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Race and the Racialized State: A Du Boisian Interrogation

By Anthony Monteiro

The events of September 11, 2001 did not begin, but accelerated, processes that have for some years been leading to the transformation of the US state and political system. These historic processes have culminated in the reconfiguration of the US state, establishing the hegemony of its military industrial/national security and police/domestic control sectors. As no less an authority than Richard Holbrooke puts it, "the American military has acquired an unprecedented role in the conduct of foreign policy."1 At the same time, many of the state's Welfare or New Deal features are being downsized, privatized and eliminated. Vast and radical attacks upon bourgeois democracy, civil and human rights, and civil liberties are under way, justified by the need for homeland security.

The current moment of empire and the new relationship of forces within the state are crystallized in the Bush Administration's Doctrine of Preemptive War, the USA Patriot Act, and the Homeland Security Act. The Justice Department and the Homeland Security Department are designed as the command centers of the attack upon civil and political rights. International law and international institutions are being assaulted as the Bush Administration proclaims its right to wage war unilaterally anywhere in the world. The Administration has literally declared itself outside of international law and thus a self-defined rogue state. In economic terms a policy shift from Keynesian state economic and financial policies to Friedmanite free market, neo-liberal ones, has taken place.

Modern capitalism, bourgeois democracy, globalization, and other contemporary phenomena of the economy and culture are virtually incomprehensible without understanding the modern racialized capitalist state. Such an understanding cannot be carried on at the level of broad generalities; it must be specific and concrete. The US state must be explained as it has emerged in US history, in terms of the specific stages of its development, its ideological contexts and justifications, and the social psychology of its people, especially as it relates to their understanding of authority and governance. These social-psychological and ideological dimensions are particularly important. It is safe to say that the American population, particularly white people, views the current moment as a new and unsafe frontier. There is a perceptible transformation of psychological and ideological impulses among white Americans, a kind of collective traumatization, as the business of empire has come home to roost. The psychological and ideological moment is nourished by the concerns that ordinary white people have with their own vulnerability, and by their awareness that it is they who are called upon to make significant sacrifices in the name of empire. It is in this milieu that we witness the attempt of leading elements of the state to forge a new national identity and sense of purpose.

The subjective realities of ordinary white folk are filtered through the inevitable prisms of race and white supremacy. The threat, therefore, is viewed as a threat to white people as a collective and not solely to the economic interests of the nation, or even to specific class interests. For them the American dreamscape has been sullied and tarnished. Their sense of security and expectation of privacy are wounded. Their dreamworld has to be redeemed in order that the American psyche can be restored. In the deepest sense the privileges of whiteness and white supremacy are viewed as being under attack. Hence, the defense of America and of democracy are viewed, at their core, as defenses of the global rights of white people, articulated variously as defenses of civilization or the West.

The US state is the product of a distinct evolutionary history; it is an aspect of the evolution of whiteness to autonomous legal status, i.e., from the idea of whiteness as a product of nature and thus part of the natural order, to the recognition of it as a social relational category constructed and upheld by society and law: what Colette Guillaumin calls "the legal enunciation of the physical (somatic, genetic, etc.)."2 In US experience, the movement to elevate whiteness to autonomous legal status demanded significant changes in the psychic and ideological conditions of the dominant (white) group and the relegation of subordinated races to the status of Other.3

The transformation of the legal status of whiteness is decisive to the evolution of the racialized state. The very existence of the racialized state confirms the racialized nature of social relationships and negates the notion that social relationships are above race. The legal constitution of the racialized state, therefore, requires the elevation of whiteness to a legally protected category like that of property.4 This history can be broadly periodized into three stages: 1776-1873, 1873-1971, and 1971 to the present.5 Each begins and ends in a transformative economic and/or political crisis (except for the most recent stage, which is still in process). The first stage is the pre-imperialist stage of the US state, the second is the imperialist stage and the third is the stage of empire. Another way to conceptualize these stages is as (1) the pre-monopoly capitalist stage, (2) the stage of state monopoly capitalism, and (3) the transnational globalization stage. From the standpoint of state formation, each of these stages was a level in the evolution of the racialized state. Each stage is a level in the evolution of whiteness to autonomous legal status. For instance, in the first stage race and whiteness as legal foundations of the state are defined, more or less, by the three-fifths clause of the Constitution and the Dred Scott Decision (1857), affirming the protection of slaves as property and what amounts to the social death of black folk. In the second stage it is Plessy v Ferguson and the notion that whiteness is a form of property to be protected by law. The deployment of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965) to defend white privilege against African American claims, defines the legal status of whiteness in the current stage. This represents a return to the protection of whiteness enunciated in Plessy v Ferguson.

