Race and Ethnicity: Across Time, Space and Discipline (Studies in Critical Social Sciences) [Illustrated] 9004139915, 9789004139916

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Race and Ethnicity

Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor DAVID FASENFEST College of Urban, Labor and Metropolitan Affairs Wayne State University

Editorial Board JOAN ACKER, Department of Sociology, University of Oregon ROSE BREWER, Afro-American and African Studies, University of Minnesota VAL BURRIS, Department of Sociology, University of Oregon CHRIS CHASE-DUNN, Department of Sociology, University of California-Riverside G. WILLIAM DOMHOFF, Department of Sociology, University of California-Santa Cruz COLLETTE FAGAN, Department of Sociology, Manchester University MARTHA GIMENEZ, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder HEIDI GOTTFRIED, CULMA, Wayne State University KARIN GOTTSCHALL, Zentrum für Sozialpolitik, University of Bremen BOB JESSOP, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University RHONDA LEVINE, Department of Sociology, Colgate University JACKIE O’REILLY, WZB, Berlin MARY ROMERO, School of Justice Studies, Arizona State University CHIZUKO UENO, Department of Sociology, University of Tokyo

VOLUME 2

Race and Ethnicity Across Time, Space and Discipline

Edited by

Rodney D. Coates

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BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2004

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Cover design: Wim Goedhart (Goedhart Ontwerp, Aarlanderveen, the Netherlands)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication data Race and ethnicity: across time, space, and discipline / edited by Rodney D. Coates. p. cm. — (Studies in critical social sciences, ISSN 1573–4234; v. 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 90–04–13991–5 (alk. paper) 1. Ethnicity. 2. Race. 3. Race awareness. 4. Blacks—Race identity. 5. Ethnic attitudes. I. Coates, Rodney D. II. Series. GN495.6.R313 2004 305.896'076—dc22

2004048565

ISSN 1573–4234 ISBN 90 04 13991 5 © Copyright 2004 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

Contents Introduction .................................................................................................. RODNEY D. COATES

1

Race Across Time Apples are the Color of Blood .................................................................. STEVE RUSSELL Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order: A New Perspective on the New Orleans Race Riot of 1866 ............ STACY K. MCGOLDRICK The State and the Production of Racial Categories ................................ MOON-KIE JUNG & TOMÁS ALMAGUER The End of Race? Rethinking the Meaning of Blackness in Post-Civil Rights America ...................................................................... DAVID L. BRUNSMA & KERRY ANN ROCKQUEMORE How to Talk Nasty About Blacks Without Sounding “Racist”: Exposing the Sophisticated Style of Color-Blind Racism .................. EDUARDO BONILLA-SILVA A Critical Sociology of African Americans, the U.S. Welfare State, and Neoliberalism in the Era of Corporate Globalization .... ROSE M. BREWER Looking B(l)ackward: 2097–1997 .............................................................. ROBIN D.G. KELLEY

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31 55

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117 133

Race Across Space Transforming Racial Identity Through Affirmative Action .................. CHARLES GALLAGHER Do the right thing – race and ethnic differences in integrity .............. JUDITH R. BLAU & ELIZABETH STEARNS The Black Radical Traditions in the South: Confronting Empire ........ WALDA KATZ-FISHMAN & JEROME SCOTT Exploring the Racial Discrimination and Competition Processes of Race-Specific Violence in the Urban Context ................................ KAREN F. PARKER, PATRICIA L. MCCALL & JODI LANE

153 171 191

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vi • Contents

A Black Feminist Critique of the Social Construction of Crack Cocaine along Race, Class, and Gender Lines ........................ QUINN M. GENTRY Dining While Black: Racial Rituals and the Black American Restaurant Experience ............................................................................ DANIELLE DIRKS & STEPHEN K. RICE Ethnography, Demography and Service-Learning: Situating Lynwood Park ........................................................................ MONICA GAUGHAN

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Race Across Discipline On Black Athena, Hippocratic Medicine, and Roman Imperial Edicts: Egyptians and the Problem of Race in Classical Antiquity .................................................................................................... DENISE EILEEN MCCOSKEY Metaphoric Black Bodies in the Hinterlands of Race; Or, Towards Deciphering the Du Boisian Concept of Race and Nation in “The Conservation of Races” ............................ REBECKA R. RUTLEDGE Sexism, Racism and African American Muslim Women: What Does Wearing Hijab Mean to Them? ........................................ MICHELLE D. BYNG Repression, Racism, and Resistance: The New Orleans Black Urban Regime and a Challenge to Racist Neoliberalism .................. JOHN D. ARENA Ethnic Pluralism and National Identity in Nigeria ................................ YUNUSA KEHINDE SALAMI I Don’t Sing, I Don’t Dance, and I Don’t Play Basketball! Is Sociology Declining in Significance, or Has It Just Returned To Business As Usual? ............................................................................ RODNEY D. COATES References ...................................................................................................... Notes on Contributors ................................................................................ Index ..............................................................................................................

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431 473 477

Rodney D. Coates Introduction

Race and ethnicity,1 much like water and air, are all around us. As long as we can remember, in many of the places we have traveled, and in many of the books, magazines, and articles we have read – race, is writ large. Race is so much a part of our social, cultural, historical, and personal realities and identities, many take it for granted. Even when it is not taken for granted, race is rarely challenged as many have now come to believe that it is a mere relic of our past that lingers in the minds of those consumed with racial identity politics, archaic social and literary studies, or those who refuse to give up the racist ghost. Still others, tired of what they perceive to be endless conversations into the racial void, would rather not talk about “it” ever again. Race, in all of its forms and with all of its consequences, refuses to die a slow death. Much like the phoenix, it rises with each new generation, each new perceived threat to personal, economic, or national security, or when some drunk is bored and looking for fun. The only way to confront this demon is to continuously shed light upon it. Hence the most critical problem associated with the analysis of race is the perception that it is intransigent. Race, as a variable, constantly changes as social, political, historical,

1 Throughout this introduction, in an effort to avoid constant repetition, ethnicity should be implied whenever I make reference to race.

2 • Rodney D. Coates

and economic structures change. Academic complacency, relying upon previous methods, theories, and conclusions that are time specific produces a sort of complacency. Getting past this complacency requires us to think outside the racial box. Ever wondered what would happen if we were to think outside the box? Will the world come to a screeching halt? Will we loose site of our existential moorings? What would happen if we dared to break out of our disciplinarian straightjackets? Although these are comfortable boxes that are imposed both within and without the discipline; all that is produced is what may be called academic complacency. Such complacency not only fails to challenge our intellect but it leaves unscathed the systems, structures, and processes that continually produce(s) ethnic and racial oppression(s). The purpose of this special volume, the charge given to the various authors, was to think outside the box. Scholars were encouraged to dare to contemplate, to evaluate, and analyze issues regarding race and ethnicity from radically different perspectives. They were asked to challenge their own assumptions and those of their respective disciplines. Therefore, much like walking a tight-rope without a net, the scholars attempt to free themselves from the disciplinarian blinders that often preclude the development of fresh insights. Whether or not these goals were accomplished, will be left to you the reader. For my part, I am pleased to offer you these papers in the hope that they take us to a new time, space, and disciplinarian reality in our understanding of race and ethnicity. Considering the titles of the papers that comprise this book you will immediately notice that this is indeed an eclectic collection from a variety of intellectual orientations. As you think about typical volumes on race and ethnicity, you will probably agree that rarely are theoretical, empirical or policy statements developed in one academic arena easily assessable to those in others. The articles that comprise this volume are not so restrictive. They provide a full range of viewpoints ranging from classics and anthropology to demography, from linguistics to law, from empirical to theoretical, and from policy to practice. They were encouraged to challenge the way we conceive and perceive of race and ethnicity. As a consequence they were encouraged to go past the ideological constraints that normally limit such discourse by disciplinarian boundaries or disciplinarian myopia. By definition these papers are intended to provide a critical re-appraisal of race and ethnic theory, research and policy.

Introduction • 3

Race is a variable and not a constant. While this variability has been acknowledged by practitioners in the field, few theoretical and empirical consequences have followed. As observed by Fields (1990) a presumed constancy of race obfuscates any significant analytical or theoretical endeavor. She essentially argues that this leads to the reification of race which merely hides the social construction associated with racial formations. We are left, as a consequence, with racial definitions rather then analysis of the formation, construction, and perpetuation of racialized systems. A few years ago, while shopping in a local pharmacy I observed that there were no persons of color employed. When I questioned the manager, he apologetically replied such hires would lead to a hostile reaction by his predominantly white clientele. Oddly, he did not see why and how the failure to have such workers could lead to similar reactions by other shoppers. Racialized systems, i.e. those which are constructed to generate racial outcomes, have long been recognized. Those charged with gate-keeping functions rarely understand and as a consequence acknowledge their complicity in maintaining racialized systems. These systems, so imbedded in our cultural frames of reference, appear innocent, and rarely appear as racist. Unfortunately, even with their recognition, the remedies designed to correct the problems are often circumvented. It never ceases to amaze me how the “innocent” justify their actions. This gets played out in many different forums, as noted by Morrison: In matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse. Evasion has fostered another, substitute language in which the issues are encoded, foreclosing open debate. The situation is aggravated by the tremor that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference. To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. (Morrison: 1992)

While most people are aware of the extreme racist views of such groups as Neo-Nazis, Skin-Heads, etc., few recognize that it is the “shadowless participation” of blacks in cultural institutions which remain hidden. Shadowless participation is only now being documented in such areas as the media (Entman and Rojecki 2000), calls for welfare reform and reproductive rights (Roberts 1997), human genome studies (Gannett 2001), and public policy debates

4 • Rodney D. Coates

and formulations (Kellstedt 2000). It is hoped that through the exploration of race across time, space and discipline, light can be shed on these shadows. Race and ethnic conflicts and realities while time specific are not time bound. That is to say, while we can identify specific events which appear to be racial or ethnic in nature, these cannot be understood within a finite time period. Discrete episodes must be approached over time if we are to identify racial periods, systems and processes. Again, while a specific event may have racial or ethnic overtones, only an analysis across time can identify whether or not these events represent trends and/or patterns that may indeed be racial. This book is broken into three sections2 which serve to group the various contributions to this volume into those dealing with race and ethnicity over time, space and discipline with the intent of identifying trends and patterns.

Race Across Time The quintessential problem of the Western World for the last few centuries has been associated with a problem that it created – race. With the global advance of western imperialism we note the invention of the ideology of race. Race has been both mystified and mythologized since its invention. The mystical aspects of race make reference to the presumption of its omnipresence, whereas the mythological aspects make reference to its presumed omnipotence. Thus, god-like, race looms over much of our historical and contemporary realities of the last few centuries. Of late, even though social scientists have reluctantly pointed out the social, political, and historical construction of race, rarely have we discussed the cultural production of race. (Coates 2003) It is through the analysis of the cultural production of race that we discover that

2

As with all categorizations these reflect more my own biases, and those imposed by this project than those of the authors’. I urge the reader to understand that this is just a means of ordering the work for this volume, and each of the articles in this section and those that follow could well, with a different reading, another margarita, or the sun hitting the page ever so slightly – wound up in a different section. I do however believe that the present groupings do reflect some common themes which coincide with the section headings, but in so doing I realize that they could have easily gone into other sections. This is particularly true of the last section – Race Across Discipline. Many of the papers that comprise this volume could have been placed in this section. Alternatively, they could have easily been placed in other sections. In the end, the reader and the various authors must determine the accuracy of “my” categorizations.

Introduction • 5

race – in all its various disguises, machinations, manifestations – remains one of the most intransigent of constructs. Race is neither an event nor a specific series of events. Race is a process of structured events which over time demonstrate a system whereby groups and individuals are racialized. Race, consequently, must be studied from a socio-historical frame of reference which provides the critical rubric by which and through which systems of racialism may be understood. Absent such an analysis one is more likely to confuse events which may have racial overtones with processes which are racialized. The mere fact that outcomes may be categorized within racial terms does not a priori lead to the conclusion that these outcomes are a result of racialization. For example, does the observation that a larger percent of African Americans die from high blood pressure lead to the conclusion that racism or systems of racialization are operant? The answer is maybe. We would however have to ask and answer a series of other questions before specific conclusions can be reached. Such questions would include, but would not be limited to: Could these results be explained by diet and choice, age and region, class and culture, or some combination of all? Or could these results be explained by historical systems of racialization that are no longer prevalent? Alternatively, is it likely that these outcomes reflect the systemic interaction of race, gender, culture, and economic exploitation, or a combination of racialization, gender expectations, economic circumstance, and cultural values? This is to say, in order to avoid racial reductionism, racial reasoning, and/or racial mythology – analysts must avoid the quick, often superficial, observations associated with a-historical analysis. It is quite evident that the answers we eventually derive will critically shape our responses. All too often, responses have been crafted to answers that are based upon faulty premises, analysis, and/or conclusions. Time is not universally experienced by all in the same way. Time reflects ones positional relations to others within specific social, cultural and historical realities. Hence time is relative and to be understood within these structured experiences. Each society and culture defines different realities as significant, hence of historical import. That is to say, as these realities are reflected in social or group memory we can further discuss the meaning, relevance, and understandings associated with what is variously described as history. In the section entitled race across time the concern is to shed light upon these historically constructed realities. In so doing, our journey into the complexity of race and ethnicity begins.

6 • Rodney D. Coates

While the racial journey has many forks and bends, it seems only fitting that our discussion begin where the concept essentially had its beginning in early American discussions about racial purity, identity, and national policy. One cannot talk of America, from any period without discussing racial and ethnic oppression. Such a reminder comes from Steve Russell’s “Apples are the Color of Blood”. Here through historical analysis of legal codes and customs, Dr. Russell demonstrates that color is a defining characteristic of America’s racial disharmony. Racial designations force non-whites to occupy subordinate positions within the American social hierarchy. He argues that while governmental policies and institutional racism were significant they were not sufficient to define Indian identity. Russell concludes by reminding us that red not only is not only the color of an apple, a blanket, or the concept used to deny, reify, and certify whiteness; it is also the color of the blood spilled in the furtherance of racial supremacy. One of the benefits of being able to look back in time is the ability to pinpoint critical periods in racial formations. Such analysis allows for the determination of not only the factors associated with such formations but also the processes associated with racialization. Stacy K. McGoldrick, in her article “Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order: A New Perspective on the New Orleans Race Riot of 1866” persuasively demonstrates how extremist groups can circumvent the political process, overturn the political vision of others and dominate significant political institutions necessary to preserve or recreate racial hierarchies. She documents the process by which local Confederates in New Orleans were able to take control of the police force and force, violently at times, their own image and desires upon the newly forming racial hierarchies of a post-slavery south. The police gained loyalty from other disaffected whites through their ability to utilize the power of the state to crush the will of others. McGoldrick therefore concludes that one of the implicit roles that these police served was as racial gate-keepers charged with preserving racial hegemony with “relative impunity” even when their actions were illegal and caused violence. Moon-Kie Jung and Tomás Almaguer extend this conversation by discussing how the state helps to creates, manipulate, and perpetuate racial identity. In their paper “The State and the Production of Racial Categories” they explain that racial identity becomes reified as norms through the development of national policies, sanctioning mechanisms and control over public discourses. Jung and Almaguer argue that U.S. history is replete with examples where

Introduction • 7

national decisions regarding race, whiteness, and citizenship have significantly and materially affected such things as who was eligible to hold public office, vote, testify in courts, obtain education, join labor unions, marry, etc. They again demonstrate the variability of race as being dependent upon and coincident with historically evident processes, political capriciousness, and state interventions. The variability of race and the intervention of the state in the manipulation of race have direct consequences for those trying to reduce the negative effects of race within society. Jung and Almaguer conclude that antiracist strategies cannot simply rely upon a policy where race is simply dismissed as being an ideological aberration of the past. Both social activism and scholarship must understand that race has very real social, political, psychological, historical and economic consequences for society and its racialized groups. Such recognition cannot however revert to a mythological or implied “biological” reality, but must be seen as a variable that is time specific. All too often, when we speak of race we assume that we are speaking of static realities and groups. In the article “The End of Race? Rethinking the Meaning of Blackness in Post-Civil Rights America” – Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma challenge us to think of racial categories as constructs reflecting slowly eroding social realities. By concentrating on what are being called the multiracial population, the authors argue that increasingly we must question the validity of our measures. Further, they point out that in a post Civil Rights era, generations of intermarriage, socioeconomic diversification, and increases in the multiracial population raises significant questions regarding the efficacy of our social scientific analysis with regards to race. Similarly in the U.S., many scholars asserting the realization of racial equality – imbued in the dream of Martian Luther King, Jr. – hold that we have turned the corner. We often see these pundits wearing academic garb arguing that since race is but a social construction, all we need do is stop utilizing the word and it will go away like so much smoke and mirrors. To such prophets of mendacity, I would point out the basic law of thermodynamics – i.e. energy can neither be created nor destroyed but it can be transformed. Or put differently, the only constant in the universe is change. Race and racial oppression are not constants but variables reflecting unique social, political and economic configurations in time and space. The article by Eduardo BonillaSilva demonstrates the variability of racism in our post-civil rights society. In “How to Talk Nasty About Blacks Without Sounding ‘Racists’: Exposing the Sophisticated Style of Color-blind Racism” Bonilla-Silva demonstrates

8 • Rodney D. Coates

that, in the late sixties and early seventies, a new ideology emerged as part of the great racial transformation, in the United States. This new ideology, encompassing a more subtle form of racism, replaced the more overt Jim Crow of previous periods. Political correctness and polite conversations are revealed, by Bonilla-Silva, as subtle masks that attempt to shield these more subtle insults, slurs, and innuendoes. Thus in post civil rights ideology, the failure of blacks to succeed in mainstream America is not a result of racism but market forces or ‘ghetto specific’ behaviors. These, non-racial factors serve to insulate and exonerate those who continue to benefit from racially hegemonic distribution systems. In recent years, the face of welfare, poverty, and urban dislocations has all too often been that of a black woman. Recognizing that perceptions often structure our realities, Professor Rose M. Brewer in “A Critical Sociology of African Americans, the U.S. Welfare State, and Neoliberalism in the Era of Corporate Globalization” implicitly argues that these perceptions are caricatures of the real world. This to say, that rather then mirroring the real world, these perceptions are actually manufactured to misrepresent the real world. Such misrepresentation not only distorts the race dynamic, but, insists Brewer, distorts the gender, race, and class dialectic. Such distortions, often part of scholarship, policy, and decision making, is often omitted, erased or deliberately ignored particularly as it relates to the U.S. Welfare State, race and Policy. Brewer argues that the increased pursuit of global private property has been at the expense of domestic social programs. Privatization culturally expresses the ideology of the right or neo-liberalism. The newly energized right, utilizing such phrases as Welfare Reform, secures increased profits by intensifying race, gender and class war. The first casualty of this war has been living and social wages for the poorest segments of America. Robin D.G. Kelley in “Looking B(l)ackward: 2097–1997”, a spoof on Bellamy’s 1883 “Looking Backward”, tongue in cheek interrogates those who would elevate identity above structure, self above reality, and deconstruction above construction. Positioning himself almost 100 years into the future, he predicts the damage of uncritically accepting new paradigms merely because they sound good, unabashedly distorting the past in order to conform to the political realities of the now, and the unwavering loyalty to the ideologues of blackness at the expense of ones loyalty to truth. He warns that attacks will come from both extremes. From the right, racists, dawning new clothes, may appear compassionate in their objective appraisals justifying the continuance

Introduction • 9

of racial distributive systems as reflecting market conditions; to the far left, dawning the clothes of postmodernist, he warns of those who would reduce the concerns of racially oppressed groups to issues of identity politics. He finally warns of attacks from within from those who would blackanize, Africanize, or further marginalize their scholarship through racially reductionist research, theories, ideologies, and policies. He ultimately concludes that the future of Black Studies/Afro-American Studies/Africana Studies will be bright just as long as there remains a commitment to sanity, scholarship, and struggle. He prophetically argues that such scholars and their scholarship will serve as defense against attacks from both the right and the left. Kelley urges these brilliant, scholar activists to “Look B(l)ackward for sources of inspiration and insight” as they lead us through the maze and continue the struggle toward freedom, justice, and equality in the ever present now.

Race Across Space Race, racialization, and racism vary across cultural, national, and societal boundaries. Racial processes myopically viewed within singular cultural, national, or societal lens rarely provide the critical insights necessary to understand underlying causes, mechanisms, and sources of perpetuation, maintenance, and change. While such narrow foci are important steps in the analytical process, they should not be viewed as ends unto themselves. These steps, properly situated within theoretical statements, can provide tremendous insight into the essence of race, racialization, and racism. It is through this process that critical theories are developed. Further, such developments can help inform the bases for policies, remedies, and solutions. As a consequence race must be viewed across space. Over the past few years we have witnessed an avalanche of racial time bombs feverously ticking against the recurrent threat of explosions. At the heart of these racial time bombs are the erosion of trust, destabilization of racial and ethnic accords, resurgence of xenophobia, and the failure of many in academia, media or government to do little more then report on the plight of the so-called victims. Examples can be drawn from every quarter of the world. Here in the United States we are well aware of racial profiling associated not only with blacks, Asians, and Hispanics but also of late middle easterners. Interethnic and interracial conflict has also increased as African American fear being displaced (or replaced) by Hispanics; affirmative action

10 • Rodney D. Coates

pits Asians, African Americans, Hispanics and Whites against each other in a strange tug of war over public resources, and the war on terrorism inflames religious antagonism among various racial and ethnic groups. Ethnic conflict and violence has also been tracked in Latin America. For example, in Bolivia, indigenous communities in the Chiquitano forest region have taken on a predominant white elite in their organized resistance to the building of a natural gas pipeline. Similar struggles are also witnessed among the U’wa Indians of Colombia. Alternatively in Europe, the fear of escalating ethnic conflict continues to get front page attention. Thus we note that Asians in England watch new acts of violence aimed at them escalate. A planned mosque in Ulster threatens to create a full blown race war. In the Middle East we similarly are continuously made aware of the violence and death that mark the continual struggles between the Israelis and Palestinians. Frequent and continuous ethnic and racial conflict has surfaced in the horn of Africa where ethnic conflict has reached genocidal levels. Such conflict is easily identified in the civil wars that have erupted in the Sudan between Arabized northerners and African southerners, or those in Ethiopia between the Amharas and the Tigreans, Oromos, Eritreans, and so on. Ethnic conflicts in Somali have also frequently captured world attention. Here we note ongoing conflicts among the Maraheens and the Isaaqs, or between the Darods and the Ogadenis, and so on. Lastly, in Djibouti the conflict between the Afars and the Issas continues to simmer. Ethnic wars continue to ravage the Congo. The most significant thing about all of these conflicts is the reality that they are not recent phenomenon but reflect long standing disputes, cleavages, and problems. Race, viewed, spatially, requires us to leave our academic comfort zones and venture into the racialized spaces produced by systems of oppression. Racialized space does not naturally come into being, but must be reserved and sanctioned by corporate bodies of law, custom, and practice. Racialized spaces, and how people are grouped within them, help to identify, understand and expose the hegemonic hierarchies that structure systems of racial oppression, legitimacy, and ideology. The examination of race across space allows us to explore these spatial dimensions and thus explore the terrain of race. The strange thing about our discussions regarding race is that it often ignores significant racialized groups. Much like conversations of gender, masculinity is often reduced to a footnote, whiteness, while assumed, is often ignored as an analytical category. Chares Gallagher in “Transforming Racial Identity Through Affirmative Action” critically examines the range of responses

Introduction • 11

to affirmative action with a particular focus on how this policy had the effect of pushing whiteness, to various degrees, to the forefront as a social identity. He argues that regardless of the respondents’ position, affirmative action forced a majority of white respondents to think about their own racial identity in relational terms as they considered whether whiteness was or was not a social or economic liability. Respondents’ position on affirmative action may have differed but these narratives were linked explicitly by a struggle to understand, define or defend, being white, and the extent to which white privilege still exists. The political and social implications of perceiving whiteness as a visible and salient category of identification is explored. It is often presumed that non-whites experience the most significant negatives as a consequence of living in racialized social structures. While this is often the case, Blau and Stearnes explain how whites are also victims of racial oppression. Judith Blau and Elizabeth Stearnes in “Do the Right thing – race and ethnic differences in integrity” discovers that white teens were most likely to score lowest on scales of integrity and honesty. This is particularly troublesome when we realize, as pointed out by Blau and Stearnes, that Blacks, Hispanics and Asians are more likely to be suspected of being delinquent. Thus, while Whites are more likely to be the perpetrators, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are more likely to be blamed. Although victimized, Blacks and racial others are not by definition victims. Racialized others have a long history of overcoming victim status as a result of adopting and promoting struggles of liberation. While many would suggest that the civil-rights period was relegated to the 1960’s, others argue that the century’s long struggle began with the first acts of oppression. Throughout this period, racialized others have utilized a variety of strategies for dealing with, mitigating the effects of, or dismantling the system of racial oppression. Walda Katz-Fishman and Jerome Scott in their article “Black Radical Struggles in the South: Confronting Empire” explain how the struggle for liberation forced Blacks to become radical early in American history. As early as the 1500’s, they identify the roots of a radical Black tradition; which forced changes upon the economic, political, and social life of this country. And while many would suggest that this radical tradition died with the sixties, Katz-Fishman and Scott clearly demonstrate that it vibrantly continues to the present day. Therefore, rather then victims, Blacks utilizing this radical tradition, effect agency as they rebelled, planned insurrections, organized strikes, boycotts, and labor actions.

12 • Rodney D. Coates

The paper by Parker, McCall and Lane entitled “Exploring the Racial Discrimination and Competition Processes of Race-Specific Violence in the Urban Context” investigates how urban disadvantages produce race-specific behavior among local residents. Specifically, the authors argue that racial competition and exploitation serves to increase the likelihood of violence both within and between racial groups. They argue that this process represents the interconnections between labor market exploitation, competition, and violence. Of interests is that while the authors identify race-specific behavior, they do not imply behavior that is racial. More succinctly, while situationally specific behavior can be identified with particular racial groups, the authors are not concluding that this behavior is inherently part of the racial cast of a particular group. The importance of this paper is that it clearly demonstrates those specific structural conditions which produce inter and intra racial group competitions, behaviors, and conflicts. Absent the specific structural conditions identified we would not expect to see similar types or levels of inter and intra racial group competition, behavior, and conflict. The plight of those at the bottom of the barrel is often lost as we dismiss their situation as self-defeating, ghetto specific behavior. Dr. Quinn M. Gentry’s chapter entitled “A Black Feminist Critique of the Social Construction of Crack Cocaine along Race, Class, and Gender Lines” argues that such dismissive attitudes actually reflect how policy, and other official stances serves as “tools” which preserve and enhance oppressive systems. Specifically she examines how policy aimed at addressing the social problems of poor African Americans actually serves to problematize the poor. Thus political, economic, and social policies, embedded in racism, classism, and sexism, serve to keep the poor, racial minorities in their place. While we sit and wonder why the poor do not “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” we fail to realize how our policies and implementation strategies actually creates vicious cycles which provide the ideological justification that undermines their ability to achieve. In a strange political irony, those who fail to achieve are castigated as somehow being undeserving of our concern. Black feminist perspectives, according to Gentry, not only reveal such insidious systems but also points to the potential for reform, redemption, and revolution. As pointed out Danielle Dirks and Stephen K. Rice in “Dining While Black: Racial Rituals and the Black American Restaurant Experience” – much of the action in racialized space operates just under our radar screens. In this novel study, the researchers examine those interpersonal zones that mediate and

Introduction • 13

mitigate racial identity formation, justification, and ritual. They observed that race is negotiated through complicated social exchanges that reflect tacit rationalizations of racial stereotypes. Thus, while in public settings politically appropriate and correct racial attitudes govern behavior, hostility and offensive racial rituals govern those behind the scene situations. Backstage processes can also be arenas of social activism. Monica Gaughan demonstrates how the role of scholar-activism can be extended even to students. The process she describes involves the development of service-learning projects. In the article “Ethnography, Demography and service-learning: Situating Lynwood Part – we are shown how the needs of a community can become the sources of research, interests, and service for college students. In an innovative project these students were encouraged to collect demographic data, conduct surveys, interviews, to facilitate their understanding and those within the community of how the processes of social stratification, racial segregation, and gentrification serve to restrict opportunities of residents. The paper concludes with recommendations of how the local residents can use the data as instruments of empowerments.

Race Across Discipline Perhaps the most extreme and difficult space to bridge is that represented by disciplinarian boundaries. Balkanization, even within disciplines, permeates academic discourse to the extent that rarely does one listen to voices from alternative intellectual orientations. Failure, on the part of scholars, to pierce these veils means that conversations regarding race tend to reflect academic myopia. Academic space, typically referred to as disciplinary boundaries, further restricts our ability to fully appreciate the innovations, insights, and theoretical constructs associated with race. Only by breaching these boundaries can we hope to unravel the extremely complex structures associated with race. Clearly race, racialization, and racism operate in multidimensional spaces associated with psychology, history, economic activity, politics, sociology, anthropology, literature, etc. Clearly, the only way to circumvent the perceived universality of such systems is to provide a multi-disciplinarian focus to its understanding. Such a focus provides evidence of clear structural, cultural, historical, and social boundaries. Again, the development of policy, theory, remedies, and solutions would benefit from such a trans-disciplinarian approach to race, racialization, and racism. The chapters in this last section

14 • Rodney D. Coates

continue our dialogue across the voids by encouraging us to think outside of the academic box. This volume is fortunate to have the scholarship of Dr. Denise McCoskey to begin our journey into the complexity of race and ethnicity. Her paper, from the field of classics, centers “On Black Athena, Hippocratic Medicine, and Roman Imperial Edicts: Egyptians and the Problem of Race in Classical Antiquity.” This paper interrogates the whole notion of racial identity among ancient peoples. As such McCoskey challenges both the conventional wisdom regarding the universality of western derived notions of race, and offers important insights into the economic, political, cultural and social factors critical in the development of race. She argues that these factors not only shape and define, but also essentially ground such concepts within specific sociohistorical realities. Failure to understand these realities has led many to attempt to impose modern realities upon the ancient world producing only confusion, obfuscation, and distortions. We continue this exploration of race across disciplines through lens of cultural theory provided by Dr. Rebecka R. Rutledge in what she calls the “Metaphoric Black Bodies in the Hinterlands of Race; Or, Towards Deciphering the Du Bosian Concept of Race and Nation in ‘The Conservation of Races’”. In this remarkable chapter Rutledge explains that discourses of race are mitigated through and in national space. Exploring the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, she effectively disengages race from its fixed western location. Race, thus disengaged, looses its preeminence and its permanence, as she explores the conditions which lead to the de-racialization of both space and existence. Rutledge concludes that once these conditions are reached, that is once race is dislocated, then its power will also be eliminated. Our perceptions, often clouded by Western images of reality, rarely observe from the vantage of the other. Michelle D. Byng through an insightful paper called “Sexism, Racism and African American Muslim Women: What Does Wearing Hijab Mean to Them?” metaphorically and analytically allows us to gaze behind the veil. Professor Byng skillfully explains how Middle Eastern veiling practices illustrate social status of Muslim women, their connection to cultural values, and insight into their perceptions of Islam. This chapter reveals the dialectical discourse of pro-veiling Islamic religious elites and anti-veiling discourse of Islamic feminists. She concludes that the various discourses regarding veiling, also demonstrates the process by which women are instrumental in orchestrating and maintaining principal sources of identity, legitimacy, and status.

Introduction • 15

John D. Arena, in “Repression, Racism, and Resistance: The New Orleans Black Urban Regime and a Challenge to Racist Neoliberalism,” demonstrates how legitimacy is negotiated as a form of resistance. In this chapter, Arena explains how the massive expansion of the United States’ criminal justice system not only reflects the increasingly repressive state apparatus of the courts, prisons and police but also parallels the curtailment of civil rights and erosion of social provision. He argues that economic transformation, utilizing repressive measures, served to support racialized systems of oppression. Unintentionally these same transformations served to radicalize elements of independent black workers who developed effective strategies to resist the expansion of the racist state apparatus of repression by the bi-racial governing elite. Professor Yunusa Kehinde Salami presents further analysis regarding identity formation and state interventions. In “Ethnic Pluralism and National Identity in Nigeria”, Salami argues that ethnic identity is basically a means by which belonging is experienced by individuals within a state or nation. He observes that Nigeria is a conglomeration of different ethnic nationalities. Based on this hotchpotch arrangement, there is the problem of ethno-cultural pluralism. The Nigerian nation-state is fragmented into different ethnic, communo-cultural, or local loyalties as well as different corresponding sociocultural allegiance and commitments. Whether this fragmentation leads to civil unrest, war, and national disintegration is essentially a matter of politics. Often ethnic elites manipulate and politicize ethnicity in their various struggles to control the distribution of the national cake. This ethnicism, (i.e. politicization of ethnicity) militates against national identity in an ethnocultural pluralist Nigeria. While Salami recognizes the value of national identity he does not suggest that it should preclude ethnicity. He concludes that stable identity and politics can only be derived by controlling the spread of ethnicism. The last paper in this volume argues that if sociology is to remain viable as a discipline then it must find ways to live up to its promises. In the article “I don’t sing, I don’t dance, and I don’t play basketball! Is Sociology declining in significance, or has it just returned to business as usual?” my concern is to critically examine our reason, as scholars for existing. Are we primarily gatekeepers of the status quo? Is sociology’s primary goal to be apologists to an otherwise oppressive system? I suggest that if a person who is ill goes to a doctor, who after detailed diagnosis with some of the most sophisticated tools, comes to the conclusion that the patient is ill – then they will soon find

16 • Rodney D. Coates

themselves without patients. We as sociologists seem to be forever discovering that a problem exists, but fail to provide the proscriptions (past some vague notions that society must be transformed, revolutionized, or etc.). Rarely, and this is particularly true in America, do we leave our armchairs and get our hands dirty with the reality of oppression and the necessary solutions. If we rely upon the past, if we fail to see that change and oppression are constant. If we continue as if its business as usual, then we will see more departments closing, more faculty displaced, and increasingly discover that Sociology as a discipline is ‘declining in significance’. Alternatively, increased significance and enhanced vitality of sociology can be achieved if its tools, techniques and theories are made applicable, useable and assessable to those most in need of liberation. Enjoy!

Race Across Time

Steve Russell Apples are the Color of Blood1

Indians tended to split into two factions from the moment it became apparent that the newcomers were not benign. Some wanted to fight to the death; others opted for the constantly changing terms of peaceful coexistence with the invaders. Crow Dog’s case was a microcosm of this war among ourselves over how Indian people would adjust to the new realities, over “traditionals” versus “blanket Indians.” The latter are sometimes called in modern parlance “apples,” as African-Americans sometimes refer to “Oreos” or Latinos refer to “coconuts:” (red) (black) (brown) on the outside and white on the inside. Crow Dog, an Indian considered by whites to be rebellious, killed Spotted Tail, a famous Brulé Sioux chief with an assimilationist reputation in white America. I choose my words carefully because these men have living relatives who do not necessarily agree with the portrayal of their ancestors in the media of the time. The important point for this discussion is not who Crow Dog and Spotted Tail were, but who they were thought by the dominant culture to be. Crow Dog was called to account within the Indian justice system. He was ordered to pay substantial restitution to Spotted Tail’s family. The duly constituted authorities within the tribe decided that Crow 1 This chapter is an expanded and rewritten version of an article of the same title that appeared in 28 Critical Sociology 65–76 (2002).

20 • Steve Russell

Dog posed no further danger to the community. This “leniency” – for so it was perceived – caused great outrage among whites, including many liberals who admired Spotted Tail’s “realism.” After much public outcry, Crow Dog was indicted by a federal grand jury for the murder of Spotted Tail and quickly convicted. His sentence was this time more “civilized:” Crow Dog would hang by the neck until dead. These were the bare bones facts that led to the 1883 United States Supreme Court decision in Ex Parte Crow Dog (1883, 109 U.S. 556), wherein the Court opined that the United States had no jurisdiction to try an Indian for a crime committed against another Indian on Indian land. To allow the federal government to hang Crow Dog would be to try Indians “. . . not by their peers, nor by the customs of their people, nor the law of their land, but by superiors of a different race, according to the law of a social state of which they have an imperfect conception, and which is opposed to the traditions of their history, to the habits of their lives, to the strongest prejudices of their savage nature; one which measures the red man’s revenge by the maxims of the white man’s morality.” (109 U.S. at 571). Leaving aside the condescending words, that restitution is not revenge, and that it was the white man’s revenge at odds with the red man’s morality, the Court spoke the law correctly and Crow Dog escaped the noose, turning up the heat on an already inflamed public opinion. Congress responded with the Major Crimes act of 1885, stripping away the right of Indian tribes to impose traditional penalties for specified crimes (18 U.S.C. § 1153). So began the killing of Indian political identity (Harring 1994). Indian cultural identity had always been under attack. For white conservatives, it was the condign result of military conquest, the extinction of inferior cultures. For white liberals, it was in our best interests, as expressed in the dictum “kill the Indian in him to save the man.” This shorthand expression of the forced assimilation policy was attributed to Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School,2 who in fact used the phrase in a paper read in Denver in 1892 (Prucha 1973, pp. 260–261). It was sometimes reported as “kill the Indian child” (Eastman 1935). In either iteration, it is an apt description of the policy (Adams 1995). Pratt, of course, had no

2 Barbara Landis maintains an outstanding resource on the Carlisle School and the boarding school movement generally on the world wide web at http://home.epix.net/~landis/ (visited May 14, 2003).

Apples are the Color of Blood • 21

motive to harm Indians (Pratt 1987). Separating Indian children from their hair, their language, and their heritage was done with the best of intentions (Prucha 1973). Whatever the stated motive, the results were the same from the reservation years until 1933: traditional religious ceremonies banned, Indian boys forced to cut their hair, Indian adults “converted” to Christianity by withholding rations, Indian children kidnapped and forced into boarding schools where Indian languages were banned, Indian adults forbidden to criticize the government and required to obtain passports to travel from one concentration camp, I mean reservation, to another. The Indian New Deal, John Collier’s tenure as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, began in 1933 (Lacy 1985, p. 92). Collier’s attempts to reverse generations of cultural genocide met with mixed success. Indians had been granted American citizenship on paper in 1924 (43 Stat. 253), but their voting rights were as difficult to vindicate as those of African-Americans (McCool 1985). Missionaries still engage in the occasional kidnapping. A Texas school district resisted a court order exempting Indian boys of the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation from mandatory haircuts (Zahniser 1994). The killing of Indian cultural identity goes on. The Spanish got started earlier than the English on the task of destroying Indian culture. By the time the United States took the Southwest from Mexico by dictating the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hildago (9 Stat. 922, U.S.-Mex., Feb. 2, 1848), most inhabitants of the area – Indian by blood with an admixture of African and Spanish (Menchaca 2001) – were generations removed from being punished by the Spanish for speaking Indian languages in school, so they were ready to have their children punished by the Anglos for speaking Spanish in school. And if that were not enough irony, the United States has now adopted an ahistorical and nonsensical identity called “Hispanic” that places the Indians and their former Spanish oppressors in the same census category (Toro 1995)! Indianness is now a political label, authenticity certified by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. U.S. Government Inspected Grade A Indian, decultured by the liberals at Indian boarding schools and neutered by the conservatives who cannot make the same government employer of last resort that was unemployer in the first place. An Indian tribe has no standing as an Indian tribe unless it is federally recognized. This is Indian identity on the tribal level. On the individual level, we have blond haired and blue eyed people who

22 • Steve Russell

speak not a word of any Native language and live nowhere near an Indian community carrying a BIA certification when a fullblood Native speaker is “not Indian” by the conqueror’s rules. In the interest of the colonial government, cooperativeness is more important than color, and in this distinction among Indians Crow Dog and Spotted Tail rule us from their graves. With most tribal land bases stolen, virtually all economic resources for Indians flow from the federal government. Tribal governments, approved by the BIA, are conduits for federal funds, and tribal office is a competition for access to those funds. Traditional leadership remains outside of recognized tribal governments but traditional leaders devote themselves to survival of language and culture. Reservation economies, with few exceptions, would make the South Bronx look like heaven on earth. There is always, of course, the tourist trade. The Diné (Navajo) carved wood into a “genuine Hopi Kachina” while the Hopi carved stone into a “genuine Zuni fetish” and the Zuni encased in plastic a “genuine Navajo sand painting.” No one’s sacred traditions were offended, the BIA zookeepers were amused, and the tourists never knew the difference. Then along came the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 which, along with outlawing faux Indian artwork, made it criminal to mislabel the tribe of origin (18 U.S.C. § 1159). Is anyone in the world dumb enough to buy a “genuine Navajo Kachina?” You bet. I have seen it with my own eyes. But after the laughter dies down there is a chill in the air and an uncomfortable quiet. How can they possibly know so little about the people on whose bones they walk? Growing up in Oklahoma in the fifties, I learned it was very cool to be “part Indian.” Will Rogers, the Paint Clan Cherokee with a good-natured grin and wit like a straight edge razor, was a cultural icon to all. Rogers was white enough for the yonega3 and Indian enough for the Tsalagi.4 Being fullblood was a different matter. I remember coming into the barber shop where I had got my hair cut in yonega fashion since the age of two to deliver newspapers as the owner cut loose a tirade about lazy, thieving Indians who paid no taxes . . . any AfricanAmerican today would recognize the details. He turned around in the middle of a sentence about “not finishing the job” in the Indian wars and saw me standing there with my bundle of newspapers. He gave me a tip that day, 3 4

White people. Cherokee.

