to refer to individuals and had little nuance in usage. The term seems to be undergoing significant and exciting transformations along with recent political changes in the racial and national life of the island. 9. I do not intend to convey here that it is always the group in power that resists tabooed mixtures. In Trinidad, East Indians are more likely to resist biological mixing with Afro-Trinidadians, while the latter seem fairly open to such intimacies. In the spirit of this essay, let me stress that I am less concerned with empirical facts per se than the relations obtained between the latter and the symbolics of national narratives, especially the disjuncture between the two.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bolland, Nigel. 1992. “Creolisation and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History.” Pp. 50–79 in Intellectuals in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, ed. Alistair Hennesey. London: Macmillan. Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger. New York and London: Routledge. Fields, Barbara J. 2003. “Of Rogues and Geldings.” AHR Forum: Amalgamation and the Historical Distinctiveness of the United States. American Historical Review 108, no. 5: 1397–1405. Hollinger. David. 2003. “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States.” AHR Forum: Amalgamation and the Historical Distinctiveness

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of the United States. American Historical Review 108, no. 5: 1363–1390. Munasinghe, Viranjini. 1997. “Culture Creators and Culture Bearers: The Interface between Race and Ethnicity in Trinidad.” Transforming Anthropology 6, nos. 1 and 2: 72–86. ______. 2001. Callaloo or Tossed Salad? East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ______. 2002. “Nationalism in Hybrid Spaces: The Production of Impurity out of Purity.” American Ethnologist 29, no. 3: 663–692. Plamenatz, John. 1973. “Two Types of Nationalism.” Pp. 23–36 in Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea, ed. Eugene Kamenka. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Renan, Ernest. 1994. “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” Pp. 17–18 in Nationalism, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Segal, Daniel. 1993. “Race and ‘Color’ in Pre-independence Trinidad and Tobago.” Pp. 81–115 in Trinidad Ethnicity, ed. Kevin Yelvington. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. ______. 1994. “Living Ancestors: Nationalism and the Past in Postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago.” Pp. 221–239 in Remapping Memory, ed. J. Boyarin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Williams, Brackette F. 1989. “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 401–444.

THE MAKING AND UNMAKING(?) OF A MALAY RACE

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Joel S. Kahn My dad is a racist; so is my mom. Similarly racists are my brother, sister, and relatives. All the friends I have, I had, are/were racists too. Well, thanks to all these people, I am, too, a racist. We are the members of a much larger community: Malaysia—the racist nation! The term ‘community’ is somewhat misleading. We are not united as such as the term seems to imply, as a true nation should be. We are only united by the fact that all of us—at one time or the other—have been racists, are racists, will be racists.1

In these remarks on race in Malaysia, I wish to engage the popularly held belief that racism in Malaysia is a legacy of colonialism. I will instead address the way racializing beliefs and practices in the Malaysian context are better understood in the context of processes of modern state- and nation-building during the period of so-called organized modernity, processes that were at work in both colonial and non-colonial settings. This explanation at the same time provides for a more effective resolution of what might otherwise appear to be a genuine paradox, namely, the fact that racism and anti-racism appear

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always to co-exist in the Malaysian context. I will deal with this sense of paradox historically by problematizing the most widely accepted explanation for the racialization of contemporary Malaysian society—that it is the legacy of Malaysia’s colonial past. Subjecting the argument for colonial exceptionalism to critical scrutiny clears the way for better explanations of the apparent persistence of racializing discourses and practices in post-colonial conditions, at the same time casting doubt on the effectiveness of the kinds of universalizing anti-racist practices and movements that characterize our times.

The Paradox of Race in Malaysia In speaking of a paradox of race, I refer to the co-presence of racializing practices and anti-racism at all levels of Malaysian society. Malaysians are highly conscious of racial identities; in most social situations, race is of the utmost salience. The racial identity of a social actor— friend, colleague or workmate, neighbor, politician, boss, criminal—is the primary factor, and everything of consequence seems inevitably to follow. A limited set of sub-national identities are deeply embedded within the modern Malaysian consciousness, and the primary categories by and through which Malaysians are classified—Malay, Chinese, Indian, Other, indigenous bumiputera, non-indigenous—are naturalized through a racial discourse of descent based on ‘blood’ and phenotype. These racializing practices assign all Malaysians, who in turn assign themselves, to one of a limited number of quasi-biological categories, effectively destabilizing all attempts to imagine a so-called civic nation in which citizens are supposed to enjoy equal rights regardless of natural endowment, culture, or religious belief. Despite such high levels of racialization, many Malaysians—ordinary citizens, members of the political and

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economic elites, oppositional politicians, religious leaders, intellectuals, artists and devotees of popular culture— claim to be anti-racist and are often critical of the prevalent racial assumptions. The more honest and insightful among them, including our observer quoted above, are worried by the hold of such racial assumptions over their own consciousness as well. Recent years have in fact seen a turn among political leaders, oppositional forces, and religious movements to a variety of more universalistic agendas—techno-modernist, civil society–based, or religious—which oppose the racially communitarian politics that emerged in the wake of independence. Such reform tendencies resonate with foreign criticism of Malaysian society, especially by Western observers, who by and large denounce what they take to be racially exclusionary policies, such as those that were implemented ostensibly to reduce the economic disparities between the supposedly economically dominant Chinese and the economically marginalized/disadvantaged bumiputera2 in the aftermath of the 1969 race riots in Kuala Lumpur. More generally, they have been eager to point to the ‘constructedness’ and hence artificiality of the racial categories on which such practices are based. But such co-existence of racism and anti-racism—and of universalizing and particularizing beliefs and practices more generally—is not in fact paradoxical at all. Both tendencies have been closely interlinked, even mutually formative in the history of state- and nation-building from at least the latter part of the nineteenth century. The racializing effect of these transformations was manifested in the changes in the category Melayu (Malay) that took place in the first few decades of the twentieth century. The people who later came to be classified, and to classify themselves, as members of Bangsa Melayu (Malay Race-Nation) at the end of this period were the descendants of linguistically and culturally diverse peoples from

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different parts of insular and peninsular South-East Asia, and sometimes even India, Arabia, and China, who had come to the region centuries ago, often intermarrying with local Malay-speaking peoples (see Reid 2001). As a consequence, what is now understood to be a uniquely Malay culture is a reified abstraction, its constitutive elements being the product of centuries of cultural influence, borrowing, and hybridization. In the pre-colonial period and in the first few decades after the imposition of formal colonial rule in British Malaya, then, ‘Malay’ was not a racial or even a fixed identity in the modern sense of these terms. Instead, it was an interstitial category, since Malay identity in this period involved speaking the regional lingua franca on which modern Bahasa Malaysia as well as Bahasa Indonesia were based, interacting with people of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds, inserting oneself into Islamic religious and commercial networks, making the pilgrimage to Mecca or to Muslim holy sites within the Malay world, establishing relationships with and often becoming socially embedded within local agrarian communities, and so forth. In the diasporic Malay world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Malayness was apparently neither a fixed nor a permanent identity defined by blood and descent. But Malay identity and social classifications more generally were systematically transformed in British Malaya from around the third decade of the twentieth century, with the emergence of a racialized classification system that came to define a permanent association between ‘blood’ and ‘territory’ (Appadurai 1993; Williams 1989). In this process, ‘Malay’ became a fixed identity, as Malays came to see themselves as the original inhabitants of a particular territory, Tanah Melayu. Peninsular Malays came to be defined and to define themselves as bumiputera, distinguishing themselves territorially, culturally,

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and through descent (typically patrilineal) from ‘alien’ Chinese, Indians, and Europeans. At the same time, Malay intellectuals and proto-nationalists constituted their ‘people’ as disadvantaged and marginalized by the twin forces of colonialism and the immigration of more commercially sophisticated peoples from China and Europe. In this they echoed the view of many colonial officials that the duty of government colonial policy—and subsequently, of course, post-colonial policy—was the protection and uplifting of this disadvantaged, indigenous Malay ‘race’. Given, then, that a racialized Malay identity, and the system of racial identities of which it formed a part, cannot be understood as a simple carryover from a ‘premodern’ past or as a ‘natural’ outgrowth of a pre-existing diversity, how might we then best explain the racialization of Malayan/Malaysian society?

Revisiting Race in Colonial Malaya The salience of race and analysis of racializing practices in Malaysia are most commonly explained as the specific legacy of colonialism. Racial thinking is assumed to be a form of colonial knowledge, adopted by colonial states to facilitate a policy of ‘divide and rule’. Elsewhere I have assessed this contention in relation to the changing meanings of Bangsa Melayu (Malay Race-Nation), arguing that new discourses on Bangsa cannot be understood simply as a precipitate or ‘derivation’ of colonial thought, much less that the division of Malayan society into separate, racially conceived groups was merely a colonial construct (Kahn forthcoming, especially chapter 3). For example, the colonial discourse on racial meanings and boundaries had multiple understandings. Early Malay nationalist racial discourse combined elements of colonial racial thinking with more localized views about the links between the domains of human biology, physical environment, and

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culture. Moreover, the idea that the ‘indigenous’ inhabitants of peninsular Malaya, the Straits Settlements, and at least parts of the Indonesian archipelago constituted a single race/community/nation was beginning to gain currency among religious intellectuals in the region more widely, hence suggesting that Islamic and/or Middle Eastern ideas about race were as influential as, if not more influential than, British ones in this period. Finally, early Malay nationalists quite clearly had reasons of their own for preferring a definition of Malay that excluded Muslims of mixed Arab and Indian descent. If there are reasons to question the link commonly drawn between racialization and colonialism in British Malaya, one may ask more generally whether imperial ideology and racialization was therefore somehow more pronounced on the margins of empire than it was ‘back home’. Certainly, contemporary nation-building projects in settler colonies like Australia, and especially in the United States, were equally racializing, often in similar circumstances. Even in the imperial heartlands of Britain and France, state institutions, ‘scientists’, and intellectuals racialized the working classes, peasants, regional cultures, immigrants, and criminals. Moreover, arguments that attempt to directly link modern racism and colonialism neglect the fact that while they were divisive, colonial projects were also universalist and universalizing in aspiration. Granted, one effect of colonial racialization in British Malaya was an increase in the political, and indeed spatial, divisions among the ‘races’. At the same time, the British mission in Malaya was overwhelmingly seen as a liberal, ‘civilizing’ one through which all ‘races’, and particularly the ‘backward’ Malays, were ultimately to be brought to the same level as that of their British rulers. Finally, as time goes on it is less and less plausible that racializing beliefs and practices in places like Malaysia can be adequately explained by refer-

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ence to the ‘persistence’ of a colonial mentality. Indeed post-colonial regimes have been and continue to be just as implicated in racializing practices as was the colonial state. All this suggests that the racialization of Malaysian polity, economy, and society cannot be easily explained as a consequence of colonial exceptionalism.

Race, State, Nation I cannot present here a fully developed alternative to the argument that racialization in general—and as it pertains to the Malay race in particular—was a specifically colonial construct. Instead, I want merely to point to a number of related elements that together might provide an alternative framework for understanding the processes of modern racialization. Such a framework, as I have suggested, needs to recognize the interiority of the relationship between racism and anti-racism in modern Malaysia, on the one hand, and the broader, even global dimensions of the phenomenon itself, on the other.

Organized Modernity Such an alternative framework might first take into account that racialization accompanied broader changes in governance, which were generated by the rise of what Peter Wagner calls “organized modernity.” Briefly, he argues that the history of modernization is characterized by disorganized and organized, or what might also be called disembedding and re-embedding, phases. In its early phases, modernity entailed the “liberation” of people from existing socio-spatial arrangements. However, this was followed by what he calls the phase of “organized modernity,” when these same citizen/subjects were re-embedded in new sets of modern institutions and practices (see Wagner 1994). Moreover, Wagner’s account

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would suggest that re-embedding also involved processes of relocalization and hence the development of newly differentiated modern spatial orders. Although Wagner’s analysis focuses on Europe, this shift was also manifest in the Malay world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Increased levels of migration, commercialization, and religious reform, accentuated by the dynamic of colonial expansion, involved precisely such delocalizing moments in the first phase of British colonial expansion in the region. People entangled in existing sets of loyalties and institutions—to traditional rulers and Islamic leaders, to particular local communities, to groups based on common kinship and clanship, etc— were separated, or ‘liberated’ from their particular local contexts. The conditions that facilitated this ‘liberation’ included, as they did in Europe, the provision of “roads, railways, schools, markets … and the circulation of money, goods, and printed matter” (Weber 1976: 486). But as Wagner points out, such disembedding did not go on unchecked. As in Europe, these processes gave rise to a counter-impulse whereby people were re-embedded within the new institutions, practices, and landscapes created by modernity. And this involved, among other things, the establishment of new spatial practices and orders. The spread of modern practices produced a perception among elites of a crisis of “manageability and intelligibility,” generating a strong disciplinarian impulse, particularly on the part of officers of the colonial state, who sought to ‘capture’ or contain new citizens within particular practices, institutions, and spaces. As to whether modern states were successful on their own in producing these new landscapes, according to Wagner they were aided in their task by unconscious social forces that “were to change the nature of modern institutions along with their expansion. These transformations entailed a reembedding of society’s individuals into a new order—to be achieved

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by means of an increasing formalization of practices, their conventionalization and homogenization. As the extension was reached and the social access widened, practices were standardized and new constraints as to the types of permissible activities introduced (Wagner 1994: 17). It is in this context of modern ‘organized’ state- and nation-building that we must locate changes in colonial Malaya from the early decades of the twentieth century. This was a period when colonial and local elites began to articulate a view that the rapid movement of colonized peoples and their separation from existing ties to social, economic, and religious communities and to traditional religion-political elites were producing a crisis of manageability. At the same time, transformations were underway that would serve to re-embed the diverse inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula within a new socio-spatial order constructed by colonial capitalism and a disciplinarian modern state. The reforms in the lower levels of colonial bureaucracy, first in Singapore and then in the Federated States, involved an attempt to include representatives of the colonized, generating new representational practices through which a diversity of new local elites competed to speak for and on behalf of less advantaged, ‘subalternized’ colonial subjects. We have already seen how this competition contributed to the development of a discourse of racial pluralism.

