Dear Ivan,
Thanks for sending this my way! I actually agreed with a fair amount of what Professor Reed had to say, and found his article clarifying. What a stroke of luck for you and me, who so often agree, to find this opportunity for a little lively interchange. I’ll bet our blog readership, um, doubles.
So let me first say that I read the scope of Reed’s project here as somewhat narrower than you seem to read it. I don’t think the article is an attack on all the organizing being done by self-identified anti-racists. (And of course I agree with you that lots of good people are doing good work that’s identified that way.) Rather, I think it’s a critique of the limitations of the idea of anti-racism as a focus for movement-building.
On the browser’s title bar there’s an apparently alternative title for the article: “Antiracism: vague politics about an nearly indescribable thing.” Reed makes the obvious point that racism is a very broad term, encompassing a great many “disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and ‘attitudes,’” from personal prejudice to housing segregation to unequal health outcomes (and that’s just within the United States).
I take his central argument to be that this collection of things is not a unitary structure against which you could develop a strategy, but rather a pattern of rationalizations and symptoms. It’s a Marxist argument he’s making (and I mean that as a compliment). Even when you talk about “instutionalized racism” or “systemic racism,” what institution, what system are you talking about? It’s capitalism, isn’t it? The underlying problem is inequality, whether that inequality is based on race or gender or anything else.
The central question on which Reed disagrees with anti-racist analysts, as I understand it, is this: Is racism structural to the project of sustaining inequality? And the contrapositive of that question: Can we strike at the heart of capitalism by undermining its racist rationale?
His answer is no. Capitalism is adept at finding pseudo-biological justifications for its brutal outcomes. When the fiction of race is not convenient to the exploitative project at hand, capitalism turns to the fiction of sex or the fiction of nationality or some other fiction. Push one down, another pops up. It’s no use fighting against the ideology of racism because there is no ideology of racism. There is racism, certainly, but it isn’t a coherent ideology. It’s a mutable set of rationalizations, perfectly able to adapt to change, sustain contradictions, and co-opt challenges.
Reed writes that he doesn’t object to invocations of racism as galvanizing rhetoric, but “as the basis for social interpretation, and particularly interpretation directed toward strategic political action, they are useless.” The article is about what should be the content of left movement popular political education, and Reed is action-oriented. What analytical tools can we provide ourselves and each other that will help us develop coherent strategy and action? Rather than target an elusive and ill-defined ideology, Reed argues for identifying and targeting the mechanisms. He cites the examples of people organizing against employment discrimination, against housing segregation, and for voting rights.
The People’s Institute (and, I’m sure, many other smart anti-racists) define racism as “race prejudice plus power.” This was very important to me as a younger person when I learned it. It really seemed to clarify how the world worked. But now I look back and it seems impossibly vague, especially as a framework for action. Power, okay, but how does power function? How do you effectively dismantle it? And isn’t power itself the problem, whether or not it’s combined with race prejudice?
In a recent talk (which I highly recommend), the philosopher Slavoj Zizek warns of the perils of vague terms and capitalism’s flexible ability to coopt words, ideas and symbols. He says:
This is the strength of today’s capitalism, to present itself as cultural capitalism…. Even Che Guevara became the icon signifying all and nothing, that is to say, whatever you want it to signify: youth rebellion against authoritarianism, solidarity with the poor and exploited, saintliness… But as usual, harmless beatification is mixed with its opposite, obscene commodification. Recently a friend from Australia sent me a publicity motto of an Australian company which put on the market ‘Cherry Guevara’ ice cream, focusing its promotion on the eating experience, of course. Here is its description: ‘The revolutionary struggle of the cherries was squashed as they were trapped between two layers of chocolate. May their memory live in your mouth’ and so on and so on. You see, that’s a joke, but it’s a very effective joke. That is to say, this is the triumph of today’s capitalism.
I think Reed is right to worry that racism, too, has come to mean whatever someone wants it to mean. Nearly everyone is opposed to it, and defines it in a way that conveniently places themselves on the correct side. You have a rally against racism, no one thinks you’re talking about them. Capitalism hires diversity trainers for its offices. The flexibility of the term allows plenty of room for people to claim to oppose racism while continuing to operate within the ideological framework of capitalism, producing and taking advantage of racial inequalities. At times, such a vague term may even lend cover to the powerful.