Apples are the Color of Blood • 23

something he had never done before. He also mumbled something about “not meaning me” as I could not help being “part Indian.” This was, as a matter of intent, an act of generosity, an invitation to be white, safely within the stockade of civilization while the half naked savages outside ululate to their heathen spirits and await the opportunity to rape and pillage. It was a forceful reminder that we are “. . . members of communities before (we are) members of a race.” (López 1994, p. 55). American Indians have always had the theoretical option of removing themselves from a tribal community and becoming legally white. American law has made it easy for Indians to disappear because that disappearance has always been necessary to the “manifest destiny” that the United States span the continent that was, after all, occupied. This could be contrasted with the predicament of the African-American “octoroon” Homer Plessy,5 who considered himself white but was found not to be white enough to sit where he pleased on public transportation (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896, 163 U.S. 537). “Race” is not a biological construct (Graves 2001, Montagu 1997), but rather a social (López 1994, Menchaca 2001) and therefore legal one (López 1996). Because the term has little significance outside of politics, the definition might be expected to answer political needs: the need to make Native Americans disappear and the need to keep African-Americans in their place, leading to a narrow definition on one hand and a broad definition on the other. Physiognomy is biological but becomes political when used to apply racial labels. When there was a legal line between freedom and bondage, descent was traced through female ancestors (Finkelman 1986), presumably because in those days before DNA testing it was easier to know mothers than fathers. Raping a slave woman was not a crime under most slave codes, so the possibility of a white father was always present (Russell 1998, p. 17). Legally recognizing the possibility of a white father as a determinant of race would have created chaos for the institution of chattel slavery. López (1994) points out a case where the freedom of three generations of women turned upon the fact that their hair was long and straight.6 So it was that I learned an easy trip to court to shed my Indian name and staying out of the sun to keep my skin as light as possible could make me 5 Plessy’s 1/8 African-American blood compares directly to the 1/8 Cherokee Chief John Ross, who unlike Plessy could choose to be Indian or to be white. 6 Long and straight hair was held to bespeak Indian rather than African ancestry, leading to freedom for the women by what we now know to be genetic happenstance (López 1994, p. 2).

24 • Steve Russell

socially white just as forsaking my tribal ties could make me legally white. I commend this experience to anyone who believes perceived race creates no social distinctions. John Howard Griffin’s (1961) classic investigation of the American South as a black man was an eye opener not only for Griffin but also for his readers at the time. Less well known was the effort of a white college student to replicate Griffin’s experiment to prove that in this decade skin color no longer matters. He lasted two weeks, including only two days in Georgia (Russell 1998, p. 12). Searching for overt racism in the Old Confederacy is difficult today for the light-skinned; for people of color it is like shooting fish in a barrel. Spanish and Portuguese colonial societies were obsessed with color as an indicator of African or Indian blood, and that obsession lives on today in Latin America. And as the Indians of America del Sur learned the importance of color from their colonizers (Menchaca 2001, pp. 62–66), so my people in America del Norte were instructed by our English colonizers. History on the popular level seldom adverts to the fact that part of the “civilizing” of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes was instruction in the institution of chattel slavery. Our oral traditions tell us that Cherokees understood slavery as a concomitant of failure in warfare, at least as a temporary status pending adoption or release (Perdue 1979).7 Cherokees were first introduced to the idea of chattel slavery by the English, but the view was from the bottom – as slaves rather than slaveholders (Mooney 1992, p. 233; Thornton 1990, p. 19). Eventually, the English were able to convert at least well-to-do Cherokees from the Indian view of slavery to the “civilized” understanding of human beings as property (Thornton 1990, p. 45). The slave trade was well established by the middle of the Eighteenth Century (Halliburton 1977, p. 10) among the Cherokee, a people who obviously did no raiding in Africa. This unfortunate education in racism by the English led to Cherokees lining up on both sides of the American Civil War8 (Abel 1992, Gaines 1989) and, just as tragically, to some Cherokees beginning to find social significance in skin color (Sturm 2002). Halliburton (1977) asserts that Cherokee slavery became “. . . a microcosm of slavery in the southern United States,” (p. 144) with all of the brutality 7

If death was the result, it would happen right away. For a white population, this would mean having some influence regardless of which side won. For an Indian population, it meant losing more autonomy regardless of which side won. 8

Apples are the Color of Blood • 25

that assertion implies. This judgment is largely unsupported by the oral histories Halliburton reports, a flaw he attributes to “. . . faulty memories . . .” (p. 145). As much as we Indian survivors of the American Holocaust would like to disassociate ourselves from the peculiar institution, kinder, gentler slavery is a fairly preposterous idea in our time, and there is no denying that when Indians began to relate servitude to color the seeds of racism were sown. The principal differences between Cherokee slavery and yonega slavery were at the beginning of the institution and at the end of it. At the beginning, a slave was simply another clanless person (clanless meaning without legal standing) (Reid 1970, pp. 36–48; Strickland 1975, pp. 26–39) and only a marginal economic asset (Perdue 1979, chap. 1). The importation of the capitalist idea of accumulating wealth and the growth of the plantation economy made slaves economically significant and the English slave trade made color a badge of slavery. In spite of the inroads made by color prejudice during the slavery years, the Cherokee Nation came a lot closer than the United States to the old “forty acres and a mule” promise in that freedmen were enrolled as Cherokees (Mooney 1992, p. 150) and as a consequence of tribal enrollment were able to receive an allotment of land9 when the United States betrayed the Cherokee Nation and broke up the reservation into individual farms – farms which soon passed into white hands as people without a tradition of private land ownership were fleeced by speculators, regardless of color (Debo 1940). Enrollment of freedmen was not without controversy within the Cherokee Nation and coercion from without (Littlefield 1978), but “. . . the freedmen’s lot in Cherokee society was better than their lot in American society.” (Id. p. 251). When the United States government found it convenient to abrogate its treaties with the so-called Five Civilized Tribes it seems logical today that abrogation would return both parties to the status quo ante. Indians would return to their homelands and refund the compensation the survivors received after being removed at gunpoint. In fact, abrogation meant that the government not only kept the land taken but also the land given in exchange. “Indian Territory” would become Oklahoma and Indians would cease to be a tribal people holding land in common.

9

The same was true of the Choctaw Nation. Laws of the Choctaw Nation 1883 (1975).

26 • Steve Russell

Every Indian was to receive an allotment of approximately 160 acres (more or less depending upon the agricultural quality of the land and the timing of the allotment) and become self-sufficient. The Dawes Commission was sent out to take the final rolls for the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole and Muscogee (Creek). Many Indians, ungrateful wretches that they were, believed the abrogation of the treaties to be illegal and engaged in what only could be called civil disobedience. There was widespread resistance to enrollment, most notably the resistance led by the Muscogee Chitto Harjo (Crazy Snake) and the Cherokee Redbird Smith (Olson and Wilson 1984). Harjo even had the gall to go before Congress and speak of the white man as a person, as if that person could be reached by appeal to a primary attribute of personhood, honor: “He told me that as long as the sun shone and the sky is up yonder this agreement will be kept. He said as long as the sun rises it shall last; as long as the waters run it shall last; as long as grass grows it shall last. That is what he said, and we believed it.” (Debo 1940, quoting testimony before the U.S. Senate). But Crazy Snake’s naive faith was misplaced. The white man is not a person and honor is a foreign concept to federal Indian law (Russell 2002). Harjo, Smith and other troublemakers were eventually coerced to sign for allotments. However, not every fullblood hiding in the Cookson Hills of nowOklahoma was brought in. Some people never did enroll. Some who did enroll were listed as fullbloods when they were not (at this time, 1887 to 1907, Cherokees had been intermarrying with whites and blacks for many generations) and vice versa. Siblings were enrolled with different blood quanta. The Dawes Rolls, meant to be the last census of the dying species known as American Indian, remain the Bible of Indianness today. Even those Indian tribes with no blood quantum requirement for membership require that a prospective enrollee trace ancestry to the Dawes Rolls, documents that the people “most Indian” in the political sense opposed at great risk to themselves. The “protection” for individual Indians – that their allotments could not be alienated – soon vanished when turned over to the corrupt Oklahoma court system. Waivers were granted for the asking, and the allotments disappeared into white hands. The Indian land in excess of the amount necessary for individual allotments had already been declared open for white settlement. Those of us left are mostly without whiteness or redness or blackness to call our genetic heritage. While there are certainly Cherokee racists, and for

Apples are the Color of Blood • 27

a time the Nation even had anti-miscegenation laws similar to the former Confederate states, the most common epithet pertaining to color is “apple,” and this only among politically active Cherokees seeking to discredit opposition. This is the Indian side of “race” as a political label, and the reference to skin color is only metaphorical. Seen from the outside, color still counts in the dominant culture, particularly for African-Americans (West 1993). As a Cherokee, I hear almost nothing about color. Many of the black Cherokees sold their allotments (often to the same swindlers who were absorbing the allotments of “red Cherokees”) and left the Nation, but others have intermarried to the degree that red and black could mean the colors on a checkerboard or they could mean communism and anarchy but they do not mean social status within the Cherokee Nation. How much the Choctaw, Chickasaw,10 and Muscogee (Creek)11 have diluted the color of their black members I am not qualified to say, but the Seminole have retained black phenotype (Littlefield 1977), particularly in the band led by the legendary John Horse (Katz 1986), and even the Cherokee have had racial controversies since acquiring the disease of racism from the yonega. But, looking at contemporary Indians generally, the very first elections to the Native American Music Hall of Fame included . . . Jimi Hendrix, a popularly perceived African-American who is also of Cherokee descent.12 Most of the writing by mixed blood Indians illustrates a clash of culture rather than color (e.g., Penn, ed. 1997), and Indian writers generally have treated color consciousness as a white phenomenon (e.g., Riley, ed. 1993). What, then, is an “apple,” red on the outside but white on the inside? If the blood does not tell, if the color does not tell, what makes a person accepted in an Indian community as Indian? For a tribal people, the question “Who are your relatives?” will always have some bearing, but there is one thing that perhaps goes deeper.

10 Littlefield (1980) claims that the Chickasaw freedmen were worse off than the Cherokee freedmen, but still not treated as badly as they would be treated later by the United States and the State of Oklahoma. 11 Debo (1989, 115–116, footnote omitted) tells us that “(e)xcept for a few of the mixed-blood aristocrats the Creeks had little prejudice against intermarriage with . . . (Africans), and the children of such marriages were accepted without prejudice as members of the tribe.” “Mixed-blood” in this context refers to Indian-white, and Debo’s statement squares with my experience growing up in Bristow, Creek County, Oklahoma (formerly the Creek Nation) two generations later. It does not square with Sturm’s (2002) subsequent research in the Cherokee Nation. 12 http://www.nativeamericanmusic.com (visited Oct. 9, 2000).

28 • Steve Russell

As a young lawyer in the seventies doing some work for the American Civil Liberties Union, I met a man from a strange tribe, a New York Jew. He was in Texas to help organize opposition to the death penalty. We were at a well known watering hole in Austin indulging the Texas custom of cold beer at the end of a hot day, when someone asked him where he found the energy to travel the country in the service of a hopeless cause. He unbuttoned his cuff (only a New Yorker would bring a long-sleeved shirt to Texas!) and rolled up his sleeve. The number was a bit fuzzy but still legible, the tattoo from the Nazi death camp. “I don’t believe that a morally correct position is ever hopeless,” he said quietly. At that moment, I understood that his path was marked by that tattoo on his arm as clearly as the star trail my people call “the place where Dog ran.” And I felt that I knew him as one tribal person knows another. After a recent speech to a group of archaeologists on why Indians object to having their graves dug up, a remark got back to me that I suppose could be taken as a compliment: “If that guy worked half as hard at being white as he does at being Indian, he could!” Well, maybe. Like the famous Cherokee Chief John Ross, I have some Scots swimming in my gene pool. What do I have against Scots? Nothing at all. What little I know of the culture is fascinating, and I would visit Scotland at the drop of a tam. But Scots are in Scotland, where their culture still flourishes, and I do not know how to be a Scot. The blood does not tell me how. My Oklahoma home was formerly “Indian Territory,” and it is Cherokee language and Cherokee lore and Cherokee people that tell me who I am. From the European Invasion until the Indian wars ended with the Nineteenth Century, the term “Indian” was a linguistic construction of the invaders. We were not “Indians.” We were Ani-Yun Wiya, Yahi, Diné, Nakota. Among ourselves, we were just “the people.” Many tribal names in use today attached when white people asked “friendly” Indians the name of the “unfriendly” Indians nearby, who were typically enemies of the people being asked. The people commonly called Sioux, Pima, Papago, Creek, Winnebago, Apache and Navajo – among others – try to reclaim their former names but generally answer when called out of politeness. Cherokees have actually taken the name into the language – Tsalagi – rather than call themselves Ani-Yun Wiya (“real people”) anymore. By the time John Ross, the 1/8 Cherokee great-grandson of a Scots trader, led the tribe into its tragic collision with European greed, Cherokees were already intermarried

Apples are the Color of Blood • 29

in a major way. Since 1825, the children of Cherokee fathers and non-Cherokee mothers13 have been considered citizens of the Cherokee Nation (Perdue 1998, p. 145; Sturm 2002, p. 55). Clan identity is now sometimes being determined for ceremonial purposes by the last Cherokee female relative rather than declare the child clanless if the mother was an unadopted non-Cherokee, but this practice is highly controversial. Christian missionaries presented patriarchy as the natural order of things, resulting in a major loss of political influence by Cherokee women (Perdue 1998). A matrilineal, matrilocal people became a patriarchy by colonization. Tension between tribal endogamy and clan exogamy relegated the matrilineal clans to a ceremonial role as the Cherokee Nation began a “whitening” (in both the ethnic and the political senses) that continues to this day (Sturm 2002). All John Ross had to do to claim the advantages of whiteness was ask. Instant assimilation. Instead, after winning his point in the Supreme Court (Worcester v. Georgia, 1832, 31 U.S. 515), he was moved out at gunpoint and force-marched to Indian Territory with the people he tried to represent. He buried his wife on the Trail Where They Cried (Nunna-da-ul-tsun-yi) after, the story goes, Quatie Ross gave up her blanket to another and so joined the thousands who perished on the journey from exposure and disease. The split among Cherokees over the Removal remains to this day. Some call John Ross naive for trusting the courts. Some say he could have gotten a better deal for his people by recognizing the inevitable sooner. Some blame him for the killing of signers of the bogus Treaty of New Echota, the legal fig leaf that failed to disguise ethnic cleansing. They call him naive or they call him wrongheaded, but they still call him Cherokee. Every Cherokee is Cherokee in relation to the Trail Where They Cried, even the Eastern Band people who hid from the soldiers so desperately that they let the Sacred Fire go out. Every Diné (Navajo) is Diné in relation to The Long Walk. Every Cheyenne is Cheyenne in relation to the massacres at Sand Creek and the Washita. The Indians of California, like the Indé (Apache) of Arizona Territory, remember when there was a bounty on their scalps: men, women and children. These horrors mark our paths as clearly as tattoos on our arms. This, I have come to understand, is the blood that matters: the blood that was spilled, and the determination to remember and to defend what remains. Color? From Redbird Smith to the sorriest “apple,” we are all the same to a

13

A classification that includes this writer.

30 • Steve Russell

racist even though among ourselves most of us have come the full circle back to the irrelevance of skin. In science, genotypes tell us little of what matters: heart and character. In modern Indian culture, the phenotypes of Jimi Hendrix or Will Rogers or Wilma Mankiller (1993) or John Ross have little in common except the memory of genocide and the color of blood.

Stacy K. McGoldrick Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order: A New Perspective on the New Orleans Race Riot of 1866

In February 1867, the U.S. Congress released its final report on the New Orleans riot of 1866. Though southern newspapers reported the riot as an improvised police response to black and Republican Party hostility, the Congress found quite contrarily that, This riotous attack upon the convention, with its terrible results of massacre and murder, was not an accident. It was the determined purpose of the mayor of the city of New Orleans to break up this convention by armed force. This was done by city officials and New Orleans citizens . . . These officers of the law living in the city, and known to that community, acting under the eye of superiors. Clothed with the uniform of office, and some of them known, as the proof shows, to be chief officer of police, have not only escaped punishment, but have been continued in their office (Report 1867: 12).

Sadly, the riot of 1866 was simply an extreme example of violence taking place throughout New Orleans and greater Louisiana and part of a larger movement blocking African American civil liberties, political rights and economic viability. In the first years after the end of the Civil War, Confederate sympathizing citizens were able to reconstitute themselves within

32 • Stacy K. McGoldrick

the Democratic Party and win control of the Mayors office. The mayor, the former Confederate John T. Monroe, stacked the police force with Confederate veterans who planned and executed an attack on African Americans and other Republicans during the summer of 1866. As a force concerned more with fulfilling the public’s wishes than with rule of law, the New Orleans police embodied, through their informal and illegal activity, the prevailing racial attitudes of the majority population. Moreover, the police acted as the symbolic embodiment of Confederate sentiment. Police also served as functionaries for the local state in the contest over the local, regional and national power. This paper argues that the police in New Orleans acted as Confederates in their assault in July of 1866 and they did so within the context of their relationship with Confederate sympathizing citizens.1 While scholars have long understood the extent of and motivation for racial violence in the South during this time, few have noted that the local state still enacted white male citizens’ racial sentiments even within Reconstruction governments. By focusing on the centrality of the police in Reconstruction racial violence, we can better understand their role within the racial ordering of the South in these post-war years. The police should be understood as the first line of assault in the new post-Emancipation racial order. By looking at the police in this way, our understanding of their role in the Jim Crow governments becomes clearer. Furthermore, this role of enacting the informal and formal laws of the racial order mirrors police activities, in terms of both white ethnic politics and slavery, before the Civil War. Thus by engaging in activities that, however illegal, mirrored their legal pre-Civil War role, the police operated as a guarantor for the continuity of racial hierarchies. The political role the police in New Orleans played stands at tension with some historians’ understanding of this period as a moment when the Southern race regime was in crisis and most susceptible to egalitarian transformation. In 1866 a Reconstruction government run by Union forces occupied the state of Louisiana and New Orleans. In March of that same year elections were held for the city government and the former Confederate Mayor, John T. Monroe, was elected. Within this context the police force was an important source of power and violence for the Confederate population. In a dis1 Hereafter I will refer to former Confederates and Confederate sympathizing community members simply as “Confederate” for purposes of clarity.

Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order • 33

armed and defeated city, the force was unique in that it had the authority to carry weapons, arrest soldiers and African Americans, and generally assert Confederate sentiment. As such the police, both in their legal and illegal activities, enjoyed the fierce loyalty of the Confederate majority of white citizens. This loyalty was reflected in both the acclaim the police received for their participation in the riot of 1866 and the interpretation of the riot offered in the New Orleans Daily Picayune. In order to articulate the continuing intimacy between the police force and the violent desires of a critical mass of the white community, I will first outline police participation in political violence in the years before the Civil War. Second, I will explain the changes made by the two occupying generals during the war, Generals Benjamin F. Butler and Nathaniel P. Banks, and how they reconstituted the police force. This reorganization did not last, however, and I will describe how and why the police force was handed over to the quasi-Confederate regime of Monroe. This framework will contextualize the riot of July 1866, for which the police force was widely held responsible. Finally, I will analyze how the police force was supported in the aftermath of the riot, and how a version of events quickly emerged that legitimated their position, despite the dubiousness of its historic reality. By analyzing the Confederate credentials required of the police, the role of the Black Codes, the riot and its representation in New Orleans’ popular press, I will underscore the continuing dynamic of informal racial enforcement in the police/hegemonic community relations. Quickly after taking over the city in April of 1863, General Butler fired all but eleven of the local police force and replaced them with civilians who were willing to sign loyalty oaths towards the Union (Rousey 1996). Butler’s force policed New Orleans until Governor Wells, in an effort to court the Confederate political factions, started replacing union police officers in 1865. Before the regime of Generals Butler and Banks, New Orleans was known for the violence of its police participation in party politics. New Orleans had a vicious political scene during the 1850s and the police, who were actively involved in party politics, were not infrequently attacked by mobs of opposition party members. The police had a tradition within New Orleans, from a period well before the riot of 1866, of taking sides in local politics and brutally supporting their position.

34 • Stacy K. McGoldrick

Politics were frequently divided ethnically with Americans (meaning whites from parts of the United States not included in the Louisiana Purchase) vying for power against the immigrant and white Creole population (Soulé 1961). The Republican Party was not viable in New Orleans in the build up to the Civil War, and party politics consisted of the American, or “Know Nothing” party and the Democrats. Immigrants and Creoles tended to work with the Democratic Party, while the Americans supported first the Whigs and by the mid 1850s, the Know Nothings. Because the Republican Party was not an option in the slave city and ethnic politics were drawn between Americans and Creoles, the Know Nothing Party was able to sustain power in New Orleans long after its electoral power had collapsed in the rest of the United States. The Know Nothings won control of the city council and the police force in 1855. A large part of the American Party’s success was its ability to physically intimidate opposition voters and procure election fraud (Soulé 1961). But party success was far less a result of violent suppression of majority rule than it was a function of party willingness to fulfill the violent wishes of those who held majorities in the city council, controlled the mayor’s office and drove the political culture of opposition mobs. Extremely intimate with the local political structure, the police officers themselves were often pulled out of the party ranks. Moreover, when a new political party gained majority on the city council, that party tended to purge the police force of officers loyal to the opposing party and bring in their own. As party operatives, the police effectively blocked opposition political participation through violence and intimidation. This party function of the police is most obvious when we look at the election season in the fall of each year. Police officers knew that their jobs were contingent on their party maintaining a majority on the city council. The local police marshaled the voting and there was no secret ballot. During the years of the Know Nothings, the police in New Orleans were notorious for “fixing” elections through force. They would attack those who voted against the party in power, block access to voting stations and destroy ballot boxes when necessary. The police were effective in their efforts to control access to voting; the votes of immigrants – who stood in party opposition to the Know Nothings – dropped precipitously during this time. In the November 1857 election, for example, only 5,464 out of a possible 12,640 eligible voted (Soulé 1961). The American Party’s effective use of political violence seemed to make Democratic victory impossible and the Democratically run state government

Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order • 35

had gone so far as to try to take election marshalling duties away from the local police force.2 Groups of men, many of whom were in the police ranks and sometimes out of uniform, would intimidate immigrant voters in the days before Election Day. Known commonly as “Thugs”, the most violent individuals were well recognized in the city. The Thugs, who moved in and out of the police ranks, became the loosely organized core responsible for political violence in the city over the next few decades. During the War many of these men would fight on the side of the Confederacy. At the end of the War when police jobs opened up to them, some of these same men participated in the riot of 1866. The persistent relationship between political violence and policing would continue well into the Jim Crow era, but it begins with the Know Nothing Party in the 1850s when Election Day violence was considered inevitable. Joseph L. Montieu, who worked at a local courthouse in the 1850s and testified to the United States Congress in hearings regarding the riot of 1866, attested to the public’s awareness of the Thug-Know Nothing relationship: Q: You say some were Thugs; what do you mean by Thugs? A: That name is always understood here. At the time of the Know-nothing party those men used to go and kill people and commit different disorders. Q: Did you see in the recent riots any of those you recognized as Thugs in the Know-nothing days? A: I know some of them from their having been brought before the courts (Report 1867:11).

The same men who might be engaging in police violence one year might be in an Election Day opposition mob the next.3 The Sherman Riot of 1854 demonstrates the mobility between thugs and police. In the few days following the 2 In 1857 the “Election Law” put forth by the Central Board of Commissioners (a state board charged with verifying elections) called the board to assemble inspectors of their own choosing to watch the proceedings and count the ballots, thus removing the New Orleans police from Election Day. The bill made the house and went up to the state senate before failing in early March. Congressional Report, as quoted in the Daily Picayune 2 March 1857, Supplement page 1; 10 March 1857, 2; 14 October 1857, 8; 31 October 1857, 8. 3 “The election of yesterday was one of uncommon excitement; and at the hour of going to press, we cannot give anything like an idea of the extent of the result. . . . Where there was so much excitement, it is not to be wondered at that there were quarrels at some of the polls. We are sorry to learn that some of these terminated fatally. In the Seventh Precinct of the First District, an attempt on the part of some persons to interfere with the ballot, resulted, as we learn, in the death of two persons,

36 • Stacy K. McGoldrick

November election there were numerous street battles between groups of police officers and Know Nothing mobs. Described by the Know Nothing sympathetic Daily Picayune as “a conflict between the natives and the Irish,” the riots were actually a series of conflicts between the police (which was populated by many officers born in Ireland or of Irish ancestry) and the Know Nothing Party (Daily Picayune, 12 Sept. 1854). In the next election the Know Nothings gained power and the police force was purged of its Democrat affiliated members and replaced by American Party loyalists, many of whom were “Thugs” (Rousey 1996). The reliance on both informal and formal acts of subversion and violence by police officers is similar to acts perpetrated against African Americans and Republicans after the Civil War. Thus the police during the riot of 1866 were perpetuating a tradition of political violence originating in the white ethnic politics of the 1850s and taking on a more extreme form in the racial violence of the post-war 1860s. If the police force in 1866 reflected the symbolic traditions of the police force in the 1850s, there was still a great discontinuity between the former force and the latter due to the extent to which policing changed during the Civil War. New Orleans was not simply patrolled by Union soldiers during occupation; it continued to have a local police force that had jurisdiction over both civilian and military criminal offenses. General Butler, within weeks from when he secured control of New Orleans in April of 1862, demanded that the local police sign loyalty oaths or lose their positions (Capers 1965). Only eleven officers agreed to sign, and Butler quickly replaced the others with men who signed the oaths. Butler’s reign would be both notorious and short, and while his successor General Banks did not replace the police officers Butler appointed, he did face the additional responsibility for carrying out the war over the entire gulf region, and this left him without time to devote himself to the complicated dealings of New Orleans (McPherson 1988). Because Generals Butler and Banks appointed police themselves and had not gone through local city officials (who were powerless anyway), police were not linked to political parties during the war years. However, in an important way the removal of New Orleans police from local politics did not end their intimacy with Confederates. Police were still free to arrest soldiers

one of whom was a policeman, whose name was Mocler, a brother of the man who was killed on Sunday morning; and we also hear that, during the casting of the votes in that precinct, there were disturbances which resulted in blood shed.” Daily Picayune, 28 March 1854, 4.

Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order • 37

for public drunkenness, petty theft, disorderly conduct, etc. as well as slaves and free African Americans who were deemed to be breaking the law. As a result, the Picayune often praised the activities of the Union police force, or at least did so when the police arrested African Americans. These activities continued the symbolic link between the Confederate whites and the police force in some respects during the war. However, as soon as there were local elections, the police reemerged as important political players. Between the spring of 1865 and 1866 the Democratic Party reconstituted itself as the party of the fallen Confederacy and gained control of New Orleans. Restrictive black codes were enacted, the police force was reverted back to control of the mayor, and the police came to embody the failed Confederacy, thus enjoying the fierce loyalty of the local white population. The police had a new symbolic role as the arbiters of racial order in the face of the national state and the forces of Reconstruction. The police embraced this role beyond the stated wishes of, and even sometimes in opposition to, the state government. This dynamic not only involved the police taking sides with the city government against the state, but also was a product of the police’s semiautonomous position and ability to act in illegal and violent ways without fear of repercussion. Post war party organization was markedly different from the American Party/Democrat rivalry of the 1850s. After the war the American Party did not re-emerge and, in a stunning reprioritizing of racial animosity over ethnic animosity, the immigrant, white Creole and “American” populations consolidated politically under the umbrella of the Democratic Party, which was further divided into more or less conservative factions.4 This comparatively

4 Before the 1872 election, Louisiana had three political parties: Republican, Conservative and Democratic. While the Conservative would quickly collapse into the Democratic, at this time the Conservative Party was more willing to negotiate with the powers of Republican rule and, importantly, live with the 1864 state constitution, which eliminated slavery and called for (extremely) limited rights for African Americans. For example, during a meeting of the Conservative Union in October 1865 an unnamed speaker said he supported the state constitution and that he respected soldiers returning from either side of the battle. Furthermore, he argued that the Conservative party was more in tune with the sentiments of the nation as a whole than the Democrats. The Picayune reported, “He said to the people that after four years of terrific war those whom he addressed had never received any support from the great Democratic Party which they were asked to rejoin.” For their part, the Democrats did not spare any bitterness toward the Conservatives, despite their seeming moderation when compared to Republicans. The Democrats believed that the Conservatives were capitulating to the Republican powers and bringing on an “Africanization” of the state. In fact, the Conservative Party was mostly

38 • Stacy K. McGoldrick

solidified white community rallied against any political power for African Americans. The party dominated in a city where there was not yet universal male suffrage, according to one prominent Republican: With very few exceptions, every officer who has been appointed or elected since the time Governor Wells and Lieutenant Governor Vorhees (sic) and the legislature were elected, all are disloyal, in my opinion, judging from the manner of their actions, from their language, and from their history. I have had persons from different parishes in the State admit to me, very frankly, that no man known as a Union man could be elected to any office (Report 1867).

In the first election in New Orleans after the war, held in March of 1866, John T. Monroe won re-election to the Mayors office (Tunnell 1984). Monroe, who ran as a Democrat, first won the mayors office in 1868 as a representative of the American Party and was the Confederate mayor of the city before Union occupation.5 Monroe led a faction of former Confederates whose political strategy was to compromise as little as possible with the Reconstruction government. The rhetoric of his faction was unapologetic. For example, Albert Voorhies, the successful candidate for Lieutenant Governor under James Madison Wells, announced that he was still a Rebel. The political line of the Democrats had evolved into an overwhelming concern with how best to represent and protect the interest of Confederate thinking from the Republican state. What is evident is that if the years before the Civil War can be characterized as a tri-partite legal racial structure (free people of color, slaves, whites) marked by intense and violent white ethnic politics (between Americans, Creoles and immigrants), then the post-war politics of New Orleans was remarkably simple. Whites consolidated their political activities against African Americans, and did not distinguish between Freedman and those who had never been slaves. However, even during the war only one white man in

made up of men who fled the Republican Party when its leaders (Durant, Dostie, Dunn, etc.) became too concerned about Black suffrage and rights. The Conservative coalition that eventually developed under Warmouth in 1872 represented these elements – those who could reconcile themselves to some elements of Emancipation and Reconstruction, but were committed to consolidating their own power as white men in the process. (Daily Picayune 6 October 1865, 4; Tunnell 1984; Warmouth 1970). 5 Monroe famously refused to surrender New Orleans when the city was invaded in April 1862.

Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order • 39

eleven would call himself supportive of the Union, and afterwards many of those pro-Union whites became active in the Republican Party (Tunnell 1984). Nevertheless, the quick dismissal of ethnic politics over the perceived new racial threat is striking. At the Democratic state convention of 1865 the party platform stated: Resolved, That we hold this to be a Government of White People, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive political benefit of the White Race, and in accordance with the constant adjudication of the United States Supreme Court, that the people of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States, and that there can in no event nor under any circumstances be any equality between White and other Races (Warmouth 1970).

As one scholar wrote, “class divisions among Caucasians blurred into insignificance next to the imperatives of white supremacy” (McTigue 1975). The same argument holds for the once important ethnic tensions between white populations. Along with Confederate assertion of control over local politics, in 1864 New Orleans adopted “Black Codes” (Warmouth 1970). Echoing municipal slave laws, the code outlined numerous restrictions on all African Americans, whether they had been slaves or free before Emancipation. In addition to limiting freedom of movement and employment there were also strict vagrancy laws that allowed police to easily justify arrest of African Americans. The Codes also controlled where a Freedman could live, stating that a Freedman could not live inside the boundaries of a town (New Orleans or elsewhere in the state) unless he or she was working for a white man (Tunnell 1984). More than anything, the Black Codes were meant to clamp down on Freedmen economically, controlling their ability to negotiate wages for their labor or participate in the market economy. This was intended to keep Freedmen out of towns, where they could compete for jobs. Restricted to rural areas, Freedman would have to serve as plantation labor, a benefit to former slave owners. The Picayune was continually calling for the arrest of Freedmen on the basis of vagrancy laws and strict enforcement of the Black Codes. From the perspective of the city government, the Freedmen’s Bureau represented an efficient way to drive out unwanted Freedmen: The cases of vagrant and idle negroes (sic) come especially under the control of the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and all negroes (sic) arrested

40 • Stacy K. McGoldrick for these causes, and not charged with any other crime, should at once be turned over to the agent of that bureau (Daily Picayune, 4 August 1865).

There were daily reports of the recorders (local city judges) sending off Freedmen who had been arrested for vagrancy to the Freedmen’s Bureau. Sometimes police officers, without pretense of enforcing a law, simply took them directly to the Bureau offices. The New Orleans Daily Picayune thought that the calling of the Freedmen’s Bureau was to forcibly control the former slaves. As such, the editors thought the Bureau could be an ally: Doubtless one of the most important bureaus now in the country is the Bureau of Freedmen, which has control of the recently liberated slaves. The military power justly concludes that they must be made to work. Many of them have been and are now mere vagrants, sleeping at various places, arrested by the police brought before the Recorders confined in the workhouse or Parish Prison for a term, then liberated to cover the same circuit again. Recently, however, they have been turned over to Mr. Conway, Superintendent of the Bureau, by whom, it is understood, they are sent to work on plantations in the country. Decidedly a good move (Daily Picayune, 22 August 1865).

The good will of local whites towards the Freedmen’s Bureau was short lived. Despite its attractive function as a conduit for the police arrest of Freedmen, the editors of the Daily Picayune and the sentiments it represented quickly lost faith in the Freedmen’s Bureau, and viewed it less as a racial enforcer and more as a resource drain (Daily Picayune, 11 August 1865). In contrast to the Freedmen’s Bureau, the police enjoyed the strong support of white public opinion. When James Madison Wells won the Governorship in 1865, he immediately reorganized the police force to reflect his own retrenchment interests. Particularly at the beginning of his time as governor, Wells was interested in dismantling as much of wartime Reconstruction as he could and getting power back into the hands of the Confederates. Wells appointed sheriffs, police officers, recorders and other local officials all over Louisiana and in New Orleans (Tunnell 1984). Moreover, when Monroe was elected mayor, Wells turned over control of the police from the jurisdiction of the governor’s office to that of the city government and the mayor’s, office. Monroe did not hesitate to reorganize the police when they were returned

Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order • 41

to his control.6 Monroe, in an effort to ingratiate himself with conservative Democrats, removed any remaining Union sympathizers on the force and replaced them with police from the new Democratic establishment. Of the officers on this new force, almost none had been on the job during the occupation of the city. Some were returning from the days before occupation and up to two-thirds were Confederate veterans or had served in the Louisiana Militia. The chief himself was a Confederate veteran.7 When asked if the police were loyal (Union) men, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau at the time of the riot stated, “The loyal men had been mainly dismissed, and disloyal men put in their places, at that time” (Report 1867). According to Rufus Waples, a U.S. attorney in New Orleans between May 1863–October 1865, “[w]hen applications were made for appointments on the police force, the applicants were invariably asked if they had served in the rebel army, and that was made an indispensable qualification to getting on the police” (Report 1867: 5, 25, 30–31; Hollandsworth 2001). A U.S. detective who was in New Orleans in the months before the riot, testified that in order to be hired as a policeman men wrote letters to Monroe describing their efforts in the Confederate army (Report 1867: 161). One pre-war police officer testified that as a Union supporter it would impossible for him to get a job on the police force (Report 1865: 394). The police were extremely fraternal in these first years after the war and many of its force even came from the same two battalions, the Hay’s Brigade and Gibson’s Battery (Report 1867: 31, 41, 43). While the New Orleans police force was reconstituted from its role as a functional component of Union occupation to the embodiment of Confederate legitimacy in the course of little more than one-year, the Republican Party leadership was forced to confront political realities. They began discussing changes to the 1864 state constitution that would include black male suffrage. Because Confederate politicians were so easily able to return to politics after the War, it became clear to Republicans that if their party was to have any hope in the state, and if African Americans were going to enjoy any rights,

6 The legislature passed a bill reorganizing the police force in New Orleans on February 7, 1866. This bill allowed for city control of police through a locally organized police board. Daily Picayune, 8 February 1866, 2. 7 The organization of the police, although not the cause of much controversy, resembled that of the pre-War regime. There was a police chief, a police board and the Mayor.

42 • Stacy K. McGoldrick

the first of those rights was going to have to be suffrage. Suffrage for black males, the argument went, could stabilize the Republicans in the state against the ascent of the Democrats (Tunnell 1984). Racial violence was already a reality throughout Louisiana, and while Republicans could not have anticipated the riot, Wells (who by the spring of 1866 had realigned himself with the forces of Reconstruction) had asked for more soldiers to be sent to occupy New Orleans (the numbers camped outside the city had already been reduced from the height of occupation), predicting a resurgence of the mob violence experienced in the Know Nothing years.8 Dr. Hugh Kennedy, the appointed mayor of New Orleans until March of 1866, had also requested more Union soldiers from the recalcitrant President Johnson (Hollandsworth 2001). However, as Democrats had already won the city government and Johnson had made clear that no more soldiers were forthcoming, Republicans had little option but to push for the one reform that would allow them both to gain local political control and to secure political rights for Freedmen: the vote. During the spring of 1866 party leaders began to discuss the legality of reconvening the constitutional convention of 1864 and presumably opening debate at that convention for universal male suffrage. Additionally, in some circles the thinking was that the new constitution would disenfranchise rebels.9

8

Governor Wells is himself an interesting character. Wells initially ran for Governor on the post-War Democratic ticket, and advocated white supremacy and the dismantling of the 1864 constitution and the limited rights to Freedmen included therein. Wells won the 1865 election on this platform. By 1866, Wells had allied himself with the Republicans and called to reconvene the 1864 constitution, but this time in order to add black male suffrage. (Arnesen, E. 1991). Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923. New York, Oxford University Press. Wells, perhaps reading the winds, did not attend the convention, but was in New Orleans on the day. Nor did General Sheridan, the military officer in charge of the city, who left town altogether. Sheridan left control of the city over to General Baird, the director of the local Freedmen’s Bureau. (Hollandsworth 2001, 6, 62, 92). 9 As stated by Thomas J. Durant, an active Republican at the time of the riot, in his statements to the Congressional Committee on the riot in 1866: The call for the re-assembling of the convention of 1864, which, as you know, was the convention called under the military order of the major general then commanding the department of the Gulf, created a good deal of excitement in the city among those who supposed they would be injured by the action of the convention. It was generally supposed, and stated – I do not know with what truth, because I was not on such familiar terms with any member of the convention as would lead to a knowledge of their objectthat the action of the convention would be to disfranchise those who were called rebels, and to admit to the right suffrage the black citizens of the State.

Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order • 43

The meeting that instigated the riot was only meant to discuss the probability of organizing a new constitutional convention, which could, in turn, decide to include universal male suffrage. It is worth noting how preliminary this meeting was given the magnitude of the response. The meeting was scheduled for July 30, 1866 at the Mechanics Institute, which was close to Canal Street on Burgundy at the edge of the French Quarter. The expected attendees were the most important leaders of the Republican Party in Louisiana. Upon hearing about the plans for the meeting Mayor Monroe’s first response was to try to stop it altogether, claiming it was an “unlawful assemblage.” However, the acting military commander of the city, General Baird, decided that the meeting could be held. This decision was made clear at a contentious meeting between General Baird, Mayor Monroe and Lieutenant Governor Vorhies in which General Baird made clear that he would allow the meeting. Monroe first vowed to arrest anyone who attended the meeting, but later relented and promised to withhold implementing arrest warrants until going through Baird, a promise he later disregarded (Hollandsworth 2001). Once Republicans got wind of Baird’s intervention, they thought (erroneously, it turns out) that the occupational forces would protect them. On July 27 a rally was held in front of the Mechanics Institute in support of the upcoming convention. Events that occurred at this rally become the subject of controversy in later reports. According to some, the rally’s main speaker called for a general assault on white people. Others stated in later testimony that it called only for black men to defend themselves if necessary. The dispute centers on inflammatory statements that may or may not have been made by Dr. Dostie, a noted “scalawag,” or New Orleans local who held Republican views. According to the Picayune, the rally on July 27 looked like this: The crowd gathered in and outside of the Mechanics Institute were principally composed of negroes (sic), Judge Hawkins, John Henderson, Jr. M. Hahn and Dr. Dostie addressed the meeting. Their language was vindictive and violent. The last named speaker went so far as to advise the

On the day of the riot, it was reported to Durant that his life was threatened. Durant and his family fled New Orleans to a friend’s plantation. After that, he gave associates power of attorney over his New Orleans property so they could move his possessions and liquidate his property. Durant moved to Washington D.C. and at the time of his appearance before the Congressional Committee had no plans of ever returning to New Orleans. Testimony of Thomas J. Durant, 7–8.

44 • Stacy K. McGoldrick negroes to assemble armed at the Mechanics’ Institute, on Monday next, [the day specified for the meeting of the Convention] and to resist by force of arms any authority that dared to interfere with the Convention. This is but one sentence of a number of the same character, made by the various speakers, and is in keeping with the whole tone of the meetings (Daily Picayune, 18 July 1866).

The greatest fears of the white population seemed to be coming to fruition. In the testimony of one New Orleans merchant, speakers “advised the negroes to insist upon their rights, and, if they did not get them, to make the streets of New Orleans run with the blood of the rebels” (Report 1867: 43). However, according to the testimony of Ezra Heistand, a judge who addressed the rally and witnessed the public statement of Dr. Dostie, the evening proceeded as follows: There were some intemperate remarks made by some of the speakers’ denunciatory of the rebels and of their cause. The blacks were also particularly informed that, being now citizens of the United States, they had the right to stand upon their rights as freemen, and if attacked that day the right to defend themselves. When the meeting adjourned there was a large procession formed of some two or three thousand, which proceeded from the Statehouse to the City Hall, where several speeches were made to them of the character I have already stated; but nothing was said or done at either place which in my estimation would authorize a magistrate to bind the party over to keep the peace (Report 1867: 11).

Whatever the case may have been, it is clear that, in the eyes of the whites, the upcoming convention at the Mechanics Institute posed a threat to the tenuously balanced racial order of political domination and black codes that Democrats had been struggling to set up since the election of Monroe earlier that spring. Furthermore, the idea of black self-defense was a particularly threatening one to the Confederates. There was discord between what the Republicans were saying the “rights” of the Freedmen were to defend themselves from harm and the pre-existing edict by the Democrats, going back to the slave ordinances, that no African American could ever act out, in defense or otherwise, toward a white man. In the three days between the rally and convention, the tension rose markedly in the city; and there was a prevailing feeling that violence would break out on the day of the convention. The Picayune wrote many editorials about the

Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order • 45

dangers of the convention and African Americans in general and disparaged any political organizing by Freedmen (Daily Picayune, 26, 29, 30 July 1866). No matter what Dr. Dostie actually said the Friday before the riot, the symbolic breach was too much for the frightened whites. In the days before the riot there was no call in the paper to rally outside the mechanics Institute or attack the convention, but according to later Congressional testimony rumors were rampant in both the white and black populations of impending violence. Throughout the weekend, city officials and the police force prepared for Monday’s events. The police had a direct and material stake in the events unfolding in local politics. According to the 1864 constitution, policemen had to be registered voters. Beyond suffrage for African American men, the new convention was also going to discuss the disenfranchisement of former Confederates, who made up the majority of the police force. A consequence of a successful convention could very well be a loss of employment and political representation for these officers (Hollandsworth 2001). While the police were clearly acting in their own material and political interests by attacking the Mechanics Institute, they were also solidifying their informal link with the hegemonic community. The police forged this link by allowing whites to interpret a threat and to act on that threat in such a way that they could simultaneously break the law and, for Confederate whites, symbolize its defense. Thus, the social power of police was upheld through community support of violent ideology. On Monday morning, July 30, between two and three hundred African Americans marched to the Mechanics Institute in a show of solidarity for the conventioneers. There were a few altercations between the marchers and white bystanders on the way to the Institute. Outside the Institute, an outraged African American fired a shot at a white newsboy who had just assaulted him. At that, policemen fired into the crowd. The all-call alarm was sounded and dozens of policemen moved towards the Mechanics Institute (Report 1866: 11–12, 94). The rioting commenced. At the Mechanics Institute the morning began not with radical policy proposals but with procedural details. When the organizers arrived at the meeting they found that they did not have a quorum (many would-be participants were scared off), and sent out for more of the committee.10 It was as they

10 As one of the conventioneers puts it: “Many members of the convention who had friends among those hostile to the movement were secretly informed of this fact

46 • Stacy K. McGoldrick

waited for more committee members to arrive that the rioting began. According to later testimony, those at the meeting were generally unarmed and unprepared for attack. Edward P. Brooks, a New York Times reporter working in New Orleans, went to the Mechanics Institute the morning of the convention and asked some of the prominent men of the convention whether they anticipated violence: They told me there might be trouble. I asked them if they were prepared for it. I do not know whether it was Mr. Cutler or someone else who said so, but I was given to understand that they had made up their minds not to resist any attempt to arrest them; and that there seemed to be a prearranged conclusion to come there unarmed.11

Furthermore, they did not know that Baird had incorrect information and thought that the meeting began at 6:00 in the evening, not 12:00 in the afternoon. Therefore there was no protection for the committee members or for the group of African Americans outside of the building. The reason for Baird’s misunderstanding is a source of one of the more offensive accusations against the convention committee in the wake of the riot. The committee members were accused by some in New Orleans of deliberately misinforming him so that they would be attacked and thereby garner the support of the rest of the nation through sympathy. According to later testimony, there had been contact between committee members and General Baird and those meeting were confident that the army would protect them.12 Once shots were fired outside the meeting, the police commenced an organ-

and begged not to go to the Mechanics’ Institute, where the convention was to assemble the 30th of July. Many remained away in consequence of these warnings, . . .” Testimony of W.R. Fish (Report 1866: 12). 11 Testimony of Edward P. Brooks, 18. Stephen F. Fish also states that they had decided to go the convention unarmed, 38; Charles S. Souvinet, 45; William Henry Hire, 67; and Rufus K. Howell (who was the pro-tem. president of the convention), 49. H.C.; Warmouth, who would later be governor of Louisiana, stated in his testimony that there was no plan to violently resist the police and that “I think they expected they would be arrested. The judge had charged the grand jury to indict them; and I heard numbers say that they expected to be arrested, and they should submit to legal process.” (Report 1866: 41). 12 “I was in front of the Institute; at which time Doctor Dostie came out of the front door; he shook hands with me, and said he ‘Good morning, Mr. Hughes;’ said I, ‘From the appearance of things we shall have some trouble today;’ he said that he ‘did not apprehend any;’ he said ‘that from the first indication or alarm of riot he expected the military would be on the ground.’” Testimony of Charles H. Hughes, (Report 1866: 103).

Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order • 47

ized assault on the meeting inside the Mechanics Institute. According to one witness: Soon after they got there [marchers to the Mechanics Institute] the police came up and fired into the crowd, and we all took shelter inside the building. After we had been there ten or fifteen minutes there was an awful rush of police inside the hall; they came in firing indiscriminately into the crowd (Report 1866: 103).

The majority of the committee was upstairs in a conference room. Upon hearing the crowd and police enter the building they blocked the door as best they could and got down on the floor. The police, backed by a group of civilians, broke past the barricade and shot into the room, killing and wounding several men. After a volley of shots, the Republicans managed to drive the police out of the room again, only to have them break down the door once more and fire into the room. This was to be repeated several more times throughout the afternoon (Report 1866: 35, 64–65, 98). Police ignored attempts by the men in the room to surrender, and when they waved white handkerchiefs, the police still “came in and commenced firing” (Report 1866: 35). Others would corroborate the inability of participants to submit themselves to a peaceful arrest. According to Charles H. Hughes’ testimony, the attendees tried to surrender to the police and offered themselves up for arrest several times; the police refused to arrest them. With policemen shooting at them, those under attack were cornered and had no recourse but to plead to the police to arrest them if they were not able to escape or hide. One man approached several different officers. A few responded by knocking him on the head. One tossed him down a flight of stairs. Finally, he came upon an officer he knew, who took him to the station and from there to the hospital. Some of those who survive credited the fact that a policeman took them into custody (Hollandsworth 2001). Another man, a Creole of Color, had to beg several officers to take him into custody and was beaten and shot by police and civilians before he was finally taken to the jail.13 Moreover, according to his testimony, one officer, upon hearing the entreaties, said “[w]e

13 I quote at length from the testimony of Stephen F. Fish: “When I asked this man [policeman] for protection to arrest me, he said, with an oath, ‘No sir; none of you can get out of here alive.’ He had a club, formed apparently of a rough piece of wood three inches wide, one inch thick, and three feet long. As I attempted to run by him he struck at me with this board, but I dodged him. Going through the door I met a policeman in uniform; I offered myself to him, but he would not arrest me. Going

48 • Stacy K. McGoldrick

do not want any prisoners; you have all got to die” (Report 1866: 103). There appears to be a loose pattern of arresting white Republican conventioneers – many after being beaten – and killing black men.14 Many of the white Republican leaders were taken into custody, while numerous African Americans, politicians and those outside supporting the meeting, were systematically killed (Report 1866: 123, 135). The police did not limit themselves to the physical site of the convention, but were seen chasing black men and shooting them down all around the French Quarter. They invaded a black boarding house, looting and beating those inside, and took another man out of his home while he was standing in his own doorway, nearly killing him until bystanders and his wife intervened. Edward P. Brooks also describes police chasing and killing African Americans. When a policeman, beating a Freedman, was begged to arrest the man instead of killing him, the policeman said: “[k]eep your mouth shut, you Negro-loving son of a bitch, or we will kill you next” (Report 1866: 18). The murderous intention of the police could not be clearer. When asked to characterize the behavior of the police, Brooks states, “[t]hey were the aggressors in every case that I saw. There were a few policemen who protected prisoners after they had become prisoners; but I did not see many of them attempting to protect freedmen in the vicinity of the mob” (Report 1866: 133–135). By about four in the afternoon General Baird had heard about the violence and convened the Union soldiers and marched them into the Mechanics

down stairs I passed two other policemen. At the time I passed them they had a Negro in charge, and were knocking him down the stairs with their policemen’s clubs, pounding him over the head, he at the same time begging that they would spare him. They did not turn their attention to me. As I arrived on the second floor, I was seized by two citizens. One of them was a ‘rough’ – one of the low order of Irishmen, I should think; the other was what appeared to be one of the chivalry – a well-dressed person, of middle age. They both seized me by the collar and commenced striking me with their fists in the face. . . . Going out of the door I met on the steps another policeman. I offered myself to him. I had a large white handkerchief in my hand, and held it up. It was in my right hand and held up when I met this policeman on the steps. I asked him to arrest and protect me. His reply was, ‘yes, damn you, I will give you protection,’ drawing out a large revolver, bright and new. . . . He drew that up and knocked me down on the landing . . .” Fish ran through the streets after that, finally being taken into custody by what he thought was a deputized officer. While on route the mob still tried to get at him, screaming and threatening him. From the Testimony of Stephen F. Fish, (Report 1866: 36–37). 14 Hollandsworth (2001: 97–117). Hollandsworth himself does not make this argument; this is based on my own reading of his account. Tunell also mentions this pattern, (1986: 106).

Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order • 49

Institute. Even after the Union army took over the city, there was an instance of the Confederate police going into a black neighborhood and harassing, beating, and killing another man. Generally, however, the soldiers were able to quell the rioting. General Baird had organized the troops and Sheridan had returned from Texas. Upon arrival Baird ordered troops to the jails to free prisoners and take those who were injured to local hospitals. He also sent troops over to the Mechanics Institute, although at that point ‘much of the building had already cleared’ (Hollansdworth 2001). It is not known exactly how many people were killed or injured that day. The Picayune estimates forty to fifty African Americans killed and six white men dead or about to die from their injuries. Albert Hartsuff, assistant surgeon in the United States army, verified a report given to him from General Baird. This report states that thirty-eight people were killed, thirty-four of them African American (Report 1867: 12). The city coroner estimates about the same number dead and over a hundred more injured, many severely (Hollansworth 2001). As one might expect, the version of events offered up by the police and their supporters, including the Picayune look very different from those of the congressional witnesses. There are several points in the narrative presented by the New Orleans Picayune, the unofficial organ of the Monroe faction, worth noting. First, the narrative presented in the Picayune, provides retrospective justification for the riot in that it represents the police force as defensive rather than offensive. Second, it helps to further the idea of the local police officers as the operatives of the white community outside in their extralegal activity. Third, the discourse represented in the Picayune serves as an excellent example of the machinations of the police/community relationship itself. As operatives of the hegemonic community, the police force acted against the interests of the state of Louisiana in favor of the local and unofficial. The narrative itself involves reconstituting the police from attackers to victims of attack. This recasting began as early as the afternoon edition the day of the riot: A difficulty commenced about one o’clock between the negroes (sic) and policemen, and others, pistols were drawn by both parties and a general fire commenced. The police finally succeeded in holding possession of the block, and permitted no one to approach the hall. We are unable to ascertain the result of the difficulty (Daily Picayune, 30 July 1866).

50 • Stacy K. McGoldrick

What is remarkable in this brief report is that what some witnesses described as one shot fired by an African American man becomes a two-sided battle in the paper. In the next morning’s paper, the first story in which blame begins to be assigned is printed. The first man held responsible is the dead Dr. Dostie: R.F. Dunnoy, one of the party arrested at the Mechanics’ Hall, on being released stated to Gen. Kautz that a fellow prisoner (Blanchard) confined in the same cell, had stated to him that through the instigation of Dr. Dostie, it was arranged by the negroes (sic) of the Third District that a general massacre of the whites should take place last night in the event of the Convention being interfered with (Daily Picayune, 30 July 1866).

This account, fed by the stories in previous days regarding the inflammatory remarks made by Dostie, was widely believed and was reiterated throughout the investigation of the riot. One can see it in the minority report of the congressional committee investigating the riot and in various statements by witnesses. Some continued to support this version despite the fact that the convention was interfered with, and there was no wholesale massacre of whites, but of blacks. Surely if several hundred African Americans really had arrived with guns prepared to do battle, there would have been many more white Democrats killed. The Congressional Committee lists one white citizen who was “disloyal” – meaning ex-Confederate and assuredly Democratic – killed and no injured men; certainly more than this number of whites would have been hurt and killed if a massive assault was planned, even if the Committee’s estimate was too conservative (Report 1866: 12). By the afternoon edition of July 31, an entire version of events of the day was established; one that would not change substantively throughout the controversy. I quote at length from the piece to illustrate the arguments about the motivation of African Americans, police and Republicans in the eyes of the paper: A meeting of the partisans of these men was held on Friday night, at which the most inflammatory language was employed to incite the negroes (sic) to acts of violence. They were told if any white man should interfere with them, ‘kill him.’ It has been well understood that arms have been distributed among them, with a view to some such use as has occurred . . . The authorities [army forces] waived any purpose they might have entertained

Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order • 51 of issuing processes against them as disturbers of the public peace, and hoped their gathering, if left undisturbed, would pass off with only temporary excitement . . . The Mayor and the city officials, and such citizens as be conferred with, advised the course, which was pursued, of counseling all citizens to keep aloof from the Mechanics Instituted, where this meeting was advertised to be held, and organizing the police force so as to be ready promptly to suppress any sudden disorder. There was never any purpose to interfere with the Conventionists, and none of the calamities of the day arose from any attempt of the kind . . . The disturbance outside commenced with the arrival of a gang of armed negroes (sic) . . . The police account, corroborated by witnesses, is that while they were engaged with the negroes (sic) in front of the building, they were fired on from the west windows by the negro (sic) party within. The Chief of Police had been singled out for a bullet from the window, which had failed in its mission. The police returned the fire, and that was the first movement against the building (Daily Picayune, 31 July 1866).

This narrative, describing excited Negroes incited by white Republicans and with police in a reactive role, was the sanctioned account in the aftermath of the riot. There is no questioning of police actions. It is held that they acted in proper proportion to the danger in front of them for themselves and the city. The minority report of the congressional committee appointed to report on the riot, provided by a more Confederacy sympathetic Democratic Party, mirrors this version of events: blacks were dangerous and instigated the events and the police were violent only in their efforts to regain order. This version of events directly contradicts the story supported by the evidence. The defensive tone of the story in the paper seems to allude to an attempt to circumvent the actual events of the day. On August 1 the Picayune continued in its attacks on the Reconstruction government and the federal forces in the city. The paper ran stories complaining about the martial law that was imposed by General Sheridan and praising the police force for their valiant efforts during the riot. The Picayune blamed Republicans who wanted to “regain offices and patronage which they had lost since the close of the war” (Daily Picayune, 1 August 1866). The local court blamed the violence on the Republicans as well. Judge Edmund Abell, who would be removed from his seat as a consequence of his handling of the riot cases, indicted the organizers of the convention. In

52 • Stacy K. McGoldrick

his report, Abell blamed the Republicans for instigating a riot, African Americans for starting the shooting and Governor Wells for supporting the convention (Hollandsworth 2001). However, the local Democratic version of events did not survive once outside the boundaries of New Orleans. In Washington D.C. a story came out in which the riots were blamed on Monroe and on the police. The final congressional report found that there was a premeditated effort to stop the convention by force and it was organized through the police. According to most of the testimony given to Congress, not only did the police do nothing to stop the violence, they instigated it. Witnesses who overheard conversations between policemen offered offer ample evidence that officers had seriously violent intentions for the day. The Police Chief, Thomas E. Adams, secured extra weapons for the police and organized the police on the evening before the riot (Report 1867: 14, 19, 124, 201). A particular sergeant in the police force, Lucien Addams, was also responsible for organizing patrolmen under his command for violence. Lucien Adams ran the First District station and was well known for his violent tactics as a Know-Nothing officer in the 1850s. At the first precinct porter Thomas Harries observed the policemen loading their weapons, and was told by one officer that they had “orders” to shoot noted Republicans such as Dostie and Hahn, along with undetermined numbers of black men (Report 1867: 94; Hollandsworth 2001). In another instance, Charles W. Gibbons, maintained in his testimony that he witnessed two policemen on the Sunday evening before the riot who claimed that they were going to hang Dostie and Hahan and “shoot down all these God damned niggers” (Report 1867: 90). Finally, the method of attack was clearly not one of crowd control or even simple brutality, but of quasi-battle. Rufus Waples, a former United States attorney in New Orleans, summed up the organization of the attack in his congressional testimony: Hays was brigadier general in the rebel army, and his brigade was made up of persons who came from New Orleans; and, although disbanded, I am credibly informed that the organization is in some way kept up, whether by secret meetings or not I do not know. I am also credibly informed that, when applications were made for appointments on the police force, the applicants were invariably asked if they had served in the rebel army, and that that was made an indispensable qualification to getting on the police. The fact that they went there so well armed, which was unusual for police

Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order • 53 in keeping order in they city, and the fact that other members of a former confederate company rushed, upon a signal, to their assistance, and that all were acting harmoniously together, makes the conclusion irresistible to mind that the whole matter was not a mere popular outbreak, but was a deeplyplotted scheme (Report 1867: 25).

Jacob Frederic Fisher, local tailor, describes the movement of the police: I went to the City Hall to see what was going on there. While on my way I saw Lucien Adams coming down with a police force, double-quick, from the fourth district, going on in the direction of the Mechanics’ Institute. They had their pistols in their hands (Report 1867: 180).

The police telegraph was readied to call all police and firemen to the scene on a moment’s notice and witnesses reported hearing the all distress call (Hollandsworth 2001). Given the numbers of African Americans killed and arrested, compared to those of whites and police officers, the idea that the police were simply responding to an armed attack by blacks is an implausible explanation of events. There is simply no evidence that this was a battle between two well-armed groups, while there is plenty of evidence and witnesses who testify that the police were the instigators and most frequent participants in the violent events of the day. That this was a planned assault by those who harbored allegiance to the Confederate cause on those at the Mechanics Institute and their supporters and not a spontaneous eruption of racial violence cannot be irrefutably proven. What is known is that many people in New Orleans and in Congress believed it to be so, and, therefore, believed that the police had the capacity to organize in this manner. They further believed that the police were undeniably acting in the interests of the white Confederates in the city. As such this event marked a new role for the police in their relationship to the whites in the community. However, the boldness of the assault jarred northerners into an appreciation of the dangers of the former Confederacy and provided further impetus to reject Johnson’s Reconstruction plans. There would be local consequences as well; the police department would go through a major overhaul in 1868. In political terms, this would mean a lessening of powers of the City Council of New Orleans, and the composition of a new constitution. Louisiana would ratify the 14th Amendment (itself a longstanding source of controversy) and be forced into Radical Reconstruction.

54 • Stacy K. McGoldrick

The tragedy of Reconstruction is often talked about as one or another type of failure on the part of northern Reconstruction forces. Depending on the interpreter, Reconstruction efforts were either not strong enough to truly change the social and political forces at work in the South, too much marked by Congressional unwillingness to take on the consequences to economic organization if Reconstruction really took hold, and/or doomed by a lack of sufficient popular northern support. While some or all of these analyses may be true, we must also look carefully at the machinations of local institutions, their ability to act outside of the law with local hegemonic community support, and the importance of their political violence. Ted Tunnell writes in his 1984 work on Reconstruction in Louisiana that “(t)he Radicals finally failed in Louisiana and other states, less because they lost State Houses and governorships than because the White League, the Red Shirts, and their kin overran places like Colfax and Coushatta” (Tunnel, 1984: 7). As a friendly amendment to Tunnell’s argument, I would add that this analysis which looks beyond the state houses should extend to the police force, the importance of their continued discretion, and availability of their violence. In this paper, I have attempted to demonstrate the extent to which local Confederates were able to construct a police force in their own image and the impact of that force, not just in terms of the violence of 1866 but in the newly forming racial hierarchies of a post-slavery south. The police, in their relationship with this faction of the local community, were able to gain loyalty for themselves through the destruction of the political vision of others. Therefore, when analyzing the role of the police in a community, we should consider their role in the racial order of the place, their relative impunity from repercussions for their illegality and violence, and the importance of their actions in the eyes of the hegemonic community supporting them.

Moon-Kie Jung & Tomás Almaguer The State and the Production of Racial Categories

Race is socially constructed. The idea is now so widely accepted in sociology and the other social sciences as to be axiomatic or cliché. Yet, the widespread acceptance is somewhat misleading. Although a vast majority of social scientists no longer views race in biologistic terms, this near consensus has not had a uniformly sweeping impact on how they carry out social-scientific research, most of whom still employ racial categories as if they were biologically given and fixed. Because race is a social construct without biological validity, how and where racial boundaries are constructed are intrinsically open to question, and the possibility of reconstruction always exists. Questions of racial boundaries therefore often hinge on the relative powers of the groups involved to infix their viewpoints. A distinct, few sociologists have long appreciated this underlying context of competition in which racial matters are contested and negotiated. Writing in 1958 – when mainstream sociology still equated racism with prejudice that was, in turn, conceptualized as an irrational manifestation of individual pathology – Herbert Blumer focused his analytic attention on the competitive struggle for “group position.” In his classic work “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” he argued that “the sense of proprietary claim” of the dominant racial group rested primarily on

56 • Moon-Kie Jung & Tomás Almaguer either exclusive or prior rights in many important areas of life. The range of such exclusive or prior claims may be wide, covering the ownership of property such as choice lands and sites; the right to certain jobs, occupations, or professions; the claim to certain kinds of industry or lines of business; the claim to certain positions of control and decision-making as in government and law (Blumer 1958, p. 4).

More, recently, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (1997) similarly called for and outlined a structural theory of racism based on material interests. At the same time, we must be cautious to avoid reducing race to a utilitarian logic. Race is “not a matter of bread alone” but also inextricably about how people “come to look at the world,” themselves, and others (Roediger 1991, p. 10). While scarce resources may inevitably invite competition, that the competition often takes place on the basis of race – rather than, or in addition to, class, skill, gender, or other categories – should not be merely assumed as a given but questioned and explained. As Stuart Hall writes, “This gives the question of culture and ideology, and the scenarios of representation – subjectivity, identity, politics – a formative, not merely an expressive, place in the constitution of social and political life” (1992, pp. 253–54). Given its empirically well-documented centrality in U.S. history, how has race, a biological fiction, become so ingrained in the constitution of social and political life? We argue that a necessary component of the answer lies with the state, in large part through which seemingly arbitrary classifications, like race, come to be accepted as “real,” as a naturalized part of reality. As Pierre Bourdieu writes, The state makes a decisive contribution to the production and reproduction of the instruments of construction of social reality. . . . it imposes and inculcates all the fundamental principles of classification. . . . Through the framing it imposes upon practices, the state establishes and inculcates common forms and categories of perception and appreciation, social frameworks of perceptions, of understanding or of memory, in short state forms of classification. It thereby creates the conditions for a kind of immediate orchestration of habituses which is itself the foundation of a consensus over this set of shared evidences constitutive of (national) common sense (1994, p. 13; emphasis in original).

The power of the state to legitimate racial categories and frame them as the national common sense is borne out empirically, for example, by the his-

The State and the Production of Racial Categories • 57

tory of access to citizenship rights in the United States. As James Barrett and David Roediger (1997, p. 187) remind us, the “sustained pattern” of the state’s conferring and denying citizenship based on race “provides the best guide to who would be racialized [as white and non-white] in an ongoing way in the twentieth-century U.S.”1 Even a cursory examination of U.S. history reveals that these state decisions regarding race, whiteness, and citizenship have had tremendous material consequences, determining who could run for public office, legally vote, testify in courts of law, attend certain schools, join labor unions, marry, and so on. In other words, the state, as Ian Haney-López (1996, p. 14) writes of the law, “translates ideas about race into the material societal conditions that confirm and entrench those ideas.” Curiously, the sociology of race rarely studies the state, and the sociology of the state rarely studies race. Highlighting the singular significance of the state, Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (1994) racial formation theory is one of the few exceptions in this regard. Most critically, they perceptively pull Antonio Gramsci into the study of race and the state. Borrowing from Gramsci (1971, p. 182), Omi and Winant see racial politics as “the continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria” and the state as the equilibrator. In this chapter, we examine one aspect of this process of equilibration: the production of racial categories. From their inception, the state’s racial classification schemes have been continually subject to question and contestation, provoked by ambiguities in society – both the “little society” of the human sciences and the “‘big society’ of our nation-state” (Wacquant 1997, p. 222). In response, the state, we suggest, has continually equilibrated these societal ambiguities, through the enactment of revised classification schemes, and established them, however temporarily and contingently, as the national common sense. We explore this dynamic in relation to the nation’s two fastest growing populations, “Asian/Pacific Americans” and “Latina/os.” In the next section, we analyze how the state played the most pivotal role in the formation and the subsequent bifurcation of the “Asian/Pacific American” racial category. We then rethink the concept of racialization to examine the

1

In other words, the state’s resolution of the initial racial ambiguity of Eastern and Southern European immigrants by consistently classifying them as “white” had the eventual effect of transmuting it into a national consensus, while non-European immigrants underwent the negative experience.

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ongoing process of equilibration in which the state tries to categorize “Latina/ os” racially.

The Formation and Bifurcation of “Asian/Pacific America” The category “Asian Pacific American” or “Asian or Pacific Islander” is a panethnic racial designation that came into widespread use in the past few decades, encompassing approximately fifty different national and ethnic origins in all. For example, under the “Asian or Pacific Islander (API)” heading, the 1990 U.S. census listed nine ethnic groups with their own check-circles: Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Asian Indian, Samoan, and Guamanian. In addition to these listed groups, one could have checked off the “Other API” circle and written in an unlisted national origin. In this section of the chapter, we examine the historical formation and transformation of this “Asian/Pacific American” racial category. Portending the experiences of various Asian groups in the United States for the subsequent hundred years, the official legal status of early Chinese immigrants in California was adjudicated in 1854 by the California Supreme Court in People v. Hall. In 1853, a George Hall was convicted of murdering a Chinese based on evidence provided by Chinese witnesses. However, the California Supreme Court overturned the decision, citing a law disallowing court testimony from Blacks, mulattos, and American Indians. The court reasoned that American Indians, having migrated originally from Asia, and the Chinese were racially akin and also that the term “black” stood for all nonwhites (Ancheta 1998, p. 28). The decision in People v. Hall was just the first of many laws and court decisions in California and other, mostly western states through which the Chinese, and later the Japanese and others from Asia, were segregated and discriminated against on a racial basis. Among the discriminatory laws were those enacting public school segregation and prohibitions against land purchases and miscegenation. The national state was similar to California in its treatment of immigrants from Asia. If the “power of the national state gave new [European] immigrants both their firmest claims to whiteness and their strongest leverage for enforcing those claims” (Barrett and Roediger 1997, p. 186), the inverse was the case for Asians in the United States prior to the 1950s. In 1790, the U.S. Congress, “in its first words on the subject of citizenship,” restricted naturalization to “free white persons,” which remained in force until 1952 (Haney-

The State and the Production of Racial Categories • 59

López 1996, p. 1).2 Consequently, one means by which the state demarcated its official, legitimate racial lines was through court cases in which this racial prerequisite was challenged. The racial prerequisite to citizenship was challenged in fifty-two court cases between 1878, when the first case was heard, and 1952, when racial restrictions to naturalized citizenship were finally removed. In adjudicating where racial lines should be drawn, foremost between whites and non-whites, the courts were also forced to justify their decisions in these cases. To do so, according to Haney-López (1996, pp. 5–9), the courts drew on the necessarily ambiguous evidence from society – in the forms of “scientific evidence,” the “supposedly objective, technical, and specialized knowledge” of experts, and “common knowledge” understandings of race, as they were being formulated, and contested, by the larger public. In every racial prerequisite case involving the Chinese, the Japanese, Koreans, or Filipinos, the two types of evidence were not in conflict, as both the scientific community and the society at large were judged to be in agreement. The courts ruled, without exception, that the aforementioned groups were not “white” and hence ineligible for naturalized citizenship (Haney-López 1996, pp. 203–208).3 Of all the ethnic groups that would later be considered “Asian or Pacific Islander,” the “whiteness” of Asian Indians was the only one on which the courts equivocated. In 1910, 1913, 1919, and 1920, the courts adjudged Asian Indians to be “white persons.” But, in 1909, 1917, and 1923, the courts decided that they were indeed not “white” (Haney-López 1996, p. 67). The definitive word on the matter of Asian Indians’ racial status prior to World War II was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1923, in the case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. Thind’s position rested on contemporary scientific evidence in which Asian Indians were classified as “Caucasian.” As the Supreme Court had earlier equated “white” with “Caucasian,” Thind posited that he was white and entitled to the right of naturalization. Faced with conflicting evidence, the Supreme Court decided against scientific evidence of the day and “adopted the ‘understanding of the common man’ as the exclusive interpretive principle for creating legal taxonomies of race”

2 In 1870, during the Reconstruction, the Naturalization Act of 1790 was amended to include “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” 3 Notably, in all cases involving multiracial persons with ancestry in any of the four Asian groups, the courts again ruled, without exception, that they were not “white,” echoing the hypo-descent rule applied to African Americans.

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(Haney-López 1996, p. 90). Determining that Asian Indians were treated as non-white by the society at large, the Supreme Court ruled that they were not eligible for naturalized citizenship. In addition to its particular effect on Asian Indians, the case finally resolved a long point of ambiguity, the intermittent conflict between scientific and social understandings of race.4 From this case forward, the racial classification understanding of the federal judiciary was theoretically to be one and the same as that of the “common man” in society. These court decisions at the national level to exclude the foregoing groups from obtaining citizenship also shaped the language of laws at the state level. Among the most important were the alien land laws which prohibited the purchase or lease of land by “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” Enacted first in California in 1913, Arizona, Washington, Louisiana, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Kansas quickly followed suit. Later, during World War II, Utah, Wyoming, and Arkansas – three of the states with concentration camps for the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans – passed similar laws as preemptive measures (Chan 1991, p. 47). Responding affirmatively to anti-Asian movements, the national state also enacted various immigration laws. In 1882, the Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was renewed decennially thereafter. Because Japan was a growing international power, the United States did not take a unilateral approach and “negotiated” the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” in 1907–1908, in which the Japanese government agreed to stop issuing passports; the Japanese government in 1905 had already stopped the emigration of Koreans, as it took colonial control of Korea. The federal courts’ equivocation on the racial status of Asian Indians also had its counterpart in the enactment of antiimmigration measures against them. After a period of halting administrative measures to minimize Asian Indian immigration, the Congress finally passed the Immigration Act of 1917 that forbade entry of persons from the “Asiatic barred zone.” The zone encompassed all land east of an imaginary line drawn “from the Red to the Mediterranean, Aegean, and Black seas, through the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea, along the Ural River, and then through the Ural Mountains” (Chan 1991, p. 55). All of the preceding antiimmigration acts were then superseded by the Immigration Act of 1924 that 4 Such conflicts between scientific and social understandings had also arisen or would subsequently arise in racial prerequisite cases involving “Syrians,” “Armenians,” “Afghanis,” and “Arabians.”

The State and the Production of Racial Categories • 61

denied the entry of “aliens ineligible to citizenship.”5 Because the Philippines was a colony of the United States, the entry of Filipinos – who, though “nationals” (rather than “aliens”), had nonetheless been deemed not “white” and hence ineligible for citizenship – was still permitted until 1934 when the Tydings-McDuffie Act limited Filipino immigration to fifty persons per year. Despite the similarity of the experiences shared by the preceding Asian groups as “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” they did not forge a pan-Asian identity before the 1960s. Corresponding to the immigration pattern, the racist exclusion movements and legislations had come in successive waves, targeting specific ethnic groups. Thus, there was widespread ethnic disidentification among Asians in the United States. For example, as the intense racism directed earlier at the Chinese began to be displaced onto them, the newly arriving Japanese insisted upon their distinctness from their predecessors in an attempt to stave off discriminatory treatment. In addition to practicing ethnic disidentification to minimize their exposure to white racism, the various Asian groups lived in segregated communities, apart not only from the larger white society but from each other (Espiritu 1992, pp. 20–24). Furthermore, “homeland” politics kept the groups apart, particularly between the Japanese and peoples from regions colonized by Japan and particularly during the period leading up to and including World War II. As Yen Le Espiritu argues in Asian American Panethnicity, a panethnic identity took shape among Asian Americans in the decades after World War II. Three structural factors stood out in facilitating its formation. First, the immigrant generation of Asians became outnumbered by second and third generation native-born U.S. citizens of Asian descent, among whom past conflicts rooted in homeland politics receded in importance. Second, residential segregation of various Asian ethnic groups decreased in the more racially democratic postwar years, increasing their interactions not only with whites but with each other. Third, more Asian American students were attending colleges, again increasing social contact among themselves. Through closer interactions across ethnic lines, these changes led to a growing recognition of commonalties in their past and current experiences in the United States. Inspired by the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, and anticolonial struggles in Asia, “Asian American activists built pan-Asian solidarity by 5 By 1924, unlike in 1917, the Supreme Court had decided definitively that Asian Indians were “ineligible to citizenship.” This law also severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe via national origin quotas.

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pointing out their common fate in American society” (Espiritu 1992, p. 31). They interpreted their “unequal circumstances and histories as being related” (Lowe 1991, p. 30, as cited in Espiritu 1992, p. 31). Largely because of activists’ success during the 1960s and 1970s in opening it up to minority claims, the state took a more interventionist role in redressing past and present racial discrimination. Especially during the Johnson administration, the state responded by giving more attention to social welfare and affirmative action policies. As Espiritu writes, “the social policies of the Johnson years legitimized the claims of the disadvantaged by placing them on the national agenda. Administratively, blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans became ‘disadvantaged’ groups, deserving of assistance to correct past discrimination” (1992, p. 86). To be effective in procuring material gains for their communities, social service providers, prompted by and joining the pan-Asian activism, united across ethnic lines “to lobby for Asian American welfare, demanding not only equal access to services but also equal opportunities to administer those services” (Espiritu 1992, p. 87). Panethnicity not only gave “Asian Pacific Americans” more political clout, but the state itself preferred to deal with and give funding to pan-Asian organizations “because politically it is the safest decision, freeing [it] from having to choose one Asian ethnic group over another” (Espiritu 1992, p. 93). On the construction of panethnicity, Espiritu concludes that “[a]lthough the pan-Asian concept may have originated in the minds of non-Asians, it is today more than a reflection of this misperception. Asian Americans did not just adopt the concept but also transformed it to conform to their ideological and political needs.” By “misperception,” she means the tendency of nonAsian Americans to “lump all Asian Americans together and treat them as if they were the same” (1992, p. 162). To Espiritu’s conclusion, we would emphasize more explicitly the state’s formative role in having shaped the categorical boundary of “Asian Pacific America.” Undoubtedly, the public’s historical lumping of Asian American and Pacific Islander groups contributed to the development of a panethnic identity, as historians have documented. At the same time, the public had not likely misperceived all the groups later categorized as “Asian Pacific American” as racially the same. In fact, most of the groups later categorized as such had not even had much of a presence in the United States before the 1970s.

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Above all, the “Asian or Pacific Islander” category was a state invention that paralleled but was not necessarily the same as the public’s racial lumping. We can see the categorical boundary of “Asian Pacific America” beginning to take shape with the Immigration Act of 1917, as the state drew an imaginary line on the continent of Asia to exclude Asian Indians from “whiteness.” Although the vast territory between this line and the United States did not yet signify one race, the state had started on its way, marking the area as “not white.” The Thind decision in 1923 solidified the line, denying Asian Indians the right to naturalized citizenship. Through the Immigration Act of 1924, which denied entry to all “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” the state again affirmed the expansive racial “barred zone” outlined in the 1917 law. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 likewise referred to an “Asian-Pacific Triangle – that consisted of countries from India to Japan and all Pacific islands north of Australia and New Zealand” (Hing 1993, p. 38). Then, in the 1970s, the state finally collapsed all Asian and Pacific Islander groups, marked previously by geographic boundaries and by the term “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” into a single racial category. In 1977, the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Statistical Policy Directive No. 15, which standardized racial categories for the entire federal government, including the census, explicitly defined “Asian or Pacific Islander” as a “person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, or the Pacific Islands.” Given the vast web of actors in the private sector and in state and local governments that directly and indirectly shares information with, receives resources from, and otherwise interacts with the federal government, the OMB Directive No. 15 was quite literally, in Bourdieu’s (1994, p. 13) terms, an “immediate orchestration of habituses . . . constitutive of (national) common sense.” Evidencing the state’s central role in the production and naturalization of racial categories, it would be hard to dispute that the OMB Directive No. 15 was the closest thing to national common sense during its two decades of obtainment. Of course, common sense is never natural or permanent but only appears to be so, projecting the present normatively onto the past and future. In 1997, the OMB issued a set of revisions to Directive No. 15, concerned primarily with multiracial reporting and, the focus of our interests here, Pacific Islanders. The “Asian or Pacific Islander” category came under criticism from Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders who rightly felt their indigenous histories

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and distinct interests, including sovereignty, were neglected, in part, by being categorized with people of Asian origin. In the 1990s, many Native Hawaiians and allies appealed to the OMB for their recategorization. In the end, the OMB (1997, p. 587) created a separate racial category, “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander,” for “person[s] having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.” Thus, we now have two “races” which were one just a few years back. With the symbolic and material powers of the state behind them, the new categories will soon appear, if not already, as if they always were or, at least, should have been.

