Racial Justice: New Structures and New Selves

Culture B O O K S | F I L M | M U S I C I n his famous March 2008 speech in Philadelphia, thencandidate Obama asked us to move beyond a racial politics that demands a perpetrator and a victim and instead to begin to embrace the full complexity of race in this country . He called for us to acknowledge the extent to which our fates are interwoven, our problems shared, our futures interdependent . Yet, as we enter the winter of 2010, this rhetoric of hope and change has given way to an administration that has beendisappointinglysilentonrace,aswell as milquetoast in its policy prescriptions, even as multiple populist movements stir upwhitefearandanger. The Machinery of Whiteness author Steve Martinot would be the first to point out that the ugly, racialized overtones of the calls to “take America back,” the outrageoverthelocationof a progressive Islamic Center, and the explicit demandforracialprofiling in Arizona’s SB 1070 are neithernewnorsurprising. In his occasionally heavyhanded book, he expands on his earlier work in The Rules of Racialization and demandsofthereaderthat wenotonlyacceptthatraceissociallyconstructedbutthatwe “describethecontours of this structure,” that we come to terms with“thebulldozingmachine of white supremacy” and ask the hard question about “the nature of whiteness … [why] even in the face of the proDemocratic ethics of the civil rights movements, it must keepcomingback.” The essays in the book are somewhat repetitive, and Martinot’s language can tend toward the overwrought vocabulary of cultural studies departments; for all its shortcomings, however, the book is unflinching in tracing the reconstitution of whiteness throughout history. Martinot is at his best when he is examining the way a white identity has been continually reconstituted through domination in the United States: the symbolic function of fugitive slave patrols and anti-miscegenation laws, the way women’s bodies and sexuality were “weaponized”asinstruments of whiteness, and the ways thatU.S.foreignintervention has been about shoring up a fragilewhitenessathome. Martinot’s book not only moves us beyond the class-dominant realm of many neo-Marxist historiographies , it also turns our attention on whatisinherentinwhiteness:itsparanoia, its will to power, its demand for impunity. While he runs the risk of turningeverysocialproblem into a nail that can be explained by the violent hammeringofwhiteness ,placing racialization back into the central spot in the history of the United States is a cold shower on the dominant narrativeofracialprogressin this country. Martinot’s recognition that equity will not be brought in through the back door, thattherecanbenoprivaterenunciationof whiteness, nor a “race-neutral” multiculturalism ,noranyside-steppingintosimple class-focused policy remedies should be notedbyallthoseworkingforsocialjustice. Whilethebookdoesanexcellentjobin looking at the jagged and bloody edges of whiteness, it only touches on the more banalstructuresthatreproduceracialhierarchyandracialdisparities .Itisherewhere weturntoDouglasMassey. Massey’s work with Nancy Denton on American Apartheid (1993) remains one of the few indispensible books for understanding racial hierarchy in the United States,andthecentralityofspatialsegregation to racialization. In Categorically Unequal, he turns his sociological gaze onto stratification across race, gender and class, but his work around race (chapter 3) remains the strongest section of the book. In contrast to Martinot’s prose, Massey’s styleiseasy,andinfiftypagesheweavesthe N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 0 W W W. T I K K U N . O R G T I K K U N 63 [BOOKS] Racial Justice: New Structures and New Selves THEMACHINERYOFWHITENESS,bySteveMartinot,TempleUniversityPress,2010 CATEGORICALLYUNEQUAL,byDouglasS.Massey,RussellSageFoundationPublications,2007 THEARTOFHAPPINESSINATROUBLEDWORLD,bytheDalaiLamaandHowardCutler,DoubledayReligion,2009 Review by john a. powell culture_2.qxd:MA 2007 10/12/10 1:44 PM Page 63 64 T I K K U N W W W. T I K K U N . O R G N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 0 scaffolding of very old parts of our brain that function faster than thought while, “in contrast, the ‘thinking’ area of the brain, the neocortex … takes more time. Thus, by the time we are consciously aware of the person … our emotional reactions have already occurred.” Furthermore, when we understand our consciousness this way, it becomes clear that we all have amultiplicityofconflicting beliefs/schemas operating within us—both at the conscious level and the unconscious—that can be called into being...