Review Essay: Theorizing Race,Theorizing Politics

At the turn of the twenty-first century, few political theorists took racial injustice as a primary area of inquiry. So few, in fact, that Heath Fogg Davis rightly decried “the racial retreat of contemporary political theory” in a Perspectives on Politics review essay. ¹ The gap between the preoccupations of democratic theory, on the one hand, and the centrality of racial categories in modern democratic life, on the other, was stark. In the last decades of the twentieth century and early years of the twenty-first, students of politics in the United States could hardly miss the degree to which the promises of the civil rights era had devolved into judicial hostility to race conscious policies, disinvestment in social welfare was exacerbated by harsh austerity measures for the poor, and communities of color were assaulted by exploding rates of incarceration and the rise of militarized policing. Furthermore, as struggles over divestment from South Africa and demands for reparations from slavery and colonial rule made clear, anti-Black racism was a transnational phenomenon with profound implications for any conception of democratic futures. Together and singly, these developments raised fundamental questions about the relationship between race and the meanings of freedom, equality, citizenship, justice, rights, and power. Where were political theorists at a time described by Manning Marable as “the twilight of the Second Reconstruction”?

The aim of this essay is not to provide an answer to this question or to offer an autopsy on political theory’s “strange silence” about matters of race and racism. ² Instead, the 50th anniversary of Political Theory offers an opportunity to reconsider books that, while not reviewed in these pages, served and still serve as resources for the emergence of political theory scholarship that centers modern slavery, colonialism, and their legacies. Because the turn of the twentieth century was such a vibrant period for studies of race in the empirical social sciences, legal studies, literature and literary theory, cultural studies, and history, choosing a set of exemplary texts is difficult. The three books highlighted here represent, without exhausting, some of the themes and approaches that have shaped contemporary scholarship. Manning Marable’s Race Reform, and Rebellion presents a history of African American politics from World War II through Hurricane Katrina and lays groundwork for three vital areas of political theory research today: studies of African American political thought, critical analyses of the intersections of race and class, and interpretations of the theory-making work of social movements. In The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Patricia Williams, a key figure in the development of critical race theory, interrogates the operations of “colorblind” legal and political norms in a society structured by race, gender, and class. She models a practice of reading that discerns the racial subtext of apparently neutral legal language and fashions a writing style capacious enough to encompass the tensions between theory and experience. Sociologist Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic advances an alternative to canonical accounts of the politics and ethics of modern life. Rooted in and routed through the Middle Passage, Gilroy’s argument explores the political thinking of figures like Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison and inaugurates a transnational approach to political theorizing that centers Black creativity in the face of racial terror. I will address these books in order of initial publication.

Marable’s work provides a topography of the complex interactions of race, racism, and African American political movements in the 20th and 21st centuries. His books include How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Race, Political Economy, and Society (1983), W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (1986), and The Great Wells of Democracy: Reconstructing Race and Politics in the 21st Century (2002), and he is probably best known for the Pulitzer Prize–winning Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011), which appeared days after his death. Race, Reform, and Rebellion was first published in 1984 and revised and reissued in 1991 and 2007. Although the sweep of Marable’s historical narrative leaves little room for extended inquiry into any single figure or concept, he lays out pathways for political theorists to pursue in more detail. First, Marable indicates why African American political figures should be studied as thinkers, whose ideas animate and exceed their contributions as movement leaders. With regard to Malcolm X, for example, Marable notes that “as the civil rights united front gradually came unstuck, the only original voice which articulated an alternative vision for Black Americans was Malcolm X” (85). Political theorists might wish for a deeper engagement with that vision, which is overshadowed by Marable’s treatment of Malcolm X’s rhetorical style and the trajectory of his career in and out of the Nation of Islam, but Race, Reform, and Rebellion also points toward features of Malcolm X’s late political thought that have inspired more recent studies. Similarly, the book offers glimpses of the thinking of figures as varied as A. Philip Randolph, Stokely Carmichael, and Angela Davis, intimating the formation of a rich and heterogeneous “tradition.” ³

