Abstract
At issue in this discussion is a question of knowledge and how those who work in education use the knowledge at their disposal in practice. How do they, firstly, work with the almost universal consensus that ‘race’ as a biological phenomenon has no inherent substance but that its equally almost universal social acceptance makes it real? Having come to their conclusions, secondly, how do they work educationally with the complexity of the ideological positions surrounding their knowledge? It is argued, that in these questions a particular kind of challenge for the politics of anti-racism arises. This challenge is deeply educational at its core. It talks to how an individual acts in relation to what he/she knows. Towards an engagement with what such a politics is in this contribution this paper seeks to argue that a concept such as ‘race’, and indeed gender, subsists and relies on presumptive agreements about the meanings – the form and substance – attached to looks. The concept depends on the supposedly obvious, the obviousness of likeness. From this it generates the presumption of relatedness. This paper argues that this logic of the look operates as a ‘trope’ of conscription. In engaging with this trope it is important to be clear about how ‘race’ is used descriptively and in social analysis. Two positions are focused upon in this paper to show how the use of ‘race’ in these descriptions and analyses – the knowledge inherent in them – has important educational implications.
Introduction
This paper analyses a particular challenge that is emerging in contemporary discussions around ‘race’. This challenge is that of how to work educationally – conceptually and practically – with the concept of ‘race’ given that ‘race’ is socially constructed. Interested readers would be familiar with the debate about whether ‘race’ is real or not. The challenge to which attention is paid here arises in what might be described as the fall-out of that debate. In its most acute expression, the challenge is about how, after the acknowledgement is made of the social constructed-ness of ‘race’, an individual continues to work with the effects and implications of what ‘race’ means in society, about how, put differently, an individual works in the interstices of its disavowal and acknowledgement. The issue, in its inchoate form, is distinct from an older discussion about the relative significance of ‘race’ in relation to factors such as class and gender in societies such as the United States and South Africa, where scholars such as No Sizwe (1979) and Wolpe (1988) sought to intervene in theoretical controversies about the underlying nature of inequality in those societies. Basing their argument on Marxist principles, both argued that ‘race’ was an epiphenomenon of class and that it could only be understood through an analysis of how class forces operated in society. Pivotal in the current discussion, demonstrating in some ways the benefits of new theoretical moves that have been made in post-structuralism, and particularly insights that have been derived from Foucault about how discourse works, is the need to come to terms with the ways in which ideological complexes such as racism – which use ‘race’ – insert themselves into the everyday, and how they condition the ways in which individuals and groups conduct their relationships with one another in the realms of the social, the economic and the cultural.
At issue in this discussion is a question of knowledge about ‘race’ and how ‘race’ can be positively worked with in an educational way. How is the almost universal consensus that ‘race’ as a biological phenomenon has no substance but that its equally almost universal social acceptance makes it real to be worked with? What is being asked is what a politics of anti-racism consists of when it is known that the manoeuvres through which on the one hand, solidarity is made and, on the other draw boundaries to signal opposition, may be governed by ideas that are in their essence ideological? What are the educational entailments of these manoeuvres and their politics?
