West African Art Essay Example For Students

West African Art Essay When W. E.B. Du Bois announced in his marvelous work Souls of Black Folk, that the problem of the 20th Century is the color line . . . immediately he set out a social and analytical paradigm that instantly recognized that the major racial problem in America was that existing between Blacks and Whites. Nevertheless, we are still, at the end of the 20th Century, struggling with the question of what kind of democratic society we are, or whether we will be a democratic society at all, often oblivious to the fact that the satisfactory resolution of Du Bois paradigm is the most critical element in the question. In this respect, what has not been fully grasped by the new radical conservatism is the notion that social justice and human rights never were disconnected communities of value within the framework of a larger political regime; that they, in fact, define the very nature of democracy itself. Democracy is not just the legal framework of the Constitution, but the real relations among people governed by it. So, the critical objective in the process of Blacks seeking social justice has been to move from an exclusive notion of democracy based upon White dominance to one more perfect even than that envisioned by the founders. When America was first defined, the founders debated the issues involved in the character of democracy. However, the unchallenged and underlying reality was that the authoritative social structure and the effective citizenship of the nation would be White and male, women having been excluded by custom, most Blacks as slaves excluded by law, and even so-called freed Blacks not considered to be citizens. Native Americans, of course, not only were excluded, but were on the chopping block of extermination. From their position as the authoritative citizens, Whites were able to erect institutions and to behave in ways that enforced their notions of social, political, and economic behavior. Certainly, groups such as the Irish or Jews were considered within the pecking order as socially less than the English, Germans, and French. And by the early 20th century, the Chinese, who had been brought to the country in the 19th century to work on the railroads, were legally excluded by the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 that affected Japanese exclusion. Since then, race relations have been defined by the preoccupation with the real and symbolic conflict between Black and White. Of course, we cannot consider race and color in America as absolutes, for within every group there is a natural variation of biology in people who have been exposed to the world. For instance, for the purposes of maintaining social power, White people were created in America. This grouping would have the cultural variation of many European ethnic groups-Irish, German, Slav, French, Spanish, Nordic, all subject to the dominating influences of the English culture, political structure, and economic power. But for the purpose of exercising that power, they merged into a defined Whiteness of status and behavior. Africans born in America were treated collectively as Blacks, colored, and Negroes. They not only were culturally African, they were Mandingo, Yoruba, Nuer, Ovinbundu, etc., who came to possess the flavoring of English, French, Dutch or other European cultures through their experience with colonialism. Thus, while cultural variations exist within the dominant grouping of White as well as Black, it is power that defines the racial stratification as occurring in near absolute terms. That is to say, any Black person, no matter how rich, is subject to acts of subordination based on race. The Black/White paradigm is still a convenient way to dialogue about race, where Blacks represent the oppressed and Whites the dominant group. All non-White groups have been oppressed to one degree or another by the dominant culture, not in the sense that they were merely disliked by the White majority (exhibiting prejudice or racial discrimination), but that they were forced into certain roles by it. Where the principle (stated or unstated) of the use of power was based on race, it was racism. Feagin and Sikes define racism as follows: Racism is racial discrimination backed by the power and resources to effect unequal outcomes based on race. (Feagin and Sikes, Living with Racism, Beacon, 1994). The use of the power of the White majority upon Blacks is a measure of the openness of society and a comment upon the nature of democracy. This power has been exercised in personal acts such as brutal forms of lynching in which Blacks were burned alive or hanged, and modern forms of lynching, such as when Blacks have been beaten to death while in jail. (Southern Poverty Law Center, 1994 Report) Also, institutions have used their power to deny Blacks access to capital, often through their own deposits in banks, for the purpose of buying houses, renting, or insuring their property. Other discriminatory incidents include Blacks being suspected of stealing merchandise and publicly humiliated by being forced to disrobe or perform other humiliating acts. Then, more sophisticated acts of intellectual racism have consistently questioned the mental abilities of Blacks and, in particular, their