Blacks and whites are cordial, warm and friendly to one another. We live together, shop together, work together, eat together, laugh together. My neighbors, a black family, have a KEY to my house and watch my home when I am gone. My neighborhood is about 30% black wealthy and upper middle class. There is a soul food restaurant at the end of my sub right next to a white owned dry cleaners.

Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 02:20:45 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Bruce N. Simon" (bnsimon@flagstaff.princeton.edu)
To: abcnews@aol.com
Subject: On Nightline and racism

To the Nightline Crew--

Before I get to the topic of black racism, another quick criticism of your series. Again, you presuppose that "race" really means "black," so that what you're always doing is looking at how Americans (black and white) look at African Americans. I think it would have been much more interesting, too, if the format of tomorrow's show were to have been reversed--why not have white people talk about white racism and privilege, and have the black audience respond? Why is it always the black perspective being analyzed, judged, held up to scrutiny in the STRUCTURE of the show? Admittedly, the content is not this way; particularly gripping tonight were the clips from the racism expert's classes and workshops. Really brought out how tiring and wasteful these arbitrary distinctions are, yet how difficult it is for those benefitting from them to even recognize this fact, much less do something to change the situation. But be that as it may, this has really been a show about "blackness" and not about "race." If it were the latter, we'd have seen more excavating of the meaning and significance of whiteness.

White Americans only like to remember a few sentences from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech (particularly about someday everyone being judged by the content of their character not the color of their skin), and are too quick to forget the rest of what he was doing. But how long will it take for us whites to recognize that being judged by the content of our characters means that we're going to have to confront the fact of whiteness? By that I mean that whites let ourselves and each other off easy because we judge each other by the colors of our skins. In order to get to be "color blind" (assuming that blinding yourself and only seeing things in black and white are good things), you first have to be more conscious of how you yourself are "raced," particularly if you are white.

To put this point another way, commitment to democracy means a rejection of aristocracy, of inherited privilege. Yet from the time this nation was founded, the democratic revolution that Tocqueville described has remained incomplete, for white-skin-privilege was coded into our Constitution, even into our Declaration of Independence (check out the first draft, where Jefferson tries to place all the blame for the slave trade on the British and accuses the King of fomenting slave rebellion--it's slightly coded, but it implies that slaves were definitely not citizens, a judgment made explicit in the 1857 Dred Scott decision). White supremacy short-circuits American democracy. It is about as un-American as you can get, especially when you consider that the American "mainstream," as Ralph Ellison and so many others have pointed out, has always been at the very least culturally black. And by white supremacy, I don't just mean far-right extremists; I mean habits of thought and action that get reproduced by the major institutions of this country (family, schools, the state, the media, to name a few), and that show themselves at the level of everyday life.

So I'll care a whole lot more about black racism once I see this nation as a whole coming to grips with its racist past and present today, now. And that means really rejecting white supremacy in all its forms (and this goes across the political spectrum, including marxists and liberals). And what does "black racism" mean, anyway? Is it like "black supremacy"? Well, until I see blacks overwhelmingly dominating every major institution and corridor of power (as white males still do--the numbers don't lie here), I won't be too worried by a few isolated voices who uphold this. Is it something like "hating people whom you perceive as belonging to a different race for no other reason than that perception," I would say that on the whole (and this is an overbroad generalization, I know) blacks are much less racist than whites, because they are forced every day to make fine distinctions in every interaction with white people, just as a matter of survival and maintaining one's dignity and mental equilibrium. This is not b/c of some mystical racial trait, it's b/c of a power differential, one that applies to any relationship; for example, you are a whole ****** of a lot more sensitive to what mood your boss is in than he (or she--remember, affirmative action has historically benefitted white females the most) is to yours, as it's your job that's on the line. Or maybe I'm wrong here; given the prevalence of de facto segregation, maybe too many black kids almost never encounter whites and never are forced to learn how to read them. Maybe I'm taking a model from an older version of segregation and misapplying it. I don't know. But here's a test. Read Richard Wright's Black Boy, the version that contains the second half his publishers asked him to drop from the original edition (entitled American Hunger), and then watch closely at how people of color interact with you. If you have non-white friends, ask them if Wright is still right today, over a half-century later. So I'll accept that this point I'm trying to make is debatable, even contentious. But if I'm right, then blacks are much better at judging white strangers by the content of their character and not the color of their skin than whites are of blacks.

So what is "racism"? Everybody loves to diss academics these days, and often for good reason. A lot of it comes down to needlessly difficult-to- read prose, although you'll notice that when academics write for a wider audience and not just to fight among themselves, they become quite a bit more readable. The books and articles I'm about to recommend offer some very important definitions, although they are not easy reads. I still think they're very important, so I'm asking for those who are interested in following this through further to have patience, and maybe to start with the article by Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield below, which is very clear, as is Slavoj Zizek, who's basically ventriloquizing Balibar's ideas and making them more accessible by applying them to what's going on now in Bosnia. As far as getting ahold of these works, try your local university or college library, or ask your public library to do an interlibrary loan. I mean, there's no reason to buy any of these books, assuming they're still in print (did you know the average academic book sells less than a thousand copies?).

