Dear Eds/Ben

I agree - Marek is looking like a full-on target of critique after his
comments about gender as a no-brainer instance of demonstrable
biological determinism.

Also, I like the idea of a review of Goldner's book a lot. I will get
down to number crunching in a mo' and then we'll see whether there's
slack in the system. We'll need to prioritise the proposed articles too.

Just wanted to forward the below response to Gilroy's Against Race book
too. This is written from the perspective of a black nationalist
anti-racist. He wants to preserve culturally/racially constructed
difference and tolerance at the same time and thinks that Gilroy (in the
employ of the white bourgeoisie) is a race traitor for espousing
racelessness. Although much of it is wack, it does have some provocative
ideas in it. Also, makes me wonder about whether MC is really a byword
for racelessness a la Gilroy's PoMo notion of hybrid/mongrel identities
etc. Also, what forms of solidarity are ok and what not/wotnot? Race as
a mechanism to unify tranches of the working class/ descendants of
slaves will always be mired in the same white-enlightenment-supermacist
discourse it results from, but it is a powerful agent of solidarity.

xxj

Paul Gilroy, Against Race - A Review

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Periodically there appears a book that runs counter to the wisdom of
experience in the African American community. Against Race by the
sociologist Paul Gilroy is just such a book. Gilroy, a British scholar,
who teaches at Yale University, made a reputation in the states with the
postmodern work, The Black Atlantic. I see this book as a continuation
of that work’s attempt to deconstruct the notion of African identity in
the United States and elsewhere. Of course it runs squarely against the
lived experiences of African Americans. The history of discrimination
against us in the West, whether the United States or the United Kingdom
or other parts of the western world, is a history of assaulting our
dignity because we are Africans or the descendants of Africans. This has
little to do with whether or not we are on one side of the ocean or the
other. Such false separations, particularly in the context of white
racial hierarchy and domination, is nothing more than an acceptance of a
white definition of blackness. I reject such a notion as an attempt to
isolate Africans in the Americas from their brothers and sisters on the
continent. It is as serious an assault and as misguided as the 1817
Philadelphia conference that argued that the blacks in the United States
were not Africans but "colored Americans" and therefore should not be
returned to Africa. To argue as Gilroy does that Africans in Britain and
the United States are part of a "Black Atlantic" is to argue the
"colored American" thesis all over again. It took us one hundred and
fifty years to defeat the notion of the "colored American" in the United
States and I will not stand idly by and see such misguided notion
accepted as fact at this late date in our struggle to liberate our
minds. We are victimized in the West by systems of thinking, structures
of knowledge, ways of being, that take our Africanity as an indication
of inferiority. I see this position as questioning the humanity and the
dignity of African people.

It should be clear that Gilroy’s new book, Against Race is not a book
against racism, as perhaps it ought to be, but a book against the idea
of race as an organizing theme in human relations. It is somewhat like
the idea offered a decade or more ago by the conservative critic, Anne
Wortham in her reactionary work, The Other Side of Racism. Like Wortham,
Gilroy argues that the African American spends too much time on
collective events that constitute "race" consciousness and therefore
participates in "militaristic" marches typified by the Million Man March
and the Million Woman March, both of which were useless. The only person
who could make such a statement had to be one who did not attend. Unable
to see the awesome power of the collective construction of umoja within
the context of a degenerate racist society, Gilroy prefers to stand on
the sidelines and cast stones at the authentic players in the arena.
This is a reactionary posture. So Against Race cannot be called an
anti-racism book although it is anti-race, especially against the idea
of black cultural identity whether constructed as race or as a
collective national identity.

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Let us be clear here, Against Race is not a book against all collective
identities. There is no assault on Jewish identity, as a religious or
cultural identity, nor is there an attack on French identity or Chinese
identity as collective historical realities. There is no assault on the
historically constructed identity of the Hindu Indian, nor on the white
British. Nor should there be any such assault. But Gilroy, like others
of this school, see the principal culprits as African Americans who
retain a complex love of African culture. In Gilroy’s construction or
lack of construction, there must be something wrong with African
Americans because Africa remains in their minds as a place, a continent,
a symbol, a reality of origin and source of the first step across the
ocean when they are really not African. But Gilroy does not know what he
is talking about here. This leads him to the wrong conclusions about the
African American community. The relationship Africans in the Americas
have with Africa is not of some mythical or a mystical place. We do not
worship unabashedly at the doorsteps of the continent although we have
an active engagement with all that it means. Are we always conscious of
it? Of course not! You will not find all African Americans walking
around the streets of Philadelphia or Chicago or Los Angeles thinking
about engaging Africa, yet we know almost instantly that when we are
assaulted by police, denied venture capital or criticized for insisting
on keeping Europe out of our consciousness without permission that
Africa is at the center of our existential reality. We are most
definitely African, though modern, contemporary, Africans domiciled in
the West.