intelligence, in books such as The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Richard Herrenstein and Charles Murray. (New York: The Free Press/Macmillan, 1994). The Black/White Paradigm Becomes Multicultural The paradigm of Black and White changed with modern events that altered its use and meaning. For example, Asian immigration to the United States came quickly in the 1970s and 1980s with refugees from the Korean War, and especially after the Vietnam War. Even the continued reign of the Communists in China stimulated the flow of immigrants to these shores. For example, in 1970 the U.S. Census counted 1,438,544 Asians, but by 1990, they had grown to five times as many, 7,273,662. Likewise, Hispanics, lured by the economic attraction of the United States, war in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and the proximity of Mexico, came with equal abandon, such that since 1970, Hispanics increased from 9,072,602 to 22,354,059! The result is that in states like California 45 percent of the residents are already Black, Asian or Hispanic, and non-White children are already a majority in the school system. The rapid pace of cultural diversity is reflected in Census data for non- White population growth, which show that between 1980-1990, Blacks grew by .2 percent and Native Americans by .09 percent, but Asians grew by 1.1 percent and Hispanics by the highest rate of 1. 6 percent. Many incoming groups such as Hispanics and Asians have benefitted from the existence of a legal regime of rights contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination against diverse cultural groups, as one protected class, in employment, education, and other areas of society. However, with the expansion of groups and the rights they enjoy, a conflict has developed as some interpret this expansion of democracy as a threat to the interests of the dominant White majority, especially as economic competition increases. Multiculturalism Liberal sociologists such as Gunnar Myrdal, who wrote what is considered a classic on race relations, An American Dilemma, in the 1940s, proposed that pluralism could defeat racial discrimination and subordination. In effect, pluralism assumed that a theoretical equality between Blacks and Whites could be achieved without serious alteration in the status of Whites, by the elimination of racial discrimination and the practice of pluralistic equality. Not only was this a false vision of racial dynamics, but also it protected Americans from the fact that they practiced a virulent kind of Apartheid, and from the implications if the practice stopped. The fact that each group has a cultural history that shapes its place in the social order, often marked by inequalities of power, negates the doctrine of pluralism. Historian Dr. Arthur Schlesinger, in The Disuniting of America, writes of Hector St. John de Crevecour, an 18th Century Frenchman who had settled in the American colonies in 1759 in Orange County, New York, who asked the question, What then, is this American? He answered his own question by saying: He is an American who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles.. ..Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men. E pluribus Unum!! This was the original theory of the melting pot. Schlesinger, a critic of multiculturalism, admitted that the United States has never fulfilled Crevecours original ideal of the melting pot, but he did not admit the fact that the framework of unity provided by the English and their European cousins was maintained by force and brutality and was imposed on an unwilling people, not only African slaves, but others as well. Thus, he refused to admit that America has never been united into one ideal by freely consenting groups. It was united by the use of power to enforce the ideals of the dominant racial class upon Blacks and other subordinate groups in a situation of brutal internal colonialism. That is to say, E Pluribus Unum meant from many, one nation, but not one people!! Whiteness Today, there are many intellectuals-Charles Taylor (Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition), Amy Gutman, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf who oppose multiculturalism, suggesting that one should look at culture from an individualized point of view rather than from a group perspective. (Taylor, 28) Nevertheless, the identities we have discussed were manufactured both individually and collectively. So Whites and Blacks are not only individuals, but are linked to basic and extended group social relationships that contain the matrix of the social behavior of individuals. Whites are, for example, individuals whose individualism is enhanced in relationship to non-Whites because it is linked to the matrix that includes wealth, access to resources, and control over the dominant institutions of society. Whether or not they can successfully use these resources depends upon their individual skills and other factors, but the fact that they exist for Whites to a degree much greater than for Blacks and other non-Whites is unassailable. Therefore, there is an urgent need to examine the concept of Whiteness or for Whites to understand the way in which they are connected to systems that result in the racial subordination of non-Whites. Understanding