Race and the Politics of the Exception

Equality, Sovereignty, and American Democracy

Utz McKnight

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134069866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The traditional assumption today about race is that it is not political; that it has no political content and is a matter of individual beliefs and attitudes. In Race and the Politics of the Exception, Utz McKnight argues that race is in fact political and defines how it functions as a politics in the United States.

McKnight organizes his book into three sections, beginning with a theoretical section about racial politics in the United States. Using theorists such as Benjamin, Agamben, and Schmitt, McKnight discusses how the idea of racial communities went from being constituted through the idea of racial sovereignty and a politics of the exception that defined blacks as the internal enemy, to being constitutionally defined through the institutions of racial equal opportunity. In the second section, McKnight further develops his critical race theory by exploring in more detail the social use of race today. The election of President Obama has brought the politics of racial equality to a critical point. In spite of a very powerful set of political tools to define it as a thing of the past, race matters. In the final section, McKnight engages with important African American fiction from each of the three major periods of racial politics in the US. Earlier descriptions of political theory are used throughout these analyses to refine the argument for a new critical politics of race.

Scholars of political theory, identity politics, African American studies, and American Studies will find this work ground-breaking and relevant.

Part I

Defining Exceptions to Equality

1 The Racist and the Elite

But all mythical, lawmaking violence, which we may call executive, is pernicious. Pernicious, too, is the law-preserving, administrative violence that serves it. Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred execution, may be called sovereign violence.

—Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”

But less well known are the interpretations that arose in the Middle Ages, in which the unique, totally abnormal condition and attitude of the Jewish people toward all other people became discernible, a condition that cannot be compared with that of any other people.

—Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes

THE STUDY OF RACE

Bruce Baum describes the complexity of the problem of determining when the idea of race changed historically; his assessment is that the definition of race as scientific fact changed by the 1950s as a result of egalitarian assumptions on the part of scientists (Baum 2006: 189). At the same time, did the assumption, the supposedly well-developed and scientifically proven settled social truth of the inferiority of Blacks, change in the US?

Only to the extent that the factual definition of race was dependent upon rather than expressed in the legal structure of Jim Crow and specific forms of legal discrimination in housing, employment, and education. Race is not first a rights problem, but a problem of how we describe persons. The description of race, and the inequality that defines it, has been explicitly developed since the mid-1600s in the political institutions of first the colonies of the North American New World and then the United States (Baum 2006: 50). That is, it is present in a wide range of social practices we take for granted today. What matters is not its origin in a decision that is metaphysical but in the ability of persons today to persist in its development as a political concept. This is not to say that specific people are responsible for its definition, even though prior to the changing racial politics in the 1960s it was more obvious that individuals were invested in race in particular ways that impacted their social activities.

One of the arguments I want to make is that the refusal of a personal investment in race is a specific attribute of the current political structure of race today. It has become necessary to question the salience of race as a way to continue to use it on a regular basis in our lives. This is not a novel claim. In fact, an argument could be made, which Ralph Ellison does, for example, that the ability to avoid personal attribution is one of the strengths, unfortunately, of the concept (Ellison 1965: 12). To be both indeterminate and determinate, isn’t that what informs Du Bois’s famous argument for double consciousness, as an exploration of how we address our racial subjection and the potential of subjectivity simultaneously (Du Bois 2012b)? I will argue that the application of the concept of race changes, how we use it not what we use it for, with the shift in the political apparatus of race in the post–civil rights period. In this chapter I identify four distinct racial subjects that I believe have been developed from within the institutional construction of formal racial equality.

I think it has been important to erase from memory, from political and social theory, what it was like with regard to race in the US until the 1960s. Many of the academics working in political theory today were young adults or born during the transition from Jim Crow to the current period of formal equality of opportunity, what I call the period of integration. The idea of racial segregation is therefore not something those older than forty-five in the US see as ancient history or outside of our personal experience. Race remains defined as it was during the period of Jim Crow, as a problem of different communities in conflict, and the current apparatus of institutional development reflects a solution of one community rather than a politics of pluralism.

