Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons

Notes

Notes 1. Introduction 1. Depending, of course, on whom one considers to be black, an issue that unsurprisingly transcends demography and involves cultural reference points (see Wood and Carvalho 1988). To NorthAmerican eyes, Brazil looks roughly half black, but of course Brazilian eyes see differently. 2. The Theoretical Status of the Concept of Race 1. Page references will be given in the text. 2. Minor objections would have to do with Fields's functionalist view of ideology, and her claim that the race concept only "came into existence" (101) when it was needed by whites in NorthAmerican colonies beginning in the late seventeenth century.The concept of race, of course, has a longer history than that. 3. Fields's admirer David Roediger also criticizes her on this point: "At times she nicely balances the ideological creation of racial attitudes with their manifest and ongoing importance and their (albeit ideological) reality.... Butelsewhere, race disappears into the 'reality' of class" (Roediger 1991, 7-8; emphasis original). 4. Another important thinker who has at least flirted with the idea of race as illusion is Kwame Anthony Appiah. See Appiah 1986, 1990. 5. This concept is developed in Harris 1964. 6. "The question of identification is never the affirmation of a pregiven identity,never a self-fulfilling prophecy— it is always the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image" (Homi K.Bhabha, "Interrogating Identity," p. 188). 7. The work of Paul Gilroy (1991) on the significance of black music in Afro-diasporic communities is particularly revealing on this point. 8. There is a vast literature by now on these matters.The foundingstatement is undoubtedly Edward Said's Orientalism (1978); also useful is Bhabha 1990a. 9. I borrow this phrase not from George Lucas but from the book of that title edited at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1982. 171 172 Notes to Chapters 2-4 10. David Lopez and Yen Espiritu define panethnicity as "the development of bridging organizations and solidarities among subgroups of ethnic collectivities that are often seen as homogeneous by outsiders." Such a development, they claim, is a crucial feature of ethnic change—"supplanting both assimilation and ethnic particularism as the direction of change for racial/ethnic minorities." While panethnic formation is facilitated by an ensemble of cultural factors (e.g., common language and religion) and structuralfactors (e.g., class, generation , and geographical concentration), Lopez and Espiritu conclude that a specific concept of race is fundamentalto the construction of panethnicity (Lopez and Espiritu 1990: 198). 11. Similar points are made in Mudimbe 1988, Rabinow 1986, and Harding 1987. 12. For example, the magisterialwork of Fernand Braudel 1981. 3. Where Culture Meets Structure: Race in the 1990s 1. For reports on some recent developments in rock, rap, and race, see DaveMarsh et al. 1990; on rap, see the magazine the Source. 2. Studies on the general subject of postcolonialiry are replete with examples and analyses of this complex. For some representative analyses see Gates, ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference, 1986. 3. This approach obviously involves an interpretation of Gramscithat cannot be spelled out within the limits of the present essay. The Gramsci literature is vast and rewarding for students of race. I rely here upon Gramsci 1971, Hall 1986, and Mouffe and Laclau 1985.1have also found useful material in Guha and Spivak 1988. 4. Nor for nonwhites. As I have argued, even cultural forms deriving from the experiences of particular racially defined minorities (such as rap, hip-hop, or, for that matter, nortena) have "crossed over." Arelated issue is whether anygroup may legitimatelyretain its exclusive racial character. Various minority organizations on university campuses—the African -American student unions, the Asian and Pacific Islanders associations, the MECHA(Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan) groups— have been attacked as exclusionary.Here I thinkthe resemblance is more superficial than real between past segregation and white exclusivism on the one hand and present racial minority efforts to construct associations solely for members of their own group on the other. Exclusivism acquires force when it is directed by a dominant majority against a subordinated minority . Hence neoconservative criticisms leveled at such groups (or at events scheduled "for women only," or gay dances, for that matter), seem either misconceived or disingenuous. 5. In 1986, blacks were three times as likely to be poor as whites; 44 percent of black children lived in poverty in 1985, as compared to 16 percent of white...