Whiteness, suggests such scholars as Ruth Frankenberg, will also illuminate many of the same systems that are the route to the subordination of women. (Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters, 93) It is just as important for subordinated individuals and groups to understand the many ways in which racial power is exercised upon them. Otherwise, their ignorance becomes a major resource for racists. In fact, subordinated individuals often employ individualism as a buttress to racial stigma. An example is Whoopi Goldberg, who denies her connection to Africa by saying, Dont call me an African American, I am an American. Another example is Morgan Freeman, who returned from Africa to declare: I aint lost nothing in Africa. Im an American. But then, the irony is that they are not regarded by the movie industry or its patrons as merely American actors; they are ultimately Black actors who are given and who accept racial roles such as those the movies Driving Miss Daisy and The Color Purple. And one of the often heard criticisms of O. J. Simpson is that the nature of his individualism is manifested in his selection of White associates rather than Black, which has cost him personal support within the Black community. In any case, individualism is a myth of American culture in a society dominated by the richest group culture in the world. In fact, the proliferation of groups for every conceivable purpose and their control of social resources and direction are the dominant reality of American culture and democracy. Afrocentrism In order to bolster their power in the midst of racial subordination, Blacks have strengthened their position by political movements that enhanced the sense of group solidarity and rehabilitated their identity. But there is the irony that while this form of naming spells out the ambiguity of the Black existence far more explicitly than other terms, it also normalizes Black identity by equating it to Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, and other groups. It is the same with the adoption of the concept of Afrocentrism, a modernized form of Pan Africanism. Afrocentrism in some quarters is a threatening philosophy, primarily because it is the newest concept that emphasizes the social cohesion of African-origin people rather than the American individualism of the older Anglo-Conformity doctrine. To this extent, it is a corrective project which seeks to: A. Reconstruct the past: African civilizationB. Rehabilitate Black identityC. Redefine the Black perspective by becoming subjects of history rather than objects.However, the issue of achieving centering has drawn the most fire, perhaps because implicit in achieving it is the political project of the struggle of a people to control their own destiny, their own definition of themselves, their own cultural way of being, and their own agenda. This is true not only in America but everywhere that people of African origin have tried to center themselves in the face of European imperialism and colonialism, the racism in the countries to which they immigrated, and their treatment as a global underclass. I have attempted to address this struggle in my most recent book, Pan Africanism In The African Diaspora, to suggest that there is both a real and theoretical unity to the existence of African-origin peoples as they struggle for reinterpreting community and destiny in places outside of Africa through politics. (Irele, 98) The potential of Afrocentrism is that it enhances the possibilities of African Americans by their becoming actors in the positive uses of power. In this regard, an historic example is the Million Man March, which took place in October of 1995. While the meaning of the March was analyzed by the press from the perspective of its relationship to the dominant society, far more important was the political project of centering actions that it initiated within the African-American community, using unity to approach an intractable set of problems. The Problematic of Race and Democracy So let us take Dr. Schlesingers problematic seriously in the following question he poses: What happens when people of different ethnic origins, speaking different languages and professing different religions, settle in the same geographical locality and live under the same sovereignty? Unless a common purpose binds them together, tribal hostilities will drive them apart. Ethnic and racial conflict, it seems evident, will now replace the conflict of ideologies as the explosive issue of our times. (Schlesinger, 10) Implicit in this question is an answer that we must preserve the old Anglo-conformity doctrine and its notion of racial hierarchy as the definition of an American, and of what constitutes the basis of unity, since there was no serious ideological conflict to either Capitalism or the European cultural origins of the nation. But there is another vision: a Rainbow Coalition of people from different ethnic and racial groups, including Whites, striving together to create a truly democratic nation without racial subordination. Therefore, I believe that we should adopt a 21st century frame of reference that includes factors that will enhance diversity. In fact, the most powerful idea of the new cultural framework is that a decent respect for the principle