Towards an engagement with what such a politics is, this paper seeks to argue that a concept such as ‘race’, and indeed gender, subsists and relies on presumptive agreements about the meanings – the form and substance – attached to looks, as opposed to the best of what is now known scientifically about it. The concept depends on the supposedly obvious, the obviousness of likeness. From this it generates the presumption of relatedness. This paper argues that this logic of the look operates as a ‘trope’ of conscription – ‘here I am brother, acknowledge me’. ‘Race’ as look presumes and enforces attachment and detachment, belonging and othering. Recently a colleague of the author of this paper noted an incident which the author had either forgotten or not at the time paid much attention to. The colleague shared a platform with the author at a conference in New York on ‘race’. The author had spoken at that meeting of the arbitrariness of racial or any other classification and made the point that he would decide what he should be a member of. He would make solidarity only on grounds of conviction. He would not accept any group affiliation that was imposed on him. A South African student at the conference, apparently, reacted with outrage, saying ‘You’re coloured, you’re coloured. That is all nonsense’. The author stated that he is not ‘coloured’, and that he is none of the categories which apartheid imposed on South Africans, whatever those categories are supposed to signify. If that South African student wished to identify herself as ‘coloured’, it is important that her right to do so is defended. She must be allowed to make affinity and to commit her loyalties wherever she wishes. But the author will not be conscripted. He argues against the ways in which individuals are conscripted into whatever hegemonic, at the local, national and global level, or communal ideas exist about ‘race’. The seduction of the trope of the look is deeply problematic. The multiple uses to which it is put are both inappropriate and inadequate. It is, as a signifier, both empty and a figure of excess. In this paradoxical state it occludes more than it reveals and makes plain. It inhibits and, moreover, obstructs the development of a radical politics of anti-racism. In this kind of politics, this paper argues, there is a sacrifice of the educational gains that have been made in the understanding of how social constructs such as ‘race’ and gender, it needs to be said, function in society.
This paper will argue that two issues are pivotal in the occlusion of ‘race’. The first relates to how we use ‘race’ is used descriptively and in social analysis. Two positions are critical in this debate around what ‘race’ is. Included in the discussion are those designated as non- and anti-racialists 1 and those designated as racial realists who argue that ‘race’ is real and so is material in identity and affirmative action politics. The second flows from how the first is resolved and is fundamentally about the politics produced by this resolution. Critical in the how is argued the difficulty of identity and how an individual manages the tension of sustaining legitimate political practices around recognition, particularly recognition of marginalized identities, against the use of identity for the distribution of rights and entitlements. Illustrating this difficulty is the struggle playing itself out in higher education admissions processes in the United States and South Africa around the development of appropriate approaches of redress and affirmative action. Readers need to be aware of the intervention of David Goldberg (2014), respected ‘race’ theorist in this debate and his argument for what he calls ‘racial anti-racism’. He says ‘racial anti-racism concerns the need to recognize those targeted by racist orderings and to offset their debilitating effects. Without deploying race as identifier of the wronged and the appropriate referent for rectification, individual or collective, the durable conditions of racist arrangement would deepen’ (Goldberg, 2014: 1–13 para.5). The argument is made in this paper that there is in this position a fundamental problem of working practically with what an individual knows and how an individual acts upon what that individual knows. How does an individual teach the difference between acknowledging people’s identity claims and making those claims the basis for the distribution of rights and so, as alluded to earlier, directly engage the ways in which racial discourse, or racial ideology, conflates the two sets of phenomena.
This paper revisits what is already known about ‘race’. It then looks at what the most current arguments are for why ‘race’ should be seen as real, and concludes with a critical analysis of the politics that are behind and surround this argument. The educational implications of this politics are emphasized. In the first part the focus is on the knowledge base about ‘race’, and in the second part the contributions of a range of scholars arguing for working with ‘race’ as a conceptual and even an empirical category in itself, are retrieved. The conclusion is an attempt to build on and take further a recent contribution the author sought to make to this discussion (see Soudien, 2013). This conclusion seeks to describe the texture and substance of the politics in this discussion, and make the argument that there are conceptual problems which need to be borne in mind in managing the politics of the discussion. A commitment is made to education, to the idea of deep learning, of learning against superficiality and against what is called here the ‘conjunctural’ politics of convenience, the basis of a new radical politics against racism.
So what is known about ‘race’?
The point was made in the 1930s already by scholars such as Boas, Hogben, Huxley and Haddon that the concept of ‘race’ was scientifically problematic. Since then, important developments in fields such as genetics have emphatically made the case that ‘race’ as a concept cannot be sustained empirically. The geneticist Calafell (2003: 435) makes the important point that the classification of human beings into biological types is possible but that this would require the assembly and analysis of a very large number of polymorphic markers. Substantiating this point, he draws on the work of Rosenberg et al who say that the global classification of groups would require the identification of at least ‘150 microsatellite polymorphisms per individual…’ (2003: 435). It is possible, he says, but then a scientist would have the challenge of what he calls confounding information: ‘often individuals have relatively high probabilities of belonging to more than one group’ (2003: 435).
