This book invites readers to confront racism by using resources available to us through utopian thinking, where, to borrow from Ernst Bloch, “Thinking means venturing beyond.” 1 This book was developed as a response to the pressing need to find alternatives to the present, not to blandly escape the present but to move thinking beyond the limits dominant culture commonly sets for us. The following chapters, which analyze authors and texts that span three centuries, are products of our contemporary moment while simultaneously expressing a desire to reach beyond to create a different future.
Today, we live in a time marked by a well-established neoliberalism and ever-growing global fascism. In the USA, this fascism is congruent with an entrenched racism that expresses itself with marked brutality at the borders as much as in the city centers and in the so-called heartland. The goal of this volume as a whole and of this introduction, in particular, is to align utopian thinking with anti-racism. Utopia, as “social dreaming,” 2 offers a powerful way to confront racism by presenting new spaces for questioning and new prospects for inventing society rather than merely adjusting our expectations to what exists.
The struggle against racial oppression stands bluntly in opposition to the complicity and false equivalence that has enabled racism and fascism to evolve and endure. If we consider Achille Mbembe’s description of race as “operating over the past centuries as a foundational category that is at once material and phantasmic, [that] has been at the root of catastrophe, the cause of extraordinary psychic devastation and of innumerable crimes and massacres,” 3 then anti-racism is imperative. Today’s rise of reactionary politics in almost every part of the world bears more than a passing resemblance to twentieth-century fascism. For some folks, this rise is a shock, for others the more shocking fact is not the persistence of fascism but the surprise with which its persistence is greeted. As Robin D. G. Kelley argues, Black intellectuals have understood “fascism not as some aberration from the march of progress, an unexpected right-wing turn, but a logical development of Western civilization itself [,] … a blood relative of slavery and imperialism, global systems rooted not only in capitalist political economy but racist ideologies that were already in place at the dawn of modernity.” 4
At the dawn of modernity, the concept of race moved to the very center of the notion of humanity itself. Understanding genocide and enslavement as key techniques by which the nebulous concept of race became operational, we see racism preceding race and creating classes of people as suitable objects of exploitation. Here, race is not a description applied to people but an action done to people; in the American colonial context, race was an action done by Europeans to colonize Native Americans, to enslave Africans, and to benefit Europeans. The notion of whiteness that grew out of this racialization operated on many fronts—against indigenous peoples and against later waves of immigrants from all over the world, but its pivotal moment may well have been the colonial-era cross-class collaboration positioning poor whites and farmers as a control mechanism over Black bond-laborers. 5 It continues to operate in analogous ways today. 6 As scholar-activist Steve Martinot concludes, “If one accepts this whiteness, one accepts a role and stratified position in society.” 7
Thus, from its beginning, the US was built from “the extraction of surplus value from racialized bodies (e.g., dispossession of indigenous lands, slavery, sharecropping, prison industrial complex, forced labor camps) that are connected to ‘racially ontologized hierarchies of space, which permitted the hyper-exploitation of certain (colorized) bodies and lands.’” 8 In this way, we can understand that race, racism, and US capital are interrelated concepts. Today’s racism builds on this base but is shaped by the circumstances of the current dominant cultural and economic logics, which are the products of neoliberalism. If racism allocates values and benefits based on race, neoliberal racism has famously been called “racism without racists” 9 where the dominant ideologies and institutions themselves insist that race and racism are no longer relevant. Historically, this “post-race” position has been much easier on white people than people of color. After all, white people generally speaking do not have to focus on race or be cognizant of themselves as racialized beings. Any enduring racism from this neoliberal, post-race perspective is blamed on those who insist on foregrounding racial categories and calling out racism, a situation which “makes for an extraordinarily efficient racial structure. Namely, there is nothing to name.” 10
What the Trump-era has made glaringly clear even to those immersed in the post-race perspective is that denying the existence of racism is an untenable claim for more than just those oppressed by racism’s obvious existence; from the first day Trump announced his candidacy by announcing his disgust over immigration (“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re rapists” 11 ), what he expressed is a melancholic longing felt by the many people who resent the social prohibition against speaking with the blunt force of unmasked white patriarchal power. These same longings justify the extravagant claims of persecution resulting from so-called political correctness when such grotesque proclamations are called out. Thus, in the US today, new/old ways of talking about race unabashedly arise, for instance, in the directness of “Muslim bans” and the forced separation of undocumented immigrant children from their parents.
Historian Carol Anderson has labeled the rise of such reactionary oppressions as part of a pattern of “white rage” where most every signal achievement in the struggle for racial equality ultimately faces an oppressive response from white power creatively adapting to the changing conditions on the ground in order to perpetuate its dominance. When the anger of the oppressed builds over time and erupts in major flashpoints, the institutions treat the rebellions as proof of the group’s inferiority and wild anger and not as a response to an untenable tightening of the racial screws by angry whites. Thus, Anderson sees the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri riots—which arose in response to the killing of Michael Brown, a young Black man, by a white police officer—not as an example of an out-of-context Black rage but as a response to the seemingly unending stream of structural expressions of white rage exacted on Black folks since the Civil Rights era. From this perspective, the presidency of Donald Trump emerges as a kind of primal scream by white voters enraged by the election of the US’s first Black president Barack Obama.
But in the era of neoliberal colorblind racism, many people have difficulty acknowledging the bluntness of this white ressentiment. Thus, the responses motivated by white rage are seen instead as a product of the decline of measurable economic conditions as so many commentators concluded when they tried to understand Trump’s presidential victory. 12 Such accounts often fail to acknowledge what W. E. B. Du Bois and, after him, David Roediger have definitively shown: Racism and economic preservation are of a piece in the USA. 13 Indeed, the dominant American discourse that struggles to come to grips with the racial hierarchies it denies creating and resents acknowledging acts as a kind of metonym for a larger phenomenon articulated in Achille Mbembe’s memorable opening to On the Postcolony: “Speaking rationally about Africa is not something that has ever come naturally” in Western discourse that has “long denied the existence of any ‘self’ but its own.” 14
Analogously, it is worth noting that Race and Utopian Desire demarcates American literature as the scope for its chapters not to assume an American exceptionalism or to suggest that what is included in the category of “American” is a settled matter, for in truth, the struggle over what it means to be American is also, if indirectly, at this book’s heart. Determining what defines “America” and who counts as a citizen entitled to the right of a peaceful life has historically been part of the struggle for national belonging. This collection centers on US literature as a way to examine a particular and particularly important site of raci...