Whiteness in this understanding is the dynamic and crucial factor of state formation. Traditional Marxian historiography understands state formation in the US from the standpoint of a class of slave owners, bankers, merchants, and small capitalists seizing state power in the name of democracy and the American nation. In this view, the American Revolution was a bourgeois democratic revolution. Du Boisian historiography asserts a racialized class, made up of slaveholders, merchants, bankers, small farmers and workers (Du Bois, 1896 and 1935) who seized power and deployed it to maintain the main form of property-slaves. It is significant that Du Bois defines the slaves in Suppression (1896) as workers and in Black Reconstruction (1935) as a proletariat. Here rests his visionary reconceptualization of class struggle and revolutionary agency. Indeed, it is the working class or proletariat as suggested by Marx that constitutes the revolutionary agency of modernity. Du Bois, however, in an act of profound theoretical displacement, argues that the racialized proletariat, the slaves, are the principal agency of progressive and revolutionary change. In this framework, the racialized identity of slaves implies giving a similarly racialized definition to the classes which comprise white people. In fact, the racialized dimension of these identities is overdetermining of other social relationships. The bourgeoisie in the American context (and to some degree in the European contexts and certainly in South Africa) is preeminently white. The working classes are, therefore, racially identified. All classes and strata of white people identify themselves as a separate race-class from blacks and identify the nation and the state in racialized terms. Hence, one can speak of a racialized nation-state; and within this mixture, the core, or organizing mechanism of race, class, nation, and nationality is the racialized state.

The slaves constituted in Du Bois's thinking the principal proletarian agency in 19th-century US history. The racialized self- identification of white workers (what Du Bois called "a wage for whiteness") bound them more strongly to the white bourgeoisie than to the Black proletariat.6 This wage for whiteness is, so to speak, an ontological benefit to being identified as white. Hence, an ontological identification exists between white workers and white slave owners, white workers and white capitalist etc. The state, therefore, is not just a mechanism of class rule; it is a mechanism of race-class rule. This rule is organized upon the ideology of white supremacy. Hence, the boundaries between the ruled and the rulers along class lines are blurred and fluid, while the real and most enduring boundaries are between the racially dominant and racially subordinated groups. Furthermore, as Du Bois suggests, the racially oppressed constitute the proletariat and within them resides the vast reservoir of proletarian consciousness and agency (Du Bois, 1935: ch. 4, "The General Strike"). The "class struggle" in this Du Boisian construal is organized around the struggle against white supremacy, and its central organizing principle is the struggle for black freedom. The racialized state functions as the instrument of white unity and white ideological identity against the threat of the black race-class and its proletarian core.

Du Bois's conceptualization of the US state as a racialized instru- ment does not negate the Marxist theory of the state. His theory advances Marxism, realizing a new and more accurate synthesis. The Du Boisian construal is both theoretically elegant and highly predictive. Furthermore, it breaks out of the reductionist strategies of class essentialism and methodological individualism. This Du Boisian standpoint informs a growing body of scholarship. As a result, a significant reexamination of state theory and its legal implications is occurring. Some of this is associated with the school of critical race theory, and thinkers such as Derek Bell, Patricia Williams, Cheryl Harris, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Charles Mills. Alongside these is the school known as whiteness studies, or race traitors, whose proponents are David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, Theodore Allen, and Joe Feagin, among others. Writers like Bernard Magubane and Clarence J. Munford have thought deeply about the state using traditional Marxism as a starting point, but going beyond it in a Du Boisian manner. Their line of research and reasoning represents the most fruitful approach to understanding the racialized state.

Charles Mills argues that the US state is formed out of a racial contract among white folk. The state, he suggests, is an a priori condition of modern racialized societies. Bernard Magubane shows a similar process with respect to South African state formation. Magubane's study examines a white settler colony and the modalities of state formation that emerged from the conflicts and cooperation between English and Dutch settlers to control the African majority of South Africa. The historical account of the US state emphasizes that it was formed and legitimated by white people based upon a protracted history of compromise, conflict, civil war and armed struggle among themselves, accompanied by a long, brutal history of betrayal by white working and middle class people of black slaves, workers, sharecroppers, and middle classes. The betrayal of the Negro, to use Rayford Logan's phrase, is critical in every moment of state formation and legitimation in American history. Noel Ignatiev's study How The Irish Became White and David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness are recent explanations of the consequences of the white working class's betrayal and its role in the legitimation of whiteness. Ignatiev says...

In the combination of Southern planters and the "plain republicans" of the North, the Irish were to become a key element. The truth is not, as some historians would have it, that slavery made it possible to extend to the Irish the privileges of citizenship, by providing another group for them to stand on, but the reverse, that the assimilation of the Irish into the white race made it possible to maintain slavery (1995:69).

Mary Frances Berry (1994) takes the story further, urging that the US state and Constitution were forged in the struggle to contain black resistance. The logic of Berry's position is that whiteness and the racialized state function to suppress Black resistance and maintain Blacks as a "sub-proletariat." Lerone Bennett Jr. (2000) argues that through it all Lincoln was unprincipled vis-à-vis the freedom of the slaves, and that had he lived beyond 1865, he would, like Jefferson, have slaughtered the ideals of the nation upon the altar of white supremacy. Lincoln, in Bennett's narrative, was another of a long line of white betrayers of blacks. What is missing in Bennett's account is that Lincoln as President was first and foremost a defender of the racialized state, which both constrained and facilitated his actions. Nonetheless, his and Berry's interpretations are as close as one can come, within the confines of academic discourse, to arguing that the US is a racist state.