There is then the work of J Craig Venter, who first mapped the human genome. Karen and Barbara Fields draw on his autobiography where he says that mapping the human genome revealed for him nature’s ‘real world of irremediably diverse individuality.… Nature’s world of diverse individuality illustrate(s) that the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis; and that there is no way to tell one ethnicity from another in the five Celera genomes’ (Fields and Fields, 2014: 6–8).
Two major scientific bodies have also expressed themselves on the matter. In 1998 the American Anthropological Association published what it called the American Anthropological Association Statement on ‘Race’ (http:www.aaanet.org/stmts/race). The statement said that: ‘(w)ith the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century… it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g. DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94% lies within so-called racial groups…. There is greater variation within ‘racial’ groups than between them… because physical traits are inherited independently of one another, knowing the range of one trait does not predict the presence of others. For example, skin color varies largely from light in the temperate zones in the north to dark in the tropical areas in the south; its intensity is not related to nose shape or hair texture’.
Working with this science, there is amongst social scientists now almost complete agreement that ‘race’ is an idea which human beings have made up. The term that has come to be used to explain this is that of social construction. Machery and Faucher (2005: 1209) explain how the term has come into being historically. They explain that the concept is fundamentally a social one that is ‘culturally transmitted’ through a process of social learning. This social learning is, moreover, determined by several historical factors. Putting this into stronger perspective are Moore et al. (2003: 2–3) who say that both ‘race’ and nature are what they call historical artefacts, ‘assemblages of material, discourse, and practice irreducible to a universal essence…’
Demonstrating the historical nature of this ‘assemblage’ is the now old but still important work of Omi and Winant (1986). Critical about this work is its demonstration of what ‘White’ means in the United States and how this meaning has shifted to include groups not previously regarded as such. ‘Race’ classification in apartheid South Africa provides an even more trenchant illustration of how this process of assemblage works. Every year, up until the late 1980s when the government began to move away from racial classification, a schedule was published in a government gazette detailing the numbers of people who had been reclassified in that year. Important about this annual schedule was not the numbers of people involved (there were hundreds) but the extraordinary assemblage of criteria underpinning and informing the bureaucratic apparatus where the decisions were being made. By the time the Population Registration Act was passed in 1950 the definitions – the assemblages – for what constituted ‘White’ or European, African or ‘Bantu’ or ‘Native’, were so weak as to be almost meaningless. Classification was determined by what an individual looked like and an individual's social acceptability, including that individual's linguistic skills (Union of South Africa, 1950). Important about this development was that it constituted a massive retreat from the scientistic raciology and ethnology of even a decade earlier in which phenotype had been confidently asserted as a fundamental truth about ‘race’ (see Dubow, 1999). The appeal to the truth of science could not be sustained. Where the ‘truth’ lay, suggested Leonardo (2009: 41), was wherever the ideological interests of the state found themselves. ‘(R)ace’, he suggested, ‘was invented in order to accomplish certain social goals’ (2009: 41). Invention was so evident in the economy of ‘race’ that by the 1970s, it was whatever the apartheid state said it was. What it said depended fundamentally on how it saw its interests. Illustrating this is the deeply revealing story of how people of Japanese ancestry became ‘White’ in South Africa. Because of South Africa’s reliance on its trading relationship with Japan, it could not afford to offend the Japanese and so accorded them honorary ‘White’ status.
In reviewing then the general state of current knowledge about ‘race’, the science around it, speaking empirically, is now almost definitive. The overwhelming balance of current scientific opinion is that there is not enough evidence to prove the existence of ‘race’. Now a great deal is known about ‘race’. The knowledge base about it is intensely robust. This understanding is now an important resource in current educational practice.