Actually Gilroy spends a considerable amount of time in this book
explaining how race, a false concept, "is understood." He writes
"Awareness of the indissoluble unity of all life at the level of genetic
materials leads to a stronger sense of the particularity of our species
as a whole, as well as to new anxieties that the character is being
fundamentally and irrevocably altered" (p. 20). I do not know how Gilroy
can move from this position to indict the African people as the carriers
of this anxiety about "race," clearly a concept that was never promoted
by African people in this country or on the continent. It is essentially
a Anglo-Germanic notion, manufactured and disseminated to promote the
distinctions between peoples and to establish a European hierarchy, as
well as a hierarchy among Europeans themselves.

I am of the opinion that Gilroy has no understanding of what Randall
Robinson means in The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks? In fact, Gilroy
would proclaim Robinson’s work of the genre that does not extend "beyond
the color line." But it is not color that creates problems in the
Western world between African descended people and whites, particularly
Anglo-Germans. It is rather a strange belief on the parts of whites that
they are superior to Africans, that they have a right to establish and
maintain a hierarchy over blacks by force of arms or customs or laws or
habits.

Gilroy’s notion that "anti-racism" has lost credibility and authority
and therefore there has to be a new language "beyond the color line"
seeks to get us to renounce race-thinking as a dramatic strategic
gesture. The problem with this line of thinking, however, is that those
who practice racism, those who support in their workplaces, and in their
daily lives the institutions that discriminate against people on the
basis of their "races" understand what they are doing. What is absurd is
our belief that they are ignorant of the false divisions that are
maintained by white racial domination.

It may be true that fascism is a major political orientation of national
wills in the last century, as Gilroy contends, but fascism’s most daring
and dangerous manifestation has always been in white racial domination
and white supremacist notions. This is true whether they have been
expressed in Germany, Britain, Australia, or the United States. To
deplore or lambast African fraternal gatherings without an appreciation
of the successful historical reactions to racism and white supremacy in
the American public by black nationalism is to miss the point of this
century. The most exacting antidote to white racism is African American
nationalism where African agency, self-determination, and self
actualization allow Africans to live their lives regardless of white
racial insanity. Otherwise, in violent reactions or in acquiescence the
African person becomes lost in the same madness of race as the white racist.

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One of the advantages of having an organic relationship with the
ordinary people of the African American community is that one does not
forget what the issues are in the struggle against racial domination.
Ordinary Africans in the United States are not wrestling with the
identity issues of the elite classes who are seeking ways to express an
abstract cosmopolitanism devoid of actual contact with African people. I
believe that Gilroy’s issues are those of Africans who are trying to
de-Africanize Africans in order to make us more acceptable to whites.
This was the old canard when the issue was our hair, our skin color, or
our speech. But we knew even then that these were false issues and that
nothing could please the racist but the annihilation of the African.
Unfortunately, instead of the racist having to perform the task of
making Africans invisible, now scholars like Gilroy rush to demonstrate
that there is something wrong with being an African.

The reality is that any new language about race or identity ought to be
straightforward, blunt, and uncompromising. It should say that one does
not have to give up his or her heritage, ancestry, or color in order to
exist in the world. Why should African descended scholars be promoted
for advancing ethnic abstractness. I prefer the language of my late
father who said, "if you cannot accept me as I am and for who I am then
that is your problem, not mine." I do not believe that this is arrogant
or militant; I believe it is the only authentic voice that is necessary
to bring about a new language of race in this century.

There is much to applaud in Gilroy’s visionary statement about an
intercultural society but it is not the "raceless future" aspect of his
argument. First, I do not look forward to such a colorless,
heritage-less, abstract future, and do not see why anyone should look
for it. Only those who have a need to escape from their own histories
have a need for such a raceless future. On the contrary, it is much more
hopeful that we defeat the notion of racial superiority and establish a
broad new moral vision based on mutual respect for all human beings. I
cannot believe that racelessness, whether that means racial amalgamation
or the obliteration of the African phenotype, would amount to anything
except the diminishing of the world. Where Gilroy has a point is his
intense desire to counter the rise of European fascism, but I think that
he has the wrong idea about how to counter that resurgence. To me, it is
not in the elimination of race or races, but in the elimination of
racism, the defeat of white racial domination, that we will discover the
way to a new humanism.

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