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9 THE POLITICAL AND THEORETICAL CONTEXTS OF THE CHANGING RACIAL TERRAIN  Manning Marable AT THE FIRST Pan-African Conference held in London in August 1900, the great African American scholar W. E. B. DuBois (1970, 125) predicted that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the question as to how far differences of race . . . will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing . . . the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.” Today, with the both tragic and triumphant racial experiences of the twentieth century behind us, we may say from the vantage point of universal culture that the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of “global apartheid”—the construction of new racialized ethnic hierarchies, discourses, and processes of domination and subordination in the context of economic globalization and neoliberal public policies. Within the more narrow context of the United States, the fundamental problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of “structural racism”: the deeply entrenched patterns of socioeconomic and political inequality and accumulated disadvantage that are coded by race and color and constantly justified in both public and private discourses by racist stereotypes, white indifference, and the prisonindustrial complex. The African political scientist and anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani (1996) has observed that beginning with the imposition of European colonial rule in Africa, the institution of race was central to the development of the modern state. Mamdani’s insight about the racialized construction of the modern state holds true for the U.S. state as well. Racial categories and racial identities in the United States are politically constructed. That is, racial identities continue to be legally sanctioned categories, supported by the weight of the courts, political institutions, organized religion, and custom and reinforced by both deliberate as well as random acts of violence. The African American has be- come the permanent reference point for the racialized other within political and civil society. To be “black” is to be excluded from the social contract that links all other citizens to the state through sets of rights and responsibilities. Even prior to the American Revolution against the British and the consolidation of the new federal system of the United States in 1787, race was firmly set as the organizing principle of power in the early American colonies, after more than a century of black civic and political exclusion. One outcome of the institutionalization of the system of racial hierarchy was the evolution, as the United States grew and matured, of two very distinct political narratives about the nature of U.S. democracy, how the American nation-state was founded, and the character of the social contract between the American people and the state. For most white Americans, U.S. democracy is best represented by values such as personal liberty, individualism, and the ownership of private property. For most African Americans, the central goals of the black freedom movement have always been equality—the eradication of all structural barriers to full citizenship and full participation in all aspects of public life and in economic relations —and self-determination—the ability to decide, on their own collective terms, what their future as a community with a unique history and culture might be. “Freedom” for black Americans has always been perceived in collective terms as something achievable by group action and capacity building. “Equality” means the elimination of all social deficits between blacks and whites and the eradication of the cultural and social stereotypes and patterns of social isolation and group exclusion generated by white structural racism over several centuries. Historically, the United States has witnessed two great struggles to achieve a truly multicultural democracy, both of which have focused on the status of African Americans. The First Reconstruction (1865 to 1877) ended slavery and briefly gave black men voting rights, but it failed to provide meaningful compensation for two centuries of unpaid labor. The promise of “forty acres and a mule” was for most blacks a dream deferred. The Second Reconstruction (1954 to 1968), or the modern civil rights movement, outlawed legal segregation in public accommodations and achieved major legislative victories such as voting rights. But these successes paradoxically obscured the tremendous human costs of historically accumulated disadvantage. Those costs remain central to black Americans’ lives today. MANIFESTATIONS OF STRUCTURAL RACISM The disproportionate wealth that most white Americans enjoy today was first constructed from centuries of unpaid black labor. Many white institutions, including Ivy League universities...

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