Introduction 1. the City Had Very Few Black Inhabitants in the Early 1950S
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Notes Introduction 1. The city had very few black inhabitants in the early 1950s. The estimated 5,000 slaves who had been kept as servants in the eighteenth century had long since merged into the general population (Dresser, 1989, p. 310). 2. In the UK context, ‘Asian’ has a similar meaning to ‘South Asian’ in the U.S. context. 3. During an impromptu feedback to the head at the end of the day on how things went, I happened to mention that, after we had done some Math and some English, we then played some reggae. The response of the head teacher of this predominantly African-Caribbean multicultural school was, ‘oh, what’s that?’ 4. Perhaps such a challenge began with the sociologist Max Weber. Although Albert Salomon’s famous observation that Weber was involved in a debate ‘with the ghost of Marx’ (Salomon, 1935) may be somewhat overstated, ever since Weber (c. 1915) made a number of criticisms of Marx and Marxism the intellectual struggle against Marxist ideas has been at the forefront of academic writing. Weber suggested that social class might not be solely related to the mode of production; that political power does not neces- sarily derive from economic power; and that status as well as class might form the basis of the formation of social groups. Subsequent attempts to challenge Marxist ideas have ranged from the post-structuralist writings of Michel Foucault who believed that power is diffuse rather than related to the means of production, and of Jacques Derrida who stressed the need for the deconstruction of all dominant discourses; through the postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard who was incredulous of all grand narratives, of Jean Baudrillard who argued that binary oppositions (such as the ruling and working classes) had collapsed; to the transmodernism of Enrique Dussel who has reworked the limited postmodern notion of multivocality (where all voices have equal validity) in favor of the prioritizing of the voices of ‘suffering Others’. Although renowned for his scholarly, thorough, ongoing and original reading of Marx, and for his numerous publications on vari- ous aspects of Marxism, Dussel, nevertheless advocates an ‘ex nihilo uto- pia’ (a utopia created from scratch) rather than socialism (see Cole, 2008d, Chapter 6). Elsewhere (Cole, 2008d), I have defended Marxism against these various challenges, but have also acknowledged some of the insights of these diverse theories. 158 NOTES 1 Critical Race Theory: Origins and Varieties 1. Analogic Reasoning, for the founder of transmodernism Enrique Dussel, is reasoning outside of the class struggle, whence the new utopia will be born (for a discussion of Analogic Reasoning, see Cole, 2008d, pp. 72–74). This is particularly problematic for Marxists since, for them, the new society will be born as a result of the class struggle. Marxists believe that social change comes about through struggle as part of a dialectical process via thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The warring classes are always the products of the respective modes of production, of the economic condition of their time. Thus slaves were in struggle with their masters in the historical epoch of ancient slavery. This gave way to feudalism (synthesis). Feudal serfs were in struggle with their lords in times of feudalism, and workers are in struggle with capitalists in the era of capitalism. This struggle is exacerbated in the mode of neoliberal global capitalism and modern imperialism (see chapter 6 of this volume). Marxists believe, given the right circumstances (workers becoming class conscious and seeing through the interpellation process—discussed at the end of this chapter—and realizing that they are in struggle with capitalists), this can lead to the synthesis of socialism. 2. Analectic Interaction involves listening to the voices of ‘suffering Others’ and interacting democratically with them as a step towards liberation (see Cole, 2008d, pp. 74–75). 3. A distinction needs to be made between the Marxist usage of the term ‘work- ing class’ and sociological meanings of the term. For Marxists, the working class consists of all those who need to sell their labor power to survive rather than living off the labor power of others (see the appendix to chapter 8 of this volume). Sociologists such as Weber use the term to describe those and their children in lower status occupations with lower earnings. Both definitions have their advantages and both are used throughout this volume. 