an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 8, January-February 2011,
ISSN 1552-5112
Race
and Racism After Anti-Racism[1]
One believes
that the meaning is going to die, but it is a death with reprieve; the meaning
loses its value, but keeps its life, in which the form of the myth will draw
its nourishment.[2]
There is a
real problem facing anti-racism in our contemporary societies, but surprisingly
it is one that anti-racist activists find hard to acknowledge, and even harder
to do anything about. This is because it is a problem not to do with
anti-racism’s failures, but rather its successes. As a direct result of the
victories of anti-racism, all dominant social actors and institutions will now
go out of their way to champion anti-racism. This is not to say those actors
and institutions are necessarily sincere in espousing such ideas, but rather
they have no real option but to do so. An anti-racist critique has shaped the
terms of all contemporary race practice, determining in often very precise
terms what can and cannot be said in any particular situation.
The Politics of Multiculturalism
In my book
which focused on the British state under the New Labour government (1997-2010),
I characterized this as the politics of multiculturalism.[3] While the
term ‘multiculturalism’ is increasingly criticized by
Rather than
serving – as the scaremongering conservative argument has it – as a means of
corroding or betraying the integrity of the nation-state, the politics of
multiculturalism have actually served to consolidate and shore up its shaky
foundations. When Paul Gilroy entitled his first book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, he rightly recognized and
named a certain limit to British race politics in the 1980s. In the
twenty-first century, this title no longer rings quite true; that limit is no
longer in existence, and it is in fact the transgression of that limit that is
now exemplary. While the contemporary politics of nationalism continue to be
racialized in all manner of ways, this racialization happens through, not
against a multicultural politics. Today there definitively is black in the
Union Jack, and as I have suggested the announcement and celebration of
In short,
because all positions taken in contemporary race politics are automatically
channeled through this dominant discourse of anti-racism and cultural
pluralism, the politics of multiculturalism has necessarily become the most
significant contemporary site of racist (as well as anti-racist) practice. This
is where anti-racist activism gets into difficulties, because much anti-racist
thinking still assumes a clean and clear distinction between racists and
anti-racists. While anti-racist activists readily acknowledge that the state,
political parties, institutions and corporations may all ostensibly speak an
anti-racist language while acting in the usual racist ways, activists tend to
finds it harder to recognize that this shift has to a large extent undermined
the terms of anti-racist critique.
Anti-racist subjects after hegemony
The fact that
all dominant social actors now claim anti-racism as their own has important
implications for the production of anti-racist subjects, for anti-racism’s move
from the margins to the mainstream effectively dissolves the critical position
that anti-racists once occupied. While anti-racist activists tend to view
mainstreamed versions of anti-racism as inadequate or insincere – little more
than whitewashing concessions with little real substance – this neglects the
sense in which those concessions fundamentally change the entire field of race
discourse.[5] What was once
outside, and critical of, the dominant social consensus, has now been brought inside
and contained within it.
I have
suggested this can be usefully conceptualized as a problem of hegemony.[6]
Dominant
social actors and institutions have performed a very clever hegemonic manoeuvre
in racial politics. Rather than maintain the increasingly difficult stance of
insisting on opposition to anti-racism, they have conceded to its indisputable
moral force. While the fact that this has happened is incontestably a good
thing, it means that anti-racist activists have some catching up to do if they
are not to remain stuck in a politically unhelpful struggle with an imaginary
enemy. Anti-racism’s hegemony means that there is no longer a critical distance
that can be opened up between anti-racists and their opponents, because while
dominant social actors continue to act in racist ways, they invariably do so
while espousing anti-racist beliefs. How do you oppose a racist practice when
it is conducted in the name of anti-racism? How do you challenge racism when
your adversaries fall over themselves to agree with you? How do you go about
reappropriating critical resources that have been ‘stolen’ from you and used
against you?
Against a possessive model of anti-racism
It is my
suggestion that while these questions are keenly felt by anti-racist activists,
there is no turning back to a simpler time when it was perhaps possible to make
that straightforward distinction between the ‘racists’ and the ‘anti-racists’,
for we are all anti-racists now. Central to the anti-racist activist imaginary
is the idea that anti-racism is an entity that ‘belongs’ to its activists –
that it is something they possess and are at liberty to arbitrate over. It is
an idea of the political modeled on something like copyright, where social
actors can be taken to task for not ‘doing’ anti-racism in the approved
fashion. Though we may sometimes wish this were the case, it is unfortunately
not how the ethics of the public sphere actually work. In truth, there is no
such conditionality. Anti-racism cannot ‘belong’ to anyone. The hegemony of
anti-racism, paradoxically, makes the job of anti-racist activists a harder
one, but the objective here must clearly be not to destroy that hegemony (and
somehow persuade dominant social actors to admit their disingenuousness by
‘coming out’ as bona fide racists), but rather to strengthen and deepen it.
The first
objective of anti-racism was to make itself hegemonic – to impose itself as the
dominant racial discourse of our societies. The second objective – and the task
that faces us today – is to find ways of making that hegemony ‘work’ and
deliver on its promises. This might seem like a particularly difficult
undertaking given what in certain respects feels like the deradicalization of a
movement that began in the streets and has ended up being written into
corporate mission statements. The character of anti-racism has certainly been
modified by its popularity and the specific terms of its adoption, and it would
be remiss if we did not acknowledge that there are significant losses and
disappointments to be registered here.[7] In some respects the anti-racist struggle might be
said to lack something of dynamism that once characterized it, but it would
be childishly counterproductive to give up on anti-racist hegemony as soiled
goods. Indeed, it would effectively be an argument to return anti-racism to the
ghetto.
Anti-racism after Obama
The election
of Obama to the
My argument is
not that this criticism of post-black politics is illegitimate – there are – as
with anti-racism more generally – certainly losses to acknowledge here. What is
problematic is the assertion that so often accompanies it: that post-black
politics and the Obama election represent a superficial, surface change in
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 8, January-February 2011,
ISSN 1552-5112
Notes
[1] A version of this paper was originally given at
Postcolonial Ethnicity, Visuality and Cultural Politics Conference,
[2] Roland Barthes Mythologies (London: Vintage, 1993), 118.
[3] Ben Pitcher, The Politics of Multiculturalism (
[4] Michel Foucault in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 204.
[5] It also neglects to entertain the possibility that the putative anti-racist commitments of dominant social actors might be genuinely held, however inadequately they might find expression.
[6] For a longer version of this argument, see Ben Pitcher, ‘Radical subjects after hegemony’, Subjectivity, 4 (1), 2011.
[7] ‘No sooner has a form been objectified than it seems in some
measure constricting or inappropriate to the vital process which called it into
being’, Donald N. Levine in Georg Simmel On
Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1971), xxxvi.
[8] For a longer version of this argument, see Ben Pitcher ‘Obama and the Politics of Blackness: anti-racism in the “post-black” conjuncture’, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, 12 (4). 2010.
[9] Manning Marable ‘Racializing Obama: The Enigma of Post-Black Politics and Leadership’, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, 11 (1). 2009.