of diversity, the integrity of the diverse groups, and the equality among them will provide the basis of a truly democratic society. To the extent that this notion is reflected in law and in social practice among groups and individuals, the basis of a new democracy will be laid. In order to achieve this new democracy, it will be necessary to remove the impediments that stand in the way, such as racism, sexism, group imperialism, and materialism. This task will require the persistent involvement of those who want true democracy in projects of social change. As former Black Panther Chair Bobby Seale has said, you dont fight racism with racism, you fight racism with solidarity, the solidarity of diversity, solidarity about the things that will make America a progressive and humane society. And if we take the famous African-American writer Jimmy Baldwin seriously when he said that the White man cannot free himself from racism by himself, then the very salvation of this idea of democracy lies in the hands of those who are the most dispossessed. Ronald RACIAL DUALISM Race matters: whether we in the United States and in many other countries as well wish this to be the case or not. The US: what is it? A nation built on the soil of conquest, battened on the theft of human beings. Yet it is not only this. The US was also created out of the doctrine of natural rights, whose restrictive application was continually eroded by the struggles of the excluded: first the European others, and then the other others down to our own day. Throughout US history, racial conflicts continually shaped and reshaped the categories into which identities all identities were classified. The racial struggles at the heart of US society, the racial projects whose clash and clangor leaps off the pages of todays headlines as it has for centuries, have created the politics and culture of today. Race matters: yet race today is as problematic a concept as ever. Over the last few decades the way we in the United States think of race has changed once again, as so often in the past. I shall argue in this essay that we are now in a period of universal racial dualism. Once, US society was a nearly monolithic racial hierarchy, in which everyone knew his place; under racial dualism, however, everyones racial identity is problematized. How does it feel to be a problem? Du Bois reported being asked (Du Bois 1989 1903). The racial dualism he discerned was, of course, that of black people, who (he argued) were forced to live simultaneously in two worlds. His insight, which at the beginning of the 20th century addressed black experience in a society of all-encompassing white supremacy, continues to apply, but the situation he analyzed has now become considerably more complicated. Today the racial anxiety, uncertainty, conflict, and tension expressed by the term racial dualism, affect everyone in the US, albeit in different ways. Monolithic white supremacy is over, yet in a more concealed way, white power and privilege live on. The overt politics of racial subordination has been destroyed, yet it is still very possible to play the racial card in the political arena. Blacks and other racially-defined minorities are no longer subject to legal segregation, but they have not been relieved of the burdens of discrimination, even by laws supposedly intended to do so. Whites are no longer the official ruling race, yet they still enjoy many of the privileges descended from the time when they were. The old recipes for racial equality, which involved creation of a color-blind society, have been transformed into formulas for the maintenance of racial inequality. The old programs for eliminating white racial privilege are now accused of creating nonwhite racial privilege. The welfare state, once seen as the instrument for overcoming poverty and social injustice, is now accused of fomenting these very ills. What racial dualism means today is that there are now, so to speak, two ways of looking at race, where previously there was only one. In the past, lets say the pre-WWII era, everyone agreed that racial subordination existed; the debate was about whether it was justified. Lester Bilbo and Thurgood Marshall to pick two emblematic figures shared the same paradigm, perhaps disagreeing politically and morally, perhaps even representing the forces of evil and good respectively, but nevertheless looking at the same social world. But today agreement about the continuing existence of racial subordination has vanished. The meaning of race has been deeply problematized. Indeed, the very idea that race matters is something which today must be argued, something which is not self-evident. This in itself attests to the transformation which racial dualism has undergone from the time of Souls to our own time. On the one hand, the world Du Bois analyzed is still very much with us. We live in a racialized society, a society in which racial meaning is engraved upon all our experiences. Racial identity shapes not only life-chances, but social life, taste, place of residence. No Escape Essay I have shown how the concept helps us understand the peculiar and contradictory character of large-scale, macro-level racial politics at centurys end. I should like now to apply it to small-scale, micro-level racial politics. RACIAL