What accounts for the shift in use? Was it not the Soviet Union pointing out our complicity in racial practices developed to their extreme under the National Socialists that gave the SCLC and King leverage to get a hearing from the White House in the early 1960s (Branch 1989; Olson 2004: 97; Blackmon 2009; Wilkerson 2011)? It is often said that the Cold War was instrumental in the success of the aims of the Civil Rights Movement (Woodward 1966: 131). Even a cursory glance at the headlines of newspapers about the racism in the American South in the 1950s and 1960s shows how important this was for framing the international image of the US. The US was a substantial target in the post–World War Two global struggle against government-sanctioned racial politics (Baum 2006: 170). The movement created a substantial political crisis. When force did not move Blacks and their complaint, the only choice was to change the way that racial difference was applied throughout society by removing the basis for the complaint (Rawls 1972; Dworkin 1978).

This is not the same thing as doing away with the importance of the distinction of race. Unable to ignore White sovereign authority as a political force, the state could only seek to resolve the situation by changing the political basis of Black community organization (Schmitt 1996: 59). It is because of this problem that I think it is efficacious to use the writing of Schmitt to explore how White America developed the current structure of formal racial equality of opportunity and the consequences this has for developing a critical race politics today. Schmitt describes a people that have become a political entity: “When it no longer possesses the capacity or the will to make this distinction, it ceases to exist politically. If it permits this decision to be made by another, then it is no longer a politically free people and is absorbed into another political system” (1996: 49). This was the intention of the change in the racial apparatus from Jim Crow to formal racial equality.

The importance of research on integration and assimilation in the period arose out of this perception by the government of political vulnerability (Gordon 1964; Glazer and Moynihan 1970; Dahl 1972). Solving the race problem as an issue of equality became a central element of US national politics. The science of race was replaced by the argument for tolerance and pluralism and the idea of diversity (Rawls 1972; Dworkin 1985; Baum 2006: 179).

This politics defined a specific place for race in the work of most political theorists. The political concerns of Blacks were described as the function of the role of civil disobedience and rights discourse, and as a problem for the resolution of the tension in a procedural democracy between liberty and equality (Rawls 1972; Walzer 1982, 1984; Shklar 1998). Racism was supposedly giving way to a new political individualism by creating the legal structure to safeguard racial equal opportunity and the protection of Black voting rights (Boxill 1992).

The idea of White sovereign authority and the importance of racial com-munities in US political development that had been such an obvious element during Jim Crow literally no longer had a place as a description of democratic politics in the new era of integration, and so remained unaddressed as a continuing problem for political theory (Mills 1997). That this politics coincided with African Americans coming into White academic environments in greater numbers was seen as further proof that race was no longer important (Bell 1996).

Race was no longer considered a legitimate subject of academic study. Instead, African American history, culture, and community development could be the subject of research as this normalized the description of race without conflict, as a social identity without political effects. All this and more were possible to support the new politics of racial equality. Marek Steedman has written on how liberal paternalism and White supremacy were able to coexist in Jim Crow society (Steedman 2012: 106). Such remains the case today.

POLITICS

How did the US go from the description of an absolute difference of human type that allows for exceptional politics on the part of a socially affirmed and reproduced community, a politics that works to substantiate the subordination of those in another community during Jim Crow, to a condition of formal racial equality? There was no political mandate for a change in the idea of a racial absolute difference and there was no politics addressing the decision of race itself in the 1960s. The collective ambitions of the movement, even if described too simply above, addressed instead how to create a racially neutral public space where previously none had existed. It did not challenge the reproduction of racial subjects from within their discrete communities; it did not challenge Whiteness as a concept of community.