Readers might similarly approach Race, Reform, and Rebellion as a starting point for considering the conjunction of race and capitalism. Approaching the United States as “a racist/capitalist state from the beginning” (4), Marable interprets the success and limitations of twentieth-century Black political movements in light of shifting political economic developments. Other commentators have echoed Du Bois’s prescient observation, in 1960, that the end of Jim Crow segregation would “not destroy the economic prerogatives of private capital over black lives” (74), but Marable’s year-by-year historical reconstruction allows readers to see concretely how these prerogatives have manifested themselves and what political opportunities they have foreclosed. One of the book’s contributions is its attentiveness to less-studied moments, such as the late 1980s and early 1990s, which he calls “a new nadir” for the fracturing of African American life into a strengthened middle class, on the one hand, and communities that were simultaneously abandoned and demonized by conservative policy, on the other. Appearing just a year after Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, Marable’s book does not advance a theoretical alternative to existing socialisms or articulate a full-blown “Black radical tradition.” For readers of Robinson who aim to understand the dynamic interrelationship of capitalism, political development, and Black resistance at different points in U.S. history, however, Marable performs the essential work of “resurrecting events that have systematically been made to vanish from our intellectual consciousness.” ⁴

A third noteworthy feature of Race, Reform, and Rebellion is the opening it provides for studies of the history- and theory-making work of political movements. Marable’s narrative is replete with the names of individual leaders, most of them male, but his critique of the view that Martin Luther King, Jr., was “indispensable” (75) gestures toward a synthetic account of Black resistance to white supremacy at every level of political and social life. Marable incisively differentiates between procapitalist and revolutionary forms of Black nationalism, recalls the work of young people and religious organizations at different historical moments and distills the political critique embodied in varied forms of activism. For political theorists who focus on abolitionism or take inspiration from the Movement for Black Lives, Marable’s book situates contemporary demands within the arc of a longer history. When he summarizes the work still undone when the Black Radical Congress disbanded around 2003, for example, Marable discerns the contours of recent efforts to remake political philosophy while remaking U.S. politics: “Only a multiracial, multiclass coalition of the dispossessed, working class and radical intelligentsia could have created the critical mass necessary for building a truly broad democratic movement to fight for power” (232).

Race, Reform, and Rebellion concludes with a meditation on “color-blindness” as the defining feature of the post–civil rights era, and it is precisely here that Williams’s Alchemy of Race and Rights intervenes. Anyone hoping to cut through the clutter of recent conservative invectives against “critical race theory” and understand the movement’s main ideas and stylistic innovations would do well to begin with Alchemy. Through a series of linked meditations on legal language, unowned operations of race/gender/class, and historical and contemporary political events, Williams creates a distinctive genre of antiracist writing. One of the most arresting dimensions of her work is Williams’s willingness to bare her own hesitations and doubts, even her students’ complaints that she is not properly fulfilling her obligations to them as a law professor. Contesting norms of legal—or any academic—writing in which impersonality serves as a “ruse” or a form of “empowerment without communion” (92–93), Williams experiments with storytelling, direct address, and personal revelation and contemplates the meaning of constitutional protections as someone who is “still evolving from being treated as three-fifths of a human, a subpart of the white estate” (147). “Since subject position is everything in my analysis of the law,” the book begins, “you should know that it’s a bad morning” (3).