DUALISM AS IDENTITY As the civil rights legacy was drawn and quartered beginning in the late 1960s and with ever-greater success in the following two decades the tugging and hauling, the escalating contestation over the meaning of race, resulted in ever more conflicting and contradictory notions of racial identity. The significance of race (declining or increasing?), the interpretation of racial equality (color-blind or color conscious?), the institutionalization of racial justice (reverse discrimination or affirmative action?), and the very categories black, white, Latino/Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American employed to classify racial groups were all called into question as they emerged from the civil rights victory of the mid-1960s. These racial signifiers are all ambiguous or contradictory today. We cannot escape the racial labels which US society comprehensively assigns to all within it; this has been the fate of Americans since Europeans arrived on these shores. Yet less than ever can we identify unproblematically or unselfconsciously with these designations, for they are riven as we ourselves are fissured to an unprecedented extent by the conflicts and contradictions posed by the political struggles of the past decades. How do these conflicts and contradictions shape the various racial identities available today? Without hoping to be anything more than schematic, I will now offer some observations on the racial politics of identity at centurys end. As the entire argument I have presented here should suggest, I do not share the denunciatory attitude toward identity politics so evident on both right and left today (Newfield 1993, Gitlin 1993). In my view, the matrices of identity are ineluctably political, for they involve interests, desire, antagonisms, etc., in constant interplay with broad social structures. To explore these matters more fully would go beyond the present articles scope. Yet the critics do have one thing right: if any of my account here rings true, there can be no straightforward identity politics. Our awareness of the pervasiveness of racial dualism today should serve to check claims of unmediated authenticity, whether hegemonic or subaltern. Appeals to traditional values, to the national culture, to canonized texts which exemplify hegemonic claims, must therefore be treated with the extreme suspicion which awareness of standpoint demands. Subaltern claims, as expressed for example through invocation of supposedly direct experiences of oppression of the form As a black person, I know X. .., or As a woman, I know X.. . (where X is an undifferentiated generalization about blacks or womens experience) are also suspect. With these guidelines in mind, let us briefly explore the terrain of the racial politics of identity, focusing our attention on the operations of racial dualism today. BLACK RACIAL DUALISM: First, 30 years after the ambiguous victory of the civil rights movement, what does it mean to be black? The decline of the organized black movement in the 1970s, and the wholesale assaults against the welfare state initiated by Ronald Reagan during the 1980s, sharply increased divisions along class and gender lines in the black community. The divergent experiences of the black middle class and the black poor experiences far more distant from each other than they were in the days of official segregation make a unitary racial identity seem a distant dream indeed. A whole other set of divisions has emerged around gender, such that black mens and womens experiences probably diverge more significantly today than at any other moment since slavery days. Consequently, a coherent black politics which could reach across class lines seems remote. Divisions of class have meant that in the upper strata of the black community a portion of the ideal of substantive equality has indeed been achieved, though in the US no black person can ever believe her or himself to be beyond the reach of white supremacy (Cose 1993, Graham 1995, Williams 1991). Meanwhile the desolation of the poor increases steadily, fuelled in part by the very claim that equality (formal equality, that is) has been attained, that we are now a color-blind society, etc. Such rhetoric attributes black poverty to defects in black motivation (Murray 1984, Kaus 1992) intelligence (Herrnstein and Murray 1994), or family structure (Gordon 1994), a strategy of victim-blaming which often takes aim, not only at underclass blacks but at low-income black women in particular. Additionally, opportunity structures for blacks are changing by class and gender in unprecedented ways (Carnoy 1994, Hacker 1992). The significance of a divided black community, and hence identity, is complex, even contradictory. On the one hand the emergence of diverse and even conflicting voices in the black community is welcome, for it reflects real changes in the direction of mobility and democratization. On the other hand, the persistence of glaring racial inequality that is, of an ongoing dimension of white supremacy and racism that pervades the entire society demands a level of concerted action that division and discord tend to preclude. Racial dualism at centurys end. OTHER OTHERS: In the 1990s, what does it mean to be yellow or brown? Before the success