And yet, overwhelming as this evidence is, the continuation of and persistence of racism demands an engagement with ‘race’ which goes beyond biology. Young and Braziel (2006: 2) make the point that the ‘modernist era… has been plagued by contradictions of equality and disparity, personhood and sub-personhood, revolution and enslavement; rather than being exceptional to modernity, these contradictions are rather constitutive of it’. This paper suggests that current responses to this demand have been poor. Education, as an opportunity for providing society with a clear view forward has been eschewed. There is a continuing struggle in dealing decisively with how to work with the constitutive-ness of this reality. One response which presents a particular challenge to those who work in education is that of an emergent movement which this author has elsewhere (Soudien, 2013) described as the racial realists. The basic argument of the racial realists is described in the next section.
Racial realism
There are a number of key contributions which pick up the struggle for racial realism including that of Young and Braziel (2006) cited above. A critical figure in this space is Mitchell (2012). He concedes, as he puts it, the ‘precarious reality of race’, especially when an individual is fighting racism (2012: 17), but insists that there is no other concept which works as well for making the point, and explaining the experience of modern subordination and humiliation as ‘race’ does: ‘the truth is… that there is nothing [his emphasis] in the world, or in language, that can do all that we ask race to do for us’ (Mitchell, 2012: 14).
What is the essential argument of racial realism? It is that ‘race’ is real. It may not be real biologically but it is real culturally and socially. As human beings, he argues, ‘(w)e have to ask ourselves, as Cornel West and Ian Hacking do, why race still matters when it has repeatedly been exposed as a pseudoscientific illusion and an ideological mystification. The answer lies in the peculiar position of race in the unavoidable human practice of classifying and discriminating kinds of things’ (Mitchell, 2012: 38). It was this, he argued, that animated WB Dubois, and so he sees his own work as an attempt to complete Du Bois’ project of affirming the phenomenon of ‘race’ while negating and opposing racism.
What then is ‘race’ in this view of the world? It is unclear that Mitchell actually spells this out. There are, however, two important moves that he makes which are helpful in coming to understand what ‘race’ means. The first move is to ask that instead of understanding ‘race’ as a lens through which to see, it should be seen as a ‘thing’ in itself – as ‘a form, image, or object’ (Mitchell, 2012: 20). This first step is followed by a second in which the ‘form, image or object takes on sensuous properties and a life of its own’ (Mitchell, 2012: 20). In this, which he says ‘requires careful description and analysis…’, it becomes a medium (Mitchell, 2012: 15–16). This medium is not physical, but operates, as he says, ‘in endless vacillation between the categories of science and the socio-historical, between nature and culture’ (Mitchell, 2012: 15–16). Later, he also describes it as a ‘conceptual icon, a potent, magical, talismanic [emphasis added] word that can be uttered in the service of a diagnosis or as a symptom of racism; it can be used as an analytic device or a polemical, rhetorical weapon’ (Mitchell, 2012: 39).
What Mitchell is doing in moving from presenting ‘race’ as a thing to a mediational device is important for the argument made later in this paper about an essential conceptual mistake being made here. First, what is being done in this two-part procedure must be understood. The first move, in constituting ‘race’ as a thing, is to render it neutral. It is just an object. How he gets to the second move he does not explain, but in making it, this object now is able to take on ‘sensuous properties’. To understand what is happening here it is suggested that the move, unexplained as it might be, is one that Mitchell has to make. He needs this first move to make the concept of ‘race’ a positive one. How he does so is by working in the socio-cultural realm. That realm is a realm of significatory practices which he describes as a medium. Against the hegemonic register in which the medium is currently inflected, he seeks to fill it in more positive ways. The socio-cultural realness he invests in ‘race’ as a medium allows him then to invoke a semiotic register in which he can mak(e) the imaginary real: ‘Race in this framework emerges as a reality that is constructed out of the Symbolic and the Imaginary – that is out of words and images, spaces and institutions, prohibitions and taboos, on the one hand, and sensuous experience on the other’ (Mitchell, 2012: 16). He concedes that the endeavour he is opening up is a ‘precarious’ one, but insists on its ‘necessity’ as a ‘framework in which any kind of reality testing could take place’ (Mitchell, 2012: 16). Coming out of this he concludes then that (r)ace is most emphatically not in the position of what Lacan called ‘the Real’, it is rather a ‘matter of constructed, mediated, represented ‘reality’ – visible, audible, and legible’ (Mitchell, 2012: 17). To do justice to the project that Mitchell is undertaking here, it needs to be said that the mediated reality he seeks to insert into the everyday is motivated by the revulsion he and others feel towards the ‘reality’ of ‘White’ dominance, itself mediated by a social imaginary. To this visible, audible and legible ‘reality’ of ‘White’ dominance he seeks to mount, as a form of resistance, the counter-imaginary of ‘Blackness’.