Nationalization A second factor that can be related to the racialization of Malayan society is the phenomenon that Wagner calls “nationalization”: The idea that people were tied to each other by the commonality of the original experiences at their places of birth, of natality … was rephrased and turned into the guiding orientation for social and political life—in the

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guise of nationalism. The conceptual innovation was twofold. First, the space of origin was extended, beyond any possible experiential qualities, to the territory of the linguistically conceived nation-state … And, second, this enlarged space of original ‘experience’ was designed to be the container of socio-economic and political life at the same time. (Wagner 2001: 95)

Although in Europe this may have been a “conceptual foundation for political communities throughout all of the nineteenth century,” it was only toward the end of the century that such an idea was “strongly applied to the governance of individuals and populations. The passing and enforcement of immigration restrictions, the introduction of passport obligations, the linkage of social and professional opportunities to citizenship, the emphasis on national attributes in conflicts of all sorts are all phenomena that were introduced or strengthened during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries” (Wagner 2001: 90). At first sight, the situation in colonial Malaya appears to be different. There could be no illusion that the colonial state could or would realize the aspiration to sovereignty of the nation, since ‘state’ and ‘society’ were the preserves of distinctly different nations or races. But this, after all, would be corrected through decolonization, to which the nationalist movement, and indeed the colonial state itself, increasingly aspired. The problem in speaking of the nationalization of Malayan society in this period is that the nation was explicitly fragmented along ‘racial’ lines. But to treat a plural society like Malaya’s as exceptional in this regard would be misleading, even by European standards. As Wagner himself points out, while “the increased acceptance of the peoples’ right to self-determination at the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially after World War I, exacerbated the process of imposing nationalized rules on individuals,” it also had the effect

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“of excluding groups of other human beings from this right. In practice, the right to collective self-determination allowed statehood for a small number of cultural-linguistic collectivities and turned many more others into officially acknowledged ‘minorities’ of ‘nation-states’ dominated by other collectivities” (Wagner 2001: 90).

Universalism Thirdly, an alternative explanation for the racialization of Malaysian society needs to recognize the close links between race and universalizing discourses and projects (Williams 1989). As I have suggested elsewhere, racialization is better understood as a precipitate of a modern will to universalize than as some pre- or anti-modern impulse carried over into modern culture. This is because liberal universalism in particular tends to construe otherness in both evolutionary and naturalized terms, supporting the view that women, children, criminals, and colonized peoples are not yet capable of fully mature human reason (see Kahn 2001). And when they did articulate their mission in Malaya, British colonial officials inevitably did so in universalistic terms. Consider, for example, the case of Hugh Clifford, not because he was typical of colonial officialdom or of other British observers, but precisely because he was distinctly atypical in the depth of his knowledge of and sympathies for colonial subjects, particularly the Malays. He first came to Malaya in 1883 and stayed for 20 years, working in various posts in the colonial administration. He returned in the late 1920s as governor. Clifford acquired a good working knowledge of the Malay language, experiencing the “frightening fascination” of living with “a culture alien to his own, and coming to accept in some measure an alien system of values” (Roff in Clifford 1993: xiii). He confessed that “one cannot

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but sympathise with the Malays, who are suddenly and violently translated from the point to which they had attempted in the natural development of their race, and are required to live up to the standards of a people who are six centuries in advance of their national progress” (Clifford 1993: 11). Yet for all his experience of and empathy for his Malay subjects, and in circumstances that led European colonial ideologues elsewhere to proclaim the wisdom if not of independence then at least of promoting forms of development more in keeping with indigenous cultural values, Clifford clung firmly to the universalizing narrative of civilization that characterized the ideology of the vast majority of British officialdom in colonial Malaya, just as it did of British and other European nation-builders back home. Clifford (1993: 11) was very clear about this aspect of the colonial project: “What we are really attempting … is nothing less than to crush into twenty years the revolutions in facts and ideas which, even in energetic Europe, six long centuries have [been] needed to accomplish. No one will, of course, be found to dispute [that] the strides made in our knowledge of the art of government, since the Thirteenth Century, are prodigious and vast.”

Conclusion The racialized and pluralized landscape of contemporary Malaysia and Singapore is in no simple sense a colonial construction. But it is quite clearly an outcome of political modernization. The fact that processes of racialization took place in the context of modernization broadly defined—modern state formation, the nationalization of society, the universalization of cultural projects—suggests that we need to rethink the connection between race, pluralism, and modern governance, both in South-East Asia and the West. It is, for example, no longer sufficient to

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weigh up the successes and failures of modern states or of universalizing anti-racist projects more broadly in the ‘management’ of diversity. It is necessary also to investigate the ways in which modernization—economic, political, and cultural—also constitutes and reproduces race and diversity in the first place. It is, moreover, probably no accident that racialization and pluralization frequently occurred in places where ‘transmigrant’ populations became caught up in modern nation-building projects that involved, among other things, the application of universalistic forms and discourses of governance aimed at turning highly mobile, even diasporic populations into citizen-subjects of particular territorially based regimes. This suggests also that we need to look beyond universalizing anti-racist projects and rhetorics—whether they emanate from the state, civil society, or religious movements—for the possibility of genuinely cosmopolitan alternatives to race-based forms of discipline and governance.

Notes 1. Phyntamil Kumaran, “Welcome to Malaysia, Where Racism Is a Way of Life!” http://www.geocities.com/tamiliam/article2.html (accessed 24 June 2005). 2. Literally, ‘princes of the soil’, a category that is made up overwhelmingly of Malays but has also come to include other socalled indigenous—as opposed to immigrant—groups, including the ‘tribal’ peoples of East Malaysia, the Orang Asli of peninsular Malaysia, and others. Perhaps the most controversial of such practices, in the eyes of non-Malays and Western observers alike, were those that established quotas favoring bumiputera in government employment and contracts, entrance to state universities, and the like.

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References Appadurai, Arjun. 1993. “Patriotism and Its Futures.” Public Culture 5: 411–429. Clifford, Hugh. 1993. At the Court of Pelusu and Other Malayan Stories. Selected and introduced by William R. Roff. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Kahn, Joel S. 2001. Modernity and Exclusion. New York and London: Sage. ______. Forthcoming. Other Malays: Travel, Commerce and Islamic Reform in Southeast Asia. Reid, Anthony. 2001. “Understanding Melayu (Malay) as a Source of Diverse Modern Identities.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32, no. 3: 235–254. Wagner, Peter. 1994. A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline. London and New York: Routledge. ______. 2001. Theorizing Modernity: Inescapability and Attainability in Social Theory. London: Sage. Weber, Eugen. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Williams, Brackette F. 1989. “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 401–444.Yergin, Daniel. 1993. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. New York: Touchstone Books.

WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? The Race of Freedom and the Drag of Descent

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Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Intimate Voyages As long as there was race, there was the savage. Tribes would come later as those who invented their descending lines and segmentable surfaces projected them into the classical past of gens and phatries. And as long as there were savages, there were infidels. Christianity, defeated in the old Jerusalem, established a New Jerusalem through conquest and settlement, conversion and genocide, enslavement and rectitude in the Americas and Pacific. Some savages would be bestowed with cultures and some religions with the power of enlightenment. And yet, in the shadow of the enlightenment project, all of these social figures and social histories seem to collapse into a unilinear process of historical descent—the Crusades begat voyages of discovery, which begat the

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problem of the twentieth century, namely, the color line and the international division of colonizer and colonizer, the North and the South, the East and the West, the politics of recognition and the refusals of secularism—and a univocal problem of race, racialization, and racism. Race seems to have begat race: what makes discourse of tribalism, racism, and the savage slot seem ‘the same’ and seem different than the national citizen/subject is that they are all the effect of the same razza (lineage). Their actual social divergences and specificities are bled out. “But he who listens to history finds that things have no pre-existing essence, or an essence fabricated piecemeal from alien forms” (Foucualt 1984: 78). This brief essay suggests another way of understanding what constitutes these social figures and social histories into one constellation. I suggest how discourses of individual freedom and social constraint—what I call autological and genealogical imaginaries—animate and articulate the razza of savagery, tribalism, race, color, and colonialism. In this way, autology and genealogy provide the diagram and logic that collapse all the razza of race, with the result that everyone appears to belong to the same species. Intimacy—what I call the ‘intimate event’—provides a powerful means of unpacking this diagram because many ordinary subjects, critical theorists, and political pundits believe that the intimate event denegates race and racism. Instead, I suggest that the intimate event makes the normative horizon of freedom productive in liberal settler colonies by creating lineages and separations between populations along which power can act. From this point of view, the savage slot, the color line, the colonized and colonizer, multi-culturalism, and post-secularism cease being a discursive bloodline that should be tracked backwards. Instead, they are strategic maneuvers of power whose purpose—or result—is to distribute life, goods, and values across social space.

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The Autological Subject The autological subject of liberalism is projected by discourses and practices that measure the worth of life and society relative to their capacity to constitute and vest sovereignty in the individual. ‘I’ must be the citation and the site of enunciation and address. What do I want, desire, and aspire to? With whom do I wish to share not merely my worldly possessions but the narratives of who I think I am and who I desire to be? This mode of sovereignty functions as a foundational event—also known as an explicit performative and a bootstrap performative—in which the act of referring to the event or thing actually creates the event or thing. This form of subjectivity is illustrated by many terms—the autological subject, the parvenu, the self-made man, die Autonomie. Such an idiom disseminates this form across the liberal diaspora—e.g., French republicanism, American pluralism, Australian multiculturalism, and Turkish secularism—and then reunifies this dissembled form into a coherent singularity. In the liberal diaspora, the subject-in-love is experienced and understood like the self-governing subject insofar as both are ideologically oriented to the fantasy of the foundational event. Both self-sovereignty and intimate recognition establish a new subject out of the husk of the old, resetting the clock at zero and obviating social history. In liberal legal and political theory, modern love has nothing to do with race and other social figures. It is what exfoliates the social skin, what produces racial difference as if it were simply a skin that can be peeled away, leaving behind the true self. This notion of race as social skin, or of sex as a social fold, is a proto-typically progressive thought that seems to oppose oppressive power rather than extend it. For instance, C. L. R. James’s seminal study of the Haitian revolution relates the origins of the articulation of “the aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of religion”

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to “the aristocracy of the skin” (James 1963: 139). In addition, Jurgen Habermas (1989) and Anthony Giddens (1993) view the social dynamic that was inaugurated by the subject-in-love to be the singular achievement of the Western Enlightenment. Indeed, Habermas argues that this new form of intimate sovereignty provided the conceptual foundations for the democratic revolution and its models of freedom, public reason, and equality-based schemes of justice; for direct and representational democracy; and for democratic notions of freedom (Habermas 1989). Similarly, Randall Kennedy, a leading US constitutional lawyer and race theorist, suggests that in matters of love, the issue is the humanity of the person, not the accident of her birth or her forced enclosure within a social skin (Kennedy 2003). In a New York Times interview (2 September 2003), Kennedy asserts that love trumps racial status with regard to his children’s intimacy: “I’ll say go into the world and try to find good people that feel genuine affection and love for you and disregard everything else about their background. Love is just such a crucial, wonderful thing, and if you are lucky enough to find somebody who genuinely loves you, grab that person and hold on to that person and nothing else matters.” Except, of course, where these thickly enfleshed bodies do matter. The imaginary of the intimate event is always disrupted and secured by the logic of the exception—“except, of course, in the case of …” The ‘nothing more than’ of deracinating intimacy always projects out the question ‘what about this, then?—referring to the color of skin or the fold of flesh. Kennedy’s reflections on love and the immediate conceptual and legal conundrums they trigger take us to the heart of the promise and problem that the intimate event holds for those who put some store in it as a liberal mode of governance. One problem concerns viewing the intimate event as an actual event: the liberal subject is presumed to become sovereign at the moment she projects

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herself as her own authentic ground. But this foundational self is necessarily phantasmagorical, as no one can pick herself up by her own bootstraps. Rather, the felicity of this foundational event depends on a myriad of social institutions. As Jacques Donzelot (1997) shows in his study of the bourgeois family and social welfare in France, the contract between power and self-authorization is insinuated into the tissues, membranes, and practices of state disciplinary care. And Ann Stoler (2002) demonstrates that this insinuation occurred in colonial practices of child care as well. Thus, the sovereign and intimate subject of recognition was anything but free, in the sense of undetermined and stabilized—a social determination prevailed.1 An additional problem concerns the categorization of the intimate event as a singular versus general kind of contract. No matter how closely the intimate event is aligned to other kinds of economic and political contracts, it is also continually distinguished from them. The intimate contract is often represented as if it were in imminent danger of collapsing into the political and economic contract. If all of these contracts are based on the same kinds of subject, then what is the difference between buying and selling a car, marrying and divorcing a spouse, choosing and rejecting a state representative?2 The fungibility of goods and services focused on human life has only intensified in court cases sorting through the new reproductive technologies (Dalton 2000; Franklin 1997; Ragone 2001). The importance of the dense hermeneutic and institutional mirroring between economic, political, and intimate contracts is not that it shows how these contractual forms have collapsed into each other in some absolute way, but how their possible implosion creates widespread anxiety. Finally, liberal forms of democratic governance did not move from social status to the intimate contract as the foundation of liberal government. Instead, it reorganized

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how social status was deployed. Certainly, liberal societies have not freed themselves from the ‘external’ constraints of family, class, and religious power—as countless feminist scholars have demonstrated. Accordingly, the foundational event is also phantasmagorical since the conceptual form of state citizenship, insinuated into the deep tissues of economic, state, and national life, is based on birth from a human body or a territorial body and is thus inflected by gender and sexuality (Cott 2002). Immigration policy, for example, is shaped by the heterosexual family, as are inheritance legislation, tax codes, health benefits, and the distribution of adoption and new reproductive rights (see Fassin 2001). Intimacy, in sum, is a method of constituting two different kinds of truth about the subject and her social world; one truth is reduced to mere fact, while the other rises to a normative end. Discourses of liberal intimacy presume that in matters of the heart and the labors of a life, attitudinal and discursive practices should be based on foundational events most of the time, at least in the context in which this social form is being advanced as the end of history. The intimacy grid is a facet of normative politics, not actual politics. This thin but resilient regulatory ideal renders actual life irrelevant, reduced to an object like that of Lacanian desire; it is that away from which we should move, that with which we should be disappointed.