of civil rights (and particularly immigration) reforms in the mid-1960s, racialized groups of Asian and Latin American origin experienced very high levels of exclusion and intolerance. After 1965 these communities began to grow rapidly. Previously isolated in enclaves based on language and national origin, Koreans, Filipinos, Japanese, and Chinese underwent a substantial racialization process from the late 1960s onward, emerging as Asian Americans (Espiritu 1992). Accompanying these shifts was significant upward mobility for some though by no means all sectors of Asian America. Similar shifts overtook Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Central Americans, and even Cubans as the Latino and Hispanic categories were popularized (Moore and Pachon 1985). For example, the destruction of formal segregation in Texas had a profound impact on Mexican-Americans there (Montejano 1987). Segregation of Latinos in the upper and middle economic strata decreased rapidly across the country (far more rapidly than that of comparable black income earners) (Massey and Denton 1993), and some Latino groups achieved or consolidated solid middle class status (notably Cubans and to some extent Dominicans). The Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Central American barrios, however, continued to be plagued by immigrant-bashing and high levels of poverty that could only be seen as racially organized (Moore and Pinderhughes, eds. 1993). Thus for both Asian Americans and Latinos contemporary racial identity is fraught with contradictions. Apart from long-standing antagonisms among particular groups for example, Cubans and Puerto Ricans, or Koreans and Japanese significant class- and gender-based conflicts exist as well. Tendencies among long-established residents to disparage and sometimes exploit immigrants who are fresh off the boat, or for group ties to attenuate as social mobility increases, suggest the centrality of class in immigrant life (Portes and Bach 1985; Takaki 1990). The liberating possibilities encountered by immigrating women, and their greater proclivity to settle in the U. S. rather than to return to their countries of origin, suggest the centrality of gender in immigrant life (Grasmuck and Pessar 1991). Not unlike blacks, Asian Americans and Latinos often find themselves caught between the past and the future. Old forms of racism have resurfaced to confront them, as in the renewed enthusiasm for immigrant bashing and the recurrent waves of anti-Japanese and anti-Chinese paranoia. Discrimination has resurfaced again, sometimes in new ways, as in controversies over Asian admissions to elite universities (Takagi 1993). Yet at the same time the newly panethnicized identities of Asian Americans and Latinos have brought them face to face with challenges that were quite distinct from anything faced in the past. Some examples of these challenges are the dubious gift of neoconservative support (Asians as the model minority, for example), the antagonism of blacks (Kim 1993, Omi and Winant 1993, Miles 1992), and the tendencies toward dilution of specific ethnic/national identity in a racialized category created by a combination of lumping and political exigency. Often more successful and accepted than in the past, but subject to new antagonisms and new doubts about their status, Asian Americans and Latinos experience a distinct racial dualism today. For reasons of space I am going to slight Native Americans here, but there is ample evidence to believe that in the postwar period Indian nations as well came face-to face-with a racially dualistic situation. Here too the old logic of despoliation still applied: environmental destruction and land rape, appalling poverty, and cultural assault continued to take their toll. Yet a new, activist, and often economically and politically savvy Native America could also be glimpsed. Today Indians have developed techniques for fighting in the courts, for asserting treaty rights, and indeed for regaining a modicum of economic and political control over their tribal destinies which would have been unthinkable a generation ago (Nagel 1995, Cornell 1988). WHITE RACIAL DUALISM: In the post-civil rights period, what did it mean to be white? During the epoch of racial war of maneuver, in which exclusion was the predominant status assigned to racially-identified minorities, white identity (and particularly white male identity) was normalized; otherness was elsewhere: among people of color and to some extent women. All these were marked by their identities, but under conditions of virtually unchallenged white supremacy, white men were not. Once white egalitarianism (Saxton 1990) had been established as the political price elites had to pay to secure mass electoral support, herrenvolk Republicanism (Roediger 1991) became the organizing principle of 19th century US politics and culture. Only whites (only white men) were full citizens; only they were fully formed individuals. In terms of race and gender their identities were, so to speak, transparent, which is what we mean by the term normalized. Of course, for a long time many whites partook of an ethnic otherness which placed them in an ambiguous relationship with both established WASP elites and with racially-defined minorities. But by the 