Another explanation: crafting a new politics of ‘race’
But there are real problems, two of which are focused upon in this section. The first problem is a problem of knowing, in essence a problem of education, that is of how an individual works between the space of DuBois’s ‘nature and the social’, between the empirical evidence to hand about the physical absence of ‘race’ and the undeniable fact of its social and cultural reification. It is here that education comes face-to-face with the question of ideology. It is in the social and cultural that ideological moves take place through which ideas and beliefs take on an almost irrefutable presence in our lives. The second is about doing, the politics of an engagement with ‘race’, and depends fundamentally on an individual's politics of knowing – the first – and only arises if the status of the social is given precedence over the natural.
Tactically, it seems, the world is caught up in what can now be argued to be the undoubted ascendancy of the ‘social and cultural reality’ position. People live in a world, at least that space of semiosis inhabited by academics, of socio-cultural race. The difficulty that this position, however, constitutes is that it requires the affirmation of an ideological complex and not that which is empirically able to be substantiated. It requires that a proponent suspend knowledge of that which is known about the non-sense of ‘race’. It requires that the proponent say to him or herself that while it now known that what an individual looks like, that the whole significatory apparatus of race, raciology, has no meaning in and of itself, individuals, nonetheless, must engage with it as if it is indeed a material object. Racial realists like Mitchell (2012) achieve this by declaring ‘race’ just a thing, an object. They want more, however, in approaching this ‘thing’. How it is vested, the characteristics it has been given, in other words its ideological construction, this it wants to argue must be accepted. Because, then, the majority of people in the world believe and accept this significatory apparatus an individual should accept it. Accept that you are what you are told.
It seems that people are in an important Copernican and so utterly pedagogical moment here in the social sciences. People's commitment to education is tested intensely in moments such as these. Because most people believe that the world is flat, they are being asked to behave as if the world is flat. The problems flowing from this knowing are multiple. Does science then mean nothing? How does an individual work with it? What does an individual do with it? If the ‘racial realists’ were to be followed, what is to be done with scientific knowledge about ‘our race’? Is the science something for the long term? How do people teach and learn through this moment?
Here, Deleuze (1994: xix) is invoked and it is sought to use his important argument that in people's obeisance to socio-cultural ‘race’ as opposed to the scientific ‘race’ they demonstrate an extraordinary kind of anti-Hegelianism, ‘difference and repetition have taken the place of the identical and the negative, of identity and contradiction’. He argues that what people should do is ‘think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same and the relation of different to different independently of those forms which make them pass through the negative’ (1994: xix). This paper seeks, therefore, in these concluding remarks to recover the virtue and strength of difference, but to also avoid casting it in a negative form of representation. ‘Race’, it will be attempted to show, is a negative in the sense that Deleuze intends. This requires, however, further engagement with the Racial Realist argument. This further engagement with the Racial Realist argument will be returned to for a moment.
