Abstract
Fred Lee’s Extraordinary Racial Politics is an exemplary piece of historically moored interdisciplinary scholarship. This carefully researched book refocuses our gaze from longstanding processes of racial formation that preoccupy much of ethnic studies scholarship—the establishment of Asian “foreignness,” for instance, or the steadfast criminalization of blackness—and draws our attention to historical moments in which the ordinary dynamics of racial politics are disrupted and transformed. Lee calls these disruptions “extraordinary racial politics” and argues that because they “rupture out of and reset everyday racial politics,” they have the power to meaningfully reconstitute race, nation, and the polity (2). Extraordinary Racial Politics demonstrates that transformations in racial meaning in the United States are indistinguishable from enactments of public freedom and order. Throughout the book, Lee uses Hannah Arendt’s theorization of freedom and judgment and Carl Schmitt’s theorization of sovereignty to understand how race inflects the reconstitution of the public. This approach successfully bridges disciplinary norms in ethnic studies and political theory, not only applying canonical political theorists to issues of race but also illustrating that what we take to be perennial questions of race and settler colonialism in the United States are already questions of what constitutes the American public.
Lee’s central project is to conceptualize the varied ways that race, nation, and the public are reconstituted through historical moments of rupture in the normal, ordinary processes of racial politics in the United States. According to Lee, these historical moments have three powers: (1) the power to disrupt normal processes of the racial order, (2) the power to enact transformative events, and (3) the power to constitute the racial order anew and thus recreate ordinary racial politics. This last power hinges on Lee’s understanding of rearticulation, a concept he borrows from Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s classic text, Racial Formation in the United States. For Omi and Winant, rearticulation is both a practice of “discursive reorganization” of ideology and a “process of redefinition” whereby familiar identities, interests, and subjectivities are “recombined” in novel fashion. Applying racial rearticulation to cases of Arendtian action and Schmittian order in the public realm, Extraordinary Racial Politics offers up four such historical events in which the ordinary functioning of racial politics have been disrupted and reordered. Lee presents two events as cases of Arendtian action or judgment, the civil rights movement (chapter 2) and the racial power movements of the 1960s and 1970s (chapter 5). Two other events, 1830s Indian removal policy (chapter 3) and Japanese internment during the Second World War (chapter 4), are cases of Schmittian decision and the sovereign creation of public order.
Lee conceptualizes mid-twentieth-century freedom movements as historical moments in which ordinary racial politics are put into crisis. For instance, when read through Lee’s lens of Arendtian action, the civil rights movement appears not as a case of nonviolent disobedience or a reminder of the limits of legal reform but rather as an extraordinary moment of re-foundation. As Lee puts it, “if the American Revolution is the constitutional foundation, the civil rights movement is the constitutional re-foundation” (33). For Lee, this re-foundation of the US polity occurred along intersecting lines of racial conflict and constitutional authority. Leveraging and revising Arendt’s distinction between the political and social in The Human Condition and On Revolution, Lee argues that whereas the founding of the United States legitimated conflict only between the politically included (white citizens) and de-legitimated conflict between racial others through machinations like congressional apportionment, the civil rights movement inaugurated a new era of public constitution, because it “legitimated racial conflict throughout the U.S. polity” (45). Second, the civil rights movement nationalized constitutional authority in that it “de-legitimized state-mediated exclusions from citizenship” that Dred Scott and Plessy had previously authorized (56). The civil rights movement’s re-foundation did not liberate the nation from its racial sins but instead culminated in a rearticulation of familiar boundaries of race and nation by culminating “in a nationalized polity in which a classically liberal form of difference-blindness sits uneasily next to a radically democratic form of social recognition” (56).
If the civil rights movement is for Lee a paradigmatic case of Arendtian action prompting public reconstitution and racial reformation, then the racial power movements are cases of Arendtian judgment. Drawing from the political thought of Malcolm X, Alcatraz occupiers Adam Norwall and LaNada Boyer, and the Union of Democratic Filipinos’ (KDP’s) popular front at the International Hotel, Lee argues that the racial power movements of the 1960s and ‘70s set in motion counterpublic judgment of the ordinary operation of white supremacy. While these movements fell short of constitutional re-foundation on Lee’s terms, their forging of international, intertribal, and anticolonial identities nonetheless articulated a new “common sense” in US racial politics—multiculturalism. In this case, as in the previous, the end of extraordinary racial politics is neither a full break with the ordinary nor a pure continuation of the past after a slight disruption but rather an action- or judgment-driven rearticulation of the ordinary. The ground shifts and then reconstitutes, but never on terms entirely determined by the movements that authored them. After all, action and judgment in a liberal pluralist polity does not culminate in a rush of victory but in the reconstitution of the ordinary after the extraordinary takes place.
Where these Arendtian chapters spotlight how midcentury black, anticolonial, and panethnic freedom movements remade racial politics and reconstituted the public in significant ways, elsewhere Lee explores the other extreme of extraordinary racial politics in the United States—Schmittian decision making in the US racial state. Chapter 3, on nineteenth-century Indian removal policy, and chapter 4, on Japanese internment, explore how federal policymakers rearticulated what Lee calls the “spatial order” in the United States in ways that created new terms of “the ordinary” in racial politics. Drawing on Schmitt’s theorization of the sovereign as the entity that decides on the state of exception, Lee argues that federal officials created rules of “racial exceptionality” at extraordinary moments, such as entry into the Second World War, and in so doing congealed racialized friend/enemy distinctions (105). In the US context, the sovereign might well be fractured—the president who issues an executive order, the military official who administrates removal or internment, the justice who renders a decision giving constitutional credence to racialized state action—yet sovereignty nevertheless cohered in federal decisions to carve out a state of exception for indigenous populations and Japanese Americans.