Finally, the crucial moment in defining white rights and black denial and hence updating the US Constitution to reflect the new stage of US racial and economic life was the famous Plessy v Ferguson decision of 1896. Cheryl Harris (1993) insists that race and property rights define the foundation of US Constitutional law and that whiteness is a form of property to be protected under the Constitution.

The legal evolution of whiteness begins with the 3/5 clause of the Constitution and is perfected through multiple political and Constitutional interpretations and rulings. Among these are the Dred Scott Decision (1857), Plessy v Ferguson (1896), and most notably recent interpretations of the US Supreme Court with respect to race and whiteness. Cheryl Harris (1993: 1753) contends that in its landmark Brown v Topeka Board of Education decision (1954), the Court dismantled an older form of whiteness as property (as upheld in Plessy), but dialectically permitted its reemergence in a more subtle form, i.e., accepting as normal de facto societal inequities between blacks and whites. As Harris puts it, "In accepting substantial inequality as a neutral base line, a new form of whiteness as property was condoned." Hence, the anti-affirmative action rulings of the Court in Bakke (1978), City of Richmond v J.A. Croson (1989), and Wygant v Jackson Board of Education (1986) were the Court's application of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to protect the property interest in whiteness (Harris, 1993: 1766). Derek Bell Jr. (1995: 23) insists that racial equality is not deemed legitimate by large segments of the American people, "at least to the extent it threatens the societal status of whites." He then points out that because of the prevailing attitudes of whites to racial equality the 14th Amendment may not be available as a remedy in cases of racial discrimination. In the current context, therefore, most legal remedies to counter racial discrimination have been trumped, thereby transforming the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment into a defense of whiteness, rather than a protection for those historically deprived of civil rights.

The evolutionary history of whiteness is connected to the state in much the way that the state is to the nation. Whiteness and white supremacy operate as deep structural foundations or unstated assumptions underlying state power and state organization. White (or American) nationalism is, in this configuration, the political manifestation of whiteness. The racialized US state is the central political organ of white power. It is, however, a complex network of relationships and socio-political forces. It is a site of intense political and ideological conflict. It is neither sui generis, nor above the political and economic realities of the historical, socio-political and ideological contexts within which it exists. Thus one can observe command-and-control functions of the US state as well as mediation functions. Liberal theory generally points to the mediation or "above class" functions (Rawls, 1971; Nozick, 1974); Marxists and other radical theorists point to the command-and-control functions as primary (see Engels, 1884, and Lenin, 1918, as modern classics). There is another view, a reform socialist or democratic socialist stance (see Desai, 2002: 297), which believes that modern capitalism has wide possibilities of democratic expansion and reform through the expansion of civil society and non-governmental institutions. And certainly it is clear that both radical and liberal commentators on the US state make credible arguments supporting their views. However, the deeper issue is how it functions to configure, defend and promote race and race relations at particular historical moments. In this respect neither liberal nor traditional radical views are adequate. What is called for is an understanding of the US state as a racialized mechanism that is the principal organizer of racialized power. As an instrument of racialized power, i.e. the power of white people over non-whites, especially black people, it functions to mediate class conflict and fissures among whites and to exert primarily command-and-control functions with respect to blacks. This situation is not only deeply contradictory, but also profoundly ironic. Blacks, the most consistently democratic force in the country, have benefited least from democracy. Remaining outside of the social contract, excluded from the liberal framework constructed and defended by the state, and the chief objects of the state's command-and-control functions, they appear almost as a stateless people, somewhat like the Palestinians or black South Africans under apartheid.

However, the theoretical defenders of the liberal "mediating" state are also defenders of the notion of a colorblind state, and thus are themselves blind to the historically constituted race-determined nature of the US state. It is they, in the end, not the US state, that are colorblind-a colorblindness which itself, as Charles Mills points out, entrenches white privilege.7 However, in being blind to the racial nature of the state, they ignore the state's command-and-control functions, which are overwhelmingly constructed upon and defined by its role as defender of racialized social relationships. The liberal democratic state should have a sign outside its door that reads, "For Whites Only."

The race-class problematic in the formation and evolution of state power in the US is a special instance of the evolution of the state in general. This race-class situation complicates the realities of the state and the theories that attempt to explain it. There is a dynamism and fluidity to the US state that defies an either/or analysis. The class dimension of the state is dialectically contingent on its race dimension. Class, in a certain sense, is thus sabotaged as the central organizing dynamic of the racialized state. The very fluidity of race and whiteness, their historical contextualities and contingencies, their dynamic and changing political and social identities, makes for a certain indeterminacy with respect to the formations and evolutions of the racialized state. The racialized state is thus an unstable, ever-evolving structure. A major destabilizing factor is demographic change, resulting from immigration and from low birth rates among whites. This occasions the need to redefine whiteness in such ways as to guarantee a white majority, as a condition of legitimation of white authority. Non-black immigrants are faced with complex negotiations between anti-black racism and whiteness. Many Latinos and Asians are so positioned as to become in a generation white.

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