In returning, the way in which scholars such as Mitchell (2012) set up the argument for the reality of the socio-cultural will be focused on. Striking about it is how, in distinction to and from the scientific register, it moves discursively. As this paper sought to show above, the terrain which the argument seeks to occupy, in the end, is that of the imaginary. The argument, actually, from the moment of its acknowledgement of the ‘precariousness’ of the concept of ‘race’, recognizes that it is in the imaginary, that imaginary that ‘White’ domination has come to populate with false concepts, that it has to find the reasons for its own justification. And so it mobilizes the wonderful register of the mysterious. It invokes words like magical, talismanic, life of its own. Full support for the move that Mitchell (2012) makes needs to be acknowledged here. The difference of the imaginary to which Mitchell appeals is essential for understanding the endlessness, the infinity of the human imagination, which is where humanness lies. But he and his colleagues are conscripting their readers into a false imaginary. It is an imaginary of bodies, not of minds. His imaginary requires the differentiating premise of racialized bodies.
What racial realism is asking to be done is to condense a perception of difference – the look – into a possible virtue, positive socio-cultural race, through a process of an alternative imaginary. It does so through the mobilization of the coded medium of signification to render the idea of ‘race’ stable. Think here of Asa Hilliard’s (1995: 47) important defence of ‘back-talk’ in African American linguistic practice. He wants his readers to acknowledge these distinctive cultural elements of African American life in understanding how intelligence might be assessed. ‘Back-talk’, or ‘call and response’ is critical he explains for stimulating creative thought. The insight is powerful but it depends on a differentiation, a separation which operates at the level of the body. The body is implicitly actualized, the ‘Black player,… tended to use his “ear”… the cries… are music, and quite moving music too’ (Hilliard, 1995: 25). Of course, Hilliard is aiming at the cultural, but it is the body around which his narrative moves. It is at this point, as Deleuze (1994: 213) helps in understanding, that things are clear but confused. They are clear because they are grasping actual differential relations but obscure because of the basis of difference that is at stake. It is what is materialized as difference which is completely under-estimated. It is from this that a ‘threshold of consciousness in relation to our bodies, a threshold of differentiation on the basis of which the little perceptions are actualized, but actualized in an apperception which in turn is only clear and confused’ (Deleuze, 1994: 213). He says that at ‘this point the value of representation in the common sense divides into two irreducible values in the para-sense, a distinctness which can only be obscure, the more obscure the more it is distinct’ (Deleuze, 1994: 214). Deleuze urges that caution should be exercised. How this actualization of difference takes place along particular lines must be understood: ‘they must be surveyed in every domain, even though they are ordinarily hidden by the constituted qualities and extensities’ (Deleuze, 1994: 214). This is a deeply important injunction.
To advance the process of how socio-cultural race is actualized, this paper suggests that it is taking place in racial realism through a fundamental conceptual mistake. What Racial Realists seek to do, as Hilliard is implicitly doing above, is to ontologize being in bodily ways. The important project of Young and Braziel (2006: 12) demonstrates this. They argue that a ‘“race”-liberating practice should be fostered to address the harm caused by theories that attempt to hide mutated forms of racism’ (2006: 12). This is right, but they demonstrate the mistake that is at work by saying ‘Deontologizing race is of little use if the a priori intuitive network of the colonial/settler/master is not cleansed of the grammar of meaning of the grotesqueries of the semiotics of blackness’ (Young and Braziel: 2006, 13). They have in the work of Goldberg (2014: para.8) important support. Here conceptually they demonstrate the confusion around the tactics and strategies for achieving what they call ‘race-liberation’. By refusing to ‘deontologize race’, actually a double error, they seek to hold on to and to rehabilitate – affirm positively – ‘race’ itself, instead of the false conclusions from which ‘race’ was constructed, i.e. racism itself. The liberation that should be sought is not in affirming ‘race’, it is in disrupting the sequence of logic which produces ‘an image of the negative as the consequence of what it affirms’ (Deleuze, 1994: 301). Disruption is disrupting the way in which the image of ‘race’ – by deontologizing it – is projected and as Deleuze (1994: 302) says, ‘interiorised in the system. The negative becomes principal and agent. Each product of the functioning assumes an autonomy. It is then supposed that difference is valid’. Flowing from this is what is thinkable and what not. Its repetition gives it a sense of reality. There is no autonomy in the idea of ‘race’. It is an idea which was constructed to justify and legitimate ‘White’ supremacy. Refusing to deontologize it, in other words to leave it, is leaving intact the entire fabric of lies upon which it is based.
