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 and Jim Crow. For the ½rst camp–what we might call a “party of hope”– current racial realities signal the promise of a race- less 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 (2005). States will simply fade away.

© 2011 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

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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

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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,

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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. These strug- sive tour of the during the gles have served not only as ways of ac- 1830s, Tocqueville regarded American quiring freedom, but also as a means of society as a test case for the prospects of performing it culturally and politically a new and inexorable world-historical across a great range that encompasses process in which equality, individualism, modes of self-fashioning, artistic styles, and democracy would increasingly dis- and direct forms of political resistance place privilege based on birth and per- and protest. This tradition of perform- manent class structures. He contemplat- ing freedom has helped raise African ed America at an early stage of its devel- American identity above the level of opment with the chaos and despotism mere external imposition as it has creat- of post-revolutionary France, and the ed a point of identi½cation for those out- slipping grip of his own class, well in side the group to symbolize their own view. Though he recognized the positive freedom struggles. potential of democracy, he remained equally cognizant of its constitutional As a dominant value in American flaws: its tendencies toward conformity, life, freedom has always stood beside, dictatorship of the people, corruption, and competed with, the idea of equal- greed, envy, moralism, intellectual shal- ity. Nowhere has the complex relation- lowness, voluntary isolation of the in- ship between these two bedrock con- dividual from collective life, and many cepts had greater impact than in the other weaknesses both large and small. history of race relations, and rarely has For Tocqueville, American society in the their mutual opposition and entangle- 1830s represented a wonderful opportu- ment received more trenchant treat- nity to observe whether such defective ment than in the work of the nine- tendencies would prevail because it of- teenth-century French aristocrat and fered a perfect photo-negative of the social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville. In European social picture: a place where his classic Democracy in America (1840), sheer newness put immigrants and near- he observed that in a country where all immigrants, strangers to the land with men are created equal, those not recog- no permanent barrier between them, in nized as equals may not be regarded as a society where they might arrange life men. Tocqueville’s eminently logical for- according to their tastes, talents, and de- mula sets out in elegant form the inti- sires. Many of the saving graces and sus- mate connection between a high uni- taining patterns that Tocqueville recog- versal ideal and a foundational violence nized in American democracy–its local that it maintains through masking. Fol- associations and communal public life, lowing Tocqueville’s calculation, hierar- its ascetic faith in the value of work, its chies of descent grow naturally from the dynamic and expansive world-altering inner tensions of democratic values, not will–stand endangered in our own age; out of a failure to attend to them. Amer- thus, we may still wonder about the ulti- icans constantly reinvent racial distinc- mate survivability of our way of life. Or, tions and invidious race theories in part in light of American race relations from to resolve the quandary of their national slavery to the present, we might wonder condition, which entails basic equality whether Tocqueville understood entirely

