Critical Race Consciousness

The Puzzle of Representation

Gary Peller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317261834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite the apparent racial progress reflected in Obama's election, the African American community in the United States is in a deep crisis on many fronts - economic, intellectual, cultural, and spiritual. This book sets out to trace the ideological roots of this crisis.Challenging the conventional historical narrative of race in America, Peller contends that the structure of contemporary racial discourse was set in the confrontation between liberal integrationism and black nationalism during the 1960s and 1970s. Arguing that the ideology of integration that emerged was highly conservative, apologetic, and harmful to the African American community, this book is sure to provide a new lens for studying - and learning from - American race relations in the twentieth century.

CHAPTER 1
THE STRUCTURE OF INTEGRATIONIST IDEOLOGY

A segregated school system isn’t necessarily the same situation that exists in an all-white neighborhood. A school system in an all-white neighborhood is not a segregated school system. The only time it’s segregated is when it is in a community other than white, but at the same time is controlled by the whites. So my understanding of a segregated school system, or a segregated community, or a segregated school, is a school that’s controlled by people other than those that go there. . .. On the other hand, if we can get an all-Black school, that we can control, staff it ourselves with the type of teachers that have our good at heart, with the type of books that have in them many of the missing ingredients that have produced this inferiority complex in our people, then we don’t feel that an all-Black school is necessarily a segregated school. It’s only segregated when it’s controlled by someone from outside. I hope I’m making my point. I just can’t see where if white people can go to a white classroom and there are no Negroes present and it doesn’t affect the academic diet they’re receiving, then I don’t see where an all-Black classroom can be affected by the absence of white children. . .. So, what the integrationists, in my opinion, are saying, when they say that whites and Blacks must go to school together, is that the whites are so much superior that just their presence in a Black classroom balances it out. I can’t go along with that.¹

Malcolm X, 1963

Today, the story of the civil rights struggle commonly is told in linear fashion, as if progress in race relations followed a teleological evolution—from an ignorant time, when racial status was taken to signify real and meaningful differences between people, to the present, enlightened time, when race is properly understood in mainstream culture not to make a difference except as a vestige of unfortunate historical oppression or in terms of a vague and largely privatized “cultural heritage.”

This sense of linear evolution has lent an aura of inevitability to the story, as if the progression from the racial caste system of American slavery to the widespread acceptance of integration and the transcendence of race consciousness as the unquestioned goals of social progress were historically determined. But the process has been neither linear nor inevitable. The institution of racial integration as a social norm results from a cultural struggle, played out in various theaters of social power, over the meaning of racial domination and racial justice in America. The sense of integrationism as the inevitable means to achieve racial enlightenment reflects both the institutionalization of a particular understanding of what racism means and the marginalization of not only white supremacists, but also the opposing analysis represented in the 1960s by Malcolm X and other Black nationalists.

It is no longer controversial within mainstream American legal culture that the goal of racial justice consists of something called “integration.” The disagreements today revolve around how widely to enforce integrationist norms. In legal and public-policy circles, conservatives and liberals distinguish themselves according to their positions on affirmative action² or whether intent must exist for a determination of discrimination.³ These are important issues, and often the choice between a narrow and wide interpretation of the integrationist vision makes a real, even material, difference. But the constant and repetitive struggle over the proper way to implement integrationist norms suppresses from consideration the fact that disagreements occur only within the confines of a shared set of beliefs that comprehend racism as a form of “discrimination.”

I want to discuss here how integrationism came to officially define racial enlightenment less than a decade after racial integration was part of a wider program of broad demands for radical reform of American society. I argue that integrationism achieved mainstream, institutionalized status in part because it was domesticated. Rather than constituting a broad-ranging indictment of the reigning social structure, as it once did, the goal of civil rights was itself “integrated” into the dominant cultural rhetoric. Seen through the universalizing lenses of the liberal American ideology of progress and enlightenment, racial integration appears as part of a general societal discourse that comprehends legitimacy in terms of policing borders between rationality and objectivity on one hand and prejudice and bias on the other. The American mainstream successfully contained the potentially radical struggle of racial liberation within the frame of “civil rights” and thereby rendered it conventional and conservative.

First, I describe the analytic components of integrationism as it has been understood in mainstream American culture. Second, I relate the integrationist categories of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation to background images of rationality and universality in liberal and enlightenment thought. Then, I suggest that this way of thinking about race can serve not only to criticize, but also to legitimize various social practices. This analysis concludes with a discussion of how the integrationist reform of public schools reflects at a practical, institutional level the features I describe at an ideological one.