The Genealogical Society How, then, do discourses of intimate freedom deepen their grip on social life even though they are internally unstable and referentially untrue? And what do these practices of love have to do with race? To answer these questions we need to understand that the power of the modern intimate event lies not merely in its ability to emplot the social order, nor merely in its ability to anchor itself to other

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like-structured institutions, nor merely in its ability to invest itself with magical qualities and ethical purpose. Its power derives equally from a mirror image that supposedly marks its geographical and civilizational difference. In other words, the intimate event does not merely characterize some truth about liberal desire—it asserts and constitutes the differential truths of social geographies and global civilizations as a difference between individual freedom and social constraint, autology and genealogy. If the imaginary of the autological subject involved discourses, practices, and fantasies about self-making, self-sovereignty, and the value of individual freedom associated with the enlightenment project of contractual constitutional democracy and capitalism, imaginaries of the genealogical society involve discourses, practices, and fantasies about social constraints placed on the autological subject by various kinds of inheritances. Autological and genealogical discourses are not in this view different in kind, even though they are used to differentiate kinds of people, societies, and civilizational orders. They both presuppose a liberal humanist claim that what makes us most human is our capacity to base our most intimate relations, our most robust governmental institutions, and our economic relations on mutual and free recognition of the worth and value of another person, rather than basing these connections on, for example, social status or the bare facts of the body. These presuppositions circulate through the subjects and institutions of liberal settler colonies, informing how people talk about themselves and others, how they govern themselves and others, and who they think they are or who they think they should be. As people go about their ordinary lives—their practices of love, work, and civic life—they continually constitute these discourses as if the discourses were the agents of social life, as if there were such a thing as the sovereign subject and the genealogical

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society, as individual freedom and social constraint, and as if the choice between these Manichaean positions were the only real choice available to us. They do this as if all other actual and potential positions and practices were impractical, politically perverse, or socially aberrant. Genealogy consists of concrete practices and regulatory ideals that, no matter their internal incoherencies, have three major topographies: the materiality of genealogy, the symbolics of genealogy, and the economy of genealogy. First, discourses about the materiality of genealogy figure the truth of the body and its reproduction as simultaneously escaping and leading social and individual sovereignty. The materiality of genealogy is what is behind, or before, the individual and the social—what material they inherit to work with and what can be given life or death by the sovereign. This is corporeality, the figure of bodily reality within any discursive formation. In this sense, Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of “naked life” as the separation “of some simple fact of living common to all living beings” from “the form or manner of living particular to a single individual or group”—and especially to a human community that constitutes the modern political subject—describes one kind of corporeality (2003: 3). Thus, the division between naked life, or corporeality, and social life results from a social division. It is a ‘bio-political fracture’ that has a specific history and path of circulation in capitalism and empire—and it is already racialized. Corporeality represents a metaphysics of substance that posits a material legacy beyond the control of a person or society. This metaphysicality does not determine where this truly deracinated materiality lies: within the thin skin of the individual body, in the hormonal systems coursing through it, in the DNA that provides a code for it, or in the particular manner in which that DNA is wound and unwound.3 Rather, this metaphysics projects a space beyond the dialectic of social determination and individual

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freedom. In projecting this space, it incites the hope that we might transcend the division between flesh and discourse and the despair that flesh can never be extracted from its discursive conditions.4 Second, symbolics of genealogy include discursive practices that organize corporeality and meta-discursive practices about the relative value of these different methods. Symbolics of genealogy include actual practices of kinship, race, and nationalism along with theoretical and political discourses about the meaning, shape, and value of these kinship, race, and national practices to the health of the nation, to the people, and to an ethical way of life. In this manner, symbolics of blood encompass all conventions around the body, its reproduction, and the means by which goods and materials and rights and obligations move through these corporealities as markers of inheritance. This discursive play is also found in what David Hollinger has called the hypodescent of race politics in the US (Hollinger 2003; see also Fields 2003, and Munasinghe in this volume). However, the symbolics of genealogy run the ideological gamut from biological essentialism to cultural relativism to radical (de)constructionism, in which the semi-autonomous materiality of the body itself disappears under the deferred scribbling of discourse (e.g., see Butler 1989; Gilroy 2001). And yet all these ways of figuring the meaning, shape, and value of inheritances fashion them as specters, the ghostly remains of the past that are still imprinting the present. Finally, symbolics of genealogy are dispersed across bureaucratic space in such a way that different social classes within the same social group are denied access to different languages and styles of genealogy. This bureaucratic dispersion continually ruptures and fragments social groups that are already fractured. Third, the economy of genealogy encompasses the ways in which genealogical inheritances are deployed to

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circulate wealth and power, including discourses whereby societies organize personal and communal wealth on the basis of descent, along with discourses about the legacy of historical events, such as the colonial extraction of people, wealth, and ideas from the South. Therefore, the economy of genealogy encompasses the family inheritances of individuals as well as the historical inheritances of empire, such as debates about taxing the financial markets in order to redistribute monetary wealth from the North to the South. Though the discourses of genealogy within liberal settler colonies vary, two general rules apply. When culture/custom is considered to have a negative social or economic value for the settler society, that culture/custom is repressed. When culture/custom is considered to have a positive social or moral value for the settler society, then demanding this determination is seen as merely recognizing facts on the ground. The exfoliation of the social skin in one place is now seen as the demand for the foliation of the social skin in another place. This is illustrated in recent laws of recognition in settler nations such as Australia and Canada, where indigenous people have been granted special legal status on the condition that they show a genealogical relation to their customs and their bodies. The state and public demand that indigenous people demonstrate that they come from a lineage associated with a particular territory and that a cultural genealogy connects their present beliefs, desires, and hopes to the beliefs, desires, and hopes of their pre-colonial ancestors. Unlike the US Supreme Court ruling Loving v. the Commonwealth of Virginia, in which ancestry was ruled out as legitimate grounds for prohibiting forms of adult marriage, contemporary laws concerning indigenous cultural recognition demand that the subject of cultural rights demonstrates the determination of individual choice, mystery, and discovery with regard to cultural and racial inheritance. The cunning of recognition, as opposed to the

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law of recognition, is that, given the dense relationship between intimate sovereignty and liberal humanism, the demand that indigenous people demonstrate their rule by custom within the field of racial difference is also a practice of dehumanization. Dehumanization is the price they must pay for even the most remedial forms of recognition. In short, they are presented with a mirror that is actually a double-bind—either love according to liberal ideals of selfsovereignty and deculturalize yourself, or love according to the fantasy of the unchanging dictates of your tradition and dehumanize yourself.

Begetting Empire Perhaps this is the begetting of empire, in which race always conjures up the specter of unfreedom and the enclosures of genealogy. Writing diagonally through these discourses of the autological subject and genealogical society demands great care. On the one hand, one must find and refuse difference as it is produced by discourses of personal freedom and social constraint. On the other hand, one must resist the temptation to flatten out the social differences between these worlds. To say that there is no difference between social worlds is as misguided as saying that their forms of difference are reducible to the dichotomy of autology and genealogy. Anti-colonial and post-colonial thinkers have pointed us in this direction. Frantz Fanon, for instance, posited what a “genuine eradication” of the colonial order would consist of after a “real struggle for freedom” had taken place. “Individualism is the first to disappear,” Fanon argues, carefully describing what he means by individualism—“the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity” (1963: 47). “The very form of organization of the struggle will suggest [to the native intellectual] a different vocabulary,” the language of “brother, sister, friend”

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(ibid.). Brother, sister, friend—such an unobtrusive series of social addresses. And yet they do not collapse into the same intimacy grid of the liberal diaspora. After all, the hail of a friend is, from the perspective of autology, nothing more or less than a form of stranger sociability made intimate. To be a friend is to go beyond kinship into a self-reflexive, chosen relation. We say, she is not simply my sister, she is more: she is my best friend. Yet the exit from kinship as the condition of becoming a friend is exactly the kind of work that the assemblage of the intimate event and the genealogical society does, inserting a European history into an indigenous social imaginary—inserting a difference where none necessarily existed before. It is not that indigenous worlds had no term analogous to ‘friend’ or had nothing that could be called ‘intimacy’, but this local kind of intimacy may well be derived from an intensification of kinship rather than its negation. Aboriginal friends of mine do say that their close sisters are considered ‘sisters’ or ‘cousin sisters’ rather than something more or other than this.

Notes 1. It is hard to recapture the intensity of the threat to the community faced by this new kind of subject, when for the most part we see the issue the other way around, that is, in terms of the threat to the individual posed by the collectivity. Max Weber perhaps best captured the anxiety of the potential of this form of subjectivity to the social collective in his discussion of Calvinism (Weber 1958). 2. Just this difference was noted as early as Locke and as recently as the California Supreme Court’s decision in Perez v. Sharp, in which the court struck down California’s miscegenation legislation 19 years before Loving v. the Commonwealth of Virginia. In Perez, according to Randall Kennedy, the court argued that “the

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fungibility that was arguably present with respect to some goods and services was absent with respect of marriage” because “human beings would be diminished ‘by a doctrine that would make them as interchangeable as trains’” (Kennedy 2003: 262). 3. A point addressed in Paul Gilroy’s recent book (Gilroy 2001). 4. This metaphysical stance does not preclude the present deployment of corporeality for disciplinary ends. Indeed, rather than precluding these ends, the metaphysics of substances helps to legitimate certain disciplinary regimes. Biometrics, for instance, has emerged as a means of surveillance in the post–September 11 world. New reproductive technologies are also riddled with social regulation, as are First World multi-national thefts of the genetic material of the Second, Third, and Fourth Worlds.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2003. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Judith. 1989. Gender Trouble. New York and London: Routledge. Cott, Nancy. 2002. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dalton, Susan. 2000. “Non-Biological Mothers and the Legal Boundaries of Motherhood.” Pp. 191–232 in Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood, ed. H. Ragone and F. W. Twine. London: Routledge. Donzelot, Jacques. 1997. The Policing of Families. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Fassin, Eric. 2001. “Same Sex, Different Politics: ‘Gay Marriage’ Debates in France and the United States.” Public Culture 13, no. 2: 215–232. Fields, Barbara J. 2003. “Of Rogues and Geldings.” The American Historical Review. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ ahr/108.5/fields.html. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Pp. 75–100 in The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow. New York: Pantheon.

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Franklin, Sarah. 1997. Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception. London: Routledge. Fraser, Nancy. 1993. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracies.” Pp. 109–142 in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. C. Calhoun. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1993. The Transformation of Intimacy: Love, Sexuality and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gilroy, Paul. 2001. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Habermas, Jurgen. 1989. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hollinger, David. 2003. “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States.” The American Historical Review 108, no. 5: 1363–1390. James, C. L. R. 1963. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage. Kennedy, Randall. 2003. Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption. New York: Vintage. Ragone, Helena. 2001. “Surrogate Motherhood: Rethinking Biological Models, Kinship, and Family.” Pp. 470–480 in Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. C. Brettell and C. Sargent. New York: Prentice Hall. Stoler, Ann. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Weber, Max. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner.

