Skip navigation

Category Archives: race

The Persistence of (Punitive) Vision

Diagram of Bentham’s panopticon

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons"

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault  traces a shift in how power works, arguing that in the late 18th and early 19th century punitive spectacle went out of fashion as the way of managing illegality.  It was, he describes “Bye-bye public execution, hello panopticon.”

Unfortunately, however, nobody bothered to tell the South.

Indeed, according to Joane Nagel’s 2003 telling of the history in Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers, it was not until the 1890s that “lynchings moved beyond instances of local lawlessness to take on the proportions of large-scale spectacles”(p. 114).

These occasions of excessive visual penality, Nagel says, were “publicized in advance and attracted crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands,” and she argues that they “were part of the consolidation of the color line and the construction of whiteness in the postwar U.S. South” (p. 114).

Until well into the 20th century in the South, then, the idea that power had ceased to act upon bodies in destructive rather than productive ways is simply not applicable when it comes to white power acting on black bodies.

Similarly, Tony Bennett (who is damn hard to find on the Internet given that other Tony Bennett)  argues explicitly in his 1995 book The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics that having “witnesses of a symbolic display of power [ . . . ] remained important—and more so than Foucault’s formations often allow” (p. 24). He particularly notes that the museums his own work analyzes made particular use of the display of “other, ‘non-civilized’ peoples upon whose bodies the effects of power were unleashed with as much force and theatricality as had been manifest on the scaffold” ( p. 67).

In Foucault’s defense, there is a sense in which this lapse on his part is the product of looking at the history in one place or set of places and generalizing to all places, which it’s not entirely clear he meant for his work to do.

However, there is nevertheless a real racial absence in Foucault’s work, which is all the more perplexing when racialized difference had to have been relevant in the precise time and place he is intending to describe–France was a colonial power exercising repressive power over bodies that were somewhere in the process of being racialized as other.

Why is it that some bodies were still fair game for this kind of punishment at the same time that others were being subjected to discipline and made productive? Can we explain this simply as those people being seen as ineligible to become docile and productive due to some racialized imputation of unruliness? Is this a product of the production of some bodies as not-quite-human?

These are vital questions, as they can perhaps help us think through things like contemporary uses of torture at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and Foucault as written doesn’t help us answer them, so now it’s our job.

The Tea Party and the Politics of White Backlash

There’s something about the Tea Party.

That something is eerily familiar as I’ve been rereading David Savran’s 1998 book Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. And no, this won’t be something that hasn’t already been said about the Tea Party’s racially-inflected hysteria, but damned if this whole white-people-angry-at-their-imagined-victimhood thing isn’t something we’ve seen before.

And it’s entirely possible that, in Battlestar Galactica style, all this will happen again, particularly as white Americans do become numerically the minority, but I have enough faith in the inexact nature of iteration (See Butler‘s Gender Trouble [1990] and “Signature, Event, Context” in Derrida‘s 1988 Limited, Inc) to think that figuring out how it works will make it go differently on down the road.

So, with that in mind, what is it that’s so familiar? During the 70s, Savran says, “as Faludi points out, ‘the “traditional” man’s real wages shrank dramatically (a 22 percent free-fall in households where white men were the sole breadwinners.’ Yet these wages were being channeled from working-class white men not to African Americans but to the very rich (who are overwhelmingly white)” (p. 207).

Does this sound to anyone else like our current situation, in which there was an economic downturn due to the greed of those extremely rich, overwhelmingly white people but neither the blame nor the consequences ever seems to fall on them (unless you’re Rolling Stone exposing Goldman Sachs)?

And now there’re angry white people in the streets over anything our black-under-the-one-drop-rule president does, even things that are in their class interest like the expansion of healthcare.

People have, of course, been picking up on the racial politics of the Tea Party, but it’s not the central story the way it seems to me like it should be. After all, “only after the Oklahoma City bombing did the press even begin to consider that there might be a relationship between the mythology of the white male as victim and the growth of the paramilitary Right,” and it seems like there’s some amount of asleep-at-the-wheel happening here again (Savran, p. 206).

Even the fact that a guy flew a plane into that IRS building didn’t quite connect the dots. Apparently it has to be guns and bombs for anyone to notice.

Moreover, the dominance of white people has in no way been challenged by recent events. Unemployment, after all, has disproportionately affected people of color in this recession much as it always has.

Nevertheless, now as 40 years ago, “the remarkable level of prosperity of white men relative to women and African Americans by no means prevented them from later identifying themselves as the victims of the slender and precarious gains made by those groups” (Savran, p. 192).