The point of discussing integrationism in this way is to show that the currently dominant vision of racial justice is not inevitable or self-evident, but rather is situated within the confines of a particular set of social, cultural, and philosophical assumptions about the world. Its dominance presupposes a set of political and social choices that could have been, and can be, made differently. After describing integrationism, I contrast it with the opposing Black nationalist analysis of race.

The Analytic Components of Integrationism

The goal of racial integration has taken many forms and has been supported by various worldviews. At one time, the idea of racial integration represented a powerful, spiritually rooted social resistance movement that threatened to destabilize the status quo of American institutional life in profound ways. Under the banner of integrationism, hundreds of thousands of people mobilized to challenge political, economic, and cultural power relations in cities and towns across the country, employing tactics that included mass protest, economic boycotts, civil disobedience, sit-ins, and strikes.⁴ Therefore, there is nothing intrinsic to the concept of racial integration that demands that it be understood in the way I am about to describe it. What I want to capture here is the general cultural sense that became dominant in the late 1960s and 1970s of what racism consists of and how to overcome it.

From this perspective, integrationism should be understood to comprise a set of attitudes and beliefs for perceiving the meaning of racist domination and for identifying the goals of racial justice. The concepts of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation are the key structural elements of this ideology. Each idea embodies a different manifestation of what is seen as the central aspect of racism: the distortion of reason through the prism of myth and ignorance.

In the integrationist perspective, racism is rooted in consciousness, in the cognitive process that attributes social significance to the arbitrary trait of skin color. The mental side of racism is accordingly represented as either “prejudice,” the prejudging of a person according to mythological stereotypes, or “bias,” the process of being influenced by subjective factors. The key image here is irrationalism. The problem with prejudice is that it obscures the work of reason by clouding perception with beliefs rooted in superstition.⁵ The paradigmatic manifestation is the white supremacist myth structure that asserts natural, biological differences between Blacks and whites—the familiar identification of whites with intelligence, industriousness, and piousness, and the corresponding association of Blacks with dullness, laziness, and lustfulness.⁶ The opposite of the ignorance that appears as racism is knowledge, truth gleaned from actual interracial experience, rather than mythologies of stereotype.

In the integrationist ideology, racism achieves social form when the distortion of prejudice in consciousness subsequently translates into practice. Here, racism manifests itself in the practice of “discrimination,” in the disparate treatment of whites and Blacks that the irrational attribution of difference is supposed to justify. After slavery, the paradigmatic practice of racism in its systematic, social form was the Jim Crow system of de jure (legally imposed) segregation, which institutionalized racial apartheid on the basis of an ideology of white supremacy.⁷ And just as “prejudice” is implicitly contrasted with knowledge, discrimination is contrasted with neutrality—the social practice of equal treatment.

The solution to segregation, then, is integration, understood as a social vision opposed to racism, in each realm in which racism manifests itself. Within popular consciousness, integration means overcoming prejudice based on skin color. Therefore, reflecting one dimension of integrationist ideology, “enlightened” liberals began to understand themselves as possible racists to the extent that they believed in irrational images of people based on skin-color stereotypes. The ideal was to transcend stereotypes in favor of treating people as individuals, free from racial-group identification.⁸

At the level of practice, the integrationist cure for discrimination is equal treatment according to neutral norms. At the institutional level, integrationism obviously means an end to the social system of racial segregation. In sum, the cure for racism would be equal treatment on an individual level and integration on an institutional level. Integrationists believed the two would go hand in hand. Once neutrality replaced discrimination, equal opportunity would lead to integrated institutions.⁹ Experience in integrated institutions would in turn replace the ignorance of racism with the knowledge that actual contact provides. This deep link between racism and ignorance on one hand and integration and knowledge on the other helps explain the initial focus of integrationists on public education: children who attend integrated schools would learn the truth about each other’s unique individuality before they came to believe stereotypes rooted in ignorance. By attending the same schools, children would in turn have equal opportunity at the various roles in American social life.¹⁰

The integrationists’ diagnosis of the distortions of the white supremacy ideology focuses on the failure of white supremacists to recognize the universal characteristics shared by whites and Blacks. According to the integrationists, white racists perceive the world through a false structure of “same” and “other” that utilizes a concept of Blacks as “other” and denies that the attributes that characterize the white racists exist in the “others.” Thus, the rationality and piousness that supposedly characterize whites are, within racist ideology, denied to Blacks. The integrationist proposes to correct this situation by demonstrating an even distribution of these characteristics across race lines; Blacks can be rational and pious, and whites can be emotional and lustful. In other words, according to integrationist ideology, racists make the mistake of “essentializing” racial categories and believing that there is some necessary, intrinsic relationship between race and particular social characteristics. Integrationists are committed to the view that race makes no real difference between people, except as unfortunate historical vestiges of irrational discrimination.¹¹ In an extreme form of the integrationist picture, the hope is that when contact occurs between different groups in society, not only race, but all “ethnic identity will become a thing of the past.”¹²