THE POLITICS OF MORAL ORDER A Brief Anatomy of Racing

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Diane Austin-Broos The Negro is an animal, the negro is bad, the negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it’s cold the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up. (Fanon [1952] 1990: 111) I told them kids, “What’s black got to do with being Arrernte! You think that Arrernte’s jus’ onna skin? You don’t know. Arrernte’s more than that.” (Elva Cook, Central Australia, 1999)

Franz Fanon and Elva Cook point out that race is more than simply a cognitive system of classification. Race is also inscribed on bodies and realized in geographies of space (Williams 1989). David Harvey (2001) has developed the latter theme in his account of the ‘moral geographies’ that symbolize relations between nation-states. His discussion

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calls attention to the ways in which a state gives value to place across various types of terrain. Spatializing race and class in the towns and cities of a state involves creating stigmatized zones that are naturalized. These zones are described as ‘slum’, ‘ghetto’, ‘fringe camp’, and the like. They suggest detritus and morass, islands of disturbed moral order residing within the state. ‘Reserve’, ‘homeland’, ‘quarter’, and ‘hinterland’ may seem more benign but can be turned to similar effect in any national discourse. Both in cities and interstate, these are spaces to ‘go around’. It becomes appropriate to know such places only through received knowledge and without the contaminating risk of actual engagement. Scholars have paid less attention to ways in which bodies, too, remain inert until they are moralized. ‘Blood’ is a key signifier of moral valences. It plays a prominent role in racializing discourse as a compelling metaphor for descent (see Schneider 1968, 1977). Moreover, blood symbolically conjoins matter with value: ‘bad’, ‘mixed’, ‘quarter’, ‘half-caste’—all fall short of ‘good’ and on the side of deficit. These terms are central tools in legitimizing and maintaining hierarchy. Blood is the initial site at which matter is moralized into political and ideological schemes and at which humanity is differentially recognized on ontological, ethical, and political grounds (Trouillot 1995: 75–76). Relative values of blood become objectified in imagined dispositions to act, in moral propensity, and from these imagined propensities relative blood value is read. The impact of this relative value is objectified in semiologies of the body’s surface. Skin color or color shade is the most common of these, but ‘color’ is also seen through other bodily attributes. The objectification of value on the body’s surface can also be seen in eyes or in a particular nose or, as Obeyesekere (1981) observes, in a particular kind of hair. It is certainly seen in the taken-for-granted histories of enclassed lives whereby

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class is as embodied and spatialized as race. The English and Irish in settler Australia objectified class in ‘Irish’ hair and a freckled complexion paired with stringy bodies, and in transactional indirection paired with communal exuberance. Symbols such as these encapsulated the errant being of the subordinated Irish. The insight that dispositions and the body’s surface objectify blood value is central to any account of how racing and enclassing continue as popular practices. These forms of discourse need no particular support from formal genetics or theories of social reproduction. Rather, practices and beliefs constitute visceral experiences of race, of differential humanity. The negatively moralized body out of its proper location is ‘matter out of place’ and is thus experienced as a form of detritus. The repugnance that also notes the smell of an unwanted other is built on the fact that the bodies that elicit this response are not simply physical and other but rather matter infused with negative blood value. They are both less and dangerous, shading toward the fearsome power and also the weakness of the animalistic. Fanon captured this dynamic when he dwelt on the experience of being black in a world where blackness is objectified as a moral deficit ([1952] 1990: 108–126). Ralph Ellison evoked it in a terrifying way when he recounted ‘good ol’ boys’ setting “Nigger-Boys” to fight ([1947] 2002: 14–26). So did Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice when he related an allegory about desire for white flesh and its corrupting impact (1968: 145–162). As one society becomes more reticent in its statements, others discover anew the shock and titillation of parading negatively moralized flesh. In Central Australia: “We kids were throwing our [sandwich] crusts away an’ them Arrernte fell on ’em like dogs. I guess they were starving, so we threw more, just for fun.” Elva Cook, on the other hand, although she has become ‘black’ in Australian society,

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remembers culture and fights against the process of racing, of being defined in terms of a moralized semiology of the body’s surface. For her, it is already a defeat to be debating ‘blackness’ in terms of bad or good.

The Politics of Moral Order These remarks sketch a phenomenological account of race and its related forms of invidious distinction. Yet such accounts often remain trapped in ahistorical minutiae, ignoring the ways in which a history is prepared for, and remains conducive to, racialized experiences. How are people disposed within the larger social field of the modern nation-state to have this form of experience? This question introduces further issues concerning how power, economy, and state discourses produce moral order in the nation. Accordingly, it is through these forms of national discourse and the alibis that they provide for distributions of material power that social fields are rendered amenable to racializing practices. Moralized spaces and inscriptions that objectify moralized bodies both confirm as real and are made coherent by forms of discourse that I describe as ‘politics of moral order’. These are forms of thinking and practice that naturalize a people and their social circumstance as the product of a moral deficit, deviance, or degeneracy. They are the forms of discourse that can realize hierarchy within egalitarian society (see also Dumont 1977). In particular, economic and social marginalization of a people within a nation, or within a community of nations, is always explained in moral terms. This is part of the state defending the nation, its constituted and always arbitrary boundaries. That the so-called sons of Ham found themselves liable to enslavement by technologically more powerful Christian nations was a ready-to-hand piece of myth for the politics of moral order that engulfed the trans-Atlantic. That Hindus

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found the circumcised Muslim both a physical and moral anathema is in fact ‘par for the course’ (see Mehta 1997). That Roderick Flanagan ([1853] 1888) took Australian Aborigines to be a degenerate arm of Malays created by dispersion, by a certain ‘fall from grace’, was not the simple opinion of an ignorant man. It was a discursive form with its own logic. The politics of moral order provides an account of the way in which forms of marginalization have been reproduced. It is mobilized at the site of class fractions or at the site of peripheralization, where a people, their land having been usurped, are rendered as surplus to the requirements of production. It is also mobilized by fear when imagined conspiracy or spreading scandal seems to threaten the reproduction of the nation. In all these cases, the state plays its part in teaching and activating moral politics. The consequence is that the disordering capacities of the state and market society are projected onto those against whom that power is used. People are raced and thus become ‘races’ (see also Fields 2003). Dispossession and subordination are explained by the politics of moral order as the incapacity to be properly part of the nation. Although it is based in the attributes of individuals, this incapacity has its genesis and reproduction in domestic life. Bad blood is passed through descent, and the nature of this descent is determined by a milieu of moral disorder. Often, though not always, women are singled out as the locus of this disorder. Sometimes these women are thought to have their own propensities toward disorder, while at other times it is seen to derive from deviant gender relations.1 In either case, this domestic disorder means that the link between child and mother as nurturer is judged inadequate. As a consequence, the genealogy, the stock, the race—all are also in deficit. This form of discourse therefore often involves the sexualizing of the group and a ‘feminization of morality’.2 Feminine

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and domestic disorders are linked to fecundity and expansive ‘breeding’ that threaten to disrupt the state, and action against this threat is deemed to be natural. The threat can be identified in terms of a scandal that needs to be managed by the state. If moral disorder pervades a group and threatens to contaminate others, it must be transformed, contained, or expunged from the nation. It is through this politics of moral order that a social field is configured for the practice of racing. A reading of dispositions and body surfaces confirms the existence of bad blood, and bad blood, in turn, renders up the experience of another ‘race’. This, rather than territorial conquest, resource usurpation, sexual and labor exploitation, governmental meanness, and cultural belittlement, becomes the focus of debate. Discourse produces race by making morality central and masking the violence and injustice of the state. Below I discuss two forms of discourse that embody this politics: debate on the ‘half-caste’ indigenous Australians who became the Stolen Generations and on the New World African ‘matrifocal’ family. In the former case, I address events that occurred in the 1990s, in the latter, events in the United States that unfolded in the 1960s. I suggest that this 1960s politics endures today, not only in the United States but also in the Caribbean—in effect, throughout the New World. I then draw attention to some commonalities in these politics.

Two Examples: Australia and the United States In November 1993, Prime Minister Paul Keating gave a speech in which he celebrated the Australian High Court’s decision on native title. In the speech, which became known as the Redfern address,3 Keating foreshadowed federal legislation that would frame the return of vacant Crown land, not defined by other titles, to

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indigenous people. This legislation would add to a series of constitutional and other reforms, dating in particular from the 1960s, that made Aborigines full (legal) citizens of the nation-state. The speech addressed the “historic wrong” that had broken “the age-old link between Aboriginal land and culture.” Keating observed: “When the connection to the land was broken, their society and economy were devastated” ([1993] 1994: 236). Land and law, he proposed, would repair the wrong. The Redfern address fostered reconciliation, calling for apologies to indigenous Australians for wrongs located in the past. The demand for apologies from government went hand in hand with claims for recompense—claims that were never realized when the federal government refused to apologize. Of course, reconciliation locates current structural circumstances in the past and trivializes the continuing condition of being raced. For some Australians, though, even this apparent disruption of the nation’s moral order was perceived as a scandal and a threat to a naturalized hierarchy. This called a moral politics into play in which one faction of a church saw another as complicit in undermining the nation’s order. The drama involved the Australian Uniting Church and a covenanting statement made by the president of the church’s assembly.4 Issued in July 1994, the statement apologized to indigenous Australians for the treatment meted out to them and sought Aboriginal forgiveness. The apology pertained, among other things, to issues concerning the Stolen Generations, those generations of half-caste children who had been taken away from their parents to be raised in white households (Manne 1998). The intended outcome of this relocation was that the socialization of these children would diminish the ranks of the indigenous who, in their traditional form, were meant to ‘fade away’, thus resolving issues created by the fact that settlers had conquered Australia and had

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usurped its people’s land, declaring the continent terra nullius. The Galations Group, which was formed in response to the statement, disagreed with the tenor of the covenant, which seemed to suggest that the church’s missionaries were morally culpable. The group’s contention was that for Christians, only Christianity can be seen as a superior morality, one that is able to encompass all other peoples. By its nature, this Christian morality stands beyond culture, and all forms of culture are subordinate to it. Some among the Galations therefore justified taking children away: “At no time in the Northern Territory has a full-blooded aboriginal child been removed from his or her parents, unless it was the parents’ wish for the health and well-being of the child. It was the practice to remove half-caste children who appeared to be at risk of rejection by the mother or mother’s full-blood husband. One of the aims from 1911 to 1939 was to limit as far as possible the occurrence of half-caste babies, as it was believed that they would fall between two societies and belong to neither” (Milliken 1994: 24).5 Even more interesting than this statement was the verbal traffic in moral panic that accompanied Galations’ meetings. A cleric with long associations in Central Australia maintained that children of indigenous mothers and non-indigenous fathers did not receive traditional knowledge (a claim disproved by even a casual summation of Central Australian custodians). Owing to this circumstance, another Galation proposed, it was known that women were inclined to “stuff” their “half-caste babies down rabbit holes” rather than have them grow up as social misfits. Taken as undisputed fact, this type of practice was linked with that of infanticide among presettlement indigenous groups.6 In post-settlement life, it was just such mothers who became involved in extramarital sexual encounters with white men. Separation of

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these children from their mothers was intended to “give the children a chance.” It seemed to impress the Galations little that the policy of child removal addressed a manufactured scandal in order to manage the threat of a resurgent indigenous population. Moreover, the Galations mobilized this moral politics, this justification of the Stolen Generations, in order to meet the contemporary threat of reconciliation—limited though it was. A second example of moral politics involves US President Lyndon Johnson’s Howard University address, delivered in 1965. In it, Johnson argued that legal equality or “freedom” was not enough to “wipe away the scars of centuries” of inequity and humiliation suffered by “Negro Americans.” He proposed that there were “two broad reasons” for this. One was that too many African Americans were “trapped in gateless poverty,” lacking training and skills, adequate housing, and health care. The second was “the breakdown of the Negro family structure” under “long years of degradation and discrimination.” He proposed that “unless we work to strengthen the family,” there would be no escape from poverty (Johnson [1965] 1967: 128–130). Johnson’s speech was based on a report written by social scientist Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In that report, Moynihan focused on the fact that, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 notwithstanding, African Americans were still unequal: “The most difficult fact for white Americans to understand is that … the Negro American community in recent years has probably been getting worse, not better. Indices of dollar income, standards of living, and years of education deceive. The gap between the Negro and most other groups in American society is widening” ([1965] 1967: 43). The full burden of Moynihan’s explanation fell on “the Negro family”—unstable, approaching breakdown, and marked by high rates of marriage dissolution,

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illegitimacy, and female-headed households. The welfare dependency and “tangle of pathology” that followed had produced a situation in which matriarchy prevailed and husbands were “not the principal earner[s].” Women were reproducing culture. Bereft of male models, young men fell into “delinquency and crime” and too often even failed “the Armed Forces mental test,” thereby precluding, in Moynihan’s view, a desirable avenue of employment. Among other things, “narcotic addiction” followed. Moynihan drew some of his evidence from previous scholarship by white and black Americans. Within New World society, this common account of the matrifocal or female-headed household knows no color boundaries.7 In the 1980s and 1990s, Jamaican middle-class women could remark on the sexual proclivity of “the natives” or “the Africans,” “the masses” or “the lower sets,” who create a situation in which “children are having children and there is no discipline.” And even among the lower sets, Pentecostal pastors preaching sin focus on the slackness of their own “whores of Babylon” (Austin-Broos 1997: 178–194). As sections of downtown Kingston become an increasingly criminalized economy, this proposed tragic failure of morality, this moral degeneracy, becomes a popular transnational account of New World marginalization. The matrifocal family was and is a manufactured scandal to divert attention away from the legal and extra-legal forces that maintain New World racism. In this second example of moral politics, the state moved to protect itself from the scandal of enduring racism by reconstituting racial domination through the Civil Rights Act. It responded to this crisis with a scandal of its own—‘the Negro family’—and thereby gave voice to an enduring and pervasive New World politics.

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Conclusion These examples of the politics of moral order have common rhetorical features. In each case they focus on injustices located in the past—“Not our fault for what happened then, but our responsibility now”—and the legal and social reforms that follow. The politics of moral order enters when the hierarchy of the nation experiences crisis: an expanding indigenous population, an attempt to disrupt the hierarchy, a delegitimation of the state due to the failure of legal reform. In the face of the scandal of continuous racing, an alternative scandal must be produced. This scandal, which deflects scrutiny from the state and its nation, concerns the historically shaped moral being of those who are raced. The feminizing of morality and sexualizing of the group provides a milieu in which the fantasy of bad blood can be sustained. Interestingly, one can see in the US case of the 1960s the ingredients for a circumstance unfolding in Australia today. Legal equality and land rights confirmed, the current federal government is now adopting a similar politics to explain continuing and expanding indigenous suffering. The legal and social reforms of the past are downplayed by the current prime minister, John Howard, of the Liberal Party. Instead, his government focuses on the ineptitude of law and the disorganization of indigenous families. This position can also involve, and often does, retrospective justification for taking half-caste children away from their families. In the Australian and New World cases alike, differences in family and domestic organization are interpreted as propensities to moral deviance or degeneracy. Aspects of the domestic milieu are isolated from other structures of social, cultural, and economic life.8 In this way, the sufferers themselves become the scandal, a scandal that needs to be managed by the state. The presumption of moral

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disorder, of profligacy and deviant fecundity, prepares the field of social relations that will also value place and frame a sense of fleshly unease. Matter is moralized and read on the body’s surface. People generate the experience of ‘race’ and support their state in its maintenance of policies that protect the nation while disadvantaging the troublesome population.

Acknowledgments Funding for research associated with this article comes from an Australian Research Council Grant, DP0450180. The research project is entitled “The Politics of Moral Order.” This article has also benefited from a discussion generated in a seminar, entitled “Creating a Racial Crisis,” given by George Baca in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, 11 July 2005. Special thanks go to George Baca and Ghassan Hage.