This section now moves to the second issue, that of how the argument should proceed. The difference which should argued for here, which should be defended, around which a legitimate project could be constructed, is the actual socio-cultural itself. At issue is how the idea of ‘race’ was constructed. It was constructed around what Deleuze (1994: 301) calls ‘the platitude of the Identical as equal to itself and the profundity of the same which is supposed to incorporate the different’. In this is the history of the ‘long error’, the ‘history of representation’. Out of this history has evolved an ontological affirmation of particular forms of representation. The politics of ontology of difference needs a different set of representational strategies and teaching approaches. This politics of necessity should proceed from recognition of the constructed-ness of difference. It should abjure its naturalization. If it were to do this it would come to understand how that which the long error has come to naturalize provides the point of departure for an anti-racist politics. Its object, therefore, is not the body itself but the constructions around the body. These constructions present themselves, eminently, as opportunities for teaching, as sites around which people can come to learn how their arguments were made – of the historical choices that people as groups and communities have made about the words, ideas and concepts that have come to play such a large role in their lives. They present themselves powerfully as opportunities for understanding not just that the idea of ‘race’ arose at a particular moment in human history, but why it arose, why the idea of a ‘raced’ body and its racial logic came to sustain itself for so long. And they present themselves, equally powerfully, as opportunities for understanding why the current anti-racist politics finds itself in this complex position in which it finds itself, why the current better scientific knowledge finds itself so over-determined by Racial Realism.
And so, tactically and strategically, what this opportunity allows is for people to teach what the politics of their anti-racist struggle and its debates are all about. Should this teaching explicitly, as the Racial Realists seek to, now render the ‘error’ neutral? In order to make the situation positive, must it be deliberately asked in how the idea of ‘race’ is taught that which is so scientifically incorrect be corrected by simply declaring it positive?
Conclusion
In providing a way forward in this situation, this paper argues that it is the responsibility of education to be defending that which it has before it as its better knowledge. This paper deliberately refrains from making the argument that it is the responsibility of education to be promoting truth if only to leave open the possibility that science as it currently stands can be made even better. And this better may present things that are not understood properly. But as things stand now the idea that ‘race’ is real is largely discredited. That racism continues is, it seems, what people are being called on to explain. How to proceed, it is suggested, is by holding on to the desire for and the interest in making solidarity and affinity on a rational basis in which their complete and unconditional human equality is the primary basis on which people engage with each other. In terms of this it is argued that the ‘race’ of Racial Realism is a false way of achieving this. In closing the difficulties that confront the position being taken are emphasized and thereby acknowledged. The major difficulty, evident even in seeking to bring this argument into the open and keeping it viable, is how powerfully around the world the struggle against racism has coalesced around looks, and how the trope of the look in its discursive seductiveness, in its emotional economy of who is ‘us’ and who ‘them’, inhibits and even discourages the necessity for thinking more deeply about these questions of who and how people include and exclude. And so, as a proponent of the power of education, this paper asks how an individual justifies remaining in the penumbra of the look, even just tactically. Racial Realists here say that the most critical issue for them is that of black unity. They reject any form of social analysis or agency which proceeds from a different approach. Building their argument on the basis of the ubiquity and totalizing reach of ‘Whiteness’ into the everyday, for them recovery is in the insertion of a positive disruptive ‘Blackness’ against and into ‘Whiteness’. The victories here, this paper suggests, can only be temporary, unless they find ways of disconnecting being black from ‘race’, from looks. The difficulty here is acknowledged, but if a struggle for affirmation of dignity is to be conducted its politics need to be as radical as they can be. Goldberg (2014: para.9) argues that there is ‘no inherent necessity to the devolution from the racial to the racist – it at least remains an open question whether racial invocation inherently produces racist inevitability’. This may be so if an