The only real difference would seem to be the inclusion of white women, and that’s a kind of gender equality I, for one, could do without.

In the end, then, the Tea Party may be new in that it is a populist white backlash instead of the more top-down one the last time (though my knowledge of that history is admittedly a bit fuzzy), in many more ways it is disturbingly familiar.

Colorblindness, the “Free” Market, and Other Neoliberal Fictions

In the United States, and in particular for people who were raised on neoliberalism (roughly, those who became aware of the world during or after the Reagan administration), a commitment to colorblindness and individual achievement make cultural sense. If we are to undermine neoliberalism’s dominance, then, we must start by troubling the assumptions that make it possible.

Beginning with the idealization of colorblindness, Jodi Melamed helpfully explains in her 2006 piece “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism” (tragically, Duke UP won’t even allow open access to the abstract) how it is that race becomes invisible under neoliberalism. As “new categories of privilege and stigma overlay older, conventional racial categories, so that traditionally recognized racial identities—black, Asian, white, or Arab/Muslim—can now occupy both sides of the privilege/stigma opposition,” being less privileged (and, indeed, stigmatized as nonnormative) no longer aligns precisely with race, and it becomes even easier to attribute lesser success to individual factors rather than structures such as racism (pp. 2-3).

This move, then, “made it possible to ascribe stigma to segments of African American society without the act of ascription appearing to be an act of racial power,” such that one can differentiate “between ‘healthy’ African American cultural formations (those aligned with idealized American cultural norms and nationalist sentiment) and ‘pathological’ ones” (Melamed, p. 8).

In this way, because some African Americans “get it right,” the status of African Americans as a group is no longer of issue; instead, as Lisa Duggan explains in The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (2004), individuals are imagined to “choose” to succeed or fail: “inequalities are routinely assigned to ‘private’ life, understood as ‘natural,’ and bracketed away from the consideration in the ‘public’ life of the state” ( p. 5). In this way, neoliberalism can both express a concern for racial inequality and perpetuate it.

Alternately, even if one values only neoliberalism’s economic tenets, it is still based on false premises and fails on its own terms (which, according to Hegelian dialectic, is what brings down each social structure anyway).

Neoliberalism works through an “equation of economic activity with voluntary, uncoerced, private freedom,” such that, if we can show that people are not actually “free” in this sense we can undermine the practice of treating them as if they are (Duggan,  p. 13).

This is to call attention to the structural determinants of decisions—workers don’t really freely choose their working conditions, so the simple supply-and-demand model that says they can just leave if they aren’t getting paid enough doesn’t really match up to reality, and this lack of freedom gets multiplied for criminalized populations such as men of color and welfare recipients.

Moreover, the “free” market isn’t so free either, such that neoliberalism fails at its own premises. As Duggan  points out, “inefficient, unprofitable ‘private’ industries routinely request and receive government support, even direct subsidies” (p. 13), a point that has become crystal clear since the start of the recent economic meltdown.

Individuals can’t “compete” fairly, and corporations don’t; in this way the premises upon which neoliberalism makes sense prove to be illusory.

Race 2.0 and the Incitement to Discourse

As Lisa Nakamura has demonstrated in Digitizing Race and elsewhere, the fact that the rise of the internet was contemporaneous with mid-90’s neoliberal colorblind discourse has resulted in a conception of the internet as a race-free environment. However, as she also shows, at the level of people’s real use of the internet, their racial identity is a key part of how they present themselves online, whether through AIM buddies or pregnancy website avatars.

This disjuncture becomes less perplexing when this racial formation is viewed through the idea of incitement to discourse that Michel Foucault elaborates in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. This is to say that the foreclosing of official discourses of race by neoliberalism not only didn’t make racial inequality go away (i.e. there’s still an un-level playing field), but is also “not a plain and simple imposition of silence. Rather, it was a new regime of discourses. Not any less was said about it; on the contrary. But things were said in a different way; it was different people who said them, from different points of view, and in order to obtain different results” (Foucault, 27).

Under neoliberalism, Nakamura notes in her 2009 piece Don’t Hate the Payer, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft, racism is “the result of the person who identifies it, for they are the ones who ‘see’ race, or ‘make the difference in their head’” (p.139). That is, it is a system in which it is assumed that if we don’t talk about race, it will go away, along with its attendant problem of racism.