In response to this political demand for change, White authorities created the political dispositif or apparatus of equality of opportunity in public space. The only way to do this while retaining the importance of race as a political distinction in the society was to create two exceptions. One was the racist and the other was the exceptional Black. Both social subjects were reifications of social practices and rules already in place in both the period of slavery and Jim Crow, and so therefore did not require changing the definition of White community political authority. What was done was to elevate both descriptions of persons and the practices of their development to the level of political exceptions. In doing so, this changed the description of White sovereignty as something constituted as a political force coincident with government that could establish exceptions to the latter’s authority to preserve racial social order under Jim Crow, to a sovereignty fully within the constitutional politics of the US government under formal racial equality (Schmitt 1988: 27, 43). The tensions that had been present within the description of White sovereignty since before the Civil War were finally integrated fully within the institutional development of the state. As Tracy Strong suggests in his discussion of Schmitt, “The sovereign delineates the realm in which political action takes place” (2012: 233). It was White sovereign authority and not the Civil Rights movement that defined this space for formal racial equality.

THE FIRST EXCEPTION: THE RACIST

One of the most powerful, and problematic, ideas to come out of this period of change from Jim Crow was the political redefinition of the traditional idea of “the racist.” This conception of the racist did not come from the events of the Civil Rights Movement but from the discourse made available to Whites to explain the way their authority was to be asserted against Blacks. This politics of the exception defined racists as those who resisted the changing racial politics, had enabled Jim Crow prior to its collapse, and did not agree that all races were due formal equality of opportunity. By applying the concept politically it was possible to absolve the remainder of the White community of culpability in ongoing social descriptions of racial inferiority. The racist became the label for those White people “over there” who are not like the rest of Whites who can accept racial equality (Olson 2004: 73). This became the description of one part of a new bifurcated White subject who was capable of both policing the social difference of race and engaging in the professional activities that supported racial equal opportunity.

This resolved the problem of the responsibility of individual Whites for the actions that occurred during Jim Crow; it was all done by racists unlike the normal White person who now could openly abjure such activity in the post–civil rights period. The question of guilt and responsibility for the past was thereby severed for the current “normal” White population, who often began describing themselves as liberal. The traditional role during Jim Crow for individual Whites of ensuring the social difference and control of Blacks was in the new politics of equality no longer the purview of individuals but of the state. Of course nothing stopped the White person from having to engage in traditional forms of racial social control if the state of exception that described the racist and formal equality collapsed or was attenuated to an extent that challenged the sovereign authority of Whites as a community in the society. This is one reason racial public discourse again became common with the presidential election campaign of 2012. The apparatus was established by Whites, not Blacks, and the exception of the racist could therefore easily be withdrawn as a political description to include all Whites once more. With this option always held in abeyance, the White community could distance itself from a racist subject, sacrificing once more some Whites to resolve the immediate political problems caused by the effects of race in the society.

This was a dramatic difference from what occurred during Jim Crow, when government, private companies, and individual Whites could openly discriminate against Blacks. A shift in how race was used, not its importance, was accomplished with the redefinition of “the racist.” This was a way to distinguish between actions that were available to legal challenge and those that were defined as not racial, as though Whites could decide, in spite of their complicity in racial politics during Jim Crow, what was racial and prohibited and what was acceptable as a way to differentiate between people. To ask Whites to define what actions should count as racial after Jim Crow is possible only if the problem of racism is described as marginal to community practices rather than the basis of the definition of Whiteness. Without the racist to differentiate good from bad Whites, the idea of Whiteness and the community politics it elaborates in the society could potentially come under criticism from within a description of formal racial equality. Today the importance of racial community in US democratic society is obscured by the racial politics of the exception defined in the subject of the racist.

The solution for Whites was to use the government to change the laws and formal practices, and thereby change the relationship of Blacks to the state, the private sector, and to individual Whites. The question became, is it possible to absorb the persistent discontent of Blacks with the institutions of government such that the fact of the decision itself, that race matters, is left intact (Morrison 1993; West 2001)? Crudely put, since there was no revaluation on the part of the White community as a collective of the place of race, the state had to find a way to absorb the continuing discontent of Blacks with segregation without threatening the social order. This explains the conundrum of how first the decision in Brown and later laws of racial equal opportunity came to be applied and enforced so slowly throughout the society. This was done with an interest in preserving the status quo wherever possible, since the majority of White citizens were against a change in the description of race in their lives.