The reason I'm asking for somebody out there to pick up at least one of these works is that although I think the woman on Nightline was fundamentally right about racism/white supremacy--especially in her critique of "reverse racism"--her take on power and the way racism works was too reductive and functionalist (almost behavioralist). I think her approach clearly works in a workshop to make a point to white people who never really thought about racism before, but it strikes me as something you have to experience to find persuasive. The nice thing (and the limit) of the works below is that the only experience needed is the act of reading. What I'm saying is that to make her your only "expert" on racism is to ignore more nuanced work being done today by a wide range of international scholars. Admittedly, nuance is something that's hard to get across in a half-hour, and she certainly was provocative, and hopefully people will really think about how much difference the past 40 years can make compared to the previous 400. So, for those who have started thinking about what it really takes to break with white supremacy, I recommend the following works.

I do so in the spirit of Nightline, which brings in a white expert to talk about racism because they know their viewers are so racist they'll often tune out what a black person is saying or try to pigeon-hole it right away into some stereotyped category; so, in that spirit, here's a group of non-black scholars who have interesting things to say about how racisms work. For good measure, a lot of them don't even directly discuss the U.S., so no need to get all defensive right away! [If you want the analysis of U.S. racial politics, check out the collection Nobel laureate Toni Morrison edited (the one with the awful title!), Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power, as well as the one just out called Mapping Multiculturalism, edited by Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, and the one that will be out within three [or so] months, The House that Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano.] OK, onto the list:

Recent Work on Racism

Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990)--a collection of essays, some better than others, on racisms.

Etienne Balibar, "Is There a Neo-Racism?" in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (NY: Verso, 1991) 17-28--ground-breaking piece on France and Europe, with definite connections to the U.S.; makes more sense after reading Taguieff's study of the French New Right (see below), but stands on its own as a major essay.

Etienne Balibar, "Racism as Universalism," Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx (NY: Routledge, 1994) 191-204--a continuation of the last essay; makes a lot more sense after Taguieff.

Joe R. Feagin and Hernan Vera, White Racism: The Basics (NY: Routledge, 1995)--looks at contemporary U.S. society;

David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993)--philosophical approach to racism; some interesting critiques of liberalism;

Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, "White Philosophy," Critical Inquiry 20 (Summer 1994) 737-757, recently reprinted in Identities, ed. Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (U of Chicago P, 1995)--an eminently readble, incredibly important expose of how liberal racists operate (liberal in the political theory sense, which means several strands of the conservative movement today as well as "liberals"); my favorite one of the bunch, and the most readable. The article is in part a critique of an earlier essay by Walter Benn Michaels; if you're interested in the larger exchange, get ahold of the Identities book.

Colette Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology (NY: Routledge, 1995)--direct, blunt, mostly about racism in France but making more general claims, too.

[Paul Kivel's Uprooting Racism is also a good introduction to issues raised in more complicated forms elsewhere....]

Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (NY: Pantheon, 1970)--maybe a bit too rigid in its application of Freudian principles for my taste, but still a very important text;

Robert Miles, Racism after "Race Relations" (NY: Routledge, 1993)--a critical review of mostly Anglo-American sociology on race and racism;

"Race and Racism: A Symposium," ed. Tricia Rose and Andrew Ross, Social Text 42 (Spring 1995) 1-52--this is the really quick and easy place to start, although b/c the pieces are so short and they respond to already well-known positions (especially Balibar's), it might make more sense after Gordon and Newfield's and Balibar's essays.

Pierre-Andre Taguieff, "From Race to Culture: The New Right's View of European Identity," trans. Deborah Cook, Telos 98-99 (Winter 1993-Fall 1994) 99-125--in-depth study of the French New Right, which is so different from the New Right here, in everything except the reliance on racialized notions of culture, it's really an amazing read, despite the dryness of the prose.

Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 226. For a similar argument, see "Caught in Another's Dream in Bosnia," in Why Bosnia?--Zizek can be by turns crystal clear and amazingly difficult. I really recommend the piece from Why Bosnia?, which is quite clear and really sums up a lot of good work being done today, with his own quirky twist to it.

Thanks for bearing with this way-too-long and cranky post.

--Bruce Simon
bnsimon@princeton.edu

And what does "black racism" mean, anyway? Is it like "black supremacy"? Well, until I see blacks overwhelmingly dominating every major institution and corridor of power (as white males still do--the numbers don't lie here), I won't be too worried by a few isolated voices who uphold this. Is it something like "hating people whom you perceive as belonging to a different race for no other reason than that perception," I would say that on the whole (and this is an overbroad generalization, I know) blacks are much less racist than whites, because they are forced every day to make fine distinctions in every interaction with white people, just as a matter of survival and maintaining one's dignity and mental equilibrium. This is not b/c of some mystical racial trait, it's b/c of a power differential, one that applies to any relationship; for example, you are a whole ****** of a lot more sensitive to what mood your boss is in than he (or she--remember, affirmative action has historically benefitted white females the most) is to yours, as it's your job that's on the line. Or maybe I'm wrong here; given the prevalence of de facto segregation, maybe too many black kids almost never encounter whites and never are forced to learn how to read them. Maybe I'm taking a model from an older version of segregation and misapplying it. I don't know. But here's a test. Read Richard Wright's Black Boy, the version that contains the second half his publishers asked him to drop from the original edition (entitled American Hunger), and then watch closely at how people of color interact with you. If you have non-white friends, ask them if Wright is still right today, over a half-century later. So I'll accept that this point I'm trying to make is debatable, even contentious. But if I'm right, then blacks are much better at judging white strangers by the content of their character and not the color of their skin than whites are of blacks.