Williams breaks the rules of academic speech to disclose how silences and omissions are written into law. In this, her reading practices resemble Toni Morrison’s attentiveness to the “unspeakable unspoken” that reveals complex truths about the violent suppression of nonwhite voices beneath the polished surface of American political ideals. ⁵ Alchemy is acutely attuned to the power that inheres in what Morrison calls “word-work,” highlighting the unowned presence of Black figures in legal textbooks and judicial decisions in which “race” is not spoken. ⁶ And her interest in the operations of racialized assumptions is joined to other forms of “spirit murder”—to the casual distinction between people who have lost their homes through natural disaster and those who are dismissed as “homeless,” to the transgender law student whose identity is distorted by the evasions of peers and administrators who aim to keep her out of their bathrooms, to the inversions in which the victims of vigilante violence are cast as “predators.” In her thoughtful unpacking of racialized forms of power and their linguistic covers, Williams offers an example to political theorists who feel compelled to linger on passing references to “savages,” “barbarians,” or “slaves” in celebrated defenses of liberty or democracy and who refuse the false choice of dismissing the canon altogether or simply averting our eyes.

What would it mean to reorient the practice of legal interpretation in order not only to decry its omissions but also to breathe life into its egalitarian possibilities? Williams provides a powerful answer in her meditations “on being the object of property.” Drawing on a contract of sale, a census record, and family lore, Williams reconstructs what she can of the life of her great-great-grandmother Sophie, who was sold to a white lawyer at the age of eleven; bore his child by the time she was thirteen; and lost that child, a daughter, who was taken away to be trained in domestic service. Although the formal record of Sophie’s life ends abruptly, Williams scours her enslaver’s words and those of his white children to glean some evidence of the impact of Sophie’s existence:

I see her shape and his hand in the vast networking of our society, and in the evils and oversights that plague our lives and laws. The control he had over her body. The force he was in her life, in the shape of my life today. The power he exercised in the choice to breed her or not. The choice to breed slaves in his image, to choose her mate and be that mate. In his attempt to own what no man can own, the habit of his power and the absence of her choice. (19)

Looking for “her shape” and “his hand” enables Williams, like Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass in the late nineteenth century, to expose and counter “the unowning of blacks” that extended the long arm of slavery long after formal emancipation (21). This approach also yields a critique of the totalizing dimensions of existing treatments of “master-slave relations” (one that might be applied to the opposition of freedom and slavery in political theory) that depend on and perpetuate the presumption that Black and other nonwhite subjects are will-less. Williams’s creative reconstruction of Sophie’s legacy thus anticipates Fred Moten’s widely cited observation that “the history of blackness is a testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.” ⁷ What follows from this resistance is, as Williams demonstrates, supremely vexed. As she practices alchemy with liberal legal concepts, like rights, equality, and self-ownership, Williams must also contend with a language that was not designed for her use: “Reclaiming that from which one has been disinherited is a good thing. Self-possession in the full sense of that expression is the companion of self-knowledge. Yet claiming for myself a heritage the weft of whose genesis is my own disinheritance is a profoundly troubling paradox” (217). ⁸ Why bother? Williams’s book serves as a profound reply: even as she dissects the exclusions and distortions of the law, she also reinhabits those legal instruments, like rights, that can be claimed by the great-grandchildren of enslaved children and by all the dispossessed.

Like Williams, Gilroy investigates the living heritage of modern slavery in cultural forms that exceed and defy the pretensions of arm’s-length theorizing. Where Williams wrestles with the responsibilities of doing antiracist intellectual work in a society that disavows the power of race, Gilroy takes aim at what he calls “dangerous obsessions with ‘racial purity’ which are circulating inside and outside black politics” (xi). Against Black nationalisms of all kinds—and Afrocentricity, in particular—Gilroy advances an account of Black Atlantic cultures that developed through “a distinctive relationship of antagonistic indebtedness” to Euro-American traditions (191). Hybridity serves as watchword and method for a text that begins with a set of epigraphs by Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Frederick Douglass and, like Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, opens every chapter with quotations that reach across the lines of time, space, and color. Drawing on Bakhtin, Gilroy identifies ships as a chronotope that both recalls the foundational effects of the Middle Passage in the emergence of modern political economy and political ideals and emphasizes practices of crossing, circulation, and memory that defy existing approaches to modern life (4).