Lee’s exploration of the creation of racialized spatial order during Indian removal and Japanese internment makes these chapters especially compelling yet also calls into question Lee’s insistence that these moments constitute extraordinary racial politics in US history. Space plays an essential role in Lee’s analysis of Schmittian decision in the US racial state. For instance, in his analysis of nineteenth-century removal policy, Lee argues that federal treaties rearticulated ordinary racial politics in part through the spatial physicality of placing the indigenous “southeastern polity again within an exceptional zone, Indian country” (72). Federal officials in this sense simultaneously drew lines of amity and enemy, white and indigenous, normal and exceptional—all organized via a reconstitution of space. US settler colonialism was organized through the creation of “normal norms” and the fiction of empty land for white Americans, and this hinged on the often-lethal herding of indigenous populations into the “exceptional zone” of Indian reservations. For Lee, this extraordinary period of removal not only “broke from the previous order of federal-Indian alliance” to initiate a period of federal management of indigenous populations (as opposed to the management of indigenous nations), but also founded an era in which federal officials created “commodifiable land” via the new spatial ordering of the reservation (101).
The creation of the spatialized “exceptional zone” for racialized “enemies” culminated in the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Like Indian removal policy in the prior century, internment was the result of federal officials crafting a state of exception that organized racialized amity/enemy distinctions spatially. As Lee explains, the sovereign decision to spatially confine a racial “enemy” authorized “exceptional norms for Japanese Americans distinguished from the normal norms of white citizenship” (114). In both cases, Schmittian decision on the part of federal actors resulted in a reconstitution of the ordinary—namely, the creation of liberal democratic unity around white nationhood and the legal, spatialized suspension of that unity for both native populations and Asian Americans.
Lee’s argument in the Schmittian chapters is a thoroughgoing retelling of two extraordinary moments in US racial history. Certainly, nineteenth-century Indian removal policy and the wartime internment of Japanese Americans are extraordinary projects of racial ordering. Both policies entailed the suspension of normal ways of governing, crafted exceptional rules to govern racialized “enemies,” and constituted the US racial order anew, thus satisfying all three of Lee’s elements of extraordinary racial politics. At the same time, the Schmittian chapters invite the question: what, precisely, is the relationship between ordinary and extraordinary racial politics? To some extent, Lee recognizes that racialized removal and internment programs were premised on and emerged out of longstanding—that is, ordinary—patterns of racial enmity. White Americans’ racist understanding of indigenous populations as requiring “civilization” and Japanese Americans as indelibly “foreign” was not new. But Lee argues that the periods of Indian removal and Japanese internment were extraordinary because they simultaneously reordered the rules of American state power, national borders, and the American public. Yet surely Indian removal and Japanese internment join other governmental projects in which Schmittian decision making creates a different set of rules and governing norms for people of color. I seek not to take Lee to task for neglecting other extraordinary events in American racial history, for I understand this book as an invitation to apply his conceptualization to other cases. Rather, I want to ask, at what point do the iterative routines of extraordinary racial politics of the Schmittian variety slip into and become legible as simply ordinary?
This question is especially pertinent because Lee delivers Extraordinary Racial Politics at a historical moment rife with dual elements of the extraordinary that vie for supremacy. On the one hand, in Schmittian fashion, the Trump administration has authorized a series of deeply racialized friend/enemy distinctions—the Muslim ban, family separation, and the border wall—that were perhaps born out of ordinary racial politics but also threaten to reorder state, nation, and the public on even more explicit racial terms. On the other hand, movements led by millennials of color, from Black Lives Matter to movements to end climate change, may “constitute an extraordinary politics of freedom and equality” and so continue the civil rights movement’s and racial power movement’s re-founding of the nation (200). If we are to heed Lee’s concluding call to “counter the perils of extraordinary racial conflict” with “the promise of extraordinary racial politics,” then we must confront the relationship between the extraordinary and simply ordinary in US racial politics (200).
Lastly, the structure of Extraordinary Racial Politics is worth noting. Lee moves from extraordinary bursts of Arendtian public freedom in the 1960s to the imposition of white sovereign state authority in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and back again to the 1960s, leading the reader on an antichronological journey through four episodes in extraordinary American racial politics. This nonsequential journey has its limitations. Lee does not develop a theory of what catapults the ordinary into the extraordinary through a carefully chronological unfolding of racial politics. Nor does he theorize the relationship between Arendtian and Schmittian iterations of the extraordinary. But that Lee’s chapters unfold, as it were, out of order, nevertheless performs important conceptual work that deepens the book’s thesis. The chapter succession successfully forestalls a neat periodization of US racial politics, thereby preempting a redemptive reading of American founding and re-founding and preventing the reader from slipping into the all-too-common practice of organizing one’s political thinking in terms of racial progress and racist retrogression. Lee’s book in both substance and form installs the sense that extraordinary racial politics take place on contradictory Arendtian (freedom-creating) and Schmittian (order-securing) terrain. This recognition is fitting, for the concluding argument of Extraordinary Racial Politics is that we must heed the Schmittian dimensions of racial power in our effort to transform racial politics on Arendtian grounds. This is, says Lee, “our only hope” when the ordinary functioning of racial politics in the United States means “extraordinary danger” for people of color (200).