To return to the topic of your previous post for a moment: In recent months, news media have focused a great deal of attention on the racism of working-class white small-town people, at these teabag rallies and town-hall protests, and speculated that fear of a black president underlies their mobilization. But is it these people’s race prejudice that sustains global capitalism and the impoverishment of people of color in the U.S. and around the world? If you see the word “racism” in print in the New York Times, it may be describing a small-towner with a sign, or a Senator who made an offensive remark, but it won’t be describing an insurance executive who made a bundle of profit putting people out of their homes, or the CEO of an apparel company, or Congress’s collective dithering on health care reform, or the President’s sending more troops to shoot and kill people of color. So “racism,” as discussed in the Times, means personal prejudice. That level of discussion becomes more a distraction than an aid in identifying and targeting the systematic causes of inequality.
The most useful (and provocative) definition of racism I have ever read comes from the brilliant geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore:
Racism is the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies. (R.W. Gilmore, “Race and Globalization,” in Geographies of global change: remapping the world, p.261)
Gilmore’s excellent article should be read in its entirety, but for the moment I extract only a couple of points. The evidence of the twentieth century, she writes, suggests that “race, while slippery, is also structural,” leading to the question: “But what structures does race make?” While noting that “the realities of racism are not the same everywhere, and represent different practices at different geographical scales,” she reaches this central point:
[A]t any scale, racism is not a lagging indicator, an anachronistic drag on an otherwise achievable social equality guaranteed by the impersonal freedom of expanding markets. History is not a long march from premodern racism to postmodern pluralism…. Rather, racism’s changing same does triple duty: claims of natural or cultural incommensurabilities secure conditions for reproducing economic inequalities, which then validate theories of extra-economic hierarchical difference. In other words, racism functions as a limiting force that pushes disproportionate costs of participating in an increasingly monetized and profit-driven world onto those who, due to the frictions of political distance, cannot reach the various levers of power that might relieve them of those costs.
Now that’s a specific and coherent analysis! If I were responding directly to Reed, I would challenge him not to find useful grounding for action in Gilmore’s words. But often the conversation about racism does not occur on nearly this level of precision.
I want to take one example from the web site of NCBI, one of several organizations you linked in your post that provide ideological trainings about systems of oppression. On their “Theory & Philosophy” page, the organization notes that
NCBI has learned to raise social class issues at all of its diversity and peer training programs. Many people have little understanding of the ways in which their class backgrounds have shaped their views of the world and their interactions with others. Since racism and classism are so closely related, whenever the issues of class are addressed NCBI has discovered that the dynamics of racism have been better understood.
I will say this first: I don’t really like the term “classism.” (Although I notice I used the heck out of it in my reply to your previous post here!) It seems to locate the primary problem in the wrong place, as though people simply aren’t politely accepting social inequality like they should. The underlying problem is not classism; it’s class!
Of course, I have to admit, classism is a problem too, a symptom we have to actively struggle against, even inside our movements, all the time: Do working-class people have roles of leadership in our organizations? Do our movements privilege the voices of those with college degrees? Is participation in our work feasible for low-income people and those with limited transportation options? Do we offer childcare at our events? What invisible cultural assumptions are we making?
These are all important questions to be asking in our work, to make it more humane and inclusive, and to grow our ability to organize en masse. But working to notice and fight against these kinds of classisms is not the same as working to eradicate the class system itself! People’s prejudiced beliefs about the poor are just one of the many painful effects of social inequality, not the cause of it. Until we abolish class, these symptomatic inequities will keep showing up.
In a similar way, I think Reed is probably right that “anti-racism” on its own is too vague a rallying term to provide a useful blueprint for struggle. On the other hand, I am persuaded by the work of Gilmore and others that the discourse of race plays some structural role in inequality, and I think it’s worthwhile to work to make that discourse visible and undermine it. But I take seriously Zizek’s admonition that a vague term will be deployed within capitalism’s ideology for its own interests. So I join him Reed in the call for greater precision, and I share his enthusiasm for more talk of structure, mechanism, and specific action plan.
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Al
ivan