Notes 1. For example, Aboriginal women are often portrayed as highly sexualized, or else as encouraged to have sex with outsiders by exploitative husbands. Either way, their subordinated position is seen to produce the same type of morally problematical men. 2. I have borrowed the term ‘feminization of morality’ from my colleague, Sam Williams, who is currently a post-graduate anthropology student at the University of Sydney. 3. Redfern is Sydney’s most notorious Aboriginal slum. 4. The Uniting Church was formed as a coalition of Methodists and Presbyterians. The dissenting group took its name, Galations, from the biblical text: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Jesus Christ” (Galations 3:28). I attended their meetings as an extension of my fieldwork in Central Australia. 5. This statement in itself could be the subject of an extended analysis. Space does not permit that here.

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6. See Cowlishaw (1978). Interestingly, in various public debates some have viewed the fact that Cowlishaw wrote on Aboriginal infanticide early in her career as being inconsistent with her persistent criticism of racism in Australia. 7. The best discussions of these issues are Rainwater and Yancey ([1965] 1967) and Smith (1996). Smith, who devised the concept of the matrifocal family and revised it from time to time, emphasized the relation between ideas about New World African families and racist discourse. 8. It is important to note that my argument is not that household violence, poor health, and illiteracy are of no consequence. Rather, my argument is that difference in family organization is sometimes an adaptation and not always pathological. Moreover, the responsibility that parents need to take for the aforementioned issues should not come in isolation from attention to other social, cultural, and economic issues concerned with marginalization and racing. Through their focus on ‘mutual obligation’, the policies of the Howard government endorse this type of isolated responsibility in indigenous households. I regard this as an example of the politics of moral order.

References Austin-Broos, Diane. 1997. Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of Moral Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cleaver, Eldridge. 1968. Soul on Ice. New York: Dell Publishing. Cowlishaw, Gillian. 1978. “Infanticide in Aboriginal Australia.” Oceania 48: 262–283. Dumont, Louis. 1977. “Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification’: Reflections of a Social Anthropologist.” Pp. 72–88 in Symbolic Anthropology, ed. J. Dolgin, D. Kemnitzer, and D. Schneider. New York: Columbia University Press. Ellison, Ralph. [1947] 2002. Invisible Man. New York: Random House. Fanon, Franz. [1952] 1990. “The Fact of Blackness.” Pp. 108–126 in Anatomy of Racism, ed. D. T. Golberg. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Fields, Barbara J. 2003. “Of Rogues and Geldings.” The American Historical Review. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ ahr/108.5/fields.html.

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Flanagan, Roderick. [1853] 1888. The Aborigines of Australia. Sydney: Edward Flanagan and George Robertson and Company. Harvey, David. 2001. “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils.” Pp. 271–309 in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, ed. J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Johnson, Lyndon B. [1965] 1967. “The Howard University Address.” Pp. 125–132 in The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, ed. L. Rainwater and W. Yancey. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Keating, Paul. [1993] 1994. “Prime Minister’s Address to the Nation.” Pp. 235–238 in Make a Better Offer: The Politics of Mabo, ed. M. Goot and T. Rowse. Leichhardt: Pluto Press Australia Ltd. Manne, Robert. 1998. “The Stolen Generations.” Quadrant 42: 53–63. Mehta, Deepak. 1997. “Circumcision, Body, Masculinity: The Ritual Wound and Collective Violence.” Pp. 79–101 in Violence and Subjectivity, ed. V. Das, A. Kleinman, M. Ramphele, and P. Reynolds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Milliken, Ted. 1994. “The Missionary Contribution to Australian Civilisation (with Particular Reference to the Northern Territory).” Pp. 21–40 in The Churches—Native to Australia or Alien Intruders. Armadale, Vic.: The Galations Group. Moynihan, Daniel P. [1965] 1967. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” Pp. 39–124 in The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, ed. L. Rainwater and W. Yancey. Cambridge, MA: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1981. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rainwater, Lee, and William Yancey, eds. [1965] 1967. The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy. Cambridge MASS: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Schneider, David. 1968. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ______. 1977. “Kinship, Nationality, and Religion in American Culture: Toward a Definition of Kinship.” Pp. 63–77 in Symbolic Anthropology, ed. J. Dolgin, D. Kemnitzer, and D. Schneider. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Smith, Raymond. 1996. The Matrifocal Family: Power, Pluralism, and Politics. New York and London: Routledge. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. “An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-event.” Pp. 70–107 in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Williams, Brackette F. 1989. “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 401–444.

SECOND-HAND DREAMS

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Vijay Prashad You give me second class houses, And second class schools. Do you think all colored folks Are just second class fools? — Nina Simone/Langston Hughes, 1966

The tragedy of the age of integration (1954 onward) in the United States is that it overlapped with the demise of the social-wage state and with the rise of the neo-liberal social order. Whereas the civil rights movement fought for the widest provision of dignity, the guardians of the American state have reduced this vision to one concession: that all people will have certain rights vested in the state. When the US Congress passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, it ended legal segregation in the US. That, combined with the judicial decisions that culminated in 1954 in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, was immense, and its victory should not be underestimated or misunderstood. Within a generation, people’s struggles had destroyed the statutory acceptance of Jim Crow and put in its place high-minded ideas of equal rights. By the logic of bourgeois democracy, the state is the guardian of those rights—the right to vote, along with all the other

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rights assembled in the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution. The problem is that the state, by the late 1960s, was not the same institution. The guardians of the state had dismantled the social-wage state, leaving citizens with high-minded norms as it gutted the institutions that could respond to them. The first-class visions of the civil rights movement would collapse into the second-class nightmare of our times.

From the New Deal to the New Racism From the 1930s (the New Deal) to the 1960s (the Great Society), the American state entered the world of social commerce and interaction with an agenda to benefit people across class lines. The concept that united the many social programs of this period was the social wage. The social wage is that amount of deferred wages that goes toward the creation of various publicly available goods, such as public transportation, health services, schools, parks, postal delivery, safety, and so forth. Public services are available to all, regardless of income and social standing, even as they are paid for by a progressive tax. A universal concept in abstraction, the social wage during this period remained highly gendered and racialized. The domain of ‘women’s work’ (such as childrearing and housework) did not benefit from these public goods. When women’s organizations or trade unions voiced demands for public child-care, for example, they were turned aside. White women did benefit from the perquisites of the racialized social wage, from the parks and schools, transportation networks, and other services. Public space and public services for those of color, however, had been severely compromised. Nevertheless, the concept of the social wage did not have any internal gendered or racialized constraints—its elements provided the horizon for the civil rights movement and, eventually, for

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all the various anti-subordination movements that came in its wake (women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, disability rights, etc.). The historical advance of the Civil Rights Act is not so much that it dismissed Jim Crow segregation but that it allowed people of color to have access to the social-wage and social-insurance schemes of the New Deal. From the 1930s to the 1960s, those whom the state designated as ‘white’ lived within a privileged, state-supported circle that thrived on the benefits from the accumulated deferred wages of all people (white and of color). The surplus from their wages went to the state as taxes, and then this fund provided whites with credit to buy homes (and thereby have access to some capital against this property), with freeways on which to drive their cars, with schools and hospitals, with health insurance and unemployment benefits, and other such “possessive investments in whiteness,” as George Lipsitz (1998) put it. The Civil Rights Act allowed people of color to benefit from the social wage (transportation, education, etc.) and social insurance (social security). It was in and through this state, supposedly outside the maelstrom of racism, that people of color would claim their deferred or indirect wages. The state stood before them as the bulwark against racism and the bank for their economic dreams. Affirmative-action schemes in the state sector strengthened this impression, and before long the largest union for African Americans, for example, became AFSCME—the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The victories of the mid-1960s opened up the social wage to all people, although its gendered character remained. Women benefited, but the domain of ‘women’s work’ was not liberated by the provision of public goods. Nor indeed did the Equal Rights Amendment pass muster before the establishment, whose own committee (the Nixon-appointed President’s Task Force on Women’s

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Rights and Responsibilities) had argued, in its 1969 report, A Matter of Simple Justice, for the creation of an Office of Women’s Rights and Responsibilities and for legislation to establish full gender equality, including, crucially, amendments to ensure equality of men and women in the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the Social Security Act. On racial terms, the victories were a huge advance for a civilization-making social program where all people had to pay into the scheme, but where previously only certain people (whites) could benefit from all of it. The social wage would now be technically colorblind. But just when this advance occurred, a combination of pressure from the old social classes and of international structural changes altered the nature of the US state. Frances Beal, in her cautionary article, “Double Jeopardy” (1970) indicated that the gains of civil rights could not be slighted because of the continuation of sexism. Rather, she stated: “We welcome [the civil rights gains]. We see in [them] the eventual liberation of all black people from this corrupt system under which we suffer … If we are going to be liberated as a people, it must be recognized that black women have very specific problems that have to be spoken to. We must be liberated along with the rest of the population.” The gains had to be recognized, but they could not create stagnation or the demobilization of the movement. Rather, the victories had to become the foundation for the intensification of the movement. From the mid-1960s onward, that section of the ruling class that had already thrown in its lot against Jim Crow crafted a new agenda that dispensed with the overt structures for a set of covert policies of division. This liberal wing, represented by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, joined with a newly refashioned conservative segment, now led by the neo-conservatives (on race, Charles Murray, for instance), to produce an intellectual agenda for

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subordination without the vulgarity of Jim Crow. These intellectuals within the government provided a very smart political coalition that dovetailed with those elements of the dominant classes (finance, insurance, real estate, military, etc.) who looked forward to a new ‘corporate wage’ to displace the social wage. They fought to reorganize the social wage state into a neo-liberal state, whose features can be summarized in four aspects.

Cannibalization of the Social In 1970, President Richard Nixon announced: “Most Americans today are simply fed up with government at all levels.” As part of a scheme to create a ‘new Republican majority,’ Nixon’s administration championed the New Federalism, which devolved social-wage schemes to increasingly underfunded states and municipalities. The Nixon administration sought to ‘starve the beast’, where the ‘beast’ represented the federal government—the state—the very institution that the civil rights movement had vested its hopes in and where it claimed its unpaid check from. One administration after another would cut the funds to support the constitutive and regulative state, invoking the mantra of ‘fiscal responsibility’ to undermine any effort to increase its social-wage provisions.

Intensification of Repression Despite its concerns for fiscal responsibility, the American state spent lavishly on law enforcement and prisons, transforming ghettos into gulags. In 1970, Congress allowed Nixon to appropriate $296.5 million toward law enforcement, which by 1973 had mushroomed to $850.5 million. Federal spending on law enforcement increased astronomically regardless of the crime rate or of the efficacy of the well-funded, highly visible strategy to deal

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with criminality. The federal government maintained a heavy hand in the arena of ‘criminal justice’, not only by its direct expansion of federal police (including the FBI, the political police), but also by providing funds to states and municipalities to expand their repressive arms. From Johnson’s Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 to Clinton’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, money flowed from the federal government to the localities, which, being strapped for cash, took it and all its harsh provisions (including its tough sentencing stipulations). As the social wage felt the axe, the widespread distress in the country was translated into petty criminality—or worse. Rather than go to the core of the social problems, the neo-liberal state sought to treat the symptoms with the baton. As more people go to jail each year, it becomes the storehouse of the redundant working population as well as its soup kitchen. The state prefers to provide social services to the unemployed if they submit themselves to total surveillance: the jail is the ultimate place for such debasement. In 1993, the state spent more on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) than on law enforcement, but by 1996 the priority had been reversed. The government added more than $8 billion to corrections in this period, while it slashed AFDC by almost $2 billion. Gregory Winter, who works at the Hamilton Family Center in San Francisco, notes: “When funds are siphoned away from social programs to prisons, communities are drawn inexorably toward incarceration.” Furthermore, if incarceration trumps social security at the same pace, “the criminal justice system will become the government’s primary interface with poor communities, particularly those of color. Prisons will replace public entitlements, subsidized housing, and perhaps even the schools as the principal place where poor people converge.”

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Parasitic Bureaucracy In 1972, Carl Gerstacker, head of Dow Chemicals, told a White House gathering hosted by Nixon: “I have long dreamed of buying an island owned by no nation and of putting the World Headquarters of Dow Company on the truly neutral ground of such an island, beholden to no notion of society.” Gerstacker’s dream had already begun to be a reality in Nixon’s America. Regulation of corporations began to slacken, as did tax laws and other such hindrances. Nixon removed the US dollar from the gold standard and, through a series of complex maneuvers, produced the dollar as the global medium of exchange. The dollar lost its value, which made US goods cheaper on the world market. With domestic price controls, Nixon’s administration maintained order at home, just as the dollar gradually replaced gold as the anchor of international finance. Petro profits and off-shore funds began to be held in dollars, whose strength provided a necessary resilience to the unfettered US commercial banks and corporate sector. Whereas in much of the Third World, the bourgeoisie had a parasitic relationship to the state, in the US, the state began to have a parasitic relationship to the corporations. The state would be driven by a corporate agenda, and its resources would be used to shore up the expansive military-industrial-financial complex. Tax benefits to companies would provide annual corporate welfare payments in excess of $75 billion. One federal agency, the Export-Import Bank, for instance, disbursed $100 billion in international trade assistance to global corporations, far more than the US government gives out in food, disaster, and development relief. A revolving door and a battery of lobbyists would enable Washington to be governed by a cabal whose principal interests intersected with those of the dominant social classes. The pittance that went toward campaign finance did not change the minds of

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the legislators, most of whom were already predisposed to the corporate logic.1 The state, in effect, had become a parasitic bureaucracy. While the two main political parties (Republicans and Democrats) are aligned toward the interests of an unregulated corporate sector, they do reflect two different sections of the oligarchy, different fragments of the ruling class, and different regionally dominant classes. Temperament, class, and region divide two parties, whose programs and leaderships are otherwise remarkably similar. As a 1948 pamphlet written on behalf of the Progressive Party put it, “The Democratic Administration carries the ball for Wall Street’s foreign policy. And the Republican Party carries the ball for Wall Street’s domestic policy.” Over five decades, this assessment remains insightful. Nevertheless, there is a fracture in the ruling alliance, and it is this that provides some measured opportunity for social movements.