Race, Universal Reason, and LIberal Progress

Of course, this is a highly abstracted model of what I mean by the “ideology of integrationism.” I assume these general ideas about race are so familiar that simply evoking them calls to mind the fuller meaning of integrationism in mainstream American culture. But at the same time, it is important to grasp the integrationist worldview at this level of generality. Integrationists comprehend racism at a high level of abstraction in part because they wish to transcend the bias of particularity that they see as the root of racist consciousness. Integrationism in short, links with a broader set of liberal images—images that connect truth, universalism, and progress.

A commitment to universalism and an association of universalism with truth and particularism with ignorance form the substructure of American integrationist consciousness.¹³ This universalism is the common theme that connects the integrationist analytic distinctions between reason and prejudice, objectivity and bias, neutrality and discrimination, and integration and segregation. Each dichotomy envisions a realm of impersonality, understood as the transcendence of subjective bias and contrasted with an image of a realm of distortion where particularity and stereotype reign. Integrationist beliefs are organized around the familiar enlightenment story of progress as the movement from mere belief and superstition to knowledge and reason, from the particular (and therefore parochial) to the universal (and therefore enlightened).¹⁴

Within this frame for organizing social perception, controversy revolves around how to categorize particular social practices as either rational and neutral, or irrational and biased. Liberals and conservatives can be distinguished by how far they believe the realms of either bias or neutrality extend. But conservatives’ and liberals’ basic comprehension of racial justice has the same underlying structure: to universalize institutional practices to efface the distortions of irrational factors like race, and thereby make social life neutral to racial identity. To both liberals and conservatives, racism consists of a form of distortion that could be superseded by an aracial arena of social understanding. Once we remove prejudice, reason will take its place; once we remove discrimination, neutrality will take its place; once we remove segregation, integration will take its place.¹⁵

One way this universalizing character of integrationism manifests itself in perception is that diverse social phenomena begin to appear the same because they are all viewed through the same analytic lens. From within this structure for cataloguing and organizing thinking about social life, racism becomes equivalent to other forms of prejudice and discrimination based on irrational stereotypes. Social domination based on race, gender, sexual preference, religion, age, national origin, language, and physical disability or appearance can all be categorized as the same phenomena because they all represent bias—deviation from a neutral, rational standard. Similarly, the fact that relations between whites and African, Asian, and Latin Americans are all perceived as presenting the issues of “discrimination against racial minorities” in legal and political discourse reflects the same structure of abstraction. From this structure, it begins to appear that the social subordination of various groups does not have a complex, particular, and historical context, but rather is a formal, numeric problem of the relations of majorities to minorities, unified under the concept “discrimination.”

Consequently, given the universalist dimension to integrationist thinking, it is plausible to conceive of a category of “reverse racism,” which is really not “reverse” at all. Because racism means a deviation from a universal norm of objectivity, it can be practiced by anyone—and anyone can be its victim— regardless of particular historical circumstances or power relations. Thus, within the integrationist ideology, a Black person who stereotypes whites is racist in the same way as a white person who harbors prejudice against Blacks. And Blacks who discriminate against whites are guilty of the same kind of racism as whites who discriminate against Blacks. Anyone can engage in racism because we can identify racism from a vantage point of race neutrality, of not making someone’s race count for anything. The symmetry of the integrationist picture is rooted in the idea that racism consists of possessing a race consciousness about the world, in thinking that race should make a difference in social relations.

Finally, given the idea of immutability common to categories of “discrimination,” the story of the struggle against racism can be related in a way that follows the basic script of liberal progress more generally. Race consciousness is associated with status-based social coercion, where individuals are treated in a particular way because of the arbitrary fact of membership in a social group they did not choose. The transcendence of race consciousness represents a social movement toward the freedom of the individual to choose group identification. Like classical images of the common law, the vision underlying integrationist ideology is of American culture working itself pure by overcoming the distortions of various kinds of prejudice in favor of the increasing rationalization of institutional forms, which in turn provides greater individual liberty to choose, free of coercive social power. Freedom from racial discrimination is but one instance of the historical move from status to contract, from caste to individual liberty.¹⁶ Individualism and universalism are thereby linked.¹⁷

The aims of racial integration seem self-evident because they are one part of a web of meaning that constitutes the dominant ideology of the nature of social progress itself. The meaning of race has been grafted onto other central cultural images of progress, so that the transition from segregation to integration and from race consciousness to race neutrality mirrors the movements from myth to enlightenment, ignorance to knowledge, superstition to reason, primitive culture t...