Abstract
Race Defaced is a thoroughly engaging and stimulating attempt to rethink and resituate conservative and radical orthodoxies surrounding the history and development of racism and anti-racism. Using an effective comparative methodology encompassing the U.K. and the U.S. to provide empirical support for the authors’ assertions, this book highlights the commonalities shared by conservatives and radicals that constrain the potential for true equality being achieved—the paradigms of pessimism. Following the police slayings of unarmed black men Michael Brown and Eric Garner in the U.S. in 2014 and the subsequent protests that took hold across the country, the questions and challenges the book poses for scholars on “race” and for participants within progressive social movements assumes a renewed significance.
In the opening chapter, Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” is invoked and the concept (and conceptual tool) of the “Hopeful Subject” introduced, as a counter to what is perceived as the pessimism-afflicted character of much contemporary writing on race. This is coupled with an intervention illuminating a key point challenging the prevailing radical argument that racism is essential to capitalism (through the rationalization of inequality in the nineteenth century). It is argued instead that the “social inadequacy of the capitalist system as a means of providing for human need gave rise to the irrationalization of equality” (p. 30). Capitalism could not offer solutions to its own iniquities but could instead point to unsolvable race relations. Irrationalism as opposed to racism thus became essential for capitalism. With reference to specific historical events and developments, it is demonstrated how the “irrationalization of equality” led to limit points being placed on equality. This argument is among the most striking and convincing in the book.
In the next chapter, the authors challenge assumptions about white unity, arguing that the weakness of whiteness is perhaps its most distinctive feature. It is persuasively argued that certain groups, in the context of the emergence of the eugenics movement, were regarded as “biopsychocultural degenerates,” ranging from the Irish, to Mexicans, to blacks, and the poor. Whiteness theory proponents are further challenged by the examples presented of oppressed groups coming together in common cause, such as the San Patricios enemy battalion made up of Irish republicans, Mexicans, blacks, and European immigrants fighting against U.S. forces in the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. When inequality of treatment towards minority groups is located and recognized, it is surmised that it is they who have the problem, in that they are psychologically disturbed, owing to an “oppression psychosis,” and leading eventually to medical diagnosis; a further barrier, or limit point, to equality (p. 78).
The book continues with the theme of suggesting that the consistent removal of economics from calls for equality has diminished the potential for true equality. Instead, the postwar period has witnessed the emergence of the “politics of recognition” (p. 80) and a subsequent multicultural or cosmopolitan capitalism. In this chapter, the strategy of oscillating between empirical examples in the U.K. and the U.S. is particularly successful, especially with regards to the similarities and differences in the trajectories of postwar race relations. This chapter also examines the dilution of anti-racism within state structures (resulting in official multiculturalism policies) and, more significantly, the removal of economics from the notion of equality, resulting in what is termed as the “equality of mind.”
Third Way politics are the focus of chapter four, where economic equality has been displaced by communitarian concerns and policy formations, targeting “moral and psychological equality” (p. 159); emotion is thus regarded as the limit point to equality here. The terms hate and hate crime have emerged to become “the central protagonists of inequality” (p. 149), again highlighting the state’s deployment of a psychological cause and solution (through “race awareness training” or criminalization) at the expense of a structural explanation and solution to inequality. The authors return to the importance of human subjectivity in chapter five, critiquing Foucault and Foucaldian proponents and arguing that the subject and humanism missing from their analysis allows for little potential in achieving social transformation or emancipatory politics.
In the final chapter, neoliberal race theorists are criticized for the relevance of neoliberalism to debates around race and for not, in the authors’ view, grasping that neoliberalism represents not the triumph of the Right but the collapse of the Right/Left ideological framework based on “the antagonistic and mutually defining radical and conservative subjects” (p. 191). The book concludes with a critique of writers who peddle in pessimism, and a call is made for the politics of possibility. The authors’ main contribution lies in providing a conceptual toolkit, framed within “hope” and “possibility,” with which to begin a movement toward an emancipatory politics. However, if the authors’ assertions of the current “state” of race are correct, then the moment of equality or utopia is, ironically, even further away than was previously imagined.