Latina/os and Cultures of Race Omi and Winant (1986, p. 64) define racialization as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, practice, or group.” In other words, racialization refers to a non- or pre-racial relationship, practice, or group becoming racially meaningful. Viewing U.S. history through this conceptual lens, many scholars have ably charted the process of racialization continually unfolding as American Indians, Africans, and later Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, and others have successively come into prolonged contact with whites and have consequently been racially classified and subjugated by them.6 In this section of the chapter, we would like to modify this conceptualization, insofar as “the extension of racial meaning” implies a unilateral imposition of racial categories and meanings by the dominant “race.” With the exceptions of the earliest encounters between Europeans and American Indians and between Europeans and Africans, there have not been many, if any, encounters between the dominant “white” group and subsequent ethnic groups in the United States that could be characterized in such one-sided manner. Neither Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Asian Indians, Filipinos, and others of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries nor the large postwar influx of immigrants from Latin America and Asia have been pre-racial peoples without their own preformed racial worldviews. Rather, they each bring a set of racial schemas, a culture of race, different than the dominant

6 Of course, “white” itself is not a natural racial category. In anglophone North America, the English and other Europeans initially imagined this new category into being in the late seventeenth century, in the course of their interactions with Africans and American Indians (Jordan 1968).

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one operant in the United States. What then transpires is a confrontation of the two cultures of race from which a new synthesis may emerge. To be sure, the confrontation is not between peoples with equal powers to enact their different racial schemas, but that the dominant culture should prevail absolutely does not follow. The “new emergent culture” of race is not the result of a linear, unilateral “diffusion” of the dominant culture but a synthesis of the two cultures of race (Sohrabi 1999, p. 285).7 We illustrate this idea with the example of racial classification and Latina/os in the United States. Unlike the other recognized panethnic categories, the Latina/o category is internally divided along multiple racial lines, refracted through those categories the state officially recognizes as “races.” For example, the OMB Directive No. 15 defined “Hispanic” as a “person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race” (emphasis added). Faced with this state classification scheme, significant percentages of the Latina/o populations opt out of it on the census and list their racial status as “Other” (Toro 1998). We suggest that this mismatch may be due principally to the conflicting cultures of race that draw racial boundaries contrarily. As the large-scale opting out signals, the conflict has yet to result in a coherent synthesis, but as discussed below, the state’s dominant racial classification scheme has not been and is not likely to operate unchallenged or unchanged. The unique features of the Latina/o population’s multiracial composition have their roots in Spanish colonialism, in which colonial states imposed racial hierarchies that were more gradational and fluid than their northern Anglo counterparts. More so than in the English colonies, Spanish colonization in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere in Latin America entailed widespread miscegenation among people of Spanish, Indian, and African origins. This pattern, in addition to the subsequent colonization by the United States in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, factored centrally in the complex re-racialization of the Latina/o population in this country. At the point of their respective colonization by the United States, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban (and Filipino) populations had undergone centuries of Spanish colonial rule. There had emerged in these earlier colonial contexts a hierarchical racial order that was much less rigid than the U.S. white/Black distinction based on hypo-descent. In Mexico, it is estimated that mestizos –

7

See also Sahlins (1981, 1985), the theoretical inspiration of Sohrabi’s analysis.

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people of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry – comprised 85–90 percent of the population by 1900; Indians comprised 8–10 percent, and Europeans, mainly Spanish, made up the remainder (Morner 1967). In the Spanish Caribbean during the eighteenth century, the Spanish and the African slave populations were fairly evenly split in number (Williams 1970, p. 109). By 1898, when Puerto Rico and Cuba came under U.S. control via the SpanishAmerican War, the largest racial category in the islands was blanco (white); an intermediate stratum – defined as mulatto or trigueno – was the next largest, and the smallest category was negro (Black). In 1910, for example, 65.5 percent of Puerto Ricans were identified by the Puerto Rican census as blanco, a figure that continued to rise throughout the century. Indicating that the blanco category was not intended to be “unmixed,” as the white category was in the United States, Virginia Dominguez explains that “when given the choice to identify themselves as either white or black, most Spanish-speaking people from the Caribbean identify themselves as white” (1986, p. 273). In the North American Southwest, prior to its annexation by the United States at the conclusion of the Mexico-U.S. War of 1846–48, there existed a racial order that was similar to those established elsewhere in the Spanish colonial world. Ramon Gutiérrez’s When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away explored the formation and transformation of this racial order in colonial New Mexico from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. According to Gutiérrez: Throughout colonial Spanish America, race functioned as a metalanguage: with few exceptions, a person’s occupation and status was often quickly deduced by simple appearance. For such visual evaluations of race to be correct, a close correlation had to exist between all constituting elements of racial definition: legal color, actual physical color, and phenotype. When such a correspondence existed, it meant that in the daily life of face-to-face community, race was a visual metonymic sign of a person’s position in the social division of labor, symbolic of a propinquity to the infidel, or in the case of slaves, dishonor and social death (1992, pp. 202–203).

Racial and religious lines in New Mexico revolved around a relational axis that privileged the conquering Spaniards, who were Christian, “civilized,” and white, at one end, and the vanquished Amerindians, who were deemed heathen, “uncivilized,” and dark, at the other. The above racial order in what is now the U.S. Southwest had important

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consequences for the way that the Mexican population was re-racialized under U.S. colonial rule in the mid-nineteenth century. Those living in the territory ceded by Mexico were initially defined as honorary “whites” through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that concluded the Mexico-U.S. War. The treaty formally extended to them access to U.S. citizenship, a privileged status that, as discussed earlier, was reserved only for “free white persons” at the time (Almaguer 1994; Martinez 1998). While the mixed Spanish/Indian background of most Mexicans was a basis of derision, antipathy, and ambiguity, the fact that they were not of African ancestry factored centrally in their attaining an “honorary” white status at this time, the late antebellum period when the distinction between white and Black faced ever stricter enforcement. In a sense, the U.S. state was trying to capture Mexicans symbolically with its classification system based on whites and Blacks. At the same time, the newly conquered Mexicans – especially the elites – were attempting to assert their own culture of race. For example, in making the case that Mexicans were white at the California State Constitutional Convention in 1849, a prominent Mexican ranchero from Santa Barbara argued impassionately that the term “white” referred to European ancestry and social standing – as it was understood under Spanish and Mexican rule – not merely to skin color. Don Pablo de la Guerra, a delegate to the convention, maintained that “it should be perfectly understood in the first place, what is the true significance of the word ‘white.’ Many citizens of California have received by nature a very dark skin; nevertheless, there are among them men who have heretofore been allowed to vote, and not only that, but to fill the highest public offices. It would be very unjust to deprive them of the privileges of citizenship merely because nature had not made them white.” In drawing attention to the Californio elite’s European ancestry, de la Guerra strategically downplayed the predominantly mestizo backgrounds of most Mexican Californians. Moreover, he apparently allayed Anglos’ concerns over Mexicans’ attaining an honorary white status by reassuring them that if they used the word white as a term intended to “exclude the African race” from the franchise, he was in full agreement with this usage (Almaguer 1994, pp. 55–56). The synthesis resulting from the confrontation of the two cultures of race in the Southwest was a racial order that recognized the “whiteness” and hence citizenship rights of some Mexicans but denied them of many others. The latter was particularly true for working-class and phenotypically darker Mexicans who were often denied their legal rights by being categorized

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summarily as Indians – as the Chinese were at one point – despite the Mexicans’ own racial antipathy toward Indians. A notable example involved Manuel Dominguez, a dark-skinned mestizo, who served as an elected delegate to the California State Constitutional Convention of 1849 and as a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. In 1857, he traveled to northern California to enter testimony in a San Francisco courtroom. Before Dominguez could testify, however, the Anglo lawyer for the plaintiff objected to his taking the witness stand. The lawyer argued that Dominguez was an Indian and therefore ineligible to enter testimony. Despite Dominguez’s high social standing among Mexican Californians, the judge upheld the objection, and Dominguez was dismissed (Almaguer 1994, p. 57). But, the above synthesis did not last, as large numbers of working-class Mexicans began to migrate to the Southwest. With continual immigration from Mexico, and the heated politics around it, a new synthesis has yet to emerge fully. Examining the census categories applied to people of Mexican origin throughout the twentieth century reveals the state’s ambivalence toward the racial status of Mexicans. After classifying Mexicans as “white,” at least in theory, for a lengthy period of time, the 1930 federal census listed “Mexican” as a distinct racial category for the first time. Then, the category was absent once again just ten years later. In 1950 and 1960, Latina/os appeared as an “ethnic” category with the designation, “Persons of Spanish Mother Tongue.” In 1970, the appellation for the category changed to “Persons of Both Spanish Surname and Spanish Mother Tongue.” In 1980 and 1990, the “Hispanic” category emerged, later amended in 2000 to become “Hispanic or Latino.” From 1950 to the present day, these Latina/o categories were to be marked in conjunction with one of the state’s officially recognized racial categories. As the state imposed these changes in racial/ethnic categorization in relation to Mexicans (and other Latina/os), people of Mexican origin tried to make sense of the changes in their own cultural terms, by either declaring themselves to be white – whereas neither the state nor most Anglos may have shared this view – or opting out of the categories altogether. For example, more than 40 percent of people of Mexican origin in 1980, 1990, and 2000 opted out of the state’s predetermined racial categories (see Appendix).8 Similar ambiguities of race in relation to Latina/os are also vividly cap-

8 We thank Sylvia Orduno and Reynolds Farley for their assistance with the analysis of the 1980 and 1990 census data.

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tured in the way that racial boundaries are configured among Puerto Ricans in the continental United States. According to Clara Rodriguez, Puerto Ricans bring with them a more complex understanding of race than the U.S. state categories. Her review of the literature on this issue suggests that there exists among Puerto Ricans a variegated continuum of racial types. These include individuals who are defined “as blanco (white), indio (dark skinned and straight haired), moreno (dark skinned but with a variety of Negroid or Caucasian features and hair forms), negro (black or African-American in appearance), and trigueno (brown or wheat-colored), a term that can be applied broadly to each of the foregoing types except for the very blond blancos” (Rodriguez 1994, p. 133; see also Rodriguez-Morazzani 1996). Eduardo Bonilla-Silva suggests a less differentiated racial classification scheme among Puerto Ricans, one that contains three principal categories – white, trigueno, and Black – with the first two being the major categories and the latter a smaller, subordinate one (personal communication 1998). Either way, Rodriguez and Bonilla-Silva agree that, as in the rest of Latin America, one can be racially reclassified through class mobility and other mitigating factors and that even persons within the same family may identify and be identified as belonging to different racial categories based on somatic features, color, hair texture, etc. Unlike racial classification in the United States, which depends, above all, on descent and hence is perceived as immutable, racial classification in Latin America is less rigid. One plausible reading of the U.S. census in relation to Puerto Ricans is that while the state recognizes their distinctness with the “Hispanic or Latino” category, it nonetheless attempts to impose a choice between the Black and white racial categories, which is rooted in the historical enforcement of the hypo-descent rule in the United States. But, like their Mexican counterparts, Puerto Ricans in the continental United States assert their own understandings of race within the strictures of the state-sanctioned categories. Therefore, we see that although perhaps a majority of Puerto Ricans may be perceived by others as “Black,” only 3.5 percent of Puerto Ricans identified as being “Black” in the 1980 federal census, whereas 48.3 percent and 47.5 percent identified as being “White” and “Other,” respectively. Similarly, ten years later, 5.9 percent, 45.8 percent, and 47.2 percent of Puerto Ricans identified as being “Black,” “White,” and “Other,” respectively. With the newly added opportunity to mark more than one racial category as the key probable cause, the 2000 census did significantly – and, in all likelihood, unintentionally –

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lower the percentage of “Other” to 38.4, while having little impact on the other two categories (see Appendix). The racial classification scheme in Cuba is similar to that of Puerto Rico, as it recognizes at least three racial categories – Black, white, and mulatto – and also takes phenotype and social class into consideration (Pedraza 1996, p. 274). The similarity between the two, however, is not replicated among Cuban and Puerto Rican populations in the United States. Cuban Americans are much more likely than Puerto Ricans (or Mexican Americans) to identify themselves as white. For example, according to the 1980, 1990, and 2000 censuses, 83.8 percent, 83.6 percent, and 84.5 percent of Cuban Americans identified themselves as “white,” respectively. The comparable figures for Puerto Ricans were 48.3 percent, 45.8 percent, and 47.0 percent (see Appendix). The intervening variables are the open borders between the continental United States and Puerto Rico, a U.S. commonwealth, and the relatively closed borders between the United States and Cuba. Consequently, migration from Cuba has been in distinct waves and has been less racially, and politically, reflective of Cuba than the migration from Puerto Rico. Not until the arrival of the Marielitos in the 1980s did a sizable number of Blacks immigrate from Cuba.9 Nonetheless, as with the Puerto Ricans’ usage of the census categories, the percentages of “Whites,” “Blacks,” and “Others” are likely as reflective of the Cubans’ understandings of these racial categories as the state’s.

Conclusion In this chapter, we conceptualized the state as the preeminent producer and naturalizer of racial categories. Racial categories are the unstable equilibria that embody the state’s necessarily elusive attempts to ensnare race in an ever more refined, more “correct” classification scheme. The section on “Asian/ Pacific America” highlighted the state’s capacity to produce and naturalize racial categories, while the section on Latina/os emphasized the necessary elusiveness of the state’s project to racially categorize the nation.

9 According to Silvia Pedraza (1996, pp. 274–275), “Over 91 percent of the refugees who came over in the first wave, Cuba’s elite, were white. But the proportion of whites declined quite markedly during the second wave. From 14 to 19 percent of those who immigrated from 1965 to 1979 considered themselves as ‘other.’ The Marielitos had the lowest proportion white of any wave – 77 percent – while 16 percent considered themselves ‘other’ and 6 percent considered themselves Black.”

The State and the Production of Racial Categories • 71

For almost the entirety of U.S. history, the production of racial categories, in general, and the state’s formative role in it, in particular, have been inextricably related to the structuring of racial domination or, in other words, white supremacy. However, in the past several decades, the foregoing statement has become somewhat ambiguous. The racial social movements of the 1960s and 1970s transformed the non-white racial categories into meaningful political identities, and the state responded, in part, by instituting raceconscious programs to redress past and present discrimination, however incompletely. As a result, the racial distinctions that were used to subjugate are now also the tools with which to resist subjugation. So, what are the implications of this paradoxical shift for social-scientific research? Paralleling antiracist politics, the social-scientific study of race cannot simply abandon “race” on the grounds that it is biologically groundless and therefore “merely” an ideology. Both in politics and scholarship, “colorblindness” does not present us with a compelling choice, which would only leave us blind to the vast racial inequalities that persist. On the other hand, social scientists also cannot merely ratify and reify the state’s racial categories and become unreflexively complicit in their naturalization. This analytic route only leads us back to treating race as if it were biologically tenable. Because “one of the major powers of the state is to produce and impose . . . categories of thought that we spontaneously apply to all things of the social world,” Bourdieu writes, “when it comes to the state, one never doubts enough” (1994, p. 1). As social scientists, we must vigilantly doubt the racial categories we employ in our work. Historical analyses must always be mindful of the historical specificity and mutability of the boundaries and meanings of racial categories. Likewise, contemporary analyses must contextualize race and theoretically justify the racial categories they use. In the process, the important project of studying the powerful effects of racial difference can and must be articulated with the study of the construction of racial difference itself.

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Appendix Table 1. Percentages of Latina/os by Ethnicity and Race in the 1980 Federal Census.

White Black American Indian Asian/Pacific Islander Other

Mexican

Puerto Rican

Cuban

Other “Hispanic”

All Latina/os

55.4 1.9 0.7 0.3 41.7

48.3 3.5 0.2 0.6 47.5

83.8 2.9 0.1 0.2 13.1

63.4 4.5 1.1 4.7 26.4

57.7 2.7 0.7 1.2 37.7

Source: U.S. Census Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), 1980.

Table 2. Percentages of Latina/os by Ethnicity and Race in the 1990 Federal Census.

White Black American Indian Asian/Pacific Islander Other

Mexican

Puerto Rican

Cuban

Other “Hispanic”

All Latina/os

50.4 0.9 0.8 0.5 47.4

45.8 5.9 0.2 1.0 47.2

83.6 3.8 0.1 0.3 12.2

50.9 7.3 0.7 2.5 38.5

51.6 2.9 0.7 1.0 43.9

Source: U.S. Census Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), 1990.

Table 3. Percentages of Latina/os by Ethnicity and Race in the 2000 Federal Census.

White Black American Indian Asian Pacific Islander Multiracial* Other

Mexican

Puerto Rican

Cuban

Other “Hispanic”

All Latina/os

47.3 0.7 1.1 0.2 0.1 5.2 45.4

47.0 5.8 0.5 0.4 0.2 7.8 38.4

84.5 3.6 0.1 0.2 0.1 4.3 7.2

44.3 2.7 1.2 0.4 0.1 8.9 42.5

47.8 1.8 1.0 0.3 0.1 6.4 42.6

Source: U.S. Census Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), 2000. The multiracial category includes all those who marked more than one race. The other racial categories include those who marked only one race.

David L. Brunsma & Kerry Ann Rockquemore The End of Race? Rethinking the Meaning of Blackness in Post-Civil Rights America1

At the turn of the century we find ourselves at an awkward historical moment in which questions abound about the role of race in governmental policy, public discourse, and social science research. While Affirmative Action in college admissions has survived it’s latest Supreme Court challenge (Grutter v. Bollinger, 02–241; Gratz v. Bollinger, 02–516), the near death experience exposed Americans’ widely held desire to move “beyond race.” Such shifts in the terrain of race relations in which once clear and mutually exclusive racial group categorizations are giving way to increasing ambiguity has been portrayed as the “browning” of American culture (Rodriguez 2002; Wynter 2002), “the end of racism” (D’Souza 1996), and the “Latin Americanization of race” (Bonilla-Silva 2003). These transformations necessitate thorough scholarly attention as alterations to the racial formations in the United States may be underway and must be understood. The most significant development in the unraveling of longstanding notions of racial categorization was the addition of the “check all that apply” directive to the race question on the 2000 census. The decision

1 The authors wish to thank Rodney Coates, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Jeffrey Littenberg, Robert Newby, Rainier Spencer, Mitch Berbrier, Aimee Vanwagean, and William Wood for their comments on various drafts of this chapter.

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to allow individuals to check multiple categories when describing their racial identity has resulted in a statistical quagmire in which there are now 63 different racial categories (Grieco and Cassidy 2001). The “check all that apply” approach to race has also ignited a conceptual debate over the meaning and usefulness of racial categories, such as the recent debate between Webster (2003) and Duster (2003). This debate is most intense over the category “black” because of the historically unique way that blackness has been defined.2 While many thought the option would have little impact on the way that black people would self-identify, both demographers and politicians were surprised by early findings that more blacks than expected identified themselves as multiracial on their census forms. Nearly 1.8 million people checked black and at least one other race as an indication of their racial identity (Jones and Symens-Smith 2001).3 In addition to the statistical problems that have resulted from multiple race responses, recent changes in the census have set in motion a validity crisis that social scientists, politicians, and policy makers must engage. We believe the outcome of discussions concerning the validity of racial categories in general, and the construct black in particular, are at the heart of understanding present and future issues of race and identity in American society. The construct black has been used in a variety of complex and contradictory ways in social science literature. Black has been considered to describe a common set of social experiences; however, it is not currently accurate in depicting a monolithic assemblage of similar situations and circumstances. The construct black historically has corresponded to issues of skin color that somehow bind individuals into a collective body; however, the empirical reality of phenotype is one of increasingly striking variation and heterogeneity, not similitude and homogeneity. Black has been used to signify a collective structural location typically associated with restricted opportunities, economic disadvantage, and community disorganization; however, the socioeconomic

2 Although we have great reservations about using terms such as “race,” “black,” “white” and “biracial” because they represent social constructions as opposed to biologically based human categories, we recognize that their use is necessary for the purpose of our argument. We must use standard racial terms in order to problematize their meaning, validity and continued use in social science research. Readers should interpret these terms as “concepts” (in quotes) that are not grounded in any empirically demonstrable, biological reality. 3 Multiple race identification is most pronounced among young people, with 8 percent of blacks under 17 choosing more than one race as compared to only 2 percent of those 50 and older.

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location and opportunity structure has altered significantly over the past three decades and the socioeconomic status of black individuals is now quite varied. Black has been described as an expression of a unique cultural space with a particular collection of values, norms, and strategies; however, while many who write and think about race have rhetorically and theoretically articulated black culture, concomitant structural, historical and material changes have resulted in a wide variety of cultural spaces. The construct black, has also been used as an identity, a marker, a social category, a statement of self-understanding, indeed a socially imposed parameter of the self; however, the terrain of identity is increasingly multifaceted, fluid, and dynamic – a negotiated terrain not encapsulated in one colossal concept. While the lived reality of many people of color has changed since the passage of Civil Rights legislation, we question whether the construct black has mirrored these changes. In other words, given the many ways that black has been used in the past, does its’ meaning remain a valid analytic or discursive unit today?4 As sociologists, we consider concepts to be valid to the extent that the descriptions of empirical reality they express are correct. Applying this assumption to racial categorization begs the question: are the ways that we understand “black” reflective of empirical reality? The answer to that question often depends on one’s politics, theoretical orientation, discipline, profession, position in the class structure, and/or one’s race. Though various interest groups may justify the existence of particular self-serving definitions of what black means, membership in a collective body should not alter consensus on the validity of a concept. Furthermore, the continued use of invalid constructs in research, policy debates, and public discourse results in their reification, affecting the very experiences of the individuals and groups that the original construct has misrepresented. Is it possible that the reification of black has reached such a plateau? By focusing on black as a social identity, we will argue that it has, necessitating a re-evaluation of the validity of black as a social construct and re-assessment of its’ continued use in social science research. Over the course of U.S. history, many social scientists have been primarily concerned with the question “Who is black?” making it possible to designate

4 Though we are framing the validity crisis in racial categorization in terms of contemporary social and cultural change, we recognize that these have never been valid constructs and have been challenged by sociologists from Du Bois (1898) to Zuberi (2001).

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a population that could be tracked and studied. Framing the discourse in this way enabled an examination of the underlying racist assumptions used to categorize individuals, while allowing for descriptive analyses of how a brutally marginalized group of people experienced the social world. As researchers interested in process, structure, and identity (as well as from the standpoint of validity concerns) we believe that the more salient question today is: What does black mean? The former question, Who is black?, invokes the power of social context over individual identity construction. Specifically, this question and the answer to it (most notably in Davis 1991), emphasize the power of social structure and racist ideology in establishing strict parameters of identity options available to individuals. Throughout U.S. history, racial identity has been legally, and later culturally determined by the one-drop rule, thereby giving individuals with any known black ancestry no choice other than to identify as black. While it is valuable to understand that historically rooted, structurally parameterized identity “options” reflect the social realities of individual’s lives and their defined group memberships, dramatic reductions in structural barriers over the past three decades necessitate a shift away from how structure defines individual identity (Who is black?), towards an analysis of how closely individuals’ racial self-understandings correspond to the unquestioned, all-encompassing, construct “black” frequently used by social scientists (What does black mean?). Considering the historical entrenchment of the one-drop rule and recent research on racial identity among mixedrace people, we wish to press social scientists to fundamentally reassess both the meaning and validity of the social construct black in the face of structural and cultural changes in the U.S. In order to explore the validity of black as a social identity and its’ continued usefulness as an analytic construct, it is necessary to first consider the ideological foundation underlying black categorization in the U.S. After describing the socio-historical and economic roots of the one-drop rule, we will question its’ contemporary salience in determining racial identity. To answer this question, we examine the emerging body of research on racial identity development among mixed-race people. As those who straddle presumably mutually exclusive categories, their identification provides a critical case to test the strength of the one-drop rule, the meaning of black as a social identity and the validity of black as a social construct. Finally, we consider the implications of this body of research on the continued use of the construct black for analytic purposes. The goal of this chapter is to raise ques-

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tions – uncomfortable questions – about our use of racial categories. It is, most importantly, an effort to critically approach: 1) the taken for granted system of racial categorization; 2) the underlying assumption that existing categories reflect a monolithic social reality; and 3) the continued usage of the construct black in social science research.

Racial Classification and the One-Drop Rule The American system of racial stratification did not emerge spontaneously, but has deep roots in 18th century European classification schemes (Jordan 1968; Omi and Winant 1994; Smedley 1999), the eugenics movement (Kevles 1985; Zuberi 2001) and the racialized history of imperialism (Bonilla-Silva 2001; Omi and Winant 1994; Winant 2002). Early colonists brought hierarchical understandings of human categorization to the “new world” and created social hierarchies based on their assessments of some individuals as sub-human. Slavery exaggerated existing ideas of racial difference and the inferiority of people of color, serving as a rationalization of the exploitation of Africans in America (Jordan 1968). That same racist ideology continued, in mutated form, after the emancipation of slaves, guaranteeing their subordinate status for generations (Feagin 2000). Here, we briefly trace the history of the idea of racial categorization to illustrate how the fallacy of race has been constructed by dominant groups (Roediger 1999), socially reproduced over generations (Van Ausdale and Feagin 2002), and remains embedded within the institutions, culture, and social consciousness of American society (Bonilla-Silva 2002). It is this mythical idea of racial groups that necessitated the emergence of the one-drop rule to define who is black. Understanding the historical roots of this social process is essential to answering the question of what black means in post-Civil Rights America. Racial Classification The process of categorizing human beings into racialized types began with Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735). His was a system of non-hierarchical categorization. Other systems followed, firmly rooted in the classical notion of the Great Chain of Being that ordered all things (from the inanimate to God) (Jordan 1968; Spencer 1999; Zuberi 2001). With rapidly expanding colonization, European systems of classification interfaced with the Great Chain of Being and eventually elevated the status of white Europeans, while marginalized

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others (particularly Africans) were deemed one minute step up from animals (Jordan 1968; Zuberi 2001). With the framework of racial classification schemes established, entire “populations” of people were neatly categorized. By extension, their correlate cultures, behaviors, and moral values were also hierarchically ordered. These racial hierarchies helped Europeans explain the differences they encountered, while justifying the colonization and enslavement of Africans and other non-European populations. The Enlightenment ushered in suspicion of existing classification systems. That suspicion, however, was directed towards “scientifically testing” the existence of racial types. The collective European racial fantasy that differences, assumed in earlier cosmological and philosophical hierarchies, were, in fact, embedded in observable cultural, behavioral, and biological differences resulted in the birth of social statistics (Zuberi 2000).5 Racial statistics relied on the eugenic assumption that race is genetic, unchangeable and determinative of the superiority of the white race (Zuberi 2001). Intrinsically aligned with white supremacist ideology, racial classification schemes provided an epistemological template for the “order of things.” When this order was challenged, the ideology adapted to explain anomalies, subvert contrary evidence (see Ritvo 1997), and develop specific mechanisms for bringing deviations (e.g., mixed-race individuals) back into the explanatory framework of racial classification. The One-Drop Rule Europeans brought their hegemonic ideology of racial difference and white supremacy to North America, creating hierarchical social structures and setting the stage for the uniquely American form of slavery to emerge. We focus here on the definition of black, because the rules of inclusion in the “black race” are both different from any other group in the U.S., and inseparable

5 Closely related to the increased usage of racial statistics was the increase in Censustaking. Utilizing existing racial classification schemes was, from its beginnings, a political tool to control populations, individualize society, and give rise to a new idea of “identity.” Through the use of censuses, majority groups were able to collect various demographic data, along with racial data, further dividing and conquering their populations. By empirically substantiating false beliefs in racial difference, political, social, and material inequalities were legitimized. That these censuses rested on the fallacious process of racially classifying the population was never questioned. Census-taking, as a culturally-determined, hegemonic process, provided the necessary basis upon which to build racialized science and the racialized socialization of subsequent generations (Zuberi 2001).

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from the social and economic institution of slavery. Specifically, black group membership has been defined by a strict application of the one-drop rule that deems individuals with any black ancestry whatsoever (regardless of their physical appearance) as members of the black race. The result is an inescapable pattern of hypodescent, where mixed-race individuals – no matter how far removed from black ancestry – have had the same position as the lowerstatus parent group. Because slavery was built upon a strong white supremacist ideology of racial separation, miscegenation was strictly prohibited. The fear underlying anti-miscegenation attitudes was that black blood would taint the purity of the white race (Zack 1995, Mills 1998, 1999). While whites publicly denounced miscegenation, white men practiced it with regularity by raping their female slaves (Blassingame 1972).6 The children of these unions, in accordance with the one-drop rule, were considered black and, therefore, assets for the slave master (Davis 1991). It was this economic incentive, grounded in white supremacist logic, that validated the one-drop rule as the definition of blackness in the plantation dominated South. The Civil War caused existing ideological divisions over slavery to become even more deeply entrenched and the socially constructed boundaries between blacks and whites were reinforced. At the war’s conclusion, Southern whites accepted the one-drop rule and mulattos became even more closely aligned with blacks due to their increased alienation from whites (Williamson 1984). This alliance resulted in full acceptance of the one-drop rule by the American population (Davis 1991). Following the Civil War, the Jim Crow system of segregation enabled an unequivocal distinction to be made between the social worlds of blacks and whites. The passing of a multitude of segregation and anti-miscegenation laws in most states necessitated a legal definition of who, precisely, belonged in the category “black.” It was at this time in history that the one-drop rule, previously an informal norm, was legally codified (Magnum 1940) making de jure a previously de facto cultural and social norm that 6 The slave-owning mentality included a belief that white male slave owners had the right to sexually “use” their black female slaves at will. As a result, the vast majority of interracial sex consisted of exploitative unions between white male slave owners and their black female slaves (Blassingame 1972). Sexual intercourse between white women and black male slaves was strictly forbidden. This was largely due to problematic possibility that such a sexual union could produce a mixed-race child. A mulatto child in a white family was scandalous and threatened the entire ideological logic of the slave system. However, a mixed-race child in the slave quarters was not only tolerated but was considered an economic asset (Davis 1991).

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had, for generations, dictated interactions between the races. It is imperative to keep in mind that the codification of the one-drop rule was necessary because of the reality of miscegenation in the context of white supremacy. Given widespread belief in the biological foundation of racial groups, the scientific reification of racial classification, and the legal codification of the onedrop rule, the fallacy of race became further embedded in the national social consciousness.7 Considering the one-drop rule in its historical perspective, several patterns emerge. First and foremost, racial hierarchies have existed as long as there has been contact between Europeans and Africans and they are firmly rooted in an ideology of white supremacy. In the U.S., the definition of who is black has consistently supported existing racist systems of stratification. Despite the fact that the one-drop rule has no basis in biological reality, and has been continually used as an ideological weapon to support the continued exploitation of African Americans, it has enjoyed near universal social acceptance (Davis 1991). Since the passage of Civil Rights legislation and the systematic (although not total) dismantling of structural barriers for people of color, the cultural space has emerged where the one-drop rule has been challenged – particularly among a young, post-Civil Rights generation. Thus, while mixed-race people have existed since the beginning of U.S. history, their organized efforts to formally reject the one-drop rule (via the Multiracial Movement) have forced a reconsideration of the mutual exclusivity of racial categories (Daniel 2001; Spencer 1999; Dalmage forthcoming). It is precisely because multiracial people’s existence challenges the one-drop rule, and because their lived experiences of race question the very validity of black as a social construct, that we consider what black means in the context of their lives.

7 It is important to note that while the idea of race was deeply entrenched in our social and cultural consciousness, geneticists and biologists were dismantling it. By World War II, evidence from geneticists failed to support a biological basis of racial categories. The eugenics movement, however, further reified the idea of race through a paradigmatic shift to cultural and demographic racial differences. In other words, in light of empirical evidence that race is not a biological reality, eugenicists shifted their emphasis to observing racial patterns in behavior, culture and intelligence. Using racial statistics from census data, they studied the racial bases of various deviant behaviors and cultural deficiencies. The subtle shift from documenting the existence of racial groups, to the observation of racial patterns in various social behaviors and attitudes, was mirrored in the social sciences.

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What Does Black Mean Today? Over the past two decades, an increasing number of social scientists have begun to study multiracial people as distinct from the black population. Prior to this recent trend, strict adherence to the one-drop rule meant that researchers considered individuals with any black ancestry whatsoever as black. The new generation of researchers has accused their predecessors of over-reliance on the one-drop rule, questioning the salience of this norm as setting parameters for identity construction in the actual lives of mixed-race people. Here we briefly overview this literature in order to: 1) provide an interpretive perspective on the shifting nature of black as a racial category, 2) further question the validity of the construct black, and 3) underscore the importance of moving beyond the question “who is black” to “what does ‘black’ mean?” The Border Identity Some mixed-race people describe their racial identity as neither exclusively black nor white, but as a unique combination of the two. For them, the onedrop rule is not salient in determining racial identity, nor is black a personally meaningful construct. Instead, “black” is an intangible quality that is blended with an equally intangible “white” into a new hybrid category of social identity. We use the term “border identity” (Anzaldua 1987) because individuals choosing this option describe their racial identity as “biracial,” meaning a separate category of existence altogether. The border identity is the racial identity that has been privileged by multiracial activists because (to them) it embodies the need for separate categorization. They argue that because individuals no longer understand themselves as members of one racial group, additional categories are necessary in order to reflect existing demographic and social realities. Many multiracial identity researchers have also privileged this identity over the traditional singular black identity (Brown 1990; Field 1996; Gibbs 1997; Herring 1995; Poston 1990; Root 1990). Root characterizes this new identity by the “ability to hold, merge, and respect multiple perspectives simultaneously” (1996: xxi) while Daniel refers to this option as a “blended identity” and describes it as one that “resists both the dichotomization and hierarchical valuation of African American and European American cultural and racial differences” (1996: 133).

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The Singular Identity In contrast to the border identity, other mixed-race people racially self-identify with only one of their parents’ races. They describe their racial identity as either exclusively black or exclusively white, so that “biracial” is an accurate description of their ancestry but inaccurate in describing their racial identity. If asked, people who have a singular identity readily share that they have one black and one white parent, however that information does not determine their self-categorization and/or group membership. As might be expected, more black/white multiracials identify exclusively as black than white (Rockquemore & Brunsma 2001). The singular black identity, while frequently cited by Civil Rights leaders in opposition to the addition of a multiracial category to the 2000 census, has fallen out of favor with researchers studying mixed-race identity and is barely mentioned by multiracial activists as a legitimate identity. Root (1990) refers to the singular black option as a biracial individual’s “acceptance of the identity society assigns” (588) while Gibbs (1997) describes individuals having a black identity as “overidentified with their black parent” (332). Despite its’ disfavored status, the singular black identity continues to be a meaningful racial identity option for multiracial individuals and evidence that the one-drop rule remains salient in identity construction for some multiracial people. Research documenting the existence of mixed-race people who self-identify as white is scarce (Root 1990, 1996, Twine 1997) and often a topic of great discomfort for researchers. Due to the logic of the one-drop rule, a white identity is impossible because no amount of intermarriage or generational distance can remove an individual from the category black. Some consider the singular white identity to be equivalent to passing, yet we find the white identity to be a distinct phenomenon altogether. Passing implies that an individual identifies as black, yet pretends to be white for various social and economic reasons. However, as described by Rockquemore and Arend (2003) the singular white identity differs because individuals truly consider their racial identity to be white (despite the fact that one of their parents is black). While rare, the existence of mixed-race people who self-identify as white creates the greatest challenge to the one-drop rule as a basis for racial categorization and raises important questions about the meaning of black as a social identity. Are these individuals really black for categorization purposes because of their parentage? Is it equally legitimate for a multiracial person to choose an

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exclusively white vs. an exclusively black identity? And is there a generational and/or phenotypic marking point when an individual is no longer considered black in post Civil Rights America? The Protean Identity Some mixed-race people develop a protean identity where they describe their racial identity as sometimes black, sometimes white, and sometimes biracial depending on the situation (Harris & Sims 2002; Rockquemore & Brunsma 2001). Here, “black” is meaningful as a social identity, but it is one of several racial identities, losing mutual exclusivity and gaining a situation-specific fluidity heretofore unknown. These respondents emphasize their unique capacity to move between and among black, white and biracial identities, calling forward whatever racial identity may be contextually appropriate (see also Daniel 1996; Root 1990, 1996; Stephan 1992). Those developing a protean identity believe that homogeneous groups of blacks and whites have distinct cultural patterns that require different social behaviors. They consider themselves to belong to multiple racial groups because they are knowledgeable of various cultural ways of being and are accepted as “insiders” by members of various racial groups. While some people might adjust their behavior to differing circumstances, proteans adjust their identity to these different circumstances. Thus, every social situation is assessed for what racial identity will ‘work’ and then that particular identity is presented. It is their ability to posses and present multiple racial identities that distinguishes the proteans from the previously described groups. The Transcendent Identity One final way that mixed-race people understand their racial identity is by refusing to have any racial identity whatsoever. In other words, some claim to have “transcended” race altogether (Rockquemore 1999). This approach to racial identity, while rarely mentioned in contemporary studies, is grounded in Park’s (1950) Marginal Man where, by virtue of an in-between status, individuals intellectualize (as opposed to internalize) racial categorization. Failing to fit within the rigidly defined groupings of the existing system, transcendents consciously identify race as a master status that is external to their individual identity (Daniel 1996; Spencer 1999; Zack 1993). While acknowledging the existence of the one-drop rule, they understand black only as a socially constructed category that is utterly meaningless to their individual sense of self.

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Implications of a Multidimensional Model of Racial Identity The findings from studies of racial identity development among mixed race people challenge the validity of black as a social identity in several ways. First and foremost, mixed-race people today identify not only as “black,” but in four additional ways (white, biracial, all of the above, and none of the above). “Black” has multiple meanings. For some, “black” is co-opted into a new racial identity (the border identity), for others it is discarded as meaningless (the singular white identity), for others it is only meaningful in specific contexts (the protean identity), and for others it was simply a socially constructed category that has no personal significance (the transcendent identity). It is these varied responses that reaffirm the necessity of asking what does black mean? More importantly, variation in racial identification among this population implies a subtle, yet fundamental, loosening in the application of the onedrop rule by mixed-race people and others in their social environments. Because we cannot posses identities that are not interactionally validated (Goffman 1959; Stone 1962), we can infer that each of these varied constructions of racial identity has been developed in social contexts where they were deemed legitimate and validated by others. It is the interactional mechanism of validation that problematizes the validity of black because racial categorization (particularly as it is used for Civil Rights compliance and monitoring) hinges on the assumption that others categorize an individual as a member of a distinct racial group. If mixed-race people have at least five different understandings of black, then black is a highly fluid construct. Overall, the literature on multiracial identity fails to support the idea that the one-drop rule remains salient in the way that multiracial people understand their own racial identity. In fact, it suggests that the grip of racial classification is loosening. Given that identity is a social process, we contend that Americans are beginning to view multiracial people in increasingly complex and fluid ways that call into question the validity of racial categories as we know them.

