The Erotic Life of Racism

By Sharon Patricia Holland

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5195-5

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………..ixintroduction The Last Word on Racism………………………………………………………..1chapter one Race: There’s No Place like “Beyond”……………………………………………..17chapter two Desire, or “A Bit of the Other”………………………………………………….41chapter three S.H.E.: Reproducing Discretion as the Better Part of (Queer) Valor…………………65conclusion Racism’s Last Word………………………………………………………………95Notes……………………………………………………………………………………115Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..147Index……………………………………………………………………………………161

Chapter One

It seems that race, like the presumption of innocence, the Hippocratic oath, or “till death do us part,” is too useful a fiction to dispense with. —Richard Thompson Ford, “What’s Queer about Race?”

“Race” is not what it was. —Paul Gilroy, Against Race

RACE There’s No Place like “Beyond”

The rhetorical force of race talk is its ability to invoke that wonderful place called “beyond.” If we can divest ourselves of our preoccupation with the past, if we can shed who we are (or have been) to one another, then we can get beyond race. Such joyful overcoming is worthy of a civil rights dirge or a Heideggerian tirade on the ends of (human?) history. But as time ticks on, moving beyond looks a lot like getting over. The particular conundrum here in this desire to move beyond, to get over, race is its reliance upon a future in which we will become, at least discursively, productive. In the wake of Johannes Fabian’s classic Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983), critics such as Lindon Barrett and Michelle Maria Wright have contributed to the further dismantling of the time/space continuum—otherwise known as the West’s progress narrative—and the centrality of black bodies to modernity’s reimagining of the white self.

As I noted in the introduction, this peculiar overcoming might have its roots in a somewhat pedantic intelligence about the relationship between black and white. It is precisely because the black subject is mired in space and the white subject represents the full expanse of time that the meeting of the two might be thought of as never actually occurring in the same temporal plane; yet the desire to get over such a meeting is immediate and the recovery is often swift. Exactly how does one move beyond a nonevent? How can this encounter be so important to us if these two never literally meet? Or to put it another way, maybe my encounter with the woman in the Safeway parking lot attests to the problem of relation—we meet all the time, but like Faulkner’s Judith and Henry at Sutpen’s Hundred the words we exchange when we happen upon our nonhappening serve as “brief staccato sentences like slaps” that reverberate off the walls, corridors, alleyways, and yes, even parking lots around us. This persistent ordering of such a meeting (one that we usually show up to with script in hand) might lead us to understand the fervent desire to move beyond an encounter that has in fact already occurred in the blood, and yet in time and space remains a nonoccurrence.

The (non)happening, and our critical obsession with its potentiality, marks a strange and schizophrenic approach to the very idea of relation. In racist ordering, relation is defined as those who shape time and those who stand outside it, as those who belong to your people, and those who do not. Only grave trespass can produce another order altogether. What makes that parking lot scene so compelling to me is that although my female counterpart certainly wanted to order time for me by manipulating the space I occupied (“move your car please”), she became the one who turned back the clock, thus changing the terms of the relationship. That confrontation illuminates the way in which racist logic ensnares even the racist trying desperately to declare the order of things, verbally or physically. By refusing to move in that Bartleby the Scrivener way—politely, I preferred “not to”—I challenged her to find another way to move me. And she did; but not without giving up her own stronghold on time’s order of things. To move me she had to situate me in a discourse I would recognize, and in that one moment she looked back past me. Like a rider on a difficult horse, she tried to bring me up under her so that we could move forward—a move that in equestrian parlance equals mastery. In that instance, she touched on the mysterious life force of racist endeavor: in constantly trying to align the world according to a particular ordering, it arrests time rather than attests to its futurity. For her beyond race is nothing of the sort—it is just an order of things in which black (radical) yields to white (liberal). Theoretically speaking, beyond signals a very dangerous turn for antiracist struggle as it reifies nonrelation while simultaneously reinscribing the past (one’s history) in a master-slave dialectic. Such is the order of things.

If relation technically happens (two persons, black and white, face to face) but never occurs given the time/space split, then what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva observes holds great purchase on my following review of work in “race” studies. As he notes: “People cannot like or love people they don’t see or interact with. This truism has been corroborated by social psychologists, who for years have maintained that friendship and love emerge when people share activities, proximity, familiarity, and status.” While reorganizing “status” under capitalism in the United States might be more than a small challenge, it is not difficult to see that proximity and familiarity can create the conditions to overcome racist practice. Or do they? What if proximity and familiarity don’t create a level playing field of difference, but instead replicate the terms upon which difference is articulated and therefore maintained? What if our coming together (all the time) is the thing that we continue not to see as the lie of nonrelation and difference rolls off our tongues each time we say who we are and where we come from?