The gift of Black Atlantic cultures, Gilroy contends, is their capacity to metabolize “the complicity of racial terror with reason” (73) and to create new expressive forms out of that conjunction. He elaborates on Seyla Benhabib’s distinction between “the politics of fulfillment” and “the politics of transfiguration” to trace the itineraries of Black demands “that bourgeois civil society live up to the promises of its own rhetoric,” on the one hand, and utopian articulations of genuinely new forms of sociability on the other (37–38). Although Gilroy appreciates the significance of both of “these sibling dimensions of black sensibility,” The Black Atlantic focuses on the transfigurative: “This politics exists on a lower frequency where it is played, danced, and acted, as well as sung and sung about, because words, even words stretched by melisma and supplemented or mutated by the screams which still index the conspicuous power of the slave sublime, will never be enough to communicate its unsayable claims to truth” (37). Beyond the boundaries of written and spoken language, Gilroy looks to the antiphonal performance of Black music for ways to hold together the memories of catastrophe and aspirations for emancipatory forms of politics.

If The Black Atlantic challenges the “all-encompassing textuality” (77) of conventional political and ethical theories, it also puts forward original readings of both celebrated and less well-studied works of Black political thought. Gilroy’s focus is on figures whose writing slides between fiction and nonfiction and exemplifies the nonsynchronous and transnational dimensions of modern Black experience. Du Bois’s imprint on the book is clear from Gilroy’s use of the concept of “double consciousness” in the title, but neither Du Bois nor double consciousness is reducible to a narrow reading of African American yearnings for U.S. citizenship at the turn of the twentieth century. Instead, Gilroy reads across Du Bois’s corpus and biography to portray an itinerant, diasporic Du Bois who decries the brutality of slavery and all forms of colonialism while distilling the beauty created by Black people on the move. Whether relocation across the Atlantic is temporary, as it was for Martin Delany; or permanent, as for Richard Wright; or imaginary, in the case of Toni Morrison, Gilroy is relentless in pursuit of the antiparochial dimensions of their political-aesthetic projects.

Much has changed, and not, since these three books appeared. When I was a graduate student in the 1990s, Marable, Williams, and Gilroy were among the thinkers whose writing offered modes of transit between political concepts and the living legacies of slavery and colonial violence. To the extent that political theory is no longer in “retreat” from questions of race, books like these played a pivotal role. For many theorists today, the study of politics is unthinkable without close attention to issues of race. For many, debates about justice, democracy, or the meanings of freedom must draw on the deep reservoirs of political thought, produced under duress, by women and men whose experience of modernity has been enslavement, dispossession, and fugitivity. Significant changes in undergraduate curricula, graduate reading lists, academic conference programs, and research agendas matter—most importantly, to scholars who might not have found a place in political theory when these books first appeared.

Yet anti-Blackness is flourishing within and beyond the academy. Insofar as political theorists attempt to come to terms with the resurgence of openly racist politics, especially in the United States and Europe, and the ongoingness of violence against nonwhite people around the world, reading Marable, Williams, and Gilroy in 2022 indicates why thinking through “race” demands a far more thorough-going reorientation than the inclusion of new topics and previously unacknowledged thinkers in our journals and syllabi. Where even left political theories of race once experimented with approaches to the “politics of fulfillment,” projects that focus on realizing the promises of liberal democracy or European traditions of socialism now appear to have little to offer. This is not news, of course, to thinkers who have been engaging what Cedric Robinson and others call the “Black radical tradition” for decades. ⁹ Nor does it require the wholesale abandonment of existing political traditions or institutions like the law, as Williams makes plain through her innovative reinvention of legal concepts. Instead, the continuing entwinement of race and politics—locally, nationally, globally—presses us to ask anew what resources the practice of theory has for conceiving a politics of transfiguration.

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Charles W. Mills, who reimagined political philosophy as an emancipatory practice.