Cruel Cultural Nationalism If the state is less able or willing to provide resources toward the creation of equity (through the social wage and similar means), how do the legislators return to the people in a formal democracy and ask for re-election? Why would people keep a regime afloat if it promises nothing in return, or if it delivers little? The expenditure on the punitive side certainly takes care of a considerable amount of organized and unorganized dissent. But coercion can be only a partial solution. As the neo-liberal state began to appear in one country after the other in the 1970s, consent in these states came about through various forms of cruel cultural ideologies. The New Racism (or the cultural incompatibility of people) that infects the advanced industrial states is only one variant of cruel cultural nationalism, whose other instantiations draw from religion (as in India, Egypt, Israel, and elsewhere).

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In the US, the New Racism consists of three intertwined and dialectically related concepts: multi-culturalism, colorblindness, and the model minority. Multi-culturalism promotes formal diversity and canalizes complex social communities on racial/cultural lines. It assumes that people’s races or cultures have a discrete history and that this separation provides ontological meaning in social life. What is needed now is simply for the state and the old social classes to celebrate this diversity. Class divisions and gender oppression can be subsumed into the fabric of difference, and power differentials on racial lines can be displaced onto cultural celebration. The logic of Vietnamization is the foreign policy variant of multi-culturalism.2 Colorblindness presupposes that each person should be treated based on his or her individual merits and not on historical distinctions (of class, race, gender, etc.). Those who justify individual merit have to do so based on examples of historically oppressed folk who have ‘made it’ by overcoming adversity, so that multi-culturalism cannot be outside this framework.3 The shallow divide between multi-culturalism as a liberal doctrine and colorblindness as a conservative one masks the dialectical inter-relationship between the two: both doctrines, in tandem, occlude any discussion of the means of subordination of certain people along class, gender, and racial lines. Multi-culturalism and colorblindness receive buoyancy from the third concept—the model minority. Just as the US government fixed the problem of apartheid, it also opened the gates to a social-engineered form of immigration. Kept out of the US for half a century, Asian immigrants were permitted entrance once again, but this time only if they brought with them fairly high levels of skill. This stateselected community of Asians was then measured by the model-minority concept against African Americans, in the main. The comparison is odious because it disregards

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fundamental social facts—that the Asians who came to the US between 1965 and the early 1980s brought statecreated skills whereas the African American community had only recently been liberated from the shackles of Jim Crow. The model-minority concept provides fodder for the colorblind/multi-cultural complex because it allows the New Racist society to celebrate diversity and achievement, often at the cost of the vast population of unemployed, underemployed, or highly exploited people of color, without seeming to be discriminatory in any way. In this view, those who make it (Asian technocrats, for example) do it on their own volition, just as failure is the fruit of the inaction of others. The triad of multi-culturalism, colorblindness, and the model minority provides the ideological foundation to the US variant of cruel cultural nationalism. For institutions, multi-culturalism and the model-minority population provide an important function by allowing them to adjust the diversity of their staff, student body, or platoon without addressing issues of inequality. For individuals, colorblindness functions as an awesome means to deny any structural conditions for inequality, as well as to allow those individuals who make it to enjoy their success ‘without any assistance’.

Conclusion As a social-ideological matrix in the age of neo-liberalism, the multi-culturalism/colorblindness/model-minority doctrine allows certain segments of the population of color to strive for upward mobility in an unequal system. A culture of hierarchy has enveloped this matrix and further occludes the immense structural inequality of the political economy. Individual advancement is the norm, and any discussion of the racialization of poverty is itself discounted as being racist. Upward mobility in a culture

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of hierarchy perpetuates inequality without confronting it. Upwardly mobile people of color do not want to be mistaken for janitors, just as they don’t want to abolish the position of janitor itself. This is a perversion of the wide demand for dignity that motivated the civil rights movement. We are in our second-class nightmare. Faced with the inevitable victory of the civil rights movement and with its social-wage consequences, the power elite attempted to refashion the ideological framework of social relations. An increase in law enforcement and incarceration, a decline in the already minimal welfare state, the abandonment of sections of the population from the possibility of meaningful, waged work—these are the contours of the neo-liberal state, whose opiate is the New Racism. To feel the effects of ‘race pride’ without the means to live proudly is small comfort.

Acknowledgments I put together the notes for this essay when preparing for the Municipal Rights meeting at the Center for Third World Organizing, Oakland, CA, 6 July 2004. My co-presenter, Jon Liss, director of the Tenant Workers Support Committee (Virginia), had prepared a co-written document with David Staples titled “New Folks on the Historic Bloc: Workers Centers and Municipal Socialism.” Our thoughts are parallel and overlapping. I want to thank them for a very fine and clear political document. Valuable advice from Joy James, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Howard Winant helped me strengthen the case, and a discussion with Indu Agnihotri, G. Balachandran, Naveen Chand, Prabhu Prasad Mohapatra, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, and the inestimable Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, after I presented this article at the V. V. Giri National Labour Institute in Noida, India, in the summer of 2005, helped me greatly. George Baca provided much-appreciated intellectual heft.

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Notes 1. The problem had already been sketched out by C. Wright Mills (1959), with the only caveat being that the people in his “Higher Circles” who transit the worlds of the military, corporations, and politics are far more intertwined. 2. The US had anyway far preferred to manage its primacy through imperial sub-contractors rather than through direct colonialism. 3. The elevation of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court took place in this ideological vise, for it was argued both that he was meritorious enough to be judged based on his record and that his elevation provided a fillip to the multi-cultural democracy.

References Armstrong, Elisabeth. 2002. The Retreat from Organization: US Feminism Reconceptualized. Albany: SUNY Press. Beal, Frances. 1970. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” Pp. 340–353 in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan. New York: Random House Publishing. Cockburn, Alexander, and Jeffrey St. Clair, eds. 2004. Dime’s Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Duggan, Lisa. 2003. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press. Gilroy, Paul. 2004. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Kelley, Robin D. G. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press. Kunreuther, Frances. 2001. “Building Movement vs. Building Organization: Summary of Regional Discussions.” New York: Building Movement. Kurashige, Scott. 2004. “The Many Facets of Brown: Integration in a Multiracial Society.” The Journal of American History 91, no. 1: 56–68. Lipsitz, George. 1998. The Progressive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Prashad, Vijay. 2000. Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ______. 2003. Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare. Boston: South End Press. Springer, Kimberly. 2005. Living the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Winant, Howard. The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wing, Bob. 2004. “The White Elephant in the Room: Race and Election 2004.” http://www.counterpunch.org/wing12032004.html (accessed 5 December 2004).

DISAPPEARING ACT Race and the Neo-liberal State

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Jason Antrosio

Since the 1990s, many countries have jettisoned a focus on economic development in favor of promoting markets and market efficiency. Much has been written on the influence of these neo-liberal economic policies and the linked idea of globalization. Less noticed is that this shift from a developmentalist ideology to neo-liberal reform has often been paired with an ideology that casts the state as neutral with respect to race, ethnicity, and even nationality. Indeed, while the heyday of wholesale adoption of neo-liberal economic policies may be receding, the neo-liberal state appears to be a more enduring feature. There is a need to examine more closely the neo-liberal ideology that pairs economic reforms with a neutral state, and a need to understand how this ideology is involved in the creation of racialized identities and racist practices.

Missed Opportunities in the Andes Ronald Stutzman’s (1981) work on notions of race mixture in Ecuador opened one of the most fertile connections between race and developmentalist state ideology. Stutzman’s essay “El Mestizaje: An All-Inclusive Ideology of Exclusion” was

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a pioneering exposure of Ecuadorian state ideology at the apogee of state efforts to provide both economic development and cultural identity for the citizenry. While this ideology espoused an officially inclusive story of race mixture, or mestizaje, Stutzman revealed that the implicit goal of mestizaje was ‘whitening’, within a narrative of national development. Stutzman refused to go along with the assumptions of the need for an integrative national culture. His work was ethnographically rooted in a particular locale, always with an eye on state formation, and he showed how race and racism were relevant to mestizaje without importing binary racial thought from the United States. Stutzman’s essay was the lead piece in a widely read volume edited by the prominent Ecuadorianist anthropologist Norman Whitten. Stutzman also became important outside of Ecuadorian studies when Brackette Williams used his work in the influential article “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain” (1989). Williams showcased Stutzman’s analysis to illustrate how an ideology of mixed blood could selectively prioritize white blood on the way to national purity. Nevertheless, Stutzman’s work, meant to be an opening salvo, did not inspire many similar studies in the Andes. In part, this was because some social scientists believed that mestizaje, if not equivalent to racial democracy, was at least less stringent than what was perceived to be the hardened binary of race in the United States. Perhaps more importantly, in the Andean studies of the 1980s and 1990s, race became eclipsed by ethnicity, a shift that was evident in the title of Whitten’s volume, Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador. The biological focus of race seemed too limiting in an Andean landscape of multiple ethnic identifications and relatively malleable identities. More recently, the issue of race has been brought back to the Andes, most notably in Mary Weismantel’s work Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes (2001).

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However, unlike Stutzman’s account of the centrality of race to state ideology, Weismantel primarily locates racism in society and everyday acts: racism in the Andes is “deeply entrenched, overt, and unapologetic” (2001: xxviii). Her stories are of restaurant owners, taxi drivers, and poor rural men who grope indigenous women on bus routes (ibid.: xxviii, 47–48). As Weismantel roams over the Andes for her examples, juxtaposing material from Quito, Cuzco, and La Paz, she blends specific political configurations. National states make only brief appearances, usually simply as manifestations of white elite interests (ibid.: 14, 60). Weismantel’s abbreviated treatment of the state neglects the shift from Stutzman’s developmental nationalism to a neo-liberal neutrality that celebrates multi-culturalism. This neo-liberal ideology would have the state disappear from view, itself becoming the neutral arbiter within a polarized society. By locating racism in society and everyday activities, Weismantel does not challenge this ideological illusion. This lack of attention is especially disconcerting because she is full of invective against neo-liberal economic policies, which she blames for a general economic malaise (2001: 144, 206).1 Therefore, despite the early fertile ground opened by Stutzman to connect racism and the developmentalist state in the Andes, later scholarship misses this opportunity, first by excising race from the Andes, and then, when race re-emerges, by not paying enough attention to the state and especially neo-liberal state ideology. What needs to be examined is how race and ethnicity function when neo-liberal ideology explicitly declares the end of “putatively homogeneous nation-states” (Williams 1989: 439).

Race at the End of Putative Homogeneity The ideology of the neo-liberal state can be seen with particular clarity in Colombia. In the early 1990s, Colombia enacted a series of reforms to follow the neo-liberal

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prescription of drastic tariff cuts and privatization of state-owned enterprises. It simultaneously adopted a new constitution in 1991; the political reforms of this constitution were always and deliberately paired with neo-liberal economic policies. This constitution is remarkable for the autonomy it purportedly concedes to minority populations, such as indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups. Written in conjunction with representatives of these groups, the constitution declares Colombia to be “multi-ethnic” and “pluri-cultural.”2 Certainly, many groups have seized upon these possibilities in order to press for greater autonomy and recognition. But this also means that Colombia has officially declared that the state should not be in the process of national identity formation. In effect, it explicitly declares the end of itself as a homogeneous nation-state, just as neo-liberal economic policies effectively declare the end of the state’s involvement in national development. The state becomes a promoter and arbiter of the economic market, as it similarly proclaims neutrality with respect to national identity.3 To be sure, Colombia’s 1991 constitution should hardly be taken at its own word as a clean break with the past. The economic and political reforms were justified in the name of national development (see Presidencia de la República 1991), just as the terms of development built on understandings of ‘progress’ stretching back to at least the nineteenth century. As I have argued elsewhere, neo-liberal terms must always be seen in the context of a longer history, and their use in a particular arena is subject to a great deal of historical and local specificity (Antrosio 2002). Nevertheless, I was surprised by how quickly even local government functionaries adopted these new terms and attitudes. In the local scenario of Túquerres, an agricultural town in southwestern Colombia, the state adoption of neo-liberal neutrality brought a series of interlocking effects.4

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First, although the official policy becomes one of neutrality with respect to identity, this very neutrality is hailed as the end of a previous period of state racism. There is a seemingly endless trumpeting of new ‘rights’, with special attention dedicated to how wonderful the state is for enshrining the rights of indigenous peoples. However, in Túquerres this rhetorical celebration of indigenous rights was not accompanied by any real transfer of resources to the approximately 15 percent of the population who explicitly identify themselves as indigenous and who have held very little land or resources. Nor did the Colombian state have the ability to effectively protect or police basic rights, as evidenced by the assassination of indigenous leaders by para-military and guerrilla groups. Meanwhile, the dominant group of landowning dairy farmers, a small but powerful elite, often complained that their interests were damaged by the neo-liberal reforms, and that the state acted only in favor of indigenous peoples. In making a rhetorical gesture to indigenous rights that fails to transfer resources and protection, the state allows dominant groups to ignore the ongoing plight of indigenous peoples, and may encourage or exacerbate attacks upon them. Second, the neo-liberal ideology peddles an idealized version of multi-cultural identity, encouraging people to participate in an essentialist fiction in order to compete for resources. In Túquerres, people who identify themselves as indigenous have long shared patterns of economic livelihood with small-scale agriculturists, who comprise approximately 60 percent of the population. Because they live in the rural area of the campo, these small-scale agriculturists may identify themselves as campesinos (peasants), but this does not mean they have an explicit peasant identity, and they often work alongside indigenous people as wage laborers as well as growing cash and subsistence crops. Despite these shared patterns of livelihood, indigenous leaders began to portray themselves

