Freedom, Equality, Race

Freedom, Equality, Race Jeffrey B. Ferguson Our current era of race relations in America maintains racial distinctions largely through the expectation that they will soon disappear. This stands in contrast with previous periods, in which such categories as black and white counted as durable facts of descent and destiny. One side of the current race debate plays up the disappearance of racial distinctions, sometimes by exaggerating the virtues of color blindness. The other side guards against the diminishment of such distinctions, at times going so far as to equate current racial problems with the dark and distant past of slavery and Jim Crow. For the ½rst camp–what we might call a “party of hope”– current racial realities signal the promise of a raceless future where skin color may have no more societal import than does eye color. The second –a “party of memory”–aims for a similar goal, but it generally casts its ultimate purpose in more pluralistic terms. This party ½nds the waning of timeworn forms of racial identity, along with the deeply etched barriers that gave rise to them, threatening to the very political movements that JEFFREY B. FERGUSON is the might bring about lasting positive change. Ironi- Andrew W. Mellon Professor cally, the party of memory ½nds what the party of Black Studies and American of hope would call racial progress somewhat dan- Studies at Amherst College. He gerous to ultimate racial justice. No less curious is the author of The Harlem Re- naissance: A Brief History with is the party of hope’s prevailing expectation that Documents (2008) and The Sage after more than two hundred years of constant ra- of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler cial strife, black and white identity in the United and the Harlem Renaissance (2005). States will simply fade away. © 2011 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 44 Dædalus Winter 2011 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00057 by guest on 28 September 2021 In some ways, the expectation that historian Edmund Morgan, have dem- Jeffrey B. race will disappear seems particular to onstrated a necessary relationship be- Ferguson our era of race relations; but in other tween the freedom cries of slavemasters ways, the thought goes back quite far. and their status as absolute rulers of Most Americans have always regarded stateless men and women who were the abiding values of our country as uni- regarded primarily as property and as versal, and therefore raceless. Because human beings in a much less formal they think of such principles as equali- register. In American Slavery, American ty and freedom in this way, they believe Freedom (1975), Morgan argues that rul- that eventually, in an essentially good ing-class Southerners at the time of the and fair country such as ours, these high American Revolution–Patrick Henry, ideals will prevail over the more paro- for example–tended to associate all chial values that keep us apart. Histori- subordination with the wretched con- cally, this progressive mindset has come dition of their slaves.1 They employed with many good intentions on the race this analogy in their idealistic insistence question but much less follow-up. For on freedom from the British. Henry’s this and other reasons it has long been famous eruption on the floor of the Con- an object of attack for scholars of the tinental Congress, “Give me liberty or African American experience. Those give me death,” marked him as a radical who believe that racial problems will republican, one ready to pay the highest go away on their own tend not to act price for independence. Nevertheless, directly to solve them, or they put forth the reverberant utterance of this slave- half-stepping measures that address holding Virginian (and others like him) some issues but invent, reinvent, or bequeathed a cruel legacy to generations exacerbate others. Over time, this ten- of Americans. Unlike free white men, dency has contributed mightily to the Henry’s slaves lived under the very con- cloud of betrayal that hangs constant- dition that would presumably have driv- ly, and sometimes ominously, over the en their freedom-loving master to kill American racial discourse. At its worst, and to die. Henry’s formulation, odd- the seemingly benign idea of progress, ly, justi½ed the degradation of African which many still regard as the soul of Americans by the very condition that the American dream, can serve as a the degradation caused; in no small mask for crass class interest, or can measure, it associated blackness with allow racists to “blame the victim” and shame. Though they lived to guarantee thus to deny the cruel meaning of their the freedom of supposedly independent anti-democratic views. Yet these conse- men, and yearned for freedom in their quences of progress do not contradict own terms despite their abasement, the meaning of such foundational val- African Americans suffered for how ues as freedom and equality so much starkly they symbolized what white as they manifest their inner logic. men both feared and despised. It is worth remembering the uncom- fortable and often repeated fact that Many writers have observed that our most cherished American princi- the Enlightenment, through its empha- ples have as one of their most important sis on human powers, gave freedom its sources the minds of slavemasters and modern meaning; but it also codi½ed slave traders. Discerning observers of the modern idea of race as one way to the American experience, such as the distinguish those worthy of liberty from Dædalus Winter 2011 45 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00057 by guest on 28 September 2021 Freedom, the irrational, uncivilized, and supersti- logical valences remain active, the post– Equality, tious “others” who supposedly lived in a civil rights concept of race relies main- Race perpetual past. In other words, this peri- ly on values, modes of signifying, and od handed down most of the reasons to behavior. Rather than membership in believe in race along with the justi½ca- a biological group, “whiteness” repre- tions for despising and resisting it. As sents a cultural norm that non-whites the Enlightenment gave life to the mod- may receive rewards for adopting– ern concept of race, it created the condi- though acquiring the necessary cultural tions that force us to explain and theo- capital to do so can prove almost impos- rize this category incessantly. In the hands sible for many. Here, as the social theo- of early race theorists such as Linnaeus, rist Etienne Balibar points out, the work Blumenbach, and de Buffon, seemingly of exclusion occurs through the regula- objective biological categories like skin tion of inclusion rather than forming an color and skull size served as impartial absolute line of demarcation between measures that positioned man as a sub- the races.2 Those able to conform to the ject of his own scienti½c inquiry and normalizing logic of post–civil rights thus as an object of new forms of power/ “whiteness” live freer lives than those knowledge that enabled the shaping and who cannot, as the dismal statistics control of populations. Thus, human showing racial disparities in wealth, freedom in this era, and thereafter, de- health, education, and criminal justice pended crucially on a thoroughgoing reveal so evidently. Under this regime, form of subjection that created its own the work of racial exclusion can occur human hierarchies, which in some ways quite ef½ciently but without overt rac- reinscribed ancient ideas of descent and ism. In contrast with the frontal as- inheritance but now with new and high- sault of the pre–civil rights racial re- ly influential scienti½c imprimatur. As gime, which occurred more or less in the modern concept of freedom carried the open, the new dispensation con- with it the inclusive language of univer- ducts most of its oppressive labor be- salism, it also privileged certain human hind a smokescreen of elaborate racial qualities: rationality, possession of na- etiquette and discursive deflection that ture or property, power, resistance, and communicates racial fear and aversion autonomy, to name a few. Instead of across an ever wider range of signi½ca- membership in humanity as it is, free- tion. dom signi½ed communion with hu- In its more recent cultural guise, race manity as it ought to be. Those who continues to play a strategic role on the failed to qualify for this imagined ideal exclusionary side of modern freedom; often faced terrible consequences, as for the excluded, however, racial iden- the long history of slavery, imperialism, tity still has deep attractions, partly be- sexism, and class oppression demon- cause the sheer existence of barriers to strates amply. full social advancement provides a back- From their inception, the concepts of drop against which group solidarity freedom and race have reinforced each might be perceived in moral terms: as other in the making of modernity; they part of a long and righteous struggle for continue to do so today, though the con- freedom. This idea is well established cept of race has shifted in its de½nition- among African Americans, who, out of al grounding, from nature to culture. the necessity of historic struggle, have Despite the fact that some of the old bio- formed an alternately heroic, sacri½cial, 46 Dædalus Winter 2011 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00057 by guest on 28 September 2021 and sometimes melodramatic sense of on one side and a battle for individual Jeffrey B. group belonging laden with collective distinction or status on the other. Ferguson memories of struggle on the wrong side Basing his observations on an exten- of the American color line.

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