1960s white ethnicity was in serious decline. Large-scale European immigration had become a thing of the past; while urban ethnic enclaves continued to exist in many major cities, suburbanization and gentrification had taken their toll. Communal forms of white ethnic identity had been eroded by outmarriage, and by heterogeneous contact in schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and religious settings (Alba 1990, Waters 1990). Nor were alternative collective identities, other forms of solidarity, readily available to whites. Class-based identities had always been weak in the US, and were particularly debilitated in the wake of the red-baiting period of the late 1940s and 50s, the same moment in which the black movement was gathering strength. What remained was the imagined community (Anderson 1983) of white racial nationalism (Walters 1987): the US as a white mans country, etc. It was this ideological construct of whiteness, already deeply problematic in a thoroughly modernized, advanced industrial society, which the black movement confronted in the post-WWII period. Detached from the previous generations ethnic ties, unable to see themselves as part of a potentially majoritarian working class with larger social justice interests, and unable to revert to the discredited white supremacy of an earlier period, most whites were ripe for conversion to neoconservative racial ideology after the civil rights victory in the mid-1960s. Efforts on the part of Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and even the Black Panther Party to forge multiracial alliances for large-scale redistributive policies and other forms of substantive social justice never had a serious chance in the national political arena. Instead, neoconservative and new right politicians, initiated by the Wallace campaigns of the mid-1960s, appealed to white workers on the basis of their residual commitments to racial status honor (Edsalls 1992). Wallace, and Nixon in his southern strategy, invoked the powerful remnants of white supremacy and white privilege. Since white identities could no longer be overtly depicted as superior, they were now presented in coded fashion as a beleaguered American individualism, as the hallmarks of a noble tradition now unfairly put upon by unworthy challengers, as the silent majority etc. The racial reaction begun by Wallace and consummated by Reagan, which resurrected 20th century Republicanism from the oblivion to which the New Deal had supposedly consigned it, was thus a fairly direct descendant of the white labor republicanism (Roediger 1991, Saxton 1990) which had shaped the US working class along racial lines more than a century earlier. In this fashion from the late 1960s on, white identity was reinterpreted, rearticulated in a dualistic fashion: on the one hand egalitarian, on the other hand privileged; on the one hand individualistic and color-blind, on the other hand normalized and white. With Reagans election in 1980, the process reached its peak. A class policy of regressive redistribution was adopted; working-class incomes, stagnant since the mid-1970s, continued to drop in real terms as profits soared. Neoconservative racial ideology with its commitment to formal racial equality and its professions of color-blindness now proved particularly useful: it served to organize and rationalize white working class resentments against declining living standards. To hear Reagan, Bush, Gramm, etc. etc. tell it, the problems faced by white workers did not derive from corporate hunger for ever-greater profits, from deindustrialization and the downsizing of workforces; rather their troubles emanated from the welfare state, which expropriated the taxes of the productive citizens who played by the rules and went to work each day in order to subsidize unproductive and parasitic welfare queens and career criminals who didnt want to work. Nowhere was this new framework of the white politics of difference more clearly on display than in the reaction to affirmative action policies of all sorts (in hiring, university admissions, federal contracting, etc. ). Assaults on these policies, which have been developing since their introduction as tentative and quite limited efforts at racial redistribution (Johnson 1967), are currently at hysterical levels. These attacks are clearly designed to effect ideological shifts, rather than to shift resources in any meaningful way. They represent whiteness as disadvantage, something which has few precedents in US racial history (Gallagher 1994). This imaginary white disadvantage for which there is almost no evidence at the empirical level has achieved widespread popular credence, and provides the cultural and political glue that holds together a wide variety of reactionary racial politics. To summarize: today, the politics of white identity is undergoing a profound political crisis. The destruction of the communal bases of white ethnicity is far advanced, yet whiteness remains a significant source of status honor. White privilege a relic of centuries of herrenvolk democracy has been called into question in the post-civil rights period. Yet, far from being destroyed, the white politics of difference is now being trumpeted as an ideology of victimization. The situation would be farcical if