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as living in harmony with nature, with “another way of seeing the world,” in contrast to their less-enlightened peasant neighbors. At the same time, functionaries from the agrarian reform agency came to Túquerres in order to “wake up the peasants” and get them to seek land reform to catch up with indigenous organizations. Moreover, these functionaries invoked an explicitly peasant identity, saying that the agriculturists would “feel realized” through land ownership and growing their own crops.5 In a time of resource cuts, particularly to the agrarian reform budget, these actions encourage people to explicitly define themselves as idealized versions of indigenous peoples or peasants, competing over meager resources. These organizations similarly expect and encourage flamboyant leaders who purport to speak on behalf of an entire group. Of course, the adoption of idealized versions of identity further outrages dominant factions, who see this as evidence that these groups are fraudulent, manipulated by urban intellectuals, and simply “looking for benefits.”6 A third, and related, consequence is that local government functionaries could then portray themselves as simply trying to mediate between the conflicts in wider society. One municipal functionary believed that the gravest problem facing the municipality was a conflict between indigenous and peasant groups, stating that “we [municipal authorities] are always intervening in these conflicts” and that the job of the municipality was to “mediate between communities.” In this account, the state has nothing to do with the creation or maintenance of these groups, an idea that is particularly ludicrous in southwestern Colombia, where there is an absence of distinguishing features to separate indigenous and peasant groups, who overlap in language, clothing, and diet. Indeed, the primary distinction is a legal creation, one that is extremely dependent on state definitions (Rappaport 1994). In effect, “the once recognizably arbitrary classifications of

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one generation … become the given inherent properties of reality several generations later” (Williams 1989: 431).7 Finally, simultaneous to this assumption of neutral arbiter among polarized groups was a distancing of local government functionaries from ‘the government’ itself. For example, when one functionary conducted a study attempting to define the local indigenous population, he reported that “it would be good for the Colombian government to establish clear politics for indigenous peoples in regard to the components and objectives and especially for institutions and functionaries that work with indigenous communities” (Guerrero Davila 1995: 35; my translation). Despite working for a government agency and writing a report explicitly commissioned by it, this functionary effectively distanced his activities from ‘the government’. James Herron (2003) reports a similar effect in the Colombian Agrarian Bank. Local bank officers would ask indigenous people to understand that it was not the bank but ‘the government’ setting the policies by which their loan requests were denied. The state, then, becomes an elusive but extremely powerful entity.

State Effects and Academic Complicity Although the neo-liberal state declares an end to state involvement in determining national identity, this hardly means that what Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2001) calls “state effects” have diminished. Though the state may not be a ‘cultural container’ and may work through a plethora of institutions, its influence is arguably increased, even as it pretends to recede from view. Part of this paradoxical influence lies in its ability to identify and encourage social groups based on identity—especially a racial or ethnic identity—rather than class or access to resources. Then the state defines racist practices and group conflict as social problems, into which the state intervenes only as a neutral arbiter.

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Academics who locate racist practices primarily in society miss the opportunity to show how neo-liberal state ideology is complicit in the construction of race and racism. Although it was written for another era, Stutzman’s essay remains a good model of how to unmask the pretenses of the neo-liberal state, “refusing to be deceived by the definitions of contemporary realities that the controllers of the state are promoting” (1981: 73).

Acknowledgments Sincere thanks to George Baca, Rudi ColloredoMansfeld, James Herron, and Brackette Williams for their comments and thoughts on this article

Notes 1. Weismantel’s broad-brushed attack on neo-liberalism, and capitalism in general (2001: 137), does not capture the specificity of the changes wrought by neo-liberal economic policies. See Colloredo-Mansfeld (2002) for a much more considered description of both the tragedies and opportunities created under neo-liberal policies in the Andes. 2. Due to the new constitution, these declarations are especially visible in Colombia, but parallels are evident in Ecuador as well (see Crain 1990). 3. Historical analyses of neo-liberal economic policies have drawn attention to parallels to the laissez-faire policies of the nineteenth century. There may also be a parallel in terms of cultural politics. Stutzman suggests that through most of Ecuadorian national history, “those in control of the Ecuadorian state apparatus have been content with the pluralistic heritage of the colonial era” (1981: 54). However, this broad parallel is meant as a rejoinder to claims of radical newness for the current era of neoliberal globalization, not as a denial of the historical specificity of current configurations.

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4. These paragraphs are an abbreviated account of themes treated in greater detail in Antrosio (2000, esp. chap. 4). 5. Actual small-scale agricultural production in Túquerres involves a mix of sharecropping, wage labor, and subsistence patterns. The assumption that all agriculturists seek their own land and crops to “feel realized” drastically simplifies the complexities of productive practices. 6. See also Wade (1995) for how black organizations in Colombia have taken up some of the tactics and terms of the indigenous movement. 7. Most people in Túquerres assumed neither an idealized indigenous nor an idealized peasant identity. In actual everyday interaction, there was hardly the incessant conflict reported by the municipal authorities. While there were certainly prejudices and stereotypes about what it meant to be indigenous or mestizo, an accusation of deeply entrenched social racism seems overstated.

References Antrosio, Jason. 2000. “Todo Moderno: Appropriations of Modernization in the Colombian Andes.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University. ______. 2002. “Inverting Development Discourse in Colombia: Transforming Andean Hearths.” American Anthropologist 104, no. 4: 1110–1122. Colloredo-Mansfeld, Rudi. 2002. “An Ethnography of Neoliberalism: Understanding Competition in Artisan Economies.” Current Anthropology 43, no. 1: 113–137. Crain, Mary M. 1990. “The Social Construction of National Identity in Highland Ecuador.” Anthropological Quarterly 63, no. 1: 43–59. Guerrero Davila, Jairo. 1995. “Informe Socio-Económico, Etnohistorico y Jurídico de la Comunidad Indígena de Túquerres de la Etnia de los Pastos.” Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agraria, Pasto. Unpublished. Herron, James. 2003. “Animating the State: Discourses of Authority and Intimacy in the Colombian Agrarian Bank.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Presidencia de la República. 1991. La Revolución Pacífica: Planes de Desarrollo Económico y Social 1990–1994. Bogota: Departamento Nacional de Planeación.

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Rappaport, Joanne. 1994. Cumbe Reborn: An Andean Ethnography of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stutzman, Ronald. 1981. “El Mestizaje: An All-Inclusive Ideology of Exclusion.” Pp. 45–94 in Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador, ed. N. E. Whitten Jr. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2001. “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind.” Current Anthropology 42, no. 1: 125–138. Wade, Peter. 1995. “The Cultural Politics of Blackness in Colombia.” American Ethnologist 22, no. 2: 341–357. Weismantel, Mary J. 2001. Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, Brackette F. 1989. “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 401–444.

THE END OF SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION What Comes Next?

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John Hartigan Jr.

These are challenging times for people who think critically about race. The intellectual edifice upon which many scholarly interventions against racist thought and practice have developed over the last few decades is in the process of crumbling. The simple but profound assertion that race is socially constructed is being assailed in a variety of intellectual forums and may soon become untenable as a basis for effectively countering widespread racial perceptions and beliefs.1 Actually, the efficacy of the social constructionist stance, as with most ‘social’ explanations for politically charged and complex problems, has at best maintained only a tenuous hold in the public imagination.2 The challenge, then, is to find a better and more effective means of both objectifying and analyzing racial dynamics. This task begins by assessing why social construction is vulnerable in the first place, by delineating its weak points as an analytical framework, and by questioning the ways it either succeeds or fails in adequately representing and interpreting the nuance and complexity of racial relations.

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Challenges to Social Construction Though new challenges to social constructivist views of race are emerging from genetics research, this lynchpin of anti-racist scholarship has been vulnerable for quite some time. In 1999, philosopher Ian Hacking dryly noted: “The notion that everything is socially constructed has been going the rounds.” Hacking, lamenting the trendiness of “constructionism,” observed that “so many types of analyses invoke social construction that quite distinct objectives get run together. An all-encompassing constructionist approach has become rather dull—in both senses of the word, boring and blunted” (1999: 35). He further argued that both the pervasiveness of this assertion and its lack of conceptual depth portend the intellectual exhaustion of this fundamental starting point for critical approaches to a range of political subjects. Whatever vigor the concept may lack in relation to discussions of race—most notably, that it ventures very little concerning the particular cultural dynamics shaping senses of racial belonging and difference—a far greater, emergent problem appears to be that it may be discredited by mounting evidence that, quite in contrast to constructionist claims, there is indeed a biological basis to race. On 23 June 2005, the Federal Drug Administration approved the first prescription drug based on racial identity—BiDil, a cardiovascular drug targeted for African Americans. BiDil is but one of an array of emerging forms of medical treatments that are predicated on the long-discredited notion that there are significant biological differences among racial groups.3 These medical developments follow from a range of genetics research projects that claim that there are indeed genetic markers of race and that people can be quite usefully and fairly accurately grouped according to commonplace racial categories.

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Armand Leroi, a biologist at Imperial College, summarizing this research in the op-ed pages of the New York Times (14 March 2005), trumpeted that “the consensus about social constructs is unraveling.” Indeed, sociologist Troy Duster, who has consistently criticized geneticists’ claims that there are scientific bases for continuing to use the concept of race, gloomily concurs, characterizing the surge of current racial research as “a remarkable fracture of the scientific consensus about race” (2005a: 115). The pedagogical and intellectual ramifications of this shift are huge, as was poignantly made clear to me by a perturbed colleague, who, in referring to Leroi’s assertions, asked me, “What do I tell my students now? For years I’ve been saying that race is socially constructed, but can I really keep telling them that?”4 The question of the biological basis for race, or whether race can be objectified in scientific terms, will kindle heated debates for years to come. The respective factions in this dispute—one composed of anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, and geneticists who have studiously labored for decades to dismantle linkages between race and physiology,5 the other composed of a smattering of scholars from these same disciplines who are dedicated to assailing the consensus regarding race as a social construct6—are well entrenched, sophisticated, and astute about the political and social import of this debate. Rather than survey the relative merits of the respective sides in this dispute, I am primarily interested in assessing how critical engagements with race might proceed in the wake of profound challenges to the social constructivist stance. Because, whether or not geneticists succeed in establishing that race and biology are significantly linked, it is already apparent that, in talking about racial matters from a social-scientific perspective, we have to convey a good deal more than “race is socially constructed.”

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Beyond Social Construction The problem, Hacking observed, is that while “the idea of social construction has been wonderfully liberating … unfortunately social construction analyses do not always liberate” (1999: 2). The assertion that any particular subject (from child abuse to quarks or emotions to illness) is socially constructed involves a few basic analytical moves. It begins with the assertion that X—any particular insidious form of social problem—need not have ever existed, or need not be at all as it is. Similarly—and this is as important in relation to race as it is to gender—the claim is also made that X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by the nature of things; hence, it is not inevitable. Additionally, the contention generally follows that if we perceive X to be real or true, then we are being deceived, perhaps purposefully, by a dominant ideological order or maybe simply by unthinking adherence to convention and tradition. It then follows that we would be much better off without X and that we must learn not to believe in it as an aspect of reality. Herein lies an aspect of why, as Hacking notes, social constructivists fall short analytically: Once a subject like race has been deconstructed, how do we account for its enduring power in our lives? Countless demonstrations that race is socially constructed have been performed in classrooms and texts over the decades—mine included. And yet we seem not much closer to effectively engaging the enduring power of popular (and even academic) beliefs in race.7 Part of the problem is that the ‘social’ or cultural realm in this gesture largely remains amorphous, a generic medium of delusion rather than a dimension of human experience shaped by particular dynamics. The declaration that race is socially constructed has been and remains of great importance. The work of Stuart Hall (1992), Paul Gilroy (1987), David Roedigger (1995),

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and Patricia Hill Collins (1990), to name but a few, illustrates the nuanced view that this position can open onto the significance of race. However, far too often this stance is either equated with or reduced to an assertion that race is simply a ‘myth’.8 The dozens of books and academic articles that pair ‘race’ and ‘myth’ in their titles attest to the compelling nature of this association. Social scientists then face the conundrum of how to further objectify or analyze something that has just been demonstrated to not exist at all. If race is simply a powerful illusion, then how are we to move beyond disabusing people of their racial beliefs and perceptions in order to say anything substantive about how and why race matters?9

Race and Racism By and large, the answer has resulted not in knowledge about how race works and what it does but rather in statistics and data highlighting the effects of individuals and institutions maintaining and reproducing beliefs about race—in other words, facts about racism.10 This involves generating and analyzing information about the manifest forms of racial disparities or inequalities that profoundly shape life chances and accesses to resources today.11 Federal law mandates that racial data be generated by a host of government agencies concerning lending practices, housing patterns, jury selections, and voting participation. These forms of data production are obviously of great import, and they truly need to be wielded to ever greater effect in confronting the resistance of many white Americans to recognizing that racism persists in this country. But such approaches to racial matters pose a certain dilemma: their production is predicated upon the reproduction of the very racial identities that social constructivists assert are mythic rather than real. Both in terms of the process of manufacturing objectifications about ‘blacks’,