What will Black Mean in the Future? The “check all that apply” approach to racial identification used in the 2000 Census illustrates a seismic shift in our understanding of racial categories and racial group membership. In fact, the very idea of races as mutually exclusive, biologically real categorizations will never be the same again. By allow-

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ing individuals to mark more than one race, the Census Bureau has dealt a deadly blow to the idea that “pure” races exist, shattering the commonsensical notion of races as genetically distinct groupings of human beings. More importantly, the new approach casts serious doubt on the validity of races as social identities, because it implies that individuals may no longer view themselves in mutually exclusive ways and, at a deeper level, that others may not view them as members of distinct racial groups. We believe the movement away from strictly defined, singular racial identities may be a shift towards a more contextualized understanding of the lived realities, experiential circumstances, social locations, and structural influences operating in our society. A change in how we understand racial identity and group membership is, for some, long overdue and, for others, a bit premature. Irrespective of politics or personal opinions, the governmental decision to allow the “check all that apply” option has forced social scientists, government bureaucrats, and pollsters to question the validity of racial constructs in general, and black in particular. What, in fact, does black represent after generations of racial mixing, inter-marriage, changing structural locations, within-group diversification, a fluid cultural space, and increasing multidimensionality in self-identification? The assumption underlying the use of longstanding racial categorizations in research, legislation, and public discourse is that each represents a fundamental commonality, a monolithic group experience that captures social, cultural, and phenotypic distinctions between U.S. citizens. However, the ongoing use of racial categories as meaningful designations stands in stark contrast to the fact that social scientists have long agreed that racial groupings are not grounded in biological reality. Though sociologists know that race is not biologically real, we have continued to use racial categorizations because of the belief that they represent a fundamental social reality (Omi and Winant 1994). Despite decreasing structural barriers since the passage of Civil Rights legislation, structurally rooted racial inequalities continue to exist in housing markets (Oliver & Shapiro 1997; Hacker 1995), churches (Emerson & Smith 2000), health care systems (Williams & Collins 1995), and public schools (Orfield & Yun 1999) In addition to those institutionally rooted inequalities, race continues to affect the way individuals perceive each other and their interactions on a daily basis (Feagin and McKinney 2002). As Dalmage pointedly states: “while there may be one [human] race, only some members of that race can catch a cab on

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42nd street” (2000, 13). Her observation illustrates the way that biological fantasy becomes social reality in the context of daily interactions. It is this lingering social reality of race that has led many to argue that the census racial categorizations are necessary and inherently meaningful designations. In other words, black remains an unquestioned construct because it represents a profound social identity: it accurately describes how individuals understand themselves and how they are understood by others. The reality of black as representing a social identity must be called into question due to the fact that 1) the U.S. government no longer supports the idea of exclusive racial categorization and 2) there exists a growing proportion of the black population who no longer view themselves as black. We have demonstrated that there are at least five different racial identities among people who (according to the one-drop rule) are black. Given the multidimensional nature of racial identity among mixed-race people, the new census data is even more alarming than at first glance. Specifically, Brunsma (2003) reported that mixed-race respondents used various identification strategies for the census. The border identifiers indicated more than one race. However, the singular white identifiers checked white, the singular blacks checked black, the proteans checked whatever they felt at the moment and the transcendents left the question blank. Therefore, we should be aware that the census data (and estimates of the size of various populations derived from it) are inherently flawed because they fail to take into account the subjective elements of identity development. Considering increasing cultural and demographic fluidity in our understandings of race can we, in fact, continue to assert with certainty that the construct black is valid? In our theoretical and empirical models what does black measure? What would it mean to sociological research to expand categorization? Is it possible (or wise) to do away with reified categories altogether? How can and how should sociologists adjust to more porous notions of racial identity? Below we consider some of these important questions, with the hope that their mere articulation will energize discussion within the discipline over the legitimacy and validity of our continued reliance on racial categories for empirical analysis. What Does Black Measure? Despite the fact that research on multiracial individuals and the new census data are pushing us all to rethink racial classification and identity, the hege-

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monic systems of the last 300 years have not completely released their hold. The general societal conception of race is still one of biologically, culturally, materially, phenotypically, and ontologically rooted difference and distinction. The original line of research on the question Who is black? was important for understanding the contextually bound nature of racial classifications and definitions. The culmination of evidence and arguments that race is not based in biological or ontological reality, however, has done little to change the way sociologists talk about and conduct research using racial statistics. Social science has, over time, oscillated between various essentialist arguments. These arguments span biological (Wiegman 1995), cultural (Smedley 1999), evolutionary (Darity 1994; Hoffman 1896; Spencer 1885), assimilationist (Frazier 1957; Park 1950), behavioral (Myrdal 1944), and social constructionist (Ferber 1995; Lopez 1995) approaches to race. Currently, sociologists tend to favor the social constructionist perspective; however, even those who rely on this explanation of race continue to operate according to an essentialist view of race (Spencer 1999; Zuberi 2001). According to Spencer: . . . if race is a social construction, of what precisely is it constructed if not the scientifically invalid false consciousness of biological race? It is as vitally necessary to problematize the social construction of race as it was to question its scientific construction. Many people believe erroneously in a biological conception of race, but it is critical to see that even for those people who claim to eschew the biological conception in favor of a social one, the basis of their social construction view is an underlying conception of biological race, whether acknowledged consciously or not. This false consciousness serves to keep Americans fixated on what are thought to be racial differences, exaggerating and ultimately reifying such differences into a socalled social reality (1999: 37–38).

In the practice of empirical social science, the social contructionist approach allows researchers to remain uncritical of race as a construct, maintain their biological and essentialist view of racial differences, and continue to accept the invalid schemas of racial classification and categorization (Appiah and Gutman 1996). Race in general, and black/non-black in particular, are used as “control variables,” and, indeed, as just one in an ever-growing array of causal variables for our statistical models of exceedingly complex social phenomena. We remain, for the most part, inattentive to each and every one of these types of exogenous variables – including them in models as part of an unquestioned routine. Subsequently, the language that we use to discuss the

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“effects” of “variables” such as race in our empirical models is a language deeply fixated on the notions of race and racial difference that we, at least theoretically, eschew. There are several dimensions of sociologists’ usage of racial concepts and statistics that deserve our immediate attention. First, we must reconsider and problematize the causal language used in discussing “race effects.” The starting place is situated in sociologists’ confusion over causation and association (Zuberi 2001). As illustrated in the research on multiracial individuals, race is not an unalterable characteristic of an individual. Historically, racial categories have been constructed from false, illogical, and mythical assumptions regarding the biological, cultural, and behavioral bases of racial groups. If one assumes that race is an unalterable characteristics of individuals, then the bulk of research on racial differences and the “effects of race” have been fundamentally misguided. Zuberi states: Race and gender as unalterable characteristics of individuals are not causal variables in inferential statistical analysis. Statisticians have questioned and criticized the use of such attributed – unalterable properties of individuals – in inferential statistical models. Most social statisticians, however, continue to treat race and sex as an individual attribute in their inferential models. Statistical models that present race as a cause are really statements of association between the racial classification and a predictor or explanatory variable across individuals in a population. To treat these models as causal or inferential is a form of racial reasoning. (Zuberi 2001: 129, emphasis in original)

By failing to acknowledge the validity issues inherent in the use of race as a “variable,” by viewing blackness, for example, as an unalterable characteristic, and, by assigning causal properties to race through interpretations of statistical relationships, sociologists have further reified the essentialist notion of race. Even if social scientists, when using race as a predictor in statistical models, can become more discerning in their causal language and work towards a more critical understanding of their own interpretations of the associations observed in data, there remains the assumption that race is a proxy for other social, cultural, and behavioral traits. Any concerted attempts to move away from considering race as a cause must also include a critical assessment of the assumptions that race stands as a proxy. Race, as a variable, must be placed within a social context where its meaning resides. As a proxy, race currently is associated with a wide and varying number of social phenomena.

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Social researchers concerned about the validity and implications of their research would do well to cease using race as a proxy for other associated causes in their models and begin measuring, directly, those other causes. There is also the persistent issue of “controlling” for other variations in statistical modeling. Much of the research on “race effects” tries to “explain away” the effect of race (e.g., a dummy variable for black, with whites as the omitted category) through the addition of other variables to the model. Typically, the differences assumed to be “caused” by the “black dummy variable” are actually due, or so it is argued, to these new variables. While this procedure is understood as interpreting race as a cause, it continues to legitimate the use of essentialist racialized reasoning and legitimate the use of methodologies that actually perpetuate the very problems we seek to overcome through our research. For while black as a construct may point to a reality, it consistently misses the mark, leaving researchers stuck in routine explanations and interpretations based on the usage of questionable concepts. Possibly the more poignant question is what does black not measure. It fails to measure how others identify an individual or how individuals are perceived in society. This is no small matter given that many important usages of racial data assume that an individual designated as black appears to others, and is identified by others, as black. Core substantive questions must be addressed as to how we can use census racial data in meaningful ways for Civil Rights monitoring and compliance. For example, if someone who identifies as multiracial, but looks black, experiences discrimination, is it because they were assumed to be black or because they were assumed to be multiracial? Does the distinction matter? Can someone experience discrimination if they identify as black, are multiracial by parentage, but appear white to others? And how do these same types of questions affect the way that we measure differences between groups on various dependent variables of interest, how we categorize individuals who have parents of different races for population estimates, and/or what we do with people who claim three or more racial identities? What Would It Mean To Expand Categorization And Is This Desirable? In response to concerns about the validity of black as a social identity, two possibilities exist. Indeed, both have been discussed in the literature – one working within the existing illogic of racial classification, the other pushing towards the erosion of the concept of race altogether. The first possibility is

90 • David L. Brunsma & Kerry Ann Rockquemore

to further expand existing racial categories. The “check all that apply” compromise to the 2000 census is an example of efforts to refine the operationalization of racial concepts, increase the validity of racial constructs (by allowing multidimensionality), and enable multiracial populations to be extracted for separate analyses. If the system of racial classification was initially created to provide compatible, non-duplicated, exchangeable racial data among federal agencies, then expanding categories increases the demographic accuracy of that data (at least in terms of self-identification). Increasingly complex racial designations may simply require more refined statistical techniques and clearer bureaucratic guidelines for when to aggregate and disaggregate the data. Another possibility is to reassess the use and value of racial categorization altogether. Many have argued that the system is collapsing under its own illogical weight. If, in fact, racial categories are not biologically real, and are increasingly failing to be socially meaningful, then adding more refined designations only compounds the problem, as opposed to providing any solution. Appiah made this critique when he stated that the “Multiracial scheme, which is meant to solve anomalies, simply creates more anomalies of its own, and that’s because the fundamental concept – that you should be able to assign every American to one of three or four races reliably – is crazy.” (Wright 1994: 49). The re-assessment of racial categorization is most strongly advocated by proponents of antiracial philosophy (see Spencer 1999) who seek to eliminate the illogical, hegemonic, false, and invalid concept of race. Scholars urging an end to the idea of race are, however, cautious in acknowledging that while race is a fallacy, racism is an empirical reality that cannot be ignored. To combat racism without the reification of invalid racial categories, Zuberi (2001) has argued that social scientists must develop new ways of tracking discrimination, while refocusing empirical analyses to examine the factors directly that we now assume race (as a variable) is a proxy for (e.g., social class). Underlying this second possibility is the fundamental concern that the validity of black as a social construct has been severely diminished (if not mortally wounded) by the newly emerging racial identities reflected in the 2000 census data. The long held allegiance to one-drop rule seems to be eroding in the context of structural, cultural and economic changes in American society. Ultimately, the way that we answer the question “what does black mean?” directly reflects the state of race relations in America. The fact that our rigid

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understandings of race are slowly yielding to more fluid notions of group membership mirrors the awkward position of racial categories in the new millennium. They are simultaneously real and unreal, both a biological fallacy and an increasingly complex social reality, differentiating individuals’ opportunities and life chances, yet varying within groups. Viewed through this lens, the “check all that apply” option was a step forward in acknowledging the constructed nature of black as a social construct. The subsequent decision that multiracial responses would be collapsed back into the traditional categories for bureaucratic use is a step backward, albeit an acknowledgement of our continued need to find other ways to monitor racial discrimination. This oscillation indicates a crisis, one that begs a discussion of the meaning of racial categories and their place in our discipline. Amidst all these uncertainties, one thing remains clear – the “check all that apply” directive on the 2000 census was not unlike opening Pandora’s box. There simply is no closing it and pretending it did not happen. While the Census Bureau and various government agencies are left to deal with the bureaucratic and statistical mess resulting from multiple race responses, sociologists are left to consider the status of black as a social construct and the implications our answer has for future analyses. Given the existing population trends, the controversy over what black means, whether (or not) we continue to consider social problems through this lens, and the political implications of these decisions loom large and show no signs of abating.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva How to Talk Nasty About Blacks Without Sounding “Racist”: Exposing the Sophisticated Style of Color-Blind Racism

Subscribing to an ideology is like wearing a piece of clothing. When you wear it, you also wear a certain style, a certain fashion, a certain way of presenting yourself to the world. The style of an ideology refers to its peculiar linguistic manners and rhetorical strategies (or racetalk),1 to the technical tools that allow users to articulate its frames and story lines. As such, the style of an ideology is the thread used to join pieces of fabric into garments. The neatness of the garments, however, depends on the context in which they are being stitched. If the garment is being assembled in an open forum (with minorities present or in public venues), dominant actors will weave its fibers carefully (“I am not a racist, but . . .”) and not too tight (“I am not black, so I don’t know). If, in contrast, the needlework is being done among friends, the cuts will be rough and the seams loose (“Darned lazy niggers”). In this chapter I examine the basic style of colorblind racism, the dominant racial ideology of the post-civil rights era. This ideology explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics. Specifically, as I have argued elsewhere,

1 For a full discussion of the various stylistic components of a racial ideology, see Chapter 3 in my White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era.

94 • Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Whereas Jim Crow racism explained blacks’ social standing as the result of their presumed biological and moral inferiority, color-blind racism avoids such facile arguments. Instead, whites rationalize minorities contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations.2

At the core of my analysis is the idea that because the normative climate changed dramatically from the Jim Crow to the post-civil rights era, the language of color-blind racism is slippery, apparently contradictory, and often subtle.3 Thus, analysts must excavate the rhetorical maze of confusing, ambivalent answers to straight questions; of answers speckled with disclaimers such as “I don’t know, but . . .” or “Yes and no”; of answers almost unintelligible because of their higher than usual level of incoherence. This is not an easy task and the analyst can end up mistaking honest “I don’t knows” for rhetorical moves to save face or nervousness for thematically-induced incoherence. Cognizant of this possibility, I offer as much data as possible on each cited case. I make my case with data from two similarly structured projects: the 1997 Survey of Social Attitudes of College Students and the 1998 Detroit Area Study (DAS henceforth). The former is a convenient sample of 627 college students in three universities, Midwestern (MU henceforth, Southern (SU henceforth), and Western universities (WU henceforth). A 10 percent random sample of the white students who participated in the survey were interviewed (41 altogether). The latter is a probabilistic survey of 400 black and white Detroit metropolitan area residents (323 whites and 67 blacks). As part of this study, 84 respondents (a 21 percent subsample) were randomly selected for in-dept interviews.4

2 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality (Lanham, Boulder, New York, and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 2. 3 There is no systematic research on whites’ private racial discourse. I suspect the structured and formal nature of our interview process made it a public matter and thus signified to respondents to be cautious. However, community based studies on whites and undercover observational studies suggest whites are more likely to use racialized language in private, white spaces. For examples of the former, see Jonathan Rieder, Carnasarie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1985) and John Hartigan, Jr., Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). For examples of the latter, see Lawrence Otis Graham, Member of the Club (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). 4 See details of these two projects in my Racism Without Racism, pp. 12–13.

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Since a full discursive analysis of the stylistic components of color blindness is beyond the scope of this chapter,5 I focus instead on showcasing five things. First, I document whites’ avoidance of direct racial language to expressing their racial views. Second, I analyze the central “semantic moves” (see below) whites use as verbal parachutes to avoid dangerous discussions or to save face. Third, I examine the role of projection in whites’ racial discourse. Fourth, I show the role of diminutives in color blind racetalk. Finally, I show how incursions into forbidden issues produce almost total incoherence in many whites. This last element is not part of the stylistic tools of color blindness but the result of talking about racially sensitive matters in a period where certain things cannot be uttered in public. Nevertheless, because rhetorical incoherence appears often in whites’ remarks it must be regarded as part of the overall language of color blindness. One concern for readers of this chapter may be whether I am attributing intentionality to whites as they piece together their accounts. That is, am I suggesting white respondents are “racists” trying to cover-up their real views through these stylistic devices? First, readers need to be reminded that I see the problem of racism as a problem of power. Hence, as I have argued in my work,6 the problem of racism is structural and not a matter of individual Archie Bunkers. Thus the intentions of individual actors are largely irrelevant to the explanation of social outcomes. Second, based on my structural definition of “racism,” it should also be clear that I conceive racial analysis as “beyond good and evil.” The analysis of people’s racial accounts is not akin to an analysis of people’s character or morality. Lastly, ideologies, like grammar, are learned socially and, therefore, the rules of how to speak properly come “naturally” to people socialized in particular societies. Thus, whites construct their accounts with the frames, style, and stories available in colorblind America in a mostly unconscious fashion. As Stuart Hall has pointed out, “we all constantly make use of a whole set of frameworks of interpretation and understanding, often in a very practical unconscious way, and [those] things along enable us to make sense of what is going on around us, what our position in, and what we are likely to do.”7 5 For an example, see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Tyrone A. Forman, “I am not a racist but’,” Discourse and Society 11, no. 1 (2000): 50–85, 2001. 6 See my “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 3 (1997): 465–80 and chapter 2 in my book White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001). 7 Stuart Hall. “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Southern Review 17 (1984): 3–17, p. 7.

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Calling Blacks “Nigger ” Softly: Racism without Racial Epithets The literature about life in plantations, accounts from frontiersmen, or narratives from cattle ranchers show that whites used to talk about minorities in a straightforward matter. When people of color were property or regarded as secondary human beings, there was no reason to be concerned in talking about them. But the Civil Rights era shattered, among many things, the United States’ norms about public discussions on race. Hence using words such as “Nigger” and “Spic” and even saying things that sound or can be perceived as racist is deemed immoral. And because the dominant racial ideology portends to be color blind, there is little space for socially sanctioned speech about race-related matters. Does this mean that whites do not talk about minorities in public? In previous work, I have showed whites talk about minorities in public even in the somewhat formal venue of an interview sponsored by a major research University. But I have also showed they talk in a very careful, indirect, hesitant manner and, occasionally, even through coded language.8 Almost all whites we interviewed avoided using traditional Jim Crow terminology to refer to blacks. Only one college student and six DAS respondents used terms such as “colored” or “Negroes” to refer to blacks and not a single one used the term “nigger” as a legitimate term. The student who used the term “colored” was Rachel, a MU student who had very conservative racial views. However, it was not clear if she used the term as part of her normal repertoire. She used the term in her answer to a question about who were her friends in college. I wouldn’t say mostly white. I’d say, it’s probably a mix. ‘Cause I have like a lot of Asian friends. I have a lot of, colored friends,9 ya’ know, but it wasn’t maybe not even the same, like, background either, I don’t know. It’s hard to tell, ya’ know? From looking at somebody, so . . .

From this statement, it is unclear whether she used the term in the old sense or if she wanted to say “people of color” and got confused.

8 See chapter 5 in my White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era. For an analysis of coded racial discussions on government spending and taxes, see Tomas Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton 1992). 9 To help readers, I underline all the rhetorical maneuvers used by respondents in this chapter. Please note that it does not indicate any type of emphasis in tone of voice.

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All DAS respondents who used the term “colored” were 60 years of age or older. For example, Pauline, a retired woman in her late seventies, described the racial makeup of the schools she attended while growing up as: “They were mixed, you know. [Interviewer: Mixed of what?] Well [raises voice] we had mostly colored and the white.” Although none of these older respondents were racial progressives, it would be a mistake to regard them as “Archie Bunkers” just because they used the racial language of the past. In truth, all these respondents were whites who have not fully absorbed the racial ideology and style of the post-civil rights era. Yet, based of what they said, some of these respondents seemed more open minded than many younger respondents. For instance, when Pauline was asked if she had black friends while growing up, she said “I always had black friends, even when I worked I had black friends. In fact, I had a couple of my best friends.” Although many whites’ self-reports on friendship with blacks are suspect,10 based on Pauline’s own narrative, she seems to have had real associations with blacks. For example, she played with black kids while growing up and remembered fondly her black coworker. More significantly, Pauline, who has a niece who is dating a black “gentleman,” seemed less concerned than one would expect. I feel like it’s none of my business. She’s had trouble with ah, she’s divorced. She’s had a lot of trouble with her Ex, and he’s very, very abusive. This fellow she’s going with is very kind. The kids like him so there you go. So maybe it’s gonna be good for her and the kids. And for him too, who knows!

The fact that white youth does not use racial slurs as legitimate terms in public does not mean that they do not use these terms or derogate blacks in private. For example, most college students acknowledged listening or telling racist jokes with friends and six even told the jokes in the interviews. For example, Lynn, a MU student, told the following joke she heard back home. Lynn: Okay [laughing] It was, it’s terrible but, what do you call a car full of niggers driving off a cliff? Int.:

What?

Lynn: A good beginning.

Eric, another MU student, told the following joke:

10

See my discussion on this matter in chapter 5 of Racism Without Racists.

98 • Eduardo Bonilla-Silva It was, what do you call a black man a black man in a, in a coat and a tie? And it was, the defendant or something. Yeah, it was the defendant. And that was probably a couple of weeks ago or something that I heard that.

In addition, racist terminology is current in the life of students and DAS respondents as illustrated by the fact that over half of them acknowledged that they have friends or close relatives who are “racist.” For example, Lee, a WU student, acknowledged that, “My father is pretty racist, so I heard everything, just about every racial slur you could possibly think of I heard it from him and I think that had an effect on me early.” He also said that while his family was watching black TV shows such as Sanford and Son or The Jeffersons, his father would say things such as “Are we gonna watch the nigger shows?” Lee and his brothers would say “Yeah” because it was “just kind of second nature.” Although Lee believes he has been able to successfully repel his father’s racist influence, he admits that he had some Nazi leanings while growing up and that although “I wasn’t a skin head or anything, but, you know, every now and again, I would draw a swastika on my notebook or something . . .” Lastly, in her important work, Kristen Myers has documented whites private racial discourse.11 Her informants revealed they used old terms such as brother/sister, nigger/nigga, spic, chink, dog eater, cracker, honkey, dothead/dot, towelhead, daga and sand nigger, they also revealed the development of new racist terms such as “niglet,” “ranchero,” “beans,” “spiclets,” and “Gandhis.” However, Myers also found that her informants had developed coded-terms to refer to minorities such as “Canadians” (used by restaurant workers to refer to black customers).

Reading through the Rhetorical Maze of Color Blindness Because post-civil rights racial norms disallow the open expression of racial views, whites have developed a concealed way of voicing them. Analysis of post-civil rights racial speech suggests whites rely on “semantic moves –” or “strategically managed . . . propositions” whose meaning can be determined

11 Kristen Myers, “White Fright: Reproducing White Supremacy Through Casual Discourse,” in Ashley Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (eds.), White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 129–144.

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by the “content of speech act sequences – ”12 to safely state their views. For instance, most whites use apparent denials (I don’t believe that, but . . .), claims of ignorance (“I don’t know”), or other moves in the process of stating their racial views. The moves act as rhetorical shields to save face because whites can always go back to the safety of the disclaimers (“I didn’t mean that because, as I told you, I am not a racist”). The data in this chapter will show whites often sandwich their racial statements between slices of nonracial utterances. In what follows I showcase the most common verbal strategies of post-civil rights’ racial speech. A) “I am not prejudiced, but . . .” & “Some of my best friends are . . .” Phrases such as “I am not a racist” or “Some of my best friends are black” have become standard fare of post-civil rights racial discourse. They act as discursive buffers before or after someone states something that is or could be interpreted as racist in nature. Therefore, it was not surprising to find that four students and ten DAS respondents used phrases such as “I’m not prejudiced, but” in their answers. One example of how the respondents insert this semantic move is, Rhonda, a part-time employee in a jewelry store in her sixties. She used the move to safely express her highly racial views on why she thinks blacks are worse off than whites. Well, I’m gonna be, you understand I’m, I’m [not] prejudice or racial or whatever. They’ve always given them smut jobs because they would do it. Then they stopped, they stopped doing. The welfare system got to be very, very easy. And I’m not saying all, there’s many, many white people on welfare that shouldn’t be. But if you take the percentage in the Tri-city country area, you will find that the majority are white, but all you see is the black people on welfare. But it’s a graduation up. Thirty years ago they started it and they continued it, and they continued it, and they continued it. And it was easier to collect welfare from the state rather than go out and get a job. Why work if, if they gonna, if the government’s gonna take care of you?

After Rhonda sated that, “I’m, I’m [not] prejudice or racial or whatever,” she then gives her account on how she believes the welfare state has spoiled blacks. The ideological value of the “I am not a racist, but”move is clear here.

12 Van Dijk, Teun, Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Cognition and Conversation (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1987), p. 86.

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The phrase “Some of my best friends are . . .” or its equivalent was used by eight students and twelve DAS respondents. Surprisingly, many respondents used it to refer to their Asian friends. For example, Eric, a student at MU, used this phrase after revealing that most of his friends while growing up were white. Specifically, when asked “Okay, and you say mostly whites, were there non-white friends along the way?,” Eric answered: “Yeah I had a few. I, one of my best friends when I lived in New Jersey was Korean.” Jill, a salesperson in her thirties, used the “Some of my best friends are black” move in a rather odd way. In response to the question, “Have you ever dated racial minorities?,” Jill said: “No, but I think one of my best friends is black.” The interviewer then asked Jill, “OK, can you talk a little bit about that relationship?” Jill answered as follows: Yeah we worked together at Automotive Company and what happened is this man was very bright. He graduated first in his class in economics from Indiana University and he got a fellowship through Automotive Company, which probably helped because he was black. And I also know he got into Harvard because he had terrible GMAT scores, but he did get in. He didn’t have terrible, he had in the high fives. He did get in and graduated from Harvard and now he’s an investment banker. But you know what? He is a nice guy. What he lacks in intellect he makes up for in . . . he works so hard and he’s always trying to improve himself. He should be there because he works harder than anybody I know.

Jill’s “best friend,” according to her own narrative, was “very bright” but had “terrible GMAT scores.” Yet, she continued, he “did get in [Harvard]” which he deserved because “He is a nice guy” who makes up “what he lacks in intellect” with hard work (Was her “best friend” “very bright” or lacking “in intellect”?). She also sprinkled the story with her veiled concerns about affirmative action (her commentary about Automotive Company helping him “because he was black”). Please also notice this “best friend” is never identified by name. B) “I am not black, so I don’t know” Since the aforementioned moves have become cliché (and thus less effective), color-blind racism has produced other semantic moves. These moves, as all the parts of any ideology, have developed collectively through a trial-anderror process and become resources available for the production of people’s

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racial accounts.13 One such move that appeared frequently among white college student but not among DAS respondents was the phrase “I am not black, so I don’t know.” After respondents interject this phrase, they proceed with statements that indicate they have strong views on the racial issue in question. For example, Brian, a student at SU, inserted the statement in response to the direct question on discrimination. I don’t know. I believe them. I don’t know, I’m not a black person living so I don’t hang out with a lot of black people, so I don’t see it happen. But I do watch TV and we were watching the stupid talk shows – there’s nothing else on – and there’s people out there. And just that and just hearing the news and stuff. I’m sure it’s less than it used to be, at least that’s what everybody keeps saying so . . . I think it’s less but I can’t say. But I can’t speak for like a black person who says they’re being harassed or being prejudice or discriminated against.

Brian’s statement can be broken down as follows. First, he stated “I’m not a black person” so he did not see discrimination happening. Second, he recognized that discrimination still happens. Third, he carefully stated his own view: “it’s less than it used to be.” The second example is Liz, a student at MU. She also used the phrase in her answer to the direct question on discrimination. Um, just because I’m not black, I’m not Hispanic, I don’t really, don’t understand. I don’t go through it I guess. But then again, I’ve seen like racism on, you know, towards whites, scholarships and as far as school goes, which, I mean, which bothers me too. So I guess I can kind of understand.

Here Liz begins his answer with the move and ponders if she cannot understand minorities complaints about discrimination because “I don’t go through it I guess.” But then she changed the topic to the issue of so-called reverse discrimination toward whites in “scholarships and as far as school goes,” which “bothers me too.” Thus Liz equalized the complaints about discrimination by all groups and concluded that, after all, “I guess I can kind of understand” minorities’ claims about discrimination. In a specific question on whether or not blacks experience discrimination in jobs and promotions, Liz answered by avoiding the issue altogether. 13

On ideology, see Ten van Dijk, Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications 1998).

102 • Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Um, I just think that the best qualified should probably get the job and that, you know, like I wouldn’t see why someone black wouldn’t get a job over someone white who was more qualified or better suited for the job.

Since Liz hinted that blacks lie when they make claims of discrimination, the interviewer asked her, “So when they say that (discrimination) happens to them, do you think they’re lying or . . .?” Liz proceeded to make a quick reversal to restore her image of neutrality. I mean, I don’t think they’re lying, but I wouldn’t, I mean, I guess in my little world, that everything is perfect, I wouldn’t see why that would happen. But I guess that there are people who are, you know, racist who do, you know, would not promote someone black just because they’re black, which I don’t really understand, you know.

Liz’s rhetorical back-and-forth (not understanding minorities’ claims of discrimination and then claiming she does) and reversals (hinting that minorities lie when they claim to have experienced discrimination to saying that discrimination happens) typify how dangerous are the waters of color blindness. Negotiating the seemingly contradictory views that “race does not matter” but, at the same time, that “race matters” a little bit for minorities and a lot for whites in the form of reverse discrimination is not an easy task. C) “Yes and no, but . . .” Another semantic move typical of color-blind racism is the “Yes and no” strategy. After respondents insert this phrase and, apparently taking or examining all sides, they proceed to take a stand on the issue at hand. Students were more likely than DAS respondents to use this move, a finding that resonates with the fact that DAS respondents were more straightforward in the enunciation of the frames of color-blind racism.14 An example of how respondents used this move, is Emily, a student at SU, who answered a question about providing minorities special opportunities to be admitted into universities as follows: Unique opportunities, I don’t know? There might be, I guess, some minorities do get schools [that] aren’t as well-funded as others. So, I would have to say yes and no. I think they should get an opportunity to come, but I also don’t think they should allow other people to come. ‘Cause that’s sort of 14

For a discussion, see chapter 2 in my Racism Without Racists.

The Sophisticated Style of Color-Blind Racism • 103 like a double-edged sword, maybe because you are discriminating against one group any way you do it and I don’t believe in that, and I don’t think you should discriminate against one group to give another a better chance. And I don’t believe that’s fair at all. But I also don’t believe that it’s fair they have to [attend a] school that can’t teach as well or don’t have the facilities to teach them like they should. I don’t know. I’m kinda wishy-washy on that.

This “yes and no” answer can be interpreted as an expression of whites’ ambivalence on a very “controversial” social policy.15 However, Emily’s answer to the direct question on discrimination clearly shows that she is decisively against affirmative action. I just have a problem with the discrimination, you’re gonna discriminate against a group and what happened in the past is horrible and it should never happen again, but I also think that to move forward you have to let go of the past and let go of what happened. You know, and it should really start equaling out um, ‘cause I feel that some of it will go too far and it will swing the other way. One group is going to be discriminated against – I don’t believe in that. I don’t think one group should have an advantage over another regardless of what happened in the past.

Thus, Emily opposes affirmative action as it is practiced because she interprets it as reverse discrimination. In turn, she favors programs that are not in place (expanding educational opportunities for minorities before college) or that would not change minorities’ status in a significant way (equal opportunity). Mark, an MU student, used the “Yes and no” strategy to express his view on affirmative action: Yes and no. This is probably the toughest thing I have deciding. I really, ‘cause I’ve thought about this a lot, but I can make a pro-con list and I still wouldn’t like. I’ve heard most of the issues on this subject and I honestly couldn’t give a definite answer.

Mark, who was taking a sociology course at the time of the interview, recognized minorities “don’t have the same starting points and, if you are starting from so much lower, they should definitely be granted some additional 15 Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scare of Race (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1993; Seymour M. Lipset, American Exceptionalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); Paul Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines, Reaching Beyond Race (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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opportunities to at least have an equal playing ground.” But he immediately added, “I’m gonna be going out for a job next year, and I’ll be honest, I’d be upset if I’m just as qualified as someone else, and individually, I’d be upset if a company takes, you know, like an African American over me just because he is an African American.” Mark repeats this point when discussing three affirmative action-based hiring scenarios. When asked if he would support the hypothetical company’s hiring decisions, Mark said: “If I’m that person, I’m not gonna support it. If I’m that majority getting rejected just because I’m a different race.” Hence Mark philosophical yes and no on affirmative action seem to disappear when the policy is discussed in practical terms. It is important to point out that other respondents did not use the particular phrase “Yes and no” but inserted similar buffer statements to safely express their reservations, objections, and, at times, opposition to certain policies. For example, Brian, a student at SU, explained his stance on affirmative action in the following manner: Man, that’s another one where [laughs] I kind of support and oppose it [laughs], you know? Uh pretty much the same thing I said before was that, I don’t know, if I come, I don’t know – somebody underqualified shouldn’t get chosen, you know?

Brian opposed providing minorities unique opportunities to be admitted into universities and the hiring decisions in the three affirmative action-hiring scenarios. This suggests Brian leans more toward the “against” than the “for” stance on affirmative action regardless of his odd “I kind of support and oppose” stance. One example of DAS respondents who used this strategy is Sandra. A retail person in her forties, Sandra used the move to voice her opposition to affirmative action. Sandra’s answer to the question, “Are you for or against affirmative action?”was: Yes and no. I feel someone should be able to have something, education, job, whatever, because they’ve earned it, they deserve it, they have the ability to do it. You don’t want to put a six year old as a rocket scientist. They don’t have the ability. It doesn’t matter if the kid’s black or white. As far as letting one have the job over another one just because of their race or their gender, I don’t believe in that.

Sandra’s “yes and no” answer on affirmative action seems like truly a strong “no,” since she does not find any reason whatsoever for affirmative action

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programs to be in place. Her “Yes and no” at the beginning is followed by a long statement on why affirmative action is wrong and thus she concludes by saying “As far as letting one have the job over another because of their race or their gender [which is the way she interprets affirmative action policies], I don’t believe in that.” D) Anything but race Another rhetorical move akin to the “I am not a racist, but” and “Some of my best friends are” is the “Anything but race.” This strategy involves interjecting comments such as “Is not a prejudiced thing” to dismiss the fact that race affects an aspect of the respondent’s life. Hence, this tool allows whites to explain away racial fractures in their color blind story. For example, Ray, a student at MU, dismissed the notion that race had any bearing on the fact that he had no minority friends in high school. Yeah, I think, I think that as things got later on, I don’t think there was any type of prejudice involved. I just think that we really didn’t know these kids. Ya’ know what I mean? They lived in different neighborhoods, they went to different schools. Um, and there was never any effort made to exclude, and if anything, there was an effort made to cultivate these kids.

Sonny, a student at MU, also used this tool to explain why she did not have minority friends while growing up. Sonny revealed in the interview that she had Italian friends,16 but suggested that “race never came into play” and that “most of my friends were just normal kids.” After revealing that “one of my best friends is Indian (Asian Indian),” she pondered why she and her friends did not have blacks in their crowd. I mean, there was (sic) so many kids. I don’t think we had any black friends. I don’t know why. It kind of stuck together and I don’t know, it wasn’t that we, it wasn’t that we wouldn’t be like . . . allowing to black people. It’s just that there was never, like, an opportunity. There’s no population like that around where we lived.

Both Ray and Sonny seem to realize their almost all-white networks violate their color blind view of themselves. Thus, in their descriptions, they point out that this is a non-racial fact in their lives. My point here is not to accuse 16 Italians seem to have a tenuous claim to whiteness since many “whites” mentioned them as examples of “minority friends” in the interviews.

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whites who do not have minority friends of being “racist.” Instead, I want to show that whites explain the product of racialized life (segregated neighborhoods, schools, and friendship networks) as nonracial outcomes and rely on the available stylistic elements of color blindness to produce such accounts. As college students, DAS respondents used phrases in line with the “Anything but race” strategy. For instance, Marge, an unemployed woman in her early fifties, used this rhetorical strategy in her response to the interracial marriage question. Very different than what I used to think I think it doesn’t have anything to do with racism. It has to do with, how you will all be treated. Now, if it’s just a matter of you and the other person and there’s no families involved, no kids involved and if you are living in an area [where people have] open minds, I think it’s fine. But when you start dragging kids in, no matter how much you love or whether you are a racist or not, that’s not the question, it’s how those kids are going to be treated. And so my answer is if there are kids, you know, families in and all that involved, and you’re living in a racially, you know, racist kind of area, no, I don’t believe in marrying somebody of a different race. But if it’s you two together and there’s nobody else involved, then I say it’s fine. But, you know, when you are dragging other people in, you have to think of them too.

Obviously, the phrase “I think it doesn’t have anything to do with racism,” and the carefully but long-winded statement afterwards, allowed Marge to oppose almost all kinds of interracial unions on a variety of apparently nonracial grounds.

“They are the Racist Ones . . .”: Projection as a Rhetorical Tool Psychologists since Freud have argued that projection is part of our normal equipment to defend our selves.17 It is also an essential tool in the creation of a corporate identity (Us versus Them).18

17 For an excellent analysis of racial projection, see the classic book by Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958). 18 For an excellent analysis of the creation of the antithetical figures of “barbarian” or “wild men” and “civilized men” in Europe and its central role in the creation of the notion of the Other, see Roger Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass: The Mythic Origins of European Otherness (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1994).

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More pertinent to this section, projection helps all of us “escape from guilt and responsibility and affix blame elsewhere.”19 As it pertain to racism, these projections, as Memmi argued, are “the presentation of a case both as an accusation and a self-exoneration.”20 College students and DAS respondents projected racism or racial motivations onto blacks and other minorities as a way of avoiding responsibility and feeling good about themselves. The projections of college students appeared on a variety of issues (e.g., affirmative action, school and residential segregation, interracial friendship and marriage, and blacks’ work ethic), but most often on the hot issue of so-called black self-segregation. For example, Janet, a student at SU, answered a question on whether or not blacks self-segregate, as follows: I think they segregate themselves. Or, I mean, I don’t know how everybody else is, but I would have no problem with talking with or being friends with a black person or any other type of minority. I think they’ve just got into their heads that they are different and, as a result, they’re pulling themselves away.

The interviewer followed-up Janet’s answer with a question trying to ascertain if Janet had tried to mingle with blacks, but Janet cut her off quickly with the following statement: “They’re off to their own kind of little, own world.”21 Janet projected once more in her answer to the interracial marriage question, but this time not onto blacks, but onto people who marry across the color line. I would feel that in most situations they’re not really thinking of the, the child. I mean, they might not really think anything of it, but in reality I think most of the time when the child is growing up, he’s going to be picked on because he has parents from different races and it’s gonna ultimately affect the child and, and the end result is they’re only thinking of them – of their own happiness, not the happiness of, of the kid.

19 Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (New York: Harper and Row, 1986: 21). 20 Albert Memmi, Racism (Minneapolis and London” University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 52–53. 21 On this matter and white college students’ lack of self-reflectivity, see Joe R. Feagin and Nikitah Imani, The Agony of Education (New York and London: Routledge 1996). On the so-called issue of self-segregation, see Beverly Tatum, op. cit.

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By projecting selfishness onto people who intermarry (“they’re not really thinking of the, the child”), Janet was able voice safely her otherwise racially problematic opposition to intermarriage. Nevertheless, she admitted that if she or a member of her family ever became involved with someone from a different race, her family, “would not like it at all! [laughs]. Other examples of projection among students occurred when they discussed affirmative action. Although most students expressed open resentment on this subject, a few projected the idea that blacks feel “terrible” if they are hired because of their race. For instance, Rachel, the conservative MU student cited above, explained her position on affirmative action as follows: Affirmative action programs? Like I was saying, I think, I don’t know if I do because, I mean, I think the only reason they, ya’ know, established it was to make up for the 200 and some years of slavery. And it’s just trying to, like, for us it’s just trying to like make up for the past. And on the blacks, on that end, I think they’re kind of . . . I would feel bad, ya’ know, because I’m getting in because of the color of my skin, not because of my merits. And I’d feel kind of inferior, ya’ know, like I’d feel that the whole affirmative action system would inferiorize (sic) me. Just because maybe I’ll get like, you know, a better placement, you know, in a school just because of the color of my skin. I don’t know.