it werent so dangerous, reflecting venerable white anxieties and fortifying the drift to the right which, now as in the past, is highly conducive to race-baiting. Todays color-blind white supremacy, then, embodies the racial duality of contemporary white identity. It is not the case, however, that whites have unequivocally or unanimously embraced the right, though certainly the ideological effects of neoconservatism have been profound, particularly on economically vulnerable whites. Although undoubtedly a minority among whites, there are still millions who have resisted the siren-song of neoconservatism, recognizing that the claim of color-blindness masks a continuing current of white supremacy and racism. Why? What enables any whites to adhere to the objective of substantive social justice, rather than its merely formal illusions? And how deep does this commitment run? We know little about the sources of white anti-racism today. Yet few themes on the domestic political horizon are more important. Without becoming entirely speculative, it is possible to identify a few elements of white experience which have potential anti-racist dimensions. Feminism and gay liberation have developed critiques of discrimination which are intimately related to the experiences of racially-defined minorities. Furthermore, these struggles can trace their origins back to the black struggles of the 19th century as well as those of the 1960s. Millions of white lives have been changed by these movements. Other forms of radical political experience also taught basic anti-racist lessons, despite various political and ideological limitations. Here I am thinking of the great industrial organizing drives of the 1930s, the various communist currents, new left and anti-war activities during the 1960s, the farmworkers movement, the solidarity movements with Central America in the 1970s and 80s, and above all, the civil rights movement, in which many thousands of whites were involved. These political struggles exercised a moral influence on whites, just as they did on national politics; that influence has perhaps waned under decades of assault from the right, but it has proved far more difficult to eradicate than its opponents expected. Beyond its fundamentally ethical character, it draws upon various material interests as well (I recognize that this distinction is not an absolute one). Among these is the difficulty of uniting all whites under conservative banners: Jews in particular (whose whiteness continues to exhibit fissures and cultural contradictions) (Sacks 1994) still adhere disproportionately to social and political liberalism for reasons which have been extensively analyzed. Arab Americans, paradoxically, are in much the same position. Other sources of white anti-racism may be located in religious institutions, the academy, and popular cultural forms, although none of these is free of ambiguity and contradiction. In short, the problematic and volatile quality of contemporary white identities, not their consolidation, is evident at all levels of US society: from the most casual conversation to the contortions and contradictions of national politics. This volatility provides ongoing evidence of racial dualism among whites. TOWARD RADICAL DEMOCRRACY As US politics plunges to the right, as the aspirations of the activists and adherents of the 1960s movements are forsaken, as indeed the legacy of those struggles is twisted and tortured into service as an obstacle to the achievement of real social and racial justice, the attempt to imagine a greater and more robust democracy, racially inclusive as well as substantively egalitarian, seems almost utopian. Yet I submit that it is precisely that task which most cries out for thought and action today. Those who wish to halt the gallop to the right need to be able to envision a convincing political alternative, if the cause of racial justice, and indeed of radical democracy, is ever to resume its advance. Without presumption for this task is more than the work of an article I would like to suggest that the recognition of widespread racial dualism in US politics and culture at centurys end suggests certain principles that can be applied to this work of imagina tion. To acknowledge racial dualism is to understand the malleability and flexibility of all identities, especially racial ones. One of the recognitions hard won by the movements of the 1960s not only the racially-based ones, but all the so-called new social movements across the globe was that identity is a political construct. Not carved in stone, not sutured (Mouffe and Laclau 1985), our concepts of ourselves can be dramatically altered by new movements, new articulations of the possible. It may yet turn out that the greatest achievement of the 1960s movements, sparked by the black movement, was not the political reforms they accomplished, but the new possibilities for racial identity they engendered, not just for black people, but for everyone. The right wing has in a certain sense understood the challenge of reimagining race, for it has clearly articulated a particular vision of the meaning of race in a conservative democratic society. This is the concept of color-blindness. Undeniably this vision has a certain appeal, not only as a cover for the perpet