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‘whites’, ‘Latinos’, and ‘Asians’—and in regard to the categorical judgments that are made about individuals or that people are compelled to make about themselves in the process of supplying this required data—the very forms of identity that initially were subject to deconstruction through social constructivist analysis are, in turn, scrupulously, methodically, and emphatically reinscribed. Nowhere is this more evident than in relation to the awkward and often clumsy matter of generating data on racial profiling, which requires police officers or outside observers to authoritatively assign racial identities to passing motorists, pedestrians, or citizens subject to arrest.12 Conservative pundits have relished as well as railed against this paradox. However, in relation to the vexing questions of the medical significance of racial identity or the biological basis for race, Sally Satel, a physician and member of the American Enterprise Institute, has emerged as a key figure. Satel, in the op-ed pages of the New York Times (5 May 2002), proudly proclaims: “In practicing medicine, I am not colorblind. I always take note of my patient’s race. So do many of my colleagues.” And, more succinctly, Satel cagily asserts: “When it comes to practicing medicine, stereotyping often works.” Moreover, Satel criticizes medical researchers who dismiss the scientific basis of race yet insist that the government produce data on race with regard to discrepancies in terms of health and disease as they relate to racial groups (2001: 52): “Despite the rhetoric about the bankruptcy of the race concept, it is notable that the federal government is pouring millions of dollars into studying racial difference in course-of-disease and in treatment response.”13 “Indeed,” as Satel wryly observes, “members of the ‘social construct’ camp do not deny the basic observation that certain illnesses cluster by race” (ibid.: 56). And therein lies a host of increasingly challenging problems. The production of these statistics designed to document racial inequalities in the area of

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health has contributed to reanimating the view that race has a significant biological basis. As Satel is quick to note, this not only renders social construction intellectually suspect but morally questionable, as well. Satel concludes that “race does have biological dimensions, and if we regard it solely as a social construct, we may forfeit opportunities to enlarge our medical treatment repertoire” (ibid.: 50). Indeed, researchers who assail the social constructivist consensus on race passionately assert that this stance on racial matters actually does more harm than good. As geneticists Esteban Gonzáles Burchard and Neil Risch intone: “We believe that ignoring race and ethnic background would be detrimental to the very populations and persons that this approach allegedly seeks to protect” (Gonzáles Burchard et al. 2003: 1174). The production of racial data is double-edged, as forms of statistical information initially designed to document the impact of racism are put to quite opposite political uses. This is most evident with regard to data derived from the National Assessment for Education Process, used in relation to ongoing debates and policy initiatives associated with the No Child Left Behind legislation. Information geared toward documenting the problem of racial inequality, such as figures that show black and Hispanic students scoring well below white and Asian students on aptitude tests, is characterized by some as evidence of a ‘racial achievement gap’. These scores are easily turned to reviving arguments from the last century that African Americans are characteristically lacking in intelligence and rationality (Roach 2004; Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003). Or consider the varied uses made of crime statistics. Racial data show that while blacks are disproportionately jailed, they also commit a disproportionate number of violent crimes. Such statistics play as easily into theories about innate racial dispositions to criminality as they do into scathing critiques of the US prison-industrial complex

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(Krupey 1997; McWhorter 2001). This questionable array of statistical artifacts, in turn, feeds into the polarized and seemingly intractable terms of public discussions about race, defining ‘the problem’ of race alternately as a product of ‘black attitudes’ (the ‘cult of victimology’), of a purportedly defective ‘black culture’, or of ‘white racism’.14 These dense escalations of racial politics and discourse constitute yet another dimension of race that is not easily accounted for by typical deployments of social construction.

Conclusion Recently, Paul Gilroy, energized partly by research on DNA in the 1990s, called for an end to “raciology,” that is, any effort to grant racial concepts, facts, or figures any intellectual credence. He emphatically asserted that we must “demand liberation not from white supremacy alone, however urgently that is required, but from all racializing and raciological thought, from racialized seeing, racialized thinking, and racialized thinking about thinking” (2000: 40). However, the current enthusiasm over the racial implications of genetics has led in exactly the opposite direction, instead reinvesting race with significance, particularly for many African Americans who now see DNA testing as a way of substantiating their racial identity.15 And there is very little chance of successfully challenging the production of such racial data when increasingly these endeavors receive impetus from organizations that strive to counter the effects of institutional racism by making blacks more active participants in generating information on genetics. An example is the National Human Genome Center based at Howard University, which defines its central objective succinctly: “To optimize participation of African Americans and other African Diaspora populations in the generation, interpretation, application, and utilization

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of human genetics/genome information.”16 Not only do these developments suggest a fundamental lack of critical purchase for social construction, they also point to a key aspect of its impending irrelevance. It is no longer tenable to dismiss or preclude an attention to the biological in relation to race by strictly insisting that the ‘social’ is the primary frame for proper comprehension. Nor does it suffice to refer to the social in generic or abstract terms, allowing a broad invocation of the power of racism to stand in place of specifying the cultural dynamics that inform all types of social identity. The social constructionist gesture has, generally, involved turning away from or dismissing the relevance of genetics or physiology. But resurgent efforts to establish this linkage between race and genes will not be defeated by being dismissed, and adamant assertions that we rigorously delineate between ‘biology’ and the ‘social’ will actually hamper our ability to think critically about race (Haraway 1997). Amidst the present moment’s numerous political perils, herein lies an opportunity to fundamentally reinvigorate social-science perspective in relation to race. Rather than fall back on pat assertions about social construction, we need to engage and complicate peoples’ understanding of biology and genetics more broadly,17 not just in relation to race, but in terms of the array of forms of social stratification (gender and class, in particular) that are made legible and that profoundly impact our physiology. The urge to link race and biology—politically, scientifically, and socially—is not going to go away; indeed, this impulse is being massively buttressed by current trends in genetics research, federal health policy, and popular culture. Rather than insist that there is no basis for such associations, we need instead to engage the manifold forms of interplay between the ‘social’ and the ‘biological’. Instead of adhering rigorously to a ‘social’ view predicated on sundering any link to the biological,

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scholars and activists working critically with racial representations today will need to consider what else to say beyond the phrase “Race is socially constructed.” The mind-numbingly limited and repetitive nature of public and academic discourse on race serves to underscore Hacking’s observation that social construction’s once “excellent shock value now has become tired.” Admittedly, that “shock value” can still shine through in effective pedagogical examples demonstrating that most of what we believe about race is unfounded. But clearly, as researchers and educators, we need to formulate more powerful forms of analytical engagement with racial matters. Fundamentally, we need to acknowledge people’s perceptions that there are indeed races, such as ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’, while at the same time demonstrating the copious distortions— historical and contemporary—that those objectifications entail. That is, rather than being content with proving that race is a socially constructed ‘myth’, which has left us with little other than ‘racism’ to study or discuss, we need to account for the many cultural dynamics that operate on and within racial groups today and that form the basis by which racial identity is experienced, perceived, and reproduced.18 It is these cultural dimensions that we will need to increasingly call into view as we work to explain the tangled dimensions of body, society, genes, place, health, and culture to our students and our peers.

Notes 1. Key works that made the claim that race is socially constructed include Fields (1990), Lopez (1994), Hall (1996), and Delgado (2000). 2. Interest in the phrase ‘social construction’ can largely be traced back to the founding effort by Berger and Luckman (1967). For an overview of social constructivist claims, see Gergen (2001).

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3. “At least 29 medicines (or combination of medicines) have been claimed, in peer-reviewed scientific or medical journals, to have differences in either safety or, more commonly, efficacy among racial or ethnic groups” (Tate and Goldstein 2004: S34). 4. I find myself considering how to revise my Powerpoint slides from my lectures on race, like the one that reads: “Race has meaning only in social, cultural, and political terms. Its usage has been largely dropped by biologists and physical anthropologists.” 5. For a survey of efforts to challenge the belief in a biological basis by anthropologists, see Caspari (2003). See also Duster (2005b). 6. In addition to works cited below, see Sarich and Miele (2004) and Graves (2001). 7. As John A. Powell notes, all the proofs that race is a social construct in no way facilitate his ability to hail a cab in New York City. See “Interview” in association with the film, Race: Power of an Illusion, http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04background-03-06.htm. 8. In anthropology, ‘myth’ is generally used in positivistic terms, as constituting a primary instantiation of a system of belief. But a more commonly linked set of associations is with false belief, as in Graves (2001, 2004). 9. See Race: The Power of an Illusion, produced in 2003 by California Newsreel, executive producer Larry Adelman. 10. Historian Barbara Fields (2003) is perhaps the most articulate spokesperson for the view that we should be talking only about racism and should leave off entirely attention to race. 11. This emphasis on racism continues even as scholars acknowledge that the racist content of US public discourse has dropped dramatically. See Bonilla-Silva (2001). 12. As Amy Westfeldt reports in “Researchers on the Trail of Racial Profiling” (Associated Press, 6 April 2002), producing data on racial profiling involves “observing drivers from moving cars and looking for differences when it came to speeding and other driving habits.” 13. For debates on this subject, see Brainard (2000). 14. These public discussions are profoundly shaped by a slew of commentators, such as Thomas Sewell, John McWhorter, Dinesh D’Souza, and Charles Murray.

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15. See Amy Harmon’s article “Blacks Pin Hope on DNA to Fill Slavery’s Gaps in Family Trees” (New York Times, 25 July 2005). 16. See http://www.genomecenter.howard.edu/units/genethics/ default.htm. 17. Demonstrations on the social constructions of race need to now also encompass critical readings of how genetic data are produced, as, for example, in the work of Duster (2005a). 18. In Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (Hartigan 2005), I undertake such an endeavor by working to simultaneously objectify ‘whites’ as a social group while also delineating the numerous forms of intra-racial conflict and heterogeneity that compose this objectification. My efforts follow in the wake of exceptional recent scholarship that challenges routinized and simplistic representations of race, depicting instead the complex variety of cultural forces at work in shaping racial matters. See Lamont (2000) and Weismantel (2001).

References Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckman. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor Books. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2001. White Supremacy and Racism. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Brainard, Jeffrey. 2000. “Federal Support Grows for Research on the Role of Race in Public-Health Problems.” Chronicle of Higher Education 47. Caspari, Rachel. 2003. “From Types to Populations: A Century of Race, Physical Anthropology, and the American Anthropological Association.” American Anthropologist 105: 65–76. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge. Delgado, Richard. 2000. “Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative.” Pp. 60–70 in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Duster, Troy. 2005a. “Race and Genetics: Controversies in Biomedical, Behavioral, and Forensic Sciences.” American Psychologist 60: 115–128.

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______. 2005b. “Race and Reification in Science.” Policy Forum 307: 1050–1051. Fields, Barbara. 1990. “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America.” New Left Review 181 (May–June): 95–118. ______. 2003. “Of Rogues and Geldings.” American Historical Review 108, no. 5: 1397–1405. Gergen, Kenneth. 2001. Social Construction in Context. London: Sage Publications. Gilroy, Paul. 1987. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gonzáles Burchard, Esteban, Elad Ziv, Natasha Coyle, Scarlett Lin Gomez, Hua Tang, Andrew J. Karter, Joanna L. Mountain, Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, Dean Sheppard, and Neil Risch. 2003. “The Importance of Race and Ethnic Background in Biomedical Research and Clinical Practice.” New England Journal of Medicine 348, no. 12: 1170–1175. Graves, Joseph. 2001. The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ______. 2004. The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America. New York: Plume. Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1992. “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” Pp. 21–33 in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent. Seattle: Bay Press. ______. 1996. “New Ethnicities.” Pp. 441–449 in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium: FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse. New York: Routledge. Hartigan, John, Jr. 2005. Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Krupey, G. J. 1997. “Black-on-White Crime.” Pp. 196–217 in The Race Card: White Guilt, Black Resentment, and the Assault on Truth and Justice, ed. Peter Collier and David Horowitz. Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing. Lamont, Michele. 2000. The Dignity of Working Men. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Lopez, Ian Haney. 1994. “The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusions, Fabrication, and Choice.” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 29, no. 1: 1–62 McWhorter, John. 2001. “What’s Holding Blacks Back?” City Journal 11 (Winter). Roach, Ronald. 2004. “The Great Divide: Racial Achievement Gap Gains Recognition as a National Concern.” Black Issues in Higher Education 21: 22–25. Roedigger, David. 1995. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class. London: Verso. Sarich, Vincent, and Frank Miele. 2004. Race: The Reality of Human Differences. Boulder: Westview Press. Satel, Sally. 2001. “Medicine’s Race Problem.” Policy Review (December): 49–59. Tate, Sarah, and David Goldstein. 2004. “Will Tomorrow’s Medicines Work for Everyone?” Nature Genetics Supplement 36: S34–S42. Thernstrom, Abigail, and Stephan Thernstrom. 2003. No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. New York: Simon & Schuster. Weismantel, Mary. 2001. Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Jason Antrosio is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hartwick College. His article “Inverting Development Discourse in Colombia: Transforming Andean Hearths” (American Anthropologist, 2002) is based on dissertation fieldwork carried out in southwestern Colombia. He is currently working on research in northern Ecuador, comparing family textile firms in Atuntaqui and Otavalo. Diane Austin-Broos is Radcliffe-Brown Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, Australia. She has done extensive fieldwork both in Kingston, Jamaica, and in Central Australia. She is the author of three books, two on the Caribbean and one on settler Australia. She is currently working on a collection of critical and ethnographic essays on the Western Arrernte. George Baca is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Goucher College in Baltimore. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2003, and is currently completing a manuscript on the relationship between racial politics and militarization in the American South. John Hartigan Jr. is an Associate Professor at the Americo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the

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author of Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (1999) and Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (2005). Joel S. Kahn holds a Chair in the Sociology and Anthropology Program at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He has been conducting research in South-East Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam) on the themes of development, globalization, identity, and modernity for over 30 years. His latest book, Other Malays: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Modernity in Peninsular Southeast Asia, is based on research carried out on a research fellowshiop at the Asia Research Centre, National University of Singapore, and is due to be published in 2006. Viranjini Munasinghe is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Callaloo or Tossed Salad? East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad (2001). Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University, where she is also Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture. She is the author of three books—Labor’s Lot (1994), The Cunning of Recognition (2002), Love and Empire (2006)—that focus on the politics of recognition. Vijay Prashad is the author of 10 books, including two chosen by the Village Voice as books of the year—Karma of Brown Folk (2000) and Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting (2001). The New Press will publish his Darker Nations: The Rise and Fall of the Third World in 2006. He teaches international studies at Trinity College in the United States.