This argument appears quite often in whites’ objections to affirmative action.22 The rhetorical beauty of this projection is that it is couched as a “concern” on how blacks feel about affirmative action. Of course, because the market is heavily tilted toward whites, if someone ought to feel “inferior” about market decisions it should be whites since they are the ones who receive preferential treatment “just because of the color of (their) skin.” DAS respondents projected racism and racial motivations onto blacks and minorities but at a slightly higher rate. Twenty two of the sixty-six white respondents projected racism or racial motivations onto blacks on a variety of issues. For example Ann, an unemployed woman in her twenties, answered the question on whether blacks are hard to approach or are not welcomed by whites as follows:

22 For a critique, see Bryan K. Fair, Racial Caste Baby: Color Blindness and the End of Affirmative Action (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997).

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I think that, I don’t know – they live too much on the past, if you ask me. Some of ‘em do. You know, I think blacks are more prejudiced against whites than whites are against blacks. Francine, a homemaker in her late twenties, answered a question on why blacks and whites see the police and the criminal court system very differently in the following way: Black people are just prejudiced. They just think that they’re out to get them or something.

Pat, an orderly in a psychiatric hospital in her early thirties, balked at the idea of the government establishing programs on blacks’ behalf to deal with the effects of discrimination. On behalf of blacks? No, I think it’s equaling out, I mean, if you want to go to school you can. I don’t think there should be – Years back [the government] came out with a Negro College Fund. We don’t have any United Caucasian Fund, I mean, I don’t know why they separate themselves because they are allowed to go to the same schools and colleges and everything as white people. It should be all together. I dont think there should be specials, you know what I am saying? [giggles and snorts] No, I don’t – it should all be the same for everybody. Everybody wants equal rights, equal this and equal this and that will equal everything out . . .

Beverly, a small business owner and homemaker woman in her forties, projected the idea that blacks who are hired through affirmative action feel terrible. She stated that affirmative action is “unfair to black and white.” When the interviewer asked her to explain what she meant, Beverly said: Because a lot of companies they know that they’re hired [because they are black]. I mean, it’s got to be in their mind, it would be in [my] mind, that’s why I’m saying this. “Was I hired because I was good or because I was black?”

Racial projections bring to mind the famous statement by Dubois in The Souls of Black Folk, “How does it feel to be a problem?”23 Whites freely lash against minorities (“They self-segregate” “They take advantage of the welfare system” “They must feel terrible about affirmative action”) and seldom exhibit reflexivity; minorities are “the problem,” whites are not.

23

W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 44.

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“It Makes Me a Little Angry . . .”: The Role of Diminutives in Color Blind Racetalk Because maintaining a nonracial, color-blind stance is key in the post-civil rights era, whites rely on diminutives to soften their racial blows. Hence, when they oppose affirmative action, few say, “I am against affirmative action.” Instead, they say something such as, “I am just a little bit against affirmative action.” Similarly, few whites who oppose interracial marriage state flatly, “I am against interracial marriage.” Instead, they say something such as, “I am just a bit concerned about the welfare of the children.” About half of the college students and a quarter of DAS respondents used diminutives to cushion their views on issues such as interracial marriage and affirmative action. For instance, Andy, a student at WU, used diminutives twice to state his concerns on interracial marriage.24 I would say I have a little bit of the same concern about the children just because it’s more, I mean, would be more difficult on them. But, I mean, I definitely [nervous laugh] have no problem with any form of interracial marriage. That’s just, just an extra hurdle that they would have to over – overcome with the children, but, but I – (it) wouldn’t be a detriment to the kids, I don’t think. That just makes it a little more difficult for them.

Mickey, a student at MU, used diminutives to make the potentially problematic claim that people at MU were oversensitive about matters regarding race or sexual orientation. Andy made his comments in response to a question about whether or not he participated in political activities in campus. After Mickey stated in no uncertain terms that he did not participate in any political activity, the interviewer, curious by the tone of his answer, commented “You sounded pretty staunch in your no.” To this Mickey replied, Yeah, I just, I don’t know. I think everybody, everybody here just seems like really uptight about that kind of stuff and, I mean, maybe it’s just because I never had to deal with that kind of stuff at home, but, ya’ know, it seems

24 The question was: “Twenty-five to thirty-five percent of whites oppose interracial marriage. Many claim they do not have any problem with minorities, but that they are concerned about what would happen to the children. What is your view on this delicate matter?” It is important to point out that we obtained similar “concerns about the children” from the DAS sample even though we did not include the second part of the question. At any rate, my focus here is on whether or not respondent used diminutives while stating concerns over racially-sensitive issues.

The Sophisticated Style of Color-Blind Racism • 111 like you have to watch everything you say because if you slip a little bit, and you never know, there’s a protest the next day.

When asked to explain what kind of “little slips” he was referring to, Mickey said: Like, I mean, if you hear a professor say something, like a racial slur, or something just like a little bit, ya’ know, a little bit outta hand, ya’ know. I mean. I would just see it as like, ya’ know, he was just, you took it out of context or something, but, ya’ know, is just little things like that. It’s just, it’s so touchy. Everything is so touchy it seems like around here. And I don’t, like I don’t like to get into debates about stuff and, ya’ know, about cultures and stuff like that. ‘Cause I’ve seen it, I ‘ye seen it around here, ya’ know, plenty, ya know, about like, with religious stuff and gay stuff and minority stuff. And it’s just nothin’ of that, I just don’t like to get into that stuff.

Thus, Mickey uses the diminutives to state that people at MU are hypersensitive because they protest when a professor does “little things” like saying “a racial slur” in class or some insensitive religious or homophobic remarks. DAS respondents also used diminutives, but, consistent with what I have documented for other rhetorical tools and the frames of color blindness (the latter in my Racism Without Racists book), they were less likely to use them. The following two examples illustrate how they used diminutives. First is Rita, an underemployed woman in her twenties. Rita stated her controversial belief that blacks are naturally different from whites as follows: Well, I can’t say that generally they all are, but a lot of the ones I’ve encountered are a little more aggressive, a little bit more high tempered or whatever.

Obviously, the diminutives and her qualification that her view applies to most but not all blacks muted somewhat her otherwise traditional Jim Crow position. Judy, a college professor in her forties who throughout the interview signified her “racial progressiveness,” softened her opposition to affirmative action by using a diminutive. I’m for it a little bit, not real dramatically. I think it’s ah, I think is a temporary solution. I think it’s bad when, if you have like, it’s used for quotas.

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“I, I, I, I Don’t Mean,You Know, But . . .”: Rhetorical Incoherence and Color Blindness Rhetorical incoherence (e.g., grammatical mistakes, lengthy pauses, or repetition) is part of all natural speech. Nevertheless, the level of incoherence increases noticeably when people discuss sensitive subjects. Because the new racial climate in America forbids the open expression of racially based feelings, views, and positions, when whites discuss issues that make them feel uncomfortable, they become almost incomprehensible.25 Almost all the college students were incoherent when discussing certain racial issues, particularly their personal relationships with blacks. For example, Ray, the MU student cited above and a respondent who was very articulate throughout the interview, became almost incomprehensible when answering the question about whether he had been involved with minorities while in college. Um so to answer that question, no. But I would not, I mean, I would not ever preclude a black woman from being my girlfriend on the basis that she was black. Ya’ know, I mean, ya’ know what I mean? If you’re looking about it from, ya’ know, the standpoint of just attraction, I mean, I think that, ya’ know, I think, ya’ know, I think, ya’ know, all women are, I mean, all women have a sort of different type of beauty, if you will. And I think that, ya’ know, for black women, it’s somewhat different than white women. But I don’t think it’s, ya know, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s nothing that would ever stop me from like, I mean, I don’t know, I mean, I don’t if that’s, I mean, that’s just sort of been my impression. I mean, it’s not like I would ever say, “No, I’ll never have a black girlfriend,” but it just seems to me like I’m not as attracted to black women as I am to white women, for whatever reason. It’s not about prejudice, it’s just sort of like, ya’ know, whatever. Just sort of the way, way like I see white women as compared to black women, ya’ know?

The interviewer followed-up Ray’s answer with the question, “Do you have any idea why that would be?” Ray replied: “I, I, I [sighs] don’t really know. It’s just sort of hard to describe. It’s just like, ya’ know, who you’re more drawn to, ya’ know, for whatever reason, ya’ know?” 25

For a similar finding, see van Dijk, Communicating Racism (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987).

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Mark, an MU student cited above, answered a direct question on interracial marriage in the following manner: I mean, personally, I don’t see myself, ya’ know, marrying someone else. I mean, I don’t have anything against it. I just I guess I’m just more attracted to, I mean, others. Nothing like, I could not and I would never, and I don’t know how my parents would – just on another side, I don’t, like, if my parents would feel about anything like that.

Mark was one of three students who openly opposed interracial marriage. Acknowledging this seems to have rattled him emotionally as his speech pattern became incongruous. Another issue that made students feel seemingly uncomfortable was discussing their views on the matter of self-segregation. Ann, for example, a WU student became very hesitant in her answer to the question of whether or not blacks self-segregate (long lines ( – ) stand for self-corrections). Um, no, I don’t think they segregate themselves, they just probably just, I guess probably they’re, I don’t know. Let’s see, let’s try to – Like we were trying – Like mutual friends, I suppose, maybe and probably maybe it’s just your peers that you know, or maybe that they, they have more, more like activities, or classes and clubs, I don’t really know, but I don’t think it’s necessarily conscious, I don’t – I wouldn’t say that I would feel uncomfortable going and talking to a whole group.

One potential reason why some whites get out of rhythm when discussing self-segregation is the realization that whatever they say about minorities can be said about them. Thus, as they explain their opinion on this issues, respondents make sure they provide nonracial explanations of why minorities may seemingly self-segregate (Ann suggesting friendship networks are based on people sharing similar interests). DAS respondents were significantly less likely to become incoherent than students, but when they did, it was around the same issues. Dorothy, for instance, a retired worker from an automobile company in her seventies, who was quite a clear talker throughout the interview, seemed confused when addressing the topic of interracial marriage. Eh, well, I donno, but I, I, I feel that uh, I donno, I just feel like, that uh, you should [low voice] stick to your own race for marriage [Interviewer: And why is that?] Uh because I feel that there’s uh proble – There would

114 • Eduardo Bonilla-Silva be problems on both sides. A girl would feel hurt if, if his parents, you know were [End of Tape 1. Interviewer asked her to continue her answer] Yeah, I really do. Well, I donno – they have different culture that we do, really and I think that his family would be, would probably be just as upset. I watch this on TV everyday and see how, you know, how they, they have a different, I donno – I hear the men, I know I hear that the black men on TV say that the black women are so, you know, so wild and mad, you know, tempers, you know what I mean. And I just feel that’s the limit. I donno, if my dau – If one of my daughters would ah, married one, I would have accepted it because it’s my daughter and I would, I wo – And I would have never be, I would never be nasty to them. Because I feel they’re just as human as we are. If they treat me decent, I’m gonna treat them decent. That’s my feelings!

Dorothy’s incoherence “makes sense” in light of her opposition to interracial marriage. Because openly opposing interracial marriage is controversial and violates the notion of color blindness, Dorothy seemed compelled to qualify her answer and insert the profoundly awkwardly statement about the equality of the races (“they’re just as human as we are”). Lynn, a human resource manager in her early fifties, became incoherent while stating her reservations about dating black men. I don’t know. Just, well [high pitched voice] I think I would have been very uncomfortable, okay, I really do. I mean, it would just be, I [raises voice] wouldn’t want to go out with a really dark Middle Eastern man, or Indian, or Oriental. I mean, I, I just would be uncomfortable. If they’re closer to me in looks, okay. That’s just always the way I felt. Not that I didn’t like men of ethnic diversity, but I just – You have a certain taste, you know. I think I do.

As with college students, DAS respondents became nervous when discussing some matters other than interracial marriage. For example, Eric, an auditor for an automotive company, became anxious when discussing whether or not he associates with his black coworkers. Sure, sure, you can, it’s – if you work in that environment the, the race is there obviously. I don’t think it will ever go away, but I don’t practice it and I see a lot of people who don’t practice it. The, they, you know, but it’s existing and I know that and I don’t. Yeah, I, I, I, I go out with the black guys. I don’t even care. It don’t matter to me.

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Conclusion If the tales of color-blind racism are going to stick, whites need to be able to repair mistakes (or the appearance of mistakes) rhetorically. In this chapter I documented the variety of tools available to whites to mend racial fissures, to restore a color-blind image when whiteness seeps through discursive cracks. Color-blind racism’s racetalk avoids racist terminology and preserves its mythological non-racialism through semantic moves such as “I am not a racist, but,” “Some of my best friends are . . .,” “I am not black, but,” “Yes and no, or ”“Anything but race.” Thus, if a school or neighborhood is completely white, whites can say “It’s not a racial thing” or “It’s economics, not race.” They can also project the matter onto blacks by saying things such as “They don’t want to live with us” or “Blacks are the really prejudiced ones.” But how can whites protect themselves against the charge of racism when they state positions that may be interpreted as racist? They can use diminutives as racial shock absorbers and utter statement such as “I am a little bit against affirmative action because it is terribly unfair to whites” or “I am a bit concerned about interracial marriage because the children suffer so much.” And, as in the case of the frames of color blind racism, whites mix and match the stylistic tools of color blind racism. Hence, respondents could use a diminutive (“I am a little bit upset with blacks . . .”), followed by a projection (“. . . because they cry racism for everything even though they are the ones who are racist . . .”), and balanced out the statement with a semantic move at the end (“. . . and I am not being racial about this, is just that, I don’t know”). The interviews also revealed that talking about race in America is a highly emotional matter. Almost all the respondents exhibited a degree of incoherence at some point or other in the interview. Digressions, long pauses, repetition, and self corrections were the order of the day. This incoherent talk is the result of talking about race in a world that insists race does not matter rather than a tool of color blindness. However, since it is so preeminent in whites’ racetalk, it must be included as part of the linguistic modalities of color blind racism. One final important point to make is that college students were more likely than DAS respondents to use semantic moves such as “I am not a racist, but,” “Some of my best friends are . . .,” “Yes and no,” and “I am not black, but.” The students were also more likely to use diminutives to soften their racial views and to become incoherent when discussing sensitive racial matters.

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DAS respondents, however, were more likely to project than students. These findings match my findings in previous work. Why is this the case? Preliminary analysis of survey and interview data from these two projects suggest that younger, educated, middle class people are more likely than older, less educated, working class people to make full use of the resources of color-blind racism. This means white youth is more adept at surfing the dangerous waters of America’s contemporary racial landscape. This should not be surprising since they are the cohort that has been ingrained from day one with the ideology of color blindness. However, it is worth noting that young, educated, middle class DAS respondents are not too far off from their older, less educated, working class counterparts in their crudeness and lack of rhetorical sophistication. This may well mean that, as whites enter the labor market, they feel entitled to vent their resentment in a relative straight manner. No need to sweeten the pill when you feel morally entitled to a job or promotion over all blacks since you believe they are “not qualified,” when you believe the taxes you pay are being largely wasted on “welfaredependent blacks,” when you are convinced that blacks use discrimination as an excuse to cover up for their own inadequacies. Finally, I end up with a methodological observation that has policy implications. If there is a new racial ideology in town that has an arsenal of rhetorical tools to avoid the appearance of racism, analysts must be fully aware of its existence and develop the analytical and interpretive know-how to dissect color-blind nonsense. Analysts unaware of these developments or unwilling to accept them or imbued in the ideology of color-blind racism will continue producing “research” suggesting that racial matters in the United States have improved dramatically and shouting like Pangloss that “We live in the best of all possible worlds” and urging for the adoption of race-neutral social policies. It is imperative that progressive social scientists expose color blindness, show the continuing significance of race, and wake-up color-blind researchers to the color of the facts of race in contemporary United States.

Rose M. Brewer “A Critical Sociology of African Americans, the U.S. Welfare State, and Neoliberalism in the Era of Corporate Globalization”

Introduction The political economy of African American life in the era of welfare state dismantling and neoliberalism, I contend, is weakly articulated in the critical sociology of late capitalism. My task is to open up this space and propose a way to think about African Americans and the state in this period of neoliberalism and corporate globalization. This conjuncture embodies the increasing privatization and elimination of core features of the social welfare state in the U.S. and the internationalization of capital It is a narrative connected also to race and Africans in the diaspora. It is an attempt to articulate the complex interplay of race, class, and gender in the global South and North, with the core analysis focusing on African Americans in the U.S. Essentially my position in this paper is this. First, U.S. Welfare State policy in the current period must be understood in the context of global economic restructuring. These processes are deeply shaped for African diaspora peoples by race. Nevertheless, for African Americans and the global African community these social forces are more than the expression of a racial dynamic. The dismantling of the U.S. social welfare state is embedded in a fundamental change in the social contract: increased pursuit of

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global private profit with little commitment to domestic social programs. Second, at the center of state transformation in the U.S. is a gender, race, and class dialectic. These relational and intersective processes are rooted deeply in the U.S. social order and are examined in this essay in the context of early U.S. state formation and change. This history is followed by an analysis of the current period of state and economic restructuring. This is a moment in capitalist crisis which requires new forms of accumulation (Dahms 2000). Nonetheless in the U.S. the process must be viewed in the context of longstanding racial and gender logics. This basic premise is omitted, erased or deliberately ignored in too much of the scholarship and decision making on the U.S. Welfare State, race, and class (Murray 1982; O’Connor 1973; Kloby 1999; Mills 1999). Ideologically this dialectic of race, class, gender and the capitalist state is expressed as an embrace, on the one hand, of neoliberalism by liberal and conservative policy makers, and on the other, as an intense move to the right by a substantial sector of the populace and dominant elite in the United States. These moves of global aggression and regressive domestic policies with the increasing immiseration of many in the U.S. occur within a racist/sexist logic – the cultural expression of privatization. This logic of race, class, and gender inequality is deeply rooted in capitalist formation and is remade in the current context under new conditions of accumulation (Roy 2001). This period involves a discourse embedded in the intense demonization of Black women as drains on the public till and unfit for motherhood. These are long-standing narratives, remade in the context of economic and state restructuring and new forms of racism. This public castigation of the most vulnerable Black women and children occurs in the midst of the virtual elimination of the social wage for the poorest Americans as the U.S. Welfare State is restructured (Murray 1984, Gingrich 1994, Lusane 1997). This castigation is, in fact, the justification for these draconian measures. The reasons for this state restructuring have been variously labeled: ‘fiscal crisis of the welfare state’, ‘crisis of capitalist accumulation’, ‘the collapse of Keynesian economic policy’, “the minimalist welfare” state and so on. I contend that this move for state privatization is an expression of a neoliberal logic which has global sweep. Moody speaks to the consequences for labor of this corporate global restructuring: The recipe for decentralizing production processes through the creation of extended production chains of progressively lower-paying work sites and

African Americans, the U.S. Welfare State, & Neoliberalism • 119 casualized labor is contributing to a deepening social crisis of the working class that began over two decades ago and shows no sign of relenting (Moody 1997: 113).

What workers are facing is a new structure of accumulation rooted in transnational corporations’ increasing integration, regionalization, and privatization of the global economy (Dahms 2000). This process encompasses a gendered and raced division of labor in the U.S. and globally (Lusane 1997). Indeed, in the U.S. the reemergence of overt racism, attacks on affirmative action, strengthened institutional racism, and deep cutbacks in the social wage are part and parcel of the current expression of state restructuring. Consequently, the deep embeddedness and interplay of gender and race with political, economic, and cultural dynamics are at the center of current social miseries: at least 45 million Americans living without health insurance, 40 million in poverty, a disproportionate whom are Black women and children, and the growing homeless population of families, as well as single men and women (Kloby 1999). The questions is why has it come to this and what must be done are core to my argument.

The Major Issues I attempt to place race, gender and state in a broader historical context of U.S. political practices. I contend that the state in America has been historically and contemporarily an expression of race, class, and gender inequalities. Given this, it is arguable that the problems of people of African descent have never been simply the expression of racial practice. It is simultaneously true that race has loomed quite large and determinative as a central organizing principle in U.S. society (Omi and Winant 1986). These complicated race/class/gender dynamics are reflected in state policies and current welfare state changes (Devine and Canak 1986). These are entangled political economic and cultural relations involving multiple sites of oppression. Indeed, the way gender is embedded and relational to race and class is crucial to this analysis (Brewer 1993). Given the preceding conceptual assumptions, the following issues are the central tenets of my argument in this essay: l) As the state has been restructured under capitalism in different historical periods (expressed in such state forms as the “social welfare state” and the neoliberal state), so has the positioning of Black people in the U.S.

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2) Processes of political economy are articulated in the exclusion, inclusion, and the bifurcation of economic and civil life along racial and gender lines: racialized and gendered labor markets, family fracturing, racially exclusive housing markets, and unequal access to education and training are striking cases in point. Today this is expressed most pointedly in the exclusion of large numbers of African Americans from the economy simultaneously with the elimination of social spending. 3) the reconstitution and change of state practices have occurred in the context of racial, gender, and class struggles. This is not simply class conflict, but the resistance of state racial/class impositions by African American people: women and men. In turn, these conflicts help reshape state practices. Black struggle and response must be considered an essential element in American state reconstitution (Morris 1984). Nonetheless, race/class/gender struggles in the United States have altered but never completely transformed the political-economy of inequality or American civil society. Moreover, new forms of struggle will be required for the current period. 4) African Americans and welfare state change can be treated as a more specific site through which to view the capitalist state. Gender is highly visible when issues of production and social reproduction in intersection with race and class are considered in analysis of state restructuring. In sum, it is the restructuring of the state in the context of liberalization and privatization, racism and gender inequality and their confluence that is of keen interest here. The key features of neoliberal state polices as articulated by Moody include: 1. Embeddedness in the ideology of the market whereby the state is used to free up market forces, 2. Older accumulation strategies replaced locally and globally with intensive privatization of all sectors. 3. The global South is locked into export oriented models embedded in structural adjustment. The IMF and World Bank are central here. Indeed, the conditions of getting loans, require opening up the country to transnational corporations as well as changing nationalized industries and state supports to private enterprise (1997). Real wages have fallen in the North and South given structural adjustment in countries such as Mexico (Moody 1997). Mentah (2002) describes the same process for Cameroon. Structural adjustment for this small West African country, according to Mentah, has the following features:

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1. Cuts in government spending particularly expenditure on services that are crucial to the poor, the vulnerable and the aged (Education, health, housing, water, etc.); 2. Removal of import controls and removal of low prices for even essential goods and allowing the free market to determine prices 3. Devaluation of currencies 4. Tight-fisted control of money supply and credit to burn away inflation and raise interest rates to encourage savings and 5. Privatization of government enterprises (Mentah 2002: 4). This neoliberal period is a time when the “globalization of capitalism is to supplant local control, countries are to be encouraged to exploit their natural resources to the fullest, public goods are to be opened up to relentless privatization and environmental regulations are to be geared to the lowest common denominator in order to not interfere with free trade.” (2003: 4) The major tools of this restructuring globally, in the interest of capital, are the World Bank and IMF. Nonetheless, this dismal reality is matched by the recognition of resistance and struggle of all to transform this situation (Katz-Fishman, et al., 2000). Consequently this two-fold dialectic, I contend, must be incorporated into a conceptualization of capitalist state policy formulation and change, with specific implications for Blacks in the U.S. The current state restructuring and corporate globalization are key here And, although a difficult period, signals a chance for renewed struggle and change.

African Americans and the Neoliberal U.S. welfare state Because African Americans occupy restricted labor, social, and political positions, and, indeed, because of racism and sexism, the current dismantling of the U.S. social welfare state has been particularly devastating. Even today, when formal economic indicators suggest low levels of unemployment, the official unemployment rate for Blacks is still two to three times the rate for whites. The Black youthful population is increasingly on the educational, social and economic margins, and many Black women have access only to low wage work below the levels of subsistence. Clearly these jobs do not pay enough for family survival (Brewer 1993; Burnham 2001). The context for the current difficulties is deeply rooted in American welfare state formation, racial

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formation and the gendering of social citizenship. An overview of a nu this history sets some of the context for the present moment. The long and sometimes acrimonious academic debates about the state characterize a number of discussions of the state in U.S. society. The most common tensions center around liberal pluralistic definitions of the state and competing conceptions within conservative and Marxist theories of the state. More recently, in Britain and the United States, a conservative tendency has reemerged emphasizing reshaping the state along minimalist lines. The minimalist state is the political expression of Thatcherism, Reaganism, Gichrichism and the neoliberal polices of past President Bill Clinton and current president George W. Bush. Moody, however, makes it quite clear for us conceptualizing the capitalist state when she argues that the “Basic function of protecting, regulating, and servicing private business property remains at the core of the capitalist state.” (Moody 1997: 123). Neoliberal housing policy, for example, supported by HUD’s former Henry Cisneros during the Clinton presidency opened up the low income housing market to a broader class sector, provided a set of vouchers to a mixed income group of claimants, and effectively squeezes even more of the poor out of housing. This was matched in urban areas all across the United States by the removal of the poor from these housing sites. This convergence of liberal and conservative policy practice is a good example of the current restructuring of the social welfare state, with deep and often devastating consequences for African Americans, a third of whom live below the poverty line. I prefer to use the term neoliberalism to describe this convergence of liberal and conservative, market embedded public policies. Classical Marxists agree that in a capitalist society, the governing entity reflects the interests of the owning classes. Thus, the state in capitalist societies is not a sphere of competing interest groups, but is constituted by and/or is an instrument of the (in some versions) the ruling class. Debates on Marxist state theories often revolve around the ‘instrumental’ versus the ‘structural’ nature of the capitalist state. Drawing upon various Marxist versions of the state, Gough (1981) argues that the term capitalist state can be used to conceptualize the political, economic, civil, as well as bureaucratized nature of the governmental and ideological structures of late twentieth century American society. He states more specifically, “this self same state acts to secure the political domination of one class by another.” Given Gough’s loose synthesis of structuralist and instrumentalist con-

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ceptions of the capitalist state, these ideas can be elaborated further by drawing upon Greenberg’s work (1977) on the state and racial domination, as well as Diamond’s work on women and the state. These are precursors to the emerging scholarship on race, class, gender and the U.S. welfare state. (Mink 1990, Gordon 1990, 1995, Abramovitz 1996, Quadagno 1994). A consideration of some of that literature follows.

Race and State Greenberg (1980) places his emphasis on the central way in which racial domination and ideologies of white supremacy have entered into the structuring of the state in capitalist societies such as the U.S. and South Africa. He suggests how racial structuring occurs “somewhat independently of the class forces that helped to propagate the original ideas.” Marable (1981) too, places the relationship between race and state at the inception of Euro/American contact with Africans during the period of slavery. Therein, he notes, “the state served to rationalize and define in the form of law, the existence of slavery.” Consequently, the very process of state formation in racially based capitalist society is its development in the context of race and racism as well as class forces. Drawing upon a Gramscian interpretation, Marable informs us that “the state cannot be analyzed separately from an analysis of the social and cultural formation.” Scott (1978), too, sheds light on this state formation process in the context of racism during the constitutional period. He states, The founders of this nation had an opportunity to politically abolish the racial oppression the British had forced upon Blacks but members of the constitutional convention drafted a strong antislavery statement and entered it in the early drafts of the Constitution, but it was finally deleted under pressure from Southerners . . . slaves were decreed to have both the social and legal qualities of property and men (sic) 1978: 61.

Historians of the antebellum period generally agree that powerful southern planters in conjunction with powerful northern shipping interests overrode the rhetoric of equality of the constitutional convention, ignored statements drafted by free blacks to disavow slavery, and compromised with the few delegates not wanting slavery. Property superceded ideology and, slavery was adopted.

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The impact of the southern state on shaping patterns of racial domination has been documented in the works of Wilson (1978) and James (1988). James points out, The southern racial state was not an accident of history but was created by white plantation owners, white farm owners, and their allies to discriminate against blacks (1988: 205).

Gough (1981) centers class and the state arguing that the growth in welfare state activity has taken place in a period sometimes referred to as monopoly capitalist. Its dismantling is occurring in the period of global capital. The welfare state in its modern form is a product of this particular economic form and of race and class struggles for a more equitable piece of the pie. Thus the most recent growth in the welfare state, reflects, to some extent, ideas reaching fruition during the New Deal and the depression of the thirties. The current retraction reflects, economic decline, a shrinking pie, and a dismantling of the old Welfare State, channeling more of these resources to capital. Gough points out further that “the welfare state denotes state intervention in the process of reproducing labor power and maintaining the nonworking population” (Gough 1981: 49). Other theorists have defined the process more materially. In fact they argue, the welfare state represents a way of handling the crisis of accumulation inherent in the capitalist mode of production (Castells 1977). Until recently, the state in the U.S. reflected the regulation of the economy through Keynesian demand side policies. The other side of this strategy was proposed by Piven and Cloward (1971). They contend the welfare state has been used to ‘regulate the poor.’ This aspect of state formation reflects social justice struggles. Groups such as the welfare rights organization (NWRO) saw the intersection among gender, race, economics and state policy before it was theorized among scholars. They pressed for a guaranteed, living wage income. On the other hand, the turmoil of the sixties, especially street rebellion, engendered a state response. Piven and Cloward argue that the social welfare, relief function of the state is clearly tied to a process of social control. Historically, sheer desperation, per se, has not precipitated the expansion of the safety net. So, Piven and Cloward argue for the “periodic expanding and contracting of relief rolls as the system performs its two main functions: maintaining civil order and enforcing work.” Thus in their still timely critique of the welfare state, Piven and Cloward show how the potentially destabilizing function of struggles for more of the

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social bounty catalyze a state response: an expanding social welfare state to control rebellion. Cleaver (1979), too, captured the former process by squarely defining the current crisis of the welfare state in this context. He minces no words in the describing the harshness of capital’s response, pointing out that “the crisis of the State emerges as a phenomenon of two moments – the first in which working class struggle imposes crises on capital, and second, in which capital tries to turn the crisis against the working class to restore command.” While none of the authors center gender, there is a growing concern with its impact on the welfare state. My contention is that much of the minimalist state practice of the current period expresses the interplay between white male patriarchy, economic restructuring, and racism. To render visible African American women and men, it is the gender/race intersection which needs to be specified. There is little or no work on Black women and the state. Deborah King (1988) to her credit, does recognize the importance of interrogating multiple sites of political inequality with her emphasis on Black women’s political agency. Diamond (1980) has assembled some of the early ideas on white women and the state. Diamond’s work delineates the power of patriarchal relations in state formation. Her focus on male domination structuring class relations is the signature contribution of her edited volume. King (1988) and Law (1983) too, consider the complexities of gender and patriarchy. King however, is attentive to race with, as noted, her focus on Black women. She is sensitive to the intersection of race, class, and gender. Yet neither Diamond or Law pay much attention to the power of race in state formation. Mies (1986) does understand class and gender. In her analysis she deems late capitalist society, a patriarchal capitalist society but does not articulate the racial dimension of capitalist crisis. She does, however, locate Third World women’s inequality in her analysis. Nonetheless, by the mid-nineties much more attention was being given to race and state in the U.S.. Quadagno (1995) in The Color of Public Policy, attempted to place race at the center of her analysis of the Great Society initiatives. Her work, however, is not deeply intersectional. She tends to elide gender in intersection with race. How the U.S. welfare is simultaneously raced as well as gendered is not her concern. Race is the core framing tenet of her argument. Gordon (1990, 1995) probably advances furthest the ideas of gender, race and the state. She notes the way Black women struggled for racial and gender respect during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The independent

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social welfare struggles of these women, especially in the early 20th century is discussed in her work. Tellingly, Gordon points out: welfare policy includes not only the giving of material goods but also regulation – of the market and the family in particular (1990: 7).

Mink in that same volume edited by Gordon (1990) clarifies even further this race, gender dynamic. She argues thusly, The interweaving of race and gender during the process of the welfare states formation gendered citizenship, produced materialist policies that benefited some women, opened the state to other women and allowed the assimilation of “lesser races” into the system while assuring their continued subordination within it. It created a welfare state that tied the woman citizen to woman’s place and that institutionalized political ambivalence towards social citizenship (1990: 114).

Indeed, given what we know historically, the treatment of African men and women and children as noncitizens was a constant in the early growth and development of local as well as national state practices in the U.S. These economic processes were infused with cultural and ideological realities. In sum, the structuring of racial inequality has been intimately tied to the evolution and growth of the capitalist economy, patriarchy, culture, and the state – the racialist/capitalist/patriarchal state. Moreover, the relationship of African Americans to the state must be considered beyond the contest of electoral, legalistic, and protest maneuvering. The state, economy and ideological representations are in interplay in shaping the form of African American inclusion/exclusion. Yet, the state has been, in turn, reshaped by racial struggles emanating from African Americans. Morris (1984) also argues the Civil Rights Movement, as noninstitutionalized political struggle, emanated out of the organizational and political savvy of southern Blacks, many of them women. Their political insurgency as well as persistence was an essential element in the remaking of the southern racial order. Examined more carefully over historical time, the racial, class, and patriarchal nature of the state can be more clearly delineated, from the revolutionary period culminating in the forging of a national state with constitution, to the fight anti-slavery and abolitionist struggles through the civil rights movement, and finally to the current restructuring of the welfare state. State

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practices have been central in the establishment of racialized and gendered inequality in American society. Thus today the minimalist welfare state has, in fact, being constituted around a new policy consensus regarding reform of the U.S. welfare state: the elimination of the principle of even the barest support for mothers and children – AFDC. This neoliberal principle is deeply shaping of the current welfare state restructuring. It is reflected in the academic and journalistic writings of Mead (1986), Murray (1984), Klaus (1986). They all agree that state welfare and work must be linked. It is captured in the Gingrich book Contract With America (1994), which essentially called for the dismantling of the U.S. social welfare state, while the state itself remains deeply supportive of wealth holders and private capital. And most centrally it is expressed in “Welfare Reform.” President Bill Clinton signed the legislation in 1996 as a set of practices which would “end welfare as we know it,” as stated by Clinton. These dramatic changes have essentially eliminated the social wage for millions of Americans. Strikingly, the instantiation of a discourse and practice of non-deserving and deserving recipients has been deeply embedded in U.S. Welfare State practices since the institutionalization of the modern welfare state (Mink 1990). African American women have typically been the target of this rhetoric. The minimalist states means that social spending cuts reach new highs for the least able of the American population. The least able economically is disproportionately Black and poor. Just as social spending has gone down, welfare spending for the rich has increased. Corporations are formally implicated in this form of state spending, yet in terms of formal beliefs about welfare, the wealthy escape critique. The cultural imagery has hardened around who is a welfare recipient. Indeed, the racial/class/gender ideology which defines Black women, men and children as laggards rationalizes the use of the stick. The current widespread acceptability of this ideology is possible because of the political powerlessness of the targeted groups and because of the instantiation of an ideology which neglects or distorts the true nature of race, class and gender in state dynamics which go back at least 50 years. The fact of the matter Is that the racialization of the state and the rhetoric of Black undeservedness is a core structuring principle of U.S. society located in the ideology and practice of white supremacy (Mills 1997). Thus economic claims based on paid labor were preferenced over motherhood claims. This of course

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was cross-cut by race. A racialized, engendering occurred. Black men were marginalized from both public support and private work. Black women had to struggle to claim a “protected motherhood.” Culminating, today with the elimination of this claim for poor women, a disproportionate number whom are Black. Quadagno (1994) delineates this relationship further: The New Deal thus united the industrial working class around a party that provided income security against job loss, injury, and old age to working men and their families. At the same time it left intact-indeed reinforced – the rigid color line. The extension of social rights thus had paradoxical consequences for racial equality – no full democracy for blacks – a modicum of economic welfare and security to whites (1994: 24).

Gender and Black Family Policy: Contested Motherhood Indeed today, an increasing number of the Black poor are women and their children. Families are formed without male providers. This group as currently constituted, is largely the outcome of economic restructuring and state transformation, Black exclusion along racial lines contemporarily and a deeply rooted sexual division of labor: productive and reproductive. The social representation of these families is also a cultural construction. These women and their children are labeled “disreputable”, “undeserving”, and increasingly “a permanent drain on the state.” Today neoliberals and conservatives of the capitalist state agree: these people are not “entitled” to public aid. They must be made to work. Thus the driving discourse is the contention that something is wrong with the American family in the public rhetoric on social welfare in the U.S. via the intense scrutiny of African American families. This contention has galvanized liberal and conservative policy makers. The roots of this Black inequality, contrary to public rhetoric, is structural. For example, Squires clearly argues in Capital and Communities in Black and White (1994) that restructuring is rooted in “the efforts of capital to seek cheaper, union-free work force in order to retain a large share of surplus wealth.” Moreover, he makes the case that These developments reflect public policy as well as private sector activity. Tax and regulatory policies have encouraged capital mobility, strengthened the hand of capital in labor-management struggles, and subsidized racial segregation and inequality (1994: 3).

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As early as 1982, Bluestone and Harrison were delineating the profound impact of deindustrialization on core sectors of the U.S. working class. Wilson (1997) drew upon this theme in his work on “the truly disadvantaged.” On this chilling ground is the belief by many white male workers that reprivatization will provide economic prosperity to those who have lost ground. Many of these workers embrace the rightwing reaction. Thus the ability to launch a strong domestic program emphasizing livable wages, under current political conditions of reprivatization, is not good. Nonetheless, there is some energy around launching living wage initiatives across the U.S. The reality is that coupled with this retrenchment is the intense rhetoric of “welfare dependency,” “workfare” and the “dysfunctional Black Family.” This is the ideological discourse of the current period, the raced and gendered face put forth by neoliberal spokespeople.

The Race to the Bottom in the U.S. Some of the most vocal rhetoric in the press regarding the dismantling of AFDC is the demand for women on welfare to work. In this period of tremendous economic restructuring where there are too few jobs for all workers this polemic is heavily a political strategy that resonates deeply among a good number of the voting public. It is also a strategy of social control, forcing work under any conditions. Thus the current period is expressed in the intense language and practice of state privatization. It is a racialized, class, and gendered assault, complicating the ability of Black women, men, and children to live. A little stated fact is that for Black men the welfare state has always been a cruel task master. Few if any of the policies are for so-called “ablebodied” men who are surplus population generated by racism and economic oppression. Programs such as job training, general assistance, minimal old age pensions, provided the barest of policy supports for Black men. Yet, through welfare reform, the support for one form of Black family: women and their children is all but being eliminated. More specifically, low wage workfare, the elimination of health and child care provision, the phase out of low income housing, goes to the heart of the ability of African American women and children, families to survive. This holds true even though the welfare state has always splintered its largesse along racial lines/class lines. The struggles which forged social legislation for a living welfare wage only incompletely

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served the needs of Blacks and whites, but even less so for Blacks. Cassity and McRoy (1983) make the same case. Black women, especially, have been hard hit by the restructuring of the social welfare state through the dismantling of AFDC. The progressive side of the social welfare struggle, which forced the state to respond to the needy is all but done for. In the context of current conservative state restructuring social support is defined out of existence with code names such as the “new federalism,” and the “minimalist state.” Reagonomics, Gingrich’s ‘Contract’, and William Clinton’s “welfare reform” are among a set of political decisions are just the public face of deep level state restructuring in the late capitalist U.S. This restructuring is counterpart to the structural adjustment requirements imposed on the global South. In both contexts these are the neoliberal decisions which places hundreds of millions of people in dire poverty. The squeeze for African Americans, given the current situation, is exactly at the most vulnerable sites: wages, work, housing, and family formation (Creigs and Howard 1986; Burnham 2002). As the public sector shrinks even the Black middle class is hard hit. This class is disproportionately employed in those government jobs most likely to be eliminated. More broadly, the economic crisis hits African Americans squarely because of the traditional deal cutting, fracturing of the working class along color and gender lines, and the whole history of labor strife and turmoil. Nonetheless, the situation is the tip of the iceberg with workers across racial categories being affected (Mies 1986; Simms and Malveaux 1986; Lusane 1997). Nonetheless, as Tabb aptly notes, “neoliberalism is widely understood, even by many mainstream economist and policy wonks, to have failed terms of its announced goals.” (Tabb 2003: 25.). He goes on to argue, It has not brought more rapid economic growth, reduced poverty, or made economies more stable. In fact, over the years of neoliberal hegemony, growth has slowed, poverty has increased, and economic and financial crises have been epidemic. The data on all of this are overwhelming. Neoliberalism has, however, succeeded as the class project of capital. In this, its unannounced goal, it has increased the dominance of transnational Corporations, international financiers, and sectors of local elites (2003: 25).

