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7. The Price of the Ticket:A Genealogy and Revaluation of Race
- State University of New York Press
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Friedrich Nietzsche was an outsider to, and critic of, traditional philosophy and proposed his own revaluation of it, while at the same time he proposed a positive philosophy whose motivating factor was the flourishing of the culture. In both the critical and positive aspects of philosophy, he wrote about race and how a revalued form of the concept might play a role in making the culture healthier. It is Nietzsche’s revaluation of race that I will discuss in this chapter, in particular, what a revaluation of race might mean in the twenty-first century and what the ramifications for it might be.1 First I will discuss the ways in which race has been conceived of as a problem by critical race theorists. Then I will argue that Nietzsche contended with a similar problem in his time and will highlight his method for addressing this problem: by doing a genealogy and revaluation of the concept of race. His genealogy and revaluation of race is inextricably bound to his larger genealogy and revaluation of moral values. I will contend that both treatments of race and values are part of his attempt to act as a physician and treat his culture for the disease of decadence that was causing its decay. In the last section, I will evaluate the use of Nietzsche’s treatments for decadence for the problems of race that plague our own culture. In particular, I will argue that Nietzsche ’s treatments serve as both helpful examples and cautionary tales for those of us who are concerned about the problem that race poses for African American cultures (and, by extension, other cultures). Specifically , I will maintain that Nietzsche’s genealogy and revaluation of race is instructive for us (in both positive and negative senses) regarding 7 The Price of the Ticket: A Genealogy and Revaluation of Race JACQUELINE SCOTT 149 issues of identity formation. I will focus on the price that I think we will have to pay for this revalued,healthier concept of race.It is the price of the ticket for a concept of race that allows for a fuller blossoming of both individual and communal identities and for an increased freedom from the internal and external constraints imposed by a static,stagnant notion of racial identity. The Problem of Race Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country , and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us:“God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”2 Those of us who care about the health of our society and in particular about the threat posed by “the racial nightmare” must take seriously Baldwin’s challenge. Though he wrote it in 1962, his diagnosis of the historical challenge still applies to us now (though I would add that it is the responsibility of conscious people of all races).We find ourselves at a crucial time in the history of race: the definition of and values assigned to race are in flux.The biological foundations upon which our contemporary notions were founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been called into question and found to be empirically false. Those scientific findings, along with the opportunities afforded by political and social challenges to racism, present us with the opportunity to end the racial nightmare by doing something with our racial theories. W. E. B. DuBois proclaimed that the problem of the twentieth century would be “the problem of the color line.”3 In terms of the contemporary debates within the field of race theory, I hypothesize that the problem of the twenty-first century will be the problem of the reconception of racial identity. This reconceived identity will necessarily involve a rejection of the strict biological foundations of race (race as color,as morphology).There are some,such as Naomi Zack,who contend 150 Jacqueline Scott [54.210.143.119] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:48 GMT) that because the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biological foundations for our contemporary notions...