In the last two decades of humanities scholarship on race and racism, proponents on either side of an increasingly widening gap have moved through the terrains of racialization as social construction, identity politics, critical race theory, and genetics and genomics in order to understand what constitutes so fraught a belonging. For example, as Antonia Darder and Rodolfo Torres, in their own formulation of racism, announce: “In our analysis ‘race,’ simply put, is the child of racism.” By placing race in pseudo-biological relationship with racism, Darder and Torres metaphorically reify the problem of biological relationship that makes studies of race and racism so difficult to manage. Settling the problem of biological belonging is the psychic life of race, and race work is always already performed by quotidian racism. My project gives depth and shape to the work of racism, arguing first and foremost, as have other Americanists, that racism is not anomalous to quotidian life. The argument here is that racism orders some of the most intimate practices of everyday life, in that racist practice is foundational to making race matter.

Given my earlier preoccupation with (non)relation, I wonder if proximity is the cure for the bad faith of racist practice? In the end, one would wish for more elaboration on Bonilla-Silva’s part: What kind of proximity, what level of familiarity? Are we talking “family” here? If one lives and works in a world primarily populated by phenotypically white people, proximity slowly morphs into the singularity that is monocular. In this instance whose perspective, whose “see[ing]” will matter most?

Bonilla-Silva’s contention about the kind of beneficial work that proximity and familiarity can do is muddied by Jennifer Richeson and J. Nicole Shelton’s pioneering work on interracial interaction. Proximity at the level of blood relation does not ensure antiracist practice at all. As Richeson and Shelton find: “Given that interracial contact may be the most promising avenue to prejudice reduction, it is important to examine factors that undermine positive interracial contact experiences, as well as those that facilitate them.” In their view, knowing that interracial interactions are cognitively draining is not enough; instead, they suggest “that it is not the goal to control prejudice per se that results in cognitive depletion but, rather, the cognitive processes that individuals employ (i.e., vigilance, suppression, effortful self-presentation) to avoid appearing or behaving in prejudiced ways. This new science about race interaction may be helping us to acknowledge that race may not be on the body, but it certainly is “in” it, as studies such as that of Richeson and Shelton compel us to see certain cognitive machinations as constitutive of the racialized drama we give character to in quotidian life. What are we seeing when we see what we see? Are we uploading the same old script and playing our respective parts or are we letting the situation be? Are racial encounters the amor fati for the twenty-first century?

Where any idea of association—in the bedroom, parking lot, or board-room—is repudiated, time matters most when the question of descent shackles biology to it. As beings enter into the symbolic and become subjects—the stuff from which personhood is crafted—they enter into a history that literally is not their own; history, in terms of descent, belongs to someone else in the sense that not only is it dependent on those who have come before but also on their place in the racial order—a place that, in turn, defines one’s own. Such is the tricky matter of race. As Sonia Sikka, reading Heidegger and his Volk, argues: “Descent becomes a determining factor through the way that biology enters ‘history’; that is through the inevitable role that it plays in self-identification.”? In the racial order of things, black/white subjects who speak of race connect themselves to the historical in a way that differentiates one history from the other. The purpose here is to maintain the illusion that there is very little shared historico-biological material.

The fact that one has to have a “history” in order to be connected to a people racializes the meaning of “history” and simultaneously locates the idea of being related (to someone) to a quotidian progress narrative, one that can be counted by its black and white parts. Here, a rhetoric of “beyond” gives meaning to the meeting of black and white as a nonevent, as the nonevent allows for bloodlines to articulate themselves in a racially ordered fashion. Put more forcefully, Stuart Hall reminds us that “the essentializing moment is weak because it naturalizes and dehistoricizes difference, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic. The moment the signifier ‘black’ is torn from its historical, cultural and political embedding and lodged in a biologically constituted racial category, we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of racism we are trying to deconstruct.” Hall’s statement demonstrates the problem the historic plays in attempts to both recognize the black body and deploy it as a signifier for something other than the biological. He argues for the black body’s attachment to the historical, among other categories, by believing that this afiliation is apart from the “biologically constituted.” But if to have a history is tied to racial homology, if not feeling, then to think the black body in the historical is to connect it to some trace of its biological force. Such belonging is reiterated in black narratives of community that seem to depend upon the link between biological futurity (generations) as historical connection—or in other words the way historical connection is realized is through the biological.