Stated in such unflinching terms, it is clear that without a progressive agenda that is linked to fundamental social transformation, the situation can only deteriorate. Given the transformation of the political economy in this technologically advanced capitalist economy, many older strategies are inade-

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quate to deal with the current realities. New struggles must be firmly embedded in a praxis expressing the interaction of culture, history, economy, race, class and gender. This complex interplay is not easily sorted out but is essential to public policies. We need movements for social change rooted in these complicated dynamics. The complexity of race, gender and class interactions suggest that our scholarship and activism must accomplish a number of theoretical and applied tasks that we are just beginning to be envisioned and acted upon.

Robin D.G. Kelley Looking B(l)ackward: 2097–19971

“Don’t try to speak. If you can hear me, blink your eyes.” The voice was faint but distinctive. Obviously a mature, learned man, though in the flood of bright lights he was little more than a brown silhouette. “Where am I? Who are you,” I asked, trying desperately to gather my bearings and sound intelligible. “You’re at University Hospital. How are you feeling?” “I feel fine. What am I doing in a hospital? I’m perfectly healthy.” It was true; I felt very good, indeed, as if I’d been vacationing in the Caribbean for three solid months. Given my usual pace, it had been a long time since I felt so rested and relaxed. “The matter is quite complicated,” the man replied. As my eyes adjusted to the light, the silhouette leaning over me became visible. He was an elegantly dressed black man, perhaps sixty years of age with salt and pepper hair closely cropped around his ears. He had a kind face, though his expression was one of obvious concern laced with heavy doses of curiosity. “You’ve just been roused from a deep sleep, or, more properly, a coma. So much I can tell you. Do you recall when you fell asleep?”

1 The tale you are about to read was inspired by Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward published in 1887. My apologies to the late Mr. Bellamy for shamelessly appropriating the structure of his fascinating book. The ideas contained in this essay, however, are my own and I take complete responsibility for all of them – including the most retrograde. Finally, many of the characters herein are fictitious and are not intended to resemble real persons living or dead. If they do, it is purely coincidental.

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“When?” I stammered, confused by the question. “When? Why just last evening, of course. I was attending a conference on Postraciality at the Crossroads of Signification – I think. I was on my way to a roundtable discussion on The Bell Curve but got turned around and couldn’t find the room. I don’t quite remember. In any case, there were two other sessions that caught my eye: one called “What’s the ‘Meta’ For? Narrative, Metanarrative and Constructing the Sign in Post Modern America,” the other titled “Deconstruct to Reconstruct, That’s all we Do.” I chose the latter, found a nice comfortable seat in the back of the room, and proceeded to doze off.” “I understand, Dr. Kelley. But if that’s your story, it wasn’t last night.” As he uttered these eerily familiar words, I was suddenly overcome with anxiety; I felt an asthma attack coming on. “How do you know my name, uh, Mr. . . .” “Legend. Ralph Legend. I’m a part-time instructor at the university and a part-time medical attendant – what they called in your day an ‘orderly.’ I know a great deal about your day because, like you, I’m a historian. My specialty is the mid to late 20th century, which isn’t very popular these days since everyone wants to work on the twenty-first. . . .” “Wait, hold on just a goddamn minute. I’m sure your life story is all that, but I need to know how long I’ve been sleeping. What day is it?” “Thursday,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to rest just a bit before we . . .” “The conference was on a Saturday, so does that mean I’ve been sleeping for five days?” “A bit longer than that, I’m afraid.” “More than a month?” “Longer. Please, Dr. Kelley; you need to preserve your strength. If you calm down I’ll tell you. Today is October 22 . . . 2097.” Though his words fell somewhere between a whisper and a mumble, the final sentence felt like a gunshot in a dark, soundproof room. Silence stood between us for what felt like fifteen minutes but was probably more like thirty seconds. “I know this is shocking and awkward, but I don’t know how else to tell you. Perhaps you might want to rest a bit before . . .” “Hell no,” I shouted, surprised at the tone of my own voice and my use of profanity – something I’ve never been very good at, by the way. “Tell me everything – and I mean everything, right here and now.” “Well, I’ve been following your case for the past thirty years. For several months back in 1995 you were in the news. The headlines read: ‘Promising

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young professor falls into a coma during academic conference.’ Just when you were about to fall out of the media, Charles Murray – you remember him, right – used you as the basis for his book The Negro Mind: A Case of National Distraction, in which he argued that members of racial groups with lower average IQ scores who make it into the ranks of the cognitive elite are incapable of processing so much knowledge. Either they fake their way through their careers, suffer emotional breakdowns or severe nervous disorders, or fall into a coma. Granted, your case was his only evidence, but the man won a Pulitzer nonetheless. “Anyway, you were eventually brought to the university and placed under observation. I discovered you because I wrote my thesis here at City Community University on Race and the rise of the Right at the turn of the century – the 21st century. Since nobody wanted to publish the thing and I couldn’t get a job, I ended up teaching one course a semester here at CCU and taking odd jobs to make ends meet. When I found out you had been relocated here, I took a position at the hospital so that I might be around if and when you woke up.” I couldn’t believe my ears. At first I thought it was some kind of a joke – asleep for 100 years? Be real! But as I carefully studied the hospital room and took notice of all the new technology, it quickly became clear that things were different. Once I realized it was not a joke, I became angry and resentful. I missed seeing my daughter grow up or my wife’s artistic career take off. I never had a chance to say goodbye to anyone in my family, not even my mother. And I never had the pleasure of seeing a book of mine reviewed in the NY Times. Nevertheless, my melancholy mood was quickly overtaken by curiosity: after all, I am, in essence, a 133-year-old time traveler with a rare opportunity to see the future. The doctors checked me out and released me that afternoon under Dr. Legend’s supervision. Legend kindly offered to show me around campus. At first I walked slowly, tentatively across the sprawling urban campus; although modern technology preserved my 33-year-old frame, my legs were still weak. Once I got my stride, Dr. Legend started to fill me in: “Alot has changed since your day,” he warned. “Black college students make up about one tenth of one percent of the undergraduate students nationally and an even smaller proportion of the graduate population. With the exception of English, the number of black faculty has dropped to about a fifteenth of what it was 100 years ago. To make matters worse, the Afro-American

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Studies Program here at City Community, and elsewhere, is now Balkanized into several different programs.” Dr. Legend gave me much more than I could absorb. After a few minutes I began to fade out, hearing bits and pieces of his narrative – none of which sounded uplifting or positive. Fifteen minutes later, we entered a tiny gray building in bad need of repair. “This is Asante Hall, the home of the Center for Africological Thought and Practice. The director, Dr. Muhammad Khalid Mansa Musa, usually has office hours about this time. He is pretty well known around these parts, does alot of media spots and holds the Distinguished Man of Kemet Chair in Africology. I should add, however, that all black faculty nowadays have chairs except for those of us who teach part-time.” Dr. Musa seemed genuinely pleased to see us. The place was dark and deserted and, besides himself, the only other live body in the building was his part-time secretary. And there were no students to be found anywhere. “I heard on the radio that you had finally been jolted out of your deep sleep,” he said as he extended his hand to greet me. “The ancestors work in mysterious ways.” Without skipping a beat, he proceeded to tell me about the strength and vision of Africology, generally, and his program, in particular. “We are out here in the community working with folks who buy our literature religiously. It’s these outside funds that keep us going, not the university but the street vendors. Unlike those other Negroes, always talking about difference and diversity within blackness, we know that the man sees only one type – Nigger – and we’ve been fighting for him to see us as Africans, noble and proud. Any scholars not down for the struggle, not writing about the history or liberation of the Black Man are worthless to us.” “With all due respect, Dr. Musa,” I interrupted, “that’s a very old debate. The pioneering black scholars practically had no choice but to devote their work to uplifting the race. But is that always the best place for them to be? Aren’t there some negative consequences to allowing skin color and ethnic allegiances to drive one’s scholarship?” I spoke with hesitation, surprised that people were still talking about such issues but cognizant of the fact that I hadn’t a clue as to what transpired over the course of the past century. “I beg to differ, my brother. You’re either with us or against us. If you don’t work on some aspect of our lives then you’re selling out.” “I’m not too sure,” I interjected. “I recall seeing something John Hope Franklin wrote a long time ago. An article titled “The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar. I read it in a collection of his essays published a couple years

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after I finished grad school, but it’s older – indeed, it predates Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.”2 “Now you’re digging into some old school shit!” blurted Dr. Legend, whose loss of composure surprised all of us. “I’m sorry gentlemen. I don’t know what came . . ., uh. Anyway, please continue.” “Thank you. Franklin was pointing out how difficult it was for black scholars to carry the burden of the entire race on their shoulders and how that kept many from pursuing important work in the fields in which they were trained. Do you have a copy of that book around here?” I asked. “Sure, we have everything on line or on the ECD system. ECD stands for Extremely Compact Disk. Let me pull it up real quick.” The new technology was fascinating. One subway-token sized disk had the capacity to hold an entire university library. In addition to the printed words, we had the benefit of hearing the text read aloud in the author’s voice, which had been digitally reconstructed through technology developed by a company called Da Lench Mob Electronics. Dr. Musa highlighted the text in question and pressed the return key. Magically, I was back in my own day listening to the eloquent voice of the Dean of Black History: Imagine, if you can, what it meant to be a competent Negro student of Greek literature, W.H. Crogman, to desert his chosen field and write a book entitled The Progress of a Race. Think of the frustration of the distinguished Negro physician C.V. Roman, who abandoned his medical research and practice, temporarily at least, to write The Negro in American Civilization. What must have been the feeling of the Negro student of English literature, Benjamin Brawley, who forsook his field to write The Negro Genius and other works that underscored the intellectual powers of the Negro? How much poorer is the field of the biological sciences because an extremely able and welltrained Negro scientist, Julian Lewis, felt compelled to spend years of his productive life writing a book entitled The Biology of the Negro.” 3

2 “The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar,” in Herbert Hill, ed., Soon One Morning: New Writing by American Negroes, 1940–1962 (New York, 1963). The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual by Harold Cruse (New York: Morrow, 1967). 3 John Hope Franklin, Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938–1988 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 299. The essay originally appeared as “The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar,” in Herbert Hill, ed., Soon One Morning (New York, 1963).

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“I see your point Dr. Kelley, but you completely misunderstand why these scholars made the decisions they did. Nobody held a gun to Benjamin Brawley’s head and told him to abandon English lit. He was committed to black freedom and made the proper sacrifice. Besides, where could he have studied Black Studies? Harvard? Howard? Come on, man! He had to invent it first.” “Yes,” I retorted, “but don’t you think we ought to work in all fields? Perhaps our collective experience gives us a different perspective on science, technology, European literature and art, etc.? Or maybe our experience does not give us any unique perspective on issues related to black people in the U.S. After all, you’re not suggesting that Africological insights are something we are born with or learn in our families and communities, right? If that were the case, why offer college classes and degrees?” Dr. Musa, who looked visibly agitated, started to tug on his kinte watchband. “You obviously missed alot while you were sleeping. We’re not the naive essentialists we’ve been made out to be. We insist that culture is learned, it isn’t biological. If it were, we’d be out of business. We believe that the best culture, the most liberating culture, existed before the European invasion. We’re trying to recover that and reconstruct it for the present generation. That has been our project over the past century plus. And you should know better than anyone that the work we do grows out of real deep historical scholarship, not guessing games or abstract theorizing. Go back and read the works of William Leo Hansberry or Cheikh Anta Diop or Frank Snowden.” I should have left it alone, but I couldn’t. One hundred years is a long time without an argument. “But Dr. Musa,” I interjected, “why does every useful thing have to always come out of Africa? What about the important contributions by black nationalist scholars who looked to the black experience in the United States, or the Americas more generally, for resistive and communitysustaining cultural values? I’m thinking about V.P. Franklin’s book Black SelfDetermination or John Langston Gwaltney’s Drylongso?4 Where do they fit in the paradigm you’re constructing?” Dr. Musa simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “I’m not familiar with those texts.”

4 V.P. Franklin, Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of African-American Resistance (Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1992, 2nd Ed.); John Langston Gwaltney, Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (Vintage Books: New York, 1981).

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“Yea,” Dr. Legend added, “they ought to be foundation texts but your predecessors couldn’t see the sand for the pyramids. The lefties were no better, though. As soon as black folk start talking about “us”, “our people,” “black aesthetic,” any of that, they start crying essentialism.” “Don’t get me wrong,” I added, trying to move our discussion to more institutional concerns, “I’m not arguing that the work Africologists do isn’t important, politically or otherwise. There are obvious benefits to your approach; in the past black leaders have been able to mobilize folks by invoking a sense of community, a sense of nationhood, and in so doing they have made tremendous strides toward improving their condition and transforming America. But judging from the current situation, you all obviously didn’t win. Why do you have such a small office, small staff, and from what I gather, an abysmal enrollment?” “I admit, we’ve made mistakes in the past. A century ago we were aware of declining enrollments and the assault on affirmative action, but we didn’t have a very good strategy to deal with it. We thought building independent schools and independent institutions within established universities would be a base of support. But not many of our people responded; see, they’re brainwashed and we need to set them straight. They need a trip to the East to see our heritage, to understand that we have a long tradition of learning dating back from Egyptian scientists to the Muslim clerics of West Africa. Modern Negroes are just. . . .” “Now hold on just a second, brother Musa,” chimed Dr. Legend. “Don’t forget that black enrollment declined because they could no longer get into college; they dismantled all efforts to recruit people of color; used test scores against us; and cut out all financial aid. Now college is the preserve of the white minority.” “What happened to the Black colleges?” I inquired, “like Morehouse and Spelman and Morgan State.” “You really want to know? Some became racially integrated colleges, the rest are behavior adjustment centers.” “Behavior adjustment?” The words struck me as both familiar and absurd. “Yes,” Dr. Legend responded, “we’ll talk about that later. At any rate, for the past three decades there have been fewer and fewer options for black High School grads. Even trade and technical schools have all but been abolished since there are no more trades to learn. Dr. Musa is right to say that the Africologists tried to establish independent schools for black folks, and it was

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a good strategy given the circumstances, but few could afford the tuition and those who could usually got their children into mainstream colleges.” “Running a school costs, you know,” added Dr. Musa. “So does running a program – and time is money. I must bid you good day, sirs. Thanks for stopping by.” Dr. Musa turned from us and stared coldly out the window. “You are quite fascinating,” he murmured, “even if you are possessed with a limited late 20th century understanding of the world. I wish you the best of luck readjusting to our society. Tuta o nana.” Dr. Legend gathered me up and together we walked next door to Stuart Hall, where the Program in Antiessentialist Black World Studies was housed. Instead of a single chair, the program was run by committee – each member representing a different voice, though the faculty was so small that certain individuals had to speak for multiple constituencies. Yet, everyone in the family of blackness was represented: Africans, West Indians, black Europeans, Afro-Canadians, black Pacific Islanders, women, men, gays, lesbians, ethnic and cultural hybrids, mulattos, intellectuals, poor people, middle-class Negroes – you name it. Unfortunately, their vast and inclusive definition of blackness was not accompanied by vast office space. The program had one main office, four tiny faculty offices, and a copying machine that they shared with Africology. The walls were adorned with beautiful art work and strikingly original posters. My favorite was from a conference titled, “‘She’s a Bricolage House: Art, Desire, and Black Female Sexuality.” “Dr. Kelley, allow me to introduce you to Dr. Patricia Post; she’s on faculty here in the Program and holds the RuPaul Chair in Black Culture/Gender Studies.” She was pleasant, though she looked tired and disheveled. As she explained to us, because of budget cuts, she and her colleagues had to teach overloads in order to cover the range of identities represented by the program. When I asked her if Dr. Musa’s program offered some of these courses, she scoffed. “The Africologists have written off the majority of black folk, and they certainly have no interest in the less flattering and more complicated aspects of black life. Do you know their story? Let me tell you.” She leaned toward me and began speaking in a low, conspiratorial tone. “Those guys might be broke now, but during the turn of the century with the rise of the Gingrich regime, their predecessors, the Afrocentrists, began getting huge government grants. Apparently, their militant defense of twoparent families, their judgements on homosexuality, their attacks on feminism and their emphasis on tradition earned them support from the “family

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values” conservatives. To be fair, not everyone under the banner of Afrocentrism advocated these conservative ideas, and the program directors felt rather uncomfortable taking money from an administration most African Americans opposed. Nevertheless, for a while there they were – as they used to say in the 1980s, “living large.” “Let’s be honest,” Dr. Legend interrupted. “Only a handful of Afrocentrists benefited back then, and most folks committed to an Afrocentric perspective – and there were many who did not always agree – bolted those government funded programs in a hurry. Indeed, the institutions became a shell of their former selves, and once their faculty and student body left or started protesting, the money dried up. The state dropped them like a teenage welfare mother.” As Dr. Legend continued to speak, I recalled my own era when the kind of scholarship Dr. Post promoted was hot and I, in my own way, was a part of it. “Things weren’t so bad for the antiessentialists in the 90s,” I pointed out. “We had a real renaissance in Black World Studies: it was the age of diversity within black politics, representations, sexualities; the age when NBA referred to basketball and the New Black Aesthetic; the age of black snap queens and Clarence Thomas; the age when the Whitney Museum could organize an exhibit on Blackmales and display Mapplethorpe’s work and not invite hardcore black nationalist artists like the AfroCobra collective; the age of the black British invasion; when Paul Gilroy appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Isaac Julien appeared on BET’s ‘Our Voices’ with Bev, and The Black Atlantic found a place on every hip person’s bookshelf. It was an age when intellectuals and artists really exploded the cultural straightjacket that has been blackness in the past. Those were exciting times.” For a moment there, I was giddy with nostalgia; that is, until Dr. Post burst my bubble. “You are right; those were relatively good times if you never left the auditorium, conference room, or movie theaters where those issues were being discussed. And don’t forget that, while black feminists were the wedge that opened up discussions of diversity within black communities, they were eased on out real quick. Blackmales became the main subject and blackmale scholars became the primary voices. The issue of sexuality, for instance, which black women – lesbian and straight – put out on the table, became largely a blackmale issue. Even the black British invaders – they were men for the most part. O.K., except for Hazel Carby . . . but she is but one.” “I see. So what happened after that,” I asked.

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“Like every other generation, black folks went out of style. The memoirs and films had become formulaic, and the really creative artists lost their foundation support with the new regime. Moreover, the really cutting edge scholarship became less and less comprehensible to readers beyond a small circle of academics.” “That’s true,” added Dr. Legend, “but they also messed up by not drawing on and acknowledging earlier intellectual traditions. Sure, they were all into DuBois and Hurston and the like – the usual suspects – but hardly anyone talked about Albert Murray. In the midst of the Black Power movement of the late 60s, Murray raised the issue of authenticity before some of the young lions of the 1980s and 90s had sex for the first time. Dr. Post, can you bring up The Omni-Americans on the monitor? Yes, page 97.” Suddenly, a simulated voice of Albert Murray began to read: Being Black is not enough to make anybody an authority on U.S. Negroes, any more than being white has ever qualified anybody as an expert on the ways of U.S. white people. It simply does not follow that being white enables a Southern sheriff, for instance, even a fairly literate one, to explain U.S. foreign policy, air power, automation, the atonality of Charles Ives, the imagery of Wallace Stevens, abstract expressionism, or even the love life of Marilyn Monroe. If it did, then it would also follow that the oldest and blackest Negro around would be the most reliable source of information about Africa, slavery, Reconstruction politics, the pathological effects of oppression, the tactics and strategies of civil rights organizations, the blues, championship sports competition, and the symbolic function of the stud horse principle (and the quest for the earth dark womb!) in interracial sexual relationships.5

“See what I’m saying!” shouted Dr. Legend. “You could go back further than that. How can anyone pick up a novel by Wallace Thurman or Countee Cullen or Zora and think black people had to wait ‘till the 1980s to discover there was more than one way to be ‘black.’ Besides, if students had been steadily reading Benjamin Brawley, W.E.B. DuBois, Amy Jacques Garvey, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Oliver Cox, or even Cedric Robinson, they would not have had to be told by Gilroy and others that black people – as labor, as thinkers,

5 Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1983, orig. 1970), 97–98.

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as bondsman, as rebels – were central to the rise of the modern West. The difference between the work of your generation, Dr. Kelley, and that of, say, DuBois and James, is that the former pretty much ignored political economy and reduced class to just another identity. It was as if scholars of your age wanted to study the construction of identities without exploring what these identities mean in terms of power and material access. As if identities have some kind of intrinsic meaning irrespective of specific structures of domination.” Dr. Legend’s intervention struck a chord in me, evoking more memories of my own age and my own students. The growing interest in the politics of identity has contributed immensely to contemporary debates in Black Studies. It has successfully extended our analytical scope to overlooked or trivialized cultural spheres and has expanded our understanding of intellectual history. At the same time, the focus on identity has sometimes tended to leave discussions of power at the discursive level. Factors such as political economy, labor, and the state are too often missing from recent treatments of the African diaspora. More significantly, very few scholars of my era – exceptions being Cedric Robinson, John Higginson, Penny Von Eschen, Vincent Harding, Peter Linebaugh, perhaps others – situate Black people in the larger world of revolutionary upheaval or pay attention to the role of Black labor in both reproducing capitalism and destabilizing economies and regimes. “You’re quite right,” I said to Dr. Legend. “In some respects it’s liberal pluralism repackaged. While celebrating difference and hybridity, many of those same scholars chastised black people for believing in a core black culture or for insisting that there is such a thing as a single black community. Rather than examine why the notion of a black community continues to carry weight among lots of ordinary people, why appeals to racial solidarity continue to work, most ‘antiessentialists’ criticize black nationalists for being wrong and for trading in fictions. Not that I’m against criticism, but we need to begin where people are rather than where we’d like them to be.” “I don’t disagree with either of you gentlemen,” said Dr. Post. “We’ve learned a lot over the past century and we’ve made efforts to rectify the problems you’ve outlined. You, especially, know this Dr. Legend, since you’ve taught in our program before. But it’s been a hard row. Most of our grad students are still driven by identity politics and seem to always want to speak from his/her standpoint rather than see larger structures and transformations. See for yourself; drop in on Dr. Cannon’s graduate seminar on the black

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body in servitude. In the meantime, I really must run. I have a meeting with the Dean about getting our own copying machine.” We all walked out together; Dr. Post scurried down the hall and we headed upstairs to the seminar. Dr. Legend informed me that Dr. Cannon’s course was once called “Slavery in the Antebellum South” but students protested to have the name changed. Dr. Cannon, a crusty old historian who fought hard as a young scholar to break down disciplinary boundaries and to “invigorate” his discipline by promoting cultural studies, decided to throw his students off a bit by assigning an ancient text titled Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made.6 (The students recognize the author as the late neo-conservative theorist who served as top advisor for the Gingrich administration.) But Dr. Cannon doesn’t care about the author’s politics; he still considers it a masterpiece of scholarly work on slavery – I mean, servitude. “First of all,” announces one of the first year grads, “the book is too long. He could have said this in 150 pages. More importantly, the author says almost nothing about sexuality, and when he does he reveals his heterosexist biases. The master’s obvious homoerotic desire for the black male body, for example, goes completely unexplored. After all, isn’t this why they used chains and whips instead of other forms of punishment? They had other kinds of punitive technologies available to them – why chains and whips?” “I don’t know,” adds another young voice, “I think he’s saying something about the interdependence of the slave and master – the construction of the master’s identity is dependent on the slave and vice versa. I’m not too sure about that; they each have autonomous cultures, and within those cultures are a vast array of differences. If we just took the so-called ‘slave community’ itself, how can we call it a community given distinctions by age, sex, sexual orientation, division of labor, skin color, etc. And when we take these factors into account, we can’t talk about a uniform ‘desire.’ Desire is not only socially constructed but can only be understood through the individual psyche, for it manifests itself in a variety of different ways in different people.” “Hold on,” interjected the aging professor. “I know this might sound absurd, but bare with me. Maybe the primary reason they enslaved these people was to work on the plantation. Maybe they’re interdependent because the master’s lifestyle depends on slaves picking cotton, which is then sold, on the

6 Roll, Jordan, Roll; the World the Slaves Made by Eugene D. Genovese (New York, Pantheon Books 1974 Edition [1st ed.]).

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market? Maybe the whips and chains were used to discipline the labor force?” “What’s with the crass economism, Dr. Cannon!? By emphasizing production over reproduction, you are privileging males and thus silencing black women’s voices. . . .” I heard it all before; it reminded me so much of my own seminars’ past that I began to feel a bit homesick for 1995. Besides, for all the absurdity embodied in that exchange, from the ridiculously limited psychosexual reading of slavery to Dr. Cannon’s unrestrained sarcasm, my students taught me that identity mattered. Scholarly discussions like these not only allowed them to grapple with their own multiple identities, in some respects they succeeded in humanizing the people they studied. By making slaves sexual beings, they cease to be just labor producing profits for the big house. Their interventions, then, are quite useful, so long as they avoided creating hierarchies among different identities and remained true to the historical moment of which they speak. Thinking about my students and colleagues made me a little queasy. Dr. Legend escorted me outside into the sunlit courtyard behind Stuart Hall, where I took a minute or two to rest. As it was already late afternoon and we had one last program to visit, we decided to get going as soon as possible. Unlike the Programs in Africology and Antiessentialist Black World Studies, the Urban Underclass Institute had its own building and was located on the other side of campus. Indeed, W.J. Wilson Hall was spectacular – fifteen stories, red brick, huge picture windows in each office, lavish furniture. After the security guards frisked us, we proceeded to the main office on the twelfth floor where we were greeted by an army of secretaries and assistants. “Dr. Thomas, there are two gentlemen here to see you. He’ll be out in just a moment.” A moment passed and out walked a clean-shaven, bespectacled man in his late forties, attired in an elegant tailor-made sharkskin gray suit. Dr. Legend stepped forward to make the formal introductions. “Dr. Kelley, this is the Institute’s director Dr. Souless Thomas; Dr. Thomas, meet Dr. Kelley.” “My pleasure, indeed. I read about you in Charles Murray’s book. I don’t agree with all of his assumptions, but he was a heck of a smart guy.” Suddenly, I felt very uncomfortable; I had an overwhelming desire jump through the large bulletproof picture window behind his desk to see if it would lead me back to 1995. Dr. Legend probably sensed my discomfort but

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he did not make any gestures to leave. Instead he flashed a wide grin, letting me know that he found my suffering amusing. “I have a million questions for you,” announced Dr. Thomas. “What was it like in those days? Were you an affirmative action baby? Glad we got rid of that atrocious policy; too many of our people slid by in those days. Did Bill Clinton ever reveal his membership in the Republican Party? Did you ever run into the great thinkers of that era – Steele, Loury, Clarence Pendleton, Alan Keyes, Ken Hamblin? What was Clarence Thomas really like? You know I hold the Clarence Thomas chair in Economics, right?” I thought I was going to throw up all over Dr. Thomas’s $1500 wing tips. He not only brought out the worst in me, but he kept insisting on putting his arm around my shoulder as if we were old friends. I tried hard to be polite. “I read about those people,” I responded, “but never met any of them. Besides, that’s all in the past. I’m very curious as to what you all do at the Urban Underclass Institute. When was it founded? Is it mainly a think tank, a research institution, do you teach classes here?” “We train some graduate students, but we mainly conduct research on the underclass and develop government policy for dealing with this deviant population. We started out as a group of neoconservative black economists with similar research interests; the group then expanded into a full-fledged institute after we merged with the Department of Criminology and the School of Genetic Engineering. That, my friend, turned out to be a great move; we shifted from econometrics and regressions to applied technology.” “Applied technology? You mean in terms of actually creating jobs? Improving security? Providing better systems of transportation for urban residents? What do you mean?” I asked. “Oh no!,” he chuckled a bit, taken aback by the questions. “Nothing of the sort. By applied technology I’m speaking of behavior modification.” The way the words rolled out of his mouth . . . it was chilling, pure evil. When Dr. Legend first mentioned “behavior modification” centers, I thought he was half-joking, an inside reference to the ways historically black colleges emphasized deportment and manners. Or perhaps I had misunderstood him. Now it was all coming to light. “You see,” Dr. Thomas continued, “as we’ve been saying all along, what distinguishes the underclass from the rest of society is their behavior. By “they”, however, I don’t mean black people exclusively, though they are still

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in the majority; the underclass consists of Hispanics as well as whites, especially the growing number of refugees from the European ethnic wars. These people are dysfunctional in every respect – they’re violent, nihilistic, grow up in deficient families, and have no desire to do an honest day’s work. And before the abolition of welfare, they were addicted to the government dole. Soon after they were cut off, the crime rate skyrocketed. We turned to the most logical solution: since behavior was the problem we needed to figure out a way to change their behavior. “At first, we tried compulsory national service. We sent young men and women from the inner cities (clearly the most criminal element) to work camps where specially trained staff tried to teach them the ways of civilization. It didn’t work; they constantly complained and whined about the way they were treated, their pay, the food, the uniforms, the long hours, the discipline, the armed guards, the barbed wire. We then realized that true behavior modification requires some kind of physiological alteration. The answer was right in front of our eyes, locked away in the primitive simplicity of the frontal lobotomy. So, with the help of engineers and biochemists, we declared chemical warfare on the worst neighborhoods in the country. Through a combination of chemicals and high frequency radio waves that the human ear cannot detect – you know how those people are; they have a thing for the low frequencies – we’ve discovered a method of altering the behavior of the poor. For the time being, the system is called Behavior Adjustment Technology or BAT. Within minutes of experiencing BAT, they become kind, patient, forgiving, and passive. And their moral index has risen at least 40 points. This method has turned the coldest homeboy into a model citizen – a better gentleman than myself, I might add. Ha, ha, ha! That’s a good one. A better gentleman than myself. I must tell my wife that one. . . .” I couldn’t believe my ears. My anger turned to utter confusion; I became numb. “So, you’ve eliminated poverty?” I asked, searching desperately for some silver lining in this dark cloud of human manipulation. “Eliminated poverty? What? Oh, no, Dr. Kelley. That was never our intent. If we solved the problem of poverty, what would we do for a living? But let’s look on the bright side, my friend: they may be poor but they have wonderful dispositions. Right now, BAT is still experimental and has only been used in California. We’re poised to implement BAT throughout the rest of the country, but our attorneys advised us to hold off for fear of being sued by the private security industry for taking away their livelihood.”

148 • Robin D.G. Kelley

Was this the world we helped create, either by our active participation or our silence? Were we so ill-equipped politically and intellectually as to relinquish our basic right to humanity? What good is Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, any sort of Humanistic studies in a world where our actions can be altered with the press of a button or a flip of a switch? If this the fate of humanity, where were our scholars when it was time to respond? My head began to tighten up, the 12th floor of Wilson Hall spun madly out of control. A dissonant cacophony of ringing cash registers and blood curdling screams grew louder and louder, becoming so unbearable it brought me to my knees, pulling me beneath the floorboards. Down, down, down I fell, into a vast, enveloping darkness, a pitch-black abyss. . . . “Robin, time to go. Wake up, it’s show time. You don’t want to disappoint the students.” I knew that voice; it belonged to Wahneema Lubiano, the brilliant Duke University professor whose work on race and American culture has moved Black Studies to yet another level. Slowly I opened my eyes, afraid that I’d see nothing but darkness, or worse. To the contrary, I woke from my slumber to find that only a few minutes had passed, not the century of my nightmare. Before me stood the most beautiful sight I’d seen since the birth of my daughter. It was like the final scene in “Brother from Another Planet.” Dozens and dozens of men and women, intellectuals with the brilliance, vision, and a political commitment to create a different future for Black Studies. Alongside Wahneema stood Patricia Williams, Kendall Thomas, Elizabeth Alexander, Nahum Chandler, Tera Hunter, Tricia Rose, Elsa Barkley Brown, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Craig Watkins – over there, Evelyn Hammonds and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Earl Lewis, Kimberle Crenshaw, Robert O’Meally, Saidiya Hartmann, Michael Eric Dyson, Rodney Coates, Adam Green, George Lewis, behind them stood Peter Linebaugh, Penny Von Eschen, Jerma Jackson, Philip Brian Harper, Guy Ramsey, George Lipsitz, Michael Awkward, Charles Payne, Joe Trotter, Grant Farred; there’s Gina Dent, and Brenda Stevenson, Tiffany Patterson, V.P. Franklin, Julie Saville, Michael Hanchard, Clarence Lusane, Denise Herd, Jerry Watts, bell hooks, Julius Scott, Kevin Gaines, Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Dwight Andrews, Chana Kai Lee, Barbara Ransby, Sid Lemelle, Linda Reed, Adolph Reed, David Roediger, Tyler Stovall, David Anthony, Kobena Mercer; outside the Ivy walls stood Lisa Jones, Lisa Sullivan, James Spady, Greg Tate, Crystal Zook, Arthur Jafa, Joe Wood, Thelma Golden; poised in the background were dozens upon dozens grad students bold enough to stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, elders, and mentors –

Looking B(l)ackward: 2097–1997 • 149

DuBois, Cox, Frazier, Herskovitz, Cayton, Drake, Allison Davis, Alaine Locke, Lorraine Williams, Charles Wesley, Dorothy Porter, Louise Kennedy, Anna Julia Cooper, John Hope Franklin, Carter Woodson, Walter Rodney, Baraka, Zora Neale Hurston, Leon Forrest, Gwendolyn Brooks, West, Morrison, Baker, Gates, Arnold Rampersad, Tom Holt, Darlene Clark Hine, Manning Marable, Mary Berry, Nell Painter, Nellie McKay, Robert Farris Thompson, Nathan Huggins, David Levering Lewis, Anthony Appiah, June Jordan, Hortense Spillers, Stuart Hall, ad infinitum. . . . Before me stood an endless sea of faces whose contributions to our work have been invaluable, faces gracious enough to forgive me for not mentioning their names and thoughtful enough to know that I’m running out of space. As I stand here, on the cusp of yesterday and tomorrow, looking out into the beautiful faces of my colleagues and future colleagues, I feel confident that the future of Black Studies/Afro-American Studies/Africana Studies, whatever we decide to call it, is secure and that there are enough sane, committed, brilliant intellectuals among us to put up a good fight against the right-wing, racist onslaught we now face. They will remain suspicious of liberal pluralism dressed up in postmodern garb, of analyses that completely ignore history or questions of power, of narrow identity politics that presumes people are the sum total of our academic categories, of the tendency to limit our critiques of people’s actions to moral chastisement. And I know for a fact that these folks will continue to Look B(l)ackward for sources of inspiration and insight, for it is only by looking back that we can make sense of where we are and how we got here. Before we dismiss various schools of thought within this larger matrix we call Black Studies, we need to pay attention to the ancestors and know what they were talking about.

Race Across Space

Charles Gallagher Transforming Racial Identity Through Affirmative Action

I think that it [affirmative action] is the worst thing that was ever invented. I mean, guess I can understand in my parent’s generation . . . but to get a job because you need to reach certain quota, I don’t think it’s fair. Tom, 20-year-old white male Like as far as I’m concerned, this affirmative action to me didn’t make no sense. Cause nobody gave my grandfather a break because he couldn’t speak English. Carmen, 54 year white butcher I think there is still a need for it because people are just so bigoted, still and it’s horrible and I guess there is a need for it still, unfortunately. Laura, 19-year-old white female

Throughout my interviews with white respondents from across the country the most incendiary, divisive and contradictory exchange concerning race in America ensued when the issue of affirmative action was raised. Respondents who had been reticent throughout an interview or focus group discussion suddenly came to life, arguing forcefully about the need for, or more typically, the inherent unfairness of, affirmative action. Indeed the discussion about affirmative action has been the center of a heated national debate in the media and most recently in the Supreme Court.

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Proponents of race based policies to increase representation of historically underrepresented groups in the nation’s elite schools and halls of power argue that such programs are still necessary because racism and discrimination at the individual and institutional level are still very much a part of how America does business. Detractors of such policies argue that affirmative action violates meritocractic norms, stigmatizes its recipients and creates a culture of victimization.1 One of the latent consequences of affirmative action policies has, however, been overlooked. Many of my white respondents were forced to think of themselves as consciously occupying a specific place in America’s racial hierarchy in a new and troubling way. Having to think about affirmative action made whiteness both visible and a salient category of identification. This chapter explores the range of responses to affirmative action with a particular focus on how this policy had the effect of pushing whiteness, to various degrees, to the forefront as a social identity. Being white was made visible and concrete as an identity when respondents spoke of the inherent threat affirmative action posed to their livelihood or when they discussed the ideological convictions they use to refute or support race based social policies. The illustrations respondents used to defend their position on this topic were quite diverse: Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as a call for a color blind nation; stories of immigrant grandparents like Carmen’s, who “made it” without the help of the government; and those like Laura who were aware that racial discrimination would continue if affirmative action measures were scrapped. It would seem, given the wide variation in respondents’ views on affirmative action and the larger issues affirmative action invokes, that no common theoretical linkage between affirmative action and the explicit construction of a white racial identity exists. This was not, however, the case. Regardless of the respondents’ position, affirmative action forced a majority of my white respondents to think about their own racial identity in relational terms as they considered whether whiteness was or was not a social and economic liability. Regardless of their views on affirmative action respondents were forced to think about their own race the extent to which white privilege does or does not exist. Ruth Frankenberg suggests that 1 For a detailed discussion of see Carol Swain, “Affirmative Action: Legislative History, Judicial Interpretations, Public Consensus” in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences edited by Neil Smelser, William J. Wilson and Faith Mitchell (National Research Council, 2001); Jennifer Hochschild, “Affirmative Action as Cultural War” in The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries edited by Michele Lamont (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

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“whiteness is a ‘standpoint’, a location from which to see selves, others, and national and global orders.”2 This standpoint is made visible to whites as they are forced to address the relational nature of racial categories explicit in debates over affirmative action. This paper draws on interviews conducted with 147 white respondents from around the country on the political and cultural meaning that whites attach to their race. While my sample is not necessarily representative of the 200 million whites in the United States, I was able to interview males and females and individuals from various regions and socio-economic backgrounds. My intention here is not to conduct an exhaustive review of the varied reasons why whites support or reject affirmative action measures. The debate over affirmative action may, as Hochschild points out, be “more symbolic than substantive”3 but the debate also has the effect of emphasizing a “sense of group position” as groups clash over resources. It is this facet of affirmative action, how racial identify is transformed through contestation of symbolic issues and the prerogatives of whites, that I wish to address.

From Reverse Discrimination Against Whites to White Racism Respondents’ views on affirmative action fell into three broad and often overlapping interpretations as typified in the epigraph. Tom and Carmen fell into the largest category, expressing similar beliefs that charges of racism were cliched and anachronistic because equal opportunity had been extended to everyone regardless of their race. Tom’s parents’ generation may have had a need for affirmative action but such prescriptions have degenerated into quotas and they are, as Tom sees it, not “fair.” Many other respondents argued that the hand of the market is now colorblind and therefore affirmative action is a “problem” for because based upon their experiences race no longer plays a role in who employers “hire or fire.” If the selection process is now colorblind, as the argument was often given, then affirmative action policies are no longer needed. Respondents in this category emphasized that merit should be the sole criteria for securing employment or acceptance into college. Tiffany sums up 2 Ruth Frankenberg, “Mirage of An Unmarked Whiteness” in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, edited by Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Erik Klineberg, Irene Nexica and Matt Wray (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 76. See also Bonilla-Silva (2003) and Gallagher (2003). 3 Hochschild, p. 350.