The reverse side of this discourse, of course, is that “if it insisted on making itself too visible, it would be designated accordingly and would have to pay the penalty,” such that all discussion of race comes to be silenced (Foucault, 4). Nakamura terms this “the language of tolerance, or of disavowing racism by simply omitting all language referring to race,” and points out that it “functioned to perpetuate digital inequality by both concrete and symbolic means” (Nakamura 2008b, 3). (For a further discussion of neoliberal colorblindness, see Omi and Winant’s 1994 book Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s.)

However, I contend that it had a second effect—in that “the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression,” we want to speak of it more and more, to insist on these identity categories because they are denied (Foucault, 6).

The incitement to discourse does, of course, work a bit differently around race than Foucault describes it working with respect to sex; in the case of the former, it went from circulating relatively freely in unofficial contexts to being constrained there but proliferating in medical, educational, and legal official, institutional contexts.

With race, on the other hand, its official instantiation—begun, at least according to David Roediger, in 1676—fell out of favor and racial discourses proliferated instead in unofficial contexts (Roediger 2009). This is to say that, under the neoliberal colorblind model, it is imperative that we not notice race in institutional contexts, but in day-to-day practice we clearly do notice it—and in that identities get erased by the implicit whiteness of colorblind discourse, it is imperative that we do.

Thus, we are incited to racialized discourse, and, as with sex, this is not outside power but a part of the very same system that made certain phenotypic features into an essence in the first place.

In this context, then, rather than accepting the neoliberal model as producing silence, “we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required” (Foucault, 27).

Thus, though “race” is now supposedly invisible, we can talk about insufficiently assimilated immigrant “culture” as a proxy (Nakamura 2008b, 3). Similarly, the fact that race does not exist as a category on the AIM buddy icon sites Nakamura describes does not stop the expression of racial identities; they’re just shifted off onto “nationality” (Nakamura 2008b, 44). In these ways, there is “a very rigorous expurgation of the authorized vocabulary,” but discourse proliferates unchecked (Foucault, 17).

The content of these proliferating racialized discourses makes their status as incited and not external to power even clearer. Of the pregnancy website’s avatars, Nakamura notes that “each figure is composed to look phenotypically the same in terms of facial features, yet distinct from each other in terms of skin color, hair color, and body shape”; she likens this to “the popular BeDazzler, a device that enables users to attach crystals, beads, and other trimmings to jeans or pocketbooks,” arguing that “these avatars embody an aesthetic of decoration that has to do with adornment of an existing ‘base.’ And in a sense, race is one of those aspects of adornment” (Nakamura 2008b, 144).

In this way, then, race becomes something of a fashion statement, a different-colored coating on an identical inside—like an M&M or gumball. Thus, as Nakamura argues , “while Race 1.0 was understood as socially constructed, a process that at least acknowledges that race and gender are historical formations, Race 2.0 is user-generated” (Nakamura 2008a, 1680). This user-generation promises us freedom, the ability to invent and express ourselves without boundaries, and so we eagerly take it up.

Of course, Race 2.0 isn’t a space of freedom. First, the internet may allow freedom of creation, but this is always within constraint, such that we must “view the interface as an object that compels particular sorts of identifications, investments, ideological seductions, and conscious as well as unconscious exercises of power” (Nakamura 2008b, 17).

Thus, in creating an online racialized identity, we are constrained the affordances built into (and left out of) the interface we use, as demonstrated by the simplicity of the AIM buddies. Second, the terms of race in existence in culture do not disappear when moved onto the internet; though Nakamura rightly notes that the digital divide is not a strict, either/or division, differential access to all sorts of resources is a fact of this country’s racial system, and so are stereotypes, and both factor into racial representation online (Nakamura 2008b 15, 18).

Finally, the BeDazzler-ified race performances Nakamura describes underscore the ways in which identity has become inextricable from capitalist consumerist choice. The processes Miranda Joseph (2002) describes are only intensified when enacting identity online, as race becomes something you paint on—and, thus, implicitly can take off or repaint a different color, as Nakamura’s example of Jennifer Lopez’s racial flexibility demonstrates. In this way, digital racial formation frequently works to obscure the power relations in operation with respect to race, and this, I think, should trouble us.

Works Cited
Foucault, M 1990, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. (New York: Vintage).
Joseph, M 2002, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P).
Nakamura, L 2008a, Cyberrace. PMLA 123(5), 1673-1682.
—– 2008b, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P).
—– 2009, “Don’t Hate the Payer, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft”. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 26(2), 128-144.
Omi M and Winant H, 1994, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s 2/e (New York: Routledge).
Roediger D 2009, “Hope and History: Past and Present Burdens of Race.” Center for Advanced Study Special Presentation, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.