Over time it was discovered that, similar to the decades following emancipation, Whites could retain their status as a community with respect to Blacks in the new regime. As Walter Benjamin writes, “… the law’s interest in the monopoly of violence vis-à-vis individuals is not explained by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving law itself” (1986a: 281). The racist is sacrificed; the local Southern sheriff, the perpetrator of the ugly hate crime, the unthinking coworker, as well as the idea of integration and equal opportunity, all serve to displace the location where race is decided upon as a part of the new social order. In colloquial terms, the former friend becomes the enemy so as to form new alliances across the old divide. The racist is offered up in sacrifice as an example of reconciliation in a public arena without race, where formal equality of opportunity can be legally sustained.

This requires the absence of the traditional discursive elements of race used in the formal legal structure of Jim Crow. This new structure repeats the moment in the Civil War when the conflict between Whites was realized as requiring the description of Black slaves as contraband and important to the success of the war for Whites in the North. The wound this creates by defining the White community as also containing the enemy, now the racist, is a constant requirement of the limitless politics of friend and enemy.

Under integration, Whiteness remained important as a private organizing concept, but was described as the result of ethnicity, or as the retention of cultural and social practices that individuals wished to hold on to as qualifiers of difference and where these differences should not impact the availability of opportunities for those of other races for success with life plans in the society. Whiteness became synonymous with merely wanting to choose one’s neighbors, friends, and family, not a decision of absolute difference and social hierarchy. This model of social integration, multiculturalism, depends on the absence of anything that points to race as a difference that still makes a difference in the economic or political achievements of an individual.

The use of the racist to suture in this way the conflict between distinct racial communities as a problem of individual beliefs and equal opportunity defines a community of difference that conceals the persistent decision of racial distinction that remains an abiding political concern in the US. The concept establishes a political space of rules, norms, and legal structures whereby Whites are able and willing to cede their control of the institutions of society to those Blacks able, as African Americans, to achieve the exceptional status allowed by this description of equality. This space is supposed to be sustainable while retaining the idea of race as one of the most important social elements in a person’s life. The concept of the racist allows Whites to literally use this subject as an exception to the rule of racial equality. Pointing at the racist as holding onto the idea of racial difference conceals the way the description of Whiteness remains a salient description of social community and important in society.

THE SECOND EXCEPTION: THE EXCEPTIONAL BLACK

Schmitt would explain the current lack of legitimacy of the president of the US with certain sectors of the population who are themselves considered important to the description of the nation as due to Obama’s inability to represent the unitary, sovereign will of the people (Kalyvas 2008: 158). That this could be the case points to the second suture necessary to allow for the stability of the current dispositif or political apparatus of racial equality. This is the description of the exceptional Black subject.

To maintain the distinction of racial difference within a society of formal racial equality, in addition to the racist subject, it was necessary to create the exceptional Black subject. This was a person who is able to use the opportunity for success and to distinguish him- or herself from a Black community that still experiences the effects of race. The key points in this are the idea of individual success and the creation of a distinction of the person from the normal Black community. Historically it has always been the case that some Black people were able to accumulate wealth, social success, and political prominence. What makes this status a focus of politics now is that the individual, and therefore a particular conception of individualism, is taken as proof of the success of racial equality in the US and of the change in society that has occurred since Jim Crow.

This is the definition of the suture, to return to the metaphor of the wound of race on the democratic body politics, allowing a covering over or a closure to take place for the remaining politics of race to persist in its traditional hierarchical absolutist form. The exceptional Black is not responsible for the political effectiveness of the device,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Defining Exceptions to Equality
• Part II Defining Racial Sovereignty
• Part III Black Politics
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index