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what was the most common response about affirmative action: “You should hire who’s best whether they’re black, white or purple.” For this group, affirmative action was viewed as an illegitimate demand because social equality and equal opportunity were understood as now being the norm. Based on these beliefs, a majority of white respondents in my study rejected affirmative action policies. As these white respondents saw it, affirmative action violated a fundamental tenet of the American Creed which endorses a meritocracy and the almost sacrosanct belief in individual rights over group rights. If racial discrimination was now an illegal practice respondents associated with their parents’ or grandparents’ generation, then government involvement in hiring or college admissions was viewed as an unwarranted and unnecessary form of social engineering. In its most extreme form affirmative action became synonymous with reverse discrimination or racism towards whites. The race-as-liability perspective by necessity requires whites to reframe and construct an identity that revolves around racial membership and identify. The second category of respondents supported affirmative action measures conditionally. Barb, a twenty year old, middle class college student explained: . . . If you had two people with the same records and all and you needed somebody for, not a quota, but if it came down to that and the only difference was, you know, what race they were, this and that, but they were equal in all other respects, I mean I think that’s fine.

Barb explains that if candidates were equally matched “in all other respects,” then race could be the final and deciding factor for employment. In this narrowly defined, all-things-equal scenario, race is the grain of sand that tips employment opportunities in the direction of racial minorities. The final category, represented by Laura’s comment in the epigraph, were those respondents who felt that racism, discrimination and bigotry were still so embedded in American culture and social institutions that affirmative action measures were the only way to achieve racial parity. This group however was quite small. Respondents in each of these categories were required to move from an understanding of whiteness that was often invisible or benign background information to one where their racial membership and identity had a multiplicity of meanings. Omi and Winant define racial formation as the “process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed and destroyed.”4 4 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in The United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, second edition (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 55.

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For many white respondents in my study what appeared to be taking place around racially charged issues like affirmative action was a transformation of their own racial identity. Being white was transformed from being a background, benign and most times invisible social category to one that took on both symbolic and concrete meaning. Respondents were obliged to think about themselves in terms of racial group membership rather than being “just” an individual. Consequently, many respondents came to define themselves or at least understand their placement in America’s racial hierarchy as being white in relation to being black or Asian. This understanding, as Blumer puts it, “refers to the position of group to group, not to that of individual to individual.”5 Being white and a member of a group that occupies a position in a racial hierarchy were linked in three ways; respondents defined what being white meant to themselves, what it meant in relation to other races, and the ideological convictions they use to support or reject their position on affirmative action.

Affirmative Action: An American Paradox Lillian Rubin defines affirmative action as “the series of programs that were designed to make up for past discrimination by giving minorities and women preference in hiring and education.”6 I use Rubin’s definition because it does not attempt to obscure the intent and justification for affirmative action behind legalese or language that minimizes the ideological controversy affirmative action evokes. Her definition employs two concepts that are generally understood by most Americans and the majority of my respondents as being central to affirmative action: “past discrimination” and “preference.” The way respondents view the extent to which past and present discrimination explains current racial inequality and the degree to which race based preference is needed to “level the playing field” raise thorny questions about how notions of “fairness” should be defined. The extent to which respondents perceive society as being equitable depends less on their knowledge about income and wealth disparities and more on their perceptions of economic mobility and political ideology. 5 Herbert Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position”, The Pacific Sociological Review, Volume 1, No. 1, Spring, 1958, p. 5. See also Cornell and Hartmann on the way government policy shapes racial and ethnic identity construction. 6 Lillian Rubin, Families on the Fault Line: America’s Working Class Speaks About the Family, the Economy, Race and Ethnicity (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 204.

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The American Creed as summed up by Myrdal calls for “liberty, equality, justice, and fair opportunity for everybody.”7 However, the “everybody” in Myrdal’s summation of the American Creed is understood culturally as a collection of individuals having rights that are not extended to groups. Affirmative action, depending on how one views the current state of racial inequality and access to opportunity, pits the belief in individual agency against structural forces that continue to make race an important component of social mobility. Lipset points out that “inconsistencies in American racial attitudes point to a deep contradiction between two values at the core of the American Creed: individualism and egalitarianism.”8 Various studies confirm the anxious coexistence between the almost universal belief that equal opportunity should be afforded to all Americans regardless of skin color and the resistance to using group membership as a means to ameliorate inequalities rooted in past and present racial discrimination. Sniderman and Piazza argue that Americans accept “color-blindness” at least in the abstract, but “what they balk at is race consciousness, in the form of affirmative action, quotas, setasides, and other instances of preferential treatment for blacks.”9 It is not a racial bias or methodological oversight that causes Sniderman and Piazza to link affirmative action measures specifically to blacks. In my interviews affirmative action was almost universally linked to blacks. A few respondents, particularly females, discussed affirmative action in terms of gender but overwhelmingly the face of affirmative action was black. According to the colorblind perspective, whites do not object to blacks per se but to the privilege given to group rights and group based solutions over the rights of individuals. Lipset explains that “many whites deeply resent [affirmative action] not because they oppose racial equality, but because they feel these measures violate their individual freedom.”10 The classic liberalism of individual rights and limited government has been challenged by “interest group” liberalism that calls for government intervention in social and economic concerns.11 Objections to race based solutions, it is argued, are less 7 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), p. xlviii. 8 Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: a Double Edged Sword (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), p. 128. 9 Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scar of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 32. 10 Lipset, p. 128. 11 Edward Carmines and W. Richard Merriman Jr., “The Changing American Dilemma: Liberal Values and Racial Policies” in Prejudice, Politics and the American Dilemma,

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about racism and more a “function of a general antagonism to statism and a preference in the American value system.”12 Within this view, affirmative action, far from creating racial equality comes to be defined by white Americans as “Jim Crow’s cousin.” In large part this negation of affirmative action programs by whites is based on two beliefs; that labor market discrimination is a thing of the past, and the perception that affirmative action is tantamount to reverse discrimination. The former claim suggests that hard work, individual responsibility and self-reliance are the ingredients needed for social mobility. Race need no longer limit life chances if individuals are willing to embrace the American version of the Protestant work ethic. The latter claim downplays the effects of racial discrimination while implying affirmative action is to whites’ economic detriment. Citing various national studies of whites’ views on affirmative action sociologist Orlando Patterson reports that: Repeated surveys indicate that no more than 7% of Americans of European heritage claim to have been adversely affected by affirmative action programs, and it has been shown that affirmative action reduces the chances of whites getting into top colleges by only 1.5 percentage points.13

A 2001 Kaiser Foundation Study found that a majority of whites 71% believe that blacks have “about the same” or “more” opportunities “in life as whites have”, 42 percent of whites replied that blacks were “just about as well off as the average white person.” while over a quarter of the white population believe there is only little or no discrimination directed at African Americans. Not surprisingly one third of the white population would decrease affirmative action programs.14 David Wellman found that whites tend to look for individualistic explanations of inequality rather than addressing the possibility that the economic and social structure might be fundamentally flawed. By using individualistic explanations over structural ones, whites are able to point a finger at socially disadvantaged groups and blame individuals in those groups and not the system that produced those inequalities. White Americans, Wellman

edited by Paul Sniderman, Philip Tetlock and Edward Carmines (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 12 Lipset, p. 143. 13 Orlando Patterson, Affirmative Action: The Sequel, The New York Times, Section 4, p. 11, Sunday, June 22, 2003. 14 The Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University, Race and Ethnicity in 2001: Attitudes, Perceptions and Experiences, August 2001.

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explains, must go through a number of social-psychological contortions to explain away persistent racial inequality while holding on to their beliefs in equal access to opportunity. He writes: America’s official version of itself is rooted in the value of egalitarianism, Americans must still justify or explain their social location using terms that do not contradict the nation’s self-conception.15

Racial amnesia and the new language of racial victimization have allowed many whites to claim that society has finally killed Jim Crow. The belief among whites that racial equality is now the norm because discrimination is illegal results in what Kluegel and Smith call the “logic of opportunity syllogism.” Since opportunity is available to all regardless of color and hard work is rewarded, then any program or policy that gives preference to a group based on skin color or gender is inherently unfair.16 The underlying belief here is that the system of economic and social stratification is, for the most part, colorblind. Kluegel and Smith argue that: the premise that affirmative action programs are necessary to equalize opportunity for blacks requires that whites believe that the stratification system currently does not provide equal opportunity for all persons or groups.17

Thus, a majority of whites believe that discrimination based on race no longer creates the almost insurmountable obstacles to black economic mobility that it once did. Black Americans’ civil rights are protected by law, a visible black middle class has emerged and black media superstars appear nightly in white America’s living rooms. As much of white America now sees it, equality of opportunity and equality of results for blacks are one and the same. “An American Dilemma” has been downgraded by many whites to “An American Annoyance” and for those most optimistic about race relations it is better described as “An American Success Story”. It is within this exchange about affirmative action that my respondents were required to think about core American values and fairness as it related to individual versus group rights. Many respondents held what would appear 15 David T. Wellman, Portraits of White Racism, second edition (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 224. 16 James R. Kluegel and Eliot R. Smith, Beliefs About Inequality (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1986). 17 James R. Kluegel and Eliot R. Smith, “Affirmative Action Attitudes: Effects of Self-Interest, Racial Affect and Stratification Beliefs on Whites’ Views” in Social Forces, Volume 61:3, March 1983, p. 801.

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to be almost schizophrenic beliefs about the embeddedness of racial discrimination and equal opportunity. What emerged from this confusion were competing versions of US race relations. On one hand numerous studies and highly publicized events (the Rodney King beating, race-based class action law suits against large corporations like Coke and Denny’s, racial profiling) indicate that discrimination at every level of society still exists. On the other hand, a growing and visible black middle class and black celebrities worshipped by young whites (Colin Powell, black and brown sports and music figures) provide counter examples that the system of rewards in the United States is based on individual achievement. Whites’ investment in a system based on a colorblind meritocracy is supported by social research. National polling data suggests that whites believe that the economic system in the United States stratifies people according to their abilities and not their race. In an ideally “colorblind” society affirmative action would undermine our meritocractic system by emphasizing group membership and, as is often argued, advancing unqualified blacks at the expense of whites. The result may be a sense of white victimization that underscores racial identity. Jaynes and Williams make the point that “black activism to advance group position may have played an important role in raising group consciousness among many whites.”18 The effects of economic and social competition on racial identity construction seem to be linked. My interviews and the focus groups clarify this linkage.

Affirming Whiteness through Affirmative Action Discussions regarding affirmative action tapped a wide range of deeply embedded cultural beliefs. The first and smallest category were those respondents who defended affirmative action. They provided examples of racial discrimination they had encountered or recounted the discriminatory attitudes and opinions of white friends and family. Ken’s experiences on campus led him to believe that some white people: just really don’t like black people – don’t like how their attitudes are and really are totally against them. They don’t like how they act or their way of speech and really just totally exclude them.

18 Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, Jr., A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989), p. 153.

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Ken believes the reason for this is that many whites feel that black students are affirmative action “admits” because they generally lack the intellectual abilities necessary to gain admittance to college. Ken explains that many whites believe that affirmative action lowers academic standards, increases white economic resentment and that what he sees as institutional meddling all serve to inflame racial antagonisms. As he puts it: Like, some people think blacks really can’t comprehend or that they are not as capable or some people think that just because they are black they get a free ride here and they’re just being asked to come here and sit there and make the school look good, make it look like an ethnically balanced school.

From his own experience Ken thinks these beliefs are “ridiculous” because “most of the people I’ve met here seem like they ought to be here [at the college he attends]. They seem to know what they are doing.” Later in the interview he explained that if blacks receive more scholarships it is because “black students’ families can’t afford it because they don’t have the jobs like some of the white people do so they can’t afford it.” Ken rejects the colorblind logic that is the basis for many whites’ rejection of affirmative action. For Ken, class, race and life chances are linked; a good job means the ability to send your children to college. Ken implies that whiteness is bound up in certain privileges associated with being a member of the dominant racial group. Ken analysis also requires him to think about his own whiteness in relation to other racial groups. Discussing her views on the extent to which race relations have changed since the passage of the Civil Rights legislation in the 1960’s Laura argues that: . . . there is still a need for it [affirmative action] because people are just so bigoted, still and it’s horrible and I guess there is a need for it still, unfortunately.

Several respondents defended affirmative action policies on the grounds that discrimination against racial minorities was serious enough to warrant government intervention. For these respondents, group rights were legitimately advanced because a major tenet of the American Creed guaranteeing equal opportunity had not been realized. The majority of respondents however believed that the United States was truly a colorblind society. As Michelle a nineteen-year-old college student frames this issue this way:

Transforming Racial Identity Through Affirmative Action • 163 Uh, I think it’s [affirmative action] a problem. It’s a problem. I don’t think that people hire and fire because someone is black and white now. I don’t see it happening from my experience. I don’t think people hire and fire people just because you’re black or because you’re white. I really don’t.

For those who believe we have matured into a colorblind society like Michelle, race-based preferences are viewed as a violation of Myrdal’s call for “fair opportunity for everybody.”19 Chrissy, a 33-year old hair stylist at a pricey salon in a large southern city also felt that race no longer was used as a sorting mechanism in the labor market. She explains that: In my opinion I think privilege are earned. I don’t really see, I see things really changing. As far as becoming more equal, around me, people get what they earn. I see people working hard and getting what they deserve not because they are white or black.

It did not go unnoticed that no blacks or Latinos worked at Chrissy’s salon where hair cuts start at $65 and it is not unheard of to spend over $200 for professional hair coloring and tinting. Drawing on how race relations have changed Monica explains why she is against affirmative action: I don’t think it’s fair. I could see back when they first started it that they needed it. But I don’t think they need it now. I think people have come a long way since then. I think all the backgrounds have come a long way to where they don’t need it any more. Basically everyone has equal opportunity to get a certain job, to get into a certain school and now it should be based on your performance and not for what you are.

As I was told repeatedly, color should not be part of the college or job selection process. Rather it should be the most “qualified” or the “best” person for the job. Skin color becomes the basis for what Monica sees as an unfair process where she is mistreated because of her race. Monica is forced to think about the opportunity structure as it applies to racial groups in a relational way where whites are included in her calculus. For many, the whole discussion regarding the need for affirmative action

19 Robert Staples defines color blind theory as being one that “has as its main premise that after 365 years of slavery and legal segregation, only 25 years of governmental laws and actions were necessary to reverse the historical systematic and legalized segregation and inequality in this country, and no further remedial effort is needed” from “The Illusion of Racial Equality” in Lure and Loathing (New York: Penguin Press, 1993), p. 230.

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was a moot point. As Abbie explains, the 1990’s are the decade of colorblind opportunity. Reflecting on these changes Abbie contends: I don’t see people losing their jobs because they’re black. Like things that happened and people getting lower kinds of jobs because they’re black. I don’t see that any more. This is the 90’s and I think things have totally changed and nobody should be upset about their past.

Abbie came of age in the late 1980s and does not have any first hand accounts of an institutionally segregated America or the civil rights movement. For her, these events are part of a distant, blurry history but interestingly enough, a history that blacks should not be “upset” about. Respondents raised the idea that history is disconnected to the current state of race relations several times. Rejecting any complicity in our “peculiar institution” Anna explains that in terms of American slavery “you can’t blame me. None of my relatives owned slaves so why should I be singled out for that.” In this exchange Mary explains that her black counterparts at the university she attended are no longer connected to racial oppression nor should her white cohort be held accountable for past racist actions. That’s what bothers me. They say we have been oppressed. They have not. The students here right now have not been oppressed. They have not experienced the Watts riot; they didn’t experience physically being hosed down by police. Granted, the white population was responsible for that but we are not. We are not responsible. Therefore, we should not be put out because of that. We didn’t do it. We’re not doing it now, therefore they have no right to say, well, we’ve been oppressed.

Mary’s generation should not be “put out” because race, it was said, no longer determines social and economic outcomes. If respondents’ black contemporaries cannot claim victim status because they are generationally removed from Jim Crow, whites can contend that white privilege is also a thing of the past. This point was raised several times when respondents pointed to how much race relations have changed. As was noted in a previous exchange, several respondents believed that discrimination, racial inequality and the lack of access to opportunity was fully addressed in the 1960’s. As Jason put it, “why it is still such a problem when everything is like over and done with since like the 60’s.” Joe criticized blacks that use the past to complain about their lack of mobility today. As he sees it:

Transforming Racial Identity Through Affirmative Action • 165 . . . they don’t know what in the world happened back in the 50’s and the 40’s with slavery. They’re just going on what they read in books, you know, what their great, great, great-grandparents have been passing down. They have nothing to do with what happened back then. I don’t know why they have to keep bringing it up, you know, keep causing stuff – well, we were slaves. You weren’t a slave. Your great, great, great, great, great, great-grandparents were slaves. There is no reason to cause a fight now. You know, like Michael Jordan is like one of the highest paid athletes in the sports business. . . . He gets paid more than the president. Michael Jackson. Look at his house. You know. You’re black, you’re white, you’re Hispanic, you’re Asian. You can do it, too.

For my white respondents, black celebrities are larger than life examples that race has declined in significance. Joe’s equating being black, Asian or Hispanic with being white suggests there is no social cost to being a racial minority nor is there any social benefit to being white. Reflecting on race and opportunity James explains that “the struggle is over. I think there was a long hard climb that they took and I think they made it. So let it go, don’t keep carrying it on.” As Joe reminds us anyone “can do” the American Dream. Joe sees an America where skin color no longer matters. Carry, a 43-year old custodial worker and mother was perhaps the most direct about the extent to which the color line has been erased. When asked about “being white” she replied “What about whiteness? It’s no different than being black, to me. OK?” While Carry may genuinely believe that race is irrelevant in how she sees others she nonetheless must think about herself as occupying a specific racial category that only has meaning in relation to other racial groups. The irony is the way white respondents explain that race no longer matters for blacks but in real and direct ways matters immensely for them. Writer Ellis Cose asks this question which is central to understanding the ideological nuance of Joe’s comment: Life is rough for a lot of people, not all of whom are black. So why, given the advantages at least some African Americans so conspicuously enjoy, should whites feel any guilt whatsoever.20

To feel or express guilt would suggest that whites may have certain advantages in a social system predicated on equal opportunity. Colorblindness, as

20

Ellis Cose, The Rage of the Privilege Class (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 190.

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Rubin sees it, allows whites “to believe in the idea of a meritocracy and avoid a confrontation with the one thing they could count on until now – the conviction that they are superior to people of color.”21 Whites’ rejection of the notion of racial bias allows them to negate racial history and the life chances of blacks who are now a generation or two removed from the civil rights movement. This negation of history also erases any sense that whites should feel any guilt for the privileges that have allowed for greater white economic mobility relative to blacks. As Stephen Steinberg wryly puts it “No guilt, no obligation to redress wrongs.”22 Like Joe, Jeff also believes that dwelling on past wrongs is both counterproductive and ultimately unfair to whites. He explains: I don’t personally feel responsible for my father’s sins. Uh, I also don’t believe in reparations for something that cannot ever be erased or changed. The past has happened. We can try to make the future better. I don’t think that by making me personally pay or by making anybody of my race pay because at one time my race was the perpetrators of sins is going to do anything for the future except keep it going in a vicious cycle because eventually I am going to be the downtrodden. . . .

Whites as the “downtrodden” or the new victims was seen as the end result of affirmative action. The result is not just racial animosity but a heightening of white racial consciousness. Mike a college student, also believes racial politics have come full circle; whites are now the ones socially and economically marginalized. He explains that: It’s not like they’re discriminated against anymore, it’s like the majority is now the minority because we are the ones being discriminated against because we are boxed in.

For some respondents perceiving oneself as a victim resulted in prejudice against those perceived to be responsible for their oppression. Those responsible were usually blacks. The feeling of being victimized by the beneficiaries of affirmative action also had the effect “strengthening group ties.”23 Thus,

21

Rubin, p. 206. Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat From Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 159. 23 Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1974), p. 148. 22

Transforming Racial Identity Through Affirmative Action • 167

Kathleen describes men in their mid-twenties she socializes with in her white lower middle class neighborhood bar as being “prejudiced because of affirmative action.” Her friends tell her it is easier to promote a black, Hispanic or female employee over a white man. She explains, “that’s why they’re all prejudiced. Why should that be? . . . They just think the prejudice is reversed and they want give me, give me, give me.” Later in the interview Kathleen confided, “I think white people are beginning to kind of get – like how the black people lost out before. Now, we’re losing. You know, like you think you are.” To think you are losing out because of your skin color, I would argue, makes race an essential and integral part of how social identities are constructed. Connie, a 54 year old executive secretary made a similar observation about how whites were now subject to reverse discrimination because she was been held accountable for past racial injustices. I think that if anything there is a bit of reverse discrimination because particularly blacks are put in positions when more qualified whites are there, so I think it has gone just the reverse . . . I think that they being the black race want to hold whites and Caucasians accountable for what my forefathers did and I refuse to be accountable for what my forefathers did.

Theresa is much more direct about the linkage between affirmative action and racism. In this focus group exchange with Martha, being white is described as a distinct social and economic disadvantage. Theresa: I think that affirmative action is a lot of the reason why people still have, like, hate feelings for the black people or for any minority because they feel that they’re taking away jobs that we can get or they’re taking away opportunities. Like, one of my girlfriends is always saying that when she’s rich and famous she’s going to start herself a white scholarship fund. Martha: Or a white college fund. Yes! Theresa: That was unbelievable. Because if you’re your basic middle class white person who doesn’t really happen to have that much money to go to college you’re pretty much screwed . . . And, it’s just, it’s not fair, that they can get it. What makes them so much more special that they can have something like that. I mean a white mind is a terrible thing to waste, too. As, she always says.

Racial animosity is, at least for Theresa, tied directly to the struggle over resources, which were perceived by many respondents as becoming increasingly

168 • Charles Gallagher

scarce. This scarcity comes, at least in part, from the belief that affirmative action allows blacks to take jobs that should and would have gone to whites. The perception is that equal opportunity for all has been replaced by equal opportunity for blacks. As Barb explains: It should be the best person for the job. So no now everything’s turned to where, even though you may be the best person for the job, that black person will get it. You know, and I think the tables have turned where they’re getting more rights than we have. Like, it never balanced out. It just went from one extreme to another.

In each of these cases Connie, Martha, Theresa and Barb were required to rearticulate a definition of whiteness that in all likelihood did not exist prior to having to think about affirmative action policies. The quote below creates a hierarchy of who this respondent believes is helped and hurt by affirmative action: I think right now they say a black woman is like, the best person to be right now in the job market. White men are a dime a dozen but to be a minority is gonna be – is great right now. I heard on the radio that whites are going to be a minority in the year 2010.

Being white and male is, by this account, to be at the bottom of a caste system. This quote suggests that by the year 2010 it may be that all whites, females included, find themselves ascribed to the lower ranks of a changing racial hierarchy. These views seem less tied to Lipset’s notion of the American Creed and more about future material deprivation as whites perceive they are losing out to blacks. In an epilogue to his 1977 study, Wellman argues that political convictions are a convenient cover for maintaining white privilege. He argues that “The principle of meritocracy and the charge of reverse discrimination, however, covers up a dirty little secret: self-interest.”24 It is not clear, however, the extent to which self-interest, political ideology or both shape respondents’ beliefs about affirmative action. What does seem clear is the struggle over scarce resources, core values and identity politics has the effect, as Jaynes put it, of “raising group consciousness” among many of my respondents.

24

Wellman, p. 233.

Transforming Racial Identity Through Affirmative Action • 169

As for the charge that affirmative action causes “hate feelings”, it is not possible to determine if affirmative action “causes” racial prejudice or if respondents’ predispositions or cultural stereotypes are given a socially appropriate platform by the affirmative action debate. Sniderman and Piazza argue that racism may not be what drives these responses because the “apparent cause and effect can be reversed; dislike of affirmative action can engender dislike of blacks.”25 It is difficult however, not to take what white America thinks about black America into consideration when we think about Sniderman and Piazza’s causal logic. A National Opinion Research Center Study found that 78% of whites believed that blacks were more likely to prefer to live off welfare, 62% believed that blacks were less hard working, 56% responded that blacks were violent and 53% believed that blacks were less intelligent.26 If racial stereotypes are the basis for prejudice then Sniderman and Piazza overemphasize political convictions while ignoring the extent racial stereotypes may influence attitudes on affirmative action.

Racing the Dominant Group My respondents generally embraced the belief that the US class system is fair and equitable. Most respondents argued that individuals who delay gratification, work hard, and follow the rules will succeed, irrespective of color. A majority of white respondents felt the leveled playing field argument has rendered affirmative action policies a form of reverse discrimination and a source of resentment. Hochschild calls this “whites’ quandary.” “Whites are more sure that discrimination is not a problem,” that blacks can succeed, that self-reliance pays off, that blacks now “control their own fate” and whites feel that their life chances have eroded.27 These beliefs allow whites to define themselves as a “minority” and see themselves as victims. My data suggest that affirmative action is interpreted by many of my white respondents as an economic threat, lowering social status and fostering the belief that whites are now victims. Affirmative action makes whiteness visible and salient as a social identity. Even those respondents sympathetic to affirmative action were forced to think about race politics and being white. For many of my

25 26 27

Sniderman and Piazza, p. 176. New York Times, 1/10/91, p. 21. Hochschild, p. 68.

170 • Charles Gallagher

respondents opinions formed about affirmative action resulted in an “extension of racial meaning” that included coming to understand the meaning they attached to being white and whiteness as a sense of group position. The byproduct of what is or is not “fair” as it pertains to affirmative action is for many, the construction of an identity centered around whiteness.

Judith R. Blau & Elizabeth Stearns Do the Right Thing – Race and Ethnic Differences in Integrity1

Honesty and integrity among school-age adolescents and children are matters of concern in schools and families, and sometimes reach the public spotlight when cheating on national or state tests becomes an issue. Sociologists, with few exceptions (see Schab 1991; Alwin 1988), have left the study of teen honesty to developmentalists, who approach it from a psychological or psychoanalytical perspective, as involving conscience and morality (Piaget 1932; Kohlberg 1972, 1984). Our study examines valuations of integrity as a social disposition, namely the importance that adolescents attach to being honest on tests, doing their own work and not copying from others, being respectful of teachers, and complying with school rules about truancy and attending classes. We explicitly focus on race and ethnic differences among adolescents because we assume that socialization practices vary systematically among blacks, whites, Asians and Hispanics. We also assume that differences in groups’ privilege affect attitudes about honesty, cheating, and integrity. That is, the effects of racialization and racialized privilege penetrate deeply into the ways that parents socialize their children and the ways that young people perceive the 1 Research was from the American Educational Research Association, the National Science Foundation, and The Spencer Foundation supported this study. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Judith R. Blau, Race in the Schools: The End of White Dominance? (Lynne Rienner, 2003).

172 • Judith R. Blau & Elizabeth Stearns

world and behave.2 We also suspected that media accounts of inner-city nonwhite delinquency and gangs influence public perceptions. It is the case that many nonwhites live in impoverished inner cities in which the delinquency and crime rates are high and sociologists have drawn attention to the many problems faced by youth who grow up in these neighborhoods (Wilson 1987; Jencks 1992; Massey and Denton 1993; National Center for Education Statistics [NCES] 1996). However, the near exclusive focus by the media on nonwhite criminality and delinquency and the higher surveillance in nonwhite neighborhoods may be distorting public perceptions about race and ethnic differences in many respects (see McClafferty, Torres, and Mitchell 2000). New evidence is emerging that current racial and ethnic gaps in teen arrest, detention, and incarceration are out of line with actual gaps in the severity and frequency of offences (Males and Macallair 1999; Poe-Yamagata and Jones 2000). Studies by the Applied Research Center (1999, 2000) show that high arrest and incarceration rates of black and Hispanic teens are due to an alarming degree to high police surveillance in their neighborhoods and bias in the juvenile justice system. Our research does not deal directly with teen delinquency – although we do take into account drug use – but does indirectly as we focus on teenagers’ assessments of what is moral and right.

Theoretical Perspectives To frame our research hypotheses, we initially drew from perspectives that have bearing on adolescent race and ethnic variation in attitudes about the difference between what is right and wrong. These are perspectives on deprivation, oppositional culture, socialization, and differences in cultural values. The deprivation perspective is based on the assumption that growing up in impoverished conditions is likely to foster rebellious and nonconforming behavior and, therefore, youth from poor homes and neighborhoods have a low regard for conventional norms (Kornhauser 1978; Hagan and Peterson 1995). Because nonwhite teens tend to be poorer than white teens, and poverty 2 We carried out a thorough search of the literatures in sociology, anthropology, psychology and social psychology and found none that included race and ethnic comparisons in analyses of honesty and integrity. Below we do cite sociological research on class differences in conformist values (e.g., Cochran, Chamlin and Wood 1999), but none involves race and ethnic comparisons.

Race and Ethnic Differences in Integrity • 173

tends to accompany delinquency, the presumption is that nonwhites are likely to disregard school standards as well. This is consistent with accounts that adversarial groups provide a sense of belonging and positive identity for black and immigrant youth who experience marginality and rejection in their schools and whose struggling parents cannot provide the support that children and adolescents require (Jankowski 1991). Earlier studies on race and delinquency underscored links between poverty, being black and delinquent offending (see, for example, Cohen 1969). However, current research shows that there is considerable racial variation across offenses (for example, white teens are most likely to use hard drugs, and black teens are more likely to commit property offenses) and that black teen predominance in arrest figures are inconsistent with survey data that show small racial differences (for a summary, see Jensen and Rojek 1998: 141–142). This disparity between arrest data and survey data, according to the Applied Research Center (1999, 2000), is due to high police surveillance in black neighborhoods, racial inequities in sentencing, and low thresholds of tolerance in black schools. The presumption that black youth have little regard for norms about integrity and conformity compared with white and immigrant youth is consistent with Ogbu’s (1978) early thesis about black oppositional culture. Rebellion, opposition, and defiance are, according to this view, a cultural frame of reference that stems from experiencing racism and discrimination in America. This thesis also contrasts immigrant youth, whose families come voluntarily to America, with African Americans, whose ancestors came to America as slaves. On the one hand, immigrant youth are hopeful about acceptance in mainstream American society and therefore conform to prevailing norms, whereas African American youth are resentful of their historical oppression and continuing marginality, and, are, therefore, more likely to be defiant and rebellious. This perspective is not without its critics, however. Recent tests of this thesis by Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey (1998; also see Tyson 1999) indicate that African American students have more positive attitudes towards school than other students do. Another perspective on teen’s integrity is from an early research tradition dealing with socialization that makes certain assumptions about the link between class and race differences in parenting practices and the internalization of moral standards. Research by Bronfenbrenner (1958), Havighurst (1953), and Miller and Swanson (1958) focused on class differences in socialization practices, and Kohn (1969: 80, 85) spelled out racial differences as well.

174 • Judith R. Blau & Elizabeth Stearns

They contrasted a parenting style favored by middle-class whites that fosters independent thinking and the internalization of moral standards with a style favored by working class and black families that encourages little in the way of an autonomous morality. During the 1950s and 1960s, when this research was carried out, it seemed self-evident that an ethic of individualism and autonomy was crucial for educational advancement, for good citizenship, and for success in professional and entrepreneurial careers. The implication was that schools and parents should encourage youngsters to value risk-taking, independence, and high aspirations. Alwin’s (1988) research shows that such an emphasis on individualism and autonomy continued to increase into the 1980s, and Coll, Meyer and Brillon (1995) report that it did so particularly among white parents. In undertaking our research, we were also attentive to recent work, especially by ethnographers, anthropologists, and psychologists, who have focused on group differences in cultural values and, in the American context, differences between immigrant and native-born black and white youngsters. Whether the focus is on immigrants (e.g., Zhou 1997; Saltzstein 1997; Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 1995; Garrod 1993; Keats, Munro, and Mann 1989; Rumbaut 1998), or on African Americans (Reynolds and Gill 1994; Connell et al., 1995; Porter and Washington 1993; Oliver, Smith and Wilson 1989; Gaziel 1997; Floyd 1996; Caldwell and Ginther 1996; McAdoo 1998), the conclusion is the same. Specifically, nonwhite youngsters tend to have strong attachments to their families and communities, and such attachments instill a heightened sense of responsibility. Immigrant and African American parents generally consider it important that their children have exemplary values and that they behave in public in a way that reflects positively on the family and the larger group. Each of these perspectives, with the exception of the last one, would predict that white teens would have the highest regard for integrity. As we report, our results support the perspective that focuses on inter-group cultural differences in childrearing. Our interest is on race and ethnic differences, but this requires that we examine additional factors that may be systematically related to both integrity and to race and ethnic group differences. We assume that norms about what is right and wrong are constructed within groups of membership, and that individuals draw from these norms and apply them in relevant social contexts (see Ullman 1987).

Race and Ethnic Differences in Integrity • 175

Measurement and Methods This research is based on analyses of data from the High School Effectiveness Study (HSES), a survey carried out under the auspices of the Department of Education (National Center for Education Statistics 1992). HSES is a special follow up to the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), and includes a representative sample of high schools from urban and suburban schools in the 30 largest US metropolitan areas. This sampling frame is advantageous for our purposes because the survey includes sufficiently large numbers of Asian, Hispanic, and African American adolescents for comparisons with white adolescents. We use the 1990 data from tenth-graders attending public schools, and also use data from the teachers’, parents’, and administrators’ surveys. The Common Core of Data (National Center for Education Statistics 1990) is the source of information on school composition, diversity, and size. Through ID linkage, data from each of these sources were attached to student files. Although the sample is not nationally representative, data on teens in metropolitan public schools permit close examination of the view that urban African American and immigrant youngsters are least conformist and most defiant of conventional school norms. Race and ethnicity, as reported by students, is categorized as follows: Asian, or Pacific Islander; Hispanic; Black, not of Hispanic origin; and White, not of Hispanic origin. There are too few American Indians and Alaskan Natives to yield stable estimates and they were excluded from the analysis. The Integrity Scale (IS), as described in Figure 1, is a summed scale, standardized for the entire sample, with a mean of zero and unit variance.3 It includes items asking about cheating as well as ones about respect for the teacher, cutting classes, and conforming to school rules. We recognize the substantive limitations of any attitudinal scale that is not validated by indicators of actual behavior, but suggest that these items are not culturally specific and would be interpreted by all students in comparable ways. That is, these questions pertain to normative behaviors at school, rather than, say, normative behaviors in the family setting, which might vary along culturally relevant

3 Each of the seven items in the IS scale had 4 response categories (1, often; 2, sometimes; 3, rarely; and 4, never). Before summing responses, we combined categories 1, 2, and 3 to improve scalability.

176 • Judith R. Blau & Elizabeth Stearns

dimensions. The scale has high face validity,4 and its alpha value is .76, which is well within the acceptable range.5 In all of the analyses, we control for three factors. These are gender, school location (urban vs. suburban), and socioeconomic status (SES). These are defined in Figure 1. On the basis of Gilligan’s (1997, 1982) research, it is hypothesized that females have higher values on IS than males. The socialization researchers (e.g., Kohn 1969) contrasted the higher moral standards of middle-class youth with working-class or poor youth, and we infer this prediction would be that suburban, high-SES students would have higher IS scores than urban, low-SES students, respectively. The deprivation, oppositional culture, and socialization perspectives, already summarized, would predict that white adolescents have higher scores than nonwhites, while, in contrast, recent ethnographic research suggests that black and immigrant adolescents would have higher IS scores than whites. Analysis of variance (ANOV) is the method employed, and we present results from Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA) output that is produced by ANOV. MCA is particularly useful when comparing two or more groups in order to ascertain whether group differences persist when additional variables are introduced as controls (see Hughes and Thomas 1998). One advantage of MCA over Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) is the easy interpretability of the results; the values represent group means – with zero as the pooled sample reference – on the continuous variable as these means are adjusted for other factors. In other words, adjusted means are interpreted much the way that partial correlation coefficients are. Another advantage of MCA is that it does not rest on overly strong assumptions about causality. For ease of interpretability, all control variables were coded as factors, that is, as dichotomies.6 For the purposes of these static comparisons, un-weighted data are used. Tests of significance are based on a comparison of a given ethnic/ racial group with all other groups combined. 4 To protect minors, school transcripts do not include reports of delinquency or miscreant acts. To explore the validity of the IS scale we constructed a scale based on student estimates of disciplinary problems. It includes responses to questions about fighting, in-school suspension, suspension, transfer for disciplinary reasons, and arrest. These are indications of serious problems in contrast with the items that make up the IS scale. However, the overall correlation is negative and significant, –.21. 5 Confirmatory factor analysis showed that these items all loaded on one factor. 6 OLS is inappropriate because of high inter-correlations among many variables of interest. However, we carried out many additional analyses using OLS and entering blocks of non-collinear variables. The results of these analyses are consistent with those reported here.

Race and Ethnic Differences in Integrity • 177 Figure 1. Integrity Scale and Baseline Control Factors used in Multiple Classification Analyses, with N’s for Individual Race/Ethnic Groups and Total N’s for Other Factors. Integrity Scale The items are: How How How How How How How

often often often often often often often

do do do do do do do

you you you you you you you

feel feel feel feel feel feel feel

it it it it it it it

is is is is is is is

OK OK OK OK OK OK OK

for you to be late for school? for you to cut a couple of classes? to skip school for an entire day? to cheat on tests? to copy someone else’s homework? to talk back to teachers? to disobey school rules?

Response categories are: “It is never OK” (coded 1), and, “It is often OK,” “sometimes OK,” or “rarely OK” (coded 0). Answers are summed and the scale is standardized with mean 0 and standard deviation, 1. Alpha = .76, N=4977.

Race/Ethnicity and Baseline Control Factors Race/Ethnicity. Black, N=915; Latino, N=1012; Asian, N=488; White, N=2373 Gender. Female, 1; Male, 0. N=5054 School Location. Urban, 1; Suburban, 0. N=5054 Socioeconomic Status (SES). Composite indicator based on each parents’ education, occupation, and income. Scores are standardized scores and divided at the mean: High, 1; Low, 0. N=4788.

Initial Results The initial analyses involve simple comparisons of means for groups and the categories of SES, gender, and school location, which are included in subsequent analyses. Table 1 reports IS means for each race and ethnic group and for the categories of SES,7 gender, and school location. The numbers of cases for these comparisons are reported in Figure 1. The overall F test for the race-ethnic group comparisons is highly significant, and, on average, whites have the lowest scores compared with all others, and Hispanics have the highest scores. These results are contrary to most perspectives reviewed, although they are consistent with the conclusions of recent qualitative studies (see Zhou 1997) that focus on group differences in cultural

7 The SES scale, as reported in Figure 1, is divided at the mean value and scores lower than the mean are scored 0, and scores at or higher than the mean are scored 1.

178 • Judith R. Blau & Elizabeth Stearns

values. It appears that white youth, who are distinctively privileged compared with others, are least concerned about complying with taken-for-granted standards about honesty and integrity.8 Also contrary to expectations, low SES youngsters have higher IS scores than high SES youngsters and those who attend urban schools have higher scores than those who attend suburban ones. Taken together, these results are contrary to stereotypes about the contrasts between adolescents who come from rich and poor backgrounds, and between those who grow up in the central cities of metropolises and those who grow up in suburbs. In short, stereotypes relating to how good character and integrity relate to adolescents’ backgrounds appear to be wrong; at least they receive no support in the results. On the other hand, stereotypes about gender differences appear to be correct. The higher mean for females, compared with males, supports the popular understanding of gender differences as well as Gilligan’s (1982) research results and her interpretation of gender differences in morality. Table 1. Means for Integrity Scale for Race and Ethnic Groups, SES, Gender, and School Location, F-test Statistics. Variables

Means

1. Race and Ethnicity Black Hispanic Asian White

.15 .18 .14 –.17

2. SES Low High

.10 –.11

3. Gender Males Females

–.09 .09

4. School Location Urban Suburban

.17 –.14

F test statistic 45.34**

50.85**

43.43**

114.67**

Note: Values rounded to second decimal; N’s for variables reported in Figure 1. *r