In thinking through this particular beyond—the “reality bites” of critical race studies—it might be fruitful to take some time to consider both where critical energies are focused in the discourse on race and what stories about race and racism are consistently rehearsed in that familiar place.

One of my objectives in this chapter is to provide an overview of work in critical race theory that has helped us to arrive at the theoretical crossroads I have articulated as a meeting between critical race and queer theory. What I outline here is a trajectory for critical race scholarship that has been pivotal in shaping future projects on the nature of race and racism; that contributes in some way to moving my own argument in a particular direction; and that represents some but by no means all of the diversity of work in the field. My hope is that the following redaction will provide an adequate grounding for the intersection I attempt to effect in chapter 3.

Black feminists such as the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw and the political scientist Cathy Cohen draw upon work in gender studies to complicate not only the intersection of conflicting oppressions but also the object of our scholarly inquiry. Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” (1991) is a lengthy exegesis of several cultural, political, and structural narratives in support of her principal claim that critical feminist methodologies about “women” do not apply to the situationality of women of color and black women in particular. Early in her essay, Crenshaw alerts us to the fact that her focus is upon the intersection of gender and race, although, she notes, “class or sexuality are often as critical in shaping the experiences of women of color.” While the notion of intersectionality has come under critique as unwieldy and diffuse, and Crenshaw in particular has been criticized for collapsing “black women” into “women of color,” the difficulty that the next generation of feminists have with Crenshaw’s analysis is not that it attempts to do too much but that it cannot account for sexuality in its framework. Moreover, what intersectionality lacks in Crenshaw’s paradigm is a sound methodology to pair with its critique of prevailing assumptions about race and gender. Nevertheless, feminists and critical race scholars have long used her model of the multiple crossings of gender, race, and class, with varying results.

Perhaps the most important contribution to the discourse on race made by Crenshaw’s essay is that it was not only a part of early black feminist critiques of poststructuralist thinking, but also that it articulated a way in which social constructionist approaches to theories about race were still useful in scholarly work. As Crenshaw notes: “One rendition of [the] antiessentialist critique—that feminism essentializes the category of woman—owes a great deal to the postmodernist idea that categories we consider natural or merely representational are actually socially constructed in a linguistic economy of difference. While the descriptive project of postmodernism, of questioning the ways in which meaning is socially constructed is generally sound, this critique sometimes misreads the meaning of social construction and distorts its political relevance.” It is unfortunate that Crenshaw’s reading here is somewhat tautological—as “meaning” interacts with “social construction” as both origin and byproduct.

Nevertheless, I would like to point out that Crenshaw helps to shape discussions within feminism about the category of woman and essentialism that reached their peak with the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) thus signaling her engagement with central tenants in feminist thought. Crenshaw does follow the arc of black feminist critique—a critique that is thoroughly situated against an evacuation of the category of woman for the poststructuralist’s linguistic economy of difference. In essence, she wants to reserve some room for the material effects of social construction. The material effects argument has been very successful in keeping alive the social constructionist position within critical race theory —a position that resists the particular flow of poststructuralism’s discursivity. For Crenshaw, the social construction of race defines a nuanced politic—one in which ideas about race have material force and therefore phenomenological meaning. In this critical situation we are somewhat betwixt and between: not rid of woman entirely, but not satisfied with her racial makeup either.

After Crenshaw’s critique of the political saliency of identity, such a position became harder and harder to maintain within queer theorizing, especially as poststructuralism’s fragmented body gave way again and again to persistent regulatory regimes so that nothing could be written on or in its changing form. As such, the body’s materiality slowly became mere byproduct. What is interesting for my focus in this book is that when the body becomes byproduct—becomes shaped by discourse—it moves away from the efforts of critical race scholarship to engage its materiality in a dialectical discourse of “race/racism” and finds itself wholly invested in sexuality. Once Foucault gave the (homosexual) body a history it could reiterate for itself as “the one,” not just “a one,” the body wrests itself from the same historical trajectory of materiality that life in the Americas demanded. Gone are the histories of slavery and removal for this fragmented, discursively besieged body; what is present is the beautiful life awaiting it in the realm of all things queer and possible. Is it at this point that the queer body abandons race?

(Continues…)

Excerpted from The Erotic Life of Racismby Sharon Patricia Holland Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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