4. Legal realism is a family of theories about the nature of law developed in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States and Scandinavia. The essential tenet of legal realism is that all law is made by human beings and thus is subject to human foibles, frailties and imperfections. Thus, as Woodard (1986, p. 1) argues, for legal realists, policy choices ‘should be informed by the best knowledge, legal or extralegal, and not based soley on the the arti- ficial authority of earlier cases’. In the case of the United States, it disavowed mechanical jurisprudence in favor of insights from social science and politics and utilized policy judgment (Delgado and Stefancic, 2001, p. 150). 5. The term ‘liberalism’ tends, in popular (and academic) parlance, to be used differently in the United Kingdom and the United States. Traditionally in the United Kingdom, it has been used (in popular discourse by Marxists and other Left radicals) to describe ‘middle of the road’ politics. In the United States, it has often been used in everyday parlance to describe those who are viewed to be on the Left. The ‘Marxism-aware’ CLS writers discussed in this chapter, including Tushnet, tend to use ‘liberalism’ to describe ‘middle of the road’ politics, as do similarly Marxism-aware Critical Race Theorists. 6. Unger (1986) held similar views, arguing for an alliance between disaffected elites and the downtrodden, and urging CLS lawyers to wage a strategic cam- paign of ‘constructive dissidence’ (cited in Woodard, 1986, p. 3). 7. Reading the twenty or so leading law review articles on civil rights in the early 1980s, Delgado ([1984] [1995], p. 46) discovered that the authors were NOTES 159 all white males, and that those they cited were also white males. Given that there were at the time about one hundred black, twenty-five Hispanic, and ten Native American law professors teaching in U.S. law schools, many of whom were writing about civil rights and related issues (pp. 46–47), Delgado (p. 47) concludes that much of their scholarship ‘seems to have been con- signed to oblivion’. He goes to argue that a number of the white males’ ‘inner-circle’ articles showed a lack of awareness of basic facts of how minor- ity persons lived or how they viewed the world (p. 49). Delgado also found some of their arguments naïve and ‘hardly worthy of serious consideration’. Most troubling for Delagado was that such articles are not confined to acade- mia, but are cited by courts, and their ideas are ‘read and discussed by legisla- tors, political scientists, and their own students’ (p. 51). Arguing in a similar vein a couple of years later, Harlon L. Dalton ([1987] [1995]) suggested that ‘the quite distinct social circumstances of white males has led to a “rights cri- tique” that is oblivious to, and potentially disruptive of, the interests of peo- ple of color’ (ibid.). Delgado (1992) followed up his 1984 study, and found that, while some of the old ‘inner circle’ had retired, they had been replaced by a new ‘inner circle’. Unfortunately, although minority writers were writ- ing in top journals, not much had changed and these new minority writers had not been fully integrated into the conversations of the new ‘inner circle’ (Isaksen, 2000, p. 698). 8. As Du Bois (1915, p. 139) put it some twelve years later, too many have accepted ‘that tacit but clear modern philosophy which assigns to the white race alone the hegemony of the world and assumes that other races . will either be content to serve the interests of the whites or die out before their all-conquering march’. 9. Although the students at Harvard may have been the original impetus for CRT, as Richard Delgado (personal correspondence, 2008) notes, ‘when they graduated, the momentum at Harvard died. The school purged Derrick Bell . and is today more conservative than ever’. 10. ‘Racialism’ in the UK context at least, is an old-fashioned term for ‘racism’. 11. The article by Kennedy (1982) discussed in the chapter is a good example of a nondeterminist or anti-‘vulgar’ Marxist approach. At one point in the article, Kennedy specifically states, ‘law cannot be usefully understood, by someone who has to deal with it in all its complexity, as “superstructural” ’ (Kennedy, 1982, p. 599). 12. Althusser (1971, p. 174) uses this formulation to describe the way in which ruling class ideology undermines the class consciousness of the working class. For Althusser, the interpellation of subjects—the hailing of concrete individuals as concrete subjects—‘Hey, you there!’ (p. 175) involves a four- fold process: (1) the interpellation of ‘individuals’ as subjects; (2) their sub- jection to the Subject; (3) the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects’ recognition of each other, and finally the subject’s recognition of himself; (4) the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right: Amen—‘So be it’ (p. 182). Althusser explains: Caught in this quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjec- tion to the Subject, of universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects ‘work’, they ‘work by themselves’ in the vast majority of cases, with the exception of the ‘bad subjects’ who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State apparatus.