April 27, 2005

Race and Multicultural Politics
by Jeff Langstraat

This relationship has been on my mind lately.  It's a topic I always end my classes on Race and Ethnicity with, and a week ago I was asked by a couple of organizations to talk about issues that finally center on this relationship.  I, the white guy from a nearly all-white town in rural Minnesota, and the only white male in the room, was talking to an organization of black men and the University's multicultural society about race and multicultural politics.  It was a fascinating experience.  I've been thinking about some things we discussed, and some of what we've been doing in class, and wanted to toss around a few ideas, some of which might make folks a little uncomfortable.  As I say to my students when they're not sure what the hell I'm doing, "Come along for the ride."

One of multiculturalism's biggest flaws is that it substitutes culture for race.  It maintains a form of racial essentialism and transfers that into a cultural particularity.  It links culture to body.  More specifically, it links particular cultures to particular bodies.

Before I move forward with the argument, I'd better do some definitional work.  "Race" and "Culture" are such loaded terms, so full of multiple meanings, so fraught with potential misunderstanding and miscommunication.  Here's what I'm talking about.

When I speak of race, I'm not talking about skin color.  Skin color (and other biological features deemed relevant) is a marker of race.  Race is a system of social classification and organization.  It's a system of power.  It's relational (races exist only in relation to each other).  Skin color is both the determinant of place in these systems and the shorthand we use to denote them.

Culture is not content.  We often reify culture; we turn it into a thing.  Culture becomes the songs, books, movies, dances, etc. particular to a social group.  It becomes discrete.  That's a common, and partially legitimate view, but it's far too limited when compared to the definition I want to use.  When I talk about culture I'm talking about process.  It's the ongoing (re)production of meaning and social life.  We enact it and create artifacts, but those are only snapshots in time, the products of social life at that moment.  Because it is social, it is interactive.  It is constantly in motion.  It is never pure.  Members of groups interact with each other, and with members of other groups, fairly regularly.  These interactions always carry the potential for intermixture, for hybridity: something new from two (or more) other sources, both yet neither at once.  All cultures contain some aspect of this.  Culture as thing sets up artificial boundaries around culture that cannot hold.

OK, back to the main argument.  This conflation of the racialized body with cultural formation is nothing new.  It is present in those Enlightenment theories of the development of societies, in the anthropologies of Social Darwinist colonizers, and in the contemporary writings of conservatives who decry the declining white birthrate and "browning" of America.  Only whites are biologically advanced enough to create and sustain Western Democratic traditions.  Whites are the height of physical and cultural evolution.

It's present in other ways, though.  It comes into play when an African American who prefers Mozart to Mos Def is accused of "Acting White" and when the white kid who adopts hip hop styles is called a "Whigger."  We connect certain cultural practices with certain body types, and by doing so create discrete cultures open only to those of a particular "race."

The point of my talk last night was that a politics of multiculturalism needs to sever this relationship between body and practice that creates racialized culture.

I was asked to speak on the particular issue of multi-racial people, interracial relationships, and how these contribute to a crisis for race itself.  The students who asked me to speak are taking or have taken a class in which I finish the course with Paul Gilroy's Against Race, which informs the argument I'm making in a deep and profound way.  One of Gilroy's initial points is that advances in biological science have laid bare the lie of race.  How do we quantify and measure it?  Where does it lie in the body?  The answers to the question depend on what "race" is, and there is no solid definition of that.  It doesn't exist as a biological reality.  Race has been conjured into being through the various means mentioned above, among many, many others.

"Race" signifies types of people.  As such, there should be something that creates a line of demarcation between they types.  That line has always been shifting, undergoing odd mutations along the way.  As more people have claimed bi- or multi-racial identities, this crisis of race is advanced.  Their presence points to the impossibility of discrete races as types of people.  

Their presence also forces the problem of culture as linked to racialized body.  "Which culture are they?" It always gets asked.  "With which group does their allegiance rest?"  So does that.  Their culture is that of both the cultures of their parents and of neither.  It is a hybrid culture that keeps and eliminates various aspects of the cultures from whence it came.  That makes it no less authentic, as those cultures also formed out of interactions through time. The presence of multi-racial/multi-cultural people often presents a crisis of everyday racial experience (just what are you?) and a crisis for race more broadly.

I would argue that this crisis should be enhanced and race discarded.  I'm not talking about the neoconservative "color blind now" approach.  We cannot undo centuries of racial structuring by immediately declaring it non-existent.  To do so would be to pervert justice, and to minimize the suffering of Race's victims.

Besides, such a color blindness is impossible.  We come in innumerable shades, and we notice them.  However, Race makes these pigmentary differences meaningful.  In a world of proliferating shades and phenotypic mixtures, ideas of racial specificity cannot hold.

The elaboration of this argument always leads to a question that sounds something like this:  "In this move to get rid of race, aren't you trying to take away my identity, my history, my family's struggle to survive and overcome?"  I would say no.  What I'm trying to get rid of is the system.  That memory of suffering and survival is a testament to the necessity of destroying the system that produced it.

A rethinking of culture and race in this interactive and relational form moves us away from essentialized identities that separate and into the possibility of coalition across difference.  It requires other lines of solidarity, though.  It also requires critical self-reflection and an obligation to listen.  The comparative histories of suffering lead us to a realization that we are all, potentially, oppressor and oppressed.  We are all, potentially, victim and victimizer.  We are all, potentially, camp guard and prisoner.

[Ed: I published this piece last week on dailyKos. I wanted to reprint it here because: 1) I think it was this piece that brought me to Liza's attention; and 2) I wanted to provide folks with a bit more of an intro to what I write than the basic introduction below. For an idea of what happens when I get a little silly, you can check this out.]

Posted by in Body, Communities, Critical Theory, Culture, Ethics, Ethnicity, Identity Politics, Politics, Race
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