individual is invoking the idea of it being ‘inherently so’. But the historical experience tends to favour inevitability. Looks matter in this inevitability. They condition solidarity and affinity. But the politics of the look are, ultimately, the same politics upon which racial domination was constructed, and people, if they are to be faithful to the demands of a commitment to education, must say so. A radical politics must now begin with the original falsehood and then to move systematically to track down its consequences. The Racial Realists’ strategy is to conflate consequences with the original falsehood. This is their confusion. They take on logics of the original error and seek to repair the consequences within the original error. Where this takes them, then, is in having to evolve a new positive falsehood. The move, it is suggested, is as problematic as it is miscalculated. As false as people have found the original error to be, so forever, will a political rejoinder constructed on a positive ‘racial’ image be susceptible to exactly the same critique. ‘Prove your claims’ will forever be the challenge it will confront. How this challenge is answered is too often by the assertion of unacceptable forms of power. The fundamental and essential politics upon which racism is constructed remains intact. This demonstrates, in the end, how difficult it is to conduct a just struggle on the basis of looks. An individual will always find themselves in the zone of the subjective, somebody’s subjective. Nothing can be really proved.
Needed now is the cultivation of a politics in which people can work with differences that are ethically sustainable. Such a politics will recognize where the ontologizing of difference is permissible. ‘Race’ is not an ontological category. Being is in the choices people make, the values to which they commit. It is this that provides the basis for people having a real conversation among each other. It is here that people demonstrate to and for each other what the value of their commitment to education is. If people know through having learnt something, such as that they now do know that ‘race’ is a social construction, they need to demonstrate the implications of that learning. People need to demonstrate in their behaviour, in their relationships with each other, the full understanding that ‘race’ has no meaning in and of itself in how people understand themselves and understand each other. This is the ultimate significance of education. It does not, moreover, for one moment, weaken people’s struggle against racism. The postures of colour-blindness have been attributed to this argument. It is important to emphasize how much anti-racism in its fullness abjures the shallowness of colour-blindness. Powerfully, the ‘Black’ consciousness movement in South Africa of the 1970s to the 1990s illustrates how such an anti-racist struggle can be conceptualized and then practised. Unity of the oppressed was its objective. But it did not proceed from the oppressor’s idea of classification, categories and principally ‘race’. ‘Black’ consciousness refused the labels of apartheid classification and constructed the idea of Black identity on terms that did not begin in the oppressor’s ontology. It proceeded from the premise that identities were not constructed around natural attributes. Black was not, to quote Goldberg (2014: para.19), a ‘matter of “pigmentation” but of “mental attitude, of critical disposition” ’. It was recognized how much people made their histories, chose their destinies and struggled, from below, to constitute their imaginary as they saw fit. It constructed the idea of ‘Blackness’ as a deliberate tactical manoeuvre against the pervasiveness of ‘Whiteness’ and the whole racialized universe on which ‘Whiteness’ depended. But the ‘Blackness’ which it struggled for was not then something which would permanently and for all time come to define identity. It was in the conjuncture of ‘White’ domination a way of asserting the commonness of all of humanity.
How people decide who is kin and who is not, who their brothers and sisters are and who are not, as is acknowledged in this paper, will never be a straightforward question. But it cannot depend on what people look like. That is what people were taught. That is the immense challenge that now almost two hundred years of false teaching has left people with. People are struggling to move out of the shadow of this long error. An anti-racist politics demands, as argued in this paper, a significantly higher level of critical engagement than the seductions offered by the trope of the look. It is in engaging this awareness that a politics becomes fully cognizant of its short-term, medium-term and long-term possibilities, and people begin to see the full bounty of what their better knowledge – their education – has provided them with. People now know that they cannot talk in the definitive ways in which they have about my race and your race. What is now required is that people show in their behaviour and in the ways in which they make community that their education matters.