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00057 by guest on 28 September 2021 Freedom, the full array of forces that have made geoning productivity, culture of equali- Equality, American democracy cohere. In the end, ty, and the competitive anxiety of its citi- Race the stability of our democracy may de- zens. In the South, he surmised, the exis- pend as much on the maintenance of tence of slavery retarded development. racial inequality, vouchsafed by the Rather than productive, the South was anxieties of equality, as it does on the lazy; instead of progressive, it remained values and structures that Tocqueville mired in the past. Lacking ingenuity, it so famously cited. depended on a narrow range of cash Without “blackness,” or some such crops; lacking equality, it suffered from negative or countervailing category, the absence of inner drive in its rank- “whiteness” would not have achieved and-½le citizens, who depended on rel- its stability as the primary mode of iden- atively unproductive slaves to do most ti½cation in America. And without the of the work. None of these characteris- stabilizing effect of “blackness,” one of tics augured well for the survival of the the main justi½cations for the average South. Underdeveloped by its own eco- white person to count himself a member nomic and cultural commitments, faced of the same group as the richest would with an expansive and dynamic section- not exist. As several important scholars al competitor, and threatened by the of whiteness studies, such as David Roe- natural increase of its slave population, diger, Noel Ignatiev, and Matthew Frye it faced an imminent crisis. In time, Jacobson, have shown, this formula has Tocqueville imagined, the South would provided one of the greatest bulwarks lose its grip on its slaves, in part because against the formation of entrenched these unfree people, as members of a so- class identity, even as Americans of all ciety that prized equality, would never colors and persuasions strive to climb accept their unequal station, and thus the class ladder partly by blending in.3 could never embrace the spirit of Euro- Whiteness, with all its confused conno- pean peasantry. Yet, he thought, whites tations of universality and particularity, would never admit blacks as equals. A of destiny and sheer emptiness, still pre- racist himself, Tocqueville believed that vails as a reason for some of the poorest whites everywhere in the United States Americans to tolerate their condition, would understandably continue to dis- even as demographers anticipate the criminate against an inferior people, day, not more than forty years from and that blacks stood little chance be- now, when the American majority will, yond establishing their own state by in numbers, take on a darker hue. conducting a war against indolent In his famous section “On the Three Southern whites. Given their numbers, Races that Currently Inhabit America,” and what he regarded as the decrepit Tocqueville contributed a foundational moral state of their white enemies, he pillar to a long tradition of social analy- liked their chances in such a conflict.4 sis that would regard the problem of black and white as an aberration rather Tocqueville’s analysis of race in “On than a constitutive feature of American the Three Races that Currently Inhabit social and political life. Though he ana- America” commands current interest lyzes the slave South in detail, he treats much more for its connection to his larg- it as the opposite of the industrial North, er theory than for its historical accuracy. which for him represented the future of Much of what he anticipated simply did American democracy because of its bur- not happen. Moreover, few current his-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00057 by guest on 28 September 2021 torians of American slavery would take white and black working classes apart, Jeffrey B. up his dichotomous view of North and rested heavily on this formula, for no Ferguson South, his dim account of slavery’s prof- matter how far a white person fell in itability, his unitary view of the slave the competition with other whites, he system, or his somewhat mechanical could always look back and spot a dark rendering of the effects of the peculiar face in his rearview mirror. Given the institution on the hearts, minds, and broad patterns of American politics motivations of slaves and slaveholders. since the late 1960s–from the success Nevertheless, Tocqueville’s theoretical of the Republican “Southern Strategy,” terms in Democracy in America do pro- to the disaffection of Northern work- vide a good foundation for understand- ing-class whites who abandoned the ing how the value of equality helped Democratic coalition in the 1970s and reinforce the perennial American ob- 1980s, to today’s racially inflected Tea session with racial distinction. Party movement and paranoid fears Tocqueville believed that white Ameri- concerning a “Marxist,” “Fascist,” cans, beyond their motivations rooted “Muslim,” African American presi- in racism, would ½nd black Americans dent–it would appear that an unfor- hard to accept because of the radically tunately high proportion of whites unequal station from which they start- still subscribe to this way of thinking. ed. Locked in an absorbing competition In his many essays on race and Amer- with their peers and exceedingly nervous ican identity, Ralph Ellison wrote art- about the prospects of rising and falling fully of what he called the democratic in the game of distinction, white Amer- “chaos” that white Americans sought icans would always feel compromised to avoid through their various projec- by their association with a degraded and tions onto African Americans. Today, inferior people; their anxiety derived in this process might have more varied part from how perfectly the condition of economic and social consequences congenital inferiority and social invisibil- than in the pre–civil rights era when ity reflected their own worst fears. The Ellison gave it such eloquent codi½ca- promise of American life, rooted in the tion, but the moral consequences have idea that no permanent social barrier not changed very much at all. Accord- stands between even the lowest white ing to Ellison, these projections have man and the very richest, comes with at their root the cowardly avoidance of the devastating prospect of freefall: those ethical responsibility to give shape to who can rise in½nitely can also fall into the self within a democratic culture. uncharted territory of vulnerability, in- At its best, Ellison suggested, such a cul- visibility, and loss. Cut off from strong ture demands sincere engagement with claims to a primordial past, and staked diverse human possibility; at its worst, on the prospect of ever better days to it cowers behind candy-coated fantasies come, white Americans needed to in- of goodness already achieved and boun- vent the nigger–the nameless, faceless, ty with no consequence. As diligent and incompetent who warranted no respect successful shapers of a way of life, Afri- –in order to hide from the real prospect can Americans have af½rmed democrat- of becoming one. The “psychological ic possibility under the toughest circum- wage” of whiteness, which W.E.B. Du stances by facing the ultimate threat of Bois famously identi½ed in Black Recon- nothingness and bringing themselves struction (1935) to explain what kept the into being, though they have also suc-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00057 by guest on 28 September 2021 Freedom, cumbed in countless ways to illusions poor–indeed, many have become even Equality, stemming from the anger, despair, and poorer–the black middle class has ris- Race resentment endemic to their social cir- en to unprecedented heights of profes- cumstance. Ellison’s protagonist in the sional achievement, inclusion in impor- novel Invisible Man (1952) spends the tant institutions, and social exposure. larger part of the book living the false Today, the appearance of black Ameri- life of a black man on the make who cans in advertising and the media no takes his signals concerning who to be longer surprises, nor do the images from whites, whose humanity he can- they portray necessarily reflect stereo- not clearly recognize for lack of facing types. Some popular stars, such as Tiger his own. Just as whites project their de- Woods, whose multiracial background sires onto him, he regards them as mere would not have spared him from being conduits to power, and thus as gods of considered black in the pre–civil rights a sort. His power fantasy engenders era, dwell in an apparent racial twilight only weakness.5 zone that seems “neither black nor The game of projection at the heart of white, yet both.”6 Though the country race relations comes, according to Elli- remains highly segregated residentially son, with a large portion of paranoia, as and educationally, and intermarriage whites, subject to the identity confusion rates between blacks and whites show so basic to American life, know on some only incremental increases, surveys of unconscious level that black skin forms white Americans reveal a continuing the mystic writing pad of their own de- diminishment of overt racism rooted sires. Of course, blacks sense the same in ideas of biological inferiority. And thing: that in important ways, white the clincher of this case needs almost Americans, for all their apparent strength no mention: our president is an Afri- as a group, remain vulnerable and always can American. a bit worried that the person behind the Yet these signs of progress seem to black mask must know their desires– engender their opposite. The effort that and with that truth in hand, may well be our society has exerted to make advances putting one over on them. Today, in our in race relations has also served at times post–civil rights period, a large part of to reinforce the importance of race in this game occurs around the public drama our politics and to encourage new styles of continuing black anger, the notion of of racial identi½cation. Nothing reflects “pulling the race card,” and the seeming- this fact better than the effect of af½rma- ly bottomless need from whites for con- tive action policies, which have granted ½rmation from blacks that racism no middle-class blacks unprecedented ac- longer exists, or at the very least that cess to important institutions, but at the they as individuals bear no visible trace same time have led many whites to think of the unspeakable sin. in zero-sum terms about racial progress: a job given to a black American is one de- To this observation some might an- nied to a more quali½ed white. At times, swer that black people no longer suffer even our celebrations of racial progress from invisibility in the same way they serve to reinforce boundaries between did when Ellison penned his famous the races because they require us to re- works. Over the last thirty years, al- inscribe race discursively by employing though large portions of the black low- it as a mode of classi½cation. Recently, er and working classes have remained a reporter commented after a speech by

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00057 by guest on 28 September 2021 President Obama that, during the course the ½nal scene of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jeffrey B. of that address, he had forgotten Obama’s The Great Gatsby (1925), which famous- Ferguson race. No doubt his thought reflected that ly reflects on the beauty and tragedy of of many Americans of every description. the American insistence on remaining Of course, this reporter’s amazement at forever new. Though he does not say so experiencing a supposedly raceless mo- directly, Huggins suggests that the pow- ment required him constantly to note, as erful effect of Fitzgerald’s famous pas- Obama spoke, that he really was in the sage, in all its tragic wisdom, depends presence of the “other,” but in a fashion in part on the exclusion of those early both new and unapproachable because black captives, who also brought dreams otherness itself was absent. In a sense, with them, however muted by misfor- Obama had provided a moment for the tune. While these dreams, and the ef- reporter that exceeded the limits of his forts they engendered, would over gen- racial categories. But recognizing this erations play a great role in constitut- fact required the evocation of a highly ing the American experience, so would rei½ed and essential form of blackness, the attempts to exclude them or to play a virtual thing in itself requiring almost down their importance. Our nation has no content. Though Obama did not “talk certainly made some progress on this black” or “act black”–apparently he did record, but it has not arrived at the new not even “look black” to this reporter– narrative of the American experience somehow he was black, nonetheless. that Huggins thought necessary to align Such are the confusions of our mo- American dreams with the events that ment, emanations of an undigested past. have made us who we are. Race has In Black Odyssey (1977), a book that over marked American culture trenchantly, the years has become a classic in black as it has marked the basic principles studies for its challenge to the progres- that we regard as raceless. Recognizing sive brand of American historiography, the full meaning of this thought will re- Nathan Huggins reaches back in his epi- quire a new narrative, indeed. In his last logue to wonder how the sprawling sentence, both in homage and in mild green visage of the new world ½rst ap- derision, Huggins quotes the famous peared to the twenty slaves aboard the last line of Gatsby, which still merits fateful Dutch ship that lay off the shore our deepest reflection: “So we beat on, of Jamestown in 1619.7 In making this boats against the current, borne cease- gesture, he parodies (to some extent) lessly into the past.”

endnotes 1 On the connection between republicanism and slavery, see Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 363–390; also Edmund S. Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” The Journal of American History 59 (1) (June 1972): 5–29. 2 Etienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Waller- stein, Race, Nation, Class (London: Verso, 1991), 17–28. 3 See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 2007); and Matthew Frye Jacob- son, Whiteness of a Different Color (Cambridge, Mass.: Press, 1998).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00057 by guest on 28 September 2021 Freedom, 4 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (: University of Chicago Press, 2002), Equality, 302–391. Race 5 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1995); Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Mask of Humanity,” Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1995), 24–29, 41; see also in the same volume, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” 53. 6 This is the title of Werner Sollors’s authoritative account of interracial literature in Amer- ica; see Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 7 Nathan Irvin Huggins, Black Odyssey: The Afro-American Ordeal in Slavery (New York: Random House, 1990), 243–244.

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