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Reviews
There
are certain optical illusions that are extremely resistant to "demystification";
only by breaking them down into components too small for recognition of
the overall form can we escape their trap. Yet as soon as we add back
enough atomized material to recog- nize the original form, we cannot resist
the illusion.
In
Martinot's archaeology, the concept of race has much of this irreducibly
compelling deceit. How can racialized persons be constructed out of the
raw material of people who differ only in accidental individual qualities?
And how can an ideology of race emerge out of a society that previously
lacked such a concept? Like all concepts, race has a history; but the
concept also carries at its kernel a denial of its historicity. Martinot
sees the American racial concept as emerging only after several
decades of the importation of African slaves to Virginia Colony, as a
refinement of economically motivated legal frameworks-and as then evolving
in various ways over the next several centuries. Mere physical complexion
does not race make, except in the retroactive act of its construction.
Martinot
provides a fairly traditionally Marxist narrative of dominant capitalist
classes molding naturalizing ideologies out of narrowly economic interests.
But rather than simply accepting a base/superstructure schema, Martinot
works out the evolution decade by decade, law by law, commodity by commodity.
His analysis-which remains specific to a U.S. context of racialization traces the construction and condensation of racial categories. The book's
chapters progress chronologically, from the self-interest of 17th-century
Virginia Colony landowners, through the whiteness "bargain" of the 19th-century
"free labor movements," to contemporary forms of racialization like
racial profiling by police.
The
relation Martinot holds to Marxist terminology is ambivalent. He argues,
convincingly, that racialization preceded and set the horizon for the
formation of (white) U.S. class identities. He rightly finds unconvincing
a familiar identification of race as a mere tactic for division of an
authentic working class identity. Nonetheless, the history he presents
is one of economic relations, and roles in systems of production. Violence,
of course, always played a central role in the maintenance of race, but
even the white "intermediary control strata" are understood in generally
productivist terms. Social evolution and the formation of ideological
forms are understood relatively univocally as advancing the security of
a mode of production-never as a counterhegemonic or orthogonal tendency.
Either
Martinot is too productivist, or perhaps he is lured by the enchantment
of dialectical puns, e.g. discussing the Jacksonian producer ethic:
Both
white working-class roles were productive-of social wealth on the one
hand and of the whiteness of corporate society on the other (111).
While
his whole book is quite strong in its characterization of such economic
and ideological duality, I remain wary that an equivocation hides within
such doubling of the word "productive"-I am quite willing to accept the
economic centrality of ideological production, but not on the basis
of an attractive word-play. There are many points, unfortunately, in The
Rule of Racialization where Martinot, to my mind, puts excessive weight
on a nice verbal formulation; but overall, he generally adduces directly
supportive historical documents and insightful analysis. As a whole, he
makes a good case that...
The
white working class was a product of economic (capitalist) property, yet
defined by a social property (whiteness) through which it became the producer
of the society of (that) property (99).
The
Rule of Racialization falls
in the emerging field of "whiteness studies"-of a piece, for example,
with the work of Noel Ignatiev,* Theodore Allen, David Roediger, and Matthew
Frey Jacobson. Perhaps because of this newish focus, there is a somewhat
odd silence in the book. Throughout Martinot's meticulous histories, almost
on each page, we are left wondering how African Americans conceptualized
and internalized their situation at each particular date and place. As
much as blacks have been unwilling participants in the emerging system
of race, and their choices have been starkly shaped by an overwhelming
violence, their resistances, co-optation, and self-consciousness must
have played a role in what specifically evolved. I wish the perspective
of African Americans were better integrated into Martinot's historical
narrative, in parallel with the changing consciousness and self-conceptualization
of whites.
I
believe Martinot would offer a particular objection to my criticism, however.
For him, "racism is a relation between whites for which nonwhite people
are the language" (185). In this sense racism is simply not a system in
which non-whites participate. Still, histories emerge, at least in part,
out of the actions of individuals; and the "others" of white supremacy
have always acted also.
Moreover,
I think that Martinot's theme of race emerging out of the primary construction
of whiteness mandates his focus on black and white in the racial
system of the United States. It is certainly not that Martinot forgets
other non-whites-Native Americans, Latinos, Chinese, and so on-but
emerging out of the African/European/North American slave trade, it was
this particular reified juridico-legal recognition of a chromatic difference
that first constructed the meaning of whiteness. Native Americans in pre-Revolution
colonies, even as they might be murdered or have their land expropriated
in accordance with British law, were initially conceptualized as heathen
and/or lacking agency under that law, but not (yet) in explicitly racial
terms.
A
particular circular structure of presupposition occurs, according to Martinot,
throughout the history of racialization-and provides a key to understanding
its illusion. A racial ideology discovers its antecedents and necessity
everywhere it looks, because its very process is the construction of race
under its gaze. For example, in recent racial profiling...
Profiling
is the inverse of law enforcement. In law enforcement, a crime is discovered
and the police then look for a suspect who might possibly have committed
it. Profiling means that a suspect is discovered and the police then look
for a crime for the person to have possibly committed (168).
Likewise, in pre-Civil War "free states":
When
newly arrived refugees from slavery sought to vote, they were denied on
the basis that, as former or runaway slaves, they were unfit for the franchise.
If they did not seek the vote, in order to live unnoticed as far as possible,
they were deemed unfit for not having participated in the democratic process (104).
This same pattern of ideological discovery is ubiquitous
in white supremacy.
After
all of Martinot's analysis, the fundamental mystery still remains: how
can race remain so persistent, even across changes in class systems and
in the specific forms of racialization? The circular rationalizations
about race provide part of the answer, but it always feels as if something
is missing. This is not remotely a flaw in Martinot's book, but is the
very kernel that he moves us slightly closer towards being able to understand.
David
Mertz
Gnosis Software
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