Toward a More Adequate Conception of Racism

This brief examination of past Marxist views leads to one conclusion. Marxist theory is indispensable yet ultimately inadequate for grasping the complexity of racism as a historical phenomenon. Marxism is indispensable because it highlights the relation of racist practices to the capitalist mode of production and recognizes the crucial role racism plays within the capitalist economy. Yet Marxism is inadequate because it fails to probe other spheres of American society where racism plays an integral role especially the psychological and cultural spheres. Furthermore, Marxist views tend to assume that racism has its roots in the rise of modern capitalism. Yet, it can easily be shown that although racist practices were shaped and appropriated by modern capitalism, racism itself predates capitalism. Its roots lie in the earlier encounters between the civilizations of Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, encounters that occurred long before the rise of modern capitalism.

It indeed is true that the very category of "race"denoting primarily skin color was first employed as a means of classifying human bodies by Francois Bernier, a French physician, in 1684. The first authoritative racial division of humankind is found in the influential Natural System (1735) of the preeminent naturalist of the 18th century, Caroluc Linnaeus. Both of these instances reveal European racist practices at the level of intellectual codificaton since both degrade and devalue non-Europeans. Racist folktales, mythologies, legends, and stories that function in the everyday life of common people predate the 17th and 18th centuries. For example, Christian anti-Semitism and Euro-Christian anti-blackism were rampant throughout the Middle Ages. These false divisions of humankind were carried over to colonized Latin America where anti-Indian racism became a fundamental pillar of colonial society and influenced later mestizo national development. Thus racism is as much a product of the interaction of cultural ways of life as it is of modern capitalism. A more adequate conception of racism should reflect this twofold context of cultural and economic realities in which racism has flourished.

A new analysis of racism builds on the best of Marxist theory (particularly Antonio Gramsci's focus on the cultural and ideological spheres), and yet it goes beyond by incorporating three key assumptions:

1. Cultural practices, including racist discourses and actions, have multiple power functions (such as domination over non-Europeans) that are neither reducible to nor intelligible in terms of class exploitation alone. In short these practices have a reality of their own and cannot simply be reduced to an economic base.

2. Cultural practices are the medium through which selves are produced. We are who and what we are owing primarily to cultural practices. The complex process of people shaping and being shaped by cultural practices involves the use of language, psychological factors, sexual identities, and aesthetic conceptions that cannot be adequately grasped by a social theory primarily focused on modes of production at the macrostructural level.

3. Cultural practices are not simply circumscribed by modes of production; they also are bounded by civilizations. Hence, cultural practices cut across modes of production. (For example, there are forms of Christianity that exist in both precapitalist and capitalist societies.) An analysis of racist practices in both premodern and modern Western civilization yields both continuity and discontinuity. Even Marxism can be shown to be both critical of and captive to a Eurocentrism that can justify racist practices. Although Marxist theory remains indispensable, it obscures the manner in which cultural practices, including notions of "scientific" rationality, are linked to particular ways of life.

A common feature of the four Marxist conceptions examined earlier is that their analyses remain on the macrostructural level. They focus on the role and function of racism within and between significant institutions such as the workplace and government. Any adequate conception of racism indeed must include such a macrostructural analysis, one that highlights the changing yet persistent forms of class exploitation and political repression of peoples of color. But a fully adequate analysis of racism also requires an investigation into the genealogy and ideology of racism and a detailed microinstitutional analysis. Such an analysis would encompass the following:

1. A genealogical inquiry into the ideology of racism, focusing on the kinds of metaphors and concepts employed by dominant European (or white) supremacists in various epochs in the West and on ways in which resistance has occurred.

2. A microinstitutional or localized analysis of the mechanisms that sustain white supremacist discourse in the everyday life of non-Europeans (including the ideological production of certain kinds of selves, the means by which alien and degrading normative cultural styles, aesthetic ideals, psychosexual identities, and group perceptions are constituted) and ways in which resistance occurs.

3. A macrostructural approach that emphasizes the class exploitation and political repression of non-European peoples and ways in which resistance is undertaken.

The first line of inquiry aims to examine modes of European domination of non-European peoples; the second probes forms of European subjugation of non-European peoples; and the third focuses on types of European exploitation and repression of non-European peoples. These lines of theoretical inquiry, always traversed by male supremacist and heterosexual supremacist discourses, overlap in complex ways, and yet each highlights a distinctive dimension of the racist practices of European peoples vis-a-vis non-European peoples.

This analytical framework should capture the crucial characteristics of European racism anywhere in the world. But the specific character of racist practices in particular times and places can be revealed only by detailed historical analyses that follow these three methodological steps. Admittedly, this analytic approach is an ambitious one, but the complexity of racism as a historical phenomenon demands it. Given limited space, I shall briefly sketch the contours of each step.

For the first step-the genealogical inquiry into predominant European supremacist discourses-there are three basic discursive logics: Judeo-Christian, scientific, and psychosexual discourses. I am not suggesting that these discourses are inherently racist, but rather that they have been employed to justify racist practices. The Judeo-Christian racist logic emanates from the Biblical account of Ham looking upon and failing to cover his father Noah's nakedness and thereby receiving divine punishment in the form of the blackening of his progeny. In this highly influential narrative, black skin is a divine curse, punishing disrespect for and rejection of paternal authority.

The scientific logic rests upon a modern philosophical discourse guided by Greek ocular metaphors (for example Eye of the Mind) and is undergirded by Cartesian notions of the primacy of the subject (ego, self) and the preeminence of representation. These notions of the self are buttressed by Baconian ideas of observation, evidence, and confirmation which promote the activities of observing, comparing, measuring, and ordering physical characteristics of human bodies: Given the renewed appreciation and appropriation of classical antiquity in the 18th century, these "scientific" activities of observation were regulated by classical aesthetic and cultural norms (Greek lips, noses, and so forth). Within this logic, notions of black ugliness, cultural deficiency, and intellectual inferiority are legitimated by the value-laden yet prestigious authority of "science", especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. The purposeful distortion of "scientific" procedures to further racist hegemony has an important history of its own. The persistent use of pseudoscientific "research" to buttress racist ideology, even when the intellectual integrity of the "scientific" position has been severely eroded, illustrates how racist ideology can incorporate and use/abuse science.

The psychosexual racist logic arises from the phallic obsessions, Oedipal projections, and anal-sadistic orientations in European cultures which endow non-European (especially African) men and women with sexual prowess; view nonEuropeans as either cruel revengeful fathers, frivolous carefree children, or passive long-suffering mothers; and identify non-Europeans (especially black people) with dirt, odious smell, and feces. In short, non-Europeans are associated with acts of bodily defecation, violation, and subordination. Within this logic, non-Europeans are walking abstractions, inanimate objects, or invisible creatures. Within all three white supremacist logics which operate simultaneously and affect the perceptions of both Europeans and non-Europeans black, brown, yellow, and red peoples personify Otherness and embody alien Difference.

The aim of this first step is to show how these white supremacist logics are embedded in philosophies of identity that suppress difference, diversity and heterogeneity. Since such discourses impede the realization of the democratic socialist ideals of genuine individuality and radical democracy, they must be criticized and opposed. But critique and opposition should be based on an understanding of the development and internal workings of these discourses-how they dominate the intellectual life of the modern West and thereby limit the chances for less racist, less ethnocentric discourses to flourish.

The second step, microinstitutional or localized analysis, examines the operation of white supremacist logics within the everyday lives of people in particular historical contexts. In the case of Afro-Americans, this analysis would include the ways in which "colored," "Negro," and "black" identities were created against a background of both fear and terror and a persistent history of resistance that gave rise to open rebellion in the 1960s. Such an analysis must include the extraordinary and equivocal role of evangelical Protestant Christianity (which both promoted and helped contain black resistance) and the blend of African and U. S. southern Anglo-Saxon Protestants and French Catholics from which emerged distinctive Afro-American cultural styles, language, and aesthetic values.

The objective of this second step is to show how the various white supremacist discourses shape non-European self-identities, influence psychosexual sensibilities, and help set the context for oppositional (but also cooptable) non-European cultural manners and mores. This analysis also reveals how the oppression and cultural domination of Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and other colonized people differ significantly (while sharing many common features) from that of Afro-Americans. Analyses of internal colonialism, national oppression, and cultural imperialism have particular significance in explaining the territorial displacement and domination that confront these peoples.

The third step-macrostructural analysis-discloses the role and function of class exploitation and political repression and how racist practices buttress them. This step resembles traditional Marxist theories of racism, which focus primarily on institutions of economic production and secondarily on the state and public and private bureaucracies. But the nature of this focus is modified in that economic production is no longer viewed as the sole or major source of racist practices. Rather it is seen as a crucial source among others. To put it somewhat crudely, the capitalist mode of production constitutes just one of the significant structural constraints determining what forms racism takes in a particular historical period. Other key structural constraints include the state, bureaucratic modes of control, and the cultural practices of ordinary people. The specific forms that racism takes depend on choices people make within these structural constraints. In this regard, history is neither deterministic nor arbitrary; rather it is an open-ended sequence of (progressive or regressive) structured social practices over time and space. Thus the third analytical step, while preserving important structural features of Marxism such as the complex interaction of the economic, political, cultural, and ideological spheres of life, does not privilege a priori the economic sphere as a means of explaining other spheres of human experience. But this viewpoint still affirms that class exploitation and state repression do take place